THE JOY OF PLAY

the shadow line series by tj worthington

 

Went to visit friends Justin and Crystal to see the day's race, and watch Vada play. She played like a kitten the whole time I was there. I told Crystal I have my very own Vada now in the form of a kitten that plays all the time. Vada makes everything into play. She picked up a small package of her daddy's, what looked to me like, earplugs. She said it's candy, let's eat it. I said I don't think daddy wants us eating his earplugs. She said it's all right, and she acted like she picked one up and handed it to me to eat. I acted like I ate it. She asked if it was good. I told her it was and she pretended to eat one. Later, she had some blue play-dough (sp?) and stuffed it into a plastic tea cup. She pressed it to my mouth, the play-dough, and said, "Drink." I pretended to drink. She said, "Was it yuckie?" She then smelled my lips and said "It smells yuckie." I was laughing inside the whole time I was there with Vada playing while the tv was going, giving me a fun distraction from something that gets a bit monotonous after a few hours.

The last 80 laps are the most interesting for me, though the earlier part of the race is important, too, to see how the different drivers are doing, who is having a good day and who is not. I love about the races that they are unpredictable. I hear announcers talk about who is favored to win and what's gonna happen and I think, Shut up. There is no knowing who will win, sometimes right up to the finish line. I've seen a win by a few inches and a win by a quarter of a lap. I've seen a big pile-up at the finish line where a dozen cars crossed the finish line wrecking, sideways, backwards, tires smoking. I've seen the winner run out of gas with a quarter lap to go and have to coast to the finish line to come in second. It is bound to be big betting business in Vegas and underground gambling all over the country and around the world. It's such big money, I think some people are looking for ways to rig a race for betting, though I can't see any way it could be done. Seems like football and basketball would be easy to rig, but a 400 mile and 500 mile race seems a bit more difficult. Where money is happening, a way will be found if it hasn't already.

We watched the last quarters of several football games, saw a few good plays, mostly quarterback sacks. Not an exemplary day for football. Vada played with her mermaid doll and danced around in her fairy dress, not a tutu, but a long nightgown type dress with pictures of animation girls from a kids movie. I asked who they were. She said, They're fairies. I thought, interesting. How many years has it been since I've heard the word fairy? It seems like it just about left the language and some kids movie brought it back. I found a word, reading Orwell's 1984, published in 1946, that has fallen out of the American vocabulary except as a product, tang. Orwell used the word in its original meaning before "the drink of astronauts," Tang, came on in the 1950s. Tang the drink put an end to tang the word. Vada kept me in good humor the whole time I was at the house, playing nonstop, stream-of-consciousness, one idea following another in a flow that went as the wind blows.

 

Though Sophia was back home, I felt the same spirit with Sophia as with Vada today. Both are relentlessly entertaining. Vada kept Sophia in my mind, and now Sophia is keeping Vada in my mind. Seeing Vada today, after a couple weeks living with a kitten, it charmed me to see human baby and cat baby loving play so similarly, stream-of-consciousness play from one thing to the next with no transition between the two but their random sequence. It's what the living do in childhood, play and learn at hyper-speed. I find it curious that our first interaction with the world, growing into it, humans, the four-leggeds, birds, I don't know about fish, but they probably play too, we play. And, like Vada and Sophia, we play nonstop thinking nothing could be more important than the moment's play. We adults continue to play, we just do it in more twisted forms. The games adults play are games like one-upmanship, the one I find most tiresome. We gamble, get drunk, get high, race cars, shoot guns, listen to rock, continuation of play into adulthood. It's good to have Sophia and Vada in my life in a time when I'd about forgotten play. It's fun right now with kitten crawling all over me. 

the shadow line series

by tj worthington

 

 

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GRUMPY OLD BASTARD REBEL WITH ATTITUDE

antoni tapies

This morning talking on the phone with my friend Carole, I was talking about how paranoid I've become about driving. An alarming number of people I know have been given tickets over the last year. I've not seen it in the past anything like it is now. The state has it set so you don't get out of a ticket for less than $200. The ticket may be less, but court costs and fees run it up. Obviously, the highway patrol has increased the quotas for patrolmen, keeping state revenues up in a time when the working people of the state are bringing in less income, hence paying less taxes. What do you do? Screw the working poor. They're easy to rape. They have no recourse. You never see a Cadillac by the side of the road with a highway patrol car behind it, blue lights flashing. The attitude of cops toward we the people has become more hostile, year by year, to the point we "citizens" (a dead word) are taken for criminals, treated like criminals, spoken to as criminals. They think they're being smart in the manner of arrogant people. They're making enemies and stand all the taller for it. This is why we did not want police state. Now it's a law that police departments are right to exclude the more intelligent applicants from a job as a cop. I thought that was already a natural law. It's like making a law requiring us to observe gravity. Throw something up in the air and if it keeps on going you're arrested. I said a whole lot more than this, talking with Carole, that I'm too paranoid to repeat in print. Paying the fine is bad enough, then the hell you're put through from the moment you see the blue light until it's finally over, regarded a criminal every step along the way. Franz Kafka and George Orwell were prophets. We are now living in the adult world they foresaw. I lived it throughout childhood and youth, as have many. It is particularly reprehensible to see Kafka become the way of American enforcement. It must be inevitable, a process, a pattern. We laugh now at the old slogan, to serve and protect, like we laugh at wind, rain, sleet or snow, except in a Jerry Lee Lewis song.

