Sermonette: "Uncle Melty"

 I was thinking about a moment in the Proctor & Bergman movie, J-MEN FOREVER!, where the footage we're watching from old Republic and Monogram serials shows the cave walls softening and running down in a horrific cliffhanger way, and the evil voice of our nemesis The Lightning Bug cackles "It's Uncle Melty!"

 And I get that reference! I even know I saw at least one Milton Berle show, because I remember there was a gag about a "topless dancer" (or was it waitress?) and it turned out to mean SHE HAD NO HEAD! Well, okay, I get it. Anyway!

I probably know Uncle Miltie from repute, via an older relative-- I had plenty-- or from MAD Magazine, which answered questions and asked many more, or from any of the nostalgia sources I readily found and latched onto. Let me tell you about secondhand nostalgia! Wait, no.

I was an early misguided adopter of nostalgia, and somehow managed to learn that old stuff wasn't all good by the time I was much of a teen, but if nothing else, it gave me an elevated level of ability to converse out of my own depth, and drop names and slogans and whatnot. So I know Uncle Miltie.

These kids today, though, would hear those words and think "Oh, yeah, like if you're in a family, and they're all cute and stuff so you say 'Uncle Milty,' only the walls are melting, so it's Uncle Melty, and I guess that's an okay joke." They don't even know the Uncle Milton from the ant farms. WAIT, ANT FARMS?

Yep, this is another thing that was normal in my world, students. You could buy this clear plastic cross section and put sand in it and ants would build tunnels in it. You got the ants in the mail after you sent in this coupon that came with it. Ants. In the mail. Is this still happening?

I picked up an ant farm, good condition in box, 25 cents at Mac's Swap Shop. Took it to show my sixth-grade classmates, and we put in some of the best playground dirt and some outside ants, then pondered how to feed them. Honey! I thought of honey from a cotton swab, and pretty much murdered those damn ants. No wonder they hate me now. What a mess. I'm sorry.

But kids today, they don't even know about sea monkeys, I'll bet. Or have a friend who'd order them, knowing what they were, just to see how it goes. But I was in my 40s by then. But there's the problem with a lot of my favorite humor. It was created by smartasses, and they came right out with current names and brands and jingles and catch phrases, and it takes the Warner Brothers Cartoon Companion to decipher them, even if you were lucky like me and damaged your brain on books of antiquated ephemera.

Perhaps the answer to the question that vexes surviving Monty Python members ("Why are these people still so obsessed with this one job I had in the 70s?") is that they hit upon a magic balance of current references with eternal generic equivalents, and will take another generation or so to make the humor truly obscure.  

Some ancient humor survives surprisingly well, like D'Ordel's Pantechnicon, written around 1908 by an architect of the doomed Afghanistan partition, partly by boiling all its targets down to archetypes that I can still spot. I feel like the part where he explains how to generate a multi-page article from a (redundant) two-word prompt sounds like it's talking about how to use A.I. 

There's also MURDERS by George Grossmith Jnr, son of the original Ko-Ko, which I talk about at the link. Despite the changes since 1915 (no 'organ man' playing along the street, no 'laundress'), it holds up better than, say, most radio comedy. (If I could ever find it online, I'd link to "The Albert Brooks Show" from "1943," which came out on a comedy LP in the 70s, written by Brooks and Harry Shearer, which contains every single cliche of the genre, except for six others.)

Anyway, I'm on borrowed time, so end of sermonette. Go, sin no more, and touch grass. Listen to a new joke, a current song, read a fresh book. The old stuff's okay, as long as you remember it's old and it's stuff.

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the facts in the case

 

In 2003, we bought a couple of suitcases for the China trip to gather the family together. There's the red one, which I use pretty much every time I'm gone for a few days, and the black one, its twin in every respect save for color. These cases went to China, England, China again, and Michigan, repeatedly. 

We're trying to slim down, ably obstacled by my own second-guessing, wishing for a tithe of "keep" in every batch that goes out, and trying hard not to act on it. My stomach churned on seeing this stand by the curb for two solid days, including light rains and showers. I hoped someone would come and claim it for their own future adventures. They didn't.

