A Familiar Topic

My regular readers may recall that I wrote a blog entry on this subject back in August, but I've fleshed it out (it went from two paragraphs to two pages), so that now it's stronger, not merely an odd thought jotted down in a hurry ... 

A Terror-Free Neighborhood

By Bill Ackerbauer  Sept. 19, 2005

Folks around these parts take the security of their homeland very seriously. I am able to sleep soundly at night, secure in the knowledge that my wife and children are safe from evildoers, thanks to the impressive qualifications of certain rock-solid citizens who inhabit our neighborhood. Why, on this block alone, we have three licensed terrorist hunters, one of whom is quite proud to be Protected by Smith & Wesson, and two employees of a Jewish carpenter. And it goes without saying that everyone is Proud to Support Our Troops. It says so right on the back of their gargantuan Suburban Uh-ssault Vehicles.

The guy next door is as generous as he is vigilant. In addition to being one of our local anti-terror permit-holders (not Mr. Smith & Wesson), he must have included me in his will, because apparently I have permission to take his firearm in the event of his death. One never knows when one will be called on to take up the Colt M4A1 semi-automatic carbine and enter the fray — for home protection and what have you.

The third terrorist hunter on my block must use non-lethal methods such as nets or tranquilizer darts, because his Humvee doesn’t mention the Second Amendment or Charlton Heston. I suppose a few enemy combatants have to be kept alive for questioning.

The homeland can never be too secure, and lately I’ve been thinking it couldn’t hurt for us to have one more person who’s trained and duly empowered to patrol our block, to keep an eye out for any unsavory or suspicious characters. So tomorrow I'll head down to city hall and see about getting myself a permit. I imagine the background check is fairly exhaustive, but I’ve never been to Afghanistan or Iraq or France or any of those other dicey places, and I don’t think they are constitutionally permitted to hold it against me that I went to a liberalarts college. I’m not sure what sort of prerequisites they havefor official terrorist hunters, other than an unflagging love of Freedom and a set of wheels to stick the permit on, but if I pass muster you can be sure the honor will be mentioned prominently on my resume, which I intend to circulate widely just as soon as the economy picks up.

And I really should get one of those yellow ribbon magnets to make it clear which side I’m on. Everybody knows that when al-Qaida is scouting locations to start a new cell, they pick a neighborhood that fails to conspicuously Support Our Troops.

Yes, by golly, it’s a good feeling, knowing that a guy can run down to the corner store for a six-pack and a can of bean dip without having to worry about suicide bombers or anthrax in the water supply, because the terrorist hunters are on the job.

Just checking in

Sunday's concert at the church was a moderate success. The crowd was small, but it was a paying gig and we raised a little dough for the Katrina relief effort. I donated $50 of my performance fee. If I find out how much else was raised through the church's bake sale, etc., I'll post the figure on my blog in case anyone is curious.

Now, onto other matters. I'm working on a couple of longish essays for one of my courses at Albany, and I hope to have them complete and up on the blog in a few days. One is about disciplining unruly children; the other is about my hometown's "cultural identity." (Don't snicker, it has one.) Stay tuned.

To keep you occupied, I'll direct your attention to the Web site of a poet/performance artist who has written an excellent piece of work on the condition of his own hometown, New Orleans. Check it out here: Chris Chandler Homepage He's a tragicomic genius.

Gig poster

I thought I'd throw this up on the blog in case any of my local readers are feeling ambitious enough to print out some posters and help publicize the concert I'll be doing on Sunday. (See last entry or the poster for details.)

I decided to donate all of my share of the free-will offering proceeds to the Hurricane Katrina relief effort. The church will be throwing in money from a bake sale that will take place before, during (?) and after the concert. Please show up hungry and generous.

Upcoming gig in Fulton County

Just a reminder to all my hordes of screaming fans: I'll be playing next Sunday, Sept. 18, at St. James Lutheran Church on North Main Street in Gloversville. The show will be the first in the church's Fall 2005 concert series. It will start at 3 p.m., and I'll probably play two sets of 40 minutes apiece. There will be some sort of meet-Smokin' Bill tea-and-biscuits reception afterward.

I've been thinking about certain songs I could play in the context of the Hurricane Katrina relief effort that's so prominent in the public eye right now. I have ruled out "Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans?" even though I love that song. It won't do it because A) it has too many fancy jazz chords for me to learn in a week, and B) I'm sick of seeing Harry Connick Jr. et al perform it ad naseaum on TV. (Do I get a Scrabble bonus for using two Latinisms in one sentence?)

The tunes I am leaning toward adding to my repertoire in light of the disaster are "Biloxi," a simple but beautiful reflective song by Jesse Winchester, and "Deep Blue Sea," a traditional folk song about losing a loved one to drowning and hoping for his eventual return in the sweet by and by. Feel free to suggest others by posting a comment here or sending them to me at smokinbill@aol.com.

Also note I've made some small changes to my music Web site, Smokin' Bill's Digital Depot, including some new .mp3 files. Mostly I just made a few visual changes.

 

Readin', Writin' and Deconstructin' the Oppresive Framework of Western Civilization

The fall semester has started at UAlbany, and I'm already in the thick of my two courses: a non-fiction prose writing workshop and a seminar called "Literature and Empire."

The workshop, obviously, will entail a significant amount of writing on my part, and the other has a heavy load of reading, both novels and theory/criticism. (Last week I went to the campus bookstore and paid $130 for eight of the 11 books required for the course. The remaining three were not available yet, so now I suppose I'll have to spend another $130 on gasoline to make another trip to Albany once they're in stock. Seems that expensive lately ...)

