Clap Trap Salon Blog

all entries are Š2006 , Š 2007 , Š2008 and Š 2009 Jim Siergey except where noted

     Esteemed songwriter and musician Chris Wiley has taken lyrics that I have written and transformed them into songs!
     Chris arranged the tunes and performs with Carl Pedigo accompanying on guitar.

    Click on the platters below to hear these delightful ditties in all their stereophonic mp3 glory.

     In the yard of the house two doors to the south of me is the largest pear tree that I have ever seen. Birds of many a feather, including a murder of crows, frequent this tree as does a scurry of squirrels. Much chattering and chirping and cawing takes place amongst the leaves and branches as the creatures argue about and feed upon the tree's bounty.
     Every day I look out and gaze upon this tree, tall, stately and loaded with pears. Those babies sure look good. As far as I can tell, no one collects the fallen or low-hanging fruit. Due to the modern desire for fortress-sized fences, I cannot see into the yard. Nor do I know who even lives there. Some neighbor am I.
     Yesterday afternoon I decided to go out into the alley and scope out the back of the house two doors to the south. I strolled over with my eyes peeled for any sign of pears that might have landed or rolled off of the yard's garage roof. Alas, nary a Bosc nor a Bartlett to behold.
     There was, however, a squirrel sitting atop a garbage can. He was eyeing me warily. I looked at him and said, "Hey, go get me some pears. Wottayasay?" He continued to eye me. I moved as if to shake on the deal and the furry mammal quickly scampered away. Home I went, empty-handed.
     This morning, I awoke early. I put some coffee on to burn and went to go outside upon the back porch. When I emerged from the back door onto the porch, I noticed an object sitting atop my barbeque grill. It appeared to be neither leaf nor twig. I drew closer to see what it was.
     It was the remains of a pear.

     For the past couple of weeks I've been suffering from bouts of vertigo. It's been murder but even more disappointing has been the fact that Kim Novak hasn't appeared.
      I confess, every morning I descend the thirty nine steps to my rear window, part the torn curtain and, spellbound, look longingly for her. I search south by southeast as well as north by northwest. Even on my way to work I search the faces of strangers on a train hoping that I will find the young and innocent visage of Ms. Novak. If she is aboard, the lady vanishes before I can espy her.
     Without a shadow of a doubt, I'm at the end of my rope. In fact, I'm in a bit of a frenzy. I even have my suspicion that her absence might be a family plot. Who, I wonder, can be the saboteur?
     Jeez, I sound like some kind of a psycho, don't I? I'm telling you, man, this obsession is strictly for the birds.

kinski's
kin skis

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                                          "Oh, would you like a spot of tea?"
                                            My gosh, was he addressing me?
                                            For coffee is my drink of choice.
                                            I love its strength, its soul, its voice.
                                            Tea is for a nice, sweet gal,
                                            The kind that people gush, "she's swell."
                                            Coffee takes a certain stance,
                                            The kind that kicks you in the pants.
                                            Drinking tea is oh-so-dainty!
                                            Slurping java? No, it ain'ty!
                                            Tea is for a quiet time.
                                            Coffee makes your life sublime.
                                            And yet this guy, with tea in hand,
                                            Most surely did not understand
                                            His offer should go to a lady
                                            And not to me, a gal so shady.
                                            I looked him up and looked him down.
                                            I then gave him my meanest frown.
                                            "How dare you offer such a drink?
                                            For I am one who likes to think
                                            About the world and all its ways,
                                            Not sit in some tea-induced haze!"
                                            "Forgive me, ma'am!" His face turned red.
                                           I almost kicked him out of bed.
                                           Perhaps I should have gave him warning.
                                           I'm not too friendly in the morning.

