Peeping and Hiding

Wichita Falls, Texas, 1963: In my apartment I played my stratocaster. I was thin and trim in those days, and I'd picked up a girlfriend for a week or two, by the name of Mary.

I don't recall how I met her, but she had a teeny-tiny little apartment some dozen blocks away from where I lived, and so who knows? Maybe I met her on the street. But I'd met her somewhere, and always an eager experimenter at that time, I'd fetched her to my place for a while.

I didn't think she was a truly pretty girl, but she was eager and earnest, and ... well ... those are good qualities, with the right timing.

And Mary was a devotee of something called Sloe Gin. It's a weird kind of sweetish alcohol beverage, and she'd been drinking quite a bit of it that day there in my apartment, and she came to sit on the carpet about a foot away from where I stood, playing my statocaster.

I was rocking out. I must have thought I was pretty cool, and I was having a good time.

And ignoring Mary, for she commenced to writhe around my legs.

For just a minute there I thought I was probably Keith Richards.

But then other thoughts intruded, and we shall now pass over later events of the day. In silence.

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Michael Murphy - North Texas Troubador

1308 1/2 W. Hickory Street, Denton Texas, Spring, 1963: The movie 'Hatari' was unmemorable, but the Henry Mancini song called 'Baby Elephant Walk' had been on the radio for weeks and weeks and weeks.

That warm day, an abundance of visitors from the HobNob to my miniscule apartment somehow drove us all to clamber up onto the flat roof. We also had beer. That may have been part of it.

On the front edge of the flat roof, with our feet dangling two stories above Hickory Street, we lined up to tell stories and watch the students and passers-by across the street on the campus.

Michael Murphy had brought his guitar.

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How to Write a Sales Script

San Francisco, Many Years Ago: Back in those days, I ran an answering service and later a voicemail company from an office on beautiful, scenic Geary Boulevard.

Fueled by a talk I heard at a trade convention, I began to experiment with 'scripted' sales presentations on the telephone. The lady giving the talk had claimed that a scripted sales presentation got more sales than just 'winging' it.

But first you got to write down the script!

How to do that?

Well ...

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The Golden Words, Opium, and my dog Charlie

The big vacant lot, Weed, California, July 4, 2008: I was walking with my dogs, and I got to talking to my dog Charlie, who is young and impulsive. He's a great listener. I can say any kind of nonsense and he's still interested.

But I was talking to Charlie and I asked him if he liked poetry. He didn't answer, being a dog, and I asked him if he like Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He didn't answer that either.

But it got me to musing about that story. Do you remember how Coleridge was an opium smoker?

Well, he was.

And there he was, high as a kite, and in his mind's eye he saw this really swell poem, and he went to write it down. It's really quite wonderful. Has several paragraphs, and the first one goes like this ...

"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea."

But at that moment, a guy to whom Coleridge owed money came banging on the door! Interrupted our Samuel, and that was the end of the swell poem.

Bummer.

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Margaret's Lime

Henrietta, Texas circa 1970: Darrel Blain went to school with my brother, David Strickland, and sometimes rode his bike out to the farm near Hurnville to visit. Like any kid growing up in Henrietta, his mother bought his clothes at John's Drygoods, and the Library Rummage Sale was a big deal.

But he was enterprising, and he got a job at the 'Lo Boy, cooking burgers and making cokes.

Then one day, there was this lime.

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Accumulation

Nocona Texas, 1969: Bob Standley is my brother-in-law, because he married my sister Mary. But some time before they got married, when he was in high school, he had a Chevy Malibu.

He had a little job, I think it was at the boot factory, and he had to be very careful with his money. Each week on Saturday, he took $2, and he'd fill up the gas tank -- it was a long time ago -- and there was money left over to go to the drive-inn movie, and to buy a nasty little cigar called a Swisher Sweet.

Every week he followed this $2 routine, and so as to conserve his money, he drove his car only when he had to, so that the gas would last through the week.

But then one Saturday, something strange happened.

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Grass Blade Whistle

Weed, California June 18, 2008: Walking the dogs in the huge vacant lot toward the end of day, I plucked a thick blade from an uprising of wild grasses, and made a loud whistle. This both excited and alarmed the dogs. So we had a little game all the way back to the house. Loud whistle. Leap and gyrate. Loud whistle. Leap and gyrate. Loud whistle. Leap and gyrate. Damn, we had fun!

And this reminded me that, back in September of 2007, Darrel Blane, another Henrietta Texas boy, took the time to capture this wondrous technology on his weblog of photos, drawings, and musings, called Daily Art Mas O Menos (Daily Art more or less). He drew the illustrations with ink, graphite, and a Derwent wash pencil.

With his permission, I here reprint "How to Make a Grass Blade Whistle." Something every boy ought to know.

HOW TO MAKE A GRASS BLADE WHISTLE

Let's suppose you need to make a loud noise to frighten off a large wild animal (assuming you've encountered a large wild animal that can actually be frightened), or suppose you become lost or injured while hiking and need to signal your whereabouts, or let's suppose you are eight years old hanging out with your cousins in a small town in Texas with not much to do, trying to make as much noise as possible.

In that case you can make a really loud whistle from a grass blade. Strictly speaking it's not a whistle but a single reed instrument. A whistle has a fixed surface; a reed instrument has a moving surface vibrating against a fixed surface.

Whatever, it still is ear-splittingly loud.

Here's how to do it.

Find yourself a grass blade, or leaf, or something similar, longer than your thumb. Not a wimpy grass blade from a suburban lawn, but a native grass or weed that's tough, with about a finger's width to it.

Hold it between thumb and forefinger so the grass more or less drapes along the length of your thumb.



