The Adventures of Bloggard

Been Around the Block. Got Some Stories. These are Them.

So Long — to the Ramen King

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Momofuki makes Instant Ramen noodles

Osaka, Japan, January 6, 2007: Today at age 96, Ando Momofuku, the inventor of Instant Ramen, passed away. While a student at Ritsumeikan University he learned to operate a clothing business, but on a cold night shortly after World War II, he came upon a long line of people who were waiting to buy fresh ramen (noodles) at a black market food stall. In an epiphany, he came to believe that the world would have peace when people had enough to eat.

So in 1948 he began learning the food business, and ten years later developed instant Chicken Ramen, which he thought would provide better nutrition for soldiers in the field. His company grew and grew and grew. Two years ago, his company developed vacuum-packed noodles for Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi to eat on the U. S. space shuttle Discovery. When interviewed, Ando said, “I’m happy I’ve realized my dream that noodles can go into space.”

One small step for man, one giant leap for noodles. But perhaps more important is this: We don’t know who invented beans and rice, and we don’t know who invented spaghetti, but we do know who invented Instant Ramen. So for all the students of the world, and for those of us who once needed very affordable food for a simple meal, we thank you, Ando Momofuku.

In this simple way, you’ve changed the world.

Bloggard Bergere?

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Les Retours d'Ombre

Paris, France, Today: Early in the morning, at 12:01, over a friendly glass of Cabernet in a little cafe in Montparnasse, the Bloggard has signed an Agreement in Principle with the world-famous Folies Bergere.

Assuming that all proceeds as planned, in the upcoming summer season, the Bloggard will assume the leading role of Margo Lane in the Folies Bergere all-singing, all-dancing production of “Les Retours d’Ombre.”

The Bloggard reports that he is “tres jolie” about the upcoming production. No comment was forthcoming from the Folies at the Bergere.

More details to follow as they become available.

Law 23 of Roommates and Dishes

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

Each roommate knows that he does more than half the dishes.

That’s it. Just that simple. It’s a law of human nature, as dependable as gravity, and it’s caused by the way we see things.

For example …

Roommate A is very, very conscious of the dishes that he has washed, because he was there. If he was emotionally resisting the work, he was even more agonizingly there, and it seemed even longer.

On the other hand, Roommate A is hardly conscious at all of the time that Roommate B put in doing the dishes. Because while Roommate B was scouring the pots and pans, our pal Roommate A was thinking about a brunette or watching TV or worrying about the gubbamint.

It’s just a function of the consciousness of Roommate A. (Also see Law 23 of Human Consciousness.)

His dishes. Took forever. Some other dishes, done by somebody else, while he was wasn’t there, what do those dishes matter? Those are hardly any dishes at all!

Therefore his own dishes are vaster and more slow. It’s just human nature. Each roommate knows for certain that he does more than 50% of the dishes.

How is this useful?

Firstly, in any kind of negotiation, even though you know that you’ve done more than 50% of the blah-blah-blah, you’ve got to pretend to understand when the other person swears that they do more of the blah-blah-blah. For example, if you are married, your wife. As she will tell you, she does far more work around here than you do.

Grinny Bearit. Just the way life works. Another of God’s little jests. Let us all laugh together. Like this: Ha ha ha!

There. Knowing this valuable Rule-O-Thumb, go forth and prosper.

Glynda and Pat

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Denton, Texas, Summer 1963: Glynda G. was a happy-go-lucky, merry girl who’d appeared in our High School my Junior year. She was friends with Carolyn, my then-girlfriend, and the two girls had come to the same college a year after me. Pat M. was one of the four of us guys who had lived in the house in the Shady Shores community on Lake Dallas, a few miles out of town.

The Viet Nam war hovered over us all. We were being called for the draft left and right. They gave a 100-question multiple-choice test with four choices for each answer. If you scored 25 — which would be the average score if you just threw darts at the test — you passed. You qualified to be a soldier.

To escape, you had to be enrolled in school, be married, or run away to Canada.

Then, the draft board decided it didn’t matter if you were enrolled in school.

I didn’t know anybody in Canada, so I got a psychiatrist to tell them, truthfully, “You don’t want this boy.” They believed him, and I didn’t go. I’m glad, for I know I’d never have come back.

Pat said he was going to get married.

Since he didn’t have a girlfriend, I thought this idea sounded peculiar. But he had a plan.

“I’m going to marry Glynda,” he said.

And, by golly, he did.

I can’t imagine why she married him. They’d not been going together. I guess the excitement of being asked was just too much. She said yes.