Today I went out to move the bins, because driveway sealers were doing their work, and I didn't want out trash guys to be inconvenienced. "We're gone in five minutes!" the man said as I wheeled the barrels, and I explained that our trash guys show up at the darnedest times and all. "Then I hope they take that stuff," I said, indicating the above cornucopia. "I took the suitcase!" said my new hero.

"YES!" I said. "That's a good fucking suitcase. We went all over with it, and it's still as good as it ever was. I didn't want to give it away in the first place, and I'm glad it's going where somebody'll use it! That suitcase is older than my daughter (I may have been off by a few months here), and we got it 23 years ago (off by one)." 

And I went on in, feeling GOOD about the suitcase, and hoping it has great adventures in the future. Only regret now is that I didn't put a sticker inside that said it had been to China, England, Escanaba. But a happy ending is a happy ending, especially when it's a beginning.

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up

The dizziness seems to be going away when I sit up in bed now, and when I lie down. It gave up when I decided it was five seconds of being high for free. Now sitting up in bed is reserved strictly for wee-hours angst, as it should be. (My brain has actually learned on this one, that I will no longer lend credence to the things it tells me at this hour. It can't be trusted.) Sitting up was my signature achievement, though. 

In sixth grade, we were still feeling the bad effects from Jack Kennedy's physical fitness mania, setting aside a portion of the year for The President's Fitness Thing, whatever they called it, which was a wall-to-wall exposition of Everything Kip Can't Do. They had a distance written down that I should be able to throw a softball, and I couldn't, and how many pushups I should be able to do, how far I should be able to jump, and other whimsical markers of inadequacy. (It didn't help that I was most of a year younger than the rest of the class, physically, and farther than that emotionally.) 

So for a week or a year or however long it was, every moment outside was spent being subnormal, much to the amusement of the bullies I'd been sharing classrooms with since second grade. Coach has your back, though. If anything happens, he'll make you run laps around the playground for a while. 

The surprise was the situps. Someone had decided, with 100% obvious objectivity, that the goal was 100 situps. Don't worry, a guy'll hold your ankles! I don't know what made this happen, whether it was one insult too many or what, but I did 100 situps. Objectively did them all, with an adult counting each one. I made it to 100 and stopped. No power on Earth could have made me do another. And after that, I was cool. I was the king of the classroom. I made it!

 Just kidding. I don't think there was an echo or a dead cat bounce. Situps were quietly removed from the list of things to make fun of me for, and that was that. Nothing else changed. Years later, I was an older college student (not much older, I was about 23 to start), and I had to take a PE class, something I'd successfully avoided since high school (see: being threatened in the locker room). I still couldn't "run" a mile, but I knew deep inside that I was going to blow them away on the situps. Except I didn't. I did a handful and then turned my attention to the exercise of breathing without losing my last three meals. Oh, well. I guess I had 100 in me, total. 

Another twenty years after that, I was a member of the Male Chorus in The Mikado, really liking the inadvertent discovery that at least some of my fellow thespians had imperfect graydar and thought I was maybe pushing thirty. I didn't fool myself that I looked good, but please don't fault me for feeling good that I didn't look used up yet. 

Anyway, the chat among Us Regular College Guys somehow turned to situps. Bryan said he could do X number. Fred maybe suggested a higher figure. Then they looked at me. I could have done the Old thing, and told them all about my grade school triumph, being careful to describe the motor cars on the street and the popular TV shows of the day. I didn't. Instead, I said "I arrange my day ahead of time so that I don't have to sit up," and that was the Right Answer, because I can talk to the young people. I speak their language! 

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dimly recalling work

In 1990, days before I graduated community college with an AA in Commercial Art, a counselor told me there was a company interested in me (for which I should have thanked the counselor, in hindsight), so I went over and interviewed and was hired before I was even out on the street. For the next fifteen (or sixteen) years, I had an almost scary sort of job security in a relatively family-like environment of co-workers and bosses I saw every day. I worked for a garden center, but not in it-- the corporate office was on the other side of the parking lot, and the garden center (the flagship center of a small chain, in Hampton, Virginia) was handy but not compulsory.

