Tuesdays are the best days for Calvin and Hobbes.

Calvin and Hobbes, by Bill Watterson.


Taboo Monkey Blue Blog: Writing on Writing

“Is your client 18 years old or older?”

Yes.

 “Do you have progressive results from at least three formal IQ tests?”

Yes.

“Does his mean result register below a score of 71?”

Yes.

“Does his mean result register between a score of sixty and 71?”

Yes.

“Your client’s IQ does not register below a score of sixty?

No.

“No, as in, your client’s IQ does, in fact, register between a score of sixty and 71?”

Yes.

“Yes, as in –”

Yes.

“Does your client have a legal guardian?”

No.

“Have you completed an application with Legal Services?”

No.

“Then you must complete an application fourteen days prior to the date you anticipate he will receive his unconditional release from the psychiatric ward.”

He was unconditionally released a week before this conversation began.

“Really?”

Yes.

“Into whose custody?”

He was unconditionally released.  He has no guardian.

“But, then—where is he staying?”

He sleeps at his mother’s apartment.

“Then why are you seeking crisis dollars?

I am seeking crisis dollars because assisted living terminated his residency contract.  We want to transfer his existing support dollars to fill a comprehensive foster care home vacancy.

“If he is staying with his mother, then on what grounds are you claiming a crisis?”

The mother’s apartment is not a safe living environment.

“If your client does not have a guardian, then your client has the right to make his own decision.”

He contracts with Developmental Disabilities Services for Case Management, and a Protective Services investigation determined that his mother’s home is not a safe living environment.

“Sir, you may file an application for crisis dollars, but without a court commitment or legal representation, I doubt that the region will consider your client’s case a priority.”

An afternoon drive south from Medford to Ashland, Oregon along I-5 takes only fifteen minutes when the traffic is light.  There are many routes between the cities.  Highway 99, for example, jogs back and forth across the Rogue River for many miles.  In October, the river valley draws clean, vibrant air from the California mountains, and when you are driving through the lowlands of Southern Oregon, if you take the time, you can smell the resinous scent of cedar and red wood.  If you are careful, and choose the scenic Highway 99, you can stretch out the drive between Medford and Ashland for nearly an hour.

Two 

J___ waves me in and out of a narrow alley behind his mother’s apartment, before we negotiate a suitably safe place to park my car.  He is bouncing everywhere with excitement, beaming at me with his blushing, feminine lips, pulling his wild thinning hair until it sticks from his head like a scarecrow’s.   “Hey, buddy,” he calls to me before I can open the car door, and once again when I’m stretching my legs.

“How’s it going, J___?”

“I’m all right, buddy. I’m all right.  How are you?”  The fingers of his right hand tug at his lips.  His left hand is in a cast.  All the truth in J___ comes to a testing on his lips.  He gauges your mood by attempting the tiniest smile, or the hint of anger if he believes it may be warranted.  When we considered J___’s desire to remain his own guardian, we wondered whether J___ had the capacity to judge his own feelings.  You could read your own face by looking at his lips.

“I’m fine, J___.  Should we talk inside?”

“No, buddy, I don’t think that we should.”

“Is your mother home?”

“No, but her boyfriend D__ is in there with all his friends.”

“How is D__?”

“He’s all right.  You know what?  I hate him, I really hate him, buddy.”  With his four right fingers and thumb, he pulls his lower lip up and down, fluctuating between two conflicting thoughts.  Then he laughs.  “Yeah, he’s all right.”

“J___, I talked to the State today about getting you into a foster home.”

“What did they say?  They said no, huh.  I really don’t understand it.  Even after going to the hospital?”

“We’re going to find you a place.  We’re going to get you into the right place.  That’s what we’re trying to do, right?”

“I don’t care.  My mother doesn’t care.  Who cares, right, buddy?  I can do whatever I want.”  But he is angry, now.  He looks at me closely and senses that he has a right to express his anger. But two minutes pass and he's ready to talk about basketball.

