"Moby Dick," Melville & me

(673 words)

I try and read “Moby Dick” every five years or so because I find I discover something new every time.

For instance: I just realized the only character in “Moby Dick” with a proper first and last name is Moby Dick. The rest — Ishmael, Ahab, Starbuck, Flask, Stubb, Pip, Queequeg, etc — have only one name.

Another Did You Know? The world’s most popular coffee chain was nearly named after Capt. Ahab’s accursed vessel, but marketing strategists opined people might be reluctant to pay $5.50 for a latte from a place whose name is pronounced “PEE-quod.”

Hence, Starbucks.

It’s trivia like this that led me to conjure what is, to me, one of my best lines:

“If fans of the band The Grateful Dead are called Deadheads, what does that make those of us who revere the book ‘Moby Dick?’”

I find a way to work that one into nearly everyone of my talks. It always gets a surprised burst of laughter. It’s kind of an inside joke everyone can get so everyone who hears it feels a little smarter.

I feel a cruel sort of kinship to author Herman Melville. It’s easy to peg us both as colossal bottom-line failures.

In fact, Melville’s enduring masterpiece, “Moby Dick,” was judged such a flop he ceased writing novels and spent the remainder of his life as a customs house agent. I don’t know what that is, but I’ll wager the duty doesn’t require a stunt double.

And a flop it was.

One 1851 release review said: “The style of his tale is in places disfigured by mad (rather than bad) English; and its catastrophe is hastily, weakly, and obscurely managed.”

Another wrote: “Ahab's long soliloquies induce weariness or skipping,” which is true, by the way. I often skip dozens of pages at a time, but, ouch.

A PBS feature on Melville says it wasn’t until 30 years after his 1891 death — he was 71 — that critics and readers began to appreciate him and that by the 1940s, Americans at last recognized his genius.

Would I accept that swap, everlasting posthumous glory following a life of fret and woe over every measly cent?

Call him Ishmael.

Call me ChecksInTheMail.

I wonder if he, like me, contemplated dubious measures to secure fame or at least respectful acknowledgement when simply doing good work didn’t work.

It’s why I intend on naming my next book, “A New York Times Best Seller.” That way if any one ever asks, so, have you ever written a New York Times best seller? I can say, yes, in fact I did. In 2020 I wrote “A New York Times Best Seller.”

Financial stability, you see, is my great white whale. I, its Ahab. 

Among the slew of painful cancellations imposed by COVID-19 precautions were two high school career days. I’m disappointed because I love doing these. Understand, I’d never mislead a child considering his or her life path.

It’s why I always ask the students two questions. The first is who wants to be a writer? In any group of 20, a handful of, well, hands raise (I think about half are just being polite).

Then I ask my second question: “Now, who wants to be rich!”

Every single hand shoots up, including all the teachers.

“Want to become rich? Become a writer like me,” I say.

Then I spend the next 20 or so minutes regaling the students about the people I’ve met, the things I’ve done, etc.

“Truly,” I tell them, “I’m one of the richest men you’ve ever met. And it’s all thanks to being a writer.”

I truly believe that.

And I vow to continue believing it. Heck, I’m convinced my next book will be a New York Times best seller — and won’t that be swell!

Some of this may sound preposterous, like crazy talk from a guy who should bail on his dreams and put in an application down at the customs house.

But what do you expect from a stubborn old dickhead like me?

Insights on eyeballs

Saying a story in the New York Times “caught my eye” makes it sound like the headline reached out and snatched an eyeball right out of my head.

That’s never happened, but if diminishing eye function trends continue we may one day see strangers thanking one another for snagging their eyes moments before they rolled away into city sewers.

Pretty women will shy away from wearing eye-catching dresses for fear a stroll down the sidewalk would be like an afternoon being bullied at the paintball playground.

The story says American nearsightedness has jumped from 25 to 42 percent since the 1970s.

The reason?

Too much time spent indoors reading from artificial light.

As the writing son of an optician, I’m torn -- and not in any way requiring emergency room suturing.

I don’t want to do anything that will discourage people from reading, even if the way they’re reading eventually renders vital organs as useless as scrap appendix.

Researchers say ancestral eye sharpness developed in bright natural light -- and by natural light they mean sunshine.

I have to keep reminding myself of that because for nearly 30 years natural light to me has meant beer sign neon including ones that further confuse by saying, “Natural Light.”

They believe bright outdoor light helps developing eyes keep vision in focus. Artificial lighting doesn’t measure up.

