Warm Fuzzy Comments

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello Reader,

Got warm fuzzy comment?

Just as modern readers may enjoy a two page “flash fiction” as much as a normal short story, so too may I offer a careful web comment as if it were a “flash essay.” Hence my best writing is often my comments on other people’s blogs. Queerly, I never make copies for myself as souvenirs, instead, I let all my darlings rush away like sparkling salmon in the stream.

Recently another-commenter replied to my comment. This time with a difference: He took my words and made a poem!

The blog was by novelist John Scalzi, called Whatever. Scalzi’s post was entitled Behold My Drinks Fridge (August 29, 2019) It included a photograph of his second refrigerator being turned into a “beer cooler.” There were—get this—scores and scores of comments in the thread. My first comment is below. My second comment was a short one: “As of Saturday midmorning…” and then just before I hit the “post” button, I hit the “return” key to add:

“Strange: Nobody’s written a poem yet.”

As for ‘no poem,’ a couple comments later were my own words, sent back to me:

QUOTE

Kevin McLeod Bailey says:

AUGUST 31, 2019 AT 12:56 PM

Sean:

Are you sure?

As of

Saturday midmorning

I count

125 comments

about

a humble refrigerator

With all

due respect to world peace

sometimes

the simple pleasures

are what

we talk about.

UNQUOTE

Now, that’s a warm fuzzy.

Say, dear reader, as salmon swim away in the stream, in case you’re curious, my first comment was: 

QUOTE

Sean Crawford says:

AUGUST 29, 2019 AT 8:25 PM

Nostalgia: Only a few years ago, as a tourist, I visited a regional dump serving three towns, it was just like the dump of my childhood (In the city we use garbage cans) Chatting with the old gate shack guy, he explained that a fellow comes around with a rod to suck out the (R-14?) from all the refrigerators, as an environmental thing, protecting the ozone layer.

In my own big city dump, the young guy at the gate won’t let you in unless your vehicle has a load to drop off. Those are his orders.

As for refrigerators, sometimes, like Philip K. Dick reaching for a light bulb string that isn’t there, I wait for my refrigerator to go click when I close the door. But no, it’s all magnets now. As a boy our fridge had a round plastic handle on the inside, (cool!) so a trapped child could get back out.

Here on the Great Plains, nearly all my city’s streets were laid down after ice boxes were no longer needed. A fellow in my toastmasters club did a speech explaining the new fangled technology behind his modern “beer cooler.”

UNQUOTE

EPILOGUE 

Regarding comments being read, and being Noticed:

Recently (September 2019) I sent an e-mail to a world famous blogger, Derek Sivers.

You may wonder: 

If Derek gets hundreds of comments for most of his posts, (sometimes six or seven hundred) 

then is there any use in commenting? Would he ever notice little-old-me or you?

Sure he would. I e-mailed Derek, to warn that his mass mail out wasn’t reaching everyone. Part of his reply included:

“…Good to hear from you. Thanks again for your comments on the blog. I see and appreciate them all. :-)”

I guess the overall lesson for today’s post, coming from a poet-commenter and a big blogger, is that everything we do gets noticed, at some level. 

Sean Crawford

On the romantic rolling prairie,

September 2019,

Posted April 2020

Sipping Suds in the Spotted Dog

essaysbesean.blogspot.com 

With an essay of 

both travel and philosophy, 

to introduce a poem of history, 

both fictional and real,

both past and present.

Hello Reader,

Got suds to solve the problems of the world?

Yes, I know you and I aren’t truly that smart, but just as having tea inspires noble thoughts, so too does beer in good company lead to fine world-saving solutions—at least they seem good, within the walls of an authentic British pub.

I was in south England, and my companion across the table said he had once golfed in my home town, Calgary. I instantly knew, and I eventually got him to admit: He was an oil patch guy. (North Sea rigs) Turned out he was a geophysicist. A common job in Calgary. I said, “I bet you just tell people you are a geologist.” I was right.

What I never got to ask that night was why he was so reticent to admit his occupation to me. Here in Calgary you can’t join any club or hobby without tripping over rich petroleum engineers and executives. 

(How rich? Reporters aren’t allowed to even enter, let alone photograph, oil tower executive washrooms) 

Calgary is “the Denver of Canada.” And U.S. citizens, thanks to petroleum and natural gas, are our largest minority group. And me, as a happy joiner, I have no issues around drinking beer and hobnobbing with rich people. But I wonder: Was that man worried that poor little me would be uncomfortable with him? Is the British class system really that bad?

