A tip of the Bloggardo Hatlo to Spike Magazine, for their nice review of Adventures of Bloggard. They said:

“[The Adventures of] Bloggard – This one is truly random. Odd, amusing snippets from that [bygone] America. Or ‘True stories and lies. Wisdom, foolishness, and sometime epiphanies,’ as they put it.”

Henrietta, Texas, October 1961: I got elected Band King. I’m not sure why. Perhaps there was a dearth of candidates.

As a practical matter, this meant two things. One was that I’d get my picture printed real big in the year book, and saying “Band King.” Yahoo.

The other was that I could have a free band jacket.

The fanciest and most coveted school jackets would have the school colors (black and gold, which really came out black and orange) with sleeves of real leather. This kind of jacket was absolutably de rigeur, a must-have.

I had a different idea. As usual, it caused trouble.

I was thinking ahead, about leaving for college next year. I didn’t think my high-school jacket with real leather sleeves would actually be that spiffy. It would be, like retro, man.

So when Mr. Raeke, the band leader, sat me down with the catalog, I ordered my jacket with a plain grey flannel body. He peered over the catalog.

“Not black and gold?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

Then he asked me what kind of sleeves. Again I chose plain grey flannel material. He raised his eyebrows but said nothing.

Then he asked me what color for the High-School Letter. I requested no High-School Letter. He smiled and wrote up the order. Now I had a nice stylish grey jacket coming. A nice, free jacket. I was happy.

The next day, he told me he’d sent off the order. “I had to fight,” he said. “The principal thought you ought to have a letter.” He smiled again. I was happy, too.

All that week, I heard indirect muttering. So-and-so at the school board had heard, and he thought it was outrageous. I didn’t care.

Some weeks later my nice, free, stylish grey jacket came.

I liked it. I liked it a lot.

This is a simple law of nature, but one which is very handy:

Choose someone like yourself, and you’ll get along.

Choose someone different from yourself, and IF you can get along, it will be exciting!

That’s it.

The first step to getting along with women is Proper Selection. And it’s a choice kind of thing.

If the woman you choose is similar to yourself, and holds similar views and values, you’ll tend to get along. For example, if you’re both liberals, English majors, hate exercise, and like sentimental movies, life could be occasionally boring, but you’ll not fight much.

On the other hand, suppose you’re a liberal, English major who hates exercise, and loves sentimental movies, and you get yourself a foreign-born woman who’s a right-wing mechanical engineer, whose idea of fun is running marathons and attending the ballet. The two of you may find each other real exciting; that is, IF you can get along.

Isn’t this great? You get to choose!

Knowing this important secret of the universe, go forth and prosper.

Westbury Hotel, San Francisco, 1974: One evening, as I was working the graveyard shift with Henry So, the night auditor, I had the phone to my ear and noticed something very odd.

“Henry!” I called out. “Did you hear the angels sing?”

Henry, slim and dapper in his charcoal suit with vest, put down his Benson & Hedges cigarette, and said no, he’d not heard the angels sing. Actually, what he said was “Whaaaa?”

So I showed him, and I’ll share this wonderful secret with you, too. After all, it’s the season of love, right?

Here’s what you do. Pick up your telephone and hold it to your ear.

But don’t dial anybody. Don’t press the touch-tones. That will stop the angels from singing. You must just hold the phone very gently to your ear without touch-toning.

Listen very quietly. Listen very carefully.

You will hear the angels singing.

San Diego Hilton, 1984: I had learned it a few years earlier, from Polaris the Magnificent, who was a performing magician.

Polaris, dressed in a longish purple robe and a tall, conical hat, stood upon the flat stage at the Ghiradelli Chocolate Factory mall, outside on a warm Spring day, and there he mystified young children, and the rest of us.

I set my helmet down on the bench, and watched the show. The motorcycle was safe enough, chained to a parking meter nearby. I figured that if somebody was strong enough to lift the moto above the parking meter, they deserved to steal it, so I relaxed and that Polaris was really great.

And afterward somehow we struck up a conversation, as he was packing up his magicabelia, and later we met some buddy of his at a Mission Street tacqueria, and while sitting around the table over beers, the buddy said “Show him the bubbles.”

Polaris the Magnificent, with a knowing glance, tapped the side of his nose and then produced from his battered knapsack a bottle of common bubble-fluid, a small plastic ring for blowing bubbles, and a couple of plastic straws of different sizes.

