IHOP

I had lunch at the local International House Of Pancakes today, and yet again, I did not see one even low level functionary of the littlest of countries. You would think (if you thought like me) that a truly "international" pancake house would have at least the King of Liechtenstein as a greeter or gladhander of some sort to reassure us that we were eating in a swanky place.

No luck. So I sat down and had my usual, the Chef salad and onion rings. I know, of course that the real chef doesn't really make ALL of the "Chef salads" but rather operates in a supervisory manner to insure that the "Chef salad" is served in a uniform and reliable fashion. Don't doubt that those IHOP officials are on top of things and they want you to have a fine dining experience while you plotz in their restaurant.

There is a problem, however. I never order the pancakes when I eat at IHOP (I shouldn't say "never" "never", because I will order them when the waitress agrees to smother each pancake between the breasts of her décolletage. I ain't been too successful with that lately). The reason I rarely order the pancakes is that I read that the pancake guy lives in a little shack under the griddle, and that he has refused (on principle, I'll bet) to pay his toilet tax or to make good on the bill for his pay toilet that he has in his apartment. Normally, when a man or woman refuses to pay the toilet fees incumbent upon us all, I turn my head and express my disgust away from the oncoming wind, but in this case, when the man directly responsible for cooking the pancakes at the IHOP is the miscreant, I defer from ordering what I would expect is their special. So I ate the salad. I spit one bite out to show my solidarity with those fighting the toilet tax and the onerousness of the pay toilet industry.

Joe Postove

RADIO BLOG ON INTERNET!

Those of you who know me (none of you) understand that I rarely recommend other blogs, because I hate them. Most blogs have little to say, and less to say about it.

However, as an old time radio fan, I have found a very nice blog run by a Mr. Jeff Kallman, and I dutifuly and happily report that to you. You'll find rich commentary and very fine links to old time radio sites on the web.

So go there now, and report back after supper.

http://easyace.blogspot.com/2007/04/birth-of-father-death-of-diary-way-it.html

Joe

Shock And Awe

I've lived in this apartment now for almost four years, and have been almost everywhere in it. I haven't stuck my head in the toilet or bathed in the ice box for reasons best known to God, but I've been just about everywhere else in this damn place. Or so I thought.

There is a big full length mirror on my bedroom closet door. I was checking my face and teeth ( I think I may need braces...Jesus come home, I'm 50 for God's sake!) and all around attractiveness when I started playing with the door.

Closing it and then opening it again, open and close, just for the hell of it, maybe just to see if it would come off the hinge, and I would have had today's excitement.

Friends, instead of excitement, I had a secular orgasm. I saw for the very first time, a hook on the back of my closet door. I could have been hanging things there for years, but, no. I was throwing things on the bed, couch, even on an old exercise machine I excommunicated several years ago, because it hurt my stomach. And all that time, I had a GD hook on the back of my closet door, which was free. I saw no 10 cents a hang, or different pricing for pants, shirts, or me, if I take the plunge before they get me to the scaffold. Just a sweet thing. A hook, provided by my landlord, probably years before I got here, and I never saw or used the thing.

You can bet I'm hanging things now.



Joe Postove

Woody On War

In 1945 Woody Guthrie wrote for the Daily World Communist Party Newspaper (Wisdom in the strangest places)

I AIN'T A GONNA KILL NOBODY"

I took a bath this morning in six war speeches, and a sprinkle of peace.Looks like ever body is declaring war against the forces of force. That's what you get for building up a big war machine. It scares your neighbors into jumping on you, and then of course they them selves have to use force, so you are against their force, and they're aginst yours. Look like the ring has been drawed and the marbles are all in.

The millionaires has throwed their silk hats and our last set of drawers in the ring. The fuse is lit and the cannon is set, and somebody is in for a frailin. I would like to see every single soldier on every single side, just take off your helmet,unbuckle your kit, lay down your rifle, and set down at the side of some shady lane, and say, nope, I aint a gonna kill nobody. Plenty of rich folks wants to fight."

"Give them the guns."