At any rate, my coursework will certainly put a damper on my blog productivity, so I decided I'll post some of my writing from the non-fiction workshop here. The ravenous intellectual appetites of my devoted readers must be satiated at all costs.

So here's the first offering, a short essay that I fired off after the kids went to sleep (and revised slightly while they were watching Sesame Street):

                           The Ride to Port Antonio

   It was a remarkably well-behaved chicken. Plump and massive, it sat like a glossy-feathered black Buddha in the lap of its owner and watched me with one unblinking eye. The bird neither clucked nor fussed, content to be stroked occasionally by the old woman as we sat side by side on the crowded bus that would take 10 hours to reach the other side of Jamaica.

   I'd picked a bad weekend to visit friends on the North Coast. Mudslides from a recent tropical storm had made a mess of the main road across the mountains, so buses traveling from the south had to take the coastal route around St. Thomas Parish on the eastern tip of the island. From where I was staying, in May Pen, the trip to Port Antonio would have taken half the time if the road hadn't washed out. But I was an 18-year-old exchange student on a break from school, and there was nothing better to do than spend a day on a cramped, hot bus beside a woman with bloodshot eyes, a toothless smile and a very big chicken.

   It was 7 a.m. on a Friday when I left the house and walked down the dirt track and over the bridge into downtown May Pen, pausing to let a small but slightly menacing herd of goats trot across my path. I caught a mostly full bus to Kingston: Mostly full is better than empty, because the buses don't roll until the seats and every square inch of standing room are filled with passengers. Choose a seat on a mostly empty bus, and you're liable to wait an hour for it to start moving. A person in a hurry can always pick a bus that appears to be filled to capacity, or even jump onto one that has begun to move. The greedy thugs who wrangle passengers and collect the fares are always able to find room for one more, even if it means pulling a rider in through a window in a tangle of sweaty limbs. 

   That particular morning, I was lucky to get one of the last open seats on a bus that was filling up fast, as the ones bound for the capital usually do. It headed out of May Pen, past the bank and the post office, past the drugstore and the Kentucky Fried Chicken and on its way to Spanish Town and then Kingston. I got off at the chaotic  terminal near Trench Town, a desperate, flyblown section of the capital where a few months later I would witness a riot - from the safety of another bus -  whose purpose I never learned, but whose burning tires and screaming participants are indelibly etched into my memory. 

   The terminal was a slightly more peaceful place the day I jumped off the bus from May Pen and quickly spotted one headed around the big bend to Port Antonio. This vehicle, a baby-blue former school bus,  was nearly empty, so I grabbed a seat and settled in for some downtime. A man reached in through the open window next to my head and, like an angel of vice, promptly sold me a pack of Craven 'A' cigarettes and a surprisingly cold Red Stripe.

   The latter, combined with the long wait and the oppressive heat, must have lulled me to sleep, because when I awoke, the bus was bumping along a pot-holed stretch of country road. Sunlight was winking off the dirty pastel squares of houses and the corrugated metal roofs of the ramshackle rum shops.

   And to my left was the chicken.

   There's nothing so surreal, in my experience, as  waking up on a moving bus in a foreign country and being startled by the cold gaze of an animal less than a yard from your face. After a moment of shock, I looked up to see the face of the person carrying this strange cargo. Her smile was wide enough to reveal discolored gums, and her tongue clicked with amusement. I said hello, and she nodded and mumbled something I couldn't make out. 

   We sat together for what seemed an eternity, but there was no conversation. When the bus reached Port Antonio, and the passengers started to stir, I realized with some alarm that my legs had both gone totally numb from the long hours in a seated position. The chicken lady must have sensed my problem, because she sprang up from her seat with the chicken under one stringy arm and helped me stand with the other.
I thanked her as we climbed down off the bus, and she nodded, mumbling again.

   She carried her bird off toward the waterfront, and I stumbled up the hill toward the Bonnyview Hotel, shaking pins and needles out of my legs. 

Ouch, that smarts!

I read with some amusement that rapper Kanye West went to town during a live telethon on NBC tonight. He ripped the government's response to the situation in New Orleans, and said "George Bush doesn't care about black people." You've got to love live television.

At any rate, one of the things he said that struck me as being unfounded was the last part of this remark:

"We already realized a lot of the people that could help are at war right now, fighting another way, and they've given them permission to go down and shoot us."

This made me scratch my head. I hadn't heard about any government troops being given permission to shoot anyone. I figured perhaps West was overblowing the National Guard's attempt to get the looting and general chaos under control. Then I stumbled upon this item on the Army Times Web site, which uses remarkably bellicose language to describe what's supposed to be a relief operation:

http://www.armytimes.com/story.php?f=1-292925-1077495.php

They describe the situation in the Big Easy as an "insurgency!" With relief like that, who needs hurricanes?

Gas Pains

I saw today that the price of a gallon of regular 87 octane at the Stewart's was $3.59, 40 cents more that it was the day before, and about a buck more than it was a week ago. I thought the price of gas was bad enough a year ago, when I wrote my song "Workin' Down the Line." Here's an excerpt:

Gas is so expensive it hurts to fill the tank/

While the Arabs and the Texans are laughing to the bank/

It's draining the economy, it's messing up the skies/

But we need a way to get to work, so it's time we should get wise/

There's got to be a better way to make our engines run/

We could switch to hydrogen or power from the sun/

So tell those politicians we want alternatives to gas/

Because we're sick and tired of paying out the ..."