                                                                                           --- Š2006 C. Lynch

     The elevator doors opened and the blonde walked out. Her skin-tight leather mini skirt emanated little squeaks that served as a strange atonal accompaniment to the echoing steps of her stiletto heels as she moved briskly down the empty hallway. A black beret was perched jauntily upon her head of long blonde hair that cascaded down the back of her neck and caressed the shoulders of her white angora sweater. It was a short-sleeved number with a plunging neckline that afforded a view as enticing as anything the Grand Canyon could offer. Nestled in the petite handbag on her hip was a nickel-plated handgun. She was dressed to kill.
     She surveyed the doors that she passed and stopped in front of one of them. The plaster and paint around the doorframe looked new. The lettering on the door's window did not. It read 'H. Dare, Private Investigator'. She turned the knob and walked in.
     A feeling of suffocation immediately overtook her. She steadied herself on the doorknob as she surveyed the interior. The office was small but it seemed even smaller than it was. All it contained was a chair, a filing cabinet, wastebasket and a desk with phone and lamp. But behind the desk was a massive figure who dwarfed the contents of the room as well as the room itself. He looked as if he had been poured behind the desk that, although of normal size, appeared to have been borrowed from a child's dollhouse. One of his shoulders brushed the filing cabinet on one side of him and the other nearly brushed the opposite wall. He was clad in a tent-sized overcoat and a felt hat that could double as an aircraft carrier. Its Brobdingnagian brim shadowed the top of his face but his eyes shined like headlights. His gaze was so transfixed that he appeared to be in a trance. He neither blinked nor moved. The blonde slammed the door. The tranquil giant shuddered and blinked his headlights as he returned to earth.
     "Excuse me." he mumbled, "I was contemplating time and space. I have an abundance of one and a dearth of the other."
     He smiled, displaying a piano keyboard full of teeth.
     "I am Hugo Dare, private investigator." he boomed, "Please sit down, Miss...."
     He let the sibilance linger as he gestured with his hassock-sized hand toward the empty chair. The blonde glanced at the chair and then looked up at the calendar on the wall. Seeing that it displayed a month long past, she tore off the sheet and used it to dust off the long vacant seat. She sat down, crossed her legs and placed her purse upon her lap.
     "Faraday, " she replied, "Ann Faraday. I need you to find something for me."

                                          ---excerpt from "The Maltese Chihuahua", a novel in progress by Jim Siergey

                                               Googling Lovers and Other Strangers

     The ever-growing use of Internet search engines to locate and obtain information about individuals as well as subjects has spawned a new verb: googling. The term, based on the popular search engine Google, is so new that my computers spell check still flags both Google and googling as misspellings. Either my computer has not yet heard of the phenomenon, or my software refuses to recognize a competitor. Spell-check did offer this as an alternative to Google: go ogle, and that may well be accurate.
     I myself, neither a computer geek nor a detective, have started googling names from my own past. Heres some of what I have learned in less than one year of googling. Unless the people from your past have somewhat unusual names, be prepared to slog through hundreds and even thousands of hits. My own rather ordinary name will result in many thousands of hits, but my long-lost childhood friend Fritz Farrington, for example, pops up quite prominently and singularly when googled. He and I, out of touch for more than 35 years, have exchanged very nice e-mails since I googled him. Also, people who have been published or whose names have appeared in publications are more likely to be good googling targets. Therefore, authors and academics will produce more hits than your missing friend from the shipping room. However, it doesnt take much for ones name to be listed somewhere: I found an old friends email address from an internet-posted schedule of a road running club.
     Another lesson learned: be prepared to suffer some rejection. Not everyone from your past actually wants to re-connect with you. I have located, through googling, email addresses for former friends and acquaintances to which I have then sent personal e-mail. More have not responded than those who have. This may be due to my own failings as a friend, to not being remembered, or to having found an old or incorrect email address. One of the beauties of googling is that you can always choose to believe the latter. (Note to those who have not responded to me: Im still working on finding your current email address.) A further surprise was how quickly I ran out of names from my past to be googled. Turns out I just didnt know all that many people, I guess.
     Googling former spouses, lovers and significant others (real or imagined) might be the most attractive aspect of this new form of inter-connection, or it might be the most dangerous. I havent yet googled down that road myself, but I can imagine considerable complications. Some connections may be better left disconnected. After all, who really wants to be told, years later, why it didnt work out or what your shortcomings were. Im willing and able to search for former classmates, teammates, and colleagues because what do I have to lose by doing so? They either remain part of your past or they electronically re-enter your present. But ones current spouse or significant other just might take exception to your googling your ex. Or worse, they just might start googling, too.