Spring Is Sprung

It snowed yesterday In Blacksburg
How odd that was on April Sixteenth

Later in the day
The white turned to red
When Thirty Two children
Were cast forever young
In a falling rain

It happened in a great storm
And the children disappeared
One after one
But candidus cannot overpower the black dog of death with its lily white

The children were hypnotized and terrorized
On the mountain of doom
Each one alone
No savior here

All bootless in the snow

Joe Postove

The Key Shop

Dad’s locksmith shop was a perfect circle. So round that I don’t think I can tell you the square footage of the place. It was small though. So small that one day when an epileptic friend of my father’s had a fit in the shop, he took up nearly the length of the place, front to back, when he fell.

“Ward’s Corner Key and Lock” was how we were told to answer the phone. This is what is was. Keys made, locks fixed and sold, but mostly sitting outside on the front stoop, because sitting (or having a fit) was awkward inside. In the summer, outside sitting was preferable anyhow, since inside was hot as a blast furnace and since the shop sat in the middle of the parking lot, pretty girls walked past plenty enough to turn necks from the inside to the outside, making it more convenient to sit out front, thus not having to crank necks as hard or as often.

Locksmithing is a hard dirty business. Working all day to open a suitcase, pinching the picks and handling them just so to jostle the pins inside the lock and allow the case to open was no easy task. Cutting keys to order, opening car doors and locks without keys (and making new ones) was just part of the workaday world of my Dad’s occupation. By Noon, his hands were as black as to make any Negro resentful. However, Dad carried on good relations with the blacks here in Norfolk, a southern town, but one with the cosmopolitanism of having the United States Navy in its backyard.

I “worked” there in the summer. Dad would wake me and somehow stuff my still asleep body into the car to make the trip to Ward’s Corner. This “Times Square of the South” as it billed itself was an outdoor shopping center built in the forties and fifties. Made up of drug stores, dime and department stores, a movie, assorted general shops and my Dad’s key shop, it was a blizzard of activity until about ten o’clock when it settled down for the days traffic, steady, smooth and slow. We always called it the key shop, yet the money was in locks and fixing and opening them. But people understood keys and so on opening day in 1955, Dad and Robert and David put a big flashing key on the roof, which flashed until about 1968 and remained there until Dad left in 1987. We stopped looking at it sometime in the 60’s.

My Dad never wanted me to be a locksmith. There was no money in it, really. And the skim was skinny too. Back in those days a late night call to open up a car with the keys in the ignition was fifteen dollars. And Dad, being the democrat, charged the same for colored sections of town as he would for the tony. This worried my Mother who, even though even handed on the race question as anyone could be in liberal Norfolk, knew that there were more murders down on Church Street than up on Algonquin drive. But Dad didn’t worry. Mom did, and would call the cops who often would meet Dad on a job, if they could, to make sure he remained alive. He did, and we were awfully glad.

So you can see why he didn’t want that life for me. Like traditional Jewish parents, he wanted a doctor for a son. Forgetting that this would require having a son for a doctor was no impediment to his thinking, but he did come to realize early on, by the time I was in school, that I was not medical material. But I wasn’t going to be a locksmith either. But this didn’t constrain him from invoking the draft when summer came and inducting me into involuntary servitude. I wasn’t a slave, mind you, but I had no choice. It was up early and to the shop. I was not enthused.

I wasn’t much good at any of this, and never did get good at it. In fact it wasn’t until after my Dad’s death that I figured out once and for all the difference between a “Phillips” and a “regular” screwdriver. Or a nut and a bolt. Comic books and large amounts of diet soda kept me fairly stupid and unindustrious. I wasn’t able or willing to learn much more than how to make a key, so my job became mostly running errands and getting lunch for the real workers. This I liked. I could turn a ten minute run over to the hardware store into an hour and a half hop, skip, and jump to the drugstore to suck on a Tab for half an hour while leafing through comic books, another thirty minutes at the newsstand peeking at the nudey books and magazines and another thirty checking out the latest records at the music shop. When I got back, Dad had long ago been taken up with some such and such and forgot about me and my errand. This worked out just fine. It was going to be a good, well if not good, then fair summer. I’d rather be home in bed with Art Linkletter, eating, sleeping, using myself for unwholesome pleasure and then eventually tottering outside to see if we could get a game up. Like we always had, every summer. But this summer I was going to work. Or give the impression of it, anyway.