Have a Cool Yule!

The title of today's musing comes from a Christmas song written by Steve Allen and performed by Louie Armstrong in 1953. I had planned for the previous blog to be my last for 2018. However, that took a dark turn which was mentioned by several of my blog-benefactors. That and an interesting winter solstice email from Smithsonian.com were impetus for today's blog.

Around the 13th century, monks created a festive, holiday drink

involving eggs, sugar, milk and sherry that we call Egg Nog. The origin of the name is unsure. Some trace it to an little known Old English word meaning a strong beer. Others reference an Old Germanic/Norse word for a drinking cup. The beverage was de rigueur for the wealthy as the ingredients were costly.

In colonial America, all of the items, except the sherry, were more available and thus less expensive. One commodity plentiful and cheap in the colonies was rum. That replaced sherry. Egg Nog became popular. George Washington created his own recipe.  It shows the preference for strong drink among the early Americans: "sugar, milk, cream, eggs—add one pint of brandy, half a pint of rye, half a pint of rum and a quarter pint of sherry to the mix. In talking to a co-worker who was raised in Richmond, Egg Nog isn't Egg Nog without bourbon. I prefer brandy, or rum, but bourbon works. I'm sure it's a southern thing. 

Walking through the neighborhood this time of year provides an extravaganza for the eyes. The lights and displays give a glorious glow to the night. What would the holidays be without Christmas lights? As the story goes, walking home one night during the Christmas season, starlight reflecting off the evergreens filled Martin Luther with the glory of the season. It was customary for Germans to clip the top off of an evergreen tree and put it on a table in the house. When Luther got home, he attached candles to his tree and the Christmas light was born. 

Albert, the Prince Consort to Queen Victoria, brought the Christmas tree tradition to England from Germany. It caught on with the populace. Of course lit candles on a flammable tree raised some safety issues. Most homes had buckets of water around the tree. Beauty does have a price. 

In 1892, Edward Johnson, a partner of Thomas Edison, took the incandescent light and invented the first electric Christmas lights. By 1895, they adorned the White House tree. Those early lights got as hot as candles making fire a still-present hazard. Over the years inventive minds fine-tuned Christmas lights making them safer and more brilliant. Now you can get lights that react and blink to the rhythm of your holiday music. 

So this Christmas season, enjoy the libation of your choice, feast your eyes on the decorations and lights, stuff your bellies with delicious food and fill your soul with tidings of comfort and joy. All my love and holiday best wishes- as ever - BB

"Christmas is a season for kindling the fire for hospitality in the hall, the genial flame of charity in the heart.” - Washington Irving

Happy Holly Daze

Well, my intrepid readers, I made a new year's resolution almost twelve months ago to write more blogs in 2018. Over that time, I have written seven including this one. Not exactly a plethora, but not a scarcity either. I hope to write more in 2019, but to quote Robbie Burns, “The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft a-gley.”


As the Christmas season approaches, I wanted to pen one more musing. Not some Hallmark, It's A Wonderful Life sappy missive, just a non sequitur note. 

I am an avid reader and require something, usually several somethings to occupy myself. Between, Smithsonian Magazine, National Geographic, and usually a work of non-fiction and one of fiction, I keep out of trouble. Yeah, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. 

However, this week I found myself with nothing to read. I didn't want to start anything new because Christmas is just days away. I know I will receive books, which I will want to start immediately. In order to fill the time before December 25, I perused my bookcase and decided to re-read, Dreaming of Babylon by Richard Brautigan. 

I have always found him interesting. He began his professional writing career in San Francisco among the Beats in the mid-late 50s. Brautigan's work did not achieve any success until the late 60s. That was ironic because while he became associated with the counter culture, and worked with the Diggers and the Communication Company in the Haight-Ashbury district, he loathed "the hippie scene".

His 1968 work, In Watermelon Sugar, is set in a post-apocalyptic commune called iDeath. I find that amusing. This was virtually four decades before the "i" craze - iPhones, iPads, iMarketing, etc. While I don't see him as a mystic, I can help but sense the irony of Brautigan using the lower case i in the name iDeath - rather prophetic I must say. 

By the mid-70s, his popularity waned. He still wrote, but never achieved the critical or popular acclaim he experienced during the late 60s. Two of my favorite novels of his, Dreaming of Babylon and The Hawkline Monster, were both written in the late 70s. Neither are among his most read works. Maybe that is why I like them so much. 

Alcoholism and depression plagued Brautigan his entire life. In 1984, at 49 years old, he killed himself with a .44 Magnum to the head. The date is assumed to be September 19. Assumed because his body was not discovered until late October with the body in advanced decomposition. I remember reading about it back then. The newspaper article mentioned his suicide note, "Messy, isn't it?" From his work, I connoted his sense of humor. Thinking of him writing this before putting such a large caliber weapon to his head seemed apropos. 


