so this is my life

so this is my life

crammed into obsolescence;

some biography

the house of a friend

the house of a friend

is a polestar and comfort

when I walk by it

World War Three

SWEDEN’S TWITTER SAYS SWEDISH MEATBALLS ARE ACTUALLY FROM TURKEY

From Newsweek

The Swedes could not digest the fact that meatballs with their name

Were from a foreign nation -- it did fill them with great shame.

And so, as is the custom when a country gets too sore,

They took it out on Turkey by declaring it was war!

Their aircraft flew to Istanbul and formed a fearsome string

Of bombing raids in which they dropped the dreaded surstromming.

In retaliation the bold Turks began to lob

Ballistic missiles made up of their toothsome shish-kabob.

Other countries then took sides, to turn this food-borne spree

Into what can only be described as World War Three.

Italy dropped pasta on the Chinese countryside

(because the Chinese said that noodles were their ancient pride.)

France had sommeliers burst forth in suicidal sally

To put a stop to upstarts in the fruitful Napa Valley.

The Fenians refused to export any Irish stew

(a blow to England where cuisine all tastes like Elmer’s Glue.)

Fufu flung with fiendish glee; gefilte fish let loose;

This bellicose reaction meant we cooked our own sweet goose.

Cuz when the war was over and we sent home the Marines,

There wasn’t anything to eat except canned pork and beans.

So now the world’s quiescent, and the nations are at peace.

The only form of currency we use is bacon grease.

A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and maybe some pate,

Is all that we can dream about along our famished way . . .

Here's Mud in Your Eye

And the Lord spake unto Enoch, and said unto him:
Anoint thine eyes with clay, and wash them, and thou shalt see.
And he did so.

Moses. Chapter Six. Verse 35.

If so it comes to pass one day

That I must daub my eyes with clay

I pray for Enoch’s faith to ply

A bit of dirt around my eye.

Sometimes actions are unseemly

To obey our God extremely.

The Lord's Prayer (Revised)

Our mainframe which art in cyberspace, meme’d be thy brand.

Thy pingback come, thy flash mob fun in earth, as it is in the cloud.

Text us this day our daily app.

And forgive us our spam, as we forgive our flamers.

And lead us not into phishing, but deliver us from ransomware:

For thine is the Google, and the Facebook, and the bitcoin, for ever. Log in

Hard of Hearing

He waketh mine ear to hear as the learned

Second Nephi. Chapter Seven. Verse 4.

My ears would rather doze away

Than listen for the Judgement Day.

They do not want to be inflamed

With heavy truths and right proclaimed.

Help me thy wisdom to attend,

Oh Lord, and make my knees to bend.

The Modern Areopagus

And many more things did the people imagine up in their hearts,

which were foolish and vain . . .

Helaman. Chapter Sixteen. Verse 22.

The Gospel is good news, and it is never any threat;

But it is just a fraction of the mighty internet.

A modern Areopagus, tis a  market for fake news,

Where fools may find their fancy with a daily dose of ruse.

When searching for true knowledge there is one place you must start;

On bended knee in private place where God can touch your heart.

Ringmaster with Carson & Barnes Circus

In July of 2005 I was struck down with Bell’s Palsy while working as ringmaster for the Carson & Barnes Circus. It happened in the parking lot across from the Minnesota State Fairgrounds in St Paul, where we had just put up the big top. One minute I was getting ready to put on my tails and top hat for the matinee, and the next my face felt like melting wax. By the time I got to the ER the left side of my face was completely paralyzed. I could barely make myself understood. After a CAT scan and an MRI, the doctors gave me the diagnosis; my face would be immobilized for up to six weeks, and then a painstaking course of rehab would be needed to regain my former vocal abilities. There had been some damage to the vocal cords.

Had I been realistic about it, I would have realized that this event put paid to my career as ringmaster for Carson & Barnes. But I was just an angry and stubborn loudmouth -- who could barely talk anymore. And I was going to fix that in a hurry, no matter what the quacksalvers prognosticated.  

After a week’s rest at my mother’s home in Minneapolis, I rejoined the show in Bemidji; at first selling coloring books and writing press releases. Barbara and Larry Byrd, the owners and operators of the show at the time, were kind, but when I told them I would be back as ringmaster in a few more weeks, in a very slurred voice, they only shook their heads and said they would have to start looking for my replacement -- as the substitute ringmaster, Armando, the bareback rider, had a decidedly Hispanic accent. I begged them to hold off, to wait at least two more weeks and then let me try to announce the show again. If I couldn’t do it, I’d help them find my replacement. They reluctantly agreed.

Man alive, did I sweat bullets for the next two weeks! In my wayward reading as a youth, I had come across the story of how the ancient Greek orator Demosthenes improved his diction and pronunciation by supposedly holding pebbles in his mouth while he practiced a speech. I decided to try something similar, although I didn’t want to put any dirty gravel in my mouth.

