As I went out one morning

(Author's note. I'll be damned if I remember writing this, but it has to be mine because I can't find it anywhere else. As I Walked Out One Evening by W. H. Auden is perhaps my favorite poem, so maybe it got the juices flowing. In any case, I must have borrowed some imagery here and there. Auden I'm not, but we must wade in.)

As I went out one morning

Walking the primal road

My shoulders were bent over

With an invisible load.

And down by the creek where the salmon

Sing all day in the spring

I heard a man with holes in his clothes

Say, “Love has no ending.”

I wondered at his heresy

He wasn’t supposed to speak

Of things he did not understand

And shouldn’t even seek.

“I love you, Lord, I love you,”

the ragged man proclaimed,

although his face was badly scarred

and his body bent and maimed.

The man was clearly crazy

For as he spoke his rhyme,

The salmon danced in the shallow stream

In fish-determined time.

I didn’t try to love him

But I loved him just the same

For he broke the diver’s quivering bow

And called his God by name.

“Oh tell me, man, oh tell me,”

I cried in my anguished state,

“What is the secret of the world?

Where is the end of hate?”

And all at once his face had changed

To an evil, ugly mask

His body had become the hate

About which I had asked.

“How stamp this mask into the mud,

How keep despair at bay?”

“You can’t,” he told me, grinning,

“But my God can point the way.”

“How dare you speak of God, you wretch,

When God’s abandoned you?

How dare you use the Holy Name?

He doesn’t want you to!

Your life’s just spent surviving

With the sidewalk as your bed

And taking poisons in your veins

And scrambling to be fed.”

The man just stood in leaves and mulch

While the salmon sang and spawned:

“Just see the other side of me

And tell me I am wrong.”

Another face appeared just then

A face all beaming bright

Its eyes were streaming like the sun

With pure mysterious light

“You blinded fool, you stand before

A drop of mist made rain

An eye that Paradise looks through

That holds both joy and pain.”

“I cannot understand you, for

You play such games with me!

How can you masquerade as God

And tell me how to see?”

“No one knows how Life began,

From Nothing came our birth.

A stir of seething molecules

Sparked all the life on earth.”

“Don’t tell me, wretch, you are the one

Who made this world come true!

Imposter, get out of my road,

I cannot look at you.”

“Just so,” the man said, streaming light,

“For no one knows the why.

But you will be forever changed

By looking through my eye.”

"You had me at hello"

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Clowns who sell shit

It doesn't take too many trips to the YouTube store to make you realize that Milky was far from alone in existing just to sell stuff.

He may have been more dedicated than most, wearing a bedsheet costume (hopefully, not used - whoa there, Mr. Milks) to match his product. But this Kedso creature, covered in mysterious spots and holding a tiny useless umbrella, is willing to take some major leaps for the corporation.

Live-action clowns are, of course, far creepier, like this Fizzies clown with the orgasmic facial expression. One of the worst aspects of clown closeups is the fact that we can see the guy's real eyebrows, lips, teeth, etc. - which was probably never meant to happen while clowns pranced around the circus ring at a merciful distance. This guy has the teeth of a rabid beaver or a most unfriendly hamster about to fasten itself on to the end of your index finger. Fun.

This is Clarabell, perhaps the most famous clown in TV history, and goddamn, is he mud-ugly! The makeup consists of two squares drawn above the eyes, and a gory-looking Satanic mouth ringed in white. The advantage is that he could probably apply his makeup in less than five minutes, but the disadvantage is that, this close, his creepiness is so extreme as to be nearly incomprehensible. Yet clowns are always described as "loveable". Might there be something a little bit wrong with a man who needs to do this every day?

Krinkles the Klown is downright disturbing, so much so that I had to make two gifs of him. Here he hands a bowl of his product to an unwitting victim. If he looks a little more peculiar than usual (for this isn't the first time I've giffed Krinkles), it's because someone, not me, mind you, but SOMEONE has slowed down the YouTube video just a hair, so that he looks glassy-eyed and stoned (I mean, more than usual).

