Fortune, Cookie

If you were reading this blog almost exactly a year ago, you’ll remember a little ditty entitled “The Devil is in the Details,” a look at how the infamous and frequently reviled Aleister Crowley changed the face of tarot cards, literally and esoterically, by including a one word mnemonic on each of the minor arcana, or trump, cards.

I’m returning to the subject of the tarot as a means of explaining how “The Bite“ will be evolving or, more accurately, devolving in the future.

As I noted in the “Devil” post, Crowley did novice tarot readers like myself (who, I’m sorry to say, will always retain the status of rank amateur) a great service by adding those mnemonics on the four suits of the minor trump cards. The majors, though, are a whole ‘nother kettle of fish.

Crowley himself wrote, “my tarot is not your tarot,” meaning that everyone will experience the cards in a different way. For instance, when a major card like “Temperance” or “Justice” shows up in one of my puny, six-card readings, I have a pretty good idea of the current situation or possible outcome, depending on the position of the card. However, I am still stumped by “The Hierophant,” and even close observation of the events that this card heralds hasn’t clued me in to what the Pope-based figure is trying to teach me.

But there’s one card that even non-tarot readers can immediately relate to and that’s The Wheel of Fortune (thanks Vanna!).

An important element in this card is the legend, “Regnabo, Regno, Regnavi, Sim sine regno,” translated as, “I shall reign, I reign, I reigned, I have no reign.” If you go clockwise around the Wheel beginning at the nine o’clock position, you can easily see how this translation plays itself out. Another Latin adage works just as well: “Sic transit gloria mundi” – All glory is fleeting.

As I’ve previously noted a time or two, I lost my full-time job a few years back, “lost” being a euphemism for getting kicked to the curb like millions of other Americans during our seemingly never-ending Great Recession. I’ve managed to keep the lights turned on and food on the table thanks to unemployment benefits, freelance work and my own native frugality. However, the benefits ran out in late March of last year, freelance is a rather sketchy business and even the best belt tightener starts running out of notches.

I definitely hit the “Sim sine regno,” or bottom, of the Wheel a couple of months ago when I took a seasonal, part-time position at a national toy store chain to earn a meager yet dependable source of income. All I’ll say about that little adventure is, I now know what it’s like to work for a manager who’s a 21st century version of Jeff Spicoli.

Just as that crazy gig was coming to an end, a good friend of mine gave me a heads up about a part-time position at her company. Within a week, she not only got me in the door for an interview, but the job was offered and gladly accepted by yours truly. Between this solid, thirty hours a week and my freelance work, I’m might actually be able to thrive instead of merely survive.

However, the one thing I won’t have a lot to spend is time, especially on this blog. As I’ve written before, “The Bite” has brought me great joy (and a convenient soap box for my personal pet peeves) but the god Mammon must be appeased as do the minor deities of the mortgage, electric and insurance companies.

I’m hoping I’ll still be able to write the occasional screed but, until I see how my back-to-the-workplace schedule plays itself out, “The Bite” will more than likely take a permanent hiatus from its weekly, TGIF posting.

As I take a turn on what I hope will be the “Regnabo” side of the Wheel, I’m counting my good fortune in having friends who watch my back and in the readers who have kept “The Bite” on their reading radar for the past 14 months.

Long may you all “regno”!

Street Wise

Among the many things that separate the girls from the boys, besides Brazilian bikini waxes, is the way the genders navigate.

All homo sapiens have a built-in GPS in their noses, in the form of a small magnetite deposit found in the ethmoid bone, located between the eyes and behind the schnozz, that helps them find the North Magnetic Pole. Men, however, seem to have a larger lump than women (in the South Magnetic Pole, too), which is why they have a better overall sense of direction. It also accounts for why, on the occasions they do get hopelessly lost, they’re so damned reluctant to stop at a gas station and ask for directions.

Women, on the other hand, prefer to find their way using landmarks and street signs, which is no easy feat if you’re driving on Long Island, a region that shows an astonishing lack of imagination when it comes to getting creative with location names.

