For Ecdysiasts and Their Enthusiasts

            On Saturday I didn’t go to the food bank and won’t be going until after I hand in my essay on the 21^st. I did go to the supermarket though, which took me outside for the first time since Wednesday. On my way I stopped to pay for my November phone service. At No Frills I bought blackberries, raspberries, grapes, yogourt and mouthwash.

            After bringing my groceries home I went back out to buy a couple of cans of Creemore.

            I watched most of the debate between David Frum and Steve Bannon. Bannon is not much of a debater and the audience laughed at a lot of the things he said. Frum crushed him. I don’t understand the protests against the debate. If Hitler had been involved in broadcast debates her probably would never have come to power.

            Since the heat is now often on and my hygrometer has started going below 40 I decided it was time to make another humidifier for my guitar. I punched some perforations in a sandwich bag and sliced my sea sponge in two. I soaked it, squeezed it, sealed it in the baggy and then placed it in the hole of my guitar.

            I worked on my essay and added a few ideas to expand on what I’d already written. As would normally be the case at this stage, it’s not an essay yet. I’m more concerned about turning the piece into an organic whole that’s six pages long. Giving it an essay format for me is easier once the creative part is done.

            Here’s something I came up with:

The light of nature is essential for the growth and well being of humanity and Blake draws attention to this by showing the alternative. He writes of impoverished children starved of light by uncaring humanity and held back from nature in a parentless prison of urban circumstance.  He shows these waifs being denied a mother's care and the joys of singing and dancing in the open sunlight. He accentuates this image by describing black coal soot on their heads and faces to represent the darkness of night in which these innocents live even in daytime. These young chimney sweeps bear the brunt of winter cold while ironically cleaning chimneys that heat the homes of the more fortunate.

            I heated up the other burger I’d grilled on Wednesday and had it as a sandwich with a beer while watching Peter Gunn. They really do go out of their way to make this show hip and cool. In this story a guy named Guy walks into a nightclub called The Blue Funnel where there is a blind man named Steve playing piano and a wealthy woman named Laura Hope Stanfield sitting at a table watching and listening to him. There are no waiters or bartenders in the room. Guy walks up behind Laura and strangles her to death with his scarf. The police come and do their thing. Peter Gunn arrives and after they leave the owner tells Gunn that he was closing while Laura was still nursing her drink. The place had been empty because she’d asked him to go out and get her a sandwich. Gunn hasn’t seen Steve since he left for Europe. The owner leaves them alone and tells Steve to lock up. When he and Gunn are alone, Steve takes off his dark glasses and tells Gunn, “It’s good to see you!” he explains that surgeons in Antwerp gave him cornea transplants and now he is no longer blind but still pretends to be because it’s his bread and butter. This is why he can’t go to the police. He gives Gunn a description of the killer and says he will pay Gunn to catch him.

            Gunn goes to a Beatnik club where a three piece jazz combo of flute, upright bass and drums is backing up a poet reciting: “Ragged little child / standing on the outside / with your nose pressed up against the window / crying cause you aint never had a / jelly donut / But don’t you care / You’ll grow up / and drive a shiny red sports car / Join a country club / and if you’re real good / die with your mouth full … You aint so special ragged little fella / Aint you heard? / each of us is on the outside … There aint no jelly donut on the other side of that window / Only death.”

            Gunn goes to the bar to talk with Wilbur, the owner of the club. They seem to know each other well and Gunn knows all the Beatnik lingo and gestures. The poet finishes and Gunn asks, "Whatever happened to iambic pentameter?" Wilbur says, "Oh man, that's like strictly for squares! I mean, today's poets are free from all of those rigid rules and restrictions! Like man, they don’t even know what he’s sayin but ya know like they make the scene! Now you take art …” and he gestures to a painting behind him of someone with an octopus’s head and tentacles but a man’s body. “You dig?” Gunn says, “Crazy!” “I just finished it! I mean there is something you can swing with!” “Self portrait?” “What else man?” “Good likeness! You ever paint anything but yourself?" "I mean, like why should I? I’m so infinitely complex!”

            Gunn asks if Laura Hope Stanfield had been in that night. Wilbur said she came to see Shirley Blaze. “Shirley’s our new ecdysiast!” He has to explain to Gunn (and to me) that an ecdysiast is a stripper. Shirley peels to a jazz quintet, backed up by Wilbur’s recitation of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”. Shirley’s boyfriend, who used to be Laura’s, fits the description of the strangler. Wilbur gives Gunn Shirley's address. After talking to her Gunn tells her he's in the book. Later Guy comes to Gunn's apartment with a gun. Guy is confused as to how Gunn knew he’d killed Laura and about the $100,000 he owed her. Guy takes Gunn outside to his car to take him somewhere to kill him when suddenly Steve arrives and surprises Guy by taking off his dark glasses and shouting that Guy is the killer. It’s just enough distraction for Gunn to grab Guy’s gun. They struggle and Guy is killed.

            It seems that the word “ecdysiast” was coined by journalist H.L. Mencken in 1940 specifically to describe the work of Gypsy Rose Lee. The word was previously used to classify animals like snakes that shed their skin.