The anti-Socrates

 The anti-Socrates                                                                              

When we are alone, we crave company, and when we have company,
we wish to be alone, as if a meal that made us sick before will now
cure us. – Uncle Albert

It seems to be a matter of pride: Mr. Ball – “Call me Hum.” – has “never worked a day in my life.” Rather, he’s “never been paid for a day’s work.” He has “never taken a job from anyone that needed one more” than he has. “Yes, that’s the best way to put it.” And no one ever needed one less than he did.

     And that’s the frustrating end of the conversation. He doesn’t wait for me to ask what he has done instead, how he has filled up the 2,000+ hours the rest of us work in a year. Wrinkling his nose, at the coffee not at me, I hope, he pads quietly out of the kitchen, leaving me to wonder what to do with my – yes, it is shitty – coffee.

This is the way philosophy tends to work for me. Call Hum Ball the anti-Socrates: He raises the question but doesn’t stay around for any discussion of it.

03.31.16

Pick up the story from its beginning here.

The morning after the evening before

 The morning after the evening before                                             

[. . . continued from here]

“Everybody’s on their own – I should say ‘his or her,’” Mel said, “or ‘we’re all on our own’ for breakfast and lunch.

     “What time do you get up?”

     I told him, “Between 6:00 and 6:30.”

     “So 5:00 and 5:30 here,” he said.

     “Maybe the first day or two,” I said. “I tend to adjust quickly, especially if it means sleeping later.”

     “You’ll be fine,” he said, “though you may be the first one down. You drink coffee?”

     “Usually.”

     “Let me change the time the first pot begins brewing then.”

Listening to cardinals and robins through the dark, I think, “What did I mean ‘the first day or two’? How long do I think I’m staying? Already, after one night, I was feeling – as I often do – in the way. I have broken into a safe, I’m rummaging about not knowing what is or isn’t valuable. Or, I’m the metaphor that doesn’t work any better than that one, more confusing than enlightening.

     Imagine a lengthy existential whine here about how I am always the speck in the eye, the fly in the ointment, the maiden aunt that no one can admit is difficult to love, though the youngest whispers so everyone can here, “When is she leaving, Mom?” (And Mom answers, “Not for a while, dear. Besides you love her visits. You know you do.”)

     The speck, the fly, the bur under the saddle, always. It’s not here in particular but everywhere I am in the way. I am in my own way. I’m polite to myself, but that doesn’t mean I’m not irritated by my own company. Imagine pages of such whinging, existential drivel.

      You’re the youngest, now all grown up. Not your maiden aunt but her bastard son arrives. You don’t know precisely how long he’s staying – overnight, a few days, a week and a half? It’s not an accusation you feel comfortable making, but it looks like he’s living out of his car.

Mr. Ball must have walked in on little cat’s feet, because I jump in my chair, when he says, “How’s the coffee? I think Kathleen made it, which means it tastes like watery, moonlit shit – right?”

Mid-morning I . . . [to be continued]

03.30.16

Remover of obstacles

 Remover of obstacles                                                                      

I arrived yesterday. Roz sent me; why I shall write about another time. I arrived in Birmingham to visit Mel Ball, whom I had met only once, briefly, when he had come to Virginia to meet Tom Nashe, and based on Tom’s sister’s recommendation – he had been a student of hers at the small northeastern Nihilist Brothers school where she teaches art history – we asked him to become part of my burgeoning media conglomerate.

Ganapati, remover of obstacles

Mel lives at home, that is, with his parents, a pair of lazy, lively, benevolent but not foolish trust-fund hippies, who love their son and what he is doing and are happy to have him around, one of many coming-and-going hangers on, as long as he pitches in on household chores, including cooking two dinners a week, clearing and washing up after two others, cleaning the bathrooms one Saturday per month, making his bed and doing his own laundry (including sheets and towels, so changing his bed, and walking the dog as needed, also obeying the house rules which are two (+ 1): do unto others as you would have them do unto you except neither a borrower nor a lender be (which means he has to earn his own pin money); and tell your mother you love her at least once a day – and helping evict anyone in the house that fails to observe rule #1.

Mel explained his “situation” (all in one sentence, approximately as written above), while he was showing me to my room, which is sparsely but beautifully furnished: single bed with oak head, side, and foot-boards, matching bedside table, dresser, and desk and chair. The floor is also oak but lighter with a small braided rug next to the bed. The walls are white. There is a crucifix on the wall above the head-board and a small laughing Buddha on the dresser. The base of the lamp on the bedside table is a stone Ganesha, the base of the lamp on the desk ceramic fired into the shape of the Arabic letter alif. There is a mezuzah on the door frame. The room, before I began putting my stuff about, was otherwise bare. There is no mirror above the dresser, no picture on any wall, no curtains at the window. The small closet was empty except for the hanging rod, three wooden hangers, and a painted tie, and the hook on the back of the door, the upturned snout of a brightly painted Norse troll. "I made that," Mel said, "when I was 11 or 12, so it had to be kept and put up . . . and used.” All the drawers – dresser, desk, table – were empty.

          "I'll let you get settled. Then we can decide what we want to do. It'll have to be after supper, since I'm cooking tonight. That's where to find me; I need to get started. Spaghetti. And a salad. We always have ice-cream for dessert, always; but there are probably a dozen choices.