In my neighborhood, there’s a residential street called South Long Beach Avenue which, if taken to its end, brings you to Waterfront Park overlooking Freeport Bay. However, a few miles west is Long Beach Avenue, a heavily-trafficked retail/commercial strip that will eventually lead you to the barrier island of Long Beach, known as “The City By the Sea.” I cannot tell you how many times, during my frequent constitutionals through the 'hood, I’ve been stopped by some hapless driver looking for the “other” Long Beach Avenue. The town fathers have even erected a sign at the first major intersection alerting drivers of the following: “Long Beach Avenue, Oceanside, 2 ½ miles” with an arrow pointing west. Here’s an idea for these bureaucratic big daddies. Why not just rename the bloody street and end the confusion once and for all?

This is not just an aberration. The same scenario plays itself out in the next town over, where two streets named “Grand” (one a residential “boulevard,” the other a main “avenue”) are a mere three blocks apart. Whoever is responsible for this set-up has a less than grand vocabulary.

Unfortunately, this drought of designations is even worse when it comes to Long Island’s towns. The best (or worst) example is the “Islips” which encompass Islip (proper), East Islip, Central Islip, Islip Terrace (huh?) and West Islip, which is divided from its sister burgs by West Bay Shore and Brightwaters. (Brightwaters also divides West Bay Shore from North Bay Shore and all the other Bay Shores. Get the drift?)

Once, when my sister and I were small, we giggled as my Mom drove through an area of that seminal suburban village, Levittown, sporting street names such as Griddle, Saucer and Cotton. A few years later, but this time egged on by “mary jane,” I giggled once again when my cousin drove me through a part of Merrick known as “Tiny Town” because of its Lilliputian-sized domiciles. (Unfortunately, we didn’t see any Munchkins, just normal-sized residents giving our smoke-filled car the stink eye.)

Granted these are silly names, but I’d rather lose my way searching for the wildly creative than the mind-numbingly commonplace.

The X Child is Born

“It’s tradition” are words that usually set my eyes rolling, so you can imagine the workout my peepers get during this holly jolly season. To me, Christmas traditions translate into REM-depriving tasks, just when the winter solstice is begging us to get some solid sack time. Over the years, I’ve perfected a few shortcuts that allow me the double luxury of celebrating and snoozing.

Instead of hauling a Christmas tree through the door and toting boxes of lights, tinsel and bulbs out of the attic (not to mention spending the rest of the winter sweeping up pine needles), I take a Christopher Radko ceramic tree from a closet shelf, place it on a plant stand in my living room, plug it in and, presto, “O Tannenbaum”! The half-dozen cookie varieties that used to turn my kitchen into a flour- and sugar-coated catastrophe have been pared down to one, three-ingredient, no-bake, sure-fire crowd pleaser. (Recipe follows for all you bleary-eyed Santa’s helpers out there.) I do spend a fair amount of time hanging lights outside my humble co-op, but that’s to prevent my fellow residents from shooting me a baleful, “bah humbug” look.

There is one tradition, though, that turns this iconoclast into a curmudgeon when not properly observed, and that’s shortening “Christmas” to “Xmas.” I’m not nutty enough to sport a “Keep Christ in Christmas” bumper sticker on my ride, but I believed the old school spelling upheld the spirit, integrity and intent of the day.

Notice the use of the past tense in that last sentence. Turns out that not only is “Christmas” fairly modern, but that “X” is more reverent than I, or others, thought.

You have to begin with the fact that “Jesus Christ” is not Jesus Christ’s name. (To quote my neighbor, “Ain’t that a bitch?”) “Jesus” is a transliteration from the Hebrew-Aramaic to Greek to Latin to English. Jesus’ full name was Yeshua ben Yoseph, translated in English to “Joshua son of Joseph.” (Mary was a Jewish mother, but even she didn’t have the chutzpah to name her son “Yeshua ben Yahweh.”) “Christ” is an honorific from the Greek, “Christos,” meaning “anointed one” and which, when written in its native language, reads Χριστός.

For at least the past 1,000 years, “Christ" and its compound words, including “Christmas," have been abbreviated using the initial “X" or “XP" in the original Greek. Examples can be found as far back as the “Anglo-Saxon Chronicle" from 1021, in many manuscripts from the 15th century and even in Eastern Orthodox icons of today. The labarum, or the Greek p with the x crossed through its stem, is used in the major Christian religions and is depicted in Paul Ruben’s 1622 painting, “The Labarum," pictured above.