Maybe so. Back in the 1970’s, on various NATO bases, talking with various British servicemen, they all complained about the class system—but I half-thought they especially meant within the armed forces— just as readily as we Canadians, at that time, would have complained about this new fangled mysterious inflation.  

(Back then, as our prime minister Trudeau was trumpeting his plan for everyone to observe “six and five” for wages and prices, no one, including gentlemen of the press, realized our government already secretly knew the cause of inflation) 

It’s queer how entire populations, just like individuals, can be ignorant of knowledge they are not ready for, such as the cause of inflation: Like some sort of mass defence mechanism. Like how all the Germans after the First World War thought their army hadn’t been defeated, only “stabbed in the back.” Like how in Canada, at the time of the Quebec referendum on separation, all the people in Quebec—but not in Calgary—didn’t know their province was being being propped up by “equalization payments” from the three (out of ten) “have” provinces, payments that would vanish if Quebec were separate. 

(This is true of, say, the time-space 2,000 A.D, when the four provinces east of Quebec have a 50% unemployment rate, with many of the jobs being seasonal… but I guess this has changed: Ontario stopped being a “have” province to go to having the largest debt in the world of any substate, (non-country) and recently Alberta has been groaning from lack of pipelines to tidewater—the Yanks refuse to pay market value—amidst low oil prices)

We can be alienated from our own society, and maybe rush off to join the communist party, OR we can clink our glasses in fellowship, rich and poor in the same club, and feel that life is alright. Is that escapist? Nothing wrong with escape. Even the president of the United States needs to escape to go golfing at Camp David. Like how I escaped to south England to romantically follow the Martians of H.G. Wells in his classic The War of the Worlds. (They advanced north on London) 

As for the Spotted Dog, the tavern in H.G.’s novel, my local beer buddies, who of course studied Wells in school, were disgusted to tell me the age-old tavern had been knocked down to build a car dealership. Here’s a poem:

The Spotted Dog

A man rushes into the Spotted Dog

interrupting the landlord’s conversation.

Someone has just offered the landlord one pound.

The man says forcefully, “I’ll give you two pounds,

and I’ll have it back tonight.”

The landlord is amazed, “What are you talking about?

And why bring it back? I am selling a pig.”

The man rents a horse and cart, 

but he doesn’t tell the landlord to flee.

Surely there is shame,

surely there is survivor guilt,

but it’s pushed way down.

A boy reads with a torch under his blanket:

Boilers on stilts

crossing fields “as fast as flying birds.”

Fighting Machines wade among coastal shipping

facing the defiant HMS Thunderchild.

Teachers in Woking make students read.

Surely the novel is classic,

surely it will last for generations,

down the years.

Adults drink suds in the Spotted Dog,

the same tavern they had read about as children.

The visible pub connects them to the invisible,

to age-old fears and shames, hopes and resolves.

A frightened man keeps his promise

to return a horse and cart

through dark of night 

past frightful looming Things.

His efforts end in ruin.

If he hadn’t been a man of his word

he would have been in Leatherhead with his wife,

safe and sound, but he kept his promise.

Surely when the Spotted Dog is struck down

it will be rebuilt.

Sean Crawford

January

Calgary

2020

Footnote: 

~One of my few essays to be translated (into Spanish) is one where I expose the secret of inflation, archived November 2013, Conspiracies and Inflation.

I Wandered in Woking

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

Hello Reader,

Got the January resolve-to-travel bug?

Guess what? I traveled to beautiful Britain. Nice countryside. I went specifically to the suburb of Woking, south of London, a leafy town of 60, 000 where there are some mansions owned by football players. I never entered them, of course, but I probably walked past their front gates.

If you go, you may get tourist brochures at the local museum-and-art attraction, the Lightbox. You can find plain walking maps at the library: Unfortunately, the sandpit where the first Martian cylinder landed is not shown, but an enthusiastic local showed me on my map where to walk, as we were conversing in the H.G. Wells-themed bar. Now, I’m not a “social beer-swilling with gusto person,” not a stout Falstaff, I’m more of a skinny quiet bookworm, but as a friendly traveler I would muster up enough to nerve to talk to strangers, and then we would all had a good time. And they even told me of a secret place to go in Central London! (I went) 

Speaking of bars, the big thing I learned was that the only person wearing a cap was me: The old image of male Brits (like the cartoon character Andy Cap) wearing cloth tweed caps is from my dear parent’s lost era. And no head scarfs for the ladies. A local said they call  me “smiley” not because I smile easily, although I do (my smile muscles are really broken in) but because I wore a My Neighbor Totoro baseball cap, complete with eyes, whiskers, and Totoro’s preposterous Cheshire smile.

