Min Tull. (A Lampoon of Knausgaard's novel, Min Kamp.) Tuesday. October 23. 2018. Featuring Kenneth Chang, of the New York Times

You cannot conquer outer space

with a private sector race.

The galaxy, with all our fates,

has just been purchased by Bill Gates! 

I just sent a postcard to Kenneth Chang, a science reporter with the New York Times, inviting him to read this installment of Min Tull, cuz he's mentioned in it and his story in the paper is kinda the launching pad for my ruminations today.  

A postcard is both inconsequential and unique. Sending a postcard with a private message on it smacks of the Luddite persuasion as well as displaying a more than average desire to communicate with someone: "See, I have eschewed the convenience and freedom of the Internet and paid money and written out your address and a message to you, which will reach you a week or more from today -- so pay attention!" 

Chang, of course, may just throw it away. Or never get it. I became very disillusioned with the Post Office nine years ago when my dying mother gave me a large old-fashioned diamond ring she had gotten from her mother, to give to my daughter Madelaine. I think my mother felt guilty for being such a distant and forbidding character to my children, and when Madel had her first child mom was not enthused about having a great grandson. By then she had pretty much soured on the whole concept of marriage and childbearing, as memories of her own frowzy marriage and the disreputable shenanigans of her own children crowded in upon her waking hours -- which were being distorted by more and more opioid prescriptions to mask her pain and Weltschmerz.  

I mailed the diamond ring to Madel at her business address, a cancer clinic where she did accounts receivable, certified and insured. She spent so much time at work that I figured that would be the best way to get it to her. But she never got it. I waited two weeks before calling her to see if she got it. She said she didn't. I went to the Post Office with my receipt, only to be told I had not paid for insurance or for certified delivery. Incredulous, I asked the clerk what the Sam Hill I HAD paid for and she told me for 2 day deliver -- only that. She had long brown mousy hair that slid down her shoulders like a dirty waterfall. I thought she was chewing gum, but then she turned to spit in a waste basket behind her. A woman chawing baccy -- gag a maggot! I decided I could not deal with such a depraved character, and would have to come back later to raise the rafters. 

When I told Madel about it she displayed an amazing amount of stoic acceptance. I, on the other hand, was ready to go on the warpath with the Post Office -- but that same week a cop pulled me over, in the parking lot of Church on Sunday, to tell me my driving license was revoked for back child support and he would have to take me to jail for driving with a revoked license. But several members of my Ward, who were retired cops, intervened and had me fined a hundred dollars instead of locked up in the hoosegow. So that little contretemps ate up all my time and thought and I let the Great Post Office Diamond Ring Caper slide. 

But I still have a lingering mistrust for their whole operation. 

I fell into a very deep funk yesterday, after coming home from the Provo Rec Center. Even though I got a ride there and back I was so exhausted and achy the rest of the day that I gave up on writing anything and went through two-hundred pages of Knausgaard's first volume of Min Kamp -- My Struggle. That only depressed me further. Especially the part about cleaning up after his squalid alcoholic father -- it hit too close to home; I remembered my own dad, who didn't bother to go upstairs to our one and only bathroom at night, but instead went out onto the front porch to relieve himself on the steps. His urine eventually cankered the metal bolts that held the black cast iron railing in place, so one night while he was leaning on it the whole shebang gave way, hurling him into the spotted dead-nettle. 

But since reading is about all I know how to do when I'm enveloped in a stupor of thought I went on Amazon and bought a Kindle for $148.00, along with a Kindle Unlimited subscription. Soon as it arrives I'm gonna pull the venetian blinds, pop open a Mountain Dew, collapse into my bedroom recliner, and read science fiction until they send in a HazMat team to collect my putrifying body. My dreams of a new companion, working on my virtues like Ben Franklin, or even finishing this plaguey novel, have all gone by the board. I'm gonna start with Frank Herbert's Dune novels and then reread 'A Canticle for Leibowitz' and then work down a long list of other sci-fi books to take my mind off of the real world outside my door, which interests me less and less. I have always thought that the worlds created by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells were more real than the one I'm forced to inhabit -- a world where anchovies are shunned by bigots and children no longer collect PEZ dispensers. Although I'm told one of my grandsons has saved unopened all the ones I gave him before he started playing football at school.

That's why Kenneth Chang gets the nod from me today. He wrote about space stations and going back to the moon and going on to Mars, which I found pleasantly engaging, and I realize that science fiction is the only decent thing left to read on this reptilian planet -- except for the Scriptures (which often sound like sci-fi, don't they? I mean, Jonah beats anything Jacques Cousteau every tried to do and the things Ezekial saw and heard are straight out of Ray Bradbury.)

Ray Bradbury, yeah -- I could stand rereading his oeuvre. He managed to bottle a Midwestern sensibility with his books, much like a Des Moines homemaker bottles corn cob jelly. His writing was strictly 4-H, which I like. It's an undervalued and unappreciated writing style, the kind of prose that I associate with the keen aroma of a new mown front lawn and the velvet comfort of chicken gravy. Bland sometimes, but so real it can't be made fun of. 

***********************************

I'd like to turn the other cheek

and be so loving and so meek;

I'll go the sacred extra mile

but damned if I will wear a smile!

************************************

I'm going to read 'The Book of the New Sun' by Gene Wolfe, all four volumes.

I'll read 'Take Back Plenty' by Colin Greenland.

'Lanark.' By Alistair Gray. Never described very well by critics who review it, the book seems to be so bewildering and erudite that it can't be read completely through without going mad. I'll enjoy that challenge. 

And, of course, 'Planet Wheaton' by Kerry Burthen. An entire planet terraformed into North Dakota and planted in red winter wheat -- I can't wait to sink my teeth, so to speak, into that one.

