Only On Sunday

Things have been a bit hectic around here and I haven’t had much time to post so I’m just going to throw a few bits and pieces together and float them out there for your amusement or disdain.

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On a sad note, I heard yesterday that the great Palestinian Poet Mahmoud Darwish has died. Another important voice lost to us. What I find sadly interesting about this is the near total lack of coverage by the American press. The only American press coverage I found was on, of course, NPR. Are we Americans so self-centered, so selfish, that anything or anyone of any importance outside our own borders, excluding any war or conflict we might be engaged in, is somehow lacking the merit for coverage?

Poets are revered in other countries, looked upon as heroes. They are the voice of people who have no voice, eloquently expressing the pain and struggle inflicted at the hand’s of tyrants and mad men, and they all too often suffer the consequences of their words at those same hands. Here in America, with rare exception, the only poets of any note are those who write the cheesy greetings in Hallmark cards.

If you’d like to hear Mahmoud Darwish reading one of his poems in his native language, go Here. For BBC coverage, go Here.

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The larger of the two stories I mentioned in The Story Zone post a few weeks back won the Backspace contest. That felt good though it also meant I had to come up with the parameters for the next contest and I hate coming up with parameters. The name of the story is Turnbuckle and I’ve been working on it whenever time permits. At the rate it’s expanding, it may well become a novella soon.

Meanwhile, I’m working on two other stories as well. One for the new Backspace contest and another that’s been wandering around in my head for so long I just want to get it out of there and on paper. I can’t talk about the first one, don’t want to give it away before the contest ends, but the second is called Descansos Man. I suppose, in a way, it’s for my daughter.

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Here is a Really Bad Writer’s Joke my friend Gail in San Francisco sent me:

A lion was roaming the African jungle. He was terribly hungry. He came across two men sitting under a tree. One was pounding away on a typewriter; the other was reading a book. The lion devoured the man reading the book. He avoided the writer. Even lions know that readers digest and writers cramp.

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Comcast was giving me the blues last week, working fine during the day but punking out mid-evening and not returning until mid-morning. One of those intermittent problems that so drive IT Guys bat-shit.

Called support. Lot of help there. Yeah, and I’m drop dead gorgeous. They sent a tech out. He got there around mid-morning and swapped out the cable modem. I suppose that was one possibility but it seemed a remote one to me. The Internet was up when I got back from doing the pay-the-bills thing on Friday. That lasted all of an hour and it went down again. Called support, got the same runaround and they scheduled another techy to come out on Monday.

Great! Weekends are the only real time I have to get online and get some work done. I’m also a Backspace junky and I start jonesing if I can’t get to it. I really didn’t need this so I dug up the old IT Guy persona that got me through twenty plus years of dealing with computers and computer-related stuff and set out to track down the problem myself.

I suspected the cable itself, somewhere between the little puke green thingy out on the street and the wall in my house. All I needed was a tester. That was easy enough. The modem itself makes a fine, if crude, tester. With a long extension cord to power the modem, I disconnected the coax at various points and connected the modem. If the Online light comes on, I’ve got a connection. If not, the cable is bad. I finally found the bad cable, up in the attic. Using some coax I had around the house, I rigged a somewhat messy work-around and have had steady service since.

The techy never showed on Monday. I guess I’ll have to buy 30 feet of coax and replace the bad cable myself.

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I remember back in the days when the clothes in my closet were secured by wire hangers, it seemed as if those wire hangers reproduced themselves whenever the closet doors were closed. You’d start out with twenty or so and in no time at all the closet was overflowing with wire hangers. Now that I’m using those plastic hangers, the opposite seems true. I buy twenty and a month later there’s only ten left. Where the hell are they going? Probably the same place one-half of a pair of socks go after an hour of tumbling in the dryer.

You might think this has something to do with the basic difference between metal and plastic, the former being more promiscuous than the latter, but how then to explain Tupperware type containers? At some point in my life I vaguely remember buying a couple of those, surely no more than three or four and now I have an entire kitchen cabinet full of them. How did that happen? And why is it the number of lids is less than the number of containers?

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Why are Yellow Transportation Inc. trucks orange?

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Why are the authors of two of my favorite blogs, Anatomy of Melancholy and Deviant Behavior, even slower than I am about posting new material? And where in the hell is the Grumpy Old Bookman

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Do you ever wonder what happened to certain people you knew in the distant past? Would you know what to say to them if you ran into them again? I’m not sure I would. Hell, I’m a bad dog at staying in touch with the people whose locations I know (sorry Gail, Denise, Linda, Ryan, Rebbecca and Richard, to name a few). I suppose you could rattle on about old times but I get a sense it might be uncomfortable or get there pretty fast. But then, that might just be me. People tend to make me nervous.

Still, I do wonder what became of certain folks and so, with the Internet being so far reaching and search engines so efficient, I’ll toss some names out there and see what happens. Could be interesting. Could lead nowhere. Hope no one’s holding a grudge.

Skip Knapp (that’s the name most people I knew in the past would know me by) would love to know what happened to some of my old Michigan friends: Deborah Hefka, Robin Hefka, Linda Ford, Jackie Pickford, Scott Barringer and Marty Herman. Then there are some old friends from my college days at the University of Detroit: Larry Tribula and John DeLuca; and my dear friends from Greece: Maria Ambatielou and Gerasimos Ambatielou. I’m sure I’m having a senior moment here and that there are others I’m not recalling. And then there are those whose name I can’t spell and wouldn’t even attempt a stab at it or else I don’t remember their last name or never knew it.

And since I’m on about this and since I have no idea where my daughter is, I’ll toss her name out here as well. Who knows, it could turn something up. And with her I’d have plenty to talk about. So, Courtney Mackenzie Pawlaczyk-Knapp, married name Courtney Cline or Courthey Kline, if you’re out there, send me an email. If someone who knows her reads this, let her know I’m looking for her.

If anything comes of this, I’ll post about it.

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And speaking of friends, old and new, what’s your best friend’s phone number? Bet you don’t know. In fact, I’d be surprised if you knew anyone’s phone number. If asked, you’d have to look it up in your cell phone. Be nice if not having to remember all those numbers left room for remembering other stuff like where you left your keys or your glasses but it doesn’t seem work that way. I guess technology does have its limitations. Oddly, I still remember the phone number I had when I was a kid: KE2-9106. Man, does that alpha prefix date me.

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And, on a final note DEATH TO SPAMMERS! May your fingers be invaded by painful fungus, your ass grow blisters the size of baseballs, your computer’s innards overheat and melt, and your Internet connection loop back on itself and blow you out of your filthy little hole with the crap you foist on everyone.

Technorati Tags: Palestinian Poet, Mahmoud Darwish, NPR, Backspace, Comcast, Yellow Transportation Inc., Anatomy of Melancholy, Deviant Behavior, Grumpy Old Bookman, Skip Knapp, Deborah Hefka, Robin Hefka, Linda Ford, Jackie Pickford, Scott Barringer, Marty Herman, Larry Tribula, John DeLuca, Maria Ambatielou, Gerasimos Ambatielou, Courtney Mackenzie Pawlaczyk-Knapp, Courtney Cline, Courthey Kline, cell phone