He has two choices, and neither has yet occurred to him—though the police, when they escort him back to the hospital later that night, will make the choices quite clear: he can surrender his guardianship to the courts, or he can withhold from smashing windows--from all of the various actions he takes in order to explain to the world that no one listens to his problems.  The world only sees one problem, the conditions of his birth; and no other crisis registers in the charts.

Copyright ©2004-2006, ©2007 Joshua Suchman. All rights reserved.
Taboo Monkey Blue Blog: Writing on Writing  

From Journey to the East, by Hermann Hesse:
The Acquittal of Self-Accuser H

"I had not only lost the ring and had not once missed it, but during all those dreadful years I had also no longer repeated the four basic precepts or thought of them. Immediately, I tried to say them again inwardly. I had an idea what they were, they were still within me, they belonged to me as does a name which one will remember in a moment but at that particular moment cannot be recalled. No it remained silent within me, I could not repeat the rules, I had forgotten the wording. I had forgotten the rules; for many years I had not repeated them, for many years I had not observed them and held them sacred - and yet I had considered myself a loyal League brother.

The Speaker patted my arm kindly when he observed my dismay and deep shame. Then I heard the President speak again:

'Defendant and self-accuser H., you are acquitted, but I have to tell you that it is the duty of a brother who is acquitted in such a case to enter the ranks of the officials and occupy one of their seats as soon as he has passed a test of his faith and obedience. He has the option of choosing the test. Now, brother H., answer my questions!

'Are you prepared to tame a wild dog as a test of your faith?'

'No, I could not do it,' I cried, moving away.

'Are you prepared and willing to burn the League's archives immediately at our command, as our Speaker burns a portion of them now before your eyes?'

The Speaker stepped forward, plunged his hands into the well-arranged filing cabinets, drew out both hands full of papers, many hundreds of papers, and to my horror burnt them over a coal-pan.

'No,' I said, drawing back, 'I could not do that either.'

'Cave, frater,' cried the President. 'Take heed, impetuous brother! I have begun with the easiest tasks which require the smallest amount of faith. Each succeeding task will be increasingly difficult. Answer me: are you prepared and willing to consult our archives about yourself?'

I went cold and held my breath, but I had understood. Each question would become more and more difficult; there was no escape except into what was still worse. Breathing deeply, I stood up and said yes."

Distantly Related Posts and Searches:

1. "Before the Law," from The Trial, by Franz Kafka
2. "Angel of Progress - Angelus Novus" from Illuminations, by Walter Benjamin
3. Hemingway Stories - Five Free Texts
4. Hermann Hesse at Amazon

Copyright ©2004-2006, ©2007 Joshua Suchman. All rights reserved.
Taboo Monkey Blue Blog: Writing on Writing 

One month before I sacrificed the better part of my virginity to the god of supplicant Jewish boys, I received a t-shirt. I was fourteen years old, and with two hundred other freshman and sophomore boys, I competed in the Wisconsin Badgers Soccer Invite. For five days we played bruising, brutal games. My team placed second overall, earning me a smart, simple, short-sleeved cotton soccer jersey.

The end of that week is the beginning of this story: a t-shirt, a cardinal-red t-shirt, collarless but thickly ringed with a wide, white crew-neck. There was a white, military-stiff stripe sewn along the crown of each shoulder and a matching band around the cuffs of each sleeve. On the left breast stood a busty Bucky Badger, the proud mascot of the University of Wisconsin. I wore the jersey on Saturday. I wore it again on Sunday. And then, on Monday, I wore it to my first day of overnight camp in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin.

