Readers and writers blog

Why should anyone care when a waiter rants about his job, his life and the people who invade them? If what he has to say is as well-written as Waiter Rant, everyone should care. Which is why it’s the latest addition to our blogroll.

It’s an inspired idea — a waiter tells you what he really thinks of his customers, which could include people just like you, as well as of the restaurants where he works, which could include places just like the ones you frequent, and of his life among ordinary people, which just could include you. To add to the intrigue, he steadfastly remains anonymous through what is now three years of entries.

He does tell us he is a waiter in a high-end restaurant in the New York City area. And we learn that he is a “passably handsome middle-aged guy with a gut” from his account of taking a break at a water fountain during a gym workout and beholding a young redheaded woman on an elliptical machine. His vision tunnels and his mind wanders to a poem he read in high school:

This is the female form,
A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot,
It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction,
I am drawn by its breath as if I were no more than a helpless vapor . . ..

“Translation? The girl’s a supreme hottie. Suddenly I’m aware of the fountain’s water dribbling against my chin. I can feel the heat of impatient people lined up behind me, eager to take a drink.”

A grammarian might quibble about his punctuation and occasional use of ‘its’ for ‘it’s,’ but even the crankiest pedant should bow to the power and agility of the anonymous waiter’s writing.

From Walt Whitman poetry to water dribbling down his chin, he moves between the heights and the dregs — the retired cop who still packs a gun but babysits a small dog with cancer, the prosperous-looking diners who are petulant about the specials, the unshaven, grumpy old man who eats alone and “reminds me of a fearful child scanning the horizon, wondering who’s going to be the next person to hurt him,” the kitchen staff whose favorite terms of affection are “pendejo” and “maricon.”

Throughout it all, the anonymous waiter moves with ease — the deceptive ease that always is a sign of well-wrought, often hard-fought, writing.

Check, please: Waiter Rant.

– Sid Leavitt

I have no religious affiliation, and I am often dismayed at what some people do in the name of religion, not only in other parts of the world like Iraq but here at home in a government that also kills and tortures while invoking the name of God. And yet, what other people do in the name of religion I find impressive and reassuring.

One of those people is John H. Williams, whose website, Trite but True, I commend to readers for the clarity and economy of his writing. The website now appears in our blogroll at the right.

In one of his earlier entries, Williams introduces his “Brief Philosophy of Life” with the following: “I think it is useful to articulate core beliefs clearly and succinctly. It clarifies thinking and makes it possible to share one’s life experience with others. While life is complex and should not be oversimplified, we should all be capable of outlining the basic principles we live by.”

He then goes on in 16 months of entries to fulfill those aspirations, writing about God, humanity, his views and the views of others, usually with dispassion, occasionally with heat: “As I look at the world of yesterday and today — at civil war in Africa, poverty in Central America, injustice at home and corruption just about everywhere — I see the accumulative influence of many jerks in key positions of power. As I observe single-parent families, recreational drug abuse and obscene salary differentials between management and labor, I behold the ravages of selfishness . . .. So don’t be a jerk — whether for heaven’s sake or for humanity’s — just don’t be a jerk.”

Not everyone will agree with all his beliefs. I don’t. But I do admire his writing because it does, as he says, “make it possible to share one’s life experience.” I can’t think of a higher purpose for writing.

As for his personal life, I know from his writing that he is a Christian, and I assume from the one recipe on his site that he originally is from Kentucky. (If you like over-the-top desserts, you really should check out that recipe, “Kentucky stack pie.”) I also would guess that he is a clergyman or a teacher, or at least he should be.

I hope he is both. Because both professions could use more thoughtful people like John H. Williams.

– Sid Leavitt

The full Latin phrase is vox clamantis in deserto, a borrowing from the prophet Isaiah who in Chapter 40, verse 3, tells of a voice crying in the wilderness. To be more accurate, Isaiah’s voice is clamoring, but for many of us, the word ‘crying’ would in fact be more appropriate. And looking around at the Internet, the ‘wilderness’ would be more aptly described as a jungle.

Technorati, the Internet engine that searches weblogs, reported as of this month to have indexed 75 million blogs. That’s not counting the other search engines like Google, Yahoo and IceRocket. So it’s no wonder that somebody figured out the average readership for any given weblog by dividing the number of blogs by the number of people surfing the Internet and came up with a result of about 1. That average one reader of the average blog is probably the person who is writing it.

So how is one voice to be heard in this jungle?

For the purposes of this website-weblog, let’s hope that it’s the quality of the message. Not necessarily the quality of the content, but the quality of the writing itself. And if the writing can be improved, let’s hope that other messengers will share their thoughts in this interactive universe of the written word.

For an example of quality writing, even though the content may put some readers off (and delight others), we direct your attention to a new listing on our blogroll entitled, not coincidentally, vox clamantis.

– Sid Leavitt

Well, we finally got the damned thing up. So welcome to Readers and writers blog.

This combination weblog-and-website has been under construction since November, and when I say ‘we,’ I mostly mean Brett Langston, an all-around computer guru who put up the initial site, and Keith Hitlin, a website wunderkind who spent months doing blog renovations in the FrontPage-WordPress workshop, joined later by Brett again. To stretch a pun or two, it would be only binarily logical to give the two of them the old college cheer — Boole-a, Boole-a. (Not my college, by the way. I just stuck that in there to see if the unmathematical George, allegedly a Yale graduate and our president, would get it.) (Well, I also hoped some of you boolean wizards would appreciate it, too.)

