doing alright

 Reading Beagles' successful path to the boskydell of his dreams, sent me into the archives where I retrieved my 1963 copy of The EnGager to see if his aim was true on graduation from high school.  Farmer it said next to his photo.  Well I guess that is the closest thing you can put in your yearbook, hunter sounds odd, and living off the land is probably something that the faculty censors of the EnGager would not allow.

Cain the farmer was the murderer of his brother the hunter.  Always seemed to me that it should be the other way around, but outside that unfortunate incident, Abel does seem to have made the better choice because before we discovered agriculture and the rich began to get richer, hunting (and foraging) gave us a much shorter weekday and what appears to have been a better life.

It has always been curious to me why Beagles, with all that land has never put up a truck garden. but I guess that sort of thing does not float his boat, and that there are a lot of varmints around.

As far as jobs I reckon Beagles was always after something that paid well enough, but something he never wanted to occupy his mind too much.  I know he was some kind of union official but I don't think he ever thought of climbing the corporate ladder.

So I guess we, and I assume also Beagles, could say that he has done alright.

My school yearbook says biochemist and that was after my hero at the time, Isaac Asimov, and did not last beyond my first year in college where I discovered that chemistry was just too damned hard. When I graduated my degree was in psychology, and I had vague thoughts of being a public servant with a kind of run-down office where people of little means would drop by and say "Doc, I think I'm crazy," and I would say "Have a seat," and we would chat for an hour, and they would feel a little less crazy.  That would have been okay.

But I had also taken some writing courses and I kind of got that bug, and I did write a little while I was drinking a lot, and looking back I can see where that writing was basically an excuse for not looking for a more responsible job that would get in the way of my drinking.

But Valentines day of 78 I realized that I was going to have to get that more responsible job and I went out to the junior college to get my data processing certificate.  I did kind of like writing code, but it was mostly just something that I could do easily and that would likely bring in some good dough.  

Then I did that thing about trying to become a hotshot bureaucrat which didn't last long and after awhile I quit.

Being a substitute teacher is the only job I ever had where I thought I was doing good, not a great deal of good, but just for those six hours when me and the kids were in that death cage, I worked hard to make it better for them and for me.  I did go to education school with thoughts of becoming a regular teacher, but I could see that the job was too hard and long and I didn't want to make that sacrifice.

And now I am an artist.  Not really of course.  A real artist would probably put in like 80 hours a week and I put in a mere twenty.  But you know, I have my shows.  I do make some sales, which means that some strangers pay me like a hundred bucks for something I made which feeds my ego.  

I have my inspirations and despairs like you see in those overblown movies about famous artists.  I feel that nobody else really understands my work even those who fork over a hunnert bucks, but I have made my peace with that.  I guess that I am doing alright.

I have never seen One Two Three, but I like Billy Wilder well enough.  Double Indemnity and Lost Weekend are crackerjack movies.  Didn't care that much for Some Like It Hot, and my favorite is Ace In The Hole.

A Pretty Good Life

 I never cared much about financial or social success.  All I wanted in my life was to live in  rural area where I could walk out my door to go hunting.  That way, if there ever was another Great Depression or another big war when gas was rationed, I could still do what I wanted to do.  Looking back on it, it wasn't just about killing animals, it was about living in a place where I could hunt, fish, and roam the countryside at will without having to join an expensive club.  After my experiences in Alaska and the army, I decided that I also wanted electricity and indoor plumbing, which some rural areas still didn't have in those days.  About that time I came to the realization that, to make all this possible, I needed a decent job, which some rural areas also didn't have, and still don't.  It all came together when I landed in Cheboygan, but then I decided that I needed one more thing to make my life complete, regular sex and female companionship.  That one took a couple of years to secure, but I didn't mind because I had a lot of fun trying.  It hasn't been a perfect life, but it's been pretty good so far and it ain't over yet. 

I never saw those movies but, when I was in West Berlin, it was a modern thriving city.  The commies who ruled East Berlin didn't seem to be in a hurry to rebuild after World War II, and East Berlin was still pretty bleak.  The trouble with the Wall had settled down by the time I got there, although the Wall itself remained in place until 1990.  I saw them tearing it down on TV and wished I was there with them.  Not that I wanted to do the actual demolition, but the people doing it seemed to be in a festive mood, and I figured there would be one hell of a party afterwards.  

Ready or not

Where is everybody?

Playing Hide and Seek again, a fun game.

...it riles Beagles and it bores Old Dog.

So what?  Speaking only for myself, I'm not so full of myself to think that my opinion means a damn thing to anyone but myself.  And it isn't like we're a bunch of old chums sitting around and shooting the breeze.  Anything that is posted here is out there in front of God and everybody, quite possibly archived for eternity. Being a little circumspect and concerned about privacy is not a bad thing, in my opinion.  Some people ask too many questions, or the wrong kind of questions, for this kind of forum if you get my drift.  I don't know what I mean to say exactly except that the more I am expected to respond the less likely that will happen.

-----

While looking for some movies in the comedy genre I was thinking of the films of Billy Wilder, who directed many gems.  One in particular stood out, for it was filmed in Berlin in the early 60s, just about the time that Mr. Beagles was stationed there.  I was wondering if Mr. Beagles has seen One, Two, Three and if it brought back any memories.  Although a comedy, parts of Berlin looked awfully bleak and beaten up; does the film have a ring of truth, Mr. Beagles?

 

 

getting ahead

 Where is everybody?  I don't mind entertaining you guys but I would like a little entertainment back.  I was going to write a post I was thinking about, about politics, but when I do it riles Beagles and it bores Old Dog.  I was doing some correspondence with a friend of mine and she mentioned Karmann Ghias which got me to thinking about getting ahead.  Perhaps it will inspire the dawgs to tell their own tales of getting ahead.

Did somebody say Karmann Ghia?  Bruce used to have a Karmann Ghia.  We used to go on rides of a summer evening on the little curvy, slightly hilly, roads south of Herrin, dangerously close to the super prison though we never saw hide nor hair of it, much less a convict in torn striped clothes standing by the road with one thumb out and the other hand holding a shiv behind his back.  Bruce worked in the lab in the hospital, a bit more prestigious than being a janitor like me and Craig or  an orderly like John.  We knew him well enough, and we hung with him a bit, but he was the kind of guy who always left the party before it really got going.

He was the kind of guy who was going places, not that there is anything wrong with that.  What if I did what my parents were constantly nagging me to do, apply myself?  I picture myself sometimes in one of those tony burbs in a big tony house having retired some years ago from that prestigious tony job (maybe a plaque on the wall of my den, For forty-five years of dedicated service for blah, blah, blah.  (In my fat state job they were always giving each other plaques, hanging them on their cubicle walls for visitors to admire.  (I never got a plaque.  What I got was a "Don't let the door hit your butt on the way out", and what they were worried about was damage to the door, not to my butt.)))

Bruce was at the U of I for awhile, dropped into Chin's once or twice, but never had a third beer.  Moved on after that, moving on up.  I never would have heard from him again if not for the miracle of fb.  He's some kind of applied scientist, living in North Carolina, kids, grandkids, maybe a great or two, and just a little bit too republican sounding to my partisan democrat ears. 

Could have been me I suppose.  If I'd only applied myself.  If I had never roomed with the guy who later led me into hanging out at the Tavern in the Illini Union.  If I had never set foot into the House of Chin.  But of course these were things I always wanted to do so I have no one to blame but myself, and I am easy on myself.

