Overheard these details about someone last week: She chewed cloves to cover up the smell of gin. The gin also raised her blood pressure, and she ate whole garlic cloves to bring it back down. When she woke up in the morning, her husband said she smelled like a dead squirrel.
Author: mdavidhornbuckle
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Tractor Tie
In response to my plea for people to buy my book, Angie Lane has apparently read the short stories on my website. She reminded me that she was there when the incident on which “Pineapple Tie” was based occurred. It was the summer after we all graduated. I’d had a job interview earlier that day at the Book and Art shop, where I was to work the rest of that summer. Several of us went to Boomer’s, as we often did in those days. On the street outside, a couple of drunk rednecks tried to pick a fight with me because I was wearing a tie. According to Angie, it wasn’t the pineapple tie, which I think I bought later, but a tie with stitched tractors, which she claims she bought for me. I don’t have any memory of that particular tie.
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Strangers Waiting for a Train That Never Arrives
The other day, I was at the 2nd Ave F station, and there was one of those unintelligible announcements over the intercom. I asked a woman standing nearby if she understood what was said, and she didn’t. So I said I would go upstairs and see if there were any signs. When I came back, the woman—who was about my age and sort of attractive in a thin, hippie way—was looking for me. Suddenly I realized that I was taking charge of this situation, and she was depending on me for information. I told her what I had found out, which was that, due to flooding, the F wasn’t going to Queens, and you have to transfer to another train at 34th Street.
After a few minutes, still no train, another announcement came on. It was still nearly impossible to decipher, but certain parts of it sounded distinctly different from the sign I had read. The two of us both decided we’d take a cab because there was no telling when/if a train was going to show up. She offered to share a cab, but my apartment was a little out of the way of her destination, which was 6th Ave, in the 50s. It occurred to me that she was probably stunned and grateful that someone actually bothered to talk to her in the subway. Perhaps I imagined that she was also somewhat attracted to me. I’m really not so narcissistic as to think this about every strange woman I manage to talk to, but her manner indicated a certain amount of hope and desire.
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Verlaine
I’m reading Arthur Symons’ book on the symbolist movement in French literature, which is supposed to be the seminal work of criticism on that genre. It’s an area of literature in which I’m sorely ignorant, and the book illuminates the definitive elements of poems by Rimbaud, Verlaine, Baudelaire and others of whom the importance has always been a distant mystery.
The chapter on Verlaine, which I’m reading now, zeroes in on the antisocial persona taken on by the artist and puts me in mind of antisocial artists I’ve known over the years. At one time, I would have identified with it myself, but I became rather pragmatic at some point in my life, perhaps after my divorce. Beginning to make a solidly middle-class wage can do that to you I suppose.
Artists like that are hated by almost everybody during their lifetime. People, like my acquaintance CXB, who are the embodiment of that spirit in the circle of artists I know, don’t seem to be doing anything more important or interesting than the work I’m producing. And it’s hard to imagine that there will be much to show for all CXB’s misanthropy when all is said and done.
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Battery Park
It’s 9 am, and I’m walking against the grain, against the hordes of commuters going to work, passing west over the north side of Ground Zero. There aren’t as many suits as I might have expected. I glance over each row of faces as I pass. None of them are hers.
I cross down into Battery Park, following a group of tourists who are headed toward Clinton Castle. At the bay’s edge, I have a clear view of the Statue of Liberty, so gracious and majestic still, though she’s been having a hard time of late with so much of what she stands for being hypocritically challenged by ignorant or disingenuous fearmongers and warmongers.
It was twenty years ago to the month, if not to the date, when I last explored this area, on vacation with my family. Being in New York then was like living in a dream. It’s still that way for me sometimes, when I happen to pass through Times Square late at night or early in the morning, while the crowds are sleeping in nearby hotels. This is one of those moments. I’m thinking about taking the Staten Island Ferry, just for the hell of it, but I decide I’ll save that adventure for another day. I’ve already strayed far enough from home.
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McDonald’s
Heard in the elevator around lunch time a couple of weeks ago:
– Where are you going for lunch?
– Mickey D’s.
– Hate yourself that much, huh?
– You have no idea.
I went to McDonalds for breakfast this morning and had the following exchange with M.
– I’m going to McDonalds.
– Are you trying to kill yourself?
– Yes, I hate myself that much.
– Poly (our cat) wishes you hated her as much as you hate yourself.
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The Virgin Spring
I watched Bergman’s The Virgin Spring last night, which I’ve seen before, but not in many years. When the spring bursts out of the ground at the end of the movie, it’s one of the most powerful moments I’ve ever seen on film.
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Seminary Thoughts
Thinking about God today, particularly because I was walking by the seminary. I wonder if priests wrestle with their feelings about God more than lay people. It’s a sweeping generalization, but I think lay people tend to take their feelings about God for granted—be it belief, non-belief, or agnosticism—unless they’re in a state of crisis. And then you have people—the poor, the chronically ill—who are more or less always in a state of crisis or for whom one crisis begets another. And those people may be rather set in their ways about God also. Some people find hope or optimism through God; I tend to think that the hope itself is some aspect of God.
I’m interested in the recent backlash against mythical thinking among certain scientists and philosophers—Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, etc. A kind of mythical thinking is key to the kind of literature that I’m trying to write, and it’s key to the way I tend to look at the world. Not that I believe the “magical” metaphysical implications of it, but the language of myth and religious metaphor helps me to understand my feelings about certain things. Perhaps I’m comfortable with that language because I come from the South.
Allegedly, my uncle John had the following conversation with a street urchin when he came to New York in college to study at the seminary for a semester. I think he might have made it up.
– Hey, where are you going?
– I’m going to the seminary.
– Why you wanna be around all those dead people?
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Being an End Table
I guess I’m feeling philosophical today. I’m not getting anything done on my novel (although I think I did add a sentence or two), but I’m finding myself lost in a lot of rather abstract thoughts. Just now, I was playing a mahjong game and thinking about what it means to be a “good person.” I’ve always found this concept rather suspicious.
First, it implies that there is some essence or purpose to being a person, and if you fail at that purpose, you fail at being a person. I’m not sure that’s possible. If you’re a person, that’s just a natural, indisputable fact. I’m not sure it’s all that meaningful to say that someone is a “good” one or a “bad” one.
Similarly, it sounds like a skill that can be acquired, along the lines of being a good golfer or a good mathematician. I suppose this could be a helpful metaphor if one is in the process of “trying to be a better person,” but one might just as likely throw one’s hands in the air and say, “I guess I’m just not that good at this ‘being a person’ thing. Maybe I should try to be something else, like maybe an end table.”
M. David Hornbuckle 