The Voice of God

And it came to pass that again they heard the voice, and they understood it not.
3 Nephi 11:4

The voice of God reverberates throughout the universe;
there isn't any particle through which it can't disperse.
The stars ablaze, the planets on their rolling wings, obey;
the photons and the black holes do as His clear voice does say.
And only man, in image made just like the Master Planner,
can hear His voice and disregard it in such callous manner.
Our ears are not attuned to godly discourse anymore.
Our senses can't distinguish tween the truth and groundless lore.
O give to me an open mind, a heart that can receive
Thy words upon first hearing them, that to them I may cleave!  

En Strengen av Perler: A Thai Ghost Story.

I am suffering from good health today. By that I mean my schedule is all disrupted because I feel so doggone good. Normally I arise with a backache and dizziness around 4 in the morning, drag myself to my recliner, bow my head, and whimper a prayer of thanksgiving which is barely audible and as anemic as Esau’s love for his brother Jacob. Then I sit for at least twenty minutes, wondering why I bother to get out of . . . what’s that thing called where I lay down sometimes? Oh well, whatever it is, I wish I were back in it, or on it, or maybe even under it. But I’m not, so I check my emails and Facebook and Twitter. Then I remember I have to take my pills, but my stomach is gurgling like the Maelstrom. So I leave a message for my daughter Sarah on Facebook; I do this every day when I get up since having a bad fall one night a few weeks ago so someone knows I’m alive and still able to get around.

After I manage to choke down the pills I again sit for twenty minutes wondering why I bother to take those . . . what are those little round things that taste so nasty and make me pee all the time? Oh well, thank goodness my memory is still in good shape. But my body now wants to go back to sleep, so I close my eyes to think about doing that, and an hour later I open them after deciding that I do not need to take a nap. That settled, I start to write again. Until I remember I’m hungry and I need to go to the Rec Center to swim and exercise. Should I eat first or should I go to the Rec Center first? I know if I eat first I’ll never make it to the Rec Center; I’ll have to wait around to have a bm, because if I start walking to the Rec Center I’ll get caught halfway there with a terrific urge . . .

The rest of the day is no better, but at least I have it planned out. That gives me comfort.

But today I slept soundly until six thirty, had a marvelous bowel movement, ate a hearty breakfast, and couldn’t wait to shout my prayers to heaven and then get on the ol’ laptop to start writing.

This is not me. Suddenly my libido is back. I dream about Joom. I dream about Amy. I dream about a couple of bar girls who wanted me to teach them English.  I clean the stove. I put the vacuum cleaner back together. I not only wash the dishes but soak them in Clorox water first to make sure they’re antiseptic. I go shopping for Bush’s Baked Beans for lunch so I can have them with wieners and a dash of Tabasco Sauce; a fool’s errand when your bowels are as finicky as mine.

It’s one-thirty in the afternoon and I haven’t put the beans on yet. In fact, I haven’t even unpacked the groceries, which include milk and anchovy paste and cream cheese. Plus some Utah chocolate truffle candy bars, which I have never bought before. I gave up candy bars when I gave up swearing, dammit.

And now, when I should be reading and napping the afternoon away, feeling slightly sorry for myself and hoping God notices what a martyr I am to my ill health, as per schedule, I am going to write a Thai ghost story! Because it’s all about Joom. I’m sublimating something or other for something or other else, but can’t explain it beyond that. Nor do I want to. At may age I get in trouble when sex enters the picture.

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

All Thais are superstitious. They believe in portents, magic numbers, auspicious days, and ghosts.

Joom frequently dreamed of the winning Lottery number and would not leave me alone until I coughed up a hundred baht for her ticket. It never won, for which she blamed me:

“You were disrespectful in front of Spirit House. You didn’t bow. So the spirit sent me the wrong dream!”  

“Would you like another Leo, princess?”

That usually settled her hash.

Of course the one time I absolutely refused to give in to her fetish and fork over the baht, her number came up for two-thousand ticals.

She was surprisingly laid back about it.

“It’s not a problem, thi rag. I am not angry; only sad for you because in the next life your karma will be so bad for keeping me poor.”

“Thanks for your understanding, princess. Let me put some ice in that glass of Leo for you.”

Joom could tell instantly if someone had a good spirit or bad spirit about them. She consequently told me who I could be friends with and who I could not be friends with. I didn’t really mind, because all the people she told me had bad spirits were boorish British drunks that I didn’t want to spend time with anyway -- and most of those who had a good spirit, according to Joom, were attractive women who drank too much and liked to give free foot massages.