It’s just one reason you don’t see many homeless people in Armani frames.

Ideally, people would take books, newspapers and (and blogs!) and read them outside in the glorious sunshine.

But where does that leave those of us in places like Pittsburgh? If we want to go outside and sit in the sunshine we usually have to get in our cars and drive to Myrtle Beach.

Plus, the story doesn’t differentiate between printed and illuminated words.

I suspect I’ll always prefer the printed word to slick e-versions. I still love the feel of books and hold them the way adolescent boys used to hold porn before it all creeped on-line, a setting I still maintain is too conversely sterile for acts that at heart are procreational.

Well, maybe every once in a while.

But our house up in the woods is so dark I can envision a day when I’d want an e-reader to take advantage of backlit screens and the ability to increase the type size.

It just seems like a wonderful convenience that would reduce eye strain in a place where lighting is dim enough to make the common Townend Big-Eared Bat squinty.

It may seem strange that a guy who’s spent his whole life shunning supervision would come out in favor of Super Vision, but I’ve always been alert to eye care.

The importance of taking care of my eyes was something that was drilled into me from a very young age -- and that’s just another expression and not some deal the optical department at Sears gave free to the kids of the employees.

I’ve worn glasses mostly since the eighth grade. As I scored them free, my collection rivaled Elton’s.

Sure, for a few vapid years I tried contacts for reasons of vanity. I thought I’d look sexier to women I was trying to date.

This didn’t seem to work, I guess, because the women I tried to date all seemed to have Super Vision. They’d take one look at me and see multiple flaws.

So I went back to big nerdy glasses that concealed more of my face and things began working out fine.

Now I fear the progression of nearsightedness is jeopardizing my plan to have 2020 declared “Year of the Visionary.”

Either way, I promise to keep an eye on the news.

If you see it rolling around down there, I’ll be grateful if you’ll pick it up and stick it back in my face.

Newt, the alien & me

I’m rooting for Newt Gingrich to overcome his myriad stumbles and do well in his run for the GOP nomination.

Gingrich and I share a natural affinity.

We both grew up in Pennsylvania. We both enjoy history. He loves zoos and I’m a party animal.

The Gingrich campaign is in the news today because a whole bunch of people I don’t know and certainly wouldn’t like have abandoned Newt.

Gingrich has vowed to press on. I hope he does.

The race for the GOP nomination promises to be one of the most odd, shrill and self-defeating political events any of us has ever witnessed and a bombastic gasbag like Gingrich only adds to the folly.

Really, in this race with no clear favorite, absolutely anything could happen.

An unknown might emerge. Strange alliances may be fostered. An alien endorsement could vault an underdog straight to the nomination.

And when I say alien, I’m not talking Sarah Palin.

Many people have forgotten the pivotal role a politically motivated extra-terrestrial named P’lod used to play in American politics.

That was back in the 1990s when the Weekly World News was still a supermarket staple setting brilliant new standards in news gathering.

“When a woman calls and tells me her toaster is talking to her, I don’t diagnose a mental health disorder. I tell her to put the toaster on the phone.”

To me, that may be the most succinct statement of journalistic purity ever uttered.

I heard it from an actual Weekly World News reporter in a tavern in Lantana, Florida, where both the Enquirer and the Weekly World News shared a building (it was the building that was poisoned in the surreal first anthrax attack in 2001).

I was an Enquirer correspondent from 1992-2000. It couldn’t have been more fun and every six months or so they’d fly me to Florida for two weeks. There may have been some practical reason for the junkets, but it wound up being purely social.

Each and every day reporters from all the various tabloids would gather at the same divey bar and try and outdo each other with stories from the world’s most raucous outlaw publications.

Hands down, the winners were always guys from the Weekly World News (sample headline: “Baby Born With Wooden Leg!”).

There was BatBoy, Bigfoot, and the alien P’lod and his uncanny ashtray-sized eye for picking presidential winners. For years, I had a WWN t-shirt featuring the 1992 cover of the one where P’lod correctly picked Bill Clinton who exalted, “I’m glad he saw through Bush and Perot!”

I always think of that wise alien anytime Gingrich’s name pops up.

It was 1995, just after Gingrich’s late mother Kathleen made headlines for whispering to Connie Chung that Newt thought Hillary Clinton was -- shhh! -- a “bitch.”

It ignited a huge controversy.

It was into this hornet’s nest I was thrust. The Enquirer had a tip that a family housekeeper was seducing Momma Gingrich with a wacky religion as a way to steal thousands of dollars.