Some folks travel in search of Charles Dickens. Me, I was romantically tracing the Martians of H.G. Wells. 

Today I have two poems, presenting a romantic tourist view of what must be just ordinary everyday life to the locals. 

Walking About

Everyone in Woking 

tells me to go to the Lightbox.

Shaped like a box kite on end—

it holds delightful museum displays.

I missed the War of the Worlds exhibit by only one year.

On the ground floor

—near some educational toys for sale, including robots—

is a cartoon map of the town.

Press buttons to illuminate good environmental practices.

They glow on the map.

At the bottom is the train station.

At the top is the common

showing a long furrow 

and a half buried Martian cylinder. 

From the Lightbox you may stroll the towpath

along a leafy canal amidst birds and squirrels,

or cross under wide streets,

using a tunnel lined on both sides with murals

to remember the one-sided war with the Martians.

Downtown is nice art.

Another half buried cylinder 

among triumphant walk-on pictures

of amoebas and bacteria and viruses;

the only things on our side during that terrible war.

A fighter jet on a high pedestal 

noses around the corner

to confront a tall chromium Fighting Machine

striding into town from the common.

A scary trophy to show the children.

Mundanes In Town

I

A non-local tells me,

“I’m only here for the drinking.”

An employee tells me,

“I’m only here for the job.”

Everyone says to me,

“Why the heck are you here 

in Woking?”

Maybe to see “the real England,”

yet here so plain and drab, 

—of course not,

I’m here for the Martians!

II

Entering from a brick-faced alley

I ascend past computer shelves

up into the history store.

Here are magazines and games,

Romans and knights

but no sign of Martians,

of course not.

A block north I find the

H.G. Wells Convention Centre,

without fantastical wall paintings,

of course not.

Woking is for Mundanes.

III

A happy tourist,

I step off the sidewalk into the storefront room,

seeing moonfaced young males in bland shirts.

I won’t enter whistling songs of wine and women

as the lads are setting up their orc and dragon table-games.

People are soft. The walls are barren.

Taking gentle steps around the tables

I go over to the broad-chested responsible looking chap.

He answers by leading me to the doorway 

and pointing up the street to the best tavern.

Those lads love a good fantasy,

but this is not the space and time 

to talk of Martians,

of course not. 

Sean Crawford

Calgary

January

2020

Footnote: I’m going back! I just bought a return ticket to Gatwick for the last half of February. 

Update and Relax

essaysbysean.blogspot.com Update and Relax

Being a post “including” (which does NOT mean limited to) two mini parts:

1 Blog News Update

2 Let us Relax

Hello Reader,

Got relaxation?

(1) Blog news update:

If a weekend band, after a break, plays another set (of songs) then, for variety, a solo will never be the first song. For my blog, I seldom have two poetry-posts in a row, and for each poem I try to tack on a wee essay.

From my manuscript Tracing the Martians of H.G. Wells I have been posting, for variety, poems out of manuscript order.

I have already finished the sections Prologue and The Coming of the Martians. During January, for folks with a  “New year’s travel resolution,” over two blog posts I will finish To The Home of H.G. Wells. (I stood outside his house and talked to a neighbour) The sole remaining section—half the poems of which have already been posted—is After the Martians.

As for visitor statistics, 

my web site stats have not changed after the screening of The War of the Worlds BBC miniseries taking place in Edwardian times. Too bad, as I would hope fellow-fans around the world would like my poems. Here in town, of course, I’m the only one obsessed with Martians.

(2) Let us Relax

Let’s relax, after the bustle of the holiday season. Yes, a few artists who are household names will be hard at work at their craft, even on new year’s day, but you and I can take it easy. No? Then maybe not.

As for my own artistic ambitions, both in my blog life and my personal life—… I will wait until I have something to show; I try not to tell anything to anyone in advance.  As I advise new fiction writers, “Show, don’t tell.”

(3) Because last week’s post was so long, 

today I merely invite you to scroll down and peruse more of my Gay and Sad URLs piece.