The bungalow I rented for us was haunted. By the ghost of the landlord’s daughter, who had taken her own life in it when she found out her husband was unfaithful. She did it with poison, and it took a long time for her to die.

Joom cheerfully told me this one night when the electricity was out due to a violent monsoon storm, and we had only candlelight.

“Have you seen her ghost?” I asked skeptically.

“I feel her brush past me all the time; and I can see her faintly in that mirror” Joom pointed to a cracked piece of glass hanging on the wall next to the bathroom door.

Just then her dog Nipoo began howling in the corner.

“She comes” Joom announced solemnly.

I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck begin to stiffen. My saliva turned ice cold as I gulped several times.

There was a crash of pots and pans from the dark kitchen. Something was running amok among the cheap tin cutlery and plastic chopsticks! Drawers banged. The kitchen tap gushed.

There was something in the kitchen, no doubt about it.

“Go say hello to your ghost” I told Joom, smiling weakly.

Her eyes were bugged out like ping pong balls. Through a rictus of whitening lips she barely replied that I was the man of the house, the one who wore the skivvies, so I should be the one to confront whatever nameless terror was making a percussion section out of the kitchenware.

Since I was the rationalist, I had to do it.

I took a candle and tiptoed into the kitchen. A pair of red beady eyes glared malevolently at me. There was an unearthly yowl and something grabbed at my hair as it sped past to the open window behind me. I let out a yell that could be heard from Chiang Mai to Phuket City. Trying to escape the fiend I barked my shins on a low wooden stool and nearly fell into the bucket of Plaa Ra that lay festering under the sink. I caught myself just in time to twist around and peer out the open window, where a wretched macaque monkey was busily stuffing the remains of our dinner into its mouth.

When I got back to the living room Joom had retreated to her bedroom with Nipoo, and was swaying in front of a painting of The Nine Famous Monks of Thailand, imploring them to keep her safe, never mind that infidel farang boyfriend of hers.

I waited for her to finish, then calmly explained the origin of the ruckus. She hugged me violently, her scarlet fingernails digging into my shoulder blades like surgical knives.

That night as I lay in my bed I kept having the same looping memory -- of Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion in movie The Wizard of Oz, repeating over and over again “I do believe in spooks, I do, I do, I do!”  

Leftovers

When leftovers are the entre
I hesitate not to say "Nay!"
The turkey that's wilted
is easily jilted
and sent on its botulus way. 

En Strengen av Perler: Cursed are the Gatekeepers.

Gatekeepers are superfluous and hateful. They practice simony and barratry without shame or hinderance.

I’ve always thought so, ever since Kindergarten -- when my teacher dictated who got to play in the sandbox and when; and who got to use the colored clay sticks and when; and told us when to lay down for a nap and then, just as I was starting to get sleepy, telling us to get up.

What kind of life is that for a child? Being denied time in the sandbox because it was time for finger painting, and other folderol.

I have spent a lifetime cocking a snook at gatekeepers and trying to escape their baleful influence.

I hated my father for being the gatekeeper of my allowance. In the early morning I would get up and hide his dentures so he would be late for work. Down with oppressive gatekeepers!

In high school when I told my counselor I wanted to be a circus clown he told me I couldn’t do it. It was impractical. There was no future in it.

He tried slamming the gate on my dreams, but I fooled him good. I got into the Ringling Clown College and then got a contract with the Greatest Show on Earth, and went on to perform as a clown for nearly the rest of my working career. It kept me broke, ruined my marriage, and estranged me from my children for 20 years, but by the Great Horn Spoon I did it in part  just to spite that high school gatekeeper!  Nyaaaaaaaah!

“Stop!” “Who goes there?” “What’s the password?”

That’s all I’ve heard all my life. When I worked at Circus World in Haines City, Florida, the boss clown fired me for changing my makeup without permission, leaving me with a sick pregnant wife to care for and no income. Who the hell made him the gatekeeper of my clown makeup? Nobody. The finicking bloated martinent!

When I wore a bowtie instead of a necktie to work at radio station KSAL in Salina, Kansas, I was fired for insubordination. What in the wide wide world possessed those apple-knockers to think they could deny me employment because of what I wore around my collar? Such abuse of power was, and is, as shocking as it is moronic. Those gatekeepers should be made to sleep on a bed of sandpaper in the nude. Grit size P12.

The Utah courts would not listen to my appeals against my wife’s petition for divorce -- they called it “No Fault Divorce”. The gibbering villains. The supine homebreakers. The monstrous gatekeepers, battening on the law for their indifferent subsistence!

