Absurdity – Page 8 – HUMOR IS NO FUN UNLESS YOU LAUGH

Frontporch

Back in “old” (ca.1950) Montreal the houses along rue Cherbrooke just west of rue de Bleury where I lived all had front porches. Some of those wooden porches had low bannisters all around but most did not. They were open to view from the street. That is how I know about the Canadian rocking chairs. Few porches had less then four of those. One chair per resident, it seems, was the norm. The interesting thing about these chairs is that they were used. If you walked along Cherbrooke any evening you would see them all occupied. It was fascinating to see the good folks chatting and rocking. Some would do short back and forths, controlled with their feet on the ground. Others pulled their feet up and did deep, energetic swings. No matter when I walked by this parade of motion, however, there was never any rythm to it. I do not remember ever seeing two chairs rocking at the same clip. As a matter of fact, by the time I reached the library at the other end of the street I was sometimes a little dizzy. It was a confusing phenomenon: they rock and I get dizzy.
In Newport Beach where I now live I find myself again in a neighborhood with front porches. The houses are single family homes and the porches are mostly stone and stucco. Most of those porches are furnished with chairs and little tables. The preferred style is the Adirondack chair. Many families have cushions in their chairs and flowers on their little tables, all set up for little evening gatherings and some gossiping. Just like in the old days, you would think. But there is one noticeable difference: nobody ever sits in any of those nice chairs. There are no rocking chairs either, and nobody is chatting, let alone gossiping. In a way this town is asleep. But that is deceptive. There are people living in these houses and they are awake. But they are never seen outside unless you catch a glimpse of one of them hurrying from house to car or from car to house. Judging by the few I have seen they are like regular people except that some of them have only one arm to wrestle with shopping bags, children’s seats, golf clubs, and such. Their other arm is attached to a telephone which, in turn, is fastened to one ear.

And here, I think, we come to the crux of the matter. Things have not changed. All the chatting is still going on, more than ever probably. But people no longer take time to sit around in a group, talking. One now talks to one person at a time, and not face to face either. But one does talk, all the time, continuously, all through the day. As long as it can be done by telephone. The juiciest bits of gossip are transmitted by the local blog mothers. They show up as email messages, also on your phone.

In the process our front porch lost its function. It did not disappear. It has only been reduced to a tableau, a thing you look at but mustn’t touch. Somebody please tell me: is rue Sherbrooke at least still rocking?

The Old Man In and Out of Paradise

It stands to reason that the world is actually much older than the Bible stories make us think. In fact, the history of the creation of mankind goes way back. I have no proof, but intuition and blind faith tell me that early on God was still inexperienced. She had never yet tried to create humans before. She had done well with snakes, though. Their brains had turned out powerful and perfectly capable of cunning, as we later found out. But let us begin at the beginning.

For one thing, Earth was also new and time was still set at “universe” which meant that things went extremely fast and extremely slow at the same time. Later this sort of thing was shoved into a box labeled “quantum theory”. Remnants of the old clock setting still remain today. While in the United States, for example, “time” means money and by extension, “hurry up”, in Italy, Spain, and many other cultures “time” means “take yours”, in other words, “Hey, not so fast”. But I am digressing again.

So it took God only a day or so to start “Project Mankind”, but from then on development was slow going. The thing turned out to be more complicated than expected. As a matter of fact, it took decades, celestial decades. By the time the first complete model, Adam, was rolled out he was already in his celestial eighties. So when God set him down and explained the basic rules he was almost deaf, or at least hard of hearing and, truth be told, did not understand a word of what she said about the tree and the apple, for example. It did not matter because that topic wasn’t to come up ’till later. First she had to convince him that the least he could do was to make himself presentable when in public, and that Eve should do the same. Three fig leaves would be the norm for her, one would do for him, God said. But as we already know Adam did not hear well and consequently just gave God that blank stare of senile non-comprehension. So she tried to communicate with him in an audio-visual way. She showed him artists’ renderings of Eve before fig leaves and Eve after. The idea was to make him see the difference, what is better: with or without. Like the optometrists do, flipping lenses: “One more time, Left? or Right?” The answer seemed obvious to God but the procedure was completely wasted on Adam who had already lost most of his vision by the time he hit celestial seventy. All he could say was that he did not notice any difference. He must have been stone blind, if mixed metaphors are in order.