Happy new year.

Sean Crawford

Calgary

January

2020

Footnote: Has something changed? I have no idea why people in the U.S. of A., if you write “including,” have recently started making you add the phrase “but not limited to”—(exasperation deleted) Come on, can’t regular adults be reasonably expected to use the Queen’s English? 

Here is the start of my Oxford computer ROM definition:

including | ɪnˈkluːdɪŋ |

preposition

containing as part of the whole being considered: languages including Welsh and Gaelic | weapons were recovered from the house, including a shotgun.

include | ɪnˈkluːd |

verb [with object]

1 comprise or contain as part of a whole: the price includes dinner, bed, and breakfast | other changes included the abolition of the death penalty.

2 make part of a whole or set: we have included some hints for beginners in this section.

• allow (someone) to share in an activity or privilege: there were doubts as to whether she was included in the invitation.

• (include someone out) informal specifically exclude someone from a group or activity.

Despite Desolation

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

Hello Reader,

Got recovery from desolation? (“I feel desolate”)

I believe individuals, and entire societies too, can recover from emotionally (or physically) desolating events. Perhaps even become “whole.” Just the other day I read the memoirs of the man who co-founded Second Cup, with money he made in sales while attending recovery meetings. I learned the fellow had first been a homeless alcoholic street bum for years. People are not leopards; people can “hit bottom,” find their soul, and leap up higher than any beast. 

Of course, then the man lived forever “in recovery.” Joyous, grateful and cautious. 

Maybe for us mortals, becoming “whole” is only an abstraction, an ideal never achieved here on Earth. Still, to live is to try. History tells us that people in a community, even after fire and famine, or drought and population recede, will still seek out a time and place to sing together. As the bumper sticker on a time traveling DeLorean car reads, “If I can’t sing and dance, I don’t want to be part of your community.”

Here are two serious poems:

For this poem, you may recall the narrator found his sisters. At first they survived in their old house, later they joined a community. 

On Brighton Beach

I know my sisters would understand

me taking time to go see where we 

had holidays at the seashore.

A lost orange shovel lies abraded on the beach.

I stand before a slate horizon.

Dark waves swoosh flecks of oil,

and swirl onto the grey sand.

Gulls arc in the cold sky,

and scream to each other.

People are nowhere.

Soon, with Martians gone,

people will come flowing in.

My hands are cold.

People of tomorrow,

as seen on my mind’s TV,

won’t warm me today.

Gulls screech on the chilly wind.

In this poem, we are told the narrator is “a stranger.” How so? Is he passing through, perhaps a tradesman, a journalist, or merely a man with a journal? Or has his emotional desolation, remembered in italics, made him forever a stranger on earth?

In the Music Hall (By day a community centre)

Outside,

it is too dark to work.

Inside,

we sit wearing sweaters.

Onstage,

Joan Keats plays guitar.

Folks are happy.

Among hard working yard and field growers

I am a stranger in a strange town,

with a smile

deep inside me

and my notebook plunked on the table

before me.

Easy to pen lofty revelations

while everyone else

holds a stylish Mona Lisa smile,

as Joan’s grace notes

like champagne bubbles rise to the rafters.

Folks are happy.

Death on three legs walked past me

I was spared and my uncle was not.

A file of cars was immolated

They were active and I was not.

A church was filled with bodies

They prayed and I did not.

If there’s an answer

I know it not.

Here I can watch and feel. 

Joan stabs a frown in my direction,

“Hey!” Why the notebook?

“This isn’t the Oxford Library.”

My mouth holds a straight-line repose.

At last

I stab a smile back.

I guess I don’t do the Mona Lisa thing.

Folks are happy.

Sean Crawford

December

Camrose

2019

Woking of Wells and Mars

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

Hello Reader,

Got media pilgrimage?

On Sunday (link) we had the North American premier of the new, exciting BBC mini-series War of the Worlds. I won’t see the series myself, because I won’t pay for the T and E channel, a channel I never even heard of until now. Of course fans of War of the Worlds are excited. 

Fans of anime, over in Japan, I hear, do pilgrimages. They travel to see the real locations that anime (Japanese animation) artists use to draw their cartoons for television. (Cartoons that are far, far superior to the noisy ones made in the U.S.A.)