Oh I did haul myself out to the local junior college and made that trek to Texas to find my fortune, but that foundered and I ended up in that state job in Chicago.  At one point, living in my parents attic and working the boring job, I had thoughts of maybe becoming a big time bureaucrat like my bosses, and I made a fledgling attempt but was quickly slapped down by the pros.

John in Champaign, working at Kraft I think, living in a house with beer-drinking buddies, was offered the path to higher ed by a friend and rode that into becoming a principal, but got nothing but grief from the schoolboards, and now, retired, is doing what he always wanted to do, play in a rock and roll band.

Craig I'm not so sure.  I don't remember when he got  that job at Flex N Gate, but my impression is that it was a pretty sweet gig and he just rode that to retirement.

I guess everything works out in the end.

catfish 11

 I kind of feared facing George the businessman, the guy who knew numbers, and basically asking him for money for what was really, the closer we got to the Great Wall, for kind of a stupid idea.

So I was kind of glad when we walked into the Great Wall, Dan already hanging back so that I had to give him a little shove, a little after the noon crowd had shoved off and Itch was shoving brown bottles into the coolers, and we said we wanted to see George, and he asked why, and we kind of shrugged and he went up into the restaurant and came back and said George was out.

So I'm trying to think how to formulate this whole idea, how to sell it as Dan and I are walking down Fourth Street, kind of like Cisco and Pancho, me a step or two in front and Dan coming up behind me and he starts mumbling.  "Business," he says and I turn around and ask what, and he says, "Business, it'll be good for business, for the Paradise.  You know after the game everybody goes to the bar, good crowd you know, tell him about that."  

And hell, I'm thinking he already has a good enough business, and if that crowd wasn't out playing softball they'd be sitting in the Great Wall anyway, so how does that help?  But I don't say anything, just nod my head and walk on. 

After a few steps on he says, "Publicity, it'll be good publicity for the Paradise, have our scores printed in the paper, us guys walking around in our Great Wall jerseys"

"Tee shirts?" I asked.

 "Well we gotta have tee shirts, how else are we gonna look like a team?"

 Actually sounded like a pretty good idea, yeah taking the field, looking like a team, probably with some kind of team yell, pounding our fists into our gloves, covering the bases, the outfield, daring the other team to try to hit the ball between us, our peerless defense.  Problem was that this was getting a little more expensive.  The fee was going to be a hundred bucks, and this would add, hell I don't know maybe another hundred bucks to the cost.

 "Two hundred dollars?" George asked when we were seated upstairs in the restaurant part having like a business conversation, waitresses in the background filling up the sweet and sours and hot mustards.  "Too see you guys play baseball?"  And there was sort of a silence, Dan nudging me, and me saying, "Well softball actually." and his eyes narrowing for just a minute into that cold business stare, and then he asked, "You guys any good?"

 Good?  No we weren't any good at all.  "Sure we're plenty good," I answered.

 And he started laughing.  "Good, you guys?  Sure at drinking beer you pretty good."

 "Well," I started, but I didn't have anything to follow that up with, but it didn't matter.

 "Sure," he said, "Sure I do it.  Two hundred bucks to see you guys, you beer drinking bums, see you guys out in the field running around, hah, I pay that easy."

 Well that was easy.  We sauntered down to the bar. Where Itch was shoving brown bottles into the coolers.

 Dan wasn't saying anything, so I said, "We have this idea."

 "Well, how about that?" he answered, but I just let it hang so that after he emptied all the PBRs he asked, "What idea?"

 "Ever played softball?" I asked.

 "Nope," he answered, lugging up a case of Old Style,

 "But you played a little baseball didn't you, when you were a kid, I mean."  Itch was a tall and lean guy, I could see him reaching up for the ball I'd thrown in after my spectacular catch, coming in on high after the bounce, landing back on the bag before the desperate slide back of the runner,  Double play!!

 "Well yeah," he answered, like he was looking for an argument.

 "First base!" I jumped on it.

 "As a matter of fact," he answered, and then he was suspicious again, "Why?"

 "Well we're getting up a team."

 "A team?"

 "A softball team." Dan jumped in, eager to get the spotlight.

 "Who?"

 "Us, the Great Wall, us guys," Dan on his horse now.  "We just talked to George, it's all fixed, he's going to front us, are you in?"

 "That's the stupidest idea I've ever heard of," Itch answered, and then he did kind of a surprising thing.  He was holding an Old Style which he was going to put into the cooler and he flipped it up into the air.  We watched it twirl up neck over bottom and just as it was surely headed for the floor he grabbed it by the neck and eased it into the cooler. He looked surprised himself for just a second, and then he said, "Well perhaps I can be persuaded."

 So there it was.  A couple hours ago it was just Dan, pounding that old mitt of mine, and now we had money, we had a center fielder, a first baseman, and a shortstop.  Dan plucked that plum for himself.  I was a little doubtful of that considering his considerable mass, but it was his idea after all, and he had been a minor league baseball player, so what the hell.

 Itch surprisingly set a couple free ones in front of Dan and me and Dan pulled a little notebook out of his back pocket.  Six positions to fill but it was only early afternoon, a whole day awaited us

catfish 10

 Here's a little something to tide you over for the weekend.

Diamond Dan, not sure why we called him that, one of those things you know where you do the opposite because Diamond Dan, you think some flashy guy, rings on his fingers, dressed up wearing a tie with some diamond stick pin in it, maybe a gangster, one of those gentleman gangsters like you see in the movies stepping out in shiny shoes.

And Dan wasn't like that at all, kind of squat, a little fat, never wore anything but baggy pants and a sweatshirt.  Had that gangster thing down a little bit, seemed always to be talking out of the side of his mouth, heavy Chicago accent.

Played for the White Sox, or so his story went.  Well never quite made the team, spent some seasons in the minors, catching, that would fit in with his squat physique, and got invited up to spring training once, but just at the end of it there was a fly ball to right, a man on third and only one out, and a shoestring catch which caught the runner down the line so he had to hustle back to third, but the right fielder was sprawled on the ground so the runner tagged up and made a break for it, but the right fielder bounced right back up and made a perfect throw, one bounce right into the Dan's mitt and he had him dead, turned to see him charging down and braced himself for the collision, but then at the last minute the guy went low all spikes up at Dan who went down to one knee and smacked the tag right into the SOB's groin and he was dead out.  But his spikes had tangled with Dan's shin guards and when he stood up, ball in hand the next thing he knew he was falling over and when he reached for the ankle that had betrayed him his hand came up red with blood.

The end of his career, and the thing was, as Dan liked to tell the story, not only was it a fucking exhibition game but the Sox were behind nine to nothing. 

But there was some kind of settlement, he ended up with some money, which would account for how he was able to afford the rent for that whole floor of the house even though all he did was drive a cab, and then only when he was in the mood.

The reason I say or so his story went, is because sometimes dropping in on him when he didn't see me coming, I would catch him telling some new visitors at the Great Wall that he wrote a sports column for the local newspaper or that he was a math professor at the university.  I never called him on that, because I was pretty much a bullshitter myself, and hey this is America, you can be whoever you want to be.

Come on," he said, and I said "Where?" and he said to the Great Wall, and I said why, and he said to see if he'll sponsor the team, and I said what team and he said the softball team, and I said oh yeah.

And so a few minutes later there was Dan and I walking over to the Great Wall, and Dan he kind of fell silent, an unusual thing for him, normally he talked a blue streak, but he just fell into this silence, his hands parked deep in his pants.  He was kind of nervous I could tell that, even though every now and then he just said, "This'll be great," and maybe the fourth time he said it, he turned to me and said, "Doncha think?"