Olin Sang Ruby was a Jewish camp for assimilated boys and girls. Everyone was Jewish–not in a religious, faith-based sense of the word, but rather in the distancing, alienating sense that confuses many lives of non-traditional Jews. Every Olin Sang camper brought some token, some symbolic badge to affirm the nature of our secularity. Mike thought of himself as an actor, so he brought a collection of plays by David Mamet. Ben was a musician, he brought his round, hard-shell guitar. Fat Tiny was a punk, and banged on a set of drums until the trembling earth begged for mercy. And I wore my Badger soccer t-shirt.

She was different. She wore no badge or token—though she would, later, after the summer had ended. The clothes she wore were simple, neither grunged for style nor pressed for presentation. She had smart, sad eyes that never seemed to blink, always luminous and wet, but strangely silent and obedient to the emotions that passed across the rest of her face. Her lips were simple, very soft. She laughed very often. She never smiled

One afternoon when the other campers were lounging outside the tents, waiting for supper, she led me out into a field of unkempt feed corn that filled the corridor around the boundaries of the camp. There was nothing illicit about the moment, but there was a warm wind that brushed through the field, and the edges of the sun melted a little, and a secret grew inside me that I kept even from myself.

She was always waiting for me, cross-legged in the grass with her friends, or leaning back against her elbows in sand along Lac La Belle, watching the rhythmic shadows of waves. She talked a lot. And she was a terrific listener. She let me tell stories about my life–largely fabricated, mostly forgotten. Sometimes we kissed, and my fingers would negotiate for something more elusive, more ambitious. Sometimes we held hands. Other times we didn’t. On the last night of camp we cocooned ourselves away from the world into a sticky sleeping bag; and—while all of our friends watched the endings of a movie, within an awkward, endless span of nearly seven seconds—the gods accepted my childhood as a sacrifice. In the morning, I gave her my t-shirt.

She returned to Chicago and I returned to Madison. Before the year was over, she sent my t-shirt back–washed, neatly folded. Having it back inspired in me a compulsion to wear that t-shirt incessantly, in the endlessly comic–perhaps pathetic–way that boys commit to random objects and ideas. I brought the shirt with me to Colorado Springs where I attended Colorado College, and I wore it there as well. On the occasion of a rare visit to Madison, the typical joke was for my friends to ask about the shirt, to tell me how they missed the shirt, to request that next time I send the shirt and leave myself in Colorado. On the last day of my Junior year in college, someone took a photograph of an ex-girlfriend and me while we faced the stoop of our vacated house, the world behind us dwarfed by the pale, purple luminescence of Pike’s Peak. She was dressed in an emerald summer frock that clung to her belly and breasts. I stood beside her, holding a handful of her curls, wearing long jeans; and my wide-brimmed Stetson; my crooked, thickly-wired glasses; and a tired, faded, cardinal-red soccer t-shirt.

The end of this story spans the entirety of my life between graduation and now: a gulf of nearly ten years, inexplicably during which I have no memory of that shirt. Perhaps in a paroxysm of celebration I gave away all my material memories; or, perhaps, with a deadline to finish packing, I abandoned the scraps of my belongings to my friends. I don’t remember leaving it behind; nor do I remember wondering about its absence; nor, from the vantage of my current perspective, can I conceive of any reason why its loss should have passed unnoticed from my life.

One year ago I celebrated my 31^st birthday, and by chance or fate, I was living in the city where my two best college friends also lived. They were working on their relationship. She brought me a present. She handed me a white, wax-paper bag, and inside, buried within a nest of tissue paper—and smelling of naphthalene, Clorox, and an unsettling trace of lilac—was my exhausted, forgotten jersey.

She couldn’t remember how she ended up with the shirt, she said.

Perhaps she had salvaged it from the trash, I said.

Or, I said, trying to smile and remembering the arrogance with which I once drifted away from my first lover, perhaps I gave it to her so she wouldn’t forget me.

Her lips twisted in response. “Well, it’s yours again,” she said. “What’re you going to do with it?”

Note: People have presented this riddle in various forms throughout the years. I read a version in Labyrinths of Reason, by William Poundstone, that I am using as a template for the current post.