This guy's upper lip freaks me out. Watch it while he talks, and when he chews his cud, it's awful. And the way he blinks his eyes, blink, blink. I want to rip the fake hair out of his fake skull and tear off his nose. Perhaps this is where John Wayne Gacy got his inspiration.

Post eventually replaced the oh-so-stoned Krinkles with something a little more animated. But might the boy have a sugar problem?

But for sheer incomprehensibility, we can't beat the first incarnation of Ronald McDonald, a goof with a crappy cheap clown suit, surgical gloves, and a box on his head. Yes, a box, with burger, fries and drink. At first I thought that was a toilet paper roll strapped to his nose, but now I see it's an empty paper cup. Does he anticipate a nosebleed, or a freshet of snot, or what? I apologize for the quality of this one - it was the best I could do with a badly-edited, flickering video so degenerated that it's nearly green. It's so cheaply made, so jerky, that one wonders how this could have been the genesis for Ronald McDick, a cultural icon second only to Chairman Mouse in universal appeal.

No matter how hopeless

"This is the greatest mystery of the human mind - the inductive leap. Everything falls into place, irrelevancies relate, dissonance becomes harmony, and nonsense wears a crown of meaning. But the clarifying leap springs from the rich soil of confusion, and the leaper is not unfamiliar with pain."


I didn't write that, troops. It was that Steinbeck feller, you know, the clever one. And I don't know for sure why it leapt into my mind at this late hour, or how dissonances are going to relate in this-hyarr particular post.

It all goes round and round. You put a book out, it has taken you years and years to get to this point, it's suddenly "out", and you're sitting there waiting for something to happen. It doesn't transport your life or change the fact you need to lose weight or even lift your intermittent depression interspersed by Walmartian visitations of euphoria.


No kidding. Right in the middle of Walmart, the retiree's home away from home, looking for an economy-size sack of birdseed for my bird, I am hit with blinding euphoria: MY BOOK IS OUT. Harold, we made it! After six years of wandering around the desert, of having him roaming around in my head, he is "out", he is the word made flesh. And for that sublime, dazzling moment, I crest the top of the rollercoaster.


By the time I get home my pants are too tight and it's starting all over again. The divine/obscene comedy.

I've been obsessed with Don Quixote. Everybody is obsessed with Don Quixote because he makes them feel better about their own lives. At least we aren't some nut case crashing around with a lance. But we love him at the same time, for he takes the fall. He dies for our sins. There is something Christly about him, and Cervantes knew it. The holy fool. A sort of gaunt, underfed anti-clown. I started listening to the mind-lurching, emotionally-intoxicating Richard Strauss tone poem recently, with Yo Yo Ma on cello as the voice of Quixote. Oh God oh God oh.


And yes, you don't even need words to see and hear him. Then of course I had to go on YouTube to look up that documentary, that Terry Gilliam thing I watched when it first came out. Years ago. How he tried to make a film, an update of Quixote, and everything fell into the shit to a monumental, even Biblical degree. Everything was literally swept away until there was nothing left but rubble. This film made EVERYONE feel better, but everyone, even heroin addicts on death's door! But seriously, schadenfreude aside, what people were really reacting to and feeling deeply was the courage it takes to let your dream fall apart in full view, though thank God WE don't possess that kind of courage and never will.

We say failure is good, but it isn't. Failure is just failure. I guess it's inevitable, but who likes it, who really embraces it? Those motivational speakers are so full of shit their eyes are brown. In spite of Walmart birdseed raptures, my book likely won't go very far. It won't do a Quixote swandive either, but them's the breaks. I don't think Terry Gilliam lost out in the end, for somebody made soup out of the whole thing, and it was fascinating soup.


Most of us have had times when things have seriously fallen apart, when there's nothing we can do to hold it together. Might be serious illness, or a whole lot of people suddenly die in a row, like fucking dominoes. Or a job just falls out from under and there's nothing to dive into, no safety net at all. Or the safety net throws you up in the air so violently you wish you'd landed on cement.

