I know all the words, of course. Construction workers know all the words. But I’ve known just as many construction workers who were genteel in their speech, to a fault, as white collar workers. I used to observe office workers at my former life at a big construction company. Many seemed to adopt the use of streams of expletives as the preferred communication style, because they imagined that’s what people in the field talked like. Most people, that worked in the field instead of the office, didn’t. Go @#$% ‘in figure.
As I said, I know all the words. But I’m tired of them. I long for gentility of speech and comportment. And I may severely limit that amount of people that work for me forevermore, as I will not tolerate loud music or vulgarity while I’m working, ever again. It’s lonely being normal. I must cast a wider net than your average fisherman.
I don’t know what to write about every day. I skip around this bizarro universe I inhabit and write it down. So far, that’s the plan. But what do you, dear reader, want to hear from me? That’s a complicated question.
You lie, you know. Everybody does. I can’t ask you what you want, and tally the answers. You might be polite, or busy that day, or bad people I don’t really want reading my stuff might answer in your place, and queer the pitch. And readers are always a potential thing. I have to decide before they show up.
I’ve got to figure out what the hell I know about, and offer it up to the big gaping maw of ones and zeroes that is the internet. And I can only listen to my audience tangentially to guide me on my way.
The commenter “Editor Theorist” drops by from time to time, and drops little strings of concatenated le mot juste, just like many of my internet friends. He’s half a world away, of course, and is from another walk of life. And after I described my trip to the lumberyard the other day, he wrote this in the comments:
I can’t think of anything remotely analogous in my own life to this process you describe. People’s lives really are different.
Well, there it is ladies and gents.
I read a lot of things on the internet. An insane amount of things. And every once in a while, It occurs to me that there’s nothing left on the internet that’s worth my time. I’m especially tired of persons various and sundry telling me what I should think. I’m profoundly tired of cut and paste manifestos.
I want people to tell me and show me things I don’t know about, but that are both interesting and true. I’ve had enough of blogs telling me things that wouldn’t be interesting if they were true.
I’m not Norm. I’m not Cincinattus. I’m not Jeff Beck. I’m not Archie Bunker. I’m not Bertrand Russell. We don’t have time to go over everybody I’m not, because I’m not like anybody.
We attended a Veteran’s Day ceremony in Marion yesterday. We have a small park hard by the water downtown for just such an occasion: Veteran’s Park. You gotta park, at the park, no matter how you get there: Blustery but not cold. The toddlers ran windsprints in the empty flower beds, while the veterans enjoyed the folding chairs and the attention. Lovely. Milo plays the Colonel Bogey March. The trombone has all the good parts for a change, as they whistle during the parts where they’re not playing too. My little son stood for a long time on the little stone plinth, and ran his fingers over the raised bronze letters of the names of the men commemorated on the WWII memorial. I can’t think of a more fitting and appropriate memorial to their efforts.
Thanks to all my family, friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens that served their country in the most profound way.
I went to the lumber yard this week. But like calling the garbage man a “sanitation engineer,” calling it a lumber yard is not the preferred nomenclature at this point. They’re my “hardwood supplier.”
All highfalutin’ terms for simple things seem as thin as dishwater to me. I don’t know why people abandon good solid terms for their businesses and walks of life and adopt gibberish instead. There’s nothing wrong with “hardwood supplier.” But it’s got no anima, like “lumber yard” did.
I remember Ma Bell. The telephone company used to be named after Alexander Graham Bell. They busted it all up when we all decided we’d like more than one phone per family, and they didn’t all have to be a big black corded rotary that rang like a four alarm fire. Why in god’s name didn’t one chunk of the business keep that name? The chunk that offered service where I live called itself “Verizon.” I imagine they did a lot of research into figuring out if that sounded up-to-the-minute cutting edge to a prospective customer. Then they hired Darth Vader to mispronounce Verizon as Vorizon, and added to the “I’m not particularly any sort of word” vibe.
Trust me; if my name was Chippendale, that’s what I’d be calling my furniture — not Furnizon.
Ahem. Anyway, I hate going to the lumberyard. Nothing personal; I hate going anywhere. It interrupts what I’m doing making furniture. If I could just have everything delivered to me, I would.
But I’m not buying widgets. It matters a great deal what I buy, so in general, I gotta go look at it. That’s a foreign concept in a lot of walks of life now. If I was buying a computer, I’d do it at two AM on the internet. It was made in a factory. If it looked any different than any other one, there’d be something wrong with it.
There’s something wrong with most everything I buy at the lumber yard. That’s the point.
Those magnificent tiger stripes in the maple? The spalts and birdseyes? All those marvelous whorling medullary rays in the white oak that make each piece of furniture worth looking at? They’re defects. The wood would look like pale pink or tan plastic with railroad-track-straightaway grain, evenly spaced, the entire length of the boards if it didn’t have any defects. And if it looked like that, I’d buy it also — to paint it.
