Holey sheet!

~ Chris ~ 2 Comments

There is a hole in my bed sheet, a vast and tattered Dickensian hole, through which my foot pokes each night and touches the mattress pad, and it makes me feel derelict, woebegone and like a pauper of improper bed linens. And it’s true. I have allowed my sheets of some 20 years to come to this! I sleep on rags and do nothing because, face it, they’re still pretty comfy and, well, I’m lazy.

Until now. The other night my left foot slipped inside the ragged hole and got caught. This, in the wee of the morning. I pulled and twisted my foot, but it was, to all intents and purposes, stuck. 

Despite the late hour, say 3 a.m., my rage awakened at my entangled foot and I swore out loud. And I yanked my foot out of the rupture with such violence, I compounded it, tore it into a massive aperture so grave it could never be remedied. It was catastrophic. And yet, miraculously, I still dozed off into the ether, likely dreaming of silky 800-thread count Egyptian cotton sateen sheets. (Either that or BBQ wings.) 

I woke up almost happy my wretched old sheets were at last finished. When I say they were 20 years old, I really mean … they were about 15 years old. Still. They were cheap. Now they’re a heap. 

On Thanksgiving night, taking full advantage of one of those Black Friday mumbo-jumbo sale thingies, I ordered shiny new sheets from a reputable linen company and I saved 39 bucks in the bargain. No fewer than two days later the sheets arrived, folded yet fluffy, nary a hole to be found. 

Color? Graphite. Style? “Classic Percale Core,” which they compare to 5-star hotel threads. I don’t know what half of that means, but I’m embracing it. I don’t stay at 5-star hotels. Trust is involved.

A couple days later, I am washing the new sheets — they say you should rinse out factory dust, lint and chemicals before using them (alarming, yes). Currently, they’re in the dryer and I’m making a martini, chillaxing during my ongoing linen adventures. By the time they’re done, warm, soft, and sound, I will hopefully be three sheets to the wind. 

The hole, like Hell’s maw.

Chick lit

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“The idea of meeting someone in a library, in the aisle of a bookstore or while reading on the subway, for instance, remains stubbornly high on the list of many people’s romantic fantasies.” — from The New York Times (link below) 

I admit there are few things more alluring to me than an attractive woman reading a book or browsing in (or working at) a book shop or library. It’s a smashing combo, a kind of electrifying alchemy that I can’t quite explain.

For instance, in the 1946 noir “The Big Sleep,” I’ve always been partial to the bespectacled bookshop proprietress played by Dorothy Malone than to Bogart’s famous glamor squeeze Lauren Bacall — a nerdy example of my bookish bent.

My personal history of amore is lucky with literature. There was blue-eyed Guen, who brought on our first date a copy of David Mamet’s “Writing in Restaurants,” just for me. Laura, who made my knees buckle from afar, was toting the poems of Herman Hesse (we were soon a couple).

One of my biggest crushes was on the girl who worked at the hippest book store in Austin. Then there was the woman who, after a little wine, insisted we go browse the local used book store and buy each other a volume. Now we’re talking.

On the flip-side, I once invited a date to my place. She looked around at the Rothko print and various vintage movie posters, all without comment. Then she eyed my bookshelves and scoffed, “You have way too many books.” Deal-breaker!

Like movies, books are crucial to me, and a shared passion for them is just that — shared passion. It’s something in common, hot to the touch, and can be the bedrock of something more intense, meaningful and feverish.

All this was stirred up reading the above mentioned story in the Times titled “Is Reading the Hottest Thing You Can Do as a Single Person?” (Answer: yes.) 

Check it out HERE.

Dorothy Malone, bookshop owner, face to face with Bogart in “The Big Sleep”

In Eastern Europe, a chain reaction

~ Chris ~ 4 Comments

The free-market floodgates of post-communist Budapest have let in the Wicked Waste of the West, from Burger King and McDonald’s to Starbucks and KFC.

My genial young guide on the Budapest Jewish Quarter tour last week let slip his attitude about the tawdry chain invaders when we passed a Hard Rock Cafe and I made a snarky quip. “I won’t even talk about it,” he huffed with a wave of the hand, as if fanning away a stench.

This, of course, is nothing new in my travels, or even in our very own USA. There’s a festering resentment of western chains encroaching on native businesses with crass venality. 

On another tour in Budapest a few days ago, the guide took aim at Starbucks’ coffee, explaining proudly how inferior it is to almost any local cafe offering. (True. I tried some.)

