April 1, 2016
I’m sitting with the dog on my neck, a comfort for me. Gunther is barking at…I don’t know. Nothing, probably.
I’ve got the new vacuum in the garage, on the operating table, ready for the first cut. The trouble? Doesn’t suck. Way too loud. I had a dream. In my dream a piece of–plywood(?)–fell in front of the vacuum cleaner exhaust, stopping the air from traveling through. I cannot see how this could happen, but my dream might be telling me the truth. Minus the part about the plywood, I think. Thing is made of plastic, metal, rubber. I can see only two screws, anywhere on the machine. Of course the engineers like to hide screws behind rubber circles, like that. If this intervention fails I’ll take it in for repair.
Gunther was frantic to go outdoors this morning. He didn’t show any reluctance, although on the far side of the block he got distracted by people jogging and walking. He remembered how to sit when I asked him to. I can sense that his imagination is active because he glances around as though nervous.
I step over the upheavals in the sidewalk. I think I like these evidences of tree root growth, despite the tripping hazard. They make our old neighborhood seem, well, older.
I don’t know where this was taken, by whom, or why. It predates digital stuff, though.
March 31, 2016 addendum
I had an epiphany on Montana Avenue. Not the gentrified, area of Montana Avenue, but the neighborhood of the LP Anderson store. I saw two yellowed signs that read, “Big Sky VCR.” I felt like I had stepped into a time warp. Well, the VCR business continues to operate, just not the way I imagined. Digital video cameras now need service, just as the older analog videotape cameras did.
I sought more. I checked an old Polk Directory. Here’s a bit of what I found:
D & D Mimeograph Service, 213 W. 11th Street. The stencil duplicator or mimeograph machine (often abbreviated to mimeo) was a low-cost duplicating machine that worked by forcing ink through a stencil onto paper, according to Wikipedia. In the mid-1960s, my friends and I drew comics and made a magazine using this technology. Okay, we didn’t actually get the comic drawn, but we started out drawing one.
Peterson Typewriter Exchange was always near the YMCA on North 32nd. You could get Dictaphones and Ditto Machines.
Then there was the Golden Rule at 24th Street and Central Ave. I thought it was probably a religious store, but no. J.C. Penney built general merchandise stores by that name in Billings and all across Montana: Laurel, Kalispell, Harlem, Lewistown, Missoula, Anaconda, Philipsburg, Butte, Bozeman, Dillon, and on and on. The Golden Rule in Billings suffered a fire, was sold, and ultimately a grocery supermarket ended up there.
Gunther is a good, though immature, sort.
March 31, 2016
I took the aripiprazole my psychiatrist prescribed. First time I’ve taken any antipsychotic medicine. But gee! The voice in my head has shut up, for once.
I’m thinking, ‘Hey! Maybe hearing a constant voice is not normal!’ I won’t miss it. It called me names, like ‘asshole.’ So far, the only bad thing is that the aripiprazole makes me feel peculiar; like I need to stretch and yawn. More a nuisance than a trouble, and perhaps the odd yawny feeling will abate. Oh yes, and I find myself craving food, potentially a bad thing. Although before, I had such a poor appetite I sometimes skipped every meal.
This morning, about six or so, Gunther and I started on his constitutional walk. I say “started” because he became so frightened, he refused to take a step. I mean if I pulled his harness, his toenails would make lines on the walk. At first I let him turn and hurry back to our door.
But wait. We were both dressed for action and he always poops, first thing in the morning. And pees. We had to see this through.
We start again and after half dozen steps he freezes. What is he afraid of? We stop and I look around. First Interstate Bank looms large. I get kind of angry. Hurt my feelings that the bank is so important to him.
I din’t punish Gunther. I never do. Okay, I did flick him on the head once, kind of hard, with my finger, when he kept biting my foot. Otherwise, I avoid getting physical that way. I don’t want him to be afraid of me. On the other hand I got pissed when his youthful imagination became more important to him than I am.
I’m all, “What the fuck, Gunther?”
Then I gently lifted him and carried him a hundred feet down the walk. No, I mean it. Gently. (He weighed just 16 pounds the other day.) I spoke in soothing tones. I reminded him that he is my dog, that we are both in it for the long haul. That he and I can walk through dangerous places without our freezing up like scared kids.
I gently set him down. He still wouldn’t go, so I crouched down three feet in front of him on the sidewalk and called him. He listened! He came. I repeated this several times. Then after an initial balk, he and I trotted rapidly to the end of the block, to his pooping place.
March 30, 2016
My psychiatrist acknowledged that I am a complex person. No he didn’t. That’s just wishful thinking. He acknowledged that I need help.
