I decided to post a topic titled “Glarb”.
Done.
Whilst I was thinking about posting - I had a short look at Denny’s wonderful reminders of the cosmos and all those zany shenanigans at NASA and the other posts in page 1. In so doing I saw Dale’s thing about the condemned poet. That’s very glarb so glarb will begin there.
In so doing - can that be spelled “insodoing”? Or would that sound and look like a bath in Coca Cola ™?
Are all poets condemned? I think so. To be a poet is to have a muse, to have a muse is to be exposed to passion, to be exposed to passion is out of fashion and all those suckers will wear this year’s gum-boots or to the gallows go.
The gallows may be matchsticks or two thousand year old hawthorns that witnessed Jesus’ passion.
A death may be great or small.
Not necessarily fatal.
Am I a murderer that all the ants and sundry got caught under my gum-boots?
And these humans? Special to themselves and lawers to themselves also.
The ants once held a tribunal convicting gum-boots to death by a thousand stings. The three most important ants were elected for the judgement but got rolled on by a pig as they paused to deliberate. Truly justice is a commodity - such as the belly of that particular pig.
I knew one true murderer in my time. Let’s call him “Glarb”.
Glarb was a well-payed consultant in the data mills where I was serving my own sentence of eviction from the muse.
One day, a week before Christmas, I shared an elevator to the mill with Glarb. He looked dejected. C’mon man!" I sez to him " It can’t be all that bad?".
“Yes it can.” was Glarb’s glum reply.
As it turned out, the body he had wrapped in a blanket and thrown in the company car, before a game of golf with the company execs, on the way to a hasty shallow burial in semi-rural parts somewhat north, had inconveniently washed-out a few days later in a torrential down-pour.
Glarb, it seemed, although a highly accomplished data-miller, left much to be desired in the art of corpse-concealment.
I later took that as a reference to the man’s good nature.
Glarb. Let me give you my impressions of the man:
Glarb liked a joke. He brought much happiness and mirth to the Friday afternoon long-lunch (a hallowed tradition of the mill).
Glarb loved women. He was charming. I observed his affect on the office girls who warmed to the attention and simpered. I believe each male human has a zone in their sympathetic nervous system that lights-up to the slightest female simper. In the presence of Glarb this happened to me often. For this reason alone I would have like the man.
But.
There was one thing that endeared me to him more than his talent to elicit simper-illuminatio, more even than his direct candour in the elevator.
It was simply this:
He was good at his job.
Not just good. Inspired.
He had passion. His love for women was the same love he had for doing things right. His insight into the majesty of masterpiece. The data mills came alive to his touch and wove tapestries fit for kings.
SO.
When Glarb got hauled-off for his endictment. the company saw it fashionable to disclose the fact and suspend his tenure at the mill.
They were fashionably magnanamous, however, and called a meeting to explain the circumstance and DEMOCRATICALLY (what a super fashionable word!) poll the employees about whether they could bear to be on the same floor as Glarb while he finished his assignment.
I’m tempted to say that, at this point a pig rolled on the democratic arbiters of Glarb’s short-term fate. This was not to be.
Fashion, of course, ruled. And the unconvicted man was deemed to have the wrong coloured gum-boots to enable co-existence in that particular hive and convicted to absence and a summary revocation of all simpering past and future.
For myself, I voted in the afirmative. To have such a passon-inspired individual in my presence was the food of God. I knew I would lose - I might be wierd, but I’m not blind. Still, there had to be doubt.
Without much doubt, the fashion leviathan rolled on.
Within a month, the least popular executive had been awarded Glarb’s corpse-blighted company car (a few weeks before his “promotion” to “Special Projects”. We lowly data millers often quiped how the Special Projects office could convey one to the street twice as fast as the elevator.).
And so it goes.
Dale. It is unfortunate, but poetic, that your friend will be subjected to the most gross and mistakenly symbolic of gallows. Convicted of the wrong footware at a time when the style of rugged-all-weather-multi-terrain-pedital-conveyance has shifted significantly from his feaux-pas. I imagine that there will be a great effort to enshroud the miss-deed with much pomp and ceremony of the most fashionable kind. He will die in gumboots that could never fit. The post-mortem pictures will portray no more than a suitable by-line in Harper’s.
The truth is, that I will convict a murderer while he is trying to kill me or someone I love - chances are that I will have on the wrong gum-boots at the time - hey-ho. There is yes-yes and no-no and all else? … now who said that?
So what’s the risk of passion?
Someone once refered to “salt of the earth”.
I kinda took that to heart. I’d hate to get rolled-on by a pig in anything less than pig-resistant gum-boots.
To quote myself in a song I once wrote (still out of fashion):
“The world’s just a circle of passion and pride
and it gets on a roll
or just lays on it’s side
and the ones you roll-over got no-where to hide
inside of you.”