All this historical context is never going to convince the diehard “Christmas-ers" to break out the WD-40 and remove those bumper stickers, but I’ve found a new holiday shortcut that will make writing out all my Christmas…er…Xmas cards even quicker.

And now, for that recipe…

12 ozs of chocolate chips (Semi-sweet or milk. Butterscotch works nicely, too. Your call.)

6 ozs of cocktail peanuts (Don’t try to get all heart healthy by using the lightly-salted or no salt varieties. Save the sacrificing for Lent.)

3 ozs of Chinese noodles (LaChoy or any other brand that looks like short strands of spaghetti.)

Line two small or one large cookie sheet with wax paper. Melt chips in microwave according to package directions. Stir in nuts and noodles until well-covered. Drop onto wax paper-lined sheets using a garden variety teaspoon. Put in fridge for one hour or until set. Place in tightly-covered, wax paper-lined tin. Store in fridge or a cool, dark place.

If you want to get all fancy, you can add a ¼ cup of dried fruit to the mix, such as raisins, cranberries or cherries.

Oddly enough, I don’t have a name for these tasty treats. My original recipe card has “Crunchy Chocolate Drops“ at the top, but that name’s never stuck. A friend thinks they look like nests, so “Noel Nests“ may not be a bad designation. Frankly, you can call them whatever the hell you want. Just make sure you call me after you’ve made a batch.

Merry Xmas one and all!

The Quantity of Mercy

“You are like me. We forgive nothing!”

Followed by the unctuous offer of a cookie, this was the wizened, wicked Don Corrado Prizzi’s proud assessment of his equally Machiavellian granddaughter, Maerose, in John Huston’s darkly funny mafia satire, Prizzi’s Honor, a truly under-appreciated comic gem.

To the Prizzis (and the Corleones, for that matter), forgiveness was for chumps, especially when family honor was at stake. Cross them once, and you could bet the vig that your name would be crossed off the rolls of the living.

When it to comes to the adage, “forgive and forget,” I’m not as absolute in it its rejection as the corrosive Corrado, but I’m not buying it wholesale, either.

So much has been made about the emotional healing power of forgiveness, not one but two annual “Forgiveness Days” are now observed. According to the various organizations that support these days and their mission, forgiveness doesn’t mean to forget, but does afford the offended peace of mind while taking the temptation of retribution off the table.

That’s fine as far as it goes, but my Shakespearean question is, how much is too much of a good thing?

Just as twenty-four of our state courts have adopted the “Three Strikes” law, I have my own scale of justice – “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

Regrettably, I’ve had to invoke this personal code of honor twice this year and, unlike what some forgiveness fans will tell you, my soul is not being eaten up by anger nor do I have any burning desire for revenge. On the contrary, if I had given either party the chance to turn a double dose of the same transgression into a triple, that would have blown whatever peace of mind I can muster these days. Like the popular game show, life is a game of “Survivor.” If I have to vote you out of my tribe to preserve my dignity, guess whose torch is going to get snuffed?

Mae West once embellished the above line from “As You Like It” as follows, “Too much of a good thing is wonderful.”

To put my own spin on The Bard, “Too much forgiveness is unforgivable.”

Think I’ll have a cookie now.

Amazing Academics

Say, what the hell do you parents do, anyway?

Twiddle your thumbs?

Gather wool?

Rest on your laurels?

Anything at all?

That’s the idea I get after reading about Sheldon Karnilow, the Half Hollow Hills’ school superintendent who earns a whopping $351,946.00 a year. According to board president Anne Marie Sorkin, Mr. Karnilow is a “bargain” at that price. Why? Let Ms. Sorkin explain:

“He’s got 10,000 kids that he gets to school every day. He’s in charge of their health, their safety, their welfare, their education.”

Not only should this shame all you lazy-assed Moms and Dads out there, it goes a long way towards explaining why property taxes on the Island of Long (the lion’s share of which go to schools) are some of the highest in the nation. Mr. Karnilow isn’t just a superintendent, he’s freakin’ Superman!