 

 

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I was telling Carole that all my adult life cops and people in authority positions dislike me on sight. I don't have to make a face, say something smartass, nothing. They look at me and they see the enemy. It's so close to a hundred percent that I'm used to it. I've learned to go slack in the face of authority the way black people have learned that when a cop stops you, you go slack, be passive, no resistance. Otherwise, they beat the shit out of you, and might anyway. When you're white, it's not so overt. They don't give you respect, but they also don't treat you like a coon. People that go about with a superior attitude regard me exactly the same. On sight, like reading an aura, an authoritarian of any sort, official or self-styled, sees the enemy when they see me. I think my eyes have something to do with it. My eyes do not show respect for uniform or position. Nor do they show fear. They show absence of interest. That's what I feel. I know people I would call friends who have been involved in law enforcement in one way or another, people whose egos don't require they be deferred to as authority. The ones that need to be looked up to the most are the ones that hate me. I have this objectionable way of regarding people as who they are themselves, seeing through the transparent mask of appearance. I have this odd way of knowing people for who they are. Like when I saw Maureen Stapleton play Stella in Streetcar Named Desire, I saw Maureen Stapleton playing Stella, an actress, an artist performing a role. I don't know that I've ever lost sight of a performance enough to see just the role. Maybe in childhood I could have, but don't recall. Pre-teens I was in love with actress Claudette Colbert. Susan Hayward, too. Colbert as mother, Hayward as whore. My grandfather kept a picture on the wall of reclining Susan Hayward in his garage. It was the only thing I wanted after grandpa died, but couldn't ask anybody to attempt to mail glass. I imagine it's in a landfill by now.

 

 

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I'm recalling the time of the music store. The parking lot was across the street. PhDs were a riot. I could see it in them getting out of the car. It's a certain trim of a beard, a stance, presentably dressed in something English, and professorial patterns in behavior. I like talking and visiting with intelligent, educated people. I like it very much. One comes in the door, I speak, we engage  in brief conversation. Right away I see he is sizing me up, asking test questions, assessing my knowledge in relation to his. That's when I say them for those. It's all it takes. Don't even have to go so far as to say aint. I see the conclusion register in his eyes that it's just another yokel, exactly as per expectation in his wife's home town. I realize in that moment this is not an intelligent, educated individual, and I lose interest too, at the same time. Its in my horoscope. Not many years ago I found a friend from the years just after high school by way of internet. We emailed quite awhile. Turned out he had a PhD in Psychology; mental institutions, teaching at a university, in charge, authority, retired. I got really tired of his emails full of instructions that I am to read Henry Kissinger's memoirs, lists of assignments and essay test questions. I didn't do any of the assignments and sure as hell did not read Henry Kissinger's self-praise. I started writing the blog and he'd quiz me on what I'm talking about, told me to explain this and that, explain, explain, you're wrong, something else is the case. The worst, according to an old Sufi saying, the straw that broke the camel's back, was when he told me to explain something I'd put up in the column on the right, of quotations, the one from the Tao te Ching, Not knowing is true knowledge. Presuming to know is a disease. Another essay question to be graded. All I answered was, "You had to be there." Explain the Tao te Ching to a PhD in psychology? He's Doctor Science: he knows more than I do. Of course he'd heard of Carl Jung. No matter how I would have explained it, he'd have known better than I did. He really didn't get it and I couldn't help him with it. It was too wide a strait for a bridge. It wasn't long after that I told him to quit writing me and unfriended him on facebook. Next thing, I got another list of essay questions to answer. I blocked him from my email. He had become an authority. He let me have it for not addressing him Dr, saying, I have a lot invested in my PhD. I said, I don't give a shit.

 

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It's the same with people who believe having more money than I have makes them my superior. I tend not to see it that way, nor do I honor the expectation. They call me strange because my eyes don't light up and grovel in the mud of greed when they speak down to me. I am able to give authority to someone I assess deserves it, like a martial arts sensei, or a meditation master, a teacher of something I want to learn. Just because somebody puts on a certain kind of clothes doesn't mean shit to me. I see an individual human being; their clothes usually show what they want me to think about them. Carole suggested my resistance to authority personnel goes back to daddy. Bingo. He was not right in the head. He did not adhere to the rational. Didn't pay much attention in school. He never saw but one look in my eyes after a certain point, indifference, nothing. Sometimes he'd explode, I want some respect outta you! The kid would think and dare not say: Show me something to respect. My eyes came to show absence of interest. This is what authoritarians trigger in the look they see. I could not talk back or defend self or explain. You cannot control my mind, I am the enemy. I used my eyes to say it. This, I suspect, is the root of why authoritarians and people who need to be seen high up hate me on sight. They see no light of respect in my eyes, the look of the enemy. It kept me in trouble all the time in the Navy; authorities everywhere requiring obeisance in the form of a salute and being called sir. Out of the Navy, I never said sir again but in irony. It runs awfully deep, so deep I choose to leave it be and not bother with changing it. I feel like it serves me well. It keeps me away from people I don't want to be around without any effort on my part. The same as my attitude that anybody too good for a Pruitt is too good for me keeps the pretentious away, indifference to self-importance keeps authoritarians away, too. Win-win.    

 

antoni tapies himself

 

 

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