Northspoon???

The new photo is my own, taken today (24 February 2009, which would have been my Mom's 92d birthday). The little brook (barely discernible in the snow, among the trees) is a "seasonal" brook that runs along the west side of our house, through an area we refer to as "the bog" - technically it's a "wetland." I call it the "Northspoon" for no good reason other than that when we'd been living here a year or two, we got a letter in the mail, with a check, addressed to "The Northspoon Aviary" ordering some bird food or other, addressed to our street address. Never heard of the aviary of course, and returned the check to the sender, but I loved the name "Northspoon" and applied it to the little on-again/off-again book that passes by us on its way to Wash Pond (or Sunset Lake, depending on how you feel about it).

No news is good news? Maybe but what constitutes "no news?"

If you undergo some medical diagnostic procedure or other (MRI, any of various scans, blood work, etc.) particularly on a specialist's orders, in pursuit of diagnosis of some lump or bump or twitch or hitch in yer gitalong, is it acceptable to you when the doctor or some of his or her minions announces "Oh, we won't call you if the results are negative. If we called everyone it would take up too much time."

It's not acceptable to me, and even LESS acceptable is the fact that in such situations, when you call the Dr's office seeking info, they get a little testy and issue a ration of shit, like "Well we TOLD you we wouldn't call if there was nothing to report." I think at the VERY LEAST, if you take the trouble to call, you should get a polite "The tests came back ok."

But I really think that it isn't really all that onerous and time-consuming to simply call the patient with the "tests came back ok" news - they can sure take the time to call to remind you of appointments (or is that because there's $$ involved??)

Or am I just being grumpy?

Good Old Mike, of Mike's Appliance Service

(Newton NH, I recommend him highly indeed), yanked the stove out, tinkered with the heating element in the oven, muttered a little under his breath, went down to the service panel in the cellar and jiggered stuff a bit, came back upstairs, tinkered some more, muttered a little more, and announced that it was not, after all, new stove time, but that the old ark would be back on the air entirely with a new oven element, and in the meantime the cooktop was fine and we could broil if we wanted. I mentioned this to a pal, who was aware of the fact that in the past twelvemonth we've replaced our water heater and furnace, not to mention retired an old car with over 200,000 miles on it. "Jeez," he said, "It's like getting old. Things just keep wearing out." And so, it seems, they do, and it emerged that he was speaking more specifically of anatomical and physiological infrastructure, since we've arrived at the point in our lives where, when three pals get together for a bit of lunch, the beers are barely opened when talk has turned to the latest visits to this or that doctor or diagnostic procedure. We're collections of lumps and bumps and jitters (oh my) and hitches in our collective gitalongs, but it is not without its boon, for the fact of our entropy lends truth to the old saw "the older I get, the better I was."

Just not the way we usually mean it.

Zombie Banks

Heard this on the drive to the office this morning. I'm confused.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100762999

Not very long ago (weeks? not more than a couple of months) it was unthinkable that humongous corporations could be allowed to self-destruct under the weight of their own greed and mismanagement. Now there are voices piping up pointing out (rightly, for all I know) that these dinosaurs are sucking up rescue resources without contributing to the economy, and should be "dismantled" and "restructured." Perhaps. I tend to think that organizations that can't or don't survive on their own ought to suffer the consequences, and yeah it's a pity all those shareholders will lost their stake, and all those people will be out of work, but in the latter case it'll only be temporary, and why should they be more entitled to the job they want than I am to mine (i.e. "not") and in the case of shareholders, well those are mostly institutions not widows & orphans, and where the institutions are holding funds invested by people representing the widows & orphans, I dunno what to say but when the shit hits the fan, everyone gets dirty.

The solution to the state of the world economic disaster is fundamental reconstruction, not constant propping up of the crummy policies, practices and institutions that fell apart on us. Inevitably, IMO.

I think it's time to re-invigorate this exercise.

For no real reason other than otherwise it's a resource sitting going to waste. Here's another piece about a dream.

