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On June 25th, 1976, Johnny Mercer Left Us Alone, With Only His Music To Fortify Us

June 25, 2009 No Comments

It should be plenty, but we’re whiners.


Gather ’round me, everybody
Gather ’round me, while I preach some
Feel a sermon coming on here
The topic will be sin
And that’s what I’m agin’
If you wanna hear my story
Then settle back and just sit tight
While I start reviewing
The attitude of doing right

You got to ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive
E-lim-i-nate the negative
And latch on to the affirmative
Don’t mess with mister inbetween

You got to spread joy up to the maximum
Bring gloom down to the minimum
And have faith, or pandemonium
Liable to walk upon the scene

To illustrate my last remark
Jonah in the whale, Noah in the ark,
What did they do, just when everything looked so dark?
Man, they said, we better

Ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive
E-lim-i-nate the negative
And latch on to the affirmative
Don’t mess with mister inbetween

No don’t mess with mister inbetween

You got to spread joy up to the maximum
Bring gloom down to the minimum
And have faith, or pandemonium
Liable to walk upon the scene

You got to ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive
E-lim-i-nate the negative
And latch on to the affirmative
Don’t mess with mister inbetween

No don’t mess with mister inbetween

This Is Bowling; There Are Rules

June 24, 2009 6 Comments

It’s a weird sort of a world we live in.

Wonderful, truly. There’s a visual diversity and ebullience available all over the place. It’s not universal, of course, but that’s the nature of true diversity, isn’t it? It’s the people that say that the culture and its artifacts are monolithic, and bad, that have no idea what a robust society produces. Stuff you don’t like, sometimes.

That’s a house in Madison, Indiana. I do believe I wouldn’t mind sitting on that porch for a good long while. The house it’s attached to is really nothing more than a little ranch house. You could say it was sprawl, and ask that it be flattened, or never built in the first place. Conversely, you could put a plaque on it and get a commission together to decide what colors it should be allowed to be painted, if anyone is to be allowed to touch it at all. It’s likely the same people would participate in both activities without noticing their left hand doesn’t know what their right hand is doing. America’s like that a lot.

It’s really very difficult to lay on dense decoration like that and do it well. It seems like a jumble to many eyes, because we’ve lost the knack. People try, timidly, to go a little way down this route, and make a mess of it. It’s only difficult because we don’t know the rules of decoration anymore, because there’s only been one rule exalted above all: No Decoration. It’s mildly counterintuitive, but I assure you that there’s nothing fussier than an absolute lack of decoration. Everything has to be flawless to pull it off, and nothing is, or stays that way very long.

We drive by the attempts to put decoration on dwellings now and I say to my wife: “Home Depot blew up,” and she knows exactly what I’m thinking without any further comment. Decoration has to be layered on, all of it in keeping with what’s already there and everything else you’re adding simultaneously.

For the most part, no one would have this on their house because they couldn’t picture expending even the effort it would take to maintain it, never mind the effort necessary to produce it in the first place. There is a great deal of contemporary American life and its institutions that answers that description, and that’s not good.

Get some wonderful and keep it. Then you’ll be qualified to make some, maybe.

Cape Cod, 1950

June 23, 2009 5 Comments

Before my time, of course. But maybe not.

I saw the vestigal tail of summering on Cape Cod when I was young. It wasn’t a year round home for people so much then. You got a summer rental and suffered on the clogged highways in the smothering heat to get your ration of seabreeze. The rental house and the idea behind it smelled a bit of mildew by the time I was there, but you could make it out on the receding horizon.

Later on, I used to perform at all the nightspots there in the summer. The owners were still trying to cobble together one more year of sunburned customers with too much cash and nothing to do but get a bit loaded and party. Jimmy Buffet has a sort of traveling Potemkin Village of the ideal, but it had gone grey and thick in the middle well before he latched on to it, and it hadn’t moved to God’s Great Waiting Room down south yet.

I played Happy Hour on Cape Cod before Happy Hour was made illegal here. (I’m not exaggerating; Happy Hour is illegal in Massachusetts.) The young girls would come and dance and the men would eye them warily until they all had enough tonsil polish to mix properly. We’d run sweat while we played badly and told a few bad jokes, and preside over it.

Afterwards, we used to go to an old shack called The Sandbar on the access road to the West Dennis Beach, and hear Rockwell King exhume a couple jokes and play moldy standards on the piano to people with blue hair. It was like visiting a club you were grandfathered into but never really joined, and seeing the pictures of dead club presidents on the wall in the lobby, half-remembered when alive, only half dead now that they’re gone.

No one’s born with blue hair, you know.

The Friday Slog (Again, Only On A Monday Three Years Later)

June 22, 2009 4 Comments

[Editor’s Note: Written three years ago in June. I guess it’s never going above 70 in June forever.]
{Author’s Note: My foot really hurts.}

Endless dreary rain.

It was more interesting when it was raging down like a monsoon. Now it’s just limitless, piddling, annoying dismal dripping.

The sky is dishwater, the ground coffee grounds under the sink. The sodden leaves weigh down the branches, and the trees slump like mourners. The birds sleep in.

The ground is sated, and more. Every little seam and pinhole in the basement weeps the water flung on the ground outside a week ago. It’s an assault, but the worst kind; a siege, slowly but inexorably finding the weakness in your subterranean parapets. The sump pump has become the central theme in my life.

There’s often a marvelous moment, late at night, when it first starts to rain. You’re warm and comfortable, it’s late or early, and the rain, gone for too long, reappears with a little sizzle on the windowsill, and then the steady drops drum on the roof, and you drowse and dream of creek, the river, the ocean.

That’s ten days ago. Now the sound of the rain is like the tramp of an occupying force, implacable, smothering, brutal and cold.

The windowboxes are aquariums. The toads drown in the window wells. the mosquitos hatch, and hatch their plots for the summer, when they will remind us of the awful rain long after it’s gone and we miss it.

The grass is as green as Cambodia. Water glints through the underbrush, reflecting the dull sky from the most unlikely places. It seems like it will never end.

And sure as age, and death, and taxes, and the turning of the earth and the rising of the sun, on the day it’s over, I’ll get a postcard from the town, announcing the water ban.

Month: June 2009

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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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