So here I am. A madman, looking for beautiful defects in a pile of sticks. The boards are as rough as language at a longshoreman’s tavern, and sometimes as crooked as a politician; they’re as dirty as Madonna and as heavy as a child’s head when you carry them in from the car after a long trip. It’s a rough estimate you’re making, when you look at a pile of wood that the average person might mistake as suitable for a woodstove, and know it’s worth the $10 per square foot they’re asking for it. Because there’s an end table in there somewhere.
Michelangelo Buonnarotti Simoni made the famous observation that his statues were inside the blocks of marble before he started. All he did, he said, was chip away until they were revealed.
What a jerk, or a genius, you might think. But he wasn’t saying it’s easy, to rub it in to the rest of us, or how marvelous he was to think in that manner. Great men often talk about their affairs as if they are no big deal to them. I don’t think that’s what he meant.
I think I know what he means, if only imperfectly. There is a kind of thrill in finding the raw material suitable for an excellent outcome. You can picture the roughness stripped away in your mind’s eye after a while. You see potential. The potential is in yourself, and you have spotted an appropriate medium for the expression of that potential. You’ve dragged a boat a long way overland and discovered a body of water.
As I said, I was at the lumberyard. Downes and Reader in Stoughton, Mass, if you must know. You poke through the flatstacked boards like a raccoon –or a lover. I found an odd pile of things that didn’t belong anywhere else. Sounds like the place for me.
I knew what it was, in the rough, without asking, without labels. Curly Red Birch. Flame Birch, some call it. The last time I bought Curly Red Birch, George Bush was president. The other George Bush. I built my then theoretical first son’s dresser out of it. He’s eleven now. He and his little brother could reduce a piece of IKEA furniture to kindling (does IKEA furniture burn? I’m not sure) in a lazy half hour. He’s never been able to put even the smallest dent in his dresser.
Flame Birch. It’s the king of all woods. Hard as a banker’s heart. Irridescent. Rare as compassion in a hockey fight. It’ll kill at least one tool I have when I run it through them. It cost more a Kennedy’s bar bill.
But I had to buy it. There was furniture in those baulks of wood. I could see it. All I had to do was figure out a way to let it out.
This was always my favorite Wilson Pickett song. It’s been awhile, but I think this is one of those songs I can play on all the power trio instruments, and sing. It’s just a laundry list, as we used to call such lyrics; you can make up any lyrics you can’t remember, really. It’s not a complicated piece of business.
Look at what’s going on there. It’s pandaemonium, and it’s very, very, real.
Now, that sort of frenzy is copied at all sorts of performances nowadays, and it’s a total and utter fraud. Mildewed old rock stars are like Fortune 500 companies, and they travel around like combination software salesmen/haemophiliac princes. There’s a checklist of enthusiasms they and the audience run through that is as stilted and effete as any opera crowd ever was. I can hear Mick Jagger going through the list in his head now: OK, Bic lighters (did we get a cut of those?), leave stage for 1.5 minutes, return to applause, focus group says play Angie as encore to push Zune sales, point to spot in audience where person might be, leave stage, drink Evian, wait 2.5 minutes, do Satisfaction as tie-in for Zune rollout, smile towards left boom camera for Radio Shack spot or we don’t get the royalty on the frisbee/remote control knock-off giveaway. When Keith stubs out the cigarette, that means the plane is ready and we can screw.
Let me clue you in on something. In the Wilson Pickett video, when the woman in the To Sir With Love jumper and the legs the cameraman gets interested in –a lot– whispers in Wilson’s ear while he’s trying to sing, she’s not running down his stock portfolio or giving him directions to the nearest wi-fi zone so he can check his e-mail to see if his Bentley is out of the shop or asking him if he’ll sign an autograph she can sell on e*bay tomorrow.
Every town he goes in, indeed.
I’ve rarely succumbed to that sort of reckless abandon as an audience member after I started performing. I don’t know how to act in an audience, really, as once you face the other way in an entertainment venue, you always feel a little funny facing the way the audience faces again. But the musicians on the stage are the ones who should be in control, really; it’s the audience that should get wild. I see Donald Dunn playing the bass there, maybe the most ubiquitous bass player after Motown’s James Jamerson, and he keeps banging out that cascading hypnotic riff over and over, and lets Wilson surf on the top of his wave. They all let the madness crash up against them like flotsam at a shipwreck, but they know they must keep going. You have to keep stoking the furnace, you can’t stop to warm your hands.
They’re in control. Of the uncontrollable. That wild scene was very real, and it’s gone now– because the context of being straitlaced all day long, all week, then letting your hair down on Friday has been diluted quite a bit. We’re all rock stars all the time now.
I was born too late for Wilson Pickett in his prime. But that wild scene captured on the video lasted for decades. I watched it recede during the 1980s, as the population aged and the clubs emptied out. Such things are bound to either pass or become a staid predictable industry.
I’m a little sad for those still younger than I, that never rode that musical bike without a helmet even once.
There’s a great joke in one of P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster stories. Wooster, amazed at some obscure thing Jeeves knows, asks: “Is there anything you don’t know? Jeeves considers for a moment, and replies mordantly: “I really don’t know, sir.”
None of us know what we don’t know, do we? But I’d like to offer this: none of us knows what we do know all that well, either.
