George and Gracie

           

            On Saturday the super came for the rent, but I was busy so I quietly ignored him, just like I’d done the morning before. He persisted with a wave of five sharp knocks every half a minute or so. Finally I got up and went out to shout at the door, “Could you please come back in half an hour?” Half an hour later I was still busy but he came to knock again. In frustration, I got dressed and told him to wait. I started counting the rent money and then he knocked again, causing me to lose count. I called out that the more he knocked the longer it was going to take. I put the rent, along with the increase of $11.72 into an envelope, licked the glue and sealed it. I gave him the money as he gave me the receipt and I asked him next time not to come in the morning.

            I finished reading Jacques Derrida’s “The Ends of Man”. It seems mostly to be an explanation of Heidegger’s “Letter of Humanism” with a conclusion that seems to be saying that it would only work if we throw a little Nietzsche in there to push it all over the hill.

            I re-read two Sinclair Ross stories and three Flannery O’Connor stories in preparation for Tuesday’s test. The Ross stories made me cry sometimes but the O’Connor stories didn’t because they were more fun to read despite the darkness of them, because I think that even the brutal ones are meant to be somewhat humorous. Her story, “Everything That Rises Must Converge” has more of a tragic feel to it while at the same time being the funniest of the three that I’ve read.

            That evening there was a gentle snowfall with a slight wind that seemed like the ironic but not particularly funny April Fools gift of an already shaken snow glob.

            I fried five strips of bacon while slicing up the little bag of mushrooms that I’d received three days before from the food bank. I removed the bacon and fried the mushrooms in the grease. Frying mushrooms smell like sweat. I made toast from the pumpkin seed bread that I’d gotten from the food bank. I would have used the olive bread that I’d had to take after touching it because I’d mistakenly thought that it had been raisin bread. As I say, I would have used the olive bread to get it out of the way, but it turned out that it had been raisin bread after all, which doesn’t go so well with bacon and eggs but is very good by itself.   

I watched two episodes of the George Burns and Gracie Allen show. On the show they had a young adult son named Ronnie Burns. It turns out that Ronnie was their real adopted son. Apparently when they’d decided to adopt, Gracie picked out the sickliest child in the orphanage. He grew up to be a healthy and handsome man. The show was metafictional and in between scenes George would talk to the audience about what was going on. One line from the first show I watched was, “For every child that can’t understand his parents there are two parents that can’t understand their child.”

            In the second show that I watched, Gracie gave Ronnie her engagement ring to give to his girlfriend but she kept it a secret from George and arranged for her friend Blanche to make up a story for her. Blanche told George that Gracie’s ring had slipped down the drain. George asked the audience if they were surprised that he’d believed that story. He explained that he had to because it was the plot of the show. He hired a plumber to look for the ring and the plumber was played by Howard McNear, who played the creepy barber on the Andy Griffith show. When George found out that his son’s girlfriend was wearing Gracie’s engagement ring he decided to get revenge on Blanche by trying to set her up with the plumber. He asked her if he was interested in meeting an attractive widow. When George left to get Blanche, Gracie walked in and the plumber thought that she was the widow. He started chatting with her and asked, “If you got married again would you mind if the man you married had children?” Gracie answered, “No I wouldn’t mind, but I’d be surprised. Women usually have children.”