How else to explain his ability to kick 10,000 kids’ cans out of bed every school day, stand over them while they do their morning ablutions, serve up a delicious and nutritious breakfast, wait with them at the bus stop and then manage to be in his office when the first bell rings?

And what about the countless doctor appointments, bike helmets, winter coats and college educations he has to pay for? Why, it’s a wonder the man isn’t a pauper living in a cardboard box!

In fact, these LI school superintendents, who make up nine of the ten highest-paid K-12 school employees in New York State, are such a special breed, they and others like them have spawned the word “educrats.”

What’s an educrat? Since the Amazing Karnilow is busy teaching every subject to every student in his school district, let me enlighten you.

An educrat is, quite simply, an educational bureaucrat who works as an official or administrator in a school district. Used in its more derogatory form, educrats are more interested in the process of learning, and how that process is funded, than learning itself.

I will also add that LI’s superintendents seem to possess a preternatural stamina that mere mortals do not. For instance, Commack Union Free School District’s superintendent, James Feldman, retired in June with two decades’ worth of accrued vacation and sick time. Is this guy an educrat or the Energizer Bunny?

It’s time to get off your backsides slacking parental units! You may be stressed out over whether your job will still be there tomorrow (something these tenured Titans have no worries about) or running yourselves ragged working two jobs to make ends meet, but you should count yourselves lucky that a good chunk of your salary is paying for these educrats super-sized compensations.

Or, as one defender of LI’s superintendents put it, “People would love to spend less, but they would very much like to have someone who is beyond competent.”

Way beyond. In fact, suspiciously almighty.

Ill Will

Readers of this blog may have noticed I’m an avid admirer of alliteration. Not everyone is a fan, as demonstrated by this line spoken by Albert Brooks’ ironically named TV journalist Aaron Altman in James L. Brooks’ “Broadcast News”:

“A lot of alliteration from anxious anchors placed in powerful posts.”

Call me anxious but, more and more these days, I’ve found three alliterative words popping up in my thoughts or out of my mouth – deranged, demented, delusional.

Looks like I’ve inadvertently tapped into the national zeitgeist. A new survey by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration found that 20% of American adults have experienced mental illness in the past year. That adds up to a whopping 45 million crazed citizens.

In an age when federal frisking of innocent airline passengers in the name of fighting terrorism seems sane, this comes as no surprise to me, especially since trying to be all “Que Sera Sera” all the time brought on my own year-long bout with depression exactly a decade ago.

What was alarming about the whole episode – besides the ever-present ennui, vaguely suicidal thoughts and a constant knot between my shoulder blades the size of a baby’s fist – was not recognizing the demon until I was well out of hell. My epiphany came one night several months later, when the symptoms of the disease were listed in a TV commercial touting a miraculous new anti-depressant, followed by those always scarifying drug side effects. So that’s what was eating me. Hmmm.

Turns out I didn’t need a magic bullet like Prozac, Paxil or Zoloft to blow me out of my black hole, but a healthy dose of that always energizing elixir, anger. During an office holiday party at the end of that “lost year”, one of my former company’s muckety-mucks publicly and wrongfully accused me of making slanderous comments against her. After a fitful night’s sleep, I woke up like I was shot out of a cannon, said “piss on this” and set about gathering my advisers and allies to do battle. I was back and loaded for bear.

I think my own experience neatly reflects what’s really ailing Americans – our meek willingness to drink a Kool-Aid that promises to cure our security ills but, instead, inflicts such debilitating side effects as loss of freedom, dignity and control.

Here’s my personal Rx for fighting the forces that have induced this coma of passivity and powerlessness: rationality, reaction and, most of all, rage.

Psyched Out

Funny how you always remember your first time.

Hearing a certain word, that is.

Where I grew up, kids didn’t go to summer camp. Our mothers would shoo us out the back door after breakfast, with instructions to come back when the firehouse whistle blew at noon for lunch, and again when it blasted at six for dinner.

One summer, there must have been a secret meeting among the Moms where it was decided their offspring could be doing something more constructive than tearing up the neighborhood, so we were all herded into a different station wagon every morning and driven to a local park where we took part in arts and sports activities. To this day, I remember the park counselors, a group of college students who probably thought messing around with a bunch of kids in the great outdoors was a pretty sweet gig.