I was to learn QuarkXPress and Illustrator (no Photoshop yet, but a couple of years of diligent scrounging netted a limited version of it that came with a scanner, and it had an upgrade path I was eventually able to persuade them to fund) and turn out ads and literature for these three (or so, over the years) stores, as well as all the signage. I thought about a classmate at my school who was really a good artist, but in a sort of death slump resulting from our teacher's "lose a letter grade for every day late" policy, and I thought about how much work it looked like and then I actually opened my mouth and said "This is really a job for two. There's a guy at the school you could probably hire for the signs," and darn if I didn't end up working next to him for most of a decade, before his obvious abilities got him recruited away for more money at one of the newspapers we dealt with.

My boss often said that the owner of the company was a visionary, and he seemed to be. I later came to believe she was the visionary, and he was smart enough to go along with most of her ideas. Bit by bit, she got us the hardware and software and supplies to keep the customer's attention on our products. And we delivered! The newspaper ads I made for them are painful to look upon now, but we generated business. The customer newsletter had a circulation around 35,000, and we had a return rate on our coupons that got double-takes from our media reps. The newsletter went from a monochrome trifold to a full-color tabloid, and I designed a web page that got us eyeballs (with strict procedures to keep the thing fresh each time someone went to look at it). I got to play with a lot of swell equipment, once the chief could see how much it brought back to us.

There were exciting times. I asked my boss to prioritize the numerous piles of paper on my desk, and she said "This one is first priority. So is this one. This one here is only second priority, but it has the earliest deadline so you'll have to do it first." We threw festivals that required dozens (and more every year) of vendors to set up booths, with publications for each. 

Though I wasn't the sign maker, I somehow spent enough time making signs to have learned a few things. We had metal shelves of equipment and supplies, and I loved having all the different colors of paper stock to choose from. Many of the signs went outside, displayed in sun and rain and waterings, and I learned the mysteries of laminating-- how one tiny flaw will suck water into a sign like a sponge, making it ugly and contorted. Lamination was one of our triumphs. We started out with a machine that could laminate letter-size paper in pre-cut plastic envelopes you ran through it. This led to such a demand that we expanded to a monster of a machine (with its own monstrous problems), and we could feed monster-size sheets through that, and agonize over whether a banner went in too crooked to make it.

I sometimes ended up running the thing for a while, and when I was at my peak, I'd hear the voices of the Three Easily Impressed Extras, exclaiming:

"See! He LAMINATES!"

"Aiieee! He laminates like a beast! A beast of LAMINATION!"

"(makes religious gesture) Never have these eyes of mine beheld such laminating!"

I learned things about handouts and how best to defend them against the inevitable moisture plants need-- we ended up with sheltered racks, and reformatted everything to 5.5" x 8.5", because larger things bend sooner.

I went to an expo with Pat (my boss and friend) and we admired a padding machine which cost a couple hundred dollars. "We can make one of these," I said. When I got back to the office, I drew a design and gave it to the handyman with an explanation, and he brought it back SLIGHTLY IMPROVED, even! It was some pieces of wood screwed together, and we made pads with it for years!

We learned about our worst enemy: The Sun. Red printing was a big thing for us, as nothing catches eyeballs like the *Judicious* use of an eye-catching color. The thing was, though, that red anything faded faster than black anything, or even blue. We could see it in our signs and banners. I could see it in the bumper sticker of a truck I used to see in the employee lot, in red and blue (on white), showing a flag and defiantly promising THESE COLORS WON'T RUN. Knowing what I knew about red, I smiled knowingly each time I looked at that lonely little field of stars that had been a US flag, and wondered if the makers of the sticker or its users would ever notice that they now said THESE COLORS    RUN!

I learned a lot about photocopying and color printing, too. It was particularly educational when black areas in printing were physically sliding right off the paper. (I used the information I got from that to reconstruct a gravestone photo in Massachusetts later on.)

I learned that I didn't care much for coffee, and cigarette smell got old as dirt even before I'd spent one year across the hall from the breakroom. The number of employees we had meant each of us cleaned the thing for a month, and now all coffee smells like grounds to me. We fought ants.

And now it's all over with, gone with the wind, its players scattered, and the red parts faded by the sun. The Hampton location-- the original, the main location-- no longer exists and is probably crappy self-storage warehouses by now, like everything else in the area was striving to become when I left. Last time I heard from someone there was some kind of LinkdIn scam which I ignored, from a name that was like the AI version of someone I'd worked with (though I got a nice reception once when I called to get some info-- Georgia was still answering the front phone).

