January 7: Terribly Attractive Visions, Disney Past Life, Beer and Schnitzel

Back to the saga of Arthur Dent.  Arthur is still lying in front of the bulldozer, arguing with Mr. Prosser, the man in charge of demolishing Arthur's house . . .

Mr. Prosser said, "You were quite entitled to make any suggestions or protests at the appropriate time you know."

"Appropriate time?" hooted Arthur.  "Appropriate time?  The first I knew about it was when a workman arrived at my home yesterday.  I asked him if he'd come to clean the windows and he said no he'd come to demolish the house.  He didn't tell me straight away of course.  Oh no.  First he wiped a couple of windows and charged me a fiver.  Then he told me."

"But Mr. Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months."

"Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon.  You hand't exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them had you?  I mean like actually telling anybody or anything."

"But the plans were on display . . ."

"On display?  I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."

"That's the display department."

"With a flashlight."

"Ah, well the lights had probably gone."

"So had the stairs."

"But look, you found the notice didn't you?"

"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did.  It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'" 

A cloud passed overhead.  It cast a shadow over Arthur Dent as he lay propped up on his elbow in the cold mud.  It cast a shadow over Arthur Dent's house.  Mr. Prosser frowned at it.

"It's not as if it's a particularly nice house," he said.

"I'm sorry, but I happen to like it."

"You'll like the bypass."

"Oh, shut up," said Arthur Dent.  "Shut up and go away, and take your bloody bypass with you.  You haven't got a leg to stand on and you know it."

Mr. Prosser's mouth opened and closed a couple times while his mind was for a moment filled with inexplicable but terribly attractive visions of Arthur Dent's house being consumed with fire and Arthur himself running screaming from the blazing ruin with at least three hefty spears protruding from his back.  Mr. Prosser was bothered with visions like these and they made him feel very nervous.  He stuttered for a moment and then pulled himself together.

Mr. Prosser, who is distantly descended from Genghis Khan, although he doesn't know it, is bothered by visions of spears and fire and destruction.  Perhaps deep ancestral memories imprinted in the cells of his brain.  A fragment of a past life soul pushing its way to the surface of his mind.  Evidence of some latent psychopathic tendency.

If I were to choose a person whom I was in a past life, I would have a few candidates.  Charles Dickens--I've always felt a particular kinship to him and his manic writing life.  Flannery O'Connor--minus the whole dying of lupus thing.  Robert Frost--although I would never be able to raise chickens (nasty birds).  For the last several days, however, I'm thinking that perhaps I have a little Walt Disney in me.  Not the parts where he was terrified of communists and provided names to HUAC in the 1950s.  No, I'm talking about the guy who came up with the idea for a cartoon of an unassuming little mouse and built a whole universe based on that notion.

And here I sit in a place that started with that little, black-and-white fella.  It is 61 degrees outside my door at the moment, and I just received an e-mail from my kids' school district that classes have been cancelled for today because of a winter storm and hazardous driving conditions.  That actually made me laugh out loud.  If I were home at the moment, I'd be cursing and staring out the window, watching snowplows blow by.  Instead, after I'm done with this post, I'll be putting on a pair of shorts and getting ready to head out to an amusement park (EPCOT, I think, today).

We spent yesterday at Hollywood Studios.  I went on some thrill rides--the Tower of Terror and Rock 'n' Roller Coaster.  We also tried our hands at Toy Story Midway Mania.  Then, it was a boat ride over to EPCOT to have a late lunch at the Biergarten in Germany.  It was the wurst (sorry, I couldn't resist).  The food was amazing, and there was a band for entertainment--tuba, accordion, drums.  My wife and I polkaed, which we haven't done in years.  I blame the stein of grapefruit beer that I'd just consumed with my schnitzel. 

In the evening, my kids and wife went swimming while I helped my sister do some laundry.  Yes, even at the most magical place on Earth, you have to do housework.  Tee shirts smell like sweat.  Underwear and socks pile up.  It was two or three hours of Disney time that I'll never get back, although I did walk down to the bar to have a Guava-rita with my sister and best friend.  We sat and talked and watched the fireworks go off over the lake.  It was still kind of magical.

Yes, I think I may have been Walt in a former life.  Or maybe I'm still feeling the effects of the Guava-rita.  It was quite strong.

Saint Marty is ready to make some more dreams come true today, as long as they don't cost too much.

September 14: Genghis Khan, Superpowers, Wisdom

In the deepest part of the woods was a stand of ferns.  I had just been reading in Donald Culross Peattie that the so-called "seed" of ferns was formerly thought to bestow the gift of invisibility on its bearer, and that Genghis Khan wore such a seed in his ring, "and by it understood the speech of birds." . . . 

Pretty cool little passage.  Dillard writing about superpowers.  Invisibility.  Understanding the language of feathers.  These few little sentences prove to me that everybody thinks about having extraordinary powers, even a Pulitzer-Prize-winning writer who can compose paragraphs that can literally, to quote Emily Dickinson, make me "feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off."

I'm not sure what superpower I would want.  Flying would be pretty cool, but limited.  Sure, I could fly across the Atlantic to have some fish and chips in London, but then I would just have to fly back and return to my normal life.  Super strength?  No thank you.  It would come in handy in the kitchen when the lid of a jar gets stuck, but who really needs to lift cars off the ground or leap tall buildings?  Invisibility would have attracted me as a teenager.  I wouldn't have minded slipping into the girls' locker room at school every once in a while.

When God offered to grant King Solomon a gift, Solomon didn't ask for great wealth or long life.  He didn't ask Yahweh to smite his enemies with syphilis or hangnails.  At the time, Solomon was really young, and he had just inherited the throne from his father, King David.  Solomon wasn't too sure he knew how to rule properly, so he asked God to grant him wisdom.  And God did.  Jehovah made Solomon the wisest person who ever lived.  (He still messed up plenty, worshiping other gods and lusting after too many women.  Wisdom and common sense are sometimes mutually exclusive.)

Despite Solomon's failings, I think wisdom would be a pretty awesome superpower.  To be able to discern the secrets of the universe like Einstein or write profound books like William Faulkner.  To be able to answer any question with truth and authority.  Everybody in Solomon's time knew he was the smartest guy around.  He would have killed on Celebrity Jeopardy.  That's my kind of superpower.

I'm teaching Intro to Film tonight.  I have to share my limited understanding of cinema.  The only saving grace is that I know quite a bit more than most of my students when it comes to movies.  Therefore, I will be Professor Solomon this evening, spreading the Gospel of Quentin Tarantino.  For a little while, anyway, I can pretend that I am the wisest person on the planet.  At least until about 9:30 p.m.

Then Saint Marty will go home to his wife and kids, and his teenage daughter will remind him that he's an idiot.

Super wisdom . . .