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June 29, 2008 Rants

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1. (080709 PRX) When I spoke to my radio friends about my newly diagnosed sleep apnea, 20 or 30 people wrote to tell me that they had sleep apnea and that breathing through the air mask eliminates the problem. You are not exhausted all the time and, as a result, you finally have a life. You will recall my saying that one friend said that after sleeping in the mask for one night, he required a harem. When I mentioned this to my friend Gene who is 80 years old, Gene said, “Do you suppose he’d loan it out for a weekend?

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2. Over the years hundreds of my letters have been published in newspapers. Two of the three letters I sent to USA Today were published, not only because of their import, but because they were only two or three sentences long. Newspaper editors like short letters and I flatter myself to think that if I have a good idea, if I spend two or three hours playing with it, I can often squeeze it down into two pithy sentences. Here’s an example: “When some fanatics from Saudi Arabia crashed a plane in New York City, President Bush invaded Iraq. Today there are people in Ecuador who are grateful the pilots were not from Peru.” Don’t you agree that those two sentences say more than many long articles you’ve read on the topic? But now let’s talk about Public Radio Exchange where producers are not paid by what they’ve said but for the amount of time it took them to say it. Too many of the pieces I’ve submitted to PRX to be played on the radio are 53 or 57 seconds long --- just below the one-minute cutoff point where wanna-be producers start to get into the really big bucks. Of course there is an answer. I will continue to write these rants but they will be read by my friend who sssss ttt u utters.

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3. You know that I just learned I have sleep apnea. I’m learning how to sleep in a mask that pumps air into my nose when I sleep. The pumped air keeps me from waking up 27 times every minute like I’ve been doing for 60 or more years. I was told that I haven’t had any neurological sleep since Roosevelt was president, which means that for my entire life I’ve only been firing on half of my cylinders. Since learning about sleep apnea, I’ve discovered that many of my good friends are also afflicted. But you’d think it was some rare kind of an oriental disease because you never hear anyone mention it. But now someone has a story for me every day. A friend of mine says it wasn’t bad when his wife first got the face mask but when she had to get gloves that go up to her elbows he said it was like sleeping with Dearth Vader.

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4. You might recall hearing me say that one day I looked out the window and told my wife Marsha that 10 generations of my relatives had lived next door and that I knew 7 of them. She said, “Only seven.” So you can believe what she said when I told her I hadn’t had any neurological sleep since Roosevelt was president. She said, “Which Roosevelt?”

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5. (080706 PRX) I don’t know how you feel about going to the hospital for treatment but it doesn’t bother me a bit. As a matter of fact, I feel rather good about it because I know that I am getting something back for the more than $7,000 a year I pay in supplemental health insurance. Which is, by the way, two or three thousand dollars more than I get in a year in Social Security. Yes, I feel good about going to the hospital, especially for some procedures where they give you a little happy pill to start you on the road to la la land. If you don’t drink or do drugs, that happy pill can be the highlight of your entire year, because it relaxes every muscle in your body and there is no way in the world to explain it. So, my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, was somewhat surprised when it took two neighbors and a lot of her Type-A persuasion to get me in the car to go. You see, for this particular medical procedure, it was necessary for me to fast for an entire day before going to the hospital, and after fasting for an entire day all I wanted to do was climb a mountain and meditate.

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6. (080707 PRX) You might have read that when a Russian newspaper reported that President Putin was divorcing his wife to marry a young gymnast, Putin shut the paper down. The magazine that I read called this “ominous.” What would you call getting thrown off a public radio station in America for reading from the Encyclopedia Britannica a definition of fascism?

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7. Someone told me the other day that someone had done a language comprehension study. The men in the study only heard every fifth word but it still made sense. If you’ve been married for over 20 years this is probably no surprise.

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8. My friend Lawyer Crandall comes from way up in northern Maine in Aroostook County. In Maine, Aroostook is dropped and people just refer to it as “The County.” Crandall says that springtime comes quickly in The County, in one week all the snow and ice melts and that during that one glorious week the only thing you can smell in the County is a five month accumulation of thawed out dog doo doo.