Being a fan of prose novels, I finally did something I have wanted to do since elementary school: Travel to see where HG Wells lived while he was gleefully writing about his neigbors being blasted by Heat Rays. As a boy I decided: Someday I would go up Primrose Hill where the narrator looks out over a desolate London, seeing a gash in Saint Paul’s cathedral. And on my first trip to England, with a detailed map of South England for tracking the Martian advance, I finally did so. What I had never imagined, in my boyhood, was that as a middle-aged man I would be inspired to write a book of poems about the novel, poems that would take place both in the real present and an imagined one. Note: Modern poems don’t rhyme.

I have been posting those poems onto my blog since Christmas, at roughly fortnightly intervals. Here is a poem of my very first hours on English soil. As you may know, the first Martian cylinder landed not in New York or L.A—go figure—but outside the town of Woking, south of London. Soon after my jet screeched down at Gatwick, I hiked  down the sidewalk and turned into the Woking historical society. I invited an historian named Duncan to guess why I had come straight from the airport. “You have relatives.” No. “A military connection.” No. (There is a big WWI Sikh graveyard) I said, “I’ll give you a hint: Three legs.” Turns out the high Fighting Machine in the town square, advancing from the direction of Horesell Common, is affectionately known as Tripod. I had a swell time in Woking, staying at two hotels, (my first time ever seeing Downton Abbey, in the hotel cafetria-lounge) but never staying, as it was full, at the HG Wells Hotel. Here’s a poem:

Into Woking

I flew the strato-jet from Calgary to the airport,

from the airport I rode a passenger train to Woking,

from Woking station I backpacked to the historical society.

I met Duncan who expressed his regrets 

that Occidental College is now Occidental Shopping Centre.

We both remember how the Martian Heat Ray 

blasted the college, 

putting the chimney 

of Mr. Wells’ house 

in line of sight of the Ray.

Crack! went the chimney.

The house of H.G. Wells has a little plaque.

I stood outside his home 

with my back to the raised rail line across the road.

Wells knew the station was close yet too far

so he borrowed a cart and drove his wife to Leatherhead.

The cart was borrowed 

from the owner of the Spotted Dog.

The horse, 

poor brute, 

suffered a broken neck.

The owner, 

poor man, 

was found dead in dark of night.

Wells, 

mercifully, 

was innocent of

what was to become of Leatherhead.

Today there is no Spotted Dog.

Locals raised on Wells tell me with distaste

a few years ago 

a car dealer 

levelled it to make a paved lot.

A bar named Ogilvies has a sign of a telescope.

Inside are many old pictures of telescopes—

etchings, lithographs, engravings,

but no mention of Ogilvie, 

a friendly astronomer

and a good man 

who perished under a flag of truce at the sandpit.

A bar of the Witherspoon chain has a Wells theme.

On the ceiling are two great illuminated glass circles,

a clock face,

and a circle of book pages,

readable from the floor. 

A local eagerly asks, 

“Do you want to see time go backwards?”

“Yes.”

He rushes over to the secret switch 

for the Time Machine.

Someone says George over there 

was the model for the Invisible Man.

George raises his glass to salute

while the Man sits alone 

in the window 

wrapped in his bandages.

I pull out my walking map from the town library.

A drinking buddy tells me the sandpit isn’t marked. 

“Just go there, and turn here,” says the friendly man.

No one wants to drink under the gaze of nasty Martians. 

Far down the hall to the loo is an old steel etching,

a stiff Martian holds a projector to blast a bridge.

Be thankful those times are long ago.

Sean Crawford

October

Calgary

2019

Sidebar of childhood memories:

Penguin books always had plain covers, (Not for sale in the USA) except for some of the comic ones—and The War of the Worlds. I read it cover to cover while at a thrift store, waiting for my mother to finish volunteering. She said cruelly that I should have waited, because now I had it all finished before I even got home.

Through “the bush” (as we called it) from my home was a high jump sawdust pit at the far edge of the vast school grounds. There pop cans dented the sawdust like crashed Martian cylinders. I remember running to the pit and crying myself to sleep. When I awoke I saw a brown rabbit very close by… 

I had often cried from abuse, utterly normal crying, but that was the day I faced a Truth about my life and my mother, a Truth of horrible knowledge and despair, a day I will recall forever, to be used when I wrote of a boy running up the church stairs to cry in a bell tower, to be asleep and safe when Black Smoke smothered the rest of the town. (Archived June 2019 as Losing Innocence, With Martians)