THE TWILIGHT ZONE

Nov 12 M, 2000

First, some background:

When I was young the whole F_________ family used to get together at my grandparent’s house in the basement to make bloodsausage. The most important ingredient was pork blood the availability of which determined if we would even make it. We all went to the basement through a winding, cavernous stairway off of the kitchen. It was a low ceiling’d basement that seemed to be red although none of it was. First my grandfather would take a sip of the raw blood out of a gallon jug to see if it was OK (a relative said it was just showing off) – he was also the only one who knew the recipe. When it had been mixed up a little bit would be fried and tasted to make sure it was right. Then it was put into a sausage maker and squeezed into intestines and tied off to make sausage. Over the next few weeks my grandfather would smoke the rings in a smokehouse sort of thing in the garage or yard (I never saw it done) and hang the rings on poles suspended between two chairs.

After grandpa died I figured that was the end of the bloodsausage because he was the only one who knew the recipe. Then, many years later mom and dad found some butcher shop in southern *********** that sold bloodsausage that tasted quite a bit like the kind that grandpa used to make. Even after dad died mom would buy some about twice a year or so and give it to me. Occasionally mistakes were made and some bloodsausage would be bought that wasn’t right. Once or twice it had raisons in it – which I found really odd. Who would want raisins in their bloodsausage? Another time M___ and M______ got me a bunch for Christmas from a different butcher shop and it tasted terrible. But the worst time happened in the early eighties when the butcher must have put the wrong stuff into the sausage mix. It contained some kind of fat globules that expanded when the sausage was cooked. Anyway, back to the story:

Nov 29 R

It was a Sunday afternoon and I had taken some acid and was preparing for a few good hours. There was some movie on television about spooks haunting a house (I think it was Poltergeist) and I figured I’d microwave some bloodsausage that mom had got for me. So I was making the sausage and watching the movie and the acid was kicking in. The movie had gotten to the part where the husband was just starting to notice that some things were going wrong. He was alone in the kitchen and a steak was thawing on the counter. As he watched some things started to grow out of it and then somehow it ended up full of maggots. At the same time I had finished cooking the bloodsausage and was starting to eat it on the TV table in front of the TV. I could see some of the globules (they were about the size of marbles) - white among the black meat – and it seemed kind of undercooked and greasy. I was really getting grossed out by this and kept thinking “this is really spoiling my afternoon”. I couldn’t finish the bloodsausage and finally just threw it away. Later I found out that other family members who ate bloodsausage had found the same thing and it was probably the butcher’s fault

As far as I can figure ZZZZZ, you either wasted a good trip or some bad sausage?

I think I like your paintings better!

My father spent about four years as a seabee (construction boson) in the navy. He actually liked working with wood but the word ‘construction’ and probably watching a John Wayne movie convinced him that that was what he wanted to do. He was almost in world war two. It was still going on when he was on the ship in the Pacific but it had ended by the time he got there. The combat he saw involved only US troops. It seems that some black solders were somehow accused of being involved in the murder of a white officer. The resulting race riots were the aforementioned combat. It finally ended when the accused solders were chased to the edge of a cliff and either forced to jump or be shot (or both). It isn't much of a war story but the cliff part is good. It sort of illustrates man’s inhumanity to man or the futility of war or something.

Yes. Or something.

Makes me feel dirty, ashamed and sad, and everyday almost, the feeling is renewed by radio, tv and newspaper.

What should I do? Stop listening and reading? That might help MY feelings but how does that help humanity?

I think Silhouette had a pretty good idea awhile back about working from the center of your own circle of power to affect what you could in a positive manner, and like the ripples in a pond, other circles would join and eventually reach the shore or goal

Of course it's a hell of a big pond, and the shore is out of sight, but I think I feel better acting on the idea than just thinking about it.

Lily also mentions starting with each individual. Seems the girls have a better grasp on reallity than the boys.

It may look like a carefully drafted exercise in two-point perspective but actually it isn't. The painting is based on a drawing directly on the canvas done from memory of a house that I hadn't seen in over ten years. I also didn’t use any straightedges or vanishing points to make the drawing. The house and garage are done fairly accurately but the retaining wall was really only a few courses of cement blocks and the painting shows water where a street was.

The discrepancy is due to the fact that the house was a block or two from a park on a cliff overlooking a river and there was a city to the right in the middle distance. There were some Indian mounds in the park and an island in the river that was a small airport where airplanes could always be watched taking off and landing. In those days a person could walk to the top of the Indian mounds and the view was even more spectacular there.