Grumbling about foreign corporate chains is a vigorous sport among the educated classes in Europe, bashing them and their ostensibly shoddy, unhealthy, unethical food products, sold with such vulgar aggression. (Apple, Gap, Nike and other mega-retailers get a breezy pass. A Mac is hip; a Big Mac not so much.)

Traveling in two post-Nazi, post-communist countries in recent days — Hungary and Poland — I enjoyed the dissonance of Old East banging heads with Newish West. I’m a wuss, sort of taking both sides in the argument, leaning toward the European stance. (I happen to think most fast food is execrable poison.) 

Now, beyond carping about capitalism, here’s a few pictures from a wonderful journey to a slab of the world I find beautiful, fascinating and unfailingly friendly. The trip — filled with head-spinning history, humbling humanity and killer cuisine — was a knockout.

The most famous “ruin bar,” called Szimpla Kert, a huge, arty pre-war ruin in Budapest’s hip Jewish Quarter
Budapest’s iconic Parliament through the window of a Danube River cruise
The infamous gate at Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp in Poland. Yes, some dolts took selfies there.
Main Market Square in Old Town, Krakow, Poland
Main Market Square, Krakow, from my hotel window, about 6:30 a.m.

To CVS, and into the void

~ Chris ~ 2 Comments

So today I went to the nearby CVS to get my annual flu shot and my sixth Covid vaccine since the great outbreak of 2020. I try to avoid this CVS and its florescent scuzziness if I can, but this errand had to be done sooner or later, and this store is the most convenient option.  

Like most chain drug stores, CVS dizzies with its heaving array of stuff. I waded through a chaos of clamoring consumerism, everything jostling everything else: sacks of Halloween candy, weepy Hallmark cards, laxatives, reading glasses, and, perplexingly, a tall inspirational/Christian book rack abutting, with nary a blasphemous blush, the celebrity-exploitation magazines, those tawdry journals blaring rehab stints, venomous divorces and flashing the spray-tan décolletages of washed-up starlets. The men in these screeching glossies, lizardy leches all, fare no better.

Cutting through the garish gauntlet toward the pharmacy, I notice that the store is in critical need of fresh carpet — its ratty blue pelt looks like it belongs in a beer-soaked basement with a cracked pool table and a Doritos-dusted Xbox — and that most of the products on sale plunk me into a sad funk. (50% off gargantuan bags of Funyuns? Pass the strychnine.)

Why, I wonder, does everything in this store look worn and near its expiration date? Shelves gape with spaces where products are long sold out. And much of the inventory appears coated in dust and/or placed in the wrong department. (Flintstones vitamins next to the Trojans? Huh-hum.)

After my journey down miles of aisles, I make it to the vaccination check-in counter and the store’s overall complexion magically changes. At first it’s a little hectic and scarily unprofessional. The guy assigned to administer the vaccines looks about 19, and he’s distracted and aflutter. 

“Ah, let me sneeze,” he says, turning his head. I allow him to sneeze. He sneezes. 

But when it comes down to business — i.e., when he walks me over to the vaccine area and jabs both arms with needles I’d rather not be jabbed with — he proves a steady-handed pro. And affable, to boot. 

Somehow it comes up that he is from Syria, and I tell him I’ve been there briefly (though he’s from Damascus and I went to Aleppo). We share a chuckle at the expense of the mountains of Halloween candy spilling onto the floor — so soon, more than a month away! You buy some of that, no way it’s going to last! If the kids don’t eat it, you will! Ha! I realize this is third-rate banter. 

Anyway, things go as good if not better than they could, even in this semi-wretched drug store, where I bet their discount passport photos are disastrous, unusable. My guy is swift and smooth and painless with the syringes, and he neatly bandages up the holes. I thank him, he thanks me. 

And, after a few mandated minutes sitting down post-shots, I’m back in the Aisles of Death. It’s not that bad, of course. I notice that, hey, some of these prices actually are good deals. CVS stands for Consumer Value Stores (for real), and as far as what I came there for — which wasn’t for the greasy carpet or the dirty Advil boxes — this consumer got his value.

CVS? Totally. 

Get up and go

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Work, money, kids, pets — these variables can be holding you back from taking the plunge and taking a trip, an honest-to-god bona fide vacation, a far-flung journey to another land, preferably a place where English isn’t the primary language. (England’s great; Japan’s better.) I’m not talking the Bahamas or Cabo.