And there on the table at La Chomperia, he created assemblies of bubbles that boggled the mind.

The thing was to blow bubbles inside of other bubbles, and to blow bubbles adjoining other bubbles. If their relative sizes were just right, then at the place where they touched each other, they’d form a flat plane. That is, if you had two bubbles of similar size and you could suspend both of them on two wetted straws, then where the two bubbles touched each other would be a flat common boundary.

The effect of two bubbles is interesting, I suppose, but the wonder comes when you assemble three or four or more bubbles. In some cases, you can create geometrical shapes between the bubbles: shapes like a pyramid, a square, and others.

Amazed and marvelling over another beer, I finally bid Polaris the Magnificent and the buddy a fond fairwell, and motored off to some other adventure, and never saw them again in this lifetime. Ah, but the memory remained.

And thus it was, some years later that, married and attending a trade-association convention in San Diego, that Polaris the Magnificent brought me fame and fortune.

The answering service industry has a surprising number of large people. Maybe it’s different now. But then it was startling to see so many overweight owners of answering services. Perhaps because it is a business where you sit all day, talking on the phone?

And at that convention it happened that after the big dinner on the final night, when my then-wife Lori and I entered the dance contest, performing the jitterbug which we’d learned from Oz at the Avenue Ballroom, we won. I not sure it was our skill; it may have just been the comparison with the other, more ponderous dancers. Or maybe we just did well that night. Later, we fell out over the jitterbug, but that’s another story. That night, we shone, and we won.

The prize was an electronic box called a “Call-Diverter”, which we used in our business, and it was worth about $200, so that was a swell prize.

And then they announced the Bubble Contest.

Boy, was I prepared!

As everybody else tried to think of something to do that would make their bubble look different from any other bubble in the room, I begged two tiny cocktail straws from folks at our table, then soaped a clean bread plate.

With just a bit of knitting my brows in recollection, I was able to assemble three bubbles so that a pyramid was formed between the three. Amazing! Mirableu!

I won the contest handily, and standing before the crowd and the admiring eyes of my wife, I happily accepted the prize which was $100 and another Call-Diverter device. But as I stood before the laughing crowd, who clapped madly, a guy from the back yelled out. “No fair! No fair!” he called, “He cheated!”

In a flash, I knew just how to respond. I held up the plastic straws for all to see, and yelled back.

“Whadda ya mean?” I said, “Just standard bubble tools.”

San Francisco, 1980: Network Answering Service had been running along fairly well, but then the hepatitus struck.

Bill the drunk came down first, then lanky Ed, followed in quick succession by lots more. And so it was, that particular Saturday, there were no operators able to work, to answer the phones for our 300 clients.

Early in the morning, I sat at the phones, alone, waiting for the world to wake up.

We’d just got settled into our new office on Geary Boulevard. Later we would add another table and another 300 clients, Lori would join me, I would invent the Line Seizer device, and we’d buy a voicemail company. But just now, none of that had happened.

Operators were called OPs, because we abbreviated everything, kind of as a style thing. Our motto was “Network OPs are Tops!”

Normally, two OPs worked as a team, sitting across from each other with phones in the middle and message racks to the side. This was a system that Bob and I developed, way back when.

Today, nobody sat across from me. I didn’t know how this would work. And now the calls started coming in. One wave. Another. And another. It was getting real hectic, and now somebody was banging on the door downstairs. Open during the week, on the weekend it was locked, so I ran down the stairs to open it.

It was my friend Dennis. I dashed back up the stairs, and he followed, curious at my behavior.

Dennis and I had met as writers at the San Francisco Writer’s Workshop, and had stayed friends through his cab-driver and photographer phase, and through my Simple Simon Bookkeeping, and Thumbtack Bugle phases. Several times I’d borrowed money from Dennis for my schemes, and, by the simple expedient of repaying him, we’d stayed friends.

I don’t recall why he’d come by; he was just on the way to somewhere else. I pointed to the chair across from me.

“Have a seat,” I said. He sat down. He started telling me about something, but suddenly I got an idea.

“Here, Dennis,” I said, “Put this on your head.” He stared puzzling at the Plantronics headset. It’s a small plastic hoop that goes over your head, with a tiny plug to go into your ear, and a thin microphone before your lips. I looked Dennis in the eye.