Just then God accidentally dropped her clip board. Adam, who had already developed some innate sense of politesse, instantly bent down to pick it up, a maneuver he was not prepared for. Some thing snapped and he could not get up. He had to be helped to his feet. At that moment it occurred to God for the first time that maybe she was going to have to scrap this model.

The next item on the list was that apple thing. That was important, after all. Maybe, she thought, he will understand, and maybe he will straighten out once it sinks in that this is serious. So preparations were made and Eve, wearing her finest fig leaves, brought the apple to Adam, suggesting that he take a hearty bite of it, just as the snake had instructed her. He was most willing to do that. The red-cheeked ripe juicy “Paradise Delicious” smelled so good. But his one wobbly upper front tooth, assisted by equally wobbly pre-historic partials, just did not cut it. Literally! He was unable to cut into the hard skin of the offered fruit. That did it. “If he can’t even do this!”, God mumbled. She turned the lights out in Paradise and went back to her drawing board to start over.

How long that took I do not know, but celestial time had rolled on and we were approaching modernity. We get back to the story at about Genesis 1:26. We now have a little problem, though. Can we assume that God spoke some sort of Proto-Greek? She must have spoken something. How else could anyone have heard her. It could not have been English. Even the English themselves had not been invented yet. But if you follow the text you know that she was about to create mankind, something like anthropos, and that there would be an andros and a gynaika. But then English came into use and sure enough, the English speaking translator picked the word “man” for anthropos. I wish he had been a jew. I am sure he would have called him “a mensch”. That might have been too much praise but at least it would have disspelled the notion that God favored the male of the species. That misconception, alas, has now hung on for thousands of years. It is still gospel in much of the world. I find it refreshing that lately we are beginning to suspect that in world affairs at least, we have long enough ignored the fact the Irish poet Thomas Moore laid before us, namely that “‘Tis woman, woman, rules us still”.

Perhaps “rules” is too strong a word. The old Hindu philosophers claim that it is not “a woman” or even “women” that hold sway over us but the female principle, and that is also why I think “God” is a “she”, yet not a woman. But I don’t much go for this nebulous mystic talk. And as for man, i.e. andras, the male of the species, I really have to dig deep in my memory. When was the last time one of them did anything really helpful? I believe that from time to time it simply does take a woman to set things right, here or there. A Meir, a Thatcher, or a Merkel, say.

Lazarus

The 1880’ies are often called the Golden Age. In Russia, unfortunately, these years were characterized by massive Church-inspired pogroms, events at which pious churchgoers, walking behind their priest in procession, would still yell “Kill the Jews”, and mean it.

Emma Lazarus, a minor American writer and poet intent on helping the oppressed, believed that she spoke in the name of all Americans when she wrote The New Colossus. Later, when the Statue of liberty was erected, her words found their way to the wall of the foundation structure.

Now, a hundred years later, Liberty Enlightening The World by Bartholdi is said to be the best known public sculpture in America. Lazarus’ sonnet contains probably the best known line of American poetry: “Give me your tired, you poor, your huddled masses”. Maybe the words once meant what they said. America had a big heart then. Alas, America’s heart has shrunk a bit. Those words sound hollow these days. Do we not have enough trouble with unemployment, automation, outsourcing, social security, health insurance, etc.? We need the housekeepers’, waiters’, gardeners’, and field workers’ jobs for our own people, now essentially blocked from getting into those lucrative manual labor careers. We cannot take on the problems of other nations’ poor as well.

America for Americans is a more honest slogan than ‘Send us your poor’. And if honesty matters we ought to bring Emma’s words up to date lest any newcomers visiting the statue of Liberty misunderstand what we are about. Here is one attempt:

Take back your tired, your poor, your huddled masses.
They should breathe free, live without fear.
But please,
Not here.

Why Did The Chicken

If you are a Jew and it is the night before Yom Kippur you cleanse your conscience, you let go of all the stupidities you have committed during the year. You atone. Put crudely this means that you find a scapegoat, like “The Devil made me do it”, or “Hillary Clinton”. If you are a frum Jew you do it by swinging a live chicken three times over your head. This transfers the swinger’s sins to the chicken. The practice is called Kapparot. The chickens come to the market stuffed into narrow crates. That is cruel, but we must remember that until recently all chickens spent their lives stuffed into narrow crates. Only lately are we invited to buy free range eggs, for example, eggs laid by hens who are raised on meadows where they can run and scratch for worms. I support that idea, a laudable step toward improving our collective attitude concerning the treatment of animals. But back to the business at hand.

