Days Gone Bill - Chapter 2 - The Real Bill

One thing Dr. Arnold says that truly captures my attention is man's inequality toward women, not to mention the way some women treat certain men, especially younger men, especially when I was younger. In California, a middle aged man who lived full-time in a tree-fort told me he sensed that once, in an earlier lifetime, I had been a German woman who died during World War II. This occurred during a past life ... a rather recent one, apparently. In a prior incarnation. As a proud member of the male species I do sometimes question that pride. I also wonder about the tree-fort. Was this the real, The Night of the Iguana?

Yes, we've done some pretty amazing things in the history of this country, this continent, this hemisphere, this state of ours. Look at the various vaccines, the bridges, the monuments to technology, such as this word processor I'm working with here in my studio, in Archipelago, America. Still, being a man isn't always all it's cracked up to be.

Cracked up pretty much gets it. How else could you explain three consecutive years of cultural angst? Or, as if that wasn't enough, there were the Albanians. They came in great number. They stayed longer than planned. They literally consumed more than 12 quarts of expensive rums, liquors and other stolen merchandise. Even without the Albanians, it was a tough run for all mankind ... especially the male kind.

Dr. Arnold ... now there's a subject unto itself ... or into himself. I've never known anyone like this man, although a few came close to suggesting the brilliance, only without the maturity and Iranian accent. His command of the human psyche is second to none. He's like the big open G chord ... open to everything. I strain to understand his phrasing. It's worth the effort.

On men, then, the doctor says we gentlemen have two standards. You're probably thinking I'll list those for you now. I won't. I can't remember them. I was day dreaming when Dr. Arnold described them to me. I was thinking about yodeling. I could hear banjo picking off in the distance, faint but certain. I mention the point, in any event, because my point, is, getting the job done requires going with the flow, when it comes to dealing with analysis or when it comes to yodeling, which I greatly prefer.

A singer named Chris Isaacs yodels his butt off. Various television movie cowboys from my childhood attempted yodeling. Even you yodel, even if you don't know it. Yodeling isn't restricted to a traditional cow-poke genre. Yodeling is allowed under virtually any circumstance invented in the history of man, animal, plant life, Dan Quayle, and pre-Biblical times. You can yodel in suburbia or in rural America, in tandem with your mate or in tandem with Joe's mama. You can yodel until the cows come home, or, if that doesn't apply to your lifestyle, until your income tax refund arrives. Chris Issacs sings mostly like Ray Orbison with (somehow) more soul but that doesn't restrict him from exercising his yodel imperative.

I bring this up to make one simple point: yodeling is amorphous and so is my heart today. You see, I've been smitten. Clunked right in the face with a desire to share with you what Dr. Arnold already knows, and that is, very little. First I say he's wiser than Larry from the Three Stooges. Then I tell you he has very little to say. You're right. This is contradictory. Don't you see, that's our thesis and that's one of the hundreds of reasons why I yodel instead of, say, perform actual work or play with my children. I call it Coping 101 ... an introductory course to Actual Anthropology 404.

I call it often and I call it sincerely. Anything less just wouldn't do justice to the overall exercise, the exercise being revealing myself to you like this. One man's crazy is another man's libido, or stated another way, one man's procrastination unloosed is another man's inhibitions relieved, rejoined or retrofitted, depending on other circumstances. Actual Anthropology presupposes dialing more carefully. Wrong numbers in the pursuit of lunch are no virtue and energy in the name of ennui some vice indeed.

You can yodel at any time, in any place and the same sad fact remains: People will wonder, about you, your yodeling, their proximity to you, to your yodeling and to the present tense in general. Knowing this makes it easier ... but no less perplexing. You can either take my word for this or write it all off as mere space-fill. One thing you can be sure of, it's a damn good thing I don't make records, not the way I yodel. No, if this stuff was in the public domain, you'd see real social chaos. And I'm not just yodeling Dixie.

One of the things I am doing is doing my best to do something. Goodness knows how easy pure complacency is, especially for someone of independent wealth or unlimited gall. In neither case do I or Betty qualify. We can dream, though. We can visualize a future in which seagulls mask the eastern sky, life proceeds on a verandah of sorts and all is well, in spite of ones awareness of the inherent injustice inflicted on women by men, definitely not the opposite. Their are vindictive women. But, who can blame them? Not men, that's for sure.