A neighborhood acquaintance and I ran into each other walking our dogs in the fallish cool today. She’s Mary, who I chat with about three times a year and was sporting a red shirt and red sunglasses. Her dog is tiny and hirsute. Like my dog, but bristly.

Niceties out of the way during this affable stop and chat, she asks, “Where are you going next?” I’m sort of known for jetting to some exotic-ish locale a couple times a year. (Jetting? We’re talking United Economy, baby.)

I tell her Budapest and Krakow, leaving in five weeks. 

Why Budapest, she says (though, oddly, she doesn’t ask why Poland). I say I’ve been meaning to go for years, but it never quite made my bucket list. But now I’m jacked. After deep-dish research, the Eastern European city beckons. (I didn’t actually use the word “beckons” in mixed company.)

“I wish I had that joie de vivre, that wanderlust,” Mary says, almost contritely. 

“But you do,” I say. “I think we all do.”

The dogs sniff each other’s buttholes.

I say that I don’t understand why people don’t travel more, don’t seize the day and make it happen. It’s about priorities. It’s about money. It’s about time. But it’s also about curiosity and interest in the world beyond. How does one not travel? Not harbor the galvanizing urge to move, see, taste, experience? 

I don’t say all that — I wasn’t giving a TED Talk — but I do tell her that travel is easier than you think. Once you finance it — travel cheap! It’s great! — the gears churn and plans get made. (I, of course, travel solo, so it’s even easier without the bulky carry-on cargo — i.e., another person.)

Mary seems flustered, like she can’t answer why she doesn’t get up and go. Which I find odd, frankly. She has a husband and a dog, no kids — that latter part is crucial. She’s practically free! 

“Where have you gone in the last five years?” she asks. 

I think I actually rubbed my chin as I tried to rattle off some destinations: Naples, Rome, Portugal, Scotland, Turkey, Japan, Paris, Bueno Aires … Then it felt show-offy and I trailed off. I did stress Istanbul as an extra special destination, and she seemed genuinely intrigued. She proposed we get together and talk about my trips and look at photos from them (with her husband, of course), emphasizing Turkey.  

She was coming around. In just minutes of gabbing on the acorn-cobbled sidewalk, she was getting the bug. Travel: it’s an infectious disease. And it’s almost totally benign.

Except for this little hitch: it will blow your mind. 

The angsty animal

~ Chris ~ 2 Comments

It’s raining and Cubby won’t go out to poop. He’s a dog, but he’s also a scaredy-cat. 

Yet even more than drizzling drops of water, Cubby cowers at mighty gusts of wind that make the trees sway, whipping up hissing whooshes, as if the gods are sighing at we dim mortals. 

Don’t even get him started when the landscapers are out, buzzing, rumbling and roaring with fossil fuel gusto. The spooked dog melts into a quaking, head-ducking mess. His body vibrates like one of those 25-cent motel beds and he hides between our legs and under chairs.

Cubby is a wuss. And he seems to be getting wussier with age. More neurotic, less secure in his fur, clingier and whinier. 

That hasn’t stopped his predictable barking tantrums when UPS or USPS drop by. Oh them he wants to tear apart between his keening and caterwauling. How exercised he gets when someone walks upon the front porch who isn’t friend or family. He’s a little guy, so it’s almost risible, all that raucous theater. We’d snicker if his clamor wasn’t so trying.

Poor pooch. He’s torn between fear and fury. Of course there’s the sweet in-between: the daily dogginess of cuddles and belly rubs, bully bones and the Baby Yoda chew toy, naps and nuzzles, loving woofs and lazy walks. 

But now, at this moment, Cubs has risen from repose and his ears perk nervously at a chorus of cicadas that’s blossomed after a day of rain. What’s that? Realizing it’s naught, his chin hits the floor again. The old man — 50ish in human years, really not so old — is learning that every noise isn’t a trigger.

An uppity pup? Hardly. He’s a humble character, gentle and obeisant, practically a lap dog. He likes to play chase with Baby Yoda and he gladly comes when called — he practically gallops. 

Despite his fear of the big bad lawn mowers and some other anxieties that may require pills, therapy, or both — did I mention he has to be sedated with not one but two meds before vet and grooming visits? — Cubby is fine, a good dog with curly gray hair and melting brown eyes. Funny thing is, he just might have taken a whole lot after … me. 

Cubby: craven and combustible; cuddly and crazy.