Now I want to whip up my muse again, Gunther keeping my neck warm by sitting on my shoulder. He can see out the window that way. I struggle with depression; some days just going out into the back yard seems all but impossible. On my best days I can get out there and I sit on the swing, looking at the garden, the birdhouse, the woodshed, the compost heap, the trees. It’s all pretty close in. However, my best index of how I’m doing is to watch my housemates. They do better when I do.
Walked G. to the w. end of block for his a.m.b.m. Imagine how he must feel, hearing a lot of robins for the first time? What about that pickup streaking by? Did it frighten G. or is he used to them? I’m getting a contact high.
March 29, 2016 (about a half hour later)
My story is about boy meets girl of his dreams, loses same. No. Boy meets a girl who will walk to school with him, lets him kiss her, but won’t let him get any closer to a sexual relationship than that. The boy becomes an alcoholic. Mostly beer, mostly with other high school kids on the basketball team.
Boy breaks up with girl. Boy drives to visit brother in Oregon. Learns to smoke marijuana. Returns from Oregon and picks weeds far and wide about hometown, but fails to find any that can deliver the same high as the stuff in Oregon. Boy forgets to be an alcoholic after that.
Push ahead 50 years. Boy is now a doddering old drooler, angry that his dog has lost the ball under the couch for the third time that day. Actually he doesn’t drool.
Gunther
March 29, 2016
I was sick this morning. Stomach. More than the usual number of aches, pains. I had wanted to walk downtown today. Worse luck! I did get Gunther around the block at 6 and he pooped, but I forgot my flashlight, so I had to rely partly on luck when I picked it up. Well, the familiar warmth was there, but I’m not sure I got it all. Much later it started raining, and I pretty much stayed home, although by two this afternoon I felt better. I walked Gunther a couple more times.
Printed out a contract for a fence company and sent them $1000 for a 3-foot fence. Soon Gunther will frolic outdoors without worry of dog catcher.
Best of all today the mail carrier brought me a British edition of Sue Townsend’s “The Lost Diaries of Adrian Mole 1999-2001.” Ah bliss! I began reading again the words that revive my muse, my fickle muse. I notice that the British sometimes put quotation marks inside commas and periods. I wonder at the elaborate set of rules they must follow. Also, sometimes a quote within a quote has a single quote outside, a double within. The British are no doubt fond of elaborate sets of r.
Tomorrow I have a 7:30 a.m. appointment with my psychiatrist.
After the Leo takes a torpedo from U-486:
I am cold, wet, and my ears are ringing. Am I lying on the street, and I can’t move my legs? Now I remember: The water was over my head. Then it dropped a few inches and I could yell. I screamed every time the water dropped and I could breathe. And scream. Someone grabbed my shirt and, with a steady lift, handed me up to someone who got me out of the dark water. What dark water?
Wait. I am not on a street. The sun is setting, and I see the superstructure of a ship. I’m on a ship, not a street. I again try in vain to move my legs.
Did someone knock me out? I feel like I was dreaming. In my mind we were in London looking for women, but I–no, I am on a ship. Freezing. Wet. The air stinks of a familiar gunpowder smell.
Someone is walking past me on both sides, quickly, not running. I hear many voices, but mostly I hear the sound of boots on the steel deck. Somewhere. I make out the words “We got hit.” I know I got hit. Felt like a sledge hammer. I think the deck is slanting. Sinking?
Now I remember. My buddies in Company E, weapons platoon, are with me on this ship, somewhere. Something terrible happened. Something really big, like a hammer smashed into our ship. I am hurt. Someone is telling me not to worry, that I’ll be okay. Now they are lifting me and putting me on some canvas. Now they are carrying me on a litter up hill, across the deck. The wind is cold. I hear a voice say to “set him down here.”
Soon I am being placed onto another stretcher, this one with chicken wire above me and below me. A rope harness with a pulley is close above my chest. I am being tied down to the new stretcher. Someone lifts me up and the ropes tighten. The pulley squeaks as the cable passes through.
After they put me over the side of the ship, the last thing I remember. . .
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A smaller ship, the HMS Brilliant, pulls up to the converted Belgian luxury liner, the doomed, SS Leopoldville. Someone from the deck yells up at the soldiers clustered at the rails: “Jump, mate!”
A few brave souls make the attempt, but not all of them jump at the proper time. Some fall between the ships and are crushed when the waves make the ships bump together.
Despite the lack of organized Army leadership, the soldiers are calm. They fasten each others’ life jackets and throw their helmets down the listing deck to port. Very few men carry their rifles.
They hear the shout of the Battalion Commander, a Lieutenant Colonel: “Who gave the order to abandon ship?”
One of the soldiers on the deck yells: “Fuck you!” The soldier who yelled this probably saved the lives of many who were transfixed by indecision whether to try jumping to the rescue ship. Soon wave after wave of men leap from the rails of the Leo when someone shouts, so they get the timing right.