Stream of consciousness is never malingering and truth of soulfulness is rarely exonerated. Learning this is never the same as knowing this. The two shall always be separated by the lingering nuance of all time, the flickering candle that is the light passed from father to son, from sister to teacher, from the elite and the discreet, for whom the phrase "E pluribus unum" means just that: honor, rectification and gluttony. It's not mysterious and it's not just for students of the humanities, although they do fare better at these things than, say, students of applied animal husbandry.

Dr. Arnold asked me one time to just start talking about whatever came to my mind and pay no attention to whether it had meaning, meant having or anything to that or any effect. He said, "Just ramble and ve'll see where it leads." I couldn't believe it. It was like turning loose a hyper-aggressive youth in a large room filled with poinsettia plants. Nowhere was there anything at all about NOT doing this or NOT doing that. It was all affirmative. It was all I could handle. It all happened about 20 or 25 years ago. I lost count, weeks ago. Even as I sit here I can't begin to reel it all back in. Still and all, it comes in bits and pieces, bits and pieces I share with you, as if sharing in itself could somehow purge all of mankind of its burden, that being guild, that being the reason for my existence.

Dad had a way with words. He could make syllables dance in imagery. His voice was like that of a large female collie dog when a storm approaches. It achieved great tonality in that moment between the flash of lightning and the crash of thunder, indicating the storm was approximately six inches away from our farm, on the Meadow Road, outside Blenderville in Metropolitan Narmquist. Dad took vitriol to new levels. His use of vinegar was not restricted to the dining room table. He put it on his cereal and he peppered his speech with it, it being vinegar, not vitriol. His primary cereal choice was porridge and his method was definitive provincial. A little dab of oregano here, a large dash of bug spray there. It was like shaving with cold soapwater. Scratchy and economical.

Dad often visited a place called Schwartz Creek. It was an old mining village that had become something of a tourist shrine in the mid-twentieth century. Natives of the town had the odd habit of sleeping nearly all of their lives. As would be expected, not much took place in this town, which created all sorts of opportunities for visitors.

It was here, for example, that a man named Mobil invented the self serve gas station concept. In fact, nearly all of Schwartz Creek's gas stations TO THIS DAY feature the do-it-yourself motif, all the way down to doing it yourself with the paying for the gas part. It's like an honor system, except there's usually this great big guy standing by the place where the cash register would be in a normal gas station. He doesn't say he's there to make sure you pay but, if you're anything like me, you don't take chances.

My Dad never did. He'd just look that big guy in the eye and say something like, "I'll bet your mother dressed you." A lot of people couldn't get away with lines like that. But Dad was different. He had a way of disarming people, especially people in Schwartz Creek, especially when they were asleep, especially when they were really asleep.

I developed my entire range of morality during these trips with my family, especially those special junkets Dad and took to places like Schwartz Creek and the wholly transcendent, fully Dionysiac Dionysus, the god of wine and of an orgiastic religion celebrating the power and fertility of nature. Also called "Bacchus," this triumphantly ecstatic destination was powered with personality, as well as a delightful inaccessibility that left most aspirants wanting and only truly intrepid souls like Dad standing there in actuality, wanting only for a small glass of prune juice.

History reveals many things, none of which come to mind at this moment. People approach me on the street or in cafes -- perfect strangers, sometimes -- and all seem to have but one thing on their mind. Why, they ask, do I yodel? Is it self esteem? If so, is it too much or too little?

My response, when appropriate, is designed both to inform as well as to confuse. Why? Because I believe people have been led to believe that easy questions lead to easy answers. I have decided to take it upon myself to disabuse people of this notion and that is why I take simple questions and transform them into complex matters of mammiferous proportion. It was not my idea to launch this crusade but, by jolly, I'm not going to sit back and vacate the enterprise. Not when yodeling in general is on the line and my yodeling, specifically, is called to task.

Perpetuity has other plans for me. Yoda-yoda-laaa-teee-whoooo!