Author: wdfyfe

Before WD called himself a writer, he worked at a number of different jobs from stacking lumber to interior design. He studied English at UBC and creative writing at ASU where one of his teachers, Rita Dove, taught him the importance of the tale. He has written for radio, magazines and newspapers, but never television. He’s published both fiction and nonfiction in Great Britain and the US. He reads French passably and speaks enough Spanish to get from A to B and find the toilet. He has interviewed John Cleese, Peter Ustinov, Margaret Drabble, Kenneth Branagh and enough other famous people to make him a hopeless name dropper. His not-so-secret passions are history and trivia, and he has never lost a game of Trivial Pursuit — although he did come 4th one drunken Quiz Night at the Uxbridge in Notting Hill. He lives on the Pacific Ocean, although, not close enough to see, so he spends his days looking at a computer screen. It’s a wonderful life and he has only one regret: he can’t type faster.

I Had a Friend in Arizona

When I was a young man, I lived in Arizona.  I had a friend who worked for Amtrak.  You can take the train from LA to New Orleans if you want to, but it’s a bum-numb-er, and I wouldn’t advise it.  My friend worked on the route from Tucson to El Paso.  It’s an interesting part of the world except in the summer when nothing moves in the heat – not even the sun.  It’s Chiricahua land — you know them as Apaches — but there are no Chiricahua there anymore because they were all taken to The San Carlos, to die.  This was long before a couple of Republicans named Earp shot it out with Ike and Billy Clanton one afternoon in 1881.  Amtrak basically follows the old railway line that went through Benson into Cochise County and across the southern end of the Dragoon Mountains to New Mexico.   This was originally the route of the even older Butterfield Stage which, from 1857 to 1861, went from Tucson to Franklin (what would become El Paso.)  What does all this have to do with anything?  Not much.  I just wrote it to smart-off about how much I know about Arizona.  The real story is my friend who worked for Amtrak.

In the old days, Amtrak was a despicable railroad.  They were never on time, the food was terrible, they lost reservations, lost luggage and once they lost a couple of passengers who stepped off the train during a breakdown and were left, out in the desert.  Amtrak was so bad they even employed people like my friend who honestly was never prepared for steady employment.  He had wonderful stories about all the foul-ups at Amtrak; unfortunately, most of them were connected to him.  Finally, unable to find anything Daniel (not his real name) was even remotely competent at, Amtrak stuck him in the Information Desk.  His only job was to point people in the right direction, tell them where the bathrooms were, and adjust the clock that gave the times for arrivals and departures.  That’s where he ran into trouble.

Since Amtrak was constantly late in those days, lots of folks would come up to Daniel at the INFORMATION booth and ask if the train was on time.  Daniel would look up from his book, point to the clock that gave the time delay and say, “Nope.”  Sometimes, if his book was particularly good, he wouldn’t even point; he’d just purse his lips and shake his head and then go back to it – he loved Westerns.  Think about this for a second.  Ordinary people get impatient at traffic lights.  So normally, unless their names were Mr. and Mrs. Mohandas Gandhi, nearly everybody was looking for a little more information than that.  Invariably they would say something like, “What the hell’s going on?” or “What’s the deal?” or even a simple “Why?”  Daniel would swim up from his book again, look at them like they were idiots and say, “Does it matter?”  Obviously, from time to time, tempers would flare and after a couple of weeks of this, even Amtrak couldn’t take the mountain of complaints.  They threatened to fire Daniel.  I know for a fact he was supporting at least 2 girlfriends at the time and a large Louis L’Amour habit, so he needed the money desperately.  He promised Amtrak, on the souls of his grandchildren, that he would shape up and fly right.  And he did.

Daniel hit on a cunning plan.  He eventually realized that people wanted a reason the train was late — even though it didn’t actually matter. They wanted to understand.  They wanted some connection to the events.  They wanted something to blame.  They didn’t want to feel helpless.  And they wanted all these things simultaneously and unconsciously.  So what Daniel did was make things up.  Whenever the Sunset Limited (as it is now called) was late, in either direction, passengers in Tucson were told a variety of lies based on Western novels.  Daniel wasn’t stupid enough to tell them the train had been attacked by the Apaches or anything — although once he did say it hit a buffalo — but rockslides, grass fires, washed-out bridges and such like, were all fair game.  Amtrak was happy, the passengers were happy (relatively) and — most importantly — my friend Daniel kept his job.