Hell, what did I think.  Half an hour earlier I had thought it was the dumbest idea in the world, but then I'd had the vision of catching that centerfield ball, the wild crowd, the young girls in their little t shirts and short shorts jumping up and down, so what the hell, "It'll be great," I told Dan.

"You think so?" he asked and I said sure, and then he bumped my shoulder and said, "You do the talking."

Me?  Well it made sense.  Dan, a lot of people thought he was kind of strange.  He was in the Great Wall every night, but he was the kind of guy, well you wouldn’t pick the bar stool next to him unless it was the only open one.  Truth be told, he was kind of boring, all that White Sox talk, and all those stories.  Myself I kind of liked the stories, but only the first time around, and he tended to repeat himself, so you'd be sitting with Dan and having a nice enough conversation, but you'd also be looking around to see who was coming in the door, looking out for better opportunities.

Myself you know I had that gift of gab.  I could kind of tell what people wanted to hear, it was like pushing a button for me, shoot my mouth of and see where it went, I often amazed myself.  Not much of a sell guy though, not the kind of guy to talk somebody into anything, when it came down to brass tacks, I kind of drifted off.

And George, the owner, you know, he was like one of us.  After the dinner rush died down he was down in the bar with us.  He'd plunk down on a stool and tear off that paper hat he wore in the kitchen and pound on the bar, "Hey Eetch," and whatever Itch was doing, he'd drop it right off and there'd be a bottle of Bud in front of him, and then another, and then another.  He got as drunk as the rest of us, usually drunker, and go on about whatever, and by this time none of us would know what he was talking about, and he'd say, "You know what happens when you fuck a Chinaman?"  And everybody around him who knew the drill would say, "He fucks you right back," and he would nod his head sagely.

But then there was George the businessman.  Hell he owned the whole place, the biggest restaurant in campus town.  On weekends it was jammed, tables full of hungry customers, tiny waitresses hauling big oval battleships of dishes, wads of bills plunked down at the cashiers station, cooks, mad Chinamen all of them chopping chopping, smashing food into spinning woks, slamming dishes down, pickup, pickup.  How do you hold that all together?

You have to be a businessman.  And you could see that in him early in the day pacing around, looking at the food being brought in by the trucks, looking at bills through his reading glasses, tapping his fingers on the table tops, walking through his empire, moving a table here, a table there, setting everything up.

catfish 9

"When I think of all the good times that I've wasted, having good times..."

That's maybe the essence of the catfish story.  In September of 1971 I returned to Champaign, the draft behind me, having done my duty to my country, and free as a bird.  The House of Chin was just opening its expanded bar downstairs and my buddies had secured me a job tending it.  The work was easy, fun even, just like hanging out at the bar, which is what I did when I wasn't working there, except that every now and then you had to interrupt your conversation to pour a beer.  I got one or two, depending on my shift, good Chinese meals every shift I worked, and of course I would drink my way through each one, trying to stay only sober enough to count out the cash register at the end of the night.

The bar was full of people and entering it of a night, I had my choice of friends to hang with.  It was like walking into one of those Indian buffets where I always have to have a little bit of everything and end up eating way too much.

As customer or bartender I closed the bar every night.  Good times.  

But eventually most of my good time buddies moved on to more responsible things and I was left talking to the dregs and in January of 1985 I moved to Texas.

Now when I talk to some of my old pals about the good old says many of them wince, a little ashamed of their past behavior.  But I am not at all, I look at the days of irresponsible good times with rose colored glasses, and that is mostly what Catfish is about.

And now we move on to another development.

 Slap, slap, slap.  What is that?  Slap, slap, slap.  There it goes again.  What the hell?  Oh it's Dan.  I am waking up on his red couch in his frontroom, and Dan, Diamond Dan, is walking back and forth, pacing really, and slamming a baseball into a glove.  What the hell?

 Turning back from the far end of the frontroom, he looks at me like he is surprised he woke me up.  He tosses the ball up, puts a little spin on it and snatches it with a downward swoop of the glove, "Catfish, are you a baseball player?" he wants to know.

 What the hell?  "Oh yeah, I'm just hanging here, waiting to see how those contract talks go.  If they don't pay me my millions the Cubs can just find themselves another centerfielder."

 A little frown on his face at my mention of the Cubs.  I'd have said White Sox if I had more time to think about it.  I was sitting up on the couch at this point and he plunked himself down right next to me, looked me in the eye like he was sizing me up, and then resumed slamming the ball into the glove.  "We could use a centerfielder."

 "We?" I asked.

 "The team," he answered.

 "What team?"

 "The softball team."  He'd been slamming the ball all this time, but he stopped when he said that, fixed me with this stare like he was Moses climbing down that mountain. 

 He got up again, started pacing again, slamming the ball again.  "I've been thinking," he said, "Maybe we should have a softball team, you know us guys at The Great Wall, lot of us guys, you know, probably we could put a pretty good team together.  What do you think?"

 What did I think?  I thought it was a terrible idea.  Who the hell wants to play softball?  Oh it was popular, it was like the rage in Champaign at the time.  Every bar and dry cleaner in the city seemed to have a team, you'd be sitting in some bar all nice and quiet, and maybe putting the moves on some quiet little chick, and then bam, the doors would fly open, and a bunch of guys in red jerseys would pile in and raise a ruckus.  If they won they would all be slapping each other on the back and yelling, and if they lost they'd gather in little knots, all pissed at each other.  Dumbest idea in the world to get involved in that.  Last thing I would ever want to get involved in.

 But I was staying at Dan's apartment, sleeping on his couch, paying no rent, and as I watched him slamming that ball I recognized that glove.  It was my glove, the one I had shoved into my bag, God knows why, when I was packing up back in LaCrosse.  It must have spilled out when I'd laid the bag down.

 And so you know, I didn't know why, but I felt a little like I was responsible for putting this idea in Dan's head.  Oh it had maybe been percolating for some time, but a lot of ideas percolated in Dan's head, and most of them just faded out, but maybe that glove, just laying out in the open on that raggedy carpet had sparked him.

 And I owed him, that was for sure, and maybe it wasn't that bad an idea.  Those fish stories, they were getting a little old, and truth be told I wasn't a bad centerfielder.  I could see myself running, running, running, putting the glove up at just the right time, right at the top of my leap, the smack of the ball into the glove, myself into a somersault or two on the sweet forgiving grass, and rising pointing to the ball  secure in my glove, and the umpire declaring OUT, and the batter and the runners on first, second, and third all looking outraged, we wuz robbed, and myself trotting in from the outfield like it was no big deal. I could do that.

 I was pretty sure I could.

Catfish nuggets

Uncle Ken is firing on all cylinders with the ongoing tale of the Catfish.  #7 is particularly good with the dark turn the story takes with the introduction of Ron, who may (or may not) be the successor of Catfish as the main "character" at The Great Wall.  The dynamic social life of the bar continued during the absence of the Catfish and this Ron fellow seems to have slipped in to fill the void.  I'll patiently await further developments.

As I read about the The Great Wall a couple of old songs by The Animals started to echo in my mind, reminding me of my own experiences in the social life of a barfly.  "When I Was Young" and "Good Times" are the songs I'm thinking of, with their evocative lyrics. "When I think of all the good times that I've wasted, having good times..."  I wonder if the Catfish will become another Hank Chinaski.