Pow-wows and Pinewood Derbies

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When I was six or so, my dad made me join Indian Guides, the YMCA’s pathetic version of Boy Scouts, and one festooned with astonishingly tone-deaf and un-PC Native American clichés straight out of a John Wayne western. Think tomahawks, faux-deerskin, and feathers, lots of feathers.

Each young member adopted (or just made up) cartoony “Indian” names for themselves so we felt like a real “tribe.” For some reason I was Sleeping Lizard, which, on reflection, I’m certain was a joke by my ha-ha funny dad. Apparently, a blazing warrior I was not.

Indian Guides exalted all the usual outdoorsy crap, from hiking and sharing campfires to learning how to shoot bow and arrows. We raced Pinewood Derby cars and learned, in comically broad strokes, about American Indian culture. Headdresses were involved. I’m surprised we didn’t wear red face.

One activist against the Guides has said that kids’ programs like it are “literally incubators. They take the minds of children and ingrain superficial images of the Indian people, like we don’t exist anymore. It victimizes all children.”

While “victimize” is strong sauce for what Indian Guides did to me — it mostly made me want to yank off my absurd “Indian” necklace, which was made of beads and dry macaroni, and go home and play with my “Star Wars” action figures — enough people bristled at the group’s ethos.

In the early aughts, the YMCA, under pressure from Native groups, changed the program’s name to Adventure Guides and removed all references to Indians from guidebooks and activities. There would be no more meeting invitations in the shape of little tepees, no more petty cash called “wampum,” and no more greeting others with “How How.” 

How How? For Christ’s sake. I bet we even called our meetings pow-wows.

Vintage Indian Guides. I swear that’s not me or anyone I know.

But let’s rewind to the Pinewood Derby, a storied cultural event made famous by the Boy Scouts that would seem to have zero to do with sacred Native American lore. This is where, with the considerable help of dads, kids built their own unpowered, unmanned miniature cars from wood, usually from kits containing a block of pine wood, plastic wheels, and metal axles. You painted and stuck decals on the cars, and, if savvy, attached fishing weights for maximum propulsion down the track.

Except in decorating my car, which I dubbed the Blue Bomber for it’s cobalt paint job, I did no work on it. What — was I going to use a jigsaw and a wood sander? I was six.

Never mind. Though a blur now, I set the Blue Bomber at the top of the ramp next to a half dozen other homemade racers and let her rip. I did this several times. And won every race. I walked with the day’s first place trophy. Indian Guides might have been a gross masquerade, ignorant and disrespectful, and boring as hell, but at this moment it was golden.

Sleeping Lizard crushed it.

Facing evil

~ Chris ~ 2 Comments

Let’s not get all down about it, but I’m reading “Survival in Auschwitz,” the slim and indelible account of life in the most notorious Nazi concentration camp by Primo Levi, an “Italian citizen of Jewish race.” Published in 1947, the pages bulge with terrible and inconceivable realities, much of it learned about in any decent schooling, yet far more personal and unsparingly granular. The horrors are shattering.

So I will spare you. I’m reading the book, an autobiographical classic, because of my upcoming visit to Auschwitz, just outside of Kraków, Poland. My trip, as I’ve oft-noted, takes me to Budapest, then Kraków, where I went years ago, including the day trip to the concentration camp, which is now a haunting al fresco museum that staggers with its bleak, blunt truths. Even the gift shop (yes, gift shop) is stained with gloom.

Why do we go to such places? I know someone who said he would skip Auschwitz if he went to Kraków, a fact I find astonishing. Few places throb with such recent history and so many fresh ghosts and has shaped so much of the modern era to now. It’s living history, inescapable. To duck it, inexcusable. 

That’s just me. Genocide is vital and we should be exposed to it as a reality check and cautionary device. Visiting Auschwitz (or Duchau, which I toured in Germany) is mind-expanding. It’s not a place for morbid curiosity or ogling. It’s a place for reflection and wonder. Like any potent museum, it works intellectual muscles and, more so, wrenches emotional ones. It’s as powerful as any Holocaust memorial or, similarly, the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. Its utter humanity rumbles, and humbles.

I have a strong stomach for dark and doom. I seek out shrines to deformity and mortality, like the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, the Museum of Forensic Medicine in Bangkok, freak shows and books about human oddities. I always make a solemn visit to Holocaust museums, be it in Amsterdam or Israel. Or, of course, Auschwitz-Birkenau. 