I have not had this dream in many years. I wish I could remember reliably when the last time I had it was, but it was surely more than 10 years ago. But I had it a number of times during my 30s, I think. It was not always exactly the same dream – the “plot” and the “setting” varied. Interestingly, it was a progression of variations, such that the changes that would happen (or appear) in one instance, would continue through the next instance, and probably be built upon, with more variations – often slight - and so on. I should probably set it up – like most dreams, it has “hooks” in reality. In this case the realities in which the dream has hooks are two: one is the old “Adult Entertainment District” in Boston, known as “The Combat Zone” – for many years, lower Washington and Boylston Streets, down to Kneeland and Stuart, were more or less officially set aside as a place where strip joints and smut shops and hookers could operate more or less “unmolested” by the cops. One could walk down Washington and there was an unbroken gauntlet of sleazy bars & “bookstores” and adult theaters. In the late 50s there were just a few theaters and bars where no one ever went “all the way” (strippers in G-strings and pasties, movies were pretty much restricted to boob shots and simulated sex acts) but by the late 60s it was pretty much Katie-bar-the-door, up to and including (as one barmaid described it to me once) “getting your nut.” Oops, ‘scuse me, I was kinda drifting down memory lane there for a minute…

Anyway, the earliest occurrences of this dream seem (as near as I can recall – I don’t remember dreams very often to begin with, and the first occurrence of this one was probably over 30 years ago), I am walking down Washington St. (“down” here meaning in a general direction from Old South Meeting House toward Chinatown, for anyone who knows the neighborhood). The old “Publix” and “State” theaters are there, and lots of smutshops and stripjoints, and I go into a few of each, and browse, and have a beer and watch a girl get naked on stage. In none of these dreams did I ever go into any of the movie theaters, I don’t think. I wend my way down through the Combat Zone, fending off approaches by various more-or-less young females, all offering to do sexual things for me/to me, for money. When I get to the “bottom” of the CZ, somewhere around Stuart St., I usually wake up. OK, so no big deal in this dream, right, pretty clearly the workings of an oversexed (and under serviced) mind.

Here’s where the interesting thing comes in – I spent a year in Korea in the AF (10/1970-11/71). The main US airbase there is Osan, a few miles south of Seoul. Outside the gates of Osan is what’s known as “Chico Ville” or “Chicol Village” depending on how drunk/americanized your references are. As you might suspect of a village just outside the gates of an american airbase housing about 10000 GIs, Chico had a significant population of what were called “business girls.” And they worked in a bunch of clubs, mostly – places with names like The Stereo Lounge, and “The A-Frame” (not after the chalet architecture, but after the piece of equipment that was standard for Korean peasant to use when lugging huge loads on their backs – sort of a papoose thing that strapped on and had a flat bed you could tie bundles of sticks or hay, or charcoal, or whatnot to.), “The Aragon Ballroom” (honest), and the “Five Spot.” The FiveSpot had five large rooms with dancefloors and room for up to a couple hundred hookers in each. In addition to these “clubs” there were guys who would approach one in the street and offer to lead you to some little hootch somewhere down in the maze of alleyways, and hook you up with a young lady who would do various things for you/to you, for a small fee*. Anyway – after I returned from this assignment, the next time I had this dream, the venue had changed, and it was Chico Ville instead of the Combat Zone, though some of the things that appeared in the dream (smutshops, particularly) were in fact absent from Chico. For a while I had this dream fairly regularly – maybe 6 or 8 times a year. Then, it began getting less and less frequent, and – this is very odd, but I swear it’s true – the “neighborhood” in which the dream took place started going downhill. Many of the joints would appear, but were boarded up, or simply empty. Many of the places that were open had older, and older and seedier and seedier looking girls lurking outside. I don’t remember when the last time I had the dream was, but it was quite some time ago, and I was sad that what had once been so pleasant and exciting a dream, had, like so many things as we get older, faded, and didn’t offer the least thrill anymore.

*All of this information about the Combat Zone, and Chico Ville is, of course, hearsay.