-----

Artistic recognition is nice but I think the writer will write, the painter will paint, and the musician will bang away on the old piano whether or not they get the acknowledgement they deserve; they cannot do otherwise.  But that's just my opinion, man.

-----

I'm glad that Mr. Beagles is around to tend to the needs of his ailing Missus.  Please get well soon, Mrs. Beagles.

 

 

catfish 8

 Thank you very much Beagles.  That's why the writer writes, the painter paints, the musician bangs away on that old piano, to get some feedback, to know that my god, they aren't here all alone.  Oh it's nice to hear something good, but even, this is stupid and so are you is better than nothing.  

I wrote this maybe fifteen years ago, and I  have been editing it off and on since then, even now I am making little changes here and there.  It's loosely based on my days in Champaign.  Some events are altered and some are completely made up.  Some characters are based on real people and some are just made up.

I am sorry to hear that your wife is having health problems and I hope that comes out well.

Well shit and fuck.  I had made my entrance, I'd gotten laid, I really had no cause to complain.  I could have spent a few more hours curled up next to Tammy, caught up with more sleep, pressed myself up against her little blonde butt, maybe had another go at it, given her a true Catfish performance, but I was afraid she was going to puke again.

 So it was maybe 7 AM, same time I had gotten off the bus twenty four hours ago, and I was walking up Fourth Street back up to the bunkhouse with an empty stomach.  What with everybody buying me drinks the night before I still had plenty of money.  I could have stopped in at Carmen's and gotten a good breakfast, but I just never felt that I should have to pay for breakfast.

 Claudette was her name.  She was my first lay, the first time I ever showed up in Champaign, just a kid brother, Anne's kid brother.  Didn't even want to visit her, seemed like a boring thing, folks wanted me to do it.  "You're not doing anything this summer, why don't you just drop into Champaign for a visit, you know she would appreciate it."

 And I liked Anne well enough, we had always gotten along, but we all knew what the real reason was.  They wanted me to get a taste of that college thing, thought I might like it, might want to go myself.  That's what they wanted me to do, go to college.  Just something I didn't want to do at the time.  High school was tough enough, all that crap, was just glad to be done with it-

 Anyway I went, up to Champaign to visit my sister, just to keep a little peace in the family.  And it was just as bad as I thought it would be.  She was living in like this commune, some old house where all they ate was brown rice and sometimes for a treat a little broccoli, and talked about dumb stuff all night long.

 And come Sunday, I was checking out that bus schedule.  And Anne was feeling bad, that I was feeling so bad, and she asked if there was something that I'd like to do.  "Well I'd like to go to a bar," I said, and as it turned out there was a bar that her crowd went to once in awhile.

 The Great Wall, which was not a real bar, just a bar in a restaurant, a Chinese restaurant at that.  But still they had beer there so I was happy to go along.

 I didn't expect much of it, figured the crowd would be pretty dead like in Anne's commune, just going on and on about stuff that didn't make any sense, each one just wanting to show that they were smarter than the other, but beer you know, beer can make any time a good time. 

 It was kind of rough though getting enough beer to make it a good time.  Anne's crowd they just sipped their beer, my glass was empty and theirs were still three quarters full, and I didn't feel right getting another until they were all done.  I was never going to get drunk at this rate.  But there was this one guy in the commune, Ed, who I hadn't noticed right away, kind of quiet and working nights and getting home late, but he wasn't working that night and when the subject of going out to a bar came up he just lit up.  His glass was empty as soon as mine was, and he got up to go to the bar, and seeing me sitting in front of an empty glass, he asked if I didn't want to go up and get another.  Boy did I.  When we got to the bar there were a couple of empty stools and we slid right in. 

 This commune crowd was really into movies.  It was one of the things they talked about endlessly, what this meant, and what that meant, they drove me crazy.  Especially foreign movies which to me were really boring, black and white and the characters spending a lot of time just staring at each other, say something, anything, I wanted to shout at the screen, but they just stared.  Ed was into movies too, but the thing was he made movies.  Not real movies, but he had a camcorder and he made movies of the comings and goings of the commune.  Oh they liked that well enough, they liked to think that they were like beatniks, that one day this one would be famous for writing and this one would be famous for painting, and I don't know what all, but they would all be famous one day, and it was a good thing that somebody was around to film this all.

 So they really liked Ed's movies, mostly because they were all in them, which was the main reason I didn't like them that much.  And Ed could be a little boring, he kind of droned on about camera stuff, but his beer was empty at the same time that mine was, and we were having a pretty good time.

 Which I could see, glancing back from time to time at her table, was making Anne nervous.  Anne believed that drinking was perfectly fine as long as you didn't get drunk, which made no sense at all to me.  Maybe Ed and I had gone through three quick beers by the time she untangled herself from her table and was standing next to me all smiles and I could tell she was trying to get the words out about how you didn't want to get too drunk, but wasn't sure about how to get into the subject, when she saw Claudette sitting at the end of the bar.

 "Oh John," she said, "I want you to meet a very good friend of mine."  Her main motivation was to get me away from Ed and those quickly emptying glasses, but she was my older sister and I let myself be practically dragged away to the end of the bar. 

 "Claudette," she said, almost shrieked the way girls sometimes do. "I want you to meet my brother."  Claudette looked up a little startled.  And then with that same force that she had dragged me to the end of the bar with, she put me into the stool next to Claudette.  She swiveling to greet Anne, and myself swiveling in our knees knocked. 

 Which got my attention, but before I could stammer out some kind of apology or whatever Anne was going on, about how Claudette was a poet and had been published in the campus literary magazine, which what the hell would that have to do with me, but like I said this was all about getting me away from Ed, and possibly some way of elevating me, though I can't say I ever remembered seeing Anne reading any poetry.  But her mission was accomplished, and a pat or two on Claudette's and my shoulders and she was off and I was left with Claudette the poet with whom I had just knocked knees.

 "Poetry huh?" I said, the smoothest line I could think of at the moment, and she paused a second and came back with, "Can I buy you a drink?" and my head bobbed up and down, and I came back with, "Now that's poetry," and she laughed, and like they say in that movie that the Healey commune was so crazy about, this began a beautiful friendship.
 
This and that and this and that, she didn't want to talk about poetry and thank God for that, but she didn't talk much at all and that was a problem, so I just launched into talk about LaCrosse, which there wasn't much to say about that either, so I kind of threw in some tall tales, just to make it interesting, and it seemed like she liked that so I started laying it on heavier, and she liked that even more, and here way back then was the beginning of Catfish, the spinner of tales, and the beers kept coming, and she was putting away her little dainty glasses of wine, and the next thing you know we were stumbling arm and arm down to her apartment, and I got laid for the first time in Champaign, hell for the first time anywhere for me.  I had bragged a lot with the guys in LaCrosse, but the fact was that I was no great shakes there, never even gotten, like we said there, the stinky finger.
 
I was in love.  Went back up to LaCrosse at the end of the weekend and basically just packed up my stuff, and moved rightaway to Champaign and into Claudette's apartment.  Which was fine, just fine.  She was a little skinny but she had these big beautiful eyes, soulful eyes, sad eyes, which sounds pretty and they were, but they were sad, and that gets on a guy after awhile.  She was a bit of a lush, and nothing wrong with that, but she wanted to do all her lushing in her dark little apartment and I was into bright lights big city.  It didn't end up well, her big sad eyes all wet, and me packing up my stuff.  I felt bad about it, but truth be told not that bad anticipating that bright playing field ringing the bar of The Great Wall.
 