What does this have to do with anything?  Not much.  It’s just that sometimes when events are out of control — in Tucson, or any other place for that matter — it’s good to have people like Daniel explaining things to us.  It’s good to have a reason why things went wrong.  It doesn’t have to be true.  We don’t need the truth; we just need to understand.   We need a simple, sensible explanation so we don’t feel helpless.

Tucson, Arizona is a nice town, and people don’t get killed there for no reason.  Maybe it’s wicked politics or an insane lack of gun controls.  Maybe it’s the culture of the Wild West or American culture itself, but somewhere there has to be a reason.  I’m sure my friend Daniel might be persuaded to come up with one for us.

A Streak of Bad Huck

It was reported last week that some publisher is going to change Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huck Finn and reprint it so it’s fit to be read in the 21st century.  Professor Somebody (like, I care what his name is) from Auburn has taken it upon himself to bugger up bowdlerize Twain by replacing the N-word with “Slave” and changing the I-word to “Indian.”  He hopes to fluffy up an American tale that has some sharp edges on it and thus bring Twain to a whole new generation of uber-sensitive readers.  The story caused such a stir across North America that this morning, less than 7 days later, I can find no mention of it.  Obviously, the publishers are going to go ahead with this literary castration.   My contempt for this sordid violation is surpassed only by my contempt for the society that allows it happen.  Unfortunately, I am not Twain, so I don’t have the words to properly condemn us all to Hell where we will surely go for this brutal act of nice.

The N-word offends me.  I’ve heard it a lot, in my time.  It never gets easier on my ears.  However, it doesn’t offend me that a dead white guy, hand-wrote it out in full, and published it in a fantastic novel more than 100 years ago.  Why would it?  People in 1885 were barbarians.  They peed outside for God’s sake.

What offends me is the “N-word” itself.  It offends me that perky TV personalities, who are so white they’re blue, use it with such pained contrivance.  It offends me that academic fundamentalists, whose only brush with Black America was watching Spike Lee movies in their sophomore year, use the word to advertise their inherent understanding of The Black Experience.  It offends me that regular people are starting to use it promiscuously, as though all the nuanced cruelty is covered up by this thin disguise.  It offends me that it has become acceptable in polite society, just exactly the way its ugly grandfather was acceptable in 1885.  And it offends me that the all the Professor Somebodies in the world think they’re doing Black people a big favour with this white-wash.

I have a good friend (I’m going to change his name because he is my friend) and when we were young and foolish, we used to drink together quite a bit.  My friend wasn’t comfortable drinking at places I frequented so we used to drink at bars in his neighbourhood.  One day he asked me, “Why do white people keep bringin’ this shit stuff up, all the time?  Man, I got more stories than they ever seen.”  We were drinking heavily at the time, and the conversation got waylaid before I could answer.  Actually, that’s not true: this is what really happened, but I’m going to clean it up a lot — so nobody gets offended.

We were drinking heavily, and we ran out of money.  My friend went over to his friends and said something like, “Hey, chums! I’ll bet you a pitcher of beer that I can show you a man with no butt.” They probably replied, “Nonsense!  That’s seems highly unlikely.  I’ll take that wager.  Prove your statement to be true.”  (This is losing something in the translation, isn’t it?  Let me step it up a bit but not too much: I don’t want to offend anybody.)  My friend brought his group of friends back to where I was sitting and said to me, “Stand up.”  I did.  He said, “See, African Americans?  This man ain’t got no ass.”  From there, the multi-level conversation went something like this.

“Whoa!  You right!  He ain’t got no ass!”
“Nonsense!  Get ut da way.  Let me see this stuff.”
“Po!  What?  He sick or sometin?  Got a disease?  Eat his ass off like dat?”
“Man, where he from, got no ass?  He ain’t from aroun’ ‘ere man.  No way. I’da noticed that stuff.”

My friend’s friends were clearly warming to the subject.
“Hey! African American! Come over here!  Andrew got his self a guy wit no ass.”
“Whatta fornication?  Where his ass at?”
“He don’t got one.  See.  He like straight up and down.  Stick man.”
“Nonsense!  How the maternal fornicator keep his pants up?”
“He got pants on, don’t he?  See wit your eyes, African American!”