Anyway, it was nice to remember all the paper stock and whatnot. Pat let me use the big Xerox copier/printer as much as I liked, provided I brought in a ream of paper now and then, and I used the hell out of that, printing sheet music on punched paper for my traveling books. The drive to and from eventually became practice for taking pictures from a moving car. For a year after we moved, I still was doing some things like the web page and newsletter remotely while my replacement got oriented. That's how big the job became: I had a couple days of training. Now I'm old, and I think I wouldn't mind maybe a half day in the office once a week or so, just for the social aspect, but if I must be retired, OH WELL.

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a day off Twitter

The day is best started in the company of a dog, preferably Murray, who meets the world with fortitude and humor. Be like the dog. Sniff things.

Moving forward with tech plans for the Knickerbocker Ensemble of Rochester (me and Karen and Tony). The mic stand, which would have been the perfect solution, turns out to have been made for a different model of Ultimate keyboard stand, but now I know, so we'll be approaching with Plan A again, a stand and a boom and a mic and an amp so we can stop borrowing Greg's setup, and so we'll have a mic that can get right up to my vocal apparatus for the two or three numbers I sing.

Murray is all, like "Hey, remember that great walk we just took? Good times, man."

Just scored 80 points at "Classic Words" with WIBBLES. I feel powerful.

Some time we'll find out whether the candy shop in Escanaba will let us bring in a jar to fill with Jelly Bellies, so that when I sort them by color, they stay sorted for at least a while.

Passing time in an acceptable fashion now, mostly by playing through a somewhat detailed WIZARD OF OZ anniversay folio, with the entire Munchkinland sequence spelled out for me. Note to self: "If I Were King of the Forest" is about my favorite number in musicals. It's right up there with "Frank Mills."

Murray and I walked again, first around the house (I dealt with the bunny 'hiding' on the hillside by turning us away for half a minute, and it luckily absquatulated.) and then around the block, where I smiled at hearing voices wherever we went--the neighbor behind, new family at 1, then a mom and two young sons. Murray startled the older one by trying to run beside him, and then a car was coming, so conversation resumed when everybody was there. I explained that Murray likes to run when he sees someone else run, because he likes to play. Alexander, the younger of the two, said he'd like to invite Murray to his upcoming birthday party, and he could play games. Not sure that'll happen, but the sweetest thing I've heard today. His mom mentioned my name as they were leaving, so Murray and I are not unknown to folks. Then I got involved in a text message as dogs were hailing us from various places, and we walked a couple of houses before I suddenly realized I'd made the ultimate faux pas in simply walking away from something instead of bagging it. We retraced our steps and I corrected the error. The dogs barked.

added to as the spirit or dog moved me. huge thanks to the five page views!

To A Scrubbing Pad On Its Last Day

All right, then. I'm bringing you back from the ceramic cup for a special job. You came to us fresh, clean, and ready to work. I remember. You were going to clean the world with your yellow sponge side and your green Scotchbrite scrub layer. You went right to work on the day-to-day work, and sanitized with little effort, and I always rinsed you out carefully and put you back in your optimal spot by the tap. 

Time went by, and yes, there was a limit to how much even careful procedure and aftercare could do to prevent your yellow side from slowly greying and the green side from gradually congealing, all due to the grease that seems to be everywhere. You were finally retired with honor after your excellent work, and put in the cup for the occasional stove top or counter problem, and you were just right for that job as well.

But today, you have a final job, one that you won't come back from. It's inevitable that we are all temporary here, even the plates and knives and people using them, and today you will serve your employers once more in cleaning the trash receptacle itself, which deserves to be at least occasionally in a state of apparent non-repugnance. It's temporary, too. 

With your help, the garbage can will be briefly a representation of its original shade of white, plausibly newish and unwrecked. More, you're giving it an inside cleaning of the lid that it hasn't had in many cycles. Thank you for that.

In a few moments, assuming I forget to run you around the floor in this corner first, I'll deposit you in the trash and put this now-cleaner lid back over it. I do this with respect, and sorrow, and even a twinge of a physical sensation on the same spectrum as discomfort and pain. 

Well done. 

Thank you.

Goodbye.

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