Cleaning

I spent a year working for a well-known carpet cleaning company, a job for which I was completely unsuited. I'm glad I did it because it broke me out of my comfy suburban boy bubble. Anyway, many odd things happened. Here's one of them.

My coworker for the day (let's call him Z.) and I were called to a house in Ensley. The customer was a big friendly guy who answered the door in a T-Shirt advertising a gang ministry. He offered to share his dinner with us ("I'm not weird or anything, I'm just offering you dinner") which we declined. Then he led us to his bedroom, which we were to clean. By his bed was a pile of magazines; Christian magazines. Z., the customer and I started moving stuff out of the room, starting with the mags. We soon found that beneath the Christian mags were porno mags, though. Really creepy ones; the cheezy kind that look like they were shot in a garage. And the pinup girl is the editor's Mom. Special bonus: swinger newsletters, the kind with classified ads for "Polyamourous activity partners" that turned me off the human body when I was in grade school and found an issue in the road on my walk home from school. Ewww. Z. and I instantly fled from the mags and started moving the furniture. We figured we'd let the customer move his own strokebooks, but no dice. He hung back and let us move his mags. Then we cleaned, collected payment, and left.

Was the guy hoping we'd confront him on the contrast between the Christian stuff and the smutty stuff? Was he genuinely unaware of the incongruity? I've always wondered. People balancing faith and filth is no surprise, but the fact that he'd let us discover what looked like a guilty little secret seems like a cry for help that we didn't want to answer.

Speaking of which, there's a lot of lonely people out there. Some of them turn to carpet cleaners for human contact. We had women answer the door in nothing but towels, obviously considering a seduction, then changing their minds when they got a load of the fat smelly goofballs the company sent. We've had people dish all their grandkids' drug problems as we cleaned the grandkids' rooms. I suspect I'll do a few posts on my carpet cleaning misadventures.

Graduate

Quick, before NPR takes it offline, check out this comment (From Fresh Air) on The Graduate. I need to rewatch it, because I suspect commentor John Power's point is on target: today Mrs. Robinson is the real rebel and the most interesting character.

Belief

I was looking for a famous G. K. Chesterton quote about belief when I found this article which demonstrates that the famous quote was actually someone else's paraphrase of a recurring idea in Chesterton's work. Anyway, the idea is that if you cease to believe in God you will believe in anything.
I recently took a class on sortilege, a divination process that's a bit like reading goat entrails, except instead of cutting into a goat and spilling its innards you take little items (stones, bones, coins) out of a bag, scatter them, and read the ley lines between them. Do I believe that we can tap into some kind of supernatural truth-teller-ma-tron this way? No. Do I believe that intuitive people can use this to construct a reasonable, resonant and surprising narrative about our lives? Sure. I guess I regard my investigation into this as an extention of my interest in improv.

Sortilege may not tell the future, but by putting a sortilege bag together I've gotten into the habit of really looking at pebbles and such, trying to glean what I can from them. It's opening up a new angle on the poetry of life. Once I held divination-stuff in contempt as obvious superstition, but now I get it; it's about new-minted narratives and finding meanings where we might never have looked.

Plus the lady who taught the class is HOTT. But married.

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M. John Harrison has a blog and I've added it to my links. Everybody needs a hobby, and mine is adding links.

Cubicle Potluck + I Am A Nerd

OMG, today the Sub Rosa Desktop Lunch Bunch actually brought big steaming casserole dishes to share. At their desks, not in the break room or cafeteria. It would smell good if there were some for me, but there isn't so it smells bad.

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Last night I idly switched on NPR and heard a bit of one of those new age ambient music shows they play on Sunday night. They were interviewing Roger freakin' Dean, the cover artist for a bunch of the Yes and Asia albums I loved as a student. I dug his paintings as much as the music (His Asia covers hold up much better than the cheesy pop music inside) and bought two books compiling his art: Views, with crude early efforts along all the groovy Seventies stuff, and Magnetic Storm, which focused on his publishing companies: Paper Tiger and Dragon's Dream. I would loll in bed, listening to old Yes albums and flipping to my favorite images in these books, floating through an idealized land of green grass, improbable icebergs and bombastic Limey prog rock.

Magnetic Storm had a few thumbnail images of art by Ian Miller, a much edgier artist who fascinated and repelled me in equal measure. Now I wish I'd bought some of that dude's books; he worked in a photo realistic fantasy vein similar to that of Dean, but Miller had a scary edge and a formal playfulness not present in Dean's bucolic visions of floating islands bearing idealized British countryside. Dean's stuff is mostly the same stuff over and over, but if you must have kitch art he's preferable to Thomas Kinkaide in my book.

Dean's Paper Tiger books published a book titled Realms of Fantasy which included Miller's illustrations of my beloved Gormenghast. It's long out of print, but it sounds like one to sniff out.

Anyway, here's a link to a link, with some astute comments, regarding J. R. R. Tolkien's own art. Like Dean he had a gentler approach to fantasy illustration. I think Alan Lee (you know, the guy with the awful teeth in those LotR Making Of featurettes) is the Tolkien illustrator who comes closest to matching Tolkien's gentle view of his imaginary world.


I'm more of a Gormenghast fan myself, so I'm enjoying In Viriconium by M. John Harrison. It's a slender volume set in a fantastic but gloomy city not unlike the decaying city-fortress of Gormenghast. Like Mervyn Peake, Harrison's prose is demanding but rich, and goes for hard-won beauty over easy prettiness.

P. S. Roger Dean's website

And Ian Miller's.

Here's To The Ladies Who Lunch

At work we're not supposed to eat at our desks, but they've moved a few Bad Influence types into my sector of the Cube Farm, and these Southern Belles/Insurance Clerks have got to put away the food, rule or no rule. At first it would be every now and then... someone would tiptoe in with her head down as if this sneaky stance would compensate for the odor billowing out of her barbeque sack. Now they're much more blatant. It's a non-stop gastronomic orgy around here, and the clashing odors of hot nasty southern fast food is overpowering. The constant chewing, slurping and gobbling isn't stopping the ongoing chatter, though; just punctuating it.

I'm the kind of tightlipped, sphincter-clenching Puritan who thinks everyone should do it like he does it; cautiously sneak a bit of bread and water on an as-needed basis. Bread and water vs. barbecue. If I had any sense I'd join the fun instead of hatin'.

Of course we're not really supposed to update blogs on the job either.

Keep Me Healthy

I gotta admit I'm relieved that all the Presidential Nominee health plan proposals involve a Socialist wedding of government and existing health plans like my employers. For a long time I've been conflicted about what the future of health care should be, since I believe everyone should have good coverage, and it's soothed my moral nerves to have various doctor and patient friends assure me that my employers are far better than the average health insurance company. I thought as much; I've temped at other insurance companies, and this is the one with a culture of really providing for the customer. I think it's possible for the government to get involved in insuring everyone has access to coverage which our company provides. Of course sometimes government action is a ginormous conflagration of expensive failure on all levels. Oh well.

Vice Versus Vice

Lately I'm eating too much. As a result I'm so full that when I consider drinking a beer or something I decide not to because I'm too stuffed. By getting fat I'm staving off the vice of drunkeness.

It reminds me of a weight loss scheme a guy once shared with me; spend all your food money on stuff that isn't edible. Some of us can't do right across the board, so we have to pit our vices against one another and hope the lesser evil wins.