And things hadn't gone that well for Claudette.  That poetry thing doesn't get you that far, and whatever she was doing in school didn't do that well for her either, and the last I heard she was waitressing at Carmen's, and I didn't want to run into her there , and that's probably the main reason I didn't want to go to Carmen's.
 
Made me sad, I have to tell you, walking a block out of my way, just to avoid passing by Carmen's, avoid passing by that plate glass window, where I knew I'd have to look inside to see if Claudette was still there, walking up to the kitchen to see if her order was up, if it was sliding those eggy dishes onto her tray, turning that slow sad turn of hers back towards the tables, big eyes blinking as she adjusted the tray on her narrow shoulder, stepping between the tables in her comfortable waitress shoes, looking up for a second, just long enough to see me walking past on the sidewalk and glancing in.
 
Oh geez what was I thinking?  It was because I needed sleep, needed to collapse on Dan's red couch, forget about pukey Tammy, about this Don guy, about that fat old guy on the bus, just a little shut eye that's all I needed to get back to normal, to become Catfish again.

It's a Fine Story

 My wife has been experiencing health problems lately, and I have been busy helping her out, but I look forward to reading each new chapter in the continuing saga.  Uncle Ken, are you writing a new segment each day or did you have the whole thing completed ahead of time?

Catfish 7

 So there I am standing outside the door, counting down the minutes from the time and temp of the bank across the street, and then I pull it door open.  Aa good enough crowd, plenty good enough.  And they are still unsettled, still half an eye on the door, looking to see who will else will drop in tonight.

 And it's Catfish.  Oh, I keep my head a little low as I step into the doorway, but like I said they are watching the door, and what can I say.  There is just a little bit of a hush when they aren't sure who it is, and then it's Catfish!  Catfish!  Damn look who it is.  He's back!  He's back!  Hands are offered, my back is slapped, and a beer is shoved into my hand.  It's just what I wanted.  I am so glad that I came back.  I see a couple young babes craning their necks, who is this guy?  Oh it's just heaven, it's just paradise.

 And I'm standing out there in the aisle behind the barstools which are all wiveled now to face me with my Catfish is back smile on my face and the beer in my hand, and before I can take a sip somebody is saying, "You gotta meet Ron!" and I'm stopped a little bit, who the fuck is Ron?  Tell you the truth, I'm a little bit annoyed to be sharing my glory with some stranger, but what the hell?

 I'm kind of shoved along by a cheerful crowd, barely able to get a drink of my beer, and then there's Ron, a heavyset guy wearing an old camouflage jacket, hat pulled down low over his eyes which he flips up to look at me.  "So you're Catfish," he says, "Heard a lot about you," and he offers me a hammy hand which I pump, but the last pump is his, and it’s a little too hard.

 My first thought is that this guy is wrong, just wrong, I could see it as clear as day.  And I think he saw me, saw right through me, through all my Catfish stuff, to all that uneasy queasy stuff like I went through on the bus on the way over, where in Champaign I'm this character, this cocksman, this fucking Natty Bumppo.  Well I don't know who the fuck Natty Bumppo is, Itch called me that one time, and you know Itch, you never know if he is complimenting you or insulting you, but he's some character in one of those old novels, some coonskin cap pioneer guy, kind of like Catfish I guess.

 "So how's fishing, Catfish?" he wants to know.  And you know if it was one of those college kids who asked me that, I'd be perfectly ready to tell some tall tales, about how, I don't know, I'd been chewing bubble gum, and just as a hunch I'd wrapped a wad around my bait, and got a bite as soon as I dropped in the hook, but it was a big bull catfish and he chased me up and down that river, and every now and then I could see him pop out of that river with big pink balloons sticking out of his gills.   See a story like that even those college kids wouldn't quite believe it, but they'd eat it up anyway.

 But I knew Ron wouldn't eat it up so I just said, "Oh fine, fine, they're just jumping out of the water, just dying to get in that old frying pan," and I gave him a big smile.

 "Jumping fish huh?"  He looked at his beer, but didn't pick it up.  "Must be nice.  Generally I have to drown a worm or two before I can get any fish to pucker up over my hook.  But hey, that's just me, I'm not an expert like you Catfish, nobody calls me that, they just call me Drown the worm Ron.  Maybe I can learn a lot from you, do you think?"

 "Oh I don't know, I'm just lucky I guess," I answered, backpedaling from my boastful self, not liking the way this conversation was going, wanting to get back to my Great Wall pals, and back to those girls who had swiveled their necks at my entrance.  But Ron wasn't done.  "Lucky huh?" he wanted to know, "You think you'll be getting lucky tonight?"

 Truth be told, I'm taken a little bit short by this, a little nervous talking to this guy who probably knows more about fishing than I pretend to know, afraid he's going to get into details about hooks and bait, and hell I know that's all bullshit anyway, Hell, lying and making up stories is mostly what fishing is all about anyway, but still.  Anyway I let out a, "Huh?" but then I catch my stride.  "Hell yes, the Catfish always gets lucky."  Now we are talking about something I know about.

 "That's what I hear," Ron replies.  "I don't think it should be too hard, these girls here are pretty fucking easy," and he stubs out his cigarette.

 "Yeah," I say, but as soon as I say it I wish I hadn't.  First I don't like it because it's like I'm agreeing that these girls, my beautiful Great Wall coeds are a bunch of sluts, which is not the way I think of them at all, and second it's like my whole reputation, Catfish the Charmer, Catfish the Wham Bam Thank You Ma'am Guy is nothing special, and thirdly, it's that this guy Ron has been sticking his pole in my fishing hole.

 "Nice talking to you" I say, stepping out of the barstool but my foot gets caught up in the bottom rung so that I stumble a little, and Ron catches me, that hammy hand on my jacket, and leans in and says, "See you around," and I don't like that either.

 Further down the bar though, there's still plenty of Catfish fans, plenty of clapping me on the back, I'm backed up maybe three four drinks most of the night, Itch pouring them out one at a time out of that pretty gold tap. "And yet another one for Catfish," he announces and everyone cheers, and it's just great.  

 Tammy was her name, cute little blonde girl, pretty sure she was one of those girls who swiveled her head when I was entering, pretty drunk, sloe gin fizzes pink around her lips, but there's nothing wrong with that.  Normally I do some scouting, but there she was sitting on the bar stool right next to me.  As soon as I, concluding a tall story, slipped my arm around her shoulders I knew she was a sure thing.

 Normally I like to give a good performance, but she was really drunk by the time we stumbled into her little studio coed apartment, and I was pretty loaded too.  That getting up and puking right afterwards that didn’t have anything to do with me, it was all that sloe gin.  In the morning she was hungover and got sick again.  I accompanied her into the bathroom like a gentleman, but then she fell flat back into bed and fell right asleep and there were no eggs and bacon for Catfish.

Well how do you guys like it so far?  Any comments?  Any anything?

catfish 6

 Alone on my own in Champaign at 7 in the morning, The Great Wall wouldn't be open till eleven.  There's a little crowd that shows up there around noon, people who work on campus dropping in to wash down their lunch with a couple beers, and others who aren't working just dropping in to have a place to go.  There’s a little better crowd around five after work, but you know I wanted to make an entrance, Catfish is back, and there wouldn't be a good enough crowd for that until maybe ten at night.  So a lot of time to kill, and I needed to catch up on some sleep, so the place to go would be Diamond Dan's, or as I liked to call it, the bunkhouse.

