Happy Halloween, You Bunch Of Freaks

Hallowe’en’s a mess. Everybody tells me so.

Read the newspapers. Hallowe’en is a combination salacious bachanaal, devil worship love-in, and workplace sexual harrassment playground– with the added attractions of being fired, run down by cars, dressing your daughters as Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver, and perhaps getting razor blades or anthrax in your kid’s candy. Other than that: Have Fun!

Pope Gregory III moved Festum omnium sanctorum –-All Saints Day — to November first to put a Christian gloss on the thing, but I bet appeasing dead spirits that walk the earth with treats goes back to the times of the caves of Altamira. The actual caves, not the Steely Dan song.

Co-opting an existing tradition for a current generation’s amusement. Hmm. Sounds exactly like what every crank, weirdo, jerk, and dogooder busybody is trying to do right now with Hallowe’en. At least the Pope just monkeyed about with the day after Hallowe’en, so his flock could enjoy a pagan festivity without worrying about it much. It’s like a Fortune 500 company hiring P Diddy as a spokesman. It’s more about image than any change in substance. My apologies for referring to him as “P Diddy.” I think he’s just “Diddy” now. Or perhaps he’s changed it again; it’s almost 10:00 am and I haven’t checked today.

I don’t have much of an opinion about Hallowe’en. Everyone seems to have lost their minds about it. There, that’s an opinion.

I see problems:

1. People use the day as an excuse to do vicious things to one another. I don’t care for that. And I really don’t think you want to be placed in any jail population wearing a costume.

2. Adults participate in it more than children now. That’s silly. Adults are supposed to walk behind their children with a flashlight and carry their charges and their loot for the last 7/8 of the trip.

3. People’s insane ideas about what other people should eat are intruding on the fun. Hint to homeowners: Children like candy. Children don’t like candy designed for diabetics. Trust me on this one.

4. Paganism is the root of Hallowe’en. If you’re an actual Pagan, or Druid, or Wiccan, or think you’re a witch or warlock, I’ve got news for you. Hallowe’en ain’t your night. It’s NOT the one night when everybody sees the essential coolness of your Wal*Mart Vampirella thang; it’s the one night of the year that normal people pay enough attention to the imaginary trappings of your foolish worldview to make fun of you. That’s it. Just like everybody else on Hallowe’en, you should behave and look differently for a short period. In your case, you should dress normally and act in a dignified and intelligent manner for a little while . You can spend the other 364 days acting like a loon.

5. Hallowe’en considered changing its name to “The College Kids Don’t Wear Much, Drink Still Liquor- Keystone- Cough Medicine-Rohypnol Smashes While Re-enacting the Sack of Troy, Amateur Arson/ Rapist/ NASCAR driver/Insane Jehovah’s Witness/ Melee Night.” It wouldn’t fit on the t-shirt, so they left it alone. College kids don’t need Hallowe’en. College kids only need the calendar to read “Thursday; PM,” for all that. No use eggin’ them on.

I’m here to help. Let’s solve all our problems with Hallowe’en:

At around dusk, small children dressed in cute and fantastic costumes will visit the doors of their nearby neighbors, who will give them a little Snickers bar for their trouble. Any child old enough to be unaccompanied by an adult is too old to trick-or-treat. The children’s parents will stand slightly behind their children and wave to the neighbors and they will exchange pleasantries. The home will have a pumpkin or two on the step, and perhaps the silhouette of a witch on a broom and a black cat, cut from construction paper by a gradeschooler, in the window. These small children will not be frightened by this activity, and startling people for your amusement will get you only a rap on the head from a Maglite flashlight that you will commemorate for several weeks by rubbing the lump it leaves on your addled head. The small children will be home and asleep at the regular hour, more or less.

While they sleep the deep, comforting sleep of the weary and contented child, I will steal their candy.

Words To Live By For Monday

I decided to write an aphorism from scratch today. It’s harder than I thought. Here goes:

If one man is playing checkers, the other chess, the man playing checkers will win.

Whew. That was a lot of work. Just like playing chess. I’m going to play checkers for the rest of the essay and just steal other people’s stuff. All unattributed, because I’m lazy and who knows who said what first anyway?