          "So come down to the kitchen. If you take the stairs at the other end of the hall from where we came up, they’ll take you there. Or wander; you'll eventually find your way. One other rule – sort of. You can walk through any open door. And you can knock at any closed one, unless there’s a necktie hanging on the knob. That is what that was for, in your closet, if you wondered. My dad, who hasn’t worn a necktie since not long after he learned that use for one still thinks it a wonderful joke. So, if you need some time to yourself, and you hear laughing in the hallway. . ." He shrugged.

"How many people are living here now?" I asked Mel, who chopping onions, green peppers, apples, and tomatoes for the spaghetti sauce.

          "Including you, just five right now. Mom, Pop, me, you, and Kathleen. You may or may not recognize her when you see her at dinner, but it would be nice if you pretended to. She was one of Jim Rockford’s girlfriends. Not James Garner’s but Rockford’s – among other things.

          "So there are a couple of empty bedrooms right now – there are six or seven altogether, depending on how you count them."

After supper . . . [to be continued]

03.29.16

 

the rule_ of golf

 the rule_ of golf (singular!)                                                            

I just wrote (here) about the addiction to what one jackass called “an aspirational game.” This jackass, not Bobby Jones’ cousin Jackass Jones, meant by “aspirational” that you should be rich if you wanted to play. But not many addicts are rich; they can’t afford to be.

In the same brief post, I wrote about golfers that cheat. Not many cheat as much, or so I’ve heard, as the jackass that called the game “aspirational”; but he became rich himself partly from thinking cheating is fair in any case. But all golfers, rich and poor, cheat, because it can’t be helped: The Rules of Golf like the Book of Order of the Presbyterian Church are meant to be massaged, manipulated, misread and misapplied. The Rules of Golf, I wrote “is more persnickety and meaner than Leviticus, impossible to follow if you’ve been drinking. And who would play sober?”

But the the rules of golf (lower case) do not need to be persnickety; they don't need to be complicated by exceptions, outs-of-bounds, lateral hazards, sprinkler heads, cart paths, spike marks on the green, seagulls that fly away with the ball you hit from 165 yards to 6 inches from the pin. Golf really needs only one rule.* Almost anyone can remember one rule and every “exception” is covered by this one.

The one rule of golf
          Play the ball where you find it. If you can’t find it or can’t play it, go back
          to the spot of the previous stroke and play another ball. Every time you swing
          at your ball counts one stroke.

I ran this by 16 golfers I know. None liked it; on the other hand, none could find anything about it not to like. There was one “complication” advanced by 3 of the 16 (none lawyers, one a truck driver, and the other two preachers): equipment. Simply solved:

     The one rule of golf equipment

               Everyone will play with equipment manu-
               factured to the specifications of that available
               to Ben Hogan when he won the Masters, U.S.
               Open, and The Open Championship in 1953.

If no one has struck the ball more purely than Hogan, a common claim and one I believe, there is no need for equipment “better” than that he used.

* * * * *

Next time: the application of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to playing golf and to living in a country with a presidential candidate that cheats at it (though he must know better because he has “a very good brain”). Or not.

03.17.16

_______________

* For that matter, the Presbyterian Church needs only one rule (also easily remembered and with every exception covered): “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your mind and with all your strength, and your neighbor as yourself.”

The "aspirational game"

 The “aspirational game”                                                                 

Bobby Jones' cousin Jackass Jones

No one writes the truth about golf, because it is the damned-foolishest of all the addictions. It is as expensive as drink, even high-class drugs; and it lacks the benefits of either. The highs are shorter lived; the lows last longer. The highs are lower; and the lows more desperately self-indulgent. The gentlemen that play are for the most part jackasses pretending to be gentlemen. No one doesn’t cheat, if he thinks he can get away with it. The golfer is inspired to cheat, because the rules are not intended to make fair a game that is most unfair to begin with. No one doesn't cheat, because he can't help it. “The Rules of Golf” is more persnickety and meaner than Leviticus, impossible to follow if you’ve been drinking. And who would play sober? It is an addiction within an addiction on a ground itself addicted, chemically green even in the grainy old sepia-toned photographs.

03.14.16

Six kynical thoughts . . . or seven

 Six kynical thoughts . . . . or seven                                                 

with hats off to Peter Sloterdijk

1. Shame is regulated entirely by custom, an invention of authority.
2. Theory is gray; life is green. That is: Theory may describe reality, but it does not rule either the genitals or the anus.
3. Jesus says, “Know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” The Church says, “Not so fast. We love you more.” (He wants to make you free; we want you to be comfortable.)
4. There would be no war, if all soldiers deserted.
5. But they cannot. All soldiers are liars, for all have given up what they know to be true to follow what they have taken an oath to act as if it were true.
6. To say “I am thus” does not mean that “it is thus,” however much we wish it so.
7. The age that can no longer conceive of a transcendent morality can neither any longer distinguish means and ends.

but the sole responsibility of yours truly,

Ted Riich

03.11.16

Today's new logo

 Today’s new logo                          

Two years and two months and nine days later, The Ambiguities enters a new decade. The purpose has always  been to blow raspberries at the gods, who invented us to believe that the flutter of butterfly wings in Colorado somehow changes the way the Cantonese for toothpaste (牙膏) rolls off the tongue of a housewife in Guangzhou – all things must be somehow connected. But they aren’t.

The following triptych by our graphic designer, Melchior Ball, depicts a penis with wings, a coffee spill on a white counter, and a fragment from Petronius Arbiter. (The drawing is not to scale. The translation below is for those who find they cannot not believe.)

So, there!

03.09.16

_______________

     The vulture that tracks through our guts 
     and pecks at our hearts and bowels – 
     not the the bird our dainty poets sing