You know there’s a new “Do Not Call” list being promoted, but from what I hear, it doesn’t make much difference. I’ve not added our phone numbers, because I enjoy most telemarketer calls.

I figure that, since they’ve called me on their agenda, surely as a human I have a perfect right to reply on my own agenda. My agenda is usually the amusement of The Bloggard, and I’ve noticed that if you just continually misunderstand a telemarketer, he or she will usually entertain you mightily.

For example, this morning at home, I got a call from a young lady wanting me to subscribe to a newspaper. Holding my tongue in the roof of my mouth while speaking, which made me both hard to understand and very dumb-sounding, I asked her what was a Record-Courier anyway.

When she explained that it was a newspaper, I asked her did you need to be able to read.

She pointed out that I could tear out the coupons, which had pictures. I told her that I’d not been trained in pictures, and then asked her why she was calling me.

She told me she had a great deal and quoted some numbers. I fed back the numbers incorrectly to her for a while, and then started all over at the beginning asking what was a Record Courier anyway. But finally my breakfast was burning so I had to end the call.

But in the office today, I encountered an all-time low: two telemarketers at the same time.

While I was on the line with an AT&T telemarketer attempting to change my phone service so as to save a lot of money, I had to put her on hold to take another call, which was the Better Business Bureau wanting me to sign up so as to give my business more respectability.

Since I was kind of busy, I connected the two of them together, introduced them, and explained that the lady had a way to save a lot on long distance, and that the guy had a way to make the lady’s business have more respectability.

They didn’t seem to get on very well, however.

I regret to say that they both hung up on each other.

Which shows us, I suppose, that the Better Business Bureau doesn’t care about saving money on long-distance. Which makes me seriously question joining an organization which wastes the good money I’m paying on needless high-priced phone bills.

Further, it would seem that AT&T doesn’t care much about appearing respectable. Maybe they figure what’s the use? Probably they figure people would see through the ruse, anyway.

Probably they’re right.

Life can look kind of tough sometimes. But maybe it’s how we go about looking …

Daigu Riokan (“Great Goof” or “Big Fool”) became enlightened and decided not to take students but to live as a hermit and subsist on alms. Consequently, he was very, very poor.

However, that’s not the end of the story.

One day a thief broke into his hut, and finding nothing worth stealing, trashed the place. Finding this, Daigu Riokan wrote this haiku —

The thief left it there,
there in the window —
the shining moon.

Contoocook, New Hampshire, Winter’s Night, 1958: On the full moon nights, by 8 pm on a snow-laden evening, the countryside was bright and clear at the big hill behind Barnard’s farm.

The fathers took the children tobogganing down the big hill in the moonlight, and the bright ice-laden snow twinkled like diamonds beneath the moon. Adrienne was nine, bundled up so snug with her stylish earmuffs.

Beside the dark woods, down the clear-lit hill upon their bucking toboggans, the children would glide, crying out in pleasure at the speed and the ghostly light, breath in clouds, their voices thin in the chill air.

And then they saw the wolves.

Three wolves stood at the verge of the trees, gazing down upon the children upon the slope, upon the fathers above, at the speeding toboggans.

The toboggans stopped. The children watched the wolves. The wolves watched the children. All was silent.

“Come, children,” said Adrienne’s father. “It’s best we went back to town.” There was no argument.

In a close group, the fathers and the children departed, drawing toboggans behind. The wolves silently watched them depart.

Online, November 13, 2003: You like haiku? Sure, you do! Everybody likes haiku!

Here are three from the “Cat Haiku” page —

Wanna go outside.
Oh, no! Help! I got outside!
Let me back inside!

Humans are so strange.
Mine lies still in the bed, then screams!
My claws aren’t that sharp …

Oh no! Big One
has been trapped by newspaper.
Cat to the rescue!

Find more on the “Pet Humor” site.

Denton, Texas, 1965: Paul Miner had this camel-colored corduroy sports jacket. It had leather buttons, and leather patches on the elbows. He loaned it to me one day.

On that day, wearing the corduroy coat with my round glasses and unruly hair, being a hippy and all, Patty Cake said, “You look like Bob Dylan.”

I said, “Who?”

The next day she brought a record album to my cool apartment, and she gave it to me. It showed Mr. Zimmerman walking down the street in NYC, head down, hair unruly, jeans and a jacket only slightly like mine.