Unfortunately, I have since found out that this story was apocryphal. No note was left. For some reason, that left me sadder. As ever - BB

"All of us have a place in history. Mine is clouds." - Richard Brautigan

An Onerous Oeuvre

"You can't write anything longer than it takes your average person to take an average crap."  - Jeff Goldblum's character in The Big Chill explaining the editorial policy at People magazine.

Throughout my life, words have been my milieu. I still enjoy perusing a dictionary, or a thesaurus just for fun. If forced to choose a favorite book, my choice would be the Oxford English Dictionary. It's not just definitions, but the etymology, synomyms, antonyms, homonyms...all at your fingertips.

The act of writing anything of substance eludes me. Attempts at poetry or songwriting yield pretentious, heavy-handed bupkis. Creative writing of length withers on the vine; the fruit of my pen sere and juiceless. However, I modestly admit that some of my musings and doggerel has been of merit. Perhaps, my writing talent lasts as long as it takes to evacuate fecal matter.

The question now posed, "How long is that?" In the wild, animals can evacuate quickly, as fast as 12 seconds. Medical science attributes this to a defensive mechanism. That moment of relief can cause a lapse of awareness to the prey giving an advantage to the predator. I believe a vestige of this mechanism personifies itself in humans when port-o-potties are involved. Things always seem to move faster in those situations.


Being unique individuals, the time it takes to lighten the load can vary from person to person. Other factors...diet, stress, exercise, medications, the length of a specific news article, etc.... come into play. Perhaps I should conduct research on the topic.

That leads to the question as to what type of methodology should I employ? Descriptive, experimental, ex post facto? One thing I do know is that I will forego any content analysis.

Of course research does require extensive interviewing. The being said, I believe I should eschew
going into public restrooms with a stopwatch while announcing, "Okay guys, show me what you got!" as ever BB

"I did all the poops...because poop's funny." -  Danny DeVito as Frank Reynolds in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia 

Skid Row

At the impressionable age of 14, I read On the Road by Jack Kerouac and saw the 1956 movie, On the Bowery. Thus began my lifelong fascination and infatuation with the down-and-out denizens and seedy surroundings known as skid row.

During those early sheltered years, my exploration of skid row was limited to literature and movies. It led me to Burroughs, Jackson, Bukowski, Hammett, Chandler, Cain and more film noir movies than I can count.

Ready or not, I left that comfortable nest for college. The delicious danger of the wrong side of the tracks with its dramatis personae of pimps, prostitutes, thieves, bookies, junkies, juice heads, et. al., eclipsed the attraction of academia. Spending less and less time on classes, exploring the sordid and disreputable monopolized my curricula. Unfortunately, my college did not offer a degree in this area of study. So, I began a multi-year sabbatical immersing myself in the domain of desolation angels.

Leaving no turn unstoned, I scrambled my psyche with a plethora of potions, poisons and pharmacopeia. I logged enough time in dive bars, flop houses and dens of ill-repute for a degree in debauchery. I finished my matriculation into madness by dropping out of the "straight" world. 

Eventually, I rejoined the rat race, secured my sheepskin and marched to the machinations of polite society. To this day, I don't know if maturity and a sense of responsibility caused my return to reason. Maybe I lacked the courage of conviction to follow the romantic decadence of Rimbaud and Verlaine. Perhaps an absence of fortitude kept me from embracing Ginsberg's "starry dynamo in the machinery of night."


Half a century has passed since that 14-year-old boy first encountered the lure of skid row. It could be time to reevaluate and resume my journey to find the Edge. As ever - BB

“The Edge...There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others-the living-are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later. But the edge is still Out there.” Hunter S. Thompson

Eureka!

The title of this post is the transliteration of the Greek for "I found it!" Legend has it that Archimedes expressed this interjection as he sat in the bath and discovered the physical law of buoyancy, or displacement.

I am a big fan of the bath. Though I must admit that during my countless hours of bathing, I have never had such an enlightening epiphany. Despite this lack of gnosis, taking a bath is one of my favorite pleasures. For relaxation of the mind and the muscles, nothing surpasses a salubrious soak.

Sitting in a tub filled with hot, steamy water mixed with epsom salts, or oatmeal, or lavender, or just Mr. Bubbles, partaking in some herbal relaxation and listening to some cool jazz truly takes me away from life's trials and tribulations.

Not only cleansing the mind and spirit, the bath is the best way to clean your body. I know this because of college. After expulsion from my first attempt at higher education and a multiple year hiatus, I enrolled in Rutgers to complete my matriculation.