 He had the whole first floor in one of those bigass old houses a little north of campus, a big frontroom, and  a lot of couches, sometimes a mattress or two on the floor.  It's where you went when you were down on your luck.  You couldn't pay any rent, but if you came into a little money you could buy some groceries, or better beer.  Ah I knew those couches, the red one that was the best one, you slept like a baby in that one,  the green one was okay, but a little short for a big guy like me so I had to scrunch up a bit, and the blue one was kind of broken in the middle. Couldn’t get much sleep out of that one unless you were pretty drunk, and even then you would be sore in the morning.  Well I didn't know who was staying there now, and I suspected that the red one would be taken, but I kind of had hopes for the green one.

 Dan's a great guy, but kind of boring sometimes, a big sports fan, he can go on and on, and he never notices that you are kind of nodding off and just keeps going on ratatat, which is why when I stumbled in I wasn't delighted to see him holding that stained coffee cup, his eyes and mouth wide open.  You know that whole sports thing, we guys are always supposed to be interested in it, and I like sports well enough, well I pretend to, chicks dig it.  Okay, not really, but they like to think that their man is into sports, because then when I say something like oh man I really want to watch the Orange Bowl, but I'll give that all up, just to be with you, well then they are all impressed.

 But when it's just you and Dan, and no chicks around to impress, it gets really boring, especially when that green couch is sitting empty and looking so good, and you can just see where your head will rest, and really it's not going to be such a scrunch, and Ted, over there on the red couch is beginning to yawn and stretch a little, almost ready to roll off. 

 But Dan has gone on through basketball and football, and it's like he's just warming up, getting the lesser stuff out of the way, so he can get his concentration on what really interests him, what really floats his boat, and that's the White Sox.  Most of these college kids at Champaign are from Chicago, and Itch and most of the others I hang with were college kids once so they are too.  What it is is that there is the north side and the south side, and the north side is the rich side so that's mostly where they come from, and the Cubs are the north side team and so most everybody here is a Cub fan.  But Dan is from the south side so he is a White Sox fan.  Has a bit of a chip on his shoulder about it, which I guess you can understand coming from the south side where everybody is a Sox fan to Champaign where everybody is a Cub fan.

 Myself I'm a bit of an outsider to all that, coming from Wisconsin and all, though I've adapted to being a Cub fan because that is who most of the babes root for, and they have this sad lovable loser image which just leads straight to romance.  But outside of pitching Cubbie woo, I'm not that rabid about it, so maybe Dan thinks I'm someone he could convert.  At any rate when he bad mouths the Cubs I don't put my back up.  Which doesn't make that much difference anyway, because when he is on that White Sox roll, fired up with that grimy coffee cup, which he refills without a pause, yelling from the kitchen, he is in his own world.

 And meanwhile Ted has left that comfy red couch and stumbled off to the bathroom, so it sits open now and aching for Catfish's aching bones, and I'm watching Dan's flapping jaws through half-shut eyes, which is alright really, because the longer it takes me to curl into that red paradise the longer it will be till I wake up, and there is a lot of time to kill before I make my entrance into the Great Wall.  Too early and there won't be anybody there, too late and the crowd will be already into their own things and not so responsive to Catfish coming back.

 Well this and that, this and that, a nice long snooze on the sweet red couch, no disturbing dreams like on that damn Greyhound bus, some TV in the empty bunkhouse, a little stroll out for a sandwich, but no dropping in on old pals, don't want to get the word out, don't want to dampen my entrance.  As nine approaches I'm getting a little giddy, pop the top on an Old Style to relax myself just a little.  All the while I'm thinking isn't this a little silly, this whole windup.  But you know I need this, the big entrance.  I need to feel the buzz, just to know it is all worth it, my coming back to Champaign, because there is a little doubt. Just a bit of feeling that maybe there isn't that much difference between me and the fat old guy sitting next to me on the bus. 

Don't Get Around Much Anymore

I seem to remember that we have traded our old car stories in the past.  I have had my new pickup for a year and a half now, and I have put less than 2000 miles on it.  Back in the day, I would have easily put that many miles on it in a month.  I have never had to re-take the road test, but maybe it starts after 76 like in Illinois.  There is a short written test, five or six multiple choice questions, and you can't fail it.  If you get any wrong answers they just tell you about it.  I don't know why they even bother with it.  There is an eye test and they take your picture, that's about all.  Of course a new driver getting his first license goes through a lot more than that.  

catfish 5

 Well I'm glad that you are enjoying Catfish.  It is as you said, a fictional story borrowing heavily from my experiences,  Some of the stuff in it really happened and some of the characters are loosely based on people I knew, and some of them are entirely made up.

I had kind of hoped that my previous post about getting too old would elicit stories from the dogs about the cars they drove, maybe how they learned to drive, how they felt about having to take road tests lately, that sort of thing.  But I guess that is a pot that cannot be stirred.

Back to Catfish.

After Farmer City we were back on the interstate, just a smooth twenty mile ride until Champaign, and I have to tell you my toes tingled, ah to be stepping onto those sunny sidewalks once again, to be Catfish once again.  See back in Lacrosse I was just John, just the guy who they went to high school with, who played a pretty good centerfield for the baseball team, made some flashy plays even, but at the plate, not so hot, just another picture in the yearbook. Some guy who was working at the Goddamn 7-11, and living in his parents' house.

 But in Champaign, these college kids you know, I was kind of a character for them, kind of Joe Sixpack personified, kind of well I remember one of the babes I nailed there early on, said, cooking up eggs and bacon the next morning, "Catfish," she had said, looking back at me lounging in her sweet little bed, "You are just so,” looking back at me with a shiny smile, “You are just so authentic."

 Authentic, what the hell did that mean?  Well I knew what the word meant, but why was I authentic?  Well these college kids, you know they are all kind of rich and they come from big cities, and they are just taking classes while around them most people are working, and in some way they don't think they are real people, just the way it is, and so when she called me authentic, I didn't skip a beat and just sat down to that plateful of eggs and bacon.  And that's what I was thinking about, eggs and bacon frying up in the pan, cooked up by some college cutie wearing maybe just a sweatshirt in the morning careful to keep those bacon spatters away from her milky white thighs, Goddamn Catfish was back in town. 

 I Gathered up my stuff and got ready to push past the fat old guy, but he was gathering up his stuff too, getting off at Champaign just like me.  "Nothing like Champaign in the morning huh?" I said, by way of making a little conversation, and he stopped gathering his stuff up and looked me straight in the face and said, "No, nothing like it.  I Feel kind of good about it, this time I’m hoping that - " and then someone coming down the aisle bumped him so he never got to finish that sentence, and he looked back at me, and then just kind of shook his head like he realized then that I had just been making conversation and shoved himself into the aisle and I followed him bumping down towards the front of the bus until my feet hit the good solid ground of Champaign.

Checking In

 Sorry about my lack of posting lately, but I can't seem to come up with anything worthwhile.  I have been following the Catfish story with interest. I assume it's a work of fiction, inspired by events in the lives of Uncle Ken and people he has known over the years, with just enough spin on it to protect the author from lawsuits.  Remember the disclaimer they used to put on the old "Dragnet" TV series?  They insisted that the names were changed to protect the innocent, but everybody knew the real reason was to protect the writers from getting sued.     

I see that there has been a bit of a "surge" in illegal border crossings lately, but I have been waiting for it to get worse before saying "I told you so!"  

