Tim Torkildson's Clown Alley

Tuesday, September 8, 2020

Photo Essay: Experiments in Collage. Vol. 7.

Crazy Henry: Chess Master.

(thanks to Kellen Browning for the original inspiration here)

As the pandemic deepened I fell into a clinical depression.

The doctor told me to find a hobby to obsess about; he wouldn't prescribe pills because, he said, I suffered from a rare genetic lack of pleasure centers in the brain. I think he called it 'being of Norwegian descent.' A harmless hobby that would consume all my waking hours would take my mind off my imaginary misery.

The old poop.

So I took up chess. I started playing it online with people all over the world, on a cyber chess club.

But after just a dozen attempts to finish a game I gave up. It was the most boring thing, outside of sorting gravel, in the world. I began instead to bake pans of cornbread and leave them at nearby bus stops for the dozens of homeless people who tried to sleep at them. I found it easy to obsess about cornbread variations. Each time I made a pan I changed the recipe slightly. One time I added a can of creamed corn. Another time I added a jar of tamed jalapeno peppers. Peanut butter. Scallions. Mango peach salsa. Chickpeas. And so on. I felt happy and fulfilled. My depression receded, just like my hairline.

Naturally my friend Crazy Henry, with whom I was living temporarily, until I found another job, had to kibbitz at all my chess matches.

"You should sacrifice a pawn" he'd whisper to me over my shoulder.

"Do you even know which pieces are pawns?" I asked him heatedly.

"The ones you keep losing?" he asked innocently. When I finally quit playing on the cyber chess club, Crazy Henry took over for me. And began to win.

He did not have an intuitive knack for the game. No -- he just played so erratically and with such a complete lack of logic or planning that his opponents quickly became disoriented, and had to be led away from their computer screens, defeated and sobbing, by their spouses or companions. Soon Crazy Henry was going toe to toe with grand masters from Russia. He beat the pants off of all of them.

Inevitably his unusual gamesmanship led to trouble. Everything Crazy Henry puts his hand to leads eventually, unavoidably, to complications.

This time is was some men from Las Vegas. They were the big beefy type of gorillas that can crack their knuckles over a range of several octaves. They asked Crazy Henry to throw a chess match, as a favor to their boss, Big Swinburne. In return, purely as a sign of his gratitude for this little inconsequential favor, Big Swinburne would let Crazy Henry keep walking about without the aid of crutches.

"Have some of my friend's cornbread, okay?" was all Crazy Henry said in return.

I was a little hesitant about that particular batch. I'd added some pandan leaves for a bit of a tropical tang -- but I wasn't sure if you could actually eat them in safety. The two hulking brutes grabbed large slices and gulped them down, letting crumbs rain all over the living room carpet.

Before they were loaded into the ambulance, I got the mailing address of Big Swinburne out in Las Vegas so I could mail him the remaining portions of that particular pan of pandan cornbread.

As for Crazy Henry, he decided that playing chess online was too dangerous, so he started a Winter Croquet team, called the Frosty Mallets, and is now somewhere up in Canada as team captain. So I have the apartment all to myself.

And I have turned my attention to baking Irish soda bread.

Timericks from stories in today's Wall Street Journal.

Oil Prices Tumble on Faltering Recovery in Demand

The price of oil is dropping fast;

I wonder how long that will last?

While OPEC currently may be

about to ask for charity,

I think that once the glut is o'er

they'll gouge us all until we're poor.

New Blackouts Darken California.

If you live in Sacramento

power's just a dim memento.

If in Frisco you reside

your house is dark at eventide.

And if you stay in Anaheim

your electric clock won't chime.

The juice is out and at this rate

they'll have to sell the Golden Gate.

U.S. Military Is Offered New Bases in the Pacific.

So the country of Palau

wants to welcome our own scow

in their bay to cock a snook

at Beijing and its bankbook.

Oy, we need new Navy bases

like a Janus needs new faces!

How is it that the heavens weep

"How is it that the heavens weep . . . "

Moses 7:28

How is it, Lord of Hosts, that thy

tears fall from a sullen sky?

*****

MY CHILDREN DO CORRUPT MY WAY

AND THUS THEIR JOY DOTH FLEE AWAY.

Monday, September 7, 2020

The good shepherd doth call you

". . . The good shepherd doth call you . . ."

Alma 5:38

The voice of the good shepherd

calls to ev'ry living soul;

assuring them that in the fold

they play a happy role.