People who are not Jews are called Goyim. The Goyim are sinful, too, but they don’t have an efficient mechanism to deal with that. They mistreat their chickens just as cruelly, and not just on Yom Kippur but all year long, before they chop them up and package them for the supermarket. It is a disgusting business either way and all my vegetarian friends agree. And the Goyim’s sins do not go anywhere, to boot.

The more merciful Jews practice Kapparot by swinging a bag of money around. Same result: the sins are transferred to the money. I do not know what happens to the swung money. It gets spent, I suppose. As for the sin-contaminated chickens, some are eaten, I learned. Those are the lucky ones. Many end up on the garbage pile.

I have an idea. What if we were to convince all the Chicken-Kapparot people to switch and become Money-Kapparot people? Picture this huge banner I have designed: JOIN US FOR YOM KIPPUR – COME AND HELP US SWING MONEY – SUPPORT CAGE FREE KAPPORES. This should go over well and would be good news, at least for Jewish chickens. And it might be an incentive for the rest of us to become more humane.

And then again it might not work because the practice is such an age old tradition and age old traditions are difficult to replace. Unless, of course, people see an advantage in doing things differently. We have witnessed such dramatic changes in our lifetime. We used to go to the store to buy something and then took it home to keep. We do not do this anymore. We now do it the other way around: first we buy something at home and then we take it to the store for a refund. We also used to use a special kind of very dirty green paper called money to pay for things. We don’t do this anymore, either. We may still go to the store occasionally but we pay by sticking plastic in a little box that is full of electronics. It reads our credit card, debits our account, and says “brrr!” when it is done

Now if a few overhead swings of a bag of coins can make a year’s supply of sin particles disappear I see no reason why a few electronic nano vibrations administered to a credit card by a scanner should not have the same effect. We would no longer have to swing anything over our heads. Instead there could be a scanner in every synagogue. Sinners would be encouraged to insert their card and just wait for the “brrr!”. It would be so simple, so easy. Not just Jewish temples, but churches would probably find this attractive as well. Malls, banks and other places of worship would, I trust, be delighted to offer such an extra service for a small fee. Before long the entire nation, in happy coexistence, will be seen chipping away at their sins.

The only problem remaining, some will say, are the jobs lost. Thanks for bringing this up, but this is the beauty of my plan: there are four thousand temples in the U.S.; each temple will install at least two scanners; it is common knowledge that one of them will always be out of order; former once-a-year pushcart operators will be retrained and turned into full time scanner fixers. I tell you, all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. I did not say that, however. Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss said it first.

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Humor in the Hospital?

My first breakfast in the hospital was oatmeal cooked in unsalted water. I was in shock. “Come on. Eat at least a little of it”, my wife pleaded. “It IS nourishment, as you always told me when I had broken my hip”. The irony was dripping from her tongue. I was not amused. There are limits to what you can laugh about in the hospital, right?

Not true, though. There is a lot you can only laugh about. Read the rest of my story! Trust me. But first I must tell my physicians and nurses, if they have not found that out yet, that we patients, their bread and butter, are often a little weird. Let me rephrase this. We are rather like dogs. We do what we are told, for the most part. But then we can also hear frequencies that are out of human range. In other words, we notice things you would not dream of.

Take the picture on the wall by my hospital bed, for example. It is not just standard hospital decoration. This picture actually moves. When you lie in that bed and look up at that ocean scene the canvass slowly bulges toward you, like a huge bubble about to burst. You look away, of course, and the bubble recedes. But then it starts bulging again, but this time the bubble takes on the shape of a big rectangular box. And the TV, I notice, has now been wrapped in several layers of black garden netting such as orchard men use to keep the birds out of the cherries. Now you can argue with me all you want, but I tell you only what I see, what there is. And I am not alone in this. I have heard of people who swear that they saw their TV set covered with ants.

But to continue with my story. Yesterday Joe, my surgeon’s PA, announced that we were going to pull the drainage tube. In the hospital such things signify progress. Full of anticipation, I watched the entire procedure. This is what happened. There was a bed in the middle of the room. On it lay a carcass (me). Joe entered, dressed in a dinner jacket and white shirt. He brought with him a length of reddish garden hose which he placed on a little table and covered with a cloth. Then he pulled up his sleeves to show that his hands were empty, waved a wand over the little table, and pulled away the cloth. The garden hose was gone!