I didn’t seem him much for a while, but he reported that married life agreed with him. And that summer I worked as a prison guard, in the records department of Huntsville Prison. Was it an interesting job? Yes it was. But that’s another story.

One weekend that summer, I took off and I drove back to Denton, where Pat and Glynda were living in a small apartment. They weren’t expecting me and I arrived very late on Friday evening. The lights in their apartment were off. I crept silently around to the rear, where I guessed the bedroom would be, and I crawled to a spot beneath their window. The window was open just a bit that summer night, as I’d known it would be.

There I let loose my panther scream.

Now if you haven’t heard this, it’s done like growling, but during a forceful indrawing of the breath. It makes a truly blood-curdling sound, and if you open and close your mouth while doing it, it sounds like a panther. Exactly like a panther. Like a horrible panther.

There beneath the window of your bedroom.

I heard shocked whispers through the window. “What was that?!!” she hissed.

“I don’t know,” he said.

I waited for a long, long moment, then gave another panther scream, louder!

Glynda screamed right along with me. “What the hell?!!” yelled Pat.

“Oh good,” I said, “It’s Pat and Glynda. This is your apartment.”

They actually let me in after that, which goes to show they were good friends, or maybe not very smart. We sat up talking for a while, drinking coffee and listening to a new Ramsey Lewis album about being “in with the in-crowd.” Then they made me a bed on the sofa and we all retired for the night.

The next day, Glynda told me how someone stole their blankets and towels from the laundromat, and then she asked my opinion about how to decorate a space over the sofa. They had several pictures but all were too small. I suggested they make an arrangement of all the pictures, and then held the different pictures up so that, all together, they made a large rectangle on the wall. That is, it was a large rectangle except it needed something about three feet wide and a foot tall in the lower corner.

“Let’s go look outside,” I said, and we stumbled out into the scorching heat of the vacant lot next door, where we poked through the weeds. There I found a crankshaft. I do not know why an automobile crankshaft was lying in the vacant lot, but it was the right size. So I went to the hardware store and bought a board and some trim, a piece of tan cardboard, a spool of wire, and some black paint.

Back at the apartment we cut the cardboard to cover the front face of the board, and drilled holes through the cardboard and the board. We wired the crankshaft onto the board, and then cut the trim and nailed it around the edges, to serve as a picture frame. I painted the trim black. Now we had a deep frame (black), a tan cardboard background, and the three-dimensional crankshaft in the middle. The crankshaft was rusted and had mystery speckles of white and red along one end.

We hung the framed crankshaft among the pictures on the wall.

Perfect. A wall-collage.

That was my wedding gift to Glynda and Pat. A panther, and a crankshaft.

I think they liked it.

Law 23 of Human Consciousness

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

You and I are not really all that conscious, so would we assume other folks to be conscious?

Because each of us goes through the day being continuously aware of something, we assume that we’re conscious beings. I mean from moment to moment, we’re aware of this, then aware of that, and then something else. First a thought about your work, then your butt itches, then you remember you need to stop at the grocery store, then you sneeze, and then you admire a passing girl.

You see? Continuously aware of something or other.

However, that’s not the whole story.

If we take a viewpoint outside our own busy brain, and consider one thing that’s outside ourselves, in the environment … for example, consider the color of paint on the front door of the house three doors down the street from where you live.

What color is it?

Many of us will not know. Because when we consider just one thing outside our own busy monkey-mind, it’s clear that we’re not very conscious of that one thing, not very conscious at all.

And the two things are related. Because we’re so internally busy being aware of this, of that, of this other, we’re really much too busy to be very conscious of the multiplicity of things and people and events and colors and sounds and temperatures and tones and stuff and stuff and stuff … all around us. The being busy — which makes us think we’re aware — is actually interfering with our ability to be conscious of things outside ourselves.

The book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bi-Cameral Mind is perhaps the best book ever written that explains how human consciousness came to exist. In this book, author Julian Jaynes uses an analogy for consciousness. He says that our conscious is much as if we were a flashlight in a dark room. Wherever we look, we see light. But all around us — behind and to the sides and above and below — all around us there is a vast darkness, which we can never perceive, because that’s never where we are looking.

Accepting this situation is not to say there is anything wrong. We are finite creatures in an infinite universe. That’s the deal. We are feeble and so very limited, in the wide world around us. How could we possibly be conscious of all the vast and imponderable concatenation of single things through which we swim as in a rich broth of sound and sensation?

The answer: We cannot.

By our nature, by our limitation, we cannot be conscious, no matter how busy we are being aware of this, of that, of this other. Our freedom amid this vast barrier is that we can thoughtfully choose what kinds of things we’re going to be aware of. We can learn to operate a mind, to operate a set of emotions, to operate a body. Learn how to treat others, how to find what we want and what we think we need, how we will cherish others. This is our freedom. The freedom to choose … if we’re thoughtful about … being alive.

But now to the point: If you and I are not actually all that conscious, day in and day out, then why would we assume that other people are conscious?

And the answer is that they are not. For example, if you start a new business and you advertise in the paper and pass out leaflets up and down the street, then you will be amazed how staggeringly long it takes for your community of people to actually become aware of your existence. Each of those people has such low consciousness of any one thing — such as yourself — that they can remain amazingly unconscious of you and your thoughts and your needs and your existence. Oh, for years and years, it may be.

So we shouldn’t suffer about what other people are thinking about us. They’re generally not conscious of us at all. And there’s a lot of freedom in that.

Knowing this handy Rule-O-Thumb, go forth and prosper.

Life and Death with Rex and Mike

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Henrietta, Texas, Summer 1949: My mother, who worked as a nurse for her brother, Dr. Hurn, had made arrangements for me to stay with Mrs. Miller and her two boys.

Rex was older than me, and Mike younger.

One afternoon that last summer, before I began first grade at Lulu Johnson Elementary School, we all went to pick cotton. I suppose I should be grateful that I had this highly-touted southern experience, but what I learned was this:

Picking cotton sucks.

A cotton-field in summer is no picnic. It’s hot as hell. Plus, the cotton is prickly and tough, and you’re supposed to put it in a bag. What kind of bag? We had gunny sacks.

Are you familiar with a gunny sack? Do you know how scratchy a gunny sack can be? We young boys, shirtless, wearing cut-offs and tennis-shoes, fought those gunny sacks. Drag it on the ground, it itches your hand. Throw it over your shoulder, it scratches your hide!

And cotton is heavy.

All in all, those stories you’ve heard … about the happy pickaninnys, singing and toting those sacks of cotton … I’m pretty sure that’s all crap.

This was just another of the adventures that Mrs. Miller arranged for us boys. I suppose I should be grateful. Some of our outings are still with me.

One roasting summer day, we drove to the ice house.

You see, at that time, there was still an ice-man who came around with blocks of ice. He had a horse, which pulled a wooden wagon with walls and a back door. Inside the wooden wagon were large blocks of ice, which he delivered with deadly-looking metal tongs. This was for people who had ‘ice-boxes’ rather than electric refrigerators, and it was also for people who wanted to make home-made ice cream.

We’d asked Mrs. Miller where the ice-man got the ice.

“Let’s go see,” she said.

That afternoon we drove forever out into the mysterious countryside, and along an eternal flat road in the middle of nothing, where in the distance we saw a large unpainted wooden building. We arrived. On the building, a fading sign said, “ICE.”

Inside we were shown a cold, dim room with huge blocks of ice. A mountain of blocks of ice. Of course, looking back, now I wonder: Where did the ice come from?

Another time, we went to a fourth-of-july cookout at the Henrietta Country Club, where I won a prize.

And another day we went for a picnic and a swim with friends of the Miller’s. These people had a farm, and a young boy named Alf, who was a year older than Rex. After a swell picnic, we all went down to the tank, a kind of pond, and wearing our cut-offs, in we splashed. The water was muddy brown, but cool and refreshing. “Don’t step in any holes!” called Mrs. Miller.

We had a great time.

For a while.

Until somebody asked, “Where’s Alf?”

We were hustled out of the water while the grown-ups splashed in. Mrs. Miller brought us back up to the house, and soon after, we left, quietly. After returning to her house, I heard her on the telephone.

Finally, they had found Alf.

Uncle Esty

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Hurnville, Texas, Autumn 1955: Born Pfeiffer I. Estlach he was, of German family, but when emigrating to the United States, they’d made the name more ‘American’ by translating it. East Lake it meant, and so Eastlake their name became. Pfeiffer I. Eastlake married my mother’s sister, the beauty, Rosemary, and so became my Uncle Esty.

World War II fell upon them all, and like his peers, Pfeiffer had joined the army. I don’t know where he served, nor how it went for him, save that he came back. He was a small, compact man, slight but durable, with bright blue eyes and blonde hair. If he fought the Germans in the war, I’m sure he gave it his best, for in the photographs he looked very dashing in the uniform. However, I’d guess they would have sent him to the South Pacific, so that he wouldn’t have to shoot some cousin.

As a child I must have first met him at my grandparents farm, for there I most remember him. On this particular Autumn morning we had to find some water, out in a field. Why? I don’t know. He cut a thin green branch from a young tree, and made a Y-shaped wooden device, and on the long arm, he mounted the cap from a fountain pen. Then, holding the two arms inside his hands he paced across the field, watching for the long arm to turn down.

Turn down it did. Dig there we did. Water we found.

Rosemary had given birth to the two boys, Bobby and Danny, and with them I ran through the woods, explored the barns and granaries, trudged the fields. We learned to hunt rabbits, and how to handle rifles. Uncle Esty showed us.

They moved from their Denton home to Wichita Falls, a larger town just up the road from Henrietta where I lived with my mother. Uncle Esty was, at that time, an insurance Agent, and drove a white Studebaker with a red-and-white sign painted on the doors, saying ‘State Farm.’ I asked him why he had a sign on his car.

“That makes it deductible,” he said.

I didn’t know what that meant. Now I do, and I know he probably could have just deducted it without the sign, but scrupulous and exact he was. I suppose he adored Rosemary once upon a time, but she seemed hard on him, hard on the boys, to me. Perhaps it was that my mother was more lax.

Visiting them in Wichita Falls, I learned about chili dogs. I bought a book and hypnotized my cousin Bobby. It seemed amazing, forbidden, dark and mysterious. There were games and tents and ropes and a huge and ugly bulldog named Kip.

Rosemary was the secretary to Dr. Hoggard, the pastor of a big Methodist church, so we were very Christian, oh yes we were. And it was great to spend a weekend there, not because of the church which was huge, cavernous, impressive, and boring, but because afterward, every week, we had lunch at Luby’s Cafeteria!

One Sunday, back at their home after Luby’s, we were changing from our church clothes, and an animated discussion broke out about something. My cousin Dan was imploring Uncle Esty in earnest tones and the two boys and I followed Uncle Esty out the kitchen door and up past the flower gardens to the front of the house, while on the nearby larger street a parade of cars whispered past.

My Uncle Esty unlooped the garden hose and prepared to water the roses. He stopped. Looked down at young Danny.

“Say!” Uncle Esty said, “You don’t have any pants on.”

Danny stopped in mid-sentence, looking down to discover he was wearing only his underwear. He shot a nervous look at all the cars driving past and ran pell-mell back into the house. Uncle Esty turned on the water and began to sprinkle the rosebed.

“Hmm!” he said.

Uncle Esty seemed forever patient to me. He was smart, efficient, worldly. He belonged to the Masonic Lodge and wore the ring. He smoked a pipe.

Of course the boys grew up. They joined DeMolays which is some Masonic thing, and went to high school. I’d graduated and gone off to college, and traveled to other states far away. I read books about esoteric practices like meditation and stress, and drove cars for long distances, and Rosemary died.

Esty was alone for a time, and seemed to shrink. Their house was haunted by Rosemary, who wasn’t there. Esty remained.

Returning for a visit, I stopped to see him. His health had declined, his heart was in trouble. He was the same precise man, but slower and sad, even when he told me that he’d met a dear woman he liked a lot. It had been a close call with his heart. He was trying to move forward. I tried to tell him what I’d read about meditation, and how it might help, and …

“I just do what the doctor tells me,” he said.

Soon after, I heard that he had married the dear woman. And then before long he died.

Bobby and Danny, young men now, were forbidden the house. His Masonic Ring, personal effects, photographs, mementos — all appropriated. The dear woman had it all. Perhaps it was a business with her; I don’t know.

A lifetime of doing what was right, as best he could. Of course he would just do what the doctor told him.

A good man. My Uncle Esty.

On This Day: 61 and Counting …

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Mount Shasta, April 7, 2005: As of 3 pm, I am sixty-one years old. I know it was 3 pm when I was born, because my mama told me that ‘People Are Funny‘ was playing on the radio, and back in those days, it came on at 3 pm.

I have a few more creaks and aches, now and then, than was once the case. I’m not so willowy flexible as once upon a time. Yoga and motorcycles don’t suit me as well as once upon a time.

The girls no longer grin at me, just because my hair is curly. Of course, my hair is not curly any more. Being truthful, I must admit that the curly hair, once upon a time, was a permanent anyway. I wanted to see what would happen. I found out. It made them grin.

But this is just as well. I no longer have a great need for grinning girls, so that works out fine.

But when I look in the mirror, it’s still me. I suppose some day, when I look in the mirror, I won’t be there. But in the meantime … so far, so good.

 
 

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