No, I simply took up the first book I had at hand and vowed to read outloud from it for several hours each day, between the matinee and the evening show. As it happened, the tome I chose was The Book of Mormon. This is a book with as many flowery tongue twisting phrases as anything Shakespeare composed. I began at the beginning, proclaiming to the empty bleacher seats inside the  canvas circus tent:

“I, Nephi, having been born of goodly parents . . . “

From there I went on to the thundering orations of Nephi to his disaffected brethren and then gathered steam as I quoted the brother of Nephi, Jacob, in his scathing denunciation of sin:

“. . .shake yourselves that ye may awake from the slumber of death; and loose yourselves from the pains of hell that ye may not become angels to the devil, to be cast into that lake of fire and brimstone which is the second death.”

I was on a roll, and could feel my tongue and palate responding to the grandeur of the words of these prophets of old.

I kept haranguing the bleachers with the mighty sermons of Abinadi against wicked King Noah and the portentous philippics of Alma as he faced down the worldly semantics of Nehor. And my voice grew stronger and clearer. Even the candy butchers, getting their cotton candy and popcorn ready underneath the bleachers, commented to one another:

“Él puede estar loco pero suena bien!”

Now don’t imagine that because I was quoting scripture like Charleton Heston playing Moses I was anywhere near as righteous and obedient as those spiritual giants. Far, far from it. The list of my sins and indiscretions was, and remains, longer than the Mississippi. No, I just happened to use that book to get my ringmaster voice back. I might have chosen a telephone directory or Alice in Wonderland just as easily. And, by jumping Jehosaphat, it worked! In two weeks time my voice, while still a bit weak and scratchy, was deemed acceptable by the Byrds and I was back in the spotlight in top hat and tails introducing the high wire act, the tiger act, and those ever-lovin’, crazy clowns.   

And even today, long years later, from time to time, when I’m feeling down in the dumps or particularly guilty about some shabby transgression, I like to stride around my apartment, declaiming from Alma, Chapter 29:  

“Oh, that I were an angel . . . “

I’m not an angel, as my neighbors will gladly tell you; but there’s nothing like the sound of my own voice to convince me that “God’s in His heaven -- All’s right with the world!”

The Red Owl

When I was little, my mother had to take my sisters and I shopping with her, because she didn’t trust babysitters. She had good reason not to. She left us with the Meyers, two doors down, one sunny day, to attend to some personal chores, and when she got back she found that I had persuaded my sister Sue Ellen to put a half dozen M&M’s up her nose -- just out of scientific curiosity. It was great fun watching the doctor extract them with a long pair of tweezers. Very educational, too. Another time mom left us with her sister, Aunt Ruby, at her palatial house out in the posh suburb of Edina. I was put on Aunt Ruby’s bed for a nap, I recall, and as soon as the door was shut behind me I slithered off the sateen duvet and headed for her dressing table. Aunt Ruby had a slew of tiny bottles on her dressing table, full of expensive perfume. Once again in the spirit of scientific inquiry I gathered up as many as I could in my grubby little arms and took them to the toilet, where I opened them, poured them in, and flushed them away. I was hoping for an explosion or something else spectacular, but the results were disappointing -- just an overpowering floral essence that gave me a headache. Of course, there were some spectacular fireworks once my work had been found out. I couldn’t sit down for a week.

And so each Tuesday afternoon, after ingesting a baloney sandwich and drinking a glass of milk for lunch, we all hopped in Dad’s car for the trip out to New Brighton and the Red Owl supermarket. My mother did not drive and normally my dad would rather cut off his right arm than take her anywhere -- she was an accomplished backseat driver, whose melodramatic gasps and groans at near-misses and other navigating follies on my dad’s part should have garnered her a Golden Globe award every year. But since we would all starve, including him, if she didn’t get to the supermarket each week he made an exception.

Normally a shy and retiring child, who stuck to my mother like a limpet when away from home, I could never be kept within the confines of the grocery cart once we entered the portals of the Red Owl -- because right next to the supermarket entrance stood a dozen vending machines that offered more mysterious and exotic merchandise than a Moroccan bazar. A penny got me a red or green or blue or yellow gumball, which somehow managed to stay so much sweeter so much longer than any kind of flaccid chicle I could get at the candy counter at the corner store. And for a dime -- why, for a dime I had access to a veritable Golconda. But I had to take my chances on the outcome. Sometimes a dime produced a tiny plastic egg that held a rubber skeleton; sometimes a roll of lurid press-on tattoos; other times a plastic siren ring; or perhaps even a set of stiff, evil smelling, vampire teeth. And when Lady Luck was really smiling on me, out would pop a magnificent, though artificial, rabbit’s foot, dyed purple. Then again, there was always the possibility of getting stuck with a crummy charm bracelet or a ridiculous hair scrunchy. Girl’s stuff -- phooey!