I visit various salons on the internet — the culture and information kind, my internet hair is fine. People are always shrieking in there at one another about some real or imagined slight they feel about their political persuasion. And someone comes across with some sort of nuclear weapons grade comment that shows what a low down dirty thieving warmongering totalitarian babykilling something or other somebody or other is.
And the rejoinder? Link, please!
Ah! It doesn’t exist unless it’s on the internet. Cut and paste that sucker right in there, and you’ve proven it.
I’ve got news for you. No it doesn’t. The internet is a sewer, and you guys are trying to salmon fish in it. There is no “fact,” never mind opinion, that I can’t find on the internet in five minutes flat, with annotated footnotes. The fact could be aliens made crop circles to Donald Rumsfeld shot Kennedy, doesn’t matter, it’s out there. I once saw the text droppings of two different very agitated persons arguing whether Ahmadinejad was a highly placed operative in Khomeini’s hostage gathering Iran back in the day. I’m not interested in such things, really, but the person who was defending (!) the obviously loopy Iranian midget millenarian seemed to be saying: cut and paste a picture of Ahmadinejad doing something bad right now, or he’s Gandhi and Nasser’s love child.
I had a picture of Ahmindinejad, in a book on my desk, his arms linked with Khomeini’s other henchmen,on a platform in Iran, getting ready to make Jimmy Carter watch Ted Koppel every night until Ronald Reagan was elected. But it wasn’t on the internet, so it didn’t exist. I certainly wasn’t going to put it there. I’m busy, and I don’t care. But it illustrated to me that there are plenty of things that are not on the internet that are very, very, real. And in greater measure, plenty of things all over the internet that just ain’t so. Smoke over Beirut, anyone?
I don’t know why I know what I know. None of us does. I do have a tendency to know things other people do not, because I’m a little odd. On top of being odd, I’m an auto-didact, so I’ve gleaned odd stuff, while going about it in an odd way. That’s like odd cubed. I’m not a catalog, I’m a Secret Santa, as it were.
“Lower the Boom.” I saw that used the other day, and there was some discussion about its etymology. In my humble opinion, the etymology offered is wrong.
Everybody comes at etymology from their own point of view, if you let them, just like cut and paste oratory on the internet. Sometimes you can trace etymology right to the source, but that’s rarer than you might think. Someday etymologists will search for the reasons “ever” began to be spelled “evar.”
I always refer to my hoary old copy Wentworth and Flexner’s Dictionary of American Slang. The internet is great for neologisms born on the internet, but that’s about it. Here’s what the internet says about “lower the boom”
lower the boom : 1. To deliver a knockout punch. Prize fight use. -> : 2. To chatise or punish; to attack with criticism; to treat sternly; to demand obedience. … : 3. To prevent another from succeeding; to act in such a manner as to harm another’s chances od success. : From _Dictionary of American Slang_ (1960) by H. Wentworth & S.B. Flexner. : ———- : lower the the boom on … This expression refers to the boom of a sailboat — a long spar that extends from the mast to hold the foot of the sail. In a changing wind, the boom can swing wildly, leaving one at risk of being struck. [Slang; first half of 1900s] : From _The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms_ (1997) by Christine Ammer. : ———- : As a sailor, the story ran, he had knocked men overboard with a single punch, when he “lowered the boom” on them. (Dempsey & Stearns, _Round by Round_, 1940)
LOWER THE BOOM – “to reprimand harshly, to stop someone from doing something. A boom is a long spar or pole used to extend the bottom of certain sails; or, it can be a spar that extends upward at an angle from the foot of a mast from which there are suspended objects to be lifted. Derrick, the famous hangman during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, devised the prototype for the ship’s boom – a hoist that still bears the inventor’s name. Ashore, lowering the boom on someone means to call that person harshly to account. This can be done severely enough to leave one’s ears ringing.” From “When a Loose Cannon Flogs a Dead Horse There’s the Devil to Pay: Seafaring Words in Everyday Speech” by Olivia A. Isil (International Marine/Ragged Mountain Press, McGraw-Hill, 1996)
I don’t think they know what they’re talking about.
Boum is an old Dutch word, related to beam. It has something to do with a tree limb. But if the expression lower the boom is related to the boom on the sail hitting you on the top of the head, why are the derivations so recent? People have been getting hit on the head with a boom for thousands of years. Why all of a sudden in the twentieth century is this expression for getting clobbered in fashion?
Because it was something else, and I know it. I think I know it, anyway. The part of a crane or other hoisting device that swings around to drop that famous hook is the boom, too. And I’ve stood in a ditch, and on a dock, and in a loading yard many times, and signaled to the boom operator to “Lower the boom” thousands of times. You use hand signals, as the operator of the boom is far away, and the surroundings are noisy anyway.
To signal “Lower the boom,” you extend your right arm straight out, close your fingers, and extend your thumb straight down. Death to the gladiator. Lower the boom. Contemporaneous with the introduction of such signals to cargo hands on the docks — and stevedores are the greatest treasure trove of American slang outside the military.
I say that’s what it is. And if it isn’t, it should be.
Now it’s on the internet. Someone will cut and paste it somewhere, and I’ll be right, whether I am or not.
Month: November 2006
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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