It’s not about luxuriating in morbidity or getting a “thrill” from death, like some sophomoric Goth, who gleans reality from graphic novels and zombie movies. It’s the opposite, being repelled by it while pondering the strength, the sheer fortitude, of the victims and acknowledging that it can’t happen again. The triteness of that statement is a reflection of its truth.

In “Survival in Auschwitz,” Primo Levi writes eloquently of struggle and endurance in the face of naked evil inside the death camp. His spirit is wounded but unbowed. Survival is paramount, and he carries on because it’s all he can do. 

He says: “Sooner or later in life, everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unobtainable … Our ever-sufficient knowledge of the future opposes it, and this is called, in the one instance: hope.” 

Late summer litany

~ Chris ~ 3 Comments

1.Late summer rain, lusty breezes, 70 degrees — paradise. Fall is knocking and I’m tripping over myself to answer the door. Of course more heat is brewing — it will hit 86 on Saturday — but the wind and wet is a heartening preview of the best season of all. Autumn is when I travel. It’s when I look for clothes — jackets, long sleeve shirts, shoes maybe. I recently bought a new watch and new glasses, both of them a shimmering blue, though any color coordination was strictly fortuitous. I’m not that fashionable. I consider the items fall purchases, as the watch is largely a travel accessory and the glasses signify renewal and optimism, things, perhaps counterintuitively, I associate with fall. (Plus, my prior glasses needed a new prescription and I never did like those old frumpy frames.) So summer’s in retreat. Cooler climes and shorter days are coming. And I’m getting all celebratory.  

2.The Little Rascals they’re not. But these kids have vim and spunk and initiative, an entrepreneurial spirit that fuels their gumption to holler at passing strangers who are easily a foot taller than them: “Lemonade! Get your lemonade right here!” These neighborhood urchins, some seven girls and boys, are tracing a wholesome tradition from way back — I’m thinking Tom Sawyer days. Times have changed: Their tangy beverage is displayed in bougie glass dispensers, from Ikea or West Elm. And they demand $2 per cup (in my day we charged a quarter!). It’s the last lap of summer, and here I come strolling under shade trees lining the hood’s main artery, a sitting duck. I’m buffeted by the blandishments of piping young voices touting their wares. But I am stuck. I’m carrying no cash, and evidently they don’t take Visa. All I can do is tell them this and walk on. It’s embarrassing, a little. But it beats what happened to me when I was hawking lemonade as a seven-year-old. “Lemonade!” I yelled at a passing car. The driver turned my way and flipped me off. Those were the days.

A stock photo, but look at that wad of cash!

3. Sometimes — no, almost always — a good, hard pop song is just the thing. I’ve been rediscovering two of the best power pop bands of the ‘90s, Jellyfish and The Posies, who prove a genius for the grooving, hair-tossing, sing-alongy pop hook. Plucking styles from a sequins rainbow of catchy, often ethereal influences — Bowie, The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Queen, ELO, Supertramp, Cheap Trick, with a pinch of psychedelia and a pound of Phil Spector — Jellyfish and The Posies layered sweet melodies atop bombastic rhythms and throbbing drums: sugar-coated hand grenades. Their greatest albums, Jellyfish’s “Spilt Milk” and The Posies’ “Frosting on the Beater,” rock as hard as they pop. Lush melodies and harmonies reign. And, especially in the case of Jellyfish, their sound and look is consciously sui generis; Day-Glo and dapper, the group seems right out of Sid & Marty Krofft. Even now, the bands crackle with a big bubblegum snap. Hear them here and here. (What happened to them? Grunge happened.)

Jellyfish, working hard at being psycho-delic.

4.My trip to Budapest and Kraków is precisely two months away. I know, it seems like I’ve been gabbing about it for an eternity. That’s because I have. Vacations are like that: you plan them, book them, then hurry up and wait. For months. Two months left. Grueling, but at least summer (*#$&!) is almost over. I’m still fussing with some fine points of the trip, like booking an overnight sleeper train from Budapest to Kraków (they told me to wait till the end of the month). And netting a spot at a coveted restaurant in Budapest (they told me to wait till mid-September). See, I’m ahead of myself. I booked hotels and dinners and tours four months in advance. Question: Should I really pop 30 bucks for a 45-minute tour of the Hungarian Parliament, which is beautiful and jewel-encrusted? I’m chewing over that one. But I’m pretty sure I know the answer.

Nope.