So I hear this burningly idealistic, almost indecently gorgeous Quixote music by Richard Strauss,and then of course I must look up that song, you know, the one that was so popular in the '60s that everybody recorded it, even Liberace. Or Liberace's horse, I forget which. But I found, on an old kinescope of The Ed Sullivan Show, an 11-minute segment, a live, un-lip-synched slice of the Broadway musical Man of La Mancha, when it was brand new and still wet. And I found Richard Kiley singing it with heartbreaking devotion, just beautifully. I found a studio recording of him singing it with much more polish, but I never want to hear that one again. In this one he's standing in front of an audience, garish stage makeup all over his face, and every phrase is shaped as if with his own hands and ends with a little sigh. There's a catch in his voice here and there, as if it's almost too much for him, and the timbre of his voice is like a trumpet or trombone, the burnish and generosity and flash of the vibrato, the chest tones. This is coming from a human being. And I'm thinking.

The song is very short and compact, two minutes, and the lyric simple. The tune is something that sounds like it has always been there.


Dissonances relate. This is all about impossible quests, longing and questing, and holy idiots falling down into the mud. I feel like a goddamn fool sometimes, as if I'm on my fourth marriage and it's coming apart, as if I fell for it again. Haven't learned a thing. I remember when the idea for The Glass Character first leapt into my head. Now he is a book, he's outside myself. He lives, and he's in other people's hands, even if they aren't reading it! He's probably in Rich Correll's hands and Kevin Brownlow's hands, even if THEY aren't reading it. Today in Walmart, with the bag of birdseed in my hand, that was a glorious thing. Though at this moment, sitting here, I am not sure why.

A lot of people identify with Quixote because he is seemingly crazy, but everybody loves him anyway and he never has to go for shock treatments or be in the hospital. It's a freedom not granted to many. A lot of people like Quixote because humanity is very dark indeed, and we all want someone to take the fall for us. That's what drama is all about. Fiction is about trouble, poorly resolved or not resolved at all, and no matter how shitty our lives may be, they're a damn sight less shitty than Ahab's over there, he can be counted on to act it all out for us, to bear the brunt, to be humiliated or even killed in our place.

Sort of Christly, wouldn't you think?

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The Glass Character: Make up the clowns!

This is an excerpt from my third novel, The Glass Character, which features the legendary silent film comedian Harold Lloyd and his complex, decades-long relationship with an actress/writer named Muriel Ashford. In this scene, Harold is making his first venture into talkies in what he calls the "circus picture" and is experimenting with clown makeup, with surprising consequences for Muriel.

When he turned around, I felt a literal thrill run through me: he had painted on a new face, a clown mask both classic and modern, designed along the lines of his own features but with a tinge of exaggeration that brought out a slightly wicked quality I had never seen in him before.

This was the Harold that wouldn’t, couldn’t be bested, the Harold who had to win. The curve of the mouth was almost sensual, the eyes a little fierce. But it was a clown face nevertheless: and how could we ever be afraid of such jollity, such crazy eagerness to take a pratfall? This was yet another incarnation of the Glass Character, Harold at the Big Top, pushed down again and again, discouraged, despairing, until that magic moment when his never-say-die courage makes him leap to his feet and win the day.

I was absorbing all this (and by his expression, he was obviously pleased) when he did a suprising thing.

“So, Muriel. It’s your turn now.”

“My turn?”

“Of course. Can I paint your face? It’s such a lovely face, I’m sure you’ll make a very pretty clown.”

In his long history of strange behaviour, this was the strangest thing yet. Here was this slightly menacing Pierrot with a paintbrush, asking to turn me into a different person. His artistry was obvious, but I was a little uneasy about the results.

But I succumbed, sitting in the makeup chair which he turned away from the mirror. I began blushing almost instantly as he pulled my hair back and tied it, then laid down a base coat of cold cream. First came the clown white, which he spread on with deft fingers (using both his left and his right hand, which he had learned to use with surprising dexterity). Then he began to work on me: his concentrated expression was fascinating to watch, as this was an area of mastery for him, a talent that even predated his movie career.

As he drew lines and smudged them, touched my lips with carmine, created false lashes and brows, I could not help but respond to the sensuality of being painted. I wanted to believe it was an act of love, but I knew I was fooling myself: this was just another area in which Harold shone, in which he was the best because he had to be. Nor had he ever had any instruction: as with everything else in his life, he had figured it out for himself.