One of them especially stood out, not only for his blonde good looks (he made quite a stir among girls of all ages) and his black belt in the exotic discipline of Ju Jitsu, but also his predilection for the esoteric.

One day, he handed another counselor the astrological profile of a co-worker. She began reading it and exclaimed, “This is uncanny!”

At the time, I had no idea what uncanny meant but it sounded pretty cool so I put it in my back pocket until I could investigate further.

For those needing a primer, “uncanny” is something that’s eerie or mysterious or, more to the point, an instance that is familiar yet foreign at the same time. A great example is the theory of the “Uncanny Valley,” proposed by Japanese roboticist Mashiro Mori in 1978. Mori found that the more humanlike robots became, the more people were attracted to them, but only up to a point. Fifty percent is fine, ninety percent even better, ninety-five percent the ultimate. But tip the scale to ninety-six percent or higher, and humans become repulsed, focusing on the parts of the robot that aren’t human. Think of an animated corpse like Frankenstein’s monster or the zombies in “Night of the Living Dead.”

This is where things get weird.

Recently, I was sipping a cocktail in a bar/restaurant, waiting for some friends to join me for dinner, when I saw an advertisement on the wall sporting the face of someone who looked vaguely familiar. Sliding off my stool for a closer look, I read the name that went with the face and realized this was the same great looking, martial arts master who mentored us at the park. The hair had gone gray and the lines had deepened but, no doubt, it was him. Here’s the kicker: The former counselor is now a psychic medium whose extraordinary “gift” allows him to “reconnect with the Other Side.” In other words, one could say he reanimates the dead.

I could call this collision of coincidence “eerie” or “mysterious” but “uncanny” will do it for me.

This is a First

Sometimes, it’s the things you vow never to do that turn out the best.

When I first became one of the great, unwashed unemployed of the Great Recession, many career experts were urging former professionals like me (so that’s what I was) to raise our career profiles by writing a blog. Not only did they cost zero to launch and maintain, the reasoning went, but you can share your expertise with the world, thus garnering potential customers for your small business or impressing future employers with your industry knowledge and expertise.

There’s just one small point they left out – it sure as hell helps if you can write.

I can’t tell you how many networking events I attended where I was handed a business card that featured a dreaded WordPress or, dare I write it, Blogspot address only to have the other party breathlessly announce, “Oh, and that’s my blog.”

Out of sheer curiosity (which, I swear, someday will kill me) and a small streak of masochism (ditto), I checked out a number of these blogs.

If I mixed two parts disgust with one part outrage, added a dash of depression and a twist of Schadenfreude, that’s the cocktail of discontent I’d serve with this sub-par fare. By then, I figured the blogosphere was already cluttered with enough debris and promised myself (and anyone within earshot) that I would never add to the world wide waste of space.

So why, you may wonder, did I?

Certainly the most overriding reason was the sheer act of writing itself. Until the job market picks up, or hangs out a permanent “Gone Fishing” sign, I make my coin through freelance writing, which is a “feast or famine” business even in the best of times. Writing is like any other physical or mental muscle. If you don’t use it, you lose it.

Following a close second was the liberating thought that, for once in 27 years, I could write whatever the hell I wanted without having it vetted by one of the “Eight Types of Bad Creative Critics.” (A future blog article, for sure.)

Resurrecting a name and logo created for a previous freelance venture that went nowhere, the Bite Size Copy blog was born on November 20, 2009.

Although I devote more time thinking, researching and writing for Bite Size than I do for any paid project without getting one thin dime, it’s the most enjoyable gig I’ve ever had. I can only hope my readers get as much of a charge perusing it as I do writing it.

To mark the occasion of Bite Size’s first anniversary, I’ll be imbibing another cocktail, this one made up of two parts appreciation, one part gratitude, a dash of thankfulness and a twist of “ta!”

This one’s for you. Cheers!

Cat(calls) Got Your Tongue?

My Dad was one of eight kids born into a Depression-era family. His youngest brother, Charlie, contracted polio and although it stunted his growth and put him in leg braces for the rest of his life, he was luckier than most victims of that once-dreaded disease.