“Dennis,” I said, “How would you like to be OP for a day?”

“Sure!” he said.

I showed him how to answer the phone, gave him the brief version of what to say, how to mark the message down, and how to file the messages in the message boxes.

Just in time, for here came a big wave of calls.

Some hours later, I sent him to the liquor store with cash for sandwiches for lunch. Towards the end of the day, more sandwiches for the evening meal. Toward closing time at midnight, we sat back between the few calls, and shot the breeze.

Dennis had just dropped by, but he stayed for a week, answering calls every day. One day, clowning around, he fell off his chair, and put his elbow through the window pane. He wasn’t hurt, and I called a repairman to come and fix it, while Dennis and I, bundled up in coats against the cold draft, kept answering phones. Dennis was so apologetic.

“I am so sorry,” he said, for the tenth time. I smiled.

“Dennis,” I said, “If you like, you can break out every window in the place.”

What a pal!

Marina Green, San Francisco, 1976: My friend Dennis, who invented the Taxicab Theory of Life, had got himself a kitty. It was small and gray, with wide-open eyes, and it bounced and bounded around the tables and the chairs.

Dennis always lived better than I did. I thought it was because he got free money, but it may have just been that he had better taste. His father had created a metal-fabricating and manufacturing business back in Chicago, and after Dennis emerged from the Peace Corps he received checks, which I envied, though of course I’d already had my turn.

He drove an older BMW, and he had a small apartment, kept as neat as himself, right at the end of a short street that pointed straight at the Marina Green, giving him a view of the Bay, a block away.

We fell out, for several years. It was because of his cat.

He didn’t know much about cats, but he thought it was cute.

It was cute, as it pounced from hiding. In fact, he’d taught it a game. Dennis would walk from point A to point B in his apartment, as we all do, and the game was that the kitten would pounce from hiding and bite and scratch at Dennis’s ankles. Ha ha ha ha ha.

Very funny.

I actually didn’t like the game much. I’d gone over to Dennis’s to get his help in doing some Big Research for me regarding my plan to start an answering service. He did the Big Research for me, but in my ignorance, I put the numbers together all wrong and came to amazingly wrong answers. But when I started the answering service it worked out anyway, so perhaps my abysmal ignorance didn’t matter.

While Dennis and I discussed the Big Research, the kitten leapt and bit my ankles, which I didn’t enjoy all that much.

For one thing, the kitten was growing. Let us now pause in contemplation of the perfect words of Mr. Ogden Nash …

The trouble with a kitten is that
It soon becomes a cat.

Ogden hit his head right on a nail there.

A week later, when I’d returned to visit, after some coffee and conversation, I suddenly realized that the cat wasn’t around.

“Where’s kitty?” I asked.

“Oh, I got tired of him biting me,” he said.

“So where’s kitty?” I asked.

“I took him out and set him loose over at The Presidio,” he said. The Presidio was an vast and luxurious army base in a park-like setting in the northern corner of San Francisco. It contained miles and miles of woods and empty hills, criss-crossed with army roads. I was stupified by what Dennis had said.

“What??”

He looked at me in puzzlement, and repeated his words. I was outraged.

“You know he’ll die?” I demanded.

“Why, no,” Dennis said, “He’ll catch mice and things.” I couldn’t believe he was so ignorant, so, so … stupid!

“No, he won’t catch mice and things!” I said. “He doesn’t know any of those things. He’ll first starve, and then wander into a road and get run over.” Dennis looked at me in puzzlement. He couldn’t understand my dismay.

“Are you sure?”

“Of course.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought he’d be fine.”

“Why did you do that?” I pressed.

“I got tired of him biting my ankles,” he said, “and finally I’d just had enough of it.”

“But you taught him to do that!”

“Well, I didn’t mean any harm.”

I stood up, grabbed my coat, and left in a fury. I then refused to talk to Dennis for about three years.

Over time, slowly, I realized he had, in fact, meant no harm. Caused harm yes, but meant none. He was just ignorant. He didn’t know.

So are we all, all the time, ignorant of this, ignorant of that. With a motion of the wrist, we wreck an automobile, bring destruction, even death. With an unknowing word, we crash vast castles of dreams for others. With a silence, we fail in our love for another.

Dreaming and fragile, onward we stumble, dangerous dwarves on the Yellow Brick Road.