• Technology is dominated by two types of people — those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.
• Brains x Beauty x Availability = Constant.
  This constant is always zero.
• Any change looks terrible at first.
• Sow your wild oats on Saturday night. On Sunday pray for crop failure.
• Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.
• Air goes in and out, blood goes round and round; any variation on this is bad.
• If it’s stupid but it works, it wasn’t stupid.
• An expert is someone brought in at the last minute to share blame.
• Every thorough investigation leads to confusion.
• Simple things are hard.
• The chance of a computer crash is directly proportional to the importance of the document.
• Any subject interesting to teachers is boring or counterfactual; usually both.
• We could do worse; we always have.

SpongeBob Rocks

I have two children. One is a diplomat, one is feral. Assembled, that makes me.

Anyway, they browse amongst the luxuriant undergrowth of amusements like everybody else. We don’t have TV, so more or less we choose what we’re going to look at. We often choose SpongeBob.

There’s something profoundly wrong with you if you don’t like SpongeBob Squarepants. You should have someone unscrew the top of your head and mess around with the wires if you dislike it. It’s Shakespeare and the Three Stooges with all the interim stops thrown in. It’s sublime.

There’s all sorts of diversions offered to my tots — and their parents as collateral damage. My older son is a gaping maw for content of all kinds now. Even the little one doesn’t watch the same VCR tape over and over any more without protesting. I’ve seen all the usual suspects, and I have no problem with Sheen and Karl Weezer and Billy and Mandy and a bunch of other harmless tripe. But in general, each micro-generation attracts all the best –or at least the most appropriate and timely– ideas and people and distills it into something that defines that infantile generation. Bugs Bunny. Fred Flintstone. SpongeBob. Like that.

I think the coalescence of talent and the spot to put it in is not predictable with adults, never mind children whose minds we once had but are completely opaque to all of us now. It’s like a mature economy is; no one knows exactly what’s going on with everybody, and we all throw all sorts of stuff at the wall and gauge people’s reactions to determine if we need a new wall or new stuff to throw or a new thrower. Anyone that tells you that they can predict the next big thing is a liar; or more likely is telling the truth as they understand it, which is not very well. You can only be correct in that big way by happenstance and probabilities. And almost without exception it’s a trick any person can only pull off once, anyway; so your track record in the last smash hit makes you as qualified as a homeless man on the corner yelling at the traffic in predicting the next one. Yeah, you knew in advance the obscure dork bit player that held a clipboard on Coach would be a worldwide sensation as an animated talking doofus starfish. I bet the guy that hired him didn’t. He was just flinging the best thing he could find and afford at the likeliest wall he could imagine, and hoping.

It’s a great wall. It all stuck.

Sippican’s Got His Wealth Of Nations Freak On

Look, I’m doing it wrong.

It’s not that I don’t understand how the Intertunnel works. I do. But I can’t bring myself to do what you’re supposed to do and grub around on the ones-and-zeros ground for attention. I’m too busy making things anyway.

But no one writes things and hopes no one reads them — unless they’re crazy. I’m a lunatic, of course, but a much different kind than that. I appreciate it when people come and read what’s offered here. It is a constant source of fun and interest to read what visitors here offer as comments, and to see how many other people point to what is here and talk about it.

Part of me “doing it wrong” is how badly I keep up with all that. Based on manners alone, I wish I could correspond properly with everyone that says: Hey, look at that Sippican drivel today; it’s the Shiznit! And I’d like to acknowledge a lot of such people right now, but I am loathe to do it because I will undoubtedly leave out a bunch of people, because I forgot, or I didn’t even know about it in the first place. I do find my name in the damndest places these days.

I must mention one thing, because it is so piquant. I am terribly fond of everybody’s crazy intellectual uncle, that wild wigged wag from Edinburgh, Adam Smith. I sheepishly admit I keep a hardbound copy of The Wealth of Nations at my bedside and reread it all the time. It is like a secular bible to me. Of course I’m so poor that reading it is more akin to looking at pornography than scripture, but still. As someone who is fed into the maw of the woodchipper of primitive barebones commerce daily, but has likewise run things large enough to come under the rubric of “Macro” economics, I can tell you that if you’re looking for a pinmaker, well, Adam, I’m your huckleberry.