It was easy to get a penny out of mom. No problem. She gave out pennies like a drunken sailor. But a dime -- well, now, that was a horse of a different color. A very difficult color, cold and forbidding. To pry a dime out of her coin purse took cunning and exact timing. I had to be able to judge to a nicety how much nasal wheedling to use to force her to give up a dime -- too little whining and she would close up like a clam -- too much, and I risked a box on the ears. For some reason my dumb ol’ sisters could get a dime from her with no effort whatsoever. They would simper and make petulant little moues with their mouths -- and out would come two shiny dimes, wham-bam-thankyou-ma’am. But I had to work for my dime, and there was never any promise that I would get one, even when my sisters got theirs. This, I think, is why I became an atheist at the age of ten.

Like all good hausfraus, my mother had a shopping list that she stuck to religiously. If it wasn’t on the list, it didn’t exist -- no matter what kind of spectacular deal was being offered. Always on the alert for the Main Chance, I would breathlessly point out to her (once I learned to read) that Red Owl was offering a buy-one-get-one-free deal on a carton of Twinkies -- Twinkies, for the cat’s sake! -- and she would blithely ignore my heartrending pleas, just because Twinkies were not on her stinking list! The only exception was canned tuna. Whenever THAT went on sale, she would stock up on it like there was no tomorrow.

“It’s so versatile!” she would say in a sing song voice to our grim, disgusted faces.

I remember the huge, clanking, manual coffee grinder, fire engine red, where mom would pour in a bag of coffee beans and turn the handle on the huge wheel. I itched to throw in some other items to grind up, to see what the result would be. Such as a can of corn or some ripe bananas. Luckily, that was one scientific experiment I was never able to perform.

The Red Owl supermarket gave out S&H Green Stamps; a line of trading stamps, which, when stuck into enough books, could be redeemed for merchandise such as toasters, clocks, cutlery, and even tacky furniture. While mom would dicker with the cashier on how many Green Stamps she was getting, I would be left to struggle alone with the awful temptation of the Zagnut bars, which were displayed on a wire shelf that was exactly at eye level with a six year old boy. Mom made all of our sweets, from cookies to cakes to candied apples -- and they were all supremely delicious --  so she was death on store bought candy bars. They rotted your teeth in an instant and undoubtedly contained a goodly portion of rat droppings. But nothing ever looked so tempting to a bored and hungry six year old boy as those Zagnut bars in their red wrapping.

One desperate Tuesday I couldn’t stand it anymore. I made a grab for a Zagnut, just as my rat fink of a sister Sue Ellen turned her baby blues on me. Heedless of the danger, I ripped open the candy bar and took a wolfish bite of nearly half of it. Sue Ellen began to yowl like a prison whistle, and, for once in my luckless existence, I had an inspiration. I thrust the rest of the Zagnut into the tiny hands of my baby sister Linda, who immediately began gnawing on the goodie with fiendish glee. So when mom turned around to discover the source of the tumult, she beheld baby Linda innocently destroying the evidence of my misdeed.

“Oh!” she cried in embarrassment. “I’m so sorry. My baby has got ahold of one of your candy bars. I’ll pay for it right now.”

Sue Ellen could only goggle in impotent rage. I had committed the perfect crime, with Linda as my patsy. I tried the same thing again a few weeks later, but Sue Ellen the bloodhound was now wise to my methods. Instead of screaming her head off, she silently pulled on mom’s dress until she turned around to see me smugly cramming a Zagnut into my mouth. Mom once again apologized to the cashier, paid for the candy bar, and then escorted me to my bedroom back home, where I endured solitary confinement for a period somewhat longer-seeming than the entire Pleistocene era. Plus, the dime she had paid for the Zagnut was deducted from my already skimpy allowance. But I certainly learned my lesson -- crime doesn’t pay (when you have sisters.)

The Real Revolution is yet to come

And thus they did obtain the sole management

of the government, insomuch that they did

trample under their feet and smite and

rend and turn their backs upon the poor

and the meek . . .

Helaman. Chapter Six. Verse 39.

When governments do turn their backs upon the meek and poor,

It means that they no longer can expect the Lord’s rapport.

The arm of flesh, cold intellect, and stockpiling of bombs,

Suppresses ev’ry instinct to spread charity and alms.

Who, then, will be the champion of destitute mankind?

Who powerful enough the state run mad to firmly bind?

Don’t look to parties, creeds, and plans, or any slender reed;

Only Christ and followers can meet the present need.

True Christians in the government; true Christians in the street;

True Christians in our homes will brutal tyranny defeat.

With a sword bathed in the heavens and a stern humility,

The Lord of Hosts and Battles points the way to being free!