It was one of the most hostile interview situations I’ve ever endured.

Not because of Kathleen, who was perfectly pleasant. No, it was because of Gingrich’s step-father, Robert, who’d become an impromptu media critic.

He kept glaring at me and asking insinuating questions about my background, my politics and who the utterly apolitical Enquirer’d endorsed the previous election.

I began to believe he’d never read a single newspaper when he asked if The Enquirer was the paper that had run the picture of Newt with an alien.

“No, sir,” I said. “That was The New York Times.”

The tip we had turned out to be untrue. We never wrote anything about the rumor.

Kathleen Gingrich died in 2007. I don’t know what happened to Robert, but Newt everyday does something to, well, alienate conservatives who for more than 25 years have been assuring us that Gingrich is a genius exemplar of the whole movement.

As for P’lod, who knows?

I hope he still has something to say. I hope he has guidance to offer. I hope there’s at least one journalist out there who’s not so cynical as to disregard the insights of a savvy old alien.

And I hope the talking toaster lets him get a word in edgewise.

Have a cow, man; just don't choose the sex

A recent report shows that any parent eager to pre-determine the sex of their offspring ought to pause and consider the cow.

Yes, in what is surely an indicator of what’s to come for mankind, dairy farmers have for the past three years been given the opportunity to select the sex of their cattle. They got to tinker with the divine selection ordained by God and Mother Nature that had previously set the balance at roughly 50-50.

Here’s basically how the new draft went: girl, girl, girl, boy, girl, girl, girl, boy, girl, girl . . .

Of course, dairy farmers interested in producing more milk would want to breed more milk producers. What they didn’t foresee was that the result would be, duh, too much milk.

Understand, they didn’t make their selection based on charity. Their calculation wasn’t designed to end starvation by making more nutritious milk. They don’t think like that.

No, they thought the way oil men think when they do their drilling. They thought profit. Nothing wrong with that.

But this time they thought wrong.

“It’s real simple,” said Hartford, California, farmer Tony De Groot, told The NY Times, “we’ve got too many cattle on hand and too many heifers on hand and the (milk) just keeps on coming and coming.”

Thus the retail price of milk is down 24 percent in one year.

I suppose to assist the always beleaguered farmer we could all start washing our vehicles with milk, but I’m satisfied I already do plenty for the farmer.

I eat three meals a day. Sometimes I even over-eat. Plus, I pay taxes that go to farmers who accept the money with the stipulation that they do something other than farm. I understand the basic economic function behind that maneuver, but I’ve never grasped people being paid not to make food in a world where so many other people really need food.

It would make much more cultural sense, for instance, if someone came along and paid me not to write. That I could understand. Really, on many days I look back at these musings and am surprised it hasn’t happened yet.

Maybe my indifference for the plight of the farmer stems from my early days as a young news reporter. Every summer, it was my job to write the annual unhappy farmer story.

If it had rained more than usual, I’d call my local farmer and he’d say: “Too much rain. Lousy summer for farmin’.”

The next year, I’d call back after a long stretch of sunshine and that very same farmer would say, “Not enough rain. Lousy summer for farmin’.”

I knew even then that challenging a farmer’s hallowed wisdom was like being mean to Cub Scouts. It just isn’t done.

But I had to restrain myself from asking why he didn’t think of becoming an accountant, a shoe salesman or engaging in some other pursuit involving room temperature indoor work far from bucolic pastures perfumed with manure.

So today the National Milk Producers Federation is paying farmers to send herds to slaughter. Since January the program has culled more than 230,000 cows nationwide.

That’s probably upsetting to the people in the beef industry who see their prices artificially depressed. It goes without saying how upsetting it must be to the doomed cows themselves.

Once again I’m morally chagrined that the occasional steak is toothsome enough to make me resist the vegetarian option.

That brings us to today when soon the same sex-selection techniques will be offered to ovulating moms-to-be.

To go into the unintended consequences here would be so monumental that it might inspire a movement to pay me to stop writing and I’m unprepared for that sort of government-imposed leisure (I remain, however, open to offers).

In short, if parents select boys over girls, it’ll be good for football, but bad for peace.

If it’s the reverse and girls dominate, it’s bound to to be bad for traffic and good for people who produce programming for the Lifetime Channel.

The lesson can be summed up in the tagline of an old commercial from the 1970s that promoted artificial Chiffon butter over the real thing:

It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.

And that’s no bull.