The garage with the hip roof was designed and built by my father in his mid teens (he had a thing about building). He didn’t know how to make a hip roof so he visited various neighborhood attics and built a balsa wood model before trying the real thing. Many years later when I was still quite young the river experienced a record spring flood and he took me to look at the area below the cliffs.

It was a fairly large area with roads and train tracks and businesses all over the place and sandstone caves in the cliffs. The one business I remember was a fish farm. There were round pools full of fish of various ages. The thing that made the biggest impression were the roads running down into the water. The airport was also flooded with the runways under a foot or two of water. It was a bright, sunny day and the river meandered off to the horizon on the left.

The cottonwood

the cottonwood

When I was growing up there was a family tradition to build each other’s garages. I ended up participating in quite a few of these things. It wouldn’t take long for my arm to get tired pounding the 12 penny nails used to frame a garage and so I taught myself to pound left handed. That way I could work twice as long and eventually I was able to work for an indefinite length of time by switching arms. But when something required real left handed pounding (like a left-handed toenail) I’d get my brother to do it because he really was left-handed.

Years later I attempted to paint the above painting entirely left-handed and had, with effort, almost succeeded. Finally, near the end when I was doing some detail work I switched back to my right hand. It just felt too unnatural to paint left-handed. Still sometimes when the only other alternative is to turn a painting upside down or sideways I’ll use my left hand instead.

Aug 7 Sat, 1976

When I was about 9 or 8 there was a field near where I lived. It had been unused land for many years and had deep pits, broken concrete slabs, dirt hills, all overgrown with weeds. One time, on a low hill I lied back in some deep grass and watched the sky. There was a slight wind which cut off all the sounds and I felt completely alone

On one part of the field stood a 2 and ½ story black shack that had been an icehouse in the 1800’s. Next to it was a small pump house. Behind the shack, grew a cottonwood tree bigger than any I have ever seen. It must have measured over six feet in diameter at the bottom. And I remember it being much taller than any of the telephone poles nearby.

One day in early fall the fire department came and burnt the shack. They dumped gasoline around inside and also around the trunk of the cottonwood. I have never since seen a bigger fire or brighter although it was mid afternoon and sun shining.

The shack was burnt to the ground and all the leaves were burnt off the tree. The next spring leaves began growing back on the tree. But by summertime we could see that it was dying. On warm summer evenings you would hear a loud cracking and look up to see a 25 foot long, foot in diameter branch break off and fall to the ground. The tree literally fell apart!

My great-great grandfather was named Columbus – an unusual name considering where he was from. He immigrated to North America about the time of the US civil war. In Europe he came from Alsace Lorraine which was German at the time but is now in France. The speculation is that he was some kind of farmer since he acquired a fairly large amount of land where he settled. He had other ways of producing income which included sending his sons around to offer to beat up neighbors unless they paid a kind of insurance. This didn’t make him very popular with the neighbors since the family also didn’t go to church and weren't very sociable.

He was a good moonshiner and during prohibition found the production and distribution of alcoholic beverages to be a lucrative business. Unfortunately, it didn’t make him any more popular with the neighbors. A commemorative issue of the town newspaper was printed for its centennial where the headline read “Another F_________ Nabbed”. Variations on this theme were apparently quite common in the 1930s.

There was a family liquor store started up at some time that I’ve seen when I was down that way. It looked fairly old even then and for all I know may still be going – haven't been out that way in a while. The belief was that it’s a tragic thing for a vice to go unexploited – everyone just has to do what they can.

The oldest daughter of Columbus had a baby out of wedlock and shortly afterward married the father. Columbus raised the boy as one of his own but with the constant reminder that he wasn’t really a member of the family and, for example, couldn’t inherit anything. This became important several years later when Columbus was fairly old.

His eldest son kept him isolated from the other siblings in a house near the center of the property and tranquilized with laudanum. The object was to turn him against the rest of the family so that he’d change his will. Columbus had taken a liking to my grandfather who wasn’t subject to the same restrictions as the rest of the family and was able to see him regularly. When Columbus finally died he ran off to the city never to return.

Apparently the will did get changed, was disputed and eventually became a case for the state supreme court. I know this because after my grandfather died a respondent’s brief describing the events leading to the case were found in his desk. Nobody in the family had ever heard of it since it all happened in the first decade of the 1900s.