I listened to the album. It was wierd, and good. I asked around. People liked Bob Dylan. I supposed that looking like Bob Dylan would be a good thing; though, as I recall, nobody ever again accused me of it, probably because in truth I don’t resemble him much at all.

What I’m getting at is that I kept the corduroy jacket almost forever. I suppose it eventually got returned, but it went everywhere with me. I have a picture of myself in a Villa Acuna bar wearing this jacket. Somewhere another photo shows me in the jacket and the knickerbockers from Madame X’s store.

Jeans, t-shirt, and this jacket became my official hippy garb.

Come winter, I froze. The rest of the time it was fine.

Why do we become so attached to these things?

Looking back now — no matter how mad it may sound — I can’t help feeling that, if only I could wear that corduroy jacket again … then everything would be fun again, the grief and sorrows of later years would fade into a mist, and I’d again be young forever, laughing into eternity, as we did.

Rural Tennessee, Fall 1979: My friend Bob, who helped me start Network Answering Service, had a friend back home in Tennessee, a preacher’s son named Jeffrey.

Perhaps being a preacher’s son bestows a mantle of lawlessness on young males, for it certainly happened that way with Jeffrey. At age 19, Jeff and a younger friend, whom we’ll call Doug, were in full bloom as young criminals.

Somehow they’d found a set of keys. That was how they got the money.

This set of keys opened all the Coca-Cola machines in southern Tennessee. What a find!

Jeff and Doug lived in genteel poverty in a rural shack, and in the evening they’d cruise the highways and backroads in Jeff’s battered VW bus, looking for coke machines. When nobody was looking, open popped the coke machine door, out into a sack poured handfuls of coins, and off went Jeff and Doug to buy drugs. Serious drugs. Injectable drugs.

Until one evening, when cruising a backroad, Jeff spotted a cop car coming toward them down the road. Immediately Doug called out, for the cops were behind them as well. Holding the sack of coins and the keys seemed unwise just then, so in their VW bus they took off.

The cops gave chase.

At the first opportunity, Doug threw the coins and the keys from the van, but it did no good at all. The cops easily caught the boys, and had seen the keys flying, so the evidence and the boys went to jail.

Jeff, being a personable guy, was immediately invited by the resident jailbirds to go along on a jailbreak arranged for that very night, because the other prisoners had completed an arduous task only that day. A hole had been cut to the roof.

Under cover of darkness, Jeff and Doug and 28 other prisoners snaked up to the roof and slithered down the outside wall, and were off into the woods. Under the shelter of the woods, Jeff stopped Doug.

“Wait a minute,” Jeff said. “You’re a minor. Your father’s going to be here to pick you up tomorrow morning. You’re crazy to break out. You’ll get off anyway.”

Doug considered. Jeff was right.

The two boys sneaked back to the wall, and Jeff helped Doug break back into the jail. They said their good-byes, and Jeff took off. He couldn’t find the other 28 prisioners, which was just as well, for the lot of them went to a bar where they got roaring drunk and were corralled with ease next morning by the sherrif’s deputies.

Jeff, on his own, hiked through the night and, tapping on a friend’s window in the wee hours, arranged immediate transportation, in another VW van. Through the night they drove, and all the next day, arriving at Bob’s front door in San Francisco, where they spent the night in sleeping bags upon the floor.

But before they slept, wired by the experience, they stayed up all hours playing guitars and singing. So it wasn’t unexpected that Bob’s nazi roommate Greg, the apartment’s leaseholder, threw them out the next day.

Jeff’s driver returned to Tennessee. Jeff found another place to stay, and, being a skilled carpenter, found odd jobs. I hired him to make the worktable for Operators at our new location on Geary Boulevard. I’d drawn up plans, and being documentation-crazy, made him promise to return the plans. He lost them of course.

I lost track of Jeff, and the table plans, but it seems he moved to Southern California and went straight. He got married and began a family. Because he was an escaped felon, however, he couldn’t get a California driver’s license, and so it was a matter of time that some years later he got pulled over by the highway patrol, who somehow learned by immediate radio that he was a wanted man in Tennessee.

Jeff spent the night in jail. No breaking out this time.

In the morning, the Highway Patrol got through to Tennessee, to let them know they had the fugitive in hand. But Tennessee said that they didn’t want him any more.

“Jeff,” said the watch commander. “We’re sorry for the inconvenience. They don’t want you.”

Jeff stared. The officer nodded.

“You’re free to go.”