Oh yes, that one thing? I am a devotee of a website across the roiling Atlantic called The Adam Smith Institute blog. I’ve been reading it for years, and stealing jokes from it, too. Of course any institute devoted to the memory and teaching of Adam Smith is my kinda place, and their blog is very interesting, in an I’m-interested-in-things-other-people-avoid-like-homework and-would-rather-watch-CSIMiami kinda way. And I was reading it the other day, and flummoxed to see them telling everybody to read Sippican Cottage. It seemed like such an out of the way/wonderful place to find myself.

Again, thanks to the legions of people who read and comment and link and riff and so forth. But you gents and dames over there on that foggy lump of rocks and coal out in the Atlantic? You made my day.

A Dodo Writes About Dodos

The pictures are like deja vu all over again, I know. But I’ve defaced two of yesterday’s The Wellfleet Oysterman’s House with text to point out ten aspects of house construction that will likely disappear during our lifetimes. They are quite familiar; at least they are to me, who’s been poking around old New England houses my whole life. Your mileage may vary if you’re already living in a rammed earth ranch in Arizona. Click on the pictures to embiggen them, if you like.

1.An open, site-built masonry fireplace for burning wood
Already really expensive, with a massive shortage of skilled masons and plenty of onerous regulation. Illegal in some places over smoke or the danger of fire from sparks up the chimbley. Not to mention how few people have access to firewood, and access to the get-up-and-go it takes to make a fire with logs. Gas flames in a metal box is all you’ll see in a few years.

2. Single pane divided-lite windows
Energy use regulation is fascinated with exotic windows. A single pane window with a low-e glass panel fitted on the outside is practically as energy efficient as the most cutting edge ventana, but I’m probably going to be the last human extant that can set a pane of glass in a muntin window with putty. Modern windows got no soul, people

3. A wood shingle roof
Also now illegal in many places over fire regulation. Sawn wood shingles or rough split shakes are going to be as anachronistic as slate roofs are now in a few years. Notice even the Oysterman’s house has asphalt tab shingles on the (dreadful) enclosed porch addition. People are used to ugly roofs now. They don’t even notice how drab they are.

4. Shutters that operate
Just plastic slabs nailed to the faux colonials now. The fellows I first worked with called the hardware that real wood shutters swung on: “gudgeons and pintles,” just like the nomenclature used for the hanging hardware on boat rudders. Spell-check is freaking out about the words “gudgeons” and “pintles” as I type this. It’s a lonely thing to know more words than spell-check does, my friends.

5. A front door used as the main entry into a house
9 times out of 10 I’m looking at nothing but your garage door when I look at your house. If you do have a “front door,” it makes a mummy’s tomb sound when you open it every decade or so. But even an infrequently used ceremonial grand entry door beats a snouthouse design.

6. A masonry foundation
Poured concrete isn’t masonry, really. I’m referring to bricks and blocks and stone. When I was a kid, people were still assembling concrete blocks into masonry foundations. By “people,” I mean “me” helping “my uncle.” I’m not even sure people are going to go into the ground much anymore to make a basement, never mind building one one 35 pound chunk of concrete at a time. I know I’d pitch myself into volcano before I signed up to do another one. (Note: I put that “one” right after the other “one” to confuse and delight you)

7. Wooden gutters
I used to repair and install these all the time. Every fall I’d be hired to clean the leaves out of them and paint the inside with linseed oil. The fellow I worked for wasn’t too bright. We’d wait 2 weeks too long to get around to this, so the gutters were filled with ice already. He told me that taking a teaspoon of linseed oil was considered an old-fashioned health restorative in his family. It explained a lot. Raw linseed oil has many such uses among the homeopathic crowd. Unfortunately, all he had was Boiled linseed oil, which is a deadly brain-destroying poison if you eat it. Most alternative medicine type advice pans out like that; not wrong, exactly — off-topic.

8. Painted wood shingle sidewall
They used to use red cedar sidewall shingles for use under paint. “R and Rs,” we called them; resquared and rebutted. They cost more than space shuttle tiles now. Wood clapboards will hang in there for a while, but painting sidewall shingles is a doomed proposition. Jeez, I hate plastic ersatz anything on a house.

