Humor Monday Update - 01/05/2009

I used to work in a steel foundry.  It was a place that had only one qualfication for employment: when the nurse stuck a thermometer under your tongue, you had to register warm.  This made for a workforce full of characters.

Every moring after knocking off third shift, I drove to Dinky-town in Minneapolis to wait for a stool to open up at a little restaurant called Al's Breakfast.

At that hour, the clientèle was mostly people out of sync with everyone else; cab drivers, cops, musicians, security guards and third shift factory workers.

Night people.

As long as you were waiting for a seat or could talk with your mouth full, the conversation was great. Everybody had a story to swap.

It is the way we unwound - by talking around things.

The cops prattled on about chases but never discussed searching an abandoned building for a suspect and the cab drivers laughed about weird runs, but not about the calls they refused to take.

Me, I told foundry tales, but kept to myself, the heat, the boredom, the Jurassic machinery that stalked my nights.

Sometimes our stories intersected.

One morning, I told the counter a story I heard about a crazy little guy who worked in heat-treat.

Larry had marginal intelligence at best which left him full of ticks and phobias and at the mercy of the unmerciful at work.

The thing about heavy industry, prison or the army is weakness is never tolerated and for Larry that would be his dim intelligence and his wife, an odd not-very-bright woman who spent her evening hours on the phone, talking with another equally odd and dull woman, also the wife of a third shift foundry worker.

Larry was paranoid about his wife and that was red-meat for the kennel of hungry dogs he worked with.  Not a week went by without a voice catcalling across the break-room, "So who's your wife banging now?"

And everyone knew who it was meant for.

Larry would keep his head down and pretend the torment was for someone else but on the way to the shop floor, he'd stalk off to call his wife - but she was always on the phone and he would never get through.

As the shift wore on, he'd get more and more agitated and periodically sneak off to call her but never with any success. By the time he left work, he was in full rage mode.

Then came the pay off.

Like clockwork, the tale would make the rounds.  Larry had come home to find his wife yakking with her friend and in a fit, he had ripped the phone off the wall and smashed it in the driveway.

That was in the day when Ma Bell owned and controlled everything, and the cost of replacing and remounting a phone was more than a day's wages.

The story was the kind we liked to tell at breakfast, funny, dark, and sad. The last time I told it, it got a few chuckles and a side comment from a police sergeant.

"We know about that one," he sighed, "it didn't turn out so good."

A few hours later, I sat near the window in my English class so I could monitor the girls walking under the cool canopy of elms on the mall. The professor did the same, yet he did so as he droned on about "text".

He was paid to be there; I paid to be there.  What made sense to him, made no sense to me. 

I love literature, I love stories, even ones that don't turn out well, but maybe it was just the late 1970's.  What they wanted me to study wasn't literature or stories, or life, rather it was fads, agendas, and academic play.

Medicine explains the body, but literature explains the experience of sickness and death. Biology tells us what eats what, but Literature tells us what is to eat and be eaten.  Sociology focuses on the behavior o groups, literature allows groups to understand each other.  Philosophy covers the big ideas but literature speaks to the individual.

Or at least it once spoke of these things.

I finished the quarter and never returned.

I mention this because of an article in The Chronicles of Higher Education. It seems the author agrees that literary studies are killing literature, see Leaving Literature Behind.

I guess I am not the only one who never went back.

 

An Outstanding Article

Mourning Becomes Electric by Casey Dennis

Today's Features:

Driving With Elsie, Well Half Way Driving - Humor Monday by Elsie Duggan

Why Make Resolutions? By Greg Schiller

Breaking News: Bush asks for Santa's resignation by John Philipp

Today's Links (Check back throughout the day for updated links):

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2009: A Year in Preview by Chris Carlisle

Thought~Byte No. 134 by John Philipp

Thought~Byte No. 28 by John Philipp

Rejected Themes for This Year's Tournament of Roses Parade Brian H.

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