After holding it between thumb and forefinger with one hand, so the grass more or less drapes along the length of your thumb, catch the bottom end of the blade with your middle finger.

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Fearless? Or Fear Less?

Weed, California, June 18, 2008: The other day I woke up thinking about the word 'fearless.'

Have you ever known anybody who was actually fearless?

I haven't. Pretty much any human, any mammal, has fear. And that makes sense, because if a creature didn't have any fear at all, sooner or later that creature would come a cropper. Adios muchacho.

And critters coming a cropper leave no progeny.

We are, therefore, the progeny of the timorous humans. Or at least of the humans with a healthy dose of fear. Oh we could call it 'prudence,' or something that sounds better.

But it's fear.

However, the other thought is that, over the years, things change.

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Word for Today: Synchronicity

Wikipedia, 6/14/2008: Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events which occur in a meaningful manner, but which are causally un-related. In order to be 'synchronistic', the events must be related to one another temporally, and the chance that they would occur together by random chance must be very small.

The idea of synchronicity is that the conceptual relationship of minds, defined by the relationship between ideas, is intricately structured in its own logical way and gives rise to relationships which have nothing to do with causal relationships in which a cause precedes an effect.

Instead, causal relationships are understood as simultaneous — that is, the cause and effect occur at the same time. [You're thinking of calling Suzie. You reach for the phone, but it rings. It's Suzie.]

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Where does dirt ... go?

Weed, California, Sunday June 8, 2008: About a week ago, Glenn the Magnificent and two of his beer-guzzling crew (Big Bob and Jesse the Bulldog) came and ran the water line into the shop.

They dug around in the yard until they found the water line, and then while I wasn't looking they somehow tapped into it, then dug a narrow trench across the yard and past the old rock walkway, and then connected it up with a line they'd put into the foundation last year.

But that's not my point. The point is this ...

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Bloggard Travels to Squidoo

Squidoo.com, May 31, 2008: For those as may be interested, the Bloggard, in his persona as Traktor Topaz, mild-mannered musician at a great metropolitan newspaper, has posted an article at Squidoo.

For some reason, the Squidarians call an article like this a 'lens.' So really, the Bloggard has created a lens. So now we know.

The name of the article is Play Guitar How To: Tap Guitar or Pick Guitar?

It has a story of a poor monkey, and some suggestions for fellows as would like to play a normal guitar. (Not everybody needs to play a Megatar. Different smokes for different folks, we say.)

If you enjoy the article, please put a nice commento on the commento formo. Gracias!

The Snipe Hunt

Somewhere in Kansas, Summer 1960: I was a truck driver on the wheat harvest, working for the Moser family. We cut the grain and hauled it to the grain elevator for the farmers, and we moved north as the grain ripened.

On this particular afternoon, Jake, Old Man Moser's son, was driving his pickup, and myself and another driver riding along, returning from the town. Somehow in the conversation, the other driver mentioned snipe hunting to Jake. Jake picked up his cue.

"Yeah," he said, "I've heard they have snipe around here. In fact I think I heard some the other night."

"What's a snipe?" I said.

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Wizard in a Cave

Henrietta, Texas, 1951. My mother played her nice radio in the evenings, and we listened to Green Lantern, the Phantom, the Great Gildersleeve, the Lone Ranger, and the Inner Sanctum. Not long after, television would arrive, stealing drama from the radio, but in those days radio was one story after another.

Hobby time went well with radio. For example, my mother was a great and wonderful crafts person, and made marvelous things. As we sat in the evening with one lamp turned on, she was making colored flower stencils on pillow cases.

I had a project too. She'd bought me a drawing toy called a Magic Slate. This cardboard rectangle has a gray plastic sheet attached, and a pencil-shaped wooden stylus. With this stylus, you write or draw upon the gray sheet. Whenever it's filled up, or you get tired of it, just lift the sheet and all the writing vanishes, and you can start over. Oh, the sheer magic of it!

That night we were listening to Inner Sanctum, which was a scary show about some sort of bird or a bat. But I wasn't scared. My mom was making stencils and I was a Wizard in a Cave.

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Tale of Quacking Duck

Henrietta, Texas, 1971: After Dr. Strickland had died, but before we moved to the farm, I'd finally completed my Bachelor's Degree at Midwestern University, so I lived in our home on the west side of town. (Just across from where Eddy Frank lives now.)

There, in a back room, while waiting to see if I'd be accepted into the University of Iowa or some other school with a Creative Writing department, I wrote stories every morning.

Everybody was warned not to bother me. I was an artiste!

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In the Shadow of the Space Needle

Seattle, Summer 1961: My friend Lefevre and I looked up at the towering building and gawked like hicks. Eighteen years old I was, just graduated from high school.

"Gawrsh," I said.

It was a grand adventure. The best one yet.

In study hall, while studying Life magazine, I'd seen the photographs of the Seattle World's Fair. Photographs of the towering, unique 'Space Needle'. It was far from Henrietta, Texas. It was on the West Coast, way north of fabled California, where I was born but really didn't remember

Jerry was three years older. He'd graduated earlier, an artist, and he was working at a ritzy department store in Wichita Falls, arranging their windows, and I found him in a back room, standing over an empty Coca-Cola bottle, holding an unlit cigarette four feet above the bottle.

"You see," he said, pointing to the shadow on the floor, which showed him, the bottle, and the unlit cigarette in his hand, "if you get the shadow lined up right, you can drop the cigarette into the bottle." He let go of the cigarette.

It fell four feet, and slithered into the coke bottle. As always, I was impressed. But I had bigger game on my mind.

"Do you want to go to the Seattle World's Fair this summer?" I asked.

"Sure," he said. "We'll camp out, and take v8 juice and lettuce. Just the ticket."

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