9. Unexposed timber-frame walls
People still think timber-framed houses are swell, and continue to build them now and again. They think the medieval method of making a barn to live in is so interesting that they leave it exposed on the interior to show it off. Colonial people would never leave the guts of the house exposed. No one will do it the insane hernia/black thumbnail way and then cover it up ever again.

10. Oil-based paint
The pigments and vehicle in water-based paint are almost all sorta plastic derived from petroleum, but that’s not what I’m referring to. The days of mineral spirits constituting the base for any paint are numbered. They contain Volatile Organic Compounds, ie: pollutants. If you’ve purchased a gallon of what is referred to in the vernacular as “oil-based’ paint recently, you’ve noticed that it has the consistency of block cheese. The manufacturer is assuming you –wink wink –understand that Home Depot is selling gallons of the ingredient they are forced to leave out to pass VOC regulations, right there on the shelf next to the paint. Since mineral spirits is used for–ahem… cleaning your brushes!– not for paint thinner, no sirree no way uh uh– they don’t mind that it’s 100% VOC, and this ingredient sold alone is not regulated somehow. You can buy all you want of it and splash it into the paste masquerading as $40-per-gallon alkyd paint, which can’t have hardly any mineral spirits in it anymore at all nosirree nada.

You didn’t hear that from me

Well, You’ve All Been Pleasant, I Guess.

I haven’t gotten death threats from any pacifists over yesterday’s remarks — I think they mostly sleep in — so I guess I have to pony up the pictures of the Wellfleet Oysterman’s House described in Henry David Thoreau’s Cape Cod.

That’s called a “full cape.” It has five bays. A bay is nomenclature for the portion of the facade allocated for each door or window. A “half cape” would have two windows and a door beside them. A “three-quarter cape” would have two windows, a door, and then another window on the other side of the door. It’s a full cape with ell, as there’s an addition sticking straight out the back, too.

Not a lot of the interior was original, even when these pictures were taken as part of the vestigal tail of the depression-era Historic American Building Survey. The house had been purchased shortly before then by a somewhat notable person, Joseph Jay Deiss. I assume it’s still there but can’t find any current pictures of it on the intertunnel.

The house itself is interesting, especially to a person as consumed with anachronism as I am, so tomorrow maybe I’ll point out ten things about this house that more or less will disappear in our lifetimes. The ghost of the Wellfleet Oysterman will rattle around in there forever.

Henry David Thoreau Was A Knucklehead

I’ve never had much use for him. He has a whiff of trust fund about him. And he’s become a sort of patron saint of the idle rich neurotic. Strike two. When I go to visit the mansions in Newport Rhode Island, I am struck by how frenetic the lives of the scions of the captains of industry were, and how little they accomplished compared to their fathers and grandfathers. Cornelius Vanderbilt built a steamship line from nothing. His children raced yachts. I don’t mind that people race yachts, but such activities do not advance the sum total of human accomplishment. Leisure, however frenetically engaged in, is still leisure.

Thoreau is the patron saint of everybody that thinks that amusing themselves with asceticism isn’t a form of leisure activity. Living in the Petit Hameau doesn’t make you a peasant. And peasants have to pay with the sweat of their brow for you to pursue asceticism; a leisure they generally never see. The rapacious Cornelius made steamships to deliver things to poor people, and to deliver the poor people themselves. The yacht just delivers the owner. No one that’s not rapacious has ever helped me one bit. The same goes for the factory of the mind. Thoreau is just a yacht racer of lettered asceticism. His minions can shove a rope up a drainpipe, as far as I’m concerned.

But I read Thoreau, because Thoreau wandered around, looked at things and talked to people, and he wrote it down. He was a good writer. He was just a bad thinker. Good writer/bad thinker should replace “All the news that’s fit to print” on a certain masthead, now that I think about it. And “Bad writer, worse thinker” should be the name we use if we ever rename the Internet. At any rate, there’s lots of interesting and remarkable things in Thoreau’s writing. He wrote about Cape Cod with a lot of affection and interest, and that’s how I read it.

Here’s a snippet from The Wellfleet Oysterman, a chapter in Thoreau’s Cape Cod.