Every Tuesday morning at ten I walked over to the Williams County Courthouse in Williston, North Dakota, to sit in on the County Commissioner's meeting. As news director at KGCX Radio back in 1980 it was part of my job. On the way over each Tuesday I passed an abandoned lot full of tall brown grass that I took to be some kind of wild wheat escaped from a nearby farm. In those days you only had to stretch your legs for a few blocks in any direction except south (where the Missouri River broadened out into a slough) to come up suddenly to a wheat field. I always slipped a wheat straw with a full bearded head out of the ground to chew on while taking notes at the Courthouse.  One Tuesday one of the Commissioners, Slim Johnson, who farmed two hundred acres just west of town, came up to me after the meeting to shake hands. I still had the bearded straw stuck in my mouth, for all the world like FDR with his cocky cigarette holder. 

"I see you chewing on one of them every week, son" he said to me. "What's the good of it, I'd like to know?"

"Oh" I replied airily, "just something to keep my mouth busy while I take notes."

"That isn't such a good idea" said Slim. "Those straws have sometimes got a little grub in 'em that bores into your cheek and sets up a big red gall that the doc has to cut out like a cancer."

Was he joshing me? I couldn't tell; he looked me straight in the eye and remained pretty solemn. Joke or not, I switched to chewing a stick of Beechnut instead.  

That winter in Williston was doggedly cold. Through December, January, and February there were many mornings when it was thirty below as I made my way to the radio station at four in the morning. The chimney smoke rose straight up into the air like a vertical line of cotton. I tried to get to bed at eight-thirty; it took twenty minutes for the sheets to warm up to body temperature in my unheated bedroom, and I spent that uncomfortable time dreaming up science fiction story outlines.

One that I still hark back to when sleep refuses my ardent advances is about the clouds becoming infected with a malignant virus from outer space. Slowly, inevitably, every cloud becomes a killer, striking down with lightning, drowning with cloudbursts, settling onto a community and suffocating it as an implacable smog. They gain an intelligence and no longer disperse, becoming anthropomorphic, with ferocious frowning faces like in a Max Fleischer cartoon. Part of my inspiration for this narrative, of course, is the tremendous storm and holocaust in Third Nephi in the Book of Mormon. How is the world saved from this vicious vapor? Beats me with a stick; I could never quite figure that out. One idea, in the manner of Day of the Triffids,  is to discover that seltzer water destroys them, so all the airplanes in the world take off with seltzer bottles and spritz those fiendish clouds to destruction. But that seems rather unhandy in the long run. Keep Watching the Skies.

***********************************

The last time I attempted a return to academia at the University of Minnesota I took out several student loans -- then promptly forgot about them when I had the chance to return to Thailand and live on the beach teaching English at a nearby naval barracks. That was back in 2000, if I'm not mistaken. Anyway, it was easy and uncomplicated to get my passport and goof around in Thailand without worrying about work visas and border crossings. 

Eighteen years later the IRS sends me a letter informing me that my outstanding loans, which totaled a little over two thousand dollars, have now ballooned, with penalty and interest, to around two hundred thousand dollars. They kindly offered to tap my Social Security if I didn't wish to bother with setting up a payment schedule with them -- so I called in and we set up a monthly payment of five dollars. That's because I'm so broke and so am not only below the poverty line but not even on the same continent as it. Anywho, the IRS operative told me over the phone she would send me some paper work to fill out to finalize our agreement. But I never got it. So I emailed the Department of Education, since they were supposed to send out the documents for the IRS. And received the following reply, thus:

Response By Email (Randy) (10/23/2018 08:26 AM)

Dear Timothy Torkildson,

 

This message is in reference to your loan repayment information inquiry.  Your case number is #181022-003935 . Retain this number for your reference. 

 

You must contact your servicer to discuss loan repayment.

 

To verify who is currently servicing your loans, go to the NSLDS Student Access Web site  and select the "Financial Aid Review" option to view your federal loans, grants and aid overpayments. The user will be prompted to either "Accept" or "Decline" the privacy notice. Upon accepting, the user will then need to sign in with their FSA ID.

 

Sincerely,

Student Loan Support Center
Federal Student Aid
U.S. Department of Education
Website: https://studentloans.gov

Customer By CSS Email (Timothy Torkildson) (10/22/2018 05:49 PM)

I was supposed to get forms to fill out for a student loan repayment program. I spoke to someone on on the phone at your office and sent in my first payment of five dollars, but never got the forms promised. What should I do -- who should I contact about it?

  

About as helpful as an eel at an archery contest.

Then this morning this came from the same source:

Dear Timothy Torkildson,

We invite you to participate in a feedback survey based on your recent experience with the Student Loan Support Center regarding Case #, 181022-003935. Your feedback will be used for coaching and quality purposes.

Your participation in the survey is optional. If you choose to submit feedback, click here to take the survey. The survey will take approximately 2-3 minutes to complete, and all responses will be kept confidential. When you are done, click the Submitbutton at the bottom of the last page to send the completed survey.

As part of our commitment to deliver excellent customer service, we look forward to your feedback on our services and your overall experience.

Thank you again for taking the time to provide your valuable feedback.

Sincerely,

Student Loan Support Center
Federal Student Aid
U.S. Department of Education
Website: https://StudentLoans.gov
Email: StudentLoanSupport@ed.gov

I'm gonna click on the survey button and hope they have a box where I can let them have it . . . 

They do! So here's what I wrote in it:

Your customer service is barren;

it tempts me to take up with swearin'.

Response is opaque

if not downright fake;

I think that my hair I'll be tearin'!

Let's see how they like THEM apples . . . 

"I'd rather watch a Lupe Velez movie."