He carefully applied a beauty mark, looked me over one last time, smiled. “Ready, Muriel?”

“I suppose so.”

“Behold!” He turned me around so rapidly my head spun.

Shock! Harold had found me out – had looked inside my cringeing, vulnerable, childish soul, found all my mooning romanticism and false courage, my hopeless ambition and desperate loneliness – and somehow, he had painted it all over my face.

My eyes looked huge in the dead-white skin, full of fear and a strange kind of awe. They were pretty eyes, almost doe-like, yet not timid. Somehow they had the glassy, faceted look of a dolly with blinking eyelids. He restrained himself from painting on a single tear, but the effect was the same. And yet, there was also a heartbreaking hope in them, a willingness to go back for yet another round of pain and rejection.

Ye gods, Muriel: and you thought Harold didn’t understand you? The problem is, he understands you all too well!

“Look at us. Are we a pair?” he asked with an antic grin.

“I suppose so. But I look pretty serious for a clown.”

“Sad clowns remind us how precious happiness is.”

“And happy clowns?”

He looked a bit confused. “You’re a touch beyond me, as usual, Muriel. I’m a simple soul, just offer what I have and go home. I leave the analysis to others.”

The strange thing was, it was largely true. Harold was a roll-up-your-sleeves type, and not easily daunted. He didn’t sit up at night agonizing about his art. He wanted to make people laugh because that was his job, and he was very good at it. Just lately he had been faltering, and it terrified him, though he was not about to admit it. There was nothing for it but to try again. There had to be a way – another way – it was just that hadn’t found it yet.

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Hey, wait. . . did I miss a clown?

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Milky-abilia: the archaeological dig

Everybody knew that Milky the Clown was in the dairy business. I suppose it could have been worse, but what do we really know about these Twin Pines guys (posing here with His Milks himself)? The girl is sweet enough, and her pleated skirt reads, "Mary Lou". Pierre (with a giant TP on his turtleneck, presumably for Twin Pines) is wielding what looks like an enormous loaf of French bread (but at least he's not wearing a beret). The friendly milkman is just that - the friendly milkman, the same kind of milkman I knew as a child with his glass bottles clinking away. Except that when I was a kid, the milk was delivered by horse and wagon.

Amazingly, these little hand-held games can still be had on eBay. It's sort of like a maze where you have to get little balls in the holes. They were given out as prizes on Milky's Party Time, in which they had a feature called Stars of the Future (baton-twirling, juggling, etc.) This was as forerunner of America's Got Talent.

Closeup view.

I don't know why this is posed on snakeskin. Looks a little ominous to me. I should look up the price on eBay.

Milky on a (milk) glass. Looks plastic, but they didn't really have plastic glasses back then. Cheers!

Milky's Fan Club official button. I never was a member, not much of a joiner.

Yes, you're seeing this right. It's a Milky the Clown ashtray. The little beggars had already seen Fred and Wilma Flintstone sucking on Winstons, so what harm could it do?

Then again, maybe it's a hoax, like my Scully and Mulder fridge magnet in the shape of a flower.


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A dark and shameful secret

 

Readers (or should I say reader): I have kept this from you for lo these many, well, fifteen minutes or so. Let me tell you what happened.  My computer blew up about 5 days ago. Just exploded, melted or whatever a computer-s mind does when it has had enough. . . and for a few wretched days I floated, but not in the air. In sewage of some kind. My pessimist husband assured me everything in my beloved pc was lost forever, all my manuscripts, all my photos, every self-pitying poem and  Oscar Levant YouTube video. I truly and honestly wanted to die, more than usual I mean. I fled to Vancouver to solace myself with a bad movie, and while there I ran into my techie son who works in a big tower downtown. I told him my streaming tale of grief and he looked at me quizzically and said, oh, just give me the hard drive, I ll get all the info off it. CAN YOU DO THAT I asked him, and he said WE DO IT ALL THE TIME.