Who says I can’t put mustard on my scrambled eggs? Protests when I use a paper plate as a Frisbee. Frowns when I leave dirty dishes in the sink until lichen grows on them. Tells me eating at McDonalds is a civic and moral sin.

I’ll tell you who says all those despicable things. Dirty lousy gatekeepers. Officicious, prying gatekeepers. Malign and self-serving gatekeepers, without a shred of any real jurisdiction, and nobody else!

When I wanted to dress up like Hitler so I could parade past Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and give him a Sieg Heil during a Ringling matinee, who stopped me? Charlie Baumann -- that tumefied Teuton gatekeeper!

At my first radio job in Williston, North Dakota, I wanted to announce the self-inflicted death of a prominent Catholic businessman. The station manager, Bill Anderson, wouldn’t let me do it -- because he was nothing but a ferret-faced, toadying gatekeeper for the business community. The other radio station in town and the town newspaper gave full coverage of the suicide. Pfaa! It makes me ill to write of it.

My own sister took me to court to rob me of my inheritance from my mother, leaving me homeless and unable to pay my child support. Why? Because she wanted to play gatekeeper of my money and self respect -- she thought I had too much of both. Once decided on such a foul career, no gatekeeper can keep their heart beating with anything but malice. If they can keep their heart beating at all.

I worked for the Utah State Tax Commission as a telephone tax collector. When I applied for an opening as supervisor of telephone collectors an insufferable gatekeeper named Dorothy from HR told me I was disqualified because I neglected to include a small detail on my application about previous employment -- a job that had lasted barely 3 months. She denied me the chance to progress in government employment and so provide my family with a stable and adequate income -- the bilious old crow of a gatekeeper!

I curse her, and all gatekeepers who function without authority, compassion, wit, or humanity.

I curse the gatekeepers at the Minnesota Department of Recovery Services for revoking my driver’s license for back child support when I was making regular payments, all I could afford, and taking care of my dying mother. Because I no longer could drive I could not take her out on the brief excursions she so much enjoyed, and so her last months on earth were made much more miserable by soulless and rancid gatekeepers to uphold an unjust and unhallowed piece of legislation. May their ears fill with coarse hair and their lungs fill with kapok.

The gatekeepers at airports. At Costco. At Walmart. At nameless roadblocks and speed traps. At gas stations that want payment before pumping. In MBA programs and at walnut burl desks in Washington. Cops that profile skin color and imagined nationality. They all proliferate like maggots on dung.

My own body is full of gatekeepers. My narrow arteries that won’t let the blood circulate freely. The enlarged prostate that restricts my urine flow. A digestive system that takes too long to process my meals, giving me sour breath and constipation.    

When will God strike down the gatekeepers and give us surcease from their senseless, useless, and cruel blockades?

And there are gatekeepers who keep out the real gatekeepers. Yes there are. Such usurpers thrive amidst the noisome din of existential and atheistic clap-trap.

I loathe the unfrocked and unchurched gatekeepers who block the path to repentance and forgiveness.

In Thailand I was often drunk, and lived with a Thai woman who was not my wife.  And there were so many pseudo gatekeepers who told me “It’s alright, you may pass; you have nothing to worry about and may continue on with your life as you please.”

Thank heavens I recognized them as the mountebanks and chiselers they are, and finally sought out the true gatekeepers -- for have I said such do not exist? -- to seek their kindly help in finding the correct and proper way into inner grace and harmony.

These real gatekeepers, with authority and conscience, have conducted me safely into green pastures. And so they may do the same for you, if you have both the wit and humility to recognize them. And if you don’t; well, you might be lucky enough to be beaten into recognizing them, as I was. And still am beaten from time to time, for my own good (and maybe Someone Else’s amusement).

How often do I talk of Christ?

And they were also conversing about this Jesus Christ, of whom the sign had been given concerning his death.    3 Nephi 11:2

How often do I talk of Christ outside of Sunday School,
Creator of the cosmos and the blessed Golden Rule?
How frequently do I invoke his teachings in my life,
the scriptures he inspired to end all my grief and strife?
Not take his name in vain as television preachers do,
but speak about his nature -- loving, wise, and always true.
His melancholy sacrifice that from Golgotha led
to atonement and redemption as my sacred Head.
Tis not enough; tis not enough -- his name upon my lips
should be as nectar flowing that my soul unceasing sips! 
O help me talk with dignity and words not multiply,
and never say a word that might His life re-crucify!