There was more, a lot more, but it’s difficult to portray the mood and spirit of the situation correctly while treading so carefully.   Mark Twain didn’t have that problem.  He lived in the Victorian Age — a time, by all accounts, as repressive as our own.  They did, however, do one thing properly: they actually read the books before they burned them.

There will always be professor somebodies out there, ready to remedy the world.  And there will always be anti-censorship cheerleaders who storm the blogosphere barricades for a whole 4 days or until their consciences are clear.  But to the witless ones who aid them both in their endeavours, I say read Huck Finn — before it’s too late – because, when Huck says , “All right, so then, I’ll go to Hell.” at least he knows why he’s been condemned to make that journey and you should too.

Don’t Touch That File

This weekend I’m going to fly down to Vegas. I’m going to have 3 shots of tequila at McCarran.  Then, I’m going to go to the Consumer Electronics Show.  I’m going walk in the door, go up to the first techie I can find, grab him by his dickie little shirt and slap the living snot out of him.  Then, when he (or she, I don’t give a damn which) is laying semiconscious at my feet, I’m going say — loudly and aggressively — “The next time any one of you sexually repressed mega-mathematicians even thinks about changing Facebook, Google, WordPress, YouTube or anything to do with Microsoft, just remember what happened to this guy, ‘cause if you mess with me again, I’m comin’ back here and I’m bringing Hell with me!”  Then, I’m going to turn on my heel and go have a nice quiet lunch — maybe at the Eiffel Tower.  I’m going to do all this because somebody has got to strike a blow for every one of us ordinary people who is fed up with all this geeky techno-crap.

As you probably don’t know, the Consumer Electronics Show is going on this week.  This is an annual event where a bunch of really, really smart people go to Vegas to gamble on what’s going to be the Next Big Thing in consumer electronics.  (Just as an aside, this year’s no big surprise is tablet computers.)  Anyway, it always works like this.  Every electronics company in the galaxy — except Apple — shows up with their machines (remember, they’re just machines.)   They give one each to any journalist who can spell their company name, along with all the booze and hookers they can consume in seven days.  They take whatever’s left over and throw it to the packs of snarling nerds, waiting outside.  Then they set up their booth, turn on some pasteurized hip hop music, smile for the cameras, and wait for the journalists to sober up.  A week later, they take whatever the nerds didn’t break home with them, assemble 80 million copies and ship them to Costco, Best Buy and Future Shop.  It’s the circle of life, Grasshopper.  I’m content with it.

And this is true.  I really don’t mind re-buying my electronic crap every couple of years.  It’s as inevitable as death and taxes, and I’ve grown to accept it.  I’ve come to realize that the world is spinning a lot faster than it did when I was a kid, and I can’t possibly keep up.  I know, for example, that my phone is now technically smarter than I am (it certainly remembers more than I do) my television is better than being there, and my laptop is so powerful that, if it ever really gets mad, it can reach out and kill me.  I also know that — even as I write this — there’s more new and better stuff getting loaded onto a boat in Asia, and by the time it gets here, it’s going to be way cheaper than the last stuff I bought.   Once again, the circle of life, Grasshopper, and I’m content with that, too.  There will be no punches thrown.

The thing that has finally driven me to violence, however, is that smart-ass techie who’s busy changing all the applications out from underneath me – practically over lunch.  You go to something like Facebook, (connecting with friends and family) to tell them you’re doing important stuff like eating spaghetti, and you can’t recognize  the page you used less than an hour ago!  Some jerk in Loma Lonely, California, has changed it.  (I know Jessica Alba doesn’t answer your Tweets, but don’t take it out on me.)  Everything has a different name, and it’s in a different place, and you can’t get there from here, anyway.  It’s like waking up in the morning and finding out your toaster has forgotten how to make toast.  (Bread goes in the top?  Bread goes in the side?  Where the hell does the bread go?)  Nobody is going to convince me that Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7 are so radically different that the whole configuration had to change.  There was junk on XP that I never figured out, and I’m sure there was stuff on Vista that was born, lived and died and not one person on this planet even knew it was there.

There are only 3 people in this world under the age of 100 who don’t care about computer technology: The Pope, The Dalai Lama, and Stephen Jobs’ mom.  The other 6.8 billion of us need computers to function — every single day — so it would be in everybody’s best interest to set some standards and quit changing things around once a week.  Believe me, if something isn’t done pretty soon, I’m not the only one who’s going to show up in Vegas with a bad attitude.