The end of the road

 A little personal note today to break up the Catfish story.  Old Dog seems to enjoy it, but I haven't heard anything from Beagles on the subject.  Feel free to comment you guys if you are of a mood.

It is my lazy habit to toss mail that needs to be dealt with into a folder to be taken care of whenever.  Whenever turned out to be yesterday and there among the envelopes was my driver's license renewel.  And suddenly i realized my birthday was Monday.  I just had a few days to deal with this. 

And how do I deal with this?  Will I need to take some kind of test?  Vision?  Maybe, seems like I remember taking that in the past.  Written?  Seems like maybe I have also needed to take that in the past.  Road?  Geez, I don't remember taking that since I was eighteen.  But wait, isn't there some age where suddenly you have to start taking that test again on a regular basis? 

I tried to call the place downtown where I always go, but they were closed because of the covid, and so was this place and that place, and lots of busy signals and those calm messages about how they were busy now and call back later.  I just wanted to hear somebody tell me something.

And finally I reached someone.  And yes, at 76 I have reached the age where I will have to start taking the road test on a regular basis.  I will need a car, and I will need insurance, and of course that is not going to happen.  I am at the end of the road.

I remember my dad teaching me to drive, but I think I scared him a bit, and soon I was in one of those embarrasing  driving school cars with the stupid sign above the roof.  I flunked the driving test the first time but passed the second.  The family got a new car and I kind of inherited the old one.  A white 1960 Ford which I named the white tornado after a commercial by Ajax, the foaming cleanser which I drove to work that summer. but always left parked in front to the house when me and my neighborhood pals went drinking.  But I drove it down to college in 65 and got drunk and wrecked it.

Didn't drive again until 1969 when I went down to Herrin for my CO and just had to have a car to get around. and to drive up to Champaign on the weekends to get drunk with my Champaign buddies.  My first car was a Corvair, one of those cars that had a tendancy to flip when they got a flat tire as mind did.  After that I had a 1964 Ford Fairlane which I drove up to Urbana when my work in Herrin was done, by which time it didn't run very well and eventually I sold it to some guy who entered it into the demo derby at the county fair.

When I came back from Texas in 1987 my mother had me drive the car sometimes because she was a little afraid of my dad's driving which had become erratic by then.  And that's the extent of my driving.

My dad loved to drive.  We didn't have a car until I was 8 and we got a pea green 1953 Ford Customline.  He drove it all the time.  For vacation that year we drove around Lake Michigan.  We went with this other couple that the folks used to hang with, and I guess that the other guy expected to do some of the driving but my dad would not give up the wheel.  All our vacations after that involved a lot of driving.  Dad loved being behind the wheel, in command.

So I know it was tough on him when his time came to take the regular tests, how he sweated it.  When we get old they start taking things away from us, and this was one thing he didn't want to give up.  I think maybe he kept driving even after he lost his license.  I remember mom telling me that they had sideswiped a parked car and just kept on going because they would be in big trouble if they got caught.  Like teenagers, they were outlaws.

Not a big deal for me though.  Just five more days until I will no longer be able to legally drive, but I guess I won't mind this thing being taken away from me.

catfish 4

 You know that bus, that old grey dog is not a bad way to travel.  Itch, he says the only people that ride the bus are the scum of the earth and college students.  He kind of likes to say these nasty things, lean across the bar and maybe take a quick glance to the left and the right as if he's afraid he might be insulting somebody, as if he cared, and then he says it like it's just between you and him.

 But what the hell the scum of the earth don't bother me none, still good people, just a little down on their luck is all, and college students, half of them are babes, and half of them, hell two thirds, are pretty hot, a pleasure to watch their blue jean butts as they shove their college crap up on the overheads, and if you're lucky maybe one of them will drop one of their little butts on the seat next to you and be swaying into you on the curves in the road, and you can strike up a little conversation, and already begin to be lucky before you even cruise into Champaign.

 No babe on this trip though, just some old fat guy.  Oh, had a little conversation with him about this and that, the weather, some sports and then what the hell, girls, but that just got him started on girls he’d known, and maybe and ex-wife or two.  I’m not sure because I stopped listening thinking about how those girls were probably old and fat now like him, and it wasn’t a pleasant thought, and I took to just looking out the window.  Not much scenery, just corn and soybean fields and little towns in between, but that was okay because every town was one town closer to Champaign,that land of milk and honey.

I settled into my seat and was ready for some sleep.  And that's where things went kind of bad because I couldn't fall asleep.  I got to thinking and the thinking wasn't so good.  I thought of something Itch said one night.  You know, he's always trying to show everybody how smart he is, and that night, we were all pretty loaded like usual, and he got into talking about the dark night of the soul, whatever that was, and at the time made a pretty good crack and got the crowd to laugh at him, and that was pretty cool, but it always bothered me, that phrase, dark night of the soul.

 And maybe that's what I was feeling then, riding that grey dog in the dark of night, with that fat old guy bumping up against me at every bump.  Because the thing was that thing about the scum of the earth and college students, I was always thinking of myself as a college student type because I was just a little older than them, but I had never actually been to college, and I had never had a job that paid good so maybe I was closer to the scum of the earth.

  Well I tell you I tossed and turned, as much as you can toss and turn sitting on one of those narrow seats with some old fat guy bouncing against you at every bump and me thinking is he the future Catfish, is this me twenty years from now, returning to Champaign for maybe the fiftieth time?  Well that's just crazy thinking, just crazy, the kind of thinking that creeps up on you in the darkness of the interstate. just the hum of the tires, and the soft snoring, and the bobbing of the sleeping heads, and nothing to see outside the window so it's like you're not going anywhere, and if you're not sleeping like everybody else, well you’re just by yourself.

 Caught a little sleep finally, but fell into this weird dream, the funeral of Catfish in Champaign, kind of a documentary really, and I was watching it and was a little impressed with all the cars following the hearse and kind of liked the way at the end they hoisted my body onto the bar at the Great Wall under the taps and turned them on.  Not so happy about the way I dissolved and went down that drain, but by then I was lurched awake by the bus hitting the off ramp to Farmer City  which was the last stop before Champaign.

Catfish 3

 The Old Style was cold that night and after three or four I told Mom I'd quit my job.  That didn't make her too happy.  When I told her I was going to California that made her even more unhappy. 

 "But Son, I thought you said you were going to stay here."

 "Ahhh, I know, I know," I said, "but it's just not working out."

 "You said you were never going back to Champaign again."

 "Champaign?  Why do you say Champaign?  I told you, I'm going to California."

 Mom hated Champaign.  She thought that was where I went wrong, which I don’t know where they thought I was going before.  Still it was a hard place to for me to leave once I got there, life was just so easy, and now that Mom had mentioned it, it did not seem so bad at all.  Much better to be waiting for happy hour at the Great Wall than having some old coot yelling at you for not wiping down the Goddamn candy bars.

 You know what I could do, and this was just an idea, Champaign was more or less on the way to California, I could stop there along the way, maybe I could get a good job there, make some money, just enough to get up a stake to take to California, just stay until I'd made enough money, no longer, just enough money to make my way to California.  Of course I'd never had a good job in Champaign, but then I'd never looked very hard.  And there was talk about that new nuclear plant being built just down the road.  Construction jobs, they paid a lot of money, probably wouldn't take too long, not long at all.