At some point his mother gave him a tavern and movie theater as gifts. The tavern was closed when prohibition was enacted and the liquor was moved to a hiding place under the attic stairway. Much of it was eventually taken when gangsters robbed the house. Many of the things inside the tavern were also moved to the house so there were always things like decorative beer steins, stuffed animals and paintings around. The Movie Theater started to lose money after the interstate was built because it caused the parking lot to be lost. It eventually had to be sold. My grandfather lived into his mid nineties but spent his last decade or so in a nursing home with senile dementia. It was more dementia than senility. His disposition was never very pleasant and he didn’t exactly mellow with age.

He wasn’t very popular with the nursing home staff and whenever we’d visit they would have stories for my parents of his recent antics. He would do things like piss in hallway ashtrays and pinch nurses and was generally considered kind of incorrigible. One time they told a particularly unusual story. The residents would gather in the first floor recreation room after the evening meal to socialize. One day he came down in a somewhat genial mood and told people about his first wife and family. After that he sat down at the piano and played and sang for a while. This surprised my parents. His first wife had died and we had all heard the stories and knew the aunts and uncles. Nobody had ever heard of the family that he described or had ever seen him play a piano. It was suggested that the staff had seen someone else but they were adamant that it was him.

When I was growing up there was a piano in my grandparent’s living room. When I thought about it later it seemed odd because nobody could play it. I thought that it might have come from the tavern. My brother and I would bother the adults by banging on the keys and I would often pretend to play with both hands making a noise that must have been irritating. One day when we came over the piano was gone.

There was a pet dog in the family for most of my teen years and into my early twenties. He was just an ordinary mutt – ignored mirrors and TV sets – nothing special – just a family pet. As he got older he became more and more hard of hearing and eventually became completely deaf. There was a time when my brother and me tried to get him to look at himself in a mirror and finally after much effort – since dogs sort of resist that – we succeeded. It was a sort of anticlimactic thing – he just looked sort of puzzled and continued to ignore mirrors after that.

After he had gone deaf he would often sleep in an alcove off of the living room. It had a linoleum floor while every place else in the house was carpeted. Dogs are attracted to bare floors because they’re cooler. This alcove had mirror tiles on it part way up the wall so that it reflected most of the living room. The dog would watch the reflection of the room in the mirror tiles and would often surprise everyone by reacting to something that caught its interest in the living room when everyone thought he was asleep.

The other side of my family, my mother’s side, is mostly French-Canadian. It was started about the year sixteen hundred by a navel officer from Brittany. He started a family that eventually moved into the deep woods around Hudson Bay. By nineteen hundred the family had grown quite large. Considering the thinness of the local population and local customs a lot of this was probably due to inbreeding and mixing with the local population of aboriginal peoples (usually called Indians thanks to CC (Christopher Columbus)). Around the year nineteen hundred some of them started moving south including my grandfather who was often a lumberjack. He was known by those close to him as an entertaining storyteller and according to my mother told some particularly good werewolf stories.

Most of this story took place several decades ago but it started within the last year. I had decided to transfer my cassette tape collection to CDs. It was a multi-step process where I first recorded two long MP3 files for each side of each tape. I saved those files as originals and edited copies of the originals to albums and song collections that were eventually burnt to CDs. When finished I had about 120 to 150 CDs lasting 75 to 80 minutes each. The last of the recording involved tapes I listened to several decades ago. They were mostly live recordings but there were some from other sources. One source that I listened to was tapes that had been returned to the manufacturer as defective. A tape I particularly liked was labeled “station WCBN in Boston”. One of the pieces on it was a word jazz piece called Reaching In To In. I posted a transcript of it on this site once. The other side of the tape was labeled ‘Herb Alpert” and since I wasn’t interested at the time I never listened to it. When I finally listened to the MP3 of that side it turned out to be another broadcast of the same radio station. What I think happened is that the original owner found that some of the music recorded was distorted so to verify that the distortion was in the tape and not the recording process, recorded the radio. When he found that the distortion was due to the tape it was returned and eventually I heard it. One of the songs on the side I hadn’t heard was called She Sang Hymns Out Of Tune (also posted here) by the original country composer/performer. I had heard the Harry Nilsson version and always wondered what the original sounded like. It seemed interesting to me that the song had sat unheard all those years.