CLICK THE PIC TO VIEW THE JAM!

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                                                          The Sonnet Lesson

                                               Archaic form forgotten now but for
                                               Shakespeare, its master, and tortured lovers,
                                               Writ by few, read perhaps by but one more
                                               Whose heart is rent but whose soul recovers.
                                                In just ten syllables per line and rhymed
                                               A, B, A, B, A, B for a dozen,
                                               Two final lines like haiku timed
                                               To kiss as lover or buss as cousin.
                                               Confessing anew to ancient longing
                                               Or obfuscating in shameful disguise,
                                               A poem used for patient prolonging
                                               Endures in whispers and then ends in sighs.
                                               What science there to sonnets be ascribed
                                               Is better blessed as elixir imbibed.

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Just beyond this door...Scarlet Johansson!

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The Night We Didnt See Richard Nixon

     I cant quite remember the first anti-war demonstration I attended back in the Viet Nam War Era, but I do remember the last one. The first had to have been in 1967 or 68, and the last one was in 1972. Both of those were in my hometown, Chicago, and in-between I participated in a good many others, including some in Washington, D.C. and New York. That last demonstration wasnt as historical as some, and based on wide-spread impact it surely didnt compare with the events surrounding the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, which had helped bring the anti-war movement into living rooms across the country. Nor was that last one a massive outpouring like 1969 Moratorium March in Washington D.C., which brought upwards of half a million demonstrators into the streets of the nations capital. By 1972 the fervor that had so animated the earlier marches, and which had boiled over in the nation-wide student strike at the time of the incursion into Cambodia, had largely boiled away. When students were shot and killed at Kent State and Jackson State Universities in the spring of 1970 it had seemed like a revolution was at hand. In the desultory days leading up to Richard Nixons landslide re-election two and half years later, a minor demonstration at a Nixon fund-raiser in Chicago seemed more duty than passion, more spleen-venting than world-saving.

     It wasnt that we werent still opposed to the war, which still raged -albeit in Vietnamized form, but as Nixon moved inexorably toward re-election, the popularity- if you can call it that- of large scale demonstrations and marches had surely peaked. We were certainly not hard-core radicals, at least not the three of us who went downtown that evening to join in the demonstration across Michigan Avenue from the Conrad Hilton Hotel. We were surely still committed to ending the war and to peace, but the peace movement, such as it was by that time, may have become a bit more shrill and a bit less chic by then. The announcement, however, of a Republican fund-raising dinner at the Conrad Hilton, site of the famous Battle of Michigan Avenue during the Democratic Convention, to be headlined by no less than President Nixon himself was still an obvious venue for a demonstration, and so three friends went.

     The crowd of demonstrators behind police barricades across the street from the hotel numbered no more than a thousand or so. By this late date in the history of the anti-war movement, demonstrators were no longer merely chanting Peace Now! and Bring the Troops Home! As the limousines pulled up to the hotel entrance across the street, the demonstrators were now largely shouting out epithets and obscenities directed not at the government or the war, but directly and personally at the fund-raiser attendees. The tuxedoed and gowned dignitaries paid scant attention to the scruffy lot across the street, where the police and their barricades assured that there would be no contact between the two groups. On our side of the street all awaited the arrival of the President, the prime object of our derision. As always at these events, we had struck up friendly conversations with the fellow-demonstrators around us, who mostly seemed to be students, like us, from across the Chicago area. After a couple of hours of our bitter chanting and obscene comments it became clear that Nixon would not be entering the hotel through the front entrance. Word eventually worked through the crowd that he had been spirited into hotel from the back of the building, and the demonstration petered-out. As the three of us walked north on Michigan Avenue toward Congress Street, where we had parked our car, we were joined by one of the guys we had been standing with at the demonstration. The disappointment of not seeing Nixon was tempered by the camaraderie and some sense of having done our duty nonetheless.