One day, when my Old Man came out of school and saw the local rich kid on his bicycle (an unheard of luxury in those hard times) trying to run down Charlie, he didn’t hesitate to haul the little bastard off his bike, throw him to the ground, and beat the tar out of him.

Later that evening, during the family meal, “Mrs. Rich” showed up at the Brady back door with her black and blue tyrant in tow demanding an apology. My Grandfather bellowed for my Dad and was ready to take the rod to him, until my Father quickly explained what caused him to deliver the earlier ass-whoopin.’ Without hesitation, my Grandfather grabbed the broom that was always just outside the back door and with it ran both mother and son down the driveway and off his property, swearing a blue streak along the way.

I bring up this bit of family lore because “bullying” is a word that’s recently grabbed national headlines. After several young people have committed suicide because of extreme hounding by their peers, both government and educational institutions have taken steps to stem the tide of what they call an epidemic of childhood abuse.

However, Manhattan’s City Council has decided that bullying ain’t just kid stuff anymore and is considering legislation that would make whistles, cat-calls or lewd come-ons illegal. Apparently, there’s a movement afoot in cities from New York to Cairo to make street harassment a crime. Spearheaded by women’s groups such as Hollaback, their stance is that this is gender-based violence that threatens public safety.

Here’s my stance: Since when have we, the decent members of society, forgotten how to say the words “fuck off”? Or, “You’re an asshole”? How about, “Why don’t you shut the hell up”? Here’s the beauty part – they can be texted, too!

Fact is, bullies aren’t only found in cafeterias or playgrounds, but on street corners, corporate hallways and global corridors of power. You can’t make them back down through legislation, nor can you depend on law enforcement to be there when the baiting takes place.

Not everyone has the physical strength or Irish temper to put a bully in his rightful place which, by the way, is splayed out on the pavement, but administering a loud, angry tongue-lashing is a damned good start.

The Master's Voice

Days before it was published this past Tuesday, Keith Richards’ autobiography, “Life,” topped every book category on amazon.com.

Having contributed my fair share to the Stones’ concert/record/merch coffers over the years and getting diminishing returns on my investment (quick, name the last Stones album that wasn’t a reissue or live disc), I’ve opted to wait until the book hits my library shelves instead of shelling out the publishing price.

Besides, a little googling is all it took to read some of the more semi-salacious (Jagger’s dagger is more like a penknife) and not-so-shocking (the Glimmer Twins are far from joined at the hip) revelations. One nugget I did find surprising is that Richards was a member of his school’s choir. As if the mental image of rock’s “bad boy” as a white-robed cherub singing “Jerusalem” wasn’t bizarre enough, Richards says he signed up because he had “a soprano that worked.”

I once heard it said that if a Marlboro could talk, it would sound like Keith. I have no doubt that pre-nicotine/drugs/booze/formaldehyde he had some sweet pipes, but I’m just as glad all that high livin’ vaporized them. After all, what would such Stones classics as “Happy,” “Before They Make Me Run” and “A Little T&A” be without that voice.

In writing as in music, it’s the voice that separates the masters from the mere technicians. One of my favorite Hunter S. Thompson anecdotes appears in the biography, “Gonzo.” After giving a rambling, coke-fueled speech at “Rolling Stone” magazine’s 25th anniversary party, Thompson was found by the “RS” editorial assistant who was charged with being his keeper “…talking alone with Keith Richards, which was absolutely amazing to hear. It sounded like two dogs barking at one another…”

No doubt The Good Doctor and Keef were also playing the same chord in their respective crafts – rockin’, rollin’ and rabidly debauched. In this same vein, I find it intriguing to pair up my favorite authors with their pitch-worthy counterparts in the music world. For instance, Gore Vidal is literature’s Bryan Ferry – elegant, erudite with a touch of the louche lounge lizard. David Sedaris is definitely in tune with Morrissey, turning the bleakness of family, relationships and, in Sedaris’ case, the holidays, into darkly humorous vignettes. And Marilynne Robinson strikes me as mid-career Joni Mitchell, using inward, impressionistic imagery to mine the spiritual lives of her characters.

Whether or not you appreciate their language or lyrics, there’s no mistaking the intonation of these unique “voices” for lesser artists. And that, my friends, is what true artistry is all about.