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9. (080710 PRX) No matter how old you get, no matter how much you think you know about people, your most fundamental beliefs can be shattered by a most casual happenstance. You’ve seen young people wearing t-shirts that advertise most anything. And, if I’m doing an exceptionally dirty job around the farm, you might see me wearing a hat that says Baltimore Orioles. Of course, you’d have to catch me unawares to see me in that hat, because I always feel apologetic when I wear it and I’d never put it on in front of polite company. Which is the point of this rant. While out on Monhegan the other day I saw a woman wearing a shirt that was covered with pictures of birds. I said, “I see you like birds.” The woman said, “No, it was on sale.”

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10. If you have never heard of Monhegan, I suggest that you Google it. Monhegan is an island way, way out -- 10 or so miles out from St. George, Maine where I live and Monhegan is one of the most interesting places in the world. When I was a little kid I would occasionally go to variety shows at the Odd Fellows Hall in Tenants Harbor where fishermen with guitars would sing this song. “Now when you go down to Monhegan, Put your money in your shoes, Cause them women on Monhegan got them Deep Monhegan Blues.” And of course it goes on with many verses about what happens when one goes down to Monhegan. --- Which, by the way is never called Monhegan Island. It is Monhegan. I was 52 years old the first time I went down to Monhegan, and, yes, it was a woman who has a house out there who persuaded me to make that first trip. In recent years I’ve gone out there three or four times every summer to tell stories in the Monhegan schoolhouse. I go out on the morning boat at 7 and sit on a rock under an apple tree and sell tickets to my evening show. I sleep in a friend’s woodshed and come home on the first boat back in the morning. It’s a long day because there is only one public toilet on Monhegan and it’s a long way from my rock. It operates on the honor system and as you leave you see a sign that asks you to drop two quarters into an inch and a half piece of white plastic pipe that sticks up out of the floor. Curiously enough, although there are no signs on Monhegan directing daytrippers to that one public toilet, before the day is out, every single one of them manages to find it. Does that not very clearly explain to you how young people can come into a strange town and, within a few minutes, buy a package of dope?

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11. You heard me say that two or three times every summer I tell stories in the Monhegan schoolhouse. I can do this two or three times because in the summer the population on Monhegan turns over every other week. People pay $3,000 or so to rent a modest cottage for 14 days and when they go back to Philadelphia someone else moves in. If you’ve ever sold tickets to anything you might have given people a better price if they bought the ticket up front. Gives you a little edge up if it pours rain that day or if someone who was planning to come gets sick and can’t make it. The little sign displayed at my base of operations says, “Advance Sales, $12.50. $15 at the door.” And every time someone walks up to me and says they want two tickets for tonight, I put on a sad face and say, “Is that really fair to me? Wouldn’t you be a much nicer person if you bought those tickets tonight for $15 instead of $12.50 right now?” Silly banter. Everyone is on vacation and everyone is feeling happy and most everyone has a story to tell me to pass along to you and there are worse things to be doing than standing under an apple tree selling show tickets to vacationing tourists who are walking walking, walking back and forth on the island’s only dirt road. I mention this because a lawyer and his wife bought two tickets, for $12.50 each, but --- after twenty paces and a very serious discussion, he came back, thrust another five dollar bill in my hand, and rushed off. I accepted it gratefully because I figured that after the evening show I’d slip him one of my CDs. But they didn’t come to the evening show and I never saw them again. I feel terrible.

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12. Speaking of islands, North Haven and Vinalhaven are two islands not too far from here. When my brother was in the Maine State Legislature North Haven and Vinalhaven were in his bailiwick, so he was out there often. One day he asked someone about the young man he saw cutting bushes out by the island’s small airport runway. It seems that when this man was a little kid, he cut bushes and ran errands around Tom Watson’s summer estate, and because the kid was very bright and was a good worker Tom Watson took a liking to him. And it came to pass that Tom Watson sent this young man off to Harvard where he graduated with honors and came back to the island which is where my brother saw him cutting bushes. He’s very good at it.

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