Vespro, City, Urban Development, Compost and Raised Garden Bed

Truckers , a lot of people don’t know this, but truckers sort of run on their own time clock.  They might make the delivery maybe not.

So I confronted our trucker, a burly guy,  and asked why it took five days to deliver a pallet load of product from L.A. to San Diego. He eyed my warily, and smashed his cigar into the ashtray.

“Have you ever read Thomas Mann? ”

“No , I don’t think I have.”

“Well, in  The Magic Mountain he gets into Time and Tedium quite deeply, its not really well understood.” It is only over the short haul,–say National City to Oceanside—that a crowded highway seems short.” I lost a sense of  time reading it on my lunch hour. Ever think of that?

“Nope.

“Well, he said. You ought to read the book. What is true of  time , is also true of space. When my truck is empty, it seems smaller than  a full one. ”

Then I  said: ” I think I get the drift.  Monotony is elastic and stretches the passing moment while pleasure makes time fly. Time isn’t going anyplace. Which reminds me, forget about the delivery, its lunch time.

St. Paul reminds us how evil perpetuates itself until the whole Creation groans and travails.  You may remember this.

So when tribulations  remain unflagging,  its a good idea to brush away those daytime blues with a little comic relief. And so this thought provided me with an opportunity. I strolled up to the venetian  blinds and fiddled with them pointlessly to get everybody’s attention.  I then dropped back into my swivel chair, and with a sort of animal ease, sat down to look at a petrified  forest of  blank faces.

I mentally tried to give the air of negligent ease–and paused to draw a piece of  fabric from  my  trousers to get their full attention. It was time for a little levity.

” Seems that there  are Irishmen and Irishmen, Germans and Germans, Italians and Italians, Japanese and Japanese.”

“But there are only Swedes”

You could hear a pin drop.

We have all heard the phrase politics makes strange bedfellows   but how do you explain Fate crashing into reality without a fine how do you do.

My young friend John and I were talking about John Yoo and his torture memos ,and he got all worked up  to such an extent he decided to take a hot tub at the Claremont Resort in Berkeley. He needed to unwind and relax. Let those cares steam away.

We all forget that Fate, like a summer storm, can make  unpredictable encores. Hugo Grotius, the father of International law, a Hollander, was sentenced for treason but his wife was clever enough to smuggle him out of  jail in a chest of drawers and here we have–now wait a second- a very elegant outcome,………. ending his days as the Swedish ambassador to the court of France.

But how do we explain my friend John.  From what Kingdom must he now endure exile, choked off in his youth , to find that the one companion in the hot tub, was none other than Professor Yoo?

Yes, look on it as an “intervention”.

The 99% are trying to help the gambling addicts who are tearing the American Family apart at the seams.  The 1% have stolen and then gambled away the American family fortune. They have proved that they are unable to stop and that there is never enough of a fix to satisfy their need. Theirs is a sickness of the soul and should be treated firmly but compassionately. Let’s start with a simple modest transaction tax to discourage or at least benefit from the high speed computer trading which strips a magnificent profit from minute market fluctuations. This computerized money printing scheme is of no benefit to man, beast or customer, but only to the computer’s owner. A small tax would immediately multiply to be of real benefit to the tax payer and if it had the effect of stopping or damping or slowing this immoral practice, and speculative trading in general, then so much the better.

On the weekends, I usually dine at my sister’s house, high  in the Berkeley Hills,  overlooking the San Francisco Bay and the Richmond bridge.

My helpmate always says, ” isn’t it a beautiful night, lets go outside and look at the sunset.” Perhaps its the shimmering chords of Chopin or the heady wine, but I always permit myself to be lured outside. And then I say the wrong thing.

What did I say ,last week, oh yes, : the sunset looked like a hemorrhaging wound.  My wife  flinched, of course, and said: “have you been drinking?” On another occasion I observed the colors were too Rubenesque, overdone , if you will, and not congenial to the modern spirit.  She winced, and looked at the ground, and  muttered something dark. She probably thought, how long do I have to listen to this shit.

But then September rolled around, a quickened tempo took hold. I don’t know, perhaps, I was feeling my way. I put down my glass of rum and orange/mango juice carefully on a coaster and resumed my role as a spectator of the sunset. We were joined with other guests and went outside.

It was as Tom Eliot that I strode out the door. Pinched, thoughtful and full of myself, and so recherche that when the inevitable query came up about the sunset, before which we collectively stood, I puffed up and said it looked like a patient etherized on a table.

A slight chill in the air, they all rushed inside.

Oh, I don’t know, I was drinking with Claude, glass in hand, when I exclaimed that along with the musk of the  summer breeze that the wine was  mucilaginous. We were drinking, a Whenhlener Sonnenuhr Riesling spatlese from the Rhineland-Palantiate, if memory serves. That set him off. I don’t know why.

Then on a darkling polder, in Holland  someplace, I casually mentioned that the moselle –that must be drunk young– was approaching senility. Again , the poor sot made a scene saying in effect that I was feeble minded.

Then, back in the States,  the subject of Chilean wines came up, and I   made the observation that I can taste the  flinty residue in the wine from the steal tanks in which it was made.

Then a few months passed, and I ran into Claude again, in Sonoma, and I said that the wines were overpriced because of the spiritual dilapidation of the whole region  (the wine and growers) and dilated on this theme for fifteen minutes or so.

Poor Claude, removed his glasses, and pinched and rubbed his nose in an exasperated manner of wine snobs everywhere.

I haven’t  seen Claude in years.

I just read a review in the New Yorker of a book debunking Scientific Management that started in about 1910. You know the drill, a guy comes into your office with a slide rule and a stop watch and watches a man in the shop putting pig iron into a bin and complies an efficiency  report and then charges an arm and a leg.

It turns out the efficiency expert fudged his results and his improved results were  mostly moonshine. A little like Eric Cantor and the other guy whats his name.

I know Zeno’s paradox  is fruitless from a practical point of view, in which he tries to discredit time and plurality, but I have found his approach congenial. I always knew time isn’t going anywhere.

I think also  that cigar rollers fading  from the U.S.  scene a great disservice to the commonweal. Certain tasks should take time,  lovingly performed. So too one mourns the passing of the iceman & his friendly chit chat with the Mrs. Who needs a fridge?

How about making a pie?  No need for a time clock– the dough carefully rolled out, and then the little  scraps for jam tarts.

While lacking the  abstruseness of the  absolutist approach to efficiency, who benefits from my flimsy cogitations?

Why the Iceman of course.