Rutgers is known for its parsimonious acceptance of credits from other schools. I left Siena College with about 121. To my amazement, the university accepted 93. I had underestimated the caliber of the education at that small, Franciscan college.

What has this got to do with bathing? Patience my dear reader!

Siena required either credits in math or science for a liberal arts degree. Rutgers required both, so I needed to take a science course. Never a strong point, the idea of a class in that discipline was daunting. I sat with my advisor looking for the right fit to complete said prerequisite. We found a class with no lab that seemed perfect. It was only a two-credit course, but credits were not the issue. I just needed a science class. Thus I enrolled in "Consumer Chemistry."

Despite being a filler, the class was fascinating. We learned the chemical difference between ales, stouts and lagers, why yeast makes bread rise, why Swiss cheese has holes and...here it comes...the chemistry and physics involved in bathing.

Humans perspire. Dirt and grime combine with sweat and attach to the body's oils secreted through the skins pores. Bacteria feed on this noxious mixture. That creates body odor. To rid us of this, we use water, but water and oil don't mix. So an emulsifier is needed. Soap breaks down the oil/sweat/dirt mixture which is removed by water. Ah, then a shower is better because you are not soaking in your detritus...not so...

Standing in the shower causes surface tension on your skin. That tension keeps your pores closed, so the entrapped dirt and grime is never completely removed. Soaking in a hot tub for 30-40 minutes, relaxes the skin, opens the pores and allows for a cleansing.

Ah, but the skeptic's argument is not without merit. Water also has surface tension. The soap scum with all the dirt, oils, etc., sits on the water. Getting out of the tub, this adheres to your skin. The final step in a complete cleaning involves rinsing under a warm shower once your bath has finished. The scum has not had time to enter your pores. The shower removes it, and you are now unsullied.

So, the next time this worrisome world bears down on you take to the waters and wash those earthly cares from your mind. As ever - BB

“There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them." Sylvia Plath

Give Peace A Chance

Throughout mankind, symbols have represented ideas, natural objects and feelings. Man used symbols in our first attempts to visually communicate - pictographs led to petroglyphs led to hieroglyphs led to alphabets.

Certain symbols change over time, none as drastically as the swastika. This infamous ideogram dates back a millennia over many cultures. In Hinduism it represented good luck, in Buddhism it's incorporated into the image of Buddha's foot. Seen in several Native American cultures, the swastika has a different meaning depending on the tribe. But none of them have negative connotations. So ubiquitous, the swastika can be seen as an example of man's collective unconscious. Obviously that changed after adopted by the Nazi party in the 1930s.

One of the most iconic symbols of my lifetime is the peace sign. I read somewhere that philosopher, activist Bertrand Russell was responsible for proliferation of the peace sign. That may be true, but he did not create it. That credit goes to a British graphic artist, Gerald Holtom. He came up with the idea for a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament protest in 1958 in the UK.

The design comes from semaphore, the system of communicating across distances, usually at sea, by using flags in a set formation representing each letter. Using the semaphore for N (nuclear) and D (disarmament), he encased them in a circle.

One facet of what created the turbulent 60s was protest against the Vietnam War. Those protests expanded the meaning of the peace sign to a symbol against all war, not just nuclear arms. So embraced by the counterculture, its use mushroomed. Like Topsy in Uncle Tom's Cabin, peace sign fashion and jewelry just growed up.

American businessmen being American businessmen, several tried to copyright the peace sign in the early 1970s. The courts decided that the symbol was universal and denied a copyright. Despite having lined the pocket of many a merchandiser, the peace sign still belongs to us all.

Despite the curmudgeonliness of old age and my natural aversion to popular culture, I still embrace the denotations and connotations of this symbol. Seriously, what's so funny 'bout peace, love and understanding? As ever - BB

"As I walk through this wicked world
Searchin' for light in the darkness of insanity..." Nick Lowe Peace, Love & Understanding

Snuff Said

Spinning through the dials on the ol'tube the other night, I came across the 1934 Leslie Howard film, The Scarlet Pimpernel. Howard played that "damned elusive pimpernel." I remember this movie from my youth. It led me to the book by Baroness Orczy which led me to a different Reign of Terror novel, the Dickens' classic, A Tale of Two Cities. 

Like another of my childhood heroes, Zorro, the Scarlet Pimpernel was a tough guy posing as a fop. In the 18th century, fops were so macaroni. 

Ah digression....I'm sure you all know the lyrics to Yankee Doodle. When Yankee Doodle sticks the feather in his cap and calls it macaroni, he was declaring a statement of elegant style. In England in the 1700s, macaroni meant the height of fashion. Of course the song originally was sarcastically sung by the British troops lambasting the colonials as backward bumpkins. Americans being Americans took up the song as a rallying cry. 