Sunday, September 6, 2020

Crazy Henry gets religion.

"Men are free to choose."

I was staying at Crazy Henry's place. It was only temporary. I'd been laid off back in March and then evicted in June when my savings ran out. This current rainy day was turning into a cloudburst, but I was sure I could get another job soon. I was ambitious. fairly young, respectful towards my elders, and had some vocational school training. Piece of cake.

But in the meantime Crazy Henry let me stay in his spare bedroom, which was sweet of him.

But then, he'd always been a sweet guy -- although nuttier than a fruitcake. We used to go to Sunday School and Bible Camp together when we were kids; he was a good listener back then, and wanted to become a missionary to some faraway band of marauders in Central Asia or a piranha-worshiping tribe in South America. But then his father was killed in an accident, and he took care of his mother and sisters by working for carnivals during the summer. He made a ton of money doing something with Kewpie dolls, but he never would talk to me about those times. And he stopped going to church completely. He liked to spend his Sundays baking brownies, and reading Cliff Notes -- out loud, to me.

This particular Sunday he was reading the Cliff Notes for Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale to me. He was having trouble pronouncing the name of Polixenes, and kept calling him 'Poligrip.' Since I was chowing down on his walnut fudge brownies, I didn't bother to contradict him. I was comfortable, and filled with a sugared benevolence for all humanity. Let him pronounce it 'Polycarp' for all I cared.

But then he stopped at the beginning of Act Three, which was something about an oracle and visions and stuff which kinda bored me (truth be told, I think I was approaching a glucose coma and needed to be revived with a glass of milk.)

After a long pause, during which I considered keeling over right where I was on the couch to begin a long winter's nap, Crazy Henry suddenly said, out of the blue: "Religion may be the opium of the masters, but I still think there's something in it!"

Then he flung himself into a cheap rattan chair from his patio to brood. I could tell he was brooding because he wiggled his ears. Whenever Crazy Henry tried to do some serious thinking, he wiggled his ears like the fins on a goldfish.

"I"ve always been interested in the Quakers" I told him sleepily, wondering if I could get him to bake some oatmeal raisin cookies later on.

"C'mon" he said to me urgently. "We're going to church!"

"What church?" I asked.

"ANY church!" he replied, throwing me a dark blue necktie from the coffee table and a pair of black socks from under his rattan chair. I never used to take such abrupt orders from him; in fact in the good old days I'd just tell him to go to hell. But now that I was dependent on him for a place to live, I was discovering my inner toady.

All the places of public worship were closed. Locked up tight as a drum. Some even had chains looped through the handles on their massive mahogany doors. The last place we stopped, a huge old church in the middle of downtown, made of granite and with a steeple that needled the sky, had the most ornate and massive doors I'd ever seen, like a castle in Robin Hood's time. There were a bunch of plastic flowers strewn in front of it.

"Door worshippers!" cried Crazy Henry in amazement.

"Huh?" I replied intelligently.

"These poor people can't get in, so they leave offerings at these doors instead" he said to me.

Just then an old lady in a paisley shawl shuffled up the steps and reverently laid down a pink plastic rose in front of the doors. She smiled at us weakly, then made her way down the steps to wander slowly down the silent street.

The rest of that Sunday Crazy Henry descended into a fine lunacy, which he called an 'epiphany.' He found a hardware store that was open and bought tools, an oil can, a ladder, wood putty, shellac, varnish, and lemon scented furniture polish. Then we revisited all the places of worship we had been to that day, so Crazy Henry could oil the door hinges, fill in scratches and gouges with wood putty, sand them down, and apply a coat of varnish or shellac over them. I got into the spirit of things by polishing up the doors with a bit of Pledge on a rag. We tightened hinge screws and applied naval jelly to rusting door knobs and handles.

And that became Crazy Henry's new religion: Door Repair and Maintenance.

Every Sunday he would get up early, dress in dark slacks, a white shirt, and a conservative necktie, then visit places of worship to see what he could do to get their doors looking good. If they were made of glass, he attacked them with a squeegee. If they were cheap plastic jobs from Home Depot he painted smiley faces on them. But he especially loved working on the grand mahogany doors. He kept them looking like a Cecil B. DeMille movie set.

Me, I continued to stay home on Sundays. My religion is Watchful Waiting, an offshoot of Do-Nothingism.

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