In mock-surprise he looked around and then focused on me (the carcass), stuck his hands into my belly, and began pulling out hose, hand over fist, like a fisherman dragging his net ashore. What he pulled out looked like uncooked Italian sausage. He gathered it all up, humbly accepted the applause, and then he was gone.

I also should have applauded but I was too tired. I will clap next time, however. I am sure he will do it again because the fun never stops among the Asclepians.

Eclipse

In ancient Egypt, historians say, they had a sun god named Amon, or Re. This god, they believed, was in charge of moving the sun in a barge. One beautiful day when the sun was high it suddenly disappeared from the sky. It was, we now think, an eclipse of the sun, a common event as the heavens are run. But the people on earth then were filled with fear that the sun god had left and the end was near. The Egyptians, of course, had no way to know that what actually happened was simply so: Old Re in the pilot house’s cramped condition just wanted to stretch and to change his position. So he stopped for a minute behind the moon. That’s all it was when it darkened at noon. Yet folks were in panic, kids, women and men. Tough time they had, and no CNN!

Picture credit Morguefile mensatic

Just Cruising

People go on cruises for several reasons. Some like to be on a ship in order to go on shore again all day and do things, see things, take pictures of things. Others, me for example, take the same cruise to relax in the comfort of their stateroom and quietly observe the world as it floats by. The black and white orca that shot out of the water right in front of our balcony would be an example. Or the compressed blue glacier ice blocks floating all around and the water falls rushing down the steep rock faces of the inner passage. My idea of the perfect cruise ship is an elegant dining room surrounded by a wood paneled library with leather chairs, table lamps, and lots of books. And it should be located not too far from the cappuccino bar.

I do not really care where the ship is going or how the weather is outside. On a recent foray into Alaskan waters we ran into a week of rain and cold winds. Some of my more active ship companions complained about our bad luck, although none of them were discouraged from traipsing through the woods, looking for salmon, bears, and bald eagles. The floating ice blocks crowded with resting seabirds were not enough for them. They wanted to see the glacier that “calved” those blocks and were sad when we could not go near enough to witness the procedure.

For me, on the other hand, this was a perfect arrangement. Thanks to the lure of the bears the dining room was not crowded and I had the library to myself. I had nothing to crab about.

Talking about crabs, we observed a fishing boat coming into the harbor at Prince Rupert in British Columbia. It was loaded with crabs. They were being hoisted onto the pier in large buckets. A work crew on shore inspected them. Those that passed muster were packed in ice. Those that failed the inspection – not very many – were unceremoniously tossed back into the water. That made me think this over: the bad ones live; the fit ones get eaten. Yes, that is how it goes with the crabs. “Survival of the what?” I heard the crabs say, “Where were you, Herbert Spencer, when we needed you?” If I were a crab I would be crabby, too.

Picture credit: morguefile.com

Is Useless Useless?

I do not play tennis. I could not hit the soft spot even if I tried. But from time to time I watch the professional “Opens”. The skill and the strength of these athletes is fascinating and I cannot help but watch the ritual in awe. Lately, though, I have been thinking: here is a little white rubber ball, a toy essentially. And down on the court are two grownups in their best years which they waste on scheming how best to lob that toy over a net, back and forth, back and forth. That’s their profession, their job. A job that produces absolutely nothing, except an income. That’s all they do, 24/7. And then I watch the spectators on the other side of the court. Eight hundred noses turning left, eight hundred noses turning right. For hours on end. In the glaring sun. “Lord, what fools these mortals be”, I would have liked to say but Puck beat me to it.

I would have even harsher words for certain European soccer fans who have actually attacked and killed opposing team fans over the if or how a ball had been kicked across a stretch of innocent lawn. It goes beyond uselessness when something as intrinsically useless as a soccer game turns into insanity.

Hiking in the mountains was always a passion of mine, though, until I got too old for the strain. It was always hard for me, very hard. Breath after breath, slow step after slow step. Up and up and still up. Another switchback. And another. Pant, pant. Oh God, how many more? Nobody there to see you. You could quit and turn around. But no, you force yourself. You just stare at the ground and plod along until you practically stumble out onto the plateau at the top of the mountain, the end of the trail. And then, Ah! The exhilarating feeling of having made it all the way up. The sky, the clouds, the view of the valley below are your well earned rewards. Others don’t see it that way, necessarily. Clambering up a mountain only to come right down again strikes them as a useless exercise. Touché.

