Chain Gang

Being tagged by a southern gentleman, how can I refuse? This chain of thought is the best I can do. Here's to you, Bobo the Clown.

It is wrong to be this busy. We have reached the end of the semester and grades are due Monday, so this weekend will find me hunkered-down, grading a mountain of essays and other sundry assignments. Over the edge is where I've been the past week. On the verge of lunacy. My job is my life, not by choice, but because of the sheer force it requires to push it ahead of me. God! I never dreamed I'd be in this predicament. I used to jump nimbly from experience to experience.

Hell, jobs didn't even qualify as jobs. They were life! During high school the town kids, me included, became carnies for ten days each summer at the county fair. Working at a french fry stand in front of the the grandstand, I learned to twirl a paper cone to attract the attention of passers-by as I leaned on the counter facing the midway.

One memorable year, however, my job was to take tickets at the fun house, which was tucked away in the dim recesses of the fairgrounds, near the motorcycle daredevils and the freak show. Even I, stoned and unaffected teenager, was shocked (but somewhat pleased) by the sheer enormity and gaudiness of its presentation. The exterior, covering the entire two-story maze was a badly-designed hilariously gargantuan primary-colored shiny fiberglass clown head. Like a John Wayne Gacy hallucination of heaven, the main entrance led up past the neck ruffle and into a huge gaping clown mouth out of which hysterical creepy clown laughter blared non-stop. Titillated fair-goers raced through the garishly painted smile into the dark depths of fun, where I would frequently have to rescue terrified children. The scratchy earsplitting canned psychotic laughter competed with the resounding revolutions of the daredevils' motorcycles and the endless taunts and insults of Bobo the Clown, who was set up next to us.

Bobo, a skinny little local kid with a gift for ridicule, could draw a crowd. Periodically he provoked male spectators, often in uniform, to rush the dunking booth, at which time Bobo would jump splashing into the cold water and hightail it out of there, temporarily. Then the big guy's buddies would calm him down and they would move on to other amusements, where he could regain his honor. Perhaps he would demonstrate a chain-gang-like show of strength by hitting a post with a mallet so hard the bell would ring loudly. His girlfriend would clutch her stuffed animal to her breast as they wandered down the midway, his big arm holding her close.

Across the midway from my perch by the giant clown mouth was the g-string show, where, much later in the night, my friends and I would sneak in to watch the strippers' last show.

Once I worked as a newspaper photographer in a small midwestern town and stoned, I attended ladies' hospital guild meetings and took pictures of smiling midwestern matriarchs.

Restlessness and boredom catching hold, I moved on to the cognitively impaired, driving a van-full of residents from the local mental institution to the beach ("Where in hell is Rosario?! We gotta find him. The lifeguard is pissed!"), to the store ("No. You cannot hug the other shoppers.") and on country walks ("Run! It's wasps!").

When my identity had merged a little too closely with my clients', I became a staid librarian, quietly encouraging the town ruffians to come in, make some noise, open some books and shake it up a bit. But the town didn't like these scrubby kids, rejects in mohawks who carried who-knows-what bad influence?

So I moved on to a job supervising "delinquent" adolescent girls. A whole houseful, who just wanted to sneak out and score some drugs and get laid. We went to the nearby apple orchard and picked bushels-full of crunchy apples and sang in the van and (oh dear!), one of them set her mattress on fire. House closed.

Yellowstone Park would be a cool place to work, wouldn't it? I scanned the chaotic colorful fragments of paper which layered the college bulletin board for directions to my future. Soon my days were full of steaming vats of sheets and towels and huge chomping machines that dried and pressed and folded bedding for thousands of vacationers at Old Faithful, Yellowstone Lake ... and that is where I enjoyed a background playground where reality became much more surreal than any fantasy.

I have lost interest in myself, so here are the other groups of 5, more or less, in condensed form which frankly, why bother reading? But if you must... speed read!:

I saw Pride and Prejuduce three times in the theater, which is a lot for me, and when I am in a period piece mood, occasionally I watch A Room With a View. I love The Royal Tenenbaums. The Edge is entertaining. Hmmm... It's mostly pieces of movies I like. The porch scene in The Village. Detroit, Michigan, Portland, Maine, Montana, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Curb Your Enthusiasm, Charlie Rose, Reno 911, The Simpsons, The Daily Show. I am just not interested in food lately. Not that I don't eat it, but it isn't interesting. Black licorice. A boat in the blue ocean, a garden on a warm day, in the arms of someone who loves me, hiking a remote trail. My relationship with music is so wacky of late. There are classic albums I love, but never listen to. My latest obsessions are dished up by i-tunes randomly. At the moment I love Daniel Lanois, and listen to him continually, especially in the morning, especially Slow Giving and Fire (and Ryan, I think you'd like Sometimes).

Ding!