At Amazon: Labyrinths of Reason

The jury found the prisoner guilty of the worst sort of murder, and the judge was well within his rights to sentence the prisoner to death; however, the judge could not indulge himself by condemning the murderer to an excruciating demise. The Law of the State prohibited any death-sentence other than a simple hanging. Nevertheless, the nature of the murderer's remorseless crime filled the judge with outrage, so he struggled within the bounds of his mandate to find a way to make this particular hanging slightly more painful.

The day of the sentencing arrived, and when the prisoner, along with his counselor, appeared before the court, the judge said, "I am tempted to order your immediate execution and wash my hands of this heinous crime once and for all. However, I find you to be a heartless, cold human being, and nothing would please me more than to pierce your hardened caul before you die.

"Therefore, here is your sentence: because an immediate hanging would cut your anxiety short, while an extended wait would only allow you to enjoy your life longer than you deserve, I sentence you to hang at sunrise on one of the seven days next week. I further instruct your executioner to make sure you have no way of knowing in advance what day you shall die.

"Thus, you will approach each night's sleep with the fear that this may be your last night on earth. Then, come sunrise, the executioner will walk you to the gallows, hang the rope about your neck. Perhaps he will then remove the noose and return you to your cell for another day. Or perhaps the door below your feet will vanish, and you will die. However it should happen, it will come as a complete surprise to you, and I guarantee your surprise upon my own honor, and my own life. You will not know the moment of your death until it rises to greet you."

The murderer found himself startled and suddenly afraid, as he had never been throughout the years of his life, of the cruelty of the sentence. But his counselor smiled with relief. The murderer turned then and snarled, "What happiness can you find here?"

"Well, it's just this: the judge cannot hang you now, or ever!

"Consider," the lawyer said, "you are supposed to hang one sunrise in the next seven, but you are not allowed the certainty of knowledge that would confirm for you the day of your death. So they cannot hang you next Saturday morning. It is the last day within the sentencing period, and if you walked to the gallows on that day, you would surely know it was intended to be the day of your hanging. That very knowledge was prohibited by the judge himself, on his honor and his life. Are we agreed? You cannot hang on Saturday."

The murder nodded his head, and said, "So? Who cares? It will not be Saturday; doubtless I will hang on Friday or Monday or any of the other days."

The lawyer shook his head. "Suppose you live to see Thursday afternoon. You will realize that the only remaining mornings are Friday and Saturday. However, you already know it cannot be Saturday. But if it must be Friday, then it cannot be Friday, either! Your knowledge that Friday is the only possible day on which the judge could legitimately carry out his sentence prevents the judge from carrying out his sentence!

"And now," the lawyer said, "you must see that this holds true for any day of the seven. On Wednesday afternoon you will know that Thursday is the only possible day; and then, of course, it cannot possibly be Thursday! So on, so forth. The judge must release you or break his solemn oath as a judge--and lose his own life in the process, as he has staked it to his oath."

At last the murderer began to smile.

That night he slept like a baby, and walked confidently to the gallows on Sunday morning, and just as he suspected, he walked back to his cell. He walked again on Monday morning, felt the rope secured about his neck, but he smiled nonetheless. Sure enough, the rope was removed, and he strolled back to his cell yet again.

And then on Tuesday morning, as well, the executioner led him to the gallows and secured the noose. That morning gave birth to a piercing sunrise. The sun silhouetted the murderer like a frame around a photograph, as he hanged by a stout rope - quite unexpectedly.

Did the judge fulfill his sentence?

At Amazon: Labyrinths of Reason

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This was emailed to me today: a little yummy from her inexhaustible bag o' tricks, a yummy that I believe was originally found on a Craigslist post:

"I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdgnieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe."

Distantly Related Posts:

1. Your Limited Perspective: A Woman Problem
2. Riddle: Taboo's "Free Will Versus the Sports Book" Paradox

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