Back to the pimpernel (which by the way is a flower) - during his masquerade, Sir Percy Blakeney accentuates his foppish facade by elegantly sniffing snuff wiping way the excess and awaiting the possible sneeze with a lace handkerchief. Watching that scene again, I wondered what ever came of snuff.

This dry, powdered form of tobacco, wide spread in pre-Columbian America, was introduced to Europe by the Spanish. A French minister, Jean Nicot (from whom we get nicotine) brought it to France. There it seemed to "cure" the queen's migraines and became the rage of the upper classes. 

As the tobacco craze grew, smoking was seen as low class. While snuff came to be de rigueur for the nobility. Various flavors, ornate storage vessels and other assorted paraphernalia sprung from snuff's usage. Another industry created by the habit was handkerchiefs. No gentleman worth his snuff would be seen without a hanky. 

Time marched on. As Enlightenment philosophers expounded on equality, the aura of nobility waned. With that came the decline in snuff's popularity, and the rise in tobacco smoking. 

Now a fact that I find fascinating. Early on the popular version of snuff was the dry variety. There was a lesser known moist snuff. This hovered around the edges of tobacco usage. Over a century after the decline of dry snuff, moist snuff's usage began to increase. Known as dipping, just a pinch between the cheek and gum, gave the user a hands-free nicotine fix. 

Yes, ironically the habit originally taken up by the upper crust is now embraced by the working class. This Marxian revolution in smokeless tobacco tickles me to no end. We are truly a crazy species. As ever BB

“Looks like what drives me crazy
Don't have no effect on you--
But I'm gonna keep on at it
Till it drives you crazy, too.”  - Langston Hughes

Spores of Creativity

The topic of this musing is the fecundity of literary talent that coalesced during 1960-62 in the Wallace Stegner Fellowship for creative writing at Sanford University.  The writers who met there are a literary who's who. Just a partial list: Larry McMurtry, Ken Kesey,
Robert Stone, Gurney Norman, Ed McClanahan and Ken Babbs. Born before the war and coming of age in the Fifties, they stand like a cultural colossus striding two generations, yet not really a part of either. Kesey had said, "We were too young to be Beats, but too old to be Hippies."

The wave that the Beat Generation rode from the end of World War II had broken. Several swells stirred the next cultural wave. One of those started in a small, academic neighborhood on Perry Lane in Palo Alto, CA. What a strange alchemical mixture of talent, personality and cultural metamorphosis! A serendipitous catalyst sprang from Stanford's Psychology department's experiments with psychoactive chemicals. Allen Ginsburg told Kesey that the US Government was behind this. Later, the Freedom of Information Act proved Ginsburg correct. It was part of the CIA's MK-ULTRA project.

Vic Lovell, a Psychology graduate student, suggested to Ken Kesey, supporting a wife and children on his meager stipend, that he could make $75 a session testing these substances. Another erstwhile volunteer for these experiments was Grateful Dead lyricist, Robert Hunter. Like the evils of the world issuing forth from Pandora's box, the government's chemical secret begat the Acid Tests which begat psychedelic music, the Family Dog, the Fillmore, all of which came to define the Sixties.

I recommend reading anything from the above authors. These are a few of their works that began germination in the fellowship writing sessions:
Horseman, Pass By - McMurtry's first novel made into the Paul Newman movie, HUD
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Kesey's first novel, became a play starring Kirk Douglas in 1963 and later a movie
Hall of Mirrors - Stone's first novel made into the movie, WUSA
Divine Right's Trip - Norman's first novel originally released printed in the margins of Stewart Brand's The Last Whole Earth Catalog
The Natural Man - McClanahan's first novel originally conceived in 1961, but not published until 1983
Who Shot the Water Buffalo - Babb's first novel which he worked on after coming home from Vietnam just in time to be part of the 1964 Furthur Bus Trip. During the Acid Test Days, he lost his only manuscript. Years later, an old friend found the manuscript in a box. It was finally published in 2011.

Like a psychic Rubik's cube, during certain periods in history with the right social and cultural setting, special people align to create an era that focuses its energies into a magical, creative melange. The Belle Epoque in Paris in the late 1800s, the Harlem Renaissance in New York City from the end of World War I to the mid-30s, the Beats in New York City and San Francisco from the late 40's through the 50s were such periods.

The Bay Area near and around San Francisco during the early to mid 60s was one of those. By the late 60s, our mass-market culture had squeezed much of the creative juice from that forbidden fruit. Hopefully, like ballistospores from fruiting fungi, creative flashes have forcibly shot into the universe nestling into the crania of unsuspecting young minds. Will the circle be unbroken? As ever - BB

"To Vik Lovell, who told me dragons did not exist, then led me to their lairs." Ken Kesey's dedication of One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest