When High-Tech Goes All Manual Typewriter on You - weekly column

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

When High-Tech Goes All Manual Typewriter on You

Did you hear the one about the man who walked into a ‘phone store and was greeted immediately?

Really, it happened.

Within my aging MePhone there was an email failure somewhere along the Verizon / Apple / AOL continuum which I was unable to resolve by following the instructions on various InterGossip sites.

With a desperate prayer on my lips and after bidding farewell to friends and family (can you hear me now?), I closed out my business affairs, packed what I thought I would need for a long sojourn in the wilderness of hard plastic chairs, and bid farewell to the past.

I took my existential despair and distressed MePhone to the Verizon store in Jasper, Texas, and as I entered - a staffer immediately stood up, smiled, and offered to sooth the wounded ‘phone.

Hey, if I am false in this matter may I be subjected to the agony of an eternity of Marty Haugen hymns.

I’m not kidding. I walked into a ‘phone store. A staffer stood up, smiled, and greeted me. Immediately.

In a world where customer service is more and more a grudging grunt from an unraised head behind a computer, this was a moment of joy, not unlike the Pilgrim’s Chorus from Tannhauser.

The staffer then listened to me – as in LISTENED TO ME - worked mysterious wonders with my MePhone, consulted briefly with another staffer, solved my problem within mere minutes, and thanked me for visiting Verizon.

Really. This happened.

Upon returning home I determined to send an email to Verizon praising the customer service at their Jasper store.

I accessed Verizon’s official webfootsite and soon realized that I was K in Kafka’s Das Schloss – access would be forever denied. Verizon told me that my access code, the one I have used for years and which the young staffer employed successfully only hours before, was not really my code. Not only would I have to give Verizon the right code, which would not be the right code, I would have to join a club or something.

Verizon does provide a physical address so that a grateful customer can send them a letter. A letter, with a stamp. Typed on a sheet of paper. So high-tech, eh?

Apparently the one thing impossible with Verizon is sending them an ordinary email complimenting the excellent customer service at one of their stores.

But then, perhaps the concept of good customer service is alien to corporate structures.

Anyway, thanks to the nice folks at the Jasper store for coaxing my MePhone into lighting up and making noises again.

-30-

Prelates and Presidents: The Summer of 2018 - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Prelates and Presidents: The Summer of 2018

An urgent message that was never written
Was then not left beneath the third lantern
On an arching bridge that was never built
Under a wondrous river that never flowed

And men wondered at the unwritten words
They could not find atop the fourth lantern
In an echoing tunnel never dug
Over the steppes east of an eastern shore

And the message never written did not say:
O prelates and presidents – for whom do you pray?

Argument over Wal-Mart Parking Space Leaves One Dead - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Argument over Wal-Mart Parking Space Leaves One Dead

-headline

                    And how can man die better
                       Than facing fearful odds,
                       For the ashes of his fathers,
                       And the temples of his gods

-Macauley, Lays of Ancient Rome

An argument over a parking space –
Lest all the pink Chinese flip-flops are gone
Triple-wide thongs in naughty, frothy lace
And a rhinestone case for a new MePhone

Cartoon shirts from the Vietnamese, sippy cups
Nicaraguan underwear and funny hats
Squeaky plastic toys for the little pups
And genuine autographed tee-ball bats -

There are causes for which a man might die
But “Ten Percent Off!” is no battle cry

Manichaeism is Quite Wrong, You Know - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Manichaeism is Quite Wrong, You Know

“…without God and immortal life? All things are lawful then….”

-Ivan, The Brothers Karamazov

If there are no boundaries, there is no freedom
With nothing to push against, one’s strength must fail
If God is not, then one can make no plaints
And must take on a burden that can’t exist

If man is never told no, there is no Yes
For him to answer then against the no
And if there is no Yes, there is nothing at all
There is no dichotomy, only the Yes

If there are no boundaries, there is no Yes
And man must cease in silent nothingness

The One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Beach House - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Beach House

Your Eminence:

Speaking of apostolic poverty
From the queen bed in your apostolic beach house
To those working two jobs to make life happen
Is pretty thin gruel –
                                     serve it to someone else

A Rabbi Tells a Story - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A Rabbi Tells a Story

Once upon a time:

An aged rabbi talking with two men
Asked them about their holiday in Paris

The first man said: Oh, I hated Paris
There was muck and filth everywhere I went
Stray dogs and prostitutes roamed the foul streets
And the Parisians were incessantly rude

The second man said: Oh, I loved Paris
There were flowers everywhere I went
Artists and beauty, writers scribbling away
And the Parisians were so kind to me

And so:

The rabbi said to them (his voice was kind):
Each of you found the Paris you wanted to find



(Worked up [or down, or sideways…] from a story Rabbi Joel Goor, a visiting lecturer at the University of San Diego in 1975, told his students.)

No. - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

No.

Dixit ergo Iesus ad duodecim, “Numquid et vos vultis abire?”

“Will you also go away?” He asks us.

                                                                 No.

Only sinners mourn at the foot of the Cross
Only sinners approach the baptismal font
Only sinners recline at Table with the Lord

To whom shall we go?
                                      An empty shopping mall?
A 501C cafeteria?
A feast of ashes with the cardinal?

                                                                  No.

There is only one Place, one Space, one Grace

Only sinners are invited, and so
Our yes to Him – we will not go

"To Write Poetry of No Political Significance Whatever" - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

“To Write Poetry of No Political Significance Whatever”

“But my chief argument in defence of Wang An-shih is that…he retired from the Court decisively, ignored  all recalls, and took to the mountains to write poetry of no political significance whatever.”

– David Warren on the poet-philosopher Wang An-Shih

Recusancy is not pious quietism;
In silence it is a brave voice withdrawn
From pompous Kratos’ halls of treachery
From screaming Demos’ marketplace of noise

And up into the silent hills to save
Something of civilization, to sing
Matins among the mountain mists, to write
A page in praise of Creation, to live -

Recusancy is not quietism at all;
It is a firm rebuke to tyranny

The Platonic Ideal of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful - photograph

While Dressing for an American Legion Meeting - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

While Dressing for an American Legion Meeting

A pair of slacks, a pair of shoes, a shirt
A watch to count the weary meeting hours
Coffee with comrades in the old church hall
And all of these are very good indeed

But like old shoes, old pals, the scenes of youth
We must someday let them all go, and pass
Peacefully, one prays, through the spray and foam
And sail until dawn to that farthest Shore

Where only the NCOs must dress right, dress
And the coffee’s always fresh in the company mess


(But will the smoking lamp will be lit?)

A Poetry Installation at the Temple of the Muses - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A Poetry Installation at the Temple of the Muses

 

              Number Forty Two: “You're trying to undermine my rehabilitation. Disrupt my social progress!”

              Number Six: “Strange talk for a poet.”

-The Prisoner, “A Change of Mind”

Installing a poem to factory specs
Setting iambic feet into concrete
And lifting adverbs to the tops of verbs
Through the use of heavy machinery

Metaphors must be government-inspected
For solidarity with the collective
And images most closely interrogated
For their relevance to the latest cause

The Good, the True, and the Beautiful

As cleared by United Auto Workers Local 2110
So you’d better like it; youknowwhatI’msayin’

Bridge of Sorrows - weekly column

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Bridge of Sorrows

Last week the Ponte Morandi, a modern bridge of interstate highway proportions, collapsed in Genoa, Italy. Thirty-nine deaths are known as of this scribbling

The Ponte Morandi was only 51 years old. Built according to the latest scientific principles and to a daring design by a civilization whose architecture, manufacturing, and design have earned the world’s admiration for centuries, the bridge failed and fell.

And yet in the area around Genoa, possibly in site of the wreckage, are bridges 2,000 years old. They don’t take big trucks because they weren’t meant to do so, but they still serve. The Ponte Morandi was meant to take big trucks, and did so for something less than 2,000 years.

Someone on the science / maths continuum looks at a bridge and considers the design according to the site and the various stress loads that will be made. Dr. Science then considers the quality of the materials and the professionalism of construction.

Someone else, that guy who thinks math is unscriptural because Jesus never told us to solve for X, looks at the same bridge and exclaims, “How pretty!”

But even the science-challenged among us can look at pictures of the Ponte Morandi and perceive that something was wrong in the design. The masses of concrete appeared to have been flung out too far between supports given that concrete is a glue of minerals and very heavy, with little tensile strength, and the spindly supports were inadequate for the load. Further, there seems – seems, and only from the pictures – to have been little provision for sway in any direction and from any cause. We all remember from Mr. Johnson’s sixth-grade science class that a triangular form will support more weight than a square because in a triangle the three sides each provide the anti-sway factor for each other, whereas the corners of a square are only hinges.

Engineering is the study of, among other things, bridge-building, real bridges, not metaphorical ones. The liberal arts, quite unfashionable these days, in their turn ask us if a bridge is needed in a given place so that people and trade can transit an obstacle and contribute to the common good, or if it is a political bridge to nowhere. The liberal arts – the fuzzy studies – also remind us that bridges have been built before, and if a bridge built 2,000 years ago still functions as a bridge we might want to apply our higher order thinking skills to learn how, and then apply the abstract principles to the specific needs of our own construction.

The two supports that converge on the apex of a triangle need each other in order to work; similarly, both hemispheres of our brains also need each other in order to work.

All that is something to think about while zipping along the long, concrete spans of our own flyover bridges whose footings are in swamps and bayous.

-30-

Barnum's Non-Human Animal Companions - weekly column

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Barnum’s Non-Human Animal Companions

Nabisco, now a subsidiary of Mondelez International, which used to be Kraft Something-or-Other, grovels to The Loud People Who Are Against Things to prove that it is a good corporate comrade. Nabisco has redesigned its famous circus trailer cookie box to free the cartoon animals from their cartoon cages.

Barnum’s Animal Crackers are little cookies shaped like animals. In your ‘umble scrivener’s youth they were packaged in a little box printed as a circus wagon. The wheels of the wagon continued from the sides to the bottom and were perforated as cutouts so that the little wagon could stand on its four wheels. Printed on the sides of the box were cages of critters which varied from time to time, but the essential nature of the box, complete with a little string for carrying it or hanging it from a Christmas tree, didn’t change until The Glorious Ever-Now.

This month Barnum’s animals are free of their cages, roaming in good fellowship across a printed veldt. The gorilla, being somewhat arboreal, is probably unhappy about this. All the animals, both arboreal and nonarboreal, carnivorous and herbivorous, stroll toward the viewer in oneness ‘n’ peace ‘n’ love, surely wanting a hug.

That famous rhetorical question still obtains: how many people has Walt Disney killed?

As the old alligator might say of its latest human meal, “New Look – Same Great Taste!”

Now that the cartoon animals are free to roam, perhaps someone could redesign our cities, beginning with Chicago, so that the humans could also roam free.

Given that the Mondolez-Nabisco Barnum’s Animals box has been purged of anti-social elements, the animal cookies inside could be next.

Instead of little lions and tigers and bears (oh, my!) the cookies could be shaped as carrots and kumquats and corn (oh, ich!), and made from reprocessed soy beans. The boxes could be printed with inspiring mottos: “Good Little Comrades Love Brussels Sprouts” and “Good Little Comrades Report Global-Warming Detractors to their Block Wardens.”

On one side of the box could show pictures of happy children being devoured by bears and alligators, with the enlightening reminder that “Good Little Comrades Always Remember That Animals Were Here First.”

And now we turn to the cultural insensitivity of Eskimo Pies.

-30-

An Open Letter to Really Important People / The Old Dime Box, Texas Statement - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

An Open Letter to Really Important People

The Old Dime Box, Texas Statement

A Manifesto Made Manifest in Manifesting Manifestingness

We post this serious looking document
Bloated with long vocabulary words
Sodden with weak dependent clauses
Marshaled in numbered ranks, down, down they go

To the GossipNet all serious like
And everyone has to pay attention to us
Because it’s AN OPEN LETTER, y’know -
You may sign it if you’ve got letters behind your name

Signatories:

Apostle-Disciple Magic Dawn, DD., Non-Binary, Author of Green Polar Bears I Am, Co-Equal-Director of the Anti-Oppressionist Theatre Against the Occupation, Agent of the Revolution, Auteur, Guest on The Wheel of Fortune and Parent of Two AMAZING children of indeterminate Gender with Their AWESOME and AMAZING Life-Partner Sven-Marie.

Massive Ferguson, M.Ed., Poet, Rector of Admissions, The University of Where the Old Circuit City Use to Be

Poncy Tworbst, M.A., PUBLISHED Author, Seeker, Inspirational Singer-Songwriter, PUBLISHED

Heather-Mistee La’ Thwitte-Tworbst, Ph.D., Director of Library Resources at Saint Margaret Sanger Homeschool Resource Authority Collective, Inc., Certified Ordained Consecrated Priest in The Worldwide Church of Me-ness and Pastor of the World-Famous Weddings ‘R’ Us Chapel of Rainbow Dreams in Magdalena, New Mexico

Lawrence Hall, HSG, Thinker of Thinky-Ness and, Like, Stuff, Endowed Chair he found at Goodwill, His Mark: X

(Sean Ian Johann Johnson, MBA, J.D., Chief Photocopier Operator at Donald Trump University and Fashion Editor at Gun, God, and Guts Magazine, was not able to sign today; he is sharing a cell with other White House staff and patiently awaiting The Day of Greatness.)

Panic and Its Attempted Vetoes - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Panic and Its Attempted Vetoes

There are no days free of panic attacks -
A fierce determination to recusancy
Is no defense against the men of peace
Clenching their fists and screaming out their love

There are no nights free of panic attacks -
A fierce determination to needful sleep
Is no defense against unhappy dreams
Judicial accusations of the memory

But even panic is no defense against
One’s fierce determination to write the truth

Where do I Apply for my Russian Bribes? - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Where do I Apply for my Russian Bribes?

Where, then, do I apply for bribery?
Russians are everywhere here, we are told
So why aren’t those nefarious oligarchs
Flinging dollars and dachas at poor me?

And the Chinese, poking and hacking about
(My last water bill was in Mandarin)
Have yet to pad my secret bank account
Or park a Porsche on my patio

But if they will…

I want to spy for the cool FBI
And party away with the CIA

Snakefight - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Snakefight

Two snakes in battle on a summer day
Writhing and twisting on a sandy road
Grappling desperately like taxing authorities
Fighting over a poor worker’s paycheck

Or like fierce coffee-break theologians
In anger ripping a scripture apart
Each clutching a bloody fragment to himself
But careful not to upset the 501C

And in the end, one snake swallows the other
Keeping him closer than a beloved brother

The Annual You-Know-What Examination - a rhyming couplet

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Annual You-Know-What Examination

The physician is a good man, wise and fair
But, ouch! - HIS FINGER DOES NOT BELONG THERE!





(But, hey, ya gotta do it because life is good and you want to be there for all of it.)

Returning an Electronic Gadget That Wasn't at all as Advertised and Wouldn't Fit into the Assigned Shipping Box for Return - doggerel

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Returning an Electronic Gadget That Wasn’t at all as Advertised

and Wouldn’t Fit into the Assigned Shipping Box for Return

What a surprise
It sparks, it dies
Return the prize
To those false guys

It wouldn’t fit
I thought a bit
Then stepped on it
And so it fit

Duct-Tape Automobile - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Duct-Tape Automobile

How awkward when a body part
Falls out onto the interstate
That fragment of FoMoCo art -
It spun away in a figure eight!

There is a new part now on order
For this old car; it ain’t no Lexus
It rolls along in taped disorder
And that is how we do it in Texas

God bless our state, and the strong duct tape
That holds together my Ford Escape



Please know that my wonderful Ford Escape is fifteen years old and is a strongly-built car with lots of Texas and New Mexico miles on the odometer. A bit of plastic trim fell from a window assembly a few weeks ago, and the tape is to keep rain and dirt out of the innards while a replacement is on order. A real Texan thinks of duct tape as both functional and in its own modest way aesthetically pleasing (“Aesthetically pleasing” is the English translation for the Texas vernacular, “purty.”