Before sunrise the next morning they let us out again, and I ran over to the beach to see the sun come out of the ocean. The old woman of eighty-four winters was already out in the cold morning wind, bare-headed, tripping about like a young girl, and driving up the cow to milk. She got the breakfast with despatch, and without noise or bustle; and meanwhile the old man resumed his stories, standing before us, who were sitting, with his back to the chimney, and ejecting his tobacco-juice right and left into the fire behind him, without regard to the various dishes which were there preparing. At breakfast we had eels, buttermilk cake, cold bread, green beans, doughnuts, and tea. The old man talked a steady stream; and when his wife told him he had better eat his breakfast, he said: “Don’t hurry me; I have lived too long to be hurried.” I ate of the apple-sauce and the doughnuts, which I thought had sustained the least detriment from the old man’s shots, but my companion refused the apple-sauce, and ate of the hot cake and green beans, which had appeared to him to occupy the safest part of the hearth. But on comparing notes afterward, I told him that the buttermilk cake was particularly exposed, and I saw how it suffered repeatedly, and therefore I avoided it; but he declared that, however that might be, he witnessed that the apple-sauce was seriously injured, and had therefore declined that. After breakfast we looked at his clock, which was out of order, and oiled it with some “hen’s grease,” for want of sweet oil, for he scarcely could believe that we were not tinkers or pedlers; meanwhile he told a story about visions, which had reference to a crack in the clock-case made by frost one night.He was curious to know to what religious sect we belonged. He said that he had been to hear thirteen kinds of preaching in one month, when he was young, but he did not join any of them, — he stuck to his Bible. There was nothing like any of them in his Bible.

So read Thoreau, even though he’s a knucklehead. The real dolts revere Walt Whitman anyway. And visit tomorrow the king of the internet knuckleheads — me — because I’ve found pictures of the actual house of the Wellfleet Oysterman, and if you’re pleasant I’ll show them to you.

Buttonhook on Three. Your Shoe’s Untied

I never played organized football. I was skinny and contemplative, and it never occurred to anyone involved, me included, to even try. But we used to play all the time.

It was somewhat like the picture, in that there were never enough people to make a full team, never mind two. In extremis, the quarterback had to hike the ball to himself. We actually made the fellow turn perpendicular to the line of scrimmage, and toss the ball up in the air and catch it again before he ran or threw it. Hilarious. I remember Danny, one of my friends, hiking the ball to himself; throwing the ball up in the air after receiving his own snap; running underneath his own wild heave of a pass and catching it; then like a final, magnificent capstone to his herculean if bizarre effort, tackling himself by putting his foot in a ground hog hole while picking his way through the cowflaps and tacklers, falling face first into the pasture grass.

I’d pay ten dollars to see it again; but it’s free in my head, and unavailable at any price elsewhere.

The ball often had the bladder bulging out of one or more of the seams or the lacings. To this day, I see professional players throw those marvelous spirals, the camera capturing it revolving slowly as it sails into the galloping wide receiver’s hands, and all I can think is: That’s a nice ball.

We didn’t have any equipment whatsoever. We got smart after a while and wore a half dozen coats or sweaters for the padding, and after the first time being excoriated by your mother for tearing a pocket off the only winter coat you were going to get that year, you learned to put the crummiest garment on the outside.

Once a kind cousin who had become a man and abandoned childish things gave my father his old shoulder pads. My father gave them to me with a straight face. I bet after I skipped elated out of the room with them, his laughter began — and will echo down through the eons like some second big bang. I wore them outside my clothes, the dense fiberglas flaps clacking as I ran and pinching the opponents’ fingers when they tackled me. It is hard to come up with a tableaux more absurd. I must have looked like some insane earthbound Icarus trying to get lift as I ran.

We’d butt heads like rams with our preteen nubbins, bloody our noses and rend our garments literally –figuratively if we were losing, and had a grand time.

The football game is on today, but I am a man now and must work. I will tune it in on the AM radio to carry me along as I bang on my work like a blind cobbler’s thumb. Don’t matter. The faraway crackling descriptions will be better than being there, or that marvelous fraudulent stand-in for being there, the TV.

It will be better because I will see it in my mind’s eye, imagination trumping reality every time, just the same way it did, stumbling and clacking and flapping across Miller’s field all those years ago.