En Strengen av Perler: The Hidey-Hole

In 1994 I lost my son Irvin. He was eight. He went into a diabetic coma, which was not diagnosed until it was too late to save him. I was not with him when he died. Recently divorced, I was unwelcome in my former wife's house. Initially I blamed Amy for Irvin's death, but I don't any more; now I blame God. I figure the Almighty's shoulders are broad and strong enough to hold my resentment. And sometimes I blame myself a little bit. Those are bad moments. Thankfully, they come less and less as time lengthens. I don't know if that's a good sign, or a bad sign.
There's nothing more I want to write about it. I scribbled this poem soon after the event:

Your photographs end all abruptly, too soon.

Where did you go? (Perhaps off to the moon?)

Why did you go? Did I do something wrong?

Did I say crabby words, or not sing you a song?

Come back to me, son -- I won't holler again;

I won't say you're naughty and count up to ten.

Stop hiding yourself, this is no sort of fun;

come out, little Irvin, come out precious son!

But you won't, or you can't, and I'm left all adrift

while the days turn to ashes, unraveling swift. 

Your hidey-hole someday I'll find out for sure,

and never believe that harsh Death has no cure. 

Restaurant Review: Pho Plus Noodle House. Provo, Utah

Small and intimate, Pho Plus on Center Street in downtown Provo offers a limited menu, but since it was packed today at noon I assume it's all good stuff.

I had a bowl of the basic Pho rice noodle soup. Their broth is outstanding -- I nearly ignored the meat and vegetables just so I could slurp up the stock. They obviously make their own bone broth. Its umami is pleasingly pungent and slightly sweet.

I give the place Three Plus Burps. For a regular bowl of Pho and a fountain drink I was nicked $10.05. The one thing I noticed that bothered me has nothing to do with the restaurant itself, but the people who eat there. Most of them left their bowls brimming over with broth -- the best part! I can't understand that at all. My guess is that people are just too darn lazy to use those little ceramic spoons to slurp it all up and are too hoity-toity to pick up the bowl and drain it, like I did. Their loss.

En Strengen av Perler: The Homeless Shelter.

For part of 2012 I was forced into a homeless shelter for men. In some other universe I'll explain why.

For now, all you need to know is that I found myself in a homeless shelter in Woodbridge, Virginia.  Here are some notes I took at the time:

The Death of Miser Jeff

Sunday evenings tend to be moody, melancholy times at the homeless shelter.  A group of disengaged, lonely men, recently out of jail or rehab, with nothing to do and nowhere to go, vaguely aware of some long-ago Sabbath day traditions and expectations, which are now lost, they sit out on the patio and chain smoke, kvetching with each other over the slightest incidents.  I’ve lost the button to my last pair of summer shorts, so am trying to thread a needle to sew on a new button, which I’ve cut off from an old pair of pants someone threw in the trash. But my eyes are not good enough to thread a needle anymore.  I ask if anyone can do it for me, since they are, for the most part, thirty-five years younger than me.  Nobody bothers to answer.

I put away the needle and thread, and use a large paperclip to keep the zipper up to the button hole.  I’m throwing these shorts away when I leave on Friday morning anyways.  My legs are getting so scabby and blotched from edema that I don’t want to wear shorts any more.  My bad legs remind me of Swede Johnson, an old circus clown I knew on Ringling Brothers.  Before becoming a clown he was a lion tamer . . . until the day the big cats turned on him, ripping his legs to shreds.  He always wore long pants, even when undressing and dressing in clown alley; his wife Mabel said his legs never properly healed after the mauling – they looked like raw hamburger, and he wanted to spare everyone the gruesome sight.

The sun sets, there’s no light on the patio, and the mosquitoes are active, but no one goes indoors.  Miser Jeff, who has been closeted in his room for the past two weeks, so that no one has seen him, comes shuffling out onto the patio. He's called Miser Jeff because he collects pennies in a Mason jar. Even in the dark, I can see that his stomach is huge, and perfectly round, like a basketball.  He says, to no one in particular, that he’s always hungry but can’t eat anything because he throws it right up.  I make a sympathetic murmur, but no one else even grunts.  Then, summoning up a bit of entrepreneurship, Miser Jeff announces that he knows there will be another urine test on Monday, and he is prepared to sell his urine to the highest bidder, so they won’t ‘drop dirty.’  Mickey the pyromaniac, who just got out of jail for setting fire to a Walgreens, has been drinking mouthwash all weekend, so he agrees to pay miser Jeff twenty dollars for his clean urine.  This makes miser Jeff so happy that he immediately goes into the kitchen to make his favorite meal – ramen noodles and mac and cheese mixed together in a big, gooey pile.  He hums contentedly, and since he has a cleft palate, it sounds like angry bees in a barrel.

That is the last time I am to see Miser Jeff alive.

