Tag Archives: comics

The Going Away Party

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In January 1987, I moved from Nashville to Chicago to change jobs and my surroundings. It was also the only time anyone’s ever held a going away party for me. (I went to a pre-deportation party in Osaka for a gaigin once, but I wasn’t that gaigin.)

DaveStephDees1.16.87Anyway, on January 16, 1987, Stephanie — she’s the one in the middle, flanked by Dave and me — hosted my going away party. There was actually a theme: sleepwear. Some people came dressed that way, some didn’t.

PaulSteveJonPaul, with his eyes closed; Steve, whom I don’t remember much about; Jon up in the corner; and way in the back, Raggedy Ann. Some of the attendees were coworkers of mine, others were part of a poetry reading group that I attended from time to time in Nashville. It was an informal group that met in members’ apartments. After all this time, the only verse I remember from those events was ahead of Christmas one year, when one of us (not me) recited some of Walt Kelly’s “Boston Charlie.” First verse below. It’s not as easy as you think.

Deck us all with Boston Charlie,
Walla Walla, Wash., an’ Kalamazoo!
Nora’s freezin’ on the trolley,
Swaller dollar cauliflower alley-garoo!

SusieLibbyOne the bed, Suzie, and on the floor, Libby. Others in attendance were Wendy, Mike, Barbara, Donna and Tanya, and maybe more I’ve forgotten. Note that someone brought doughnuts, and not just any doughnuts. Krispy Kreme, back when that treat wasn’t available at every gas station from here to Timbuktou.

Also, on the right side of the picture, a blue strip. That was part of the design of the movie guide that Sarratt Cinema at Vanderbilt published once a semester. Remarkably, because of my pack-rat nature, I still have some of them, including Spring 1987, which was hanging on the wall. The movie we weren’t seeing that night was Aliens.

Even more remarkably (but not really), I used to record the movies I saw at Sarratt in the Day Minders I used to use. The last one noted before I left for Chicago: My Beautiful Laundrette, January 8. That’s probably the last movie of many I ever saw there — all of which formed part of my informal collegiate and post-collegiate education.

The International Pizza Doctrine

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Seeing the Perseid Meteor Shower’s always been problematic here in the Chicago suburbs, where the sky is usually washed out at night, but this year especially so. It’s been overcast most of the time since Sunday. And usually cool today – I think we spent the day in the 60s F.

No matter. The place to be for the Perseids is somewhere in the Rockies. I might make it one of these days. At least Google doodled the subject today (and it appeared about 48 hours earlier on the Japanese version of the search engine, which sometimes has doodles the English version never sees).

Recently Lilly discovered that I’d eaten one of the larger slices of pizza left by her friends the other day in our garage refrigerator, and she made some complaint. I cited the International Pizza Doctrine to her. Later, I Googled that phrase to get the exact wording, and was shocked when no such thing readily came up, even when adding “Sam Hurt” and “Eyebeam” to the mix. So I did the only thing a reasonable person would, and thumbed through my Eyebeam books until I found it.

From Eenie, Meenie, Minie, Tweed, p. 59, a strip first published September 24, 1983: “Leftover pizza, like fish in the stream or birds in the sky, is not susceptible to ownership.” (Ratliff quotes it; Eyebeam adds, “Engraved on the refrigerators of mankind throughout history.”)

Someone needs to mention the International Pizza Doctrine online, so here it is, maybe to last as long as the server farms of Silicon Valley glow hot with gooey petabytes.

One more thing: I’ve taken to calling Lilly’s usual group of friends “your hoodlum friends.” It’s an homage to the Coasters, of course, since her friends are about as hoodlum as after dinner mints.

The Horde

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Subzero again, at least overnight. Seems like the Polar Vortex is back. Which sounds like an enemy of Dick Tracy.

In case you ever wonder just who that’s been over the years, there’s this list. (What would we do without Wiki?) But I don’t plan to look at it very closely. Dick Tracy is something that could vanish in its entirety, and the world would be exactly the same without it.

Now this is an interesting story. Millions in buried treasure. How often does that happen? Just about never. Less likely than winning a multistate lottery.

But every now and then, there’s word of a horde of one kind or another. The psychology’s fascinating. Who buried a fortune in gold in cans on a stray piece of land in rural California and, more importantly, why didn’t they come back for them?