 And so I thought about it.  I had to say it sounded like a good idea.  But you know in my earlier plan, when I'd thought about stopping off in Champaign, that had sounded pretty good.  Be kind of nice to sit in the Great Wall and drink a few with my old friends there.  Once I was gone to California I'd never see them again, I should really spend some time with them before I was gone for good.  Really that was probably the best way to do this.

The folks didn't think so.  They even offered me a loan so that I could go straight to California, but by now I had my heart set.

There was some trouble around the house for a few days, and then I was packing up.  And that's when I put that glove into my bag.  I'd played center field in high school, and I guess it had been laying around in my old room ever since then, and it was laying on top of some stuff and well maybe it would bring me luck. I just stuffed it into my bag.

A fungus among us

 Glad to be reading some of the latest posts; they grab my interest and I don't get worked over things beyond my control.  The link about the singing finches was a hoot.  Competitive warbling, who knew there was such a thing?  Uncle Ken's tale of the Catfish has some familiarity to me, like the character made an earlier appearance in these postings.  Good stuff, though, and I look forward to reading the tale as it unfolds.

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Earlier, as Mr. Beagles talked about the Great Yeast Shortage of 2020, I suggested sourdough bread, using the yeast that is floating in the air.  Mr. Beagles suggested that it's not as easy as the YouTubers make it look, and further research proves him correct (not for the first time).  Jeez, what a production!  I started a culture in early February and it's doing very well but I'm still not sure how much starter, flour, and water are required; there's a lot going on and there are many successful methods, or so it seems.  I don't understand the overnight proofing in the refrigerator so in the meantime I've been baking some regular bread, using normal yeast, in normal loaf pans.  Stuff tastes great (to me) and it would have looked better if my yeast wasn't nearly a year out of date and I hadn't misread the recipe, using teaspoons instead of tablespoons.  So it didn't rise as much as it should have, I'll call it a rookie mistake.  I'm in no hurry to bake any sourdough as long as the starter is healthy and happy; it could last forever.  Cinnamon/Raisin seems like a nice bread to bake next.

The sourdough folk are quite an interesting group, almost religious in their fervor.  You can go online and buy sourdough starters going back more than a hundred years, from all over the world.  It would be interesting to compare the variants from different locations and compare their taste.  An unofficial tradition of the sourdough nuts is to give your starter a name, a sense of humor is always appreciated.  In that vein, I present to you Sour Dog, proof that the Beaglesonian Institute has culture.

Catfish 2

 Nothing looked better than those big Old Style cans in front of the brewery when the bus pulled into LaCrosse that morning.  But Mongo, he'd married some little blonde who would hardly let him out of the house, and Deke, he was always putting in overtime at the brewery.  Does that make any sense, working in a fucking brewery, and no time to drink beer?  And the only job I could get was at that Goddamn 7-11. 

 And it wasn’t long before that job got awfully old.  I had been hoping that we would be putting the old gang together.  Maybe Mongo would dump that blonde, and maybe Deke wouldn’t be putting in so much overtime and we’d have time to drink some beers, catch some fish, and girls, there would be girls around.  Damn I hadn’t had a girl since I’d left Champaign.  They say spring does that to you, turns your fancy is the way they put it.

 Like the girl in that Old Style poster behind the cash register caught my attention, dark-haired, halter-topped, her little tanned belly button right at the bottom of the poster just above where her belly began to curve forward as she was leaning forward to take a cold one from some guy, you could just see his hand, but the way she was looking at him you could tell he was probably going to get lucky.  Damn.

 And the old guy, the owner, standing in front of the poster, blocking my view, grumbling, always grumbling, didn’t like the way business was a little slow, didn’t like the way I didn’t pick up the broom when there weren’t any customers, sweep up a little, the place looked like a Goddamn pig sty, what the hell was he paying me for?

 And the candy section, some of those bars, the ones that didn’t sell so well, he rubbed his finger across them and showed it to me.

 “Dust!” he proclaimed.  “Who the hell is going to buy a dusty candy bar?  Would it kill you to go through them with a damp rag, polish them up a little?  What the hell am I paying you for?”

 And just then the tinkle sound of the front door as some smiling high school girls walked in and I turned around to look at them, and this apparently pissed him off even more because he put his hand on my shoulder and again with the “What the hell am I paying you for?”

 "Fuck you," I answered, "I'm going to California."  Didn’t know where that came from but once I’d said it, it felt so right, just like what I should be doing, just like the forty-niners, going out to strike it rich. 

 Of course I didn't know anybody in California, but what the hell, I've never had trouble making friends, and those California girls, you know they'd fall for a ruggedly outdoorishly, handsome guy like me, fall just like those oranges off the trees.  Yeah California was the place to go.

 As soon as I said it I was damn sure of it.  I had a Beach Boys tape on the floor of Mom's car and I stuck it into the player, and sang along at the top of my lungs all the way back to the house, "Wish they all could be California, wish they all could be California, wish they all could be California gurllllls."

Catfish 1

 As that undervalued philosopher Ricky Nelson once said,  ya can't please everyone so ya got to please yourself, and since none of my posts for the last month have pleased either of the dawgs I am going to tell you guys a story.  It's a pretty long story and here is the beginning.

 

So I was sitting at the bar at the Great Wall, kind of nursing my beer, kind of killing time until five o’clock when the guys with jobs would be coming in, thirsty and eager to talk to someone who wasn’t the boss, glad to see their pal Catfish, happy to set him up with a new full one, but then, out of nowhere I began having these thoughts, troubling thoughts.   

Troubling thoughts along the line of so what kind of life is this?  Same old guys, same old jokes, same old sponging, where is this ever getting me beyond the next beer?  What the hell was I doing in this town?  Where was this ever going to get me?  Just the same old shit everyday, sitting in the same damn bar, in the same damn bar stool even, talking to the same damn people I'd been talking to yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that. 

 I needed, well I needed to do something different, but what?  I took a drink of beer and gave the matter a little thought.  I needed a big change.  I needed to leave town.  That would be the ticket.  .  But where could I go that would make any difference?  I didn’t really want to ask Itch the bartender who was kind of a smartass, but there was nobody else in the bar.

 I finished my beer, signaled for another one and as he set it before me I told him, "Itch, I gotta go."

 He looked over at the john.  "Well go then."

 "You asshole.  No I gotta go. I gotta get out of this town."

 "Where you gonna go?"

 "I don't know, I thought you’d tell me.  You're so smart, where do you think I oughta go?"

 "Where to go, where to go.  Where does one go, when one leaves this little hunk of heaven?"  Nice guy that Itch, but he could be awfully irritating sometimes.  "I suppose you could go home."

 "It's still happy hour," I protested.

 "No, Home, home.  LaCrosse isn't it?  The home of the very beer you're drinking now.  You know what Robert Frost said?"

 "No, I don't know what Robert Frost said."

 "He said home is where you go and they have to take you in."

 Well if that wasn't the stupidest thing I ever heard, but still I got to thinking about it. People would be glad to see me there.  Mom and Dad would be glad to put me up. Probably could get a job at the brewery.   I could look up my old buddies Deke and Mongo and the other guys, go fishing, drink beer, chase the women around.  So much better than sponging beers and talking to smartass bartenders.  I would be back where I started from, I could make a whole new start.  I could become, well who knows? 

But just then the door flew open and in walked Ted freed from mowing the lawns of the University and eager to wash away those mower fumes with a cold one and eager to hear a story from his old Pal Catfish.  He put up two fingers and Itch headed back to the tap. 

 Well tomorrow then, first thing in the morning I would be leaving Champaign and heading back to LaCrosse, God’s country.