The Brilliant rises and falls with the waves. Sometimes the soldiers on the Leo can reach out and almost touch it. Other times the distance from rail to deck is nearly 20 feet.
Gunther did well until he heard a dog bark outdoors.
This morning I dutifully collected a stool specimen soon after Gunther performed his … well, let’s face it. He took a shit. P. and I had agreed that if a stool analysis were to cost more than $15 we would rely on Gunther’s dog-given God-given nature to heal him. Assuming he is sick, which I’m not sure he is.
I phoned Dr. Kate Kilzer’s office for advice. The administrative assistant told me the laboratory fee would be $45. I asked if they would say, hold the vial aloft and judge its color for $15.
So this morning Gunther and I practiced “sit” and “down.” He does a damned good sit.
Writing, I sit in our basement with an electric heater making the kind of racket a fan makes. Comfort.
In the 5th grade I used to have an electric heater fan in my darkroom. I took a picture then.
About the same time in Missoula my brother Tom and I would have huge fights (which I always lost) and in the back room of our house where it was cold, I could close the door to the kitchen and turn on an electric fan-heater.
I kept my chemistry set there in the back room. That, and the foot-tall stack of comic books. I don’t remember what table was back there, but it was probably a card table with metal folding chairs. I did some of my most important experiments back there.
I melted quantities of sulfur and lots of rubbing alcohol to make fires. Why? I was in the 5th grade. Kids that age like to make fires.
My father had long since died of cancer, so I had little adult male supervision.
One time we got a visit from Don Coe and his son Douglas, who had driven over from Plains, Montana. Don was a colleague of my father’s.
Douglas, an only child, saw my chemistry lab, complete with glass apparatus with a flame issuing, but he said, “I’ve got a better lab than that.”
Douglas eventually became a college organic chemistry professor in Butte. He was also a swimmer. The Plains school had a swimming pool.
The last time I saw the Coes was at a triathlon at Frenchtown pond. Douglas’s daughter and my son Todd competed. Douglas told me he was surprised that someone would come all the way from Billings for the event. I am tempted to say Todd trounced Douglas’s daughter, but I am not certain.
In the 1940s Don Coe was editor and publisher of the Plainsman, weekly newspaper of Plains, Montana. My sister Carol said she used to enjoy watching the linotype and flatbed press when Don set type and printed his newspaper by letterpress. Don smoked a pipe, a strong memory.
Douglas was a year older than me and always beat me wrestling. His mother, Betty, whom I visited at a hospital in Missoula when she had surgery and I was still in journalism school, helped publish the paper even in the mid-70s when I visited her. By then they used a different printer who used an offset press, set type with a computer, and used a machine called a “headliner.”
I got one of those about 20 years ago and I got rid of it, although I have the cartridges of photographic paper that went with it. They are in my basement, and probably fogged by now.
I believe the headliner machine came to me through one of our kids’ friends, whose father bought the Laurel Outlook. I also got the Outlook offset press which I eventually put in my garage and made work, but I sold it for scrap after I got tired watching it work.
I’ll never forget the huge electromagnet at Golden Recycling, hanging from a crane. The magnet swung over to the press, still on the bed of a trailer. When the woman energized the magnet many levers and knobs flipped erect to face the magnet. The crane and magnet easily lifted the press, swung it to a pile of scrap, and let it fall with a nice crash. I think I got $20 or so.
At the Priest Lake District lookout tower on Indian Mountain. In back are my sister Carol, her daughter Beth Angel Rohrer, Diane Judd Sinclair and in front of them: Bob Struckman, Tom Angel, and Todd Struckman. I’m in front. Note that Todd is wearing his pajamas. Penny must be the photographer.
In 1980, when our family drove our two VW vans to Priest Lake, Idaho, to work on a Forest Service lookout tower, we stopped in Plains for ice cream. Don Coe happened to be after ice cream too, and he had his camera. He was interested in our llama, Andy, which we carried in one of the vans. We bought Andy to carry our water to the tower.
He photographed our son Bob astride Andy and published a story in the Plainsman. He noted in the cutline that he had been friends with my father, Robert Powers Struckman, who died when I was 4. The only other fact about Don that I remember is that prior to Plains, he and his family had lived in Miles City where he worked on the newspaper there.
In 1976 I returned to journalism school in Missoula after a 7-year military enlistment. In the J-school library were stacks of newspapers from all around Montana. I was astonished and dismayed by the lousy quality of the Plainsman.
The type and makeup was a mishmash of ordinary typewriter, computer print, and some unedited press releases and blotchy unscreened photographs. Margins were ragged and the type went up and downhill. Later I learned that Don and Betty had had some sort of emergency and the paper had been published by some untutored friends.
insearchofbud 