But to tell the truth, when I was a boy I also often misunderstood, even rebelled at having to do useless chores such as cleaning my room. “But I just did it yesterday”, I would object, confusing ‘useless’ with ‘onerous’. She was right, of course, my mother. I still remember the pithy way she used to counter that argument: “You also have just eaten yesterday, no?”

A Windfall, of Sorts

I am usually quite skeptical of religious or mythological beliefs but recently, during a stormy night, I was awakened by a terrific noise which suddenly made me realize that the ancient Greeks, bogged down as they were by a heaven and an underworld full of gods and goddesses, actually hit it right on the nose when they believed in Euros, the god of the unlucky wind from the east. I now believe in him, too. He knocked over the fence I share with my neighbor. Well, not the whole fence, but two eight-foot center panels that fell towards the neighbor’s tool shed to the west of our house. So it must have been that god whose name is prounced oí-ross and has nothing to do with the currency. Zephyr would not have done that. He is the god of the mild breeze.

As we, my neighbor and I, were surveying the scene in the morning we were relieved that the damage was almost negligible. So we laughed it off, mockingly. ‘Nice try’ I remember saying. I shouldn’t have said that. During the night there was an even bigger storm and the rest of the fence, all ninety feet of it, came down with a tremendous crash, burying the dwarf orange tree and several roses. What’s his name, Euros, obviously had me in his sight and was determined to show me just how unlucky his east wind can be.

But he really had the wrong man. In principle I was never much enamored of fences. When I was a youngster in occupied Germany after the second World War I loved to listen to the Armed Forces Network radio. A cowboy song was then in vogue that included the words “don’t fence me in!” I had a guitar then and sang that with gusto. I knew that I would get to that land without fences eventually. When I finally came to settle down in California I studied English and American literature and found more to agree with in Robert Frost’s Mending wall. Be careful what you wish, he seems to say in that poem. What are you walling in or walling out?
Whatever. It seems to me that old Euros is alive and well. He did a number on our fence. Now I wonder how he would handle a wall. As the folk song says, the answer is still blowin’ in the wind.

Two Cities

The first house we bought, my wife and I, was small. Two rooms and one bath. But we had not bought it for size. We had fallen for the garden. There were two orange trees, a Valencia and a Navel. There was a lath house full of fuchsias. We had a jasmine bush and several deciduous trees around a lawn. The small living room had a picture window looking out on this little paradise of ours.

Clearly, other people feel the same way about the beauty, even the necessity, of flowers, fruit, and greenery. Many a community prides itself of being the “Garden City” of the West or East or whatever. But as sure as variety can be said to be the spice of life there are also those, bless them, who go for the clean shave: some concrete to step on, a pool, and a few pots with geraniums and voilá, the perfect “garden”.

We occasionally chatted with our neighbors over the back fence. I remember the lady praising us for the beautiful garden we maintained. But her folks, she admitted, just were not garden people. “We are car people”, she once said, “from Detroit”. As she said that she motioned with her arms to indicate the three half-disassembled automobiles that were the only ornaments on her side of the fence. I have often thought of this episode, reflecting on the fact that people so much alike in many ways can yet be so different at the same time.

On a visit to Paris the first thing we saw in Parc Monceau, a lovely green spot in the 8th arrondissement, was a statue of the novelist Alfred de Musset. That same day my wife stumbled upon a statue of the dramatist Beaumarchais on rue St. Antoine near the Opera Bastille. On the Left Bank we found a bust of Chateaubriand, the first of the Romantics. Then we noticed that the offices of Air France were located on place Rostand, author of Cyrano de Bergerac, a play written in 1897 and last turned into a movie in 1950. North of the Marais was the blvd. Voltaire and near the Étoile, the rue Balzac. We found a rue Chenier and an allee Cendrars, not to forget a rue Hugo and a square Zola. It was quite obvious that in Paris poets, dramatists, and novelists are kept in high esteem. As we searched some more we found that all Parisian streets have names and that at least 175 of them are named for writers.

I do not know about Boston or New York, but on a map of Los Angeles I found only seven streets named for men of letters. As far as I was able to determine Willa Cather, James Fenimore Cooper, Emily Dickinson, William Faulkner, Robert Frost, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Allan Poe, J.D. Salinger, and Mark Twain, to count off a few prospects, did not make it. Maybe I am reading more into this than is reasonable but I have a suspicion that it says something about our two cities when I tell you that there are at least 650 streets in Los Angeles that have no names, just cold numbers.