     As we turned left onto Congress Street our role as demonstrators disappeared and we became just four guys walking down the street in downtown Chicago. Suddenly, a car screeched to a stop right next to us and three men jumped out shouting Hey you motherfuckers! Two of us stopped in our tracks, stunned and confused. One of my friends and the guy we had just met started running. My other friend and I froze for a moment- who were these guys; what did they want? As the other two guys bolted into the night, the three men from the car pounced upon us. Police! they shouted, grabbing us and shoving us around. I dont believe any of them ever showed us a badge or any kind of identification, or identified themselves any further than that initial barking of the word police. We saw that the car they were driving appeared to be an unmarked Chicago Police Department vehicle, and they themselves fit the description of Chicago cops- white, middle-aged (at least they were older than we) and hostile. You guys were at that demonstration? they asked. Uh, uh, yeah yeah, we were. Get in the car! It wasnt an invitation. They shoved us forcefully into the back seat and one of them climbed in with us. The two other cops jumped into the front seat and we drove off.

While no longer stunned we were still confused, but we were now mostly scared. The cops harangued us from the front seat, and the one in the back leaned on us heavily. Why did those guys run off? Who were they? We pleaded ignorance, saying they were just a couple of guys we met at the rally. That was clearly not a good enough answer for them, and they persisted in that line of questioning. After a few minutes we became aware that they were not taking us anywhere in particular, but were merely driving around. They continued to yell at us and threaten us, becoming increasingly agitated that we couldnt or wouldnt identify the other guys. We asked them, meekly, to take us to the station and book us, fearing that if they didnt theyd end up beating us to a pulp, or worse. They didnt respond to that entreaty, and kept driving around and kept yelling at us. Eventually- maybe 5 minutes, maybe more or maybe less, they pulled into an alley that ran under the el tracks somewhere on the near south side and then stopped the car. The guy in the front passenger seat turned around and pointed to my friend and said, Get out. My friend said no, that we were going to stay together. The cop in the back with us re-iterated, obscenely, Get out! and reached over and opened the back door. My friend, bless him, still resisted, and we exchanged a look as if this might be the last time we ever saw other. The cop in the back shoved him out the door and pulled it closed, and the car roared off. I turned to look out the back window and saw my friend running after us, and it was a chilling sight. As we sped up he disappeared into the distance. I now very much feared for my safety, if not my life.

The cops continued their harangue, eventually saying that one of the guys who had run away might have been involved in a plot against the president. They indicated it was our other friend and not the guy we didnt know. I knew, of course, that our friend was not involved in a plot against the president, and tried to explain that to them. They werent interested in explanations, and they kept driving around while I tried talking my way out of the situation: Im just a student, I grew up here in Chicago, Im sure neither of the guys who ran were looking to make any trouble and that they were only scared. A few minutes later we were back downtown and on State Street- still That Great Street in those days, and they pulled the car over in front of a subway stop. The cop in the front passenger seat turned around and told me to get out. It seemed they had lost interest in me, and since we were on a busy street, I no longer feared for my safety and life. I got out of the car as quickly as possible and walked toward the subway entrance, and they drove away. I walked down the stairs, got on the subway and went home.

When I got home I called my friend who had been dumped under the el tracks to see if he had gotten home safely. He had, and we talked for a while trying to make some sense of what had happened. If the cops had really thought our other friend, or even the guy we didnt know, had been involved in some kind of plot they certainly wouldnt have just let us go as they did. It seemed a matter of the cops taking a couple of hippies for a joy ride- their joy, not ours. In those days such things were not unusual. A couple of years later, during the Watergate hearings, it was revealed that there had been a deliberate campaign of intimidation against protesters, and some of the incidents described at that time bore a striking resemblance to what had happened to us. We never knew whether we had been a part of that, or had merely been harassed by Chicago cops, but it had been a frightening and memorable experience. The war itself outlasted all the demonstrations and outlasted Nixon, too. It was my last demonstration of that war, and it was supposed to have been the night we would be able to protest in front of the President himself. Nixon had gone in the back door, and we never saw him.

Š2007 Tim Roberts

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All material herein is Š2006 , Š2007, Š2008 and Š2009 Jim Siergey and the respective creators.
Do not use without permission. Thank you---The Management