Monday morning I go out for a walk, right after the daily rah-rah-sis-boom-bah group prayer.  When I come back the ambulance is in front of the House.  They are carrying miser Jeff out under a yellow blanket.

He had been discovered just a few moments before in his bedroom, sprawled on the floor in a pool of black vomit.  We are told he likely died from a stomach hemorrhage. Everyone is upset, especially Mickey the firebug --- where is he going to get his clean urine now?  He begs for some of mine, but luckily before I have to say no and risk his fiery wrath it is announced that the testing is postponed until Wednesday. By then I hope to holy God to be out of here, living with one of my children.

Miser Jeff’s body will be shipped to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, for burial in the family plot.  No funeral service is scheduled for here in Virginia.

And Mickey pours several bottles of Listerine down the toilet, repeating over and over again "crappity, crappity, crappity . . . "

After the storm and the sorrow

 . . . therefore there was silence in all the land for the space of many hours.
3 Nephi 10:2

After the storm and the sorrow,
after the wreckage is clear,
some can begin on tomorrow,
while others are strangled by fear.

Silence descends like a cover;
stillness spreads like the salt sea.
Over the land now will hover
the echo of our Deity.

The keening is hushed and forgotten;
our tears are beginning to dry.
Whatever the day has begotten,
my Savior is standing nearby.

  

En Strengen av Perler: The Clinkered Alleyway.

Until the early Sixties, parts of Minneapolis had alleys paved with clinkers.

The fused waste residue from industrial coal furnaces, clinkers are black vitreous pebbles pocked with iridescent blue holes. The city dumped fresh clinkers into our alleyway every other year then had a heavy roller crush them down and even them out.

I initially thought clinkers were tiny meteorites that a merry crew of astronauts dug up from some star-swept gravel pit to lay at my feet as a reminder of the strange grandeur of outer space. My mother was only too happy to set me straight about such an innocent fantasy:

"They're nasty leftover trash from the NSP plant" she told me kindly.

 Clinkers were hell on your pants when playing kickball, or with any other activity that required you to slide or get on your knees. With sharp obsidian-like edges, clinkers could rip open a pair of jeans at the knees in an instant -- and also leave a livid line of scrapped skin oozing blood. 

My mother kept the iodine bottle handy all summer, as well as an assortment of knee patches, for when I would come keening into the house with a bloody knee.

The clinkered allway an important social haunt for boys during my young summers.

We not only played games in them, but hunkered down amidst the clinkers to speculate in privacy on the theory that all sisters were aliens in disguise getting ready to take over the world, al a The Twilight Zone. Or what the best bait was for catching carp down on the Mississippi. The consensus ran heavily in favor of a gob of Velveeta cheese mixed with canned corn. 

We also went treasure hunting through the neighbor's galvanized trash cans in search of dull kitchen knives with broken handles, unstrung tennis rackets, racy paperbacks, and, best of all, empty whipped cream cans.

A discarded whipped cream can placed in a burning trash can is a pyrotechnic marvel to rival the Fourth of July. Back in those dirty unenlightened days each household burned its own trash in a metal barrel. The fires were lit by a responsible adult, who rarely stayed around until the flames went out. So when I and my cronies would latch onto a whipped cream can we quickly found an untended trash fire. We then hurled in the whipped cream can and sat back to await the fun. First a geyser of parboiled cream would come squirting out of the can. A few minutes later the can itself would explode with enough volume to rattle window panes while ashes and burning bits of trash rocketed up and then spread out over the landscape in a pyroclastic flow.

Needless to say, I and my pals would take to our heels as soon as the explosion occurred. Safely away from the mayhem, we'd stop to giggle hysterically and think of ourselves as invulnerable ruffians. Maybe that same puerile rush is part of the appeal to modern terrorists . . . 

In the winter the clinkered alleyway was a dismal and forlorn place. The clinkers mixed in with the slush gave the appearance of a long ribbon of filthy gray slurry. It provided good traction for cars; much better than the cement pavement that replaced it. But that was of no concern to me as a boy. The trash fires smoldered so much during snowfalls that we couldn't enjoy tossing in our whipped cream hand grenades without the discomfort of asphyxiation. 

Besides, in the winter we had the ice rink warming shed at Van Cleve Park. Redolent of damp wool socks and a kerosene heater, it was a place where boys could tie granny knots in their broken laces and talk shop about how many sticks of Bonomo Turkish Taffy a guy could actually stuff in his mouth before choking. At five cents a bar, it was a feasible experiment.

My own record was six sticks -- but I made the mistake of using banana. I think with chocolate I could have gotten up to ten, easy peasy.