The bus home seemed to ride a giant cushion of balmy Hawaiian air. And I did get my stuff back.  But it is all subtly. . . different. It is a different reality. There are many losses, things I have not even discovered yet.  I can no longer manipulate photos at light speed the way I used to, because that wonderful Windows photo display thingammie seems to have disappeared. I can do it, very awkwardly, by shuffling my pictures around to another program, but damn it all and shit, it will never be the same, I will never be able to manage the blur of pictures shuffled as rapidly as a deck of cards in the hands of W. C. Fields. An era is over.

And my new computer, though it lacks the queer and complex  mental illness of the old one, canèt spell or canèt punctuate or somethingÉ As you can see. Most of the^^^^^^^ççÇÈèÇ;^^éé騨ÇÇÇ symbols are catawampus.

But thatès not what-a I-am-a tryin-g-t-a do here (though the Italian accent my new pc has is quite interesting). Ièm making a dire confession. After maligning clowns for some weeks or months (one of those topics I get stuck on like an old-fashioned broken record), I suddenly came to the realization that I was maligning a heretofore shadowy aspect of my own past.

*****I***** was a clown. Thatès right-a! A fuckin-è clown!

 

A guitar-playinè, bulbous-nose-wearinè, child-entertainè, stripey-shirt-nè-stuff-like-that-clad, real live authentic regular clown.

It was a different time, I was different, obviously I was, way thinner for one thing. God I was thinner, and so young. . . hard to believe I was ever so young, living in Alberta and doing a lot of community theatre which is the only thing that kept me semi-sane.

 

So you now see that I am a hypocrite. Or else I hate what I was. But I donèt, I donèt (sorry for the Chaucerian accent, I canèt seem to get rid of it cuz thereès obviously still some bugs in the system.) On the whole I think I was a non-threatening clown who at least didnèt dress like a KKK member or try to scare anyone. I didnèt go in for heavy makeup and the nose was only to break up the tedium of my very unfunny face.

I hate clowns

 

 

I hate clowns, I hate clowns,  I truly hate clowns,

They always depress me and drag my soul down.

 

 

 

When somebody puts on such strange things to wear,

The human condition is truly laid bare.

I ask, what's the point of all this tom-foolery?

It triggers in me a deep incredulity.

 

 

 

 

Now here is a clown who caused me great dread.

In childhood this creep rented space in my head.

His name was Milky, which was awfully scary,

Just clowning and whoring for Twin Pines, the dairy.

 

 

 

 

Before John Wayne Gacy came ambling along,

There was this guy here. And he was just wrong.

He wore stars and stripes for some unknown reason,

Though flag mutilation's a high form of treason.

 

 

 

Back when I lived near old Detroit town,

I saw a strange act performed by a clown.

When he mounted his friend, to my child's mind, 

of course he

Was riding on Bozo, just playing at horsey.

 

 

 

 

When I saw this old photo of black-and-white clowns,

I climbed on a bridge and just threw myself down.

There's Milky and Bozo, the two that were lovers,

Jingles, and Whatsis - who cares, they're all mothers.

 

 

 

 

 

This clown guy I mentioned, and those of his ilk

Did a lot of hard-selling by sucking down milk.

In Milky the dairy thought they would invest - right?

Then found out that he was a flaming transvestite.

 

 

 

Twin Pines weren't aware that they'd started a fashion.

Soon clowns 'round the world drank their milk with a passion.

And poor Pagliaccio was filled with a rage,

So he drank milk, then  killed his poor wife right on-stage.

 

 

 

With hijinks like this, some dark force was released.

The ringmasters shot themselves: all were deceased.

Clowns threw nasty fits, banged their heads on the wall:

These Komedy Kapers weren't funny at all.

 

 

 

 

If this gets much weirder, I'm going to be sick.

I've never laughed once when a clown did his trick.

I can't speak for you, but I think this is rude -

I never knew clowns were this nasty and lewd.

 

 

 

 

Milky is dust now, and Bozo is dead.

Their romance still haunts me and lurks in my head.

I hate clowns, I hate them, I'll never be free,

They never will get one guffaw out of me.