But enough silliness. Here was the whole idea: Amid the explosion of websites and weblogs in recent years, much of it dedicated to the type of personal chatter you hear on cellphones these days, it occurred to me that someone should put up a website dedicated to that passion so many of us bear — the passion to write, along with its corollary, the curiosity to read what others are writing — that would be free and unlimited. To be fair, there are many fine sites and blogs dedicated to the free part, but very few to the unlimited. Well, Readers and writers blog is unlimited. If you don’t believe it, check out its first offering — my book in the nonfiction section, ‘Adrift in America,’ which in paperback runs 334 pages. That’s 102,000 words.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Following is Chapter 36 of “Adrift in America: Diary of a Minimalist Mariner,” a work found in the nonfiction section:

Old Orchard Beach, Maine. March 15, 1987.

I awake with a start. There has been a terrible cry, a low moan like someone being stabbed in the stomach, then an angry shout, “GOD DAMN IT, oh, god damn it.”

It has, of course, been me.

I blink at the fake veneer on the side of the refrigerator. I am still alive.

The cabin is cold and damp.

I look at my left hand, which is poised motionless at the end of the arm lying beneath my head. How graceful the hand is. An intricate machine of flesh and bone that with its thousands of nerves and muscles has learned to grasp a breast, clutch a bottle, catch a ball, leaf through a book, play a piano, drive a car. The hand and arm are asleep, separated by their numbness from the rest of me. What my waking shout has acknowledged is that in not too many years, the rest of me will be equally dead. In such a short time, I will be dead permanently and forever. A million years will go by, and I will be dead. Five billion years will go by, the sun will swell up into a red giant and envelop the earth, and I will be dead. When time ends, I will still be dead.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Following is Chapter 1 of “Adrift in America: Diary of a Minimalist Mariner,” a work found in the nonfiction section:

Charleston, South Carolina. January 21, 1989.

As it heads north into Charleston, Route 17 narrows to a two-way highway and imposes a long series of traffic lights against motorists trying to hurry through the downtown area. I look around at drivers stopped on either side of me. Their faces are serious, anxious, frustrated. For the first time in as long as I can remember, I don’t share their discomfort. I feel at home.

Later, parked for the night in a stand of jack pines near a small airport north of Charleston, I put the feeling into more words:

We all need a little place of our own. I have a place, and it is little, but I own it, and it seems to provide just about everything I require of a place. In fact, it provides more than any of the larger places I have owned. It can do this because it is adapted – in truth, over-adapted – to one of modern civilization’s more vulgar byproducts, a byproduct that in its vulgarity connects my place with just about every other place I have ever been or would ever want to be.

– Sid Leavitt

EDITOR’S NOTE: Following is Chapter 2 of “Adrift in America: Diary of a Minimalist Mariner,” a work found in the nonfiction section:

Sanford, Maine. May 16, 1988.

The late morning sun beats down on King’s Shopping Plaza, warming the truck after a cold night. I open the side windows and smell it. Nearby, men are rebuilding the plaza entrance and several miles of Route 109. I walk along Route 109 and smell it. The smell is everywhere.

Bituminous concrete.

If I were at a party for a young graduate who I thought needed advice about the future, I would lean forward with a crooked grin and whisper just those two words: “Bituminous concrete.”

All right, maybe it isn’t for everybody. Maybe the future belongs to the other petroleum byproduct the other old guy whispered in just one word. But as the years go by, I find fewer redeeming qualities in plastics.

Bituminous concrete – the stuff highways and parking lots are made of, otherwise known as asphalt, blacktop, hot top, macadam, pavement, tar, tarvia or tarmac – covers tens of thousands of square miles of the United States. It is ugly, as only a sludge from decomposed dinosaurs and rotted monster ferns can be. And it is spreading.

But running along it and stretching away from it is still a lot of country.

And most of it is still free.

– Sid Leavitt

EDITOR’S NOTE: Following is Chapter 3 of “Adrift in America: Diary of a Minimalist Mariner,” a work found in the nonfiction section:

Zephyrhills, Florida. December 3, 1988.

The evening sky is the kind they name citrus cocktails for – orange bleeding smoothly into a blue as pale and serene as the waters around the peninsula. It has been another beautiful Florida day. I sit on the couch in a soft breeze, thinking it now smells only slightly sweet from the sewage leak, and peer through my reading glasses for the last of the thistle spines embedded in my feet. I find a flea instead and use the tweezers on him.

The thistles caught me by surprise this morning when I walked barefoot onto the dew-covered lawn behind the house in Zephyrhills where Ma, Granny and their friend Henry are spending the winter. I was halfway around the truck when I sensed it wasn’t the dew making my soles tingle. I lifted a foot and looked at the underside. Bristling with thistles. I hopped back around the truck and dove into the cabin door on my hands and knees, twisting around in the narrow doorway to get at the bottom of my feet. I thought of my cat, Bonzo. He had made dozens of trips in and out of the truck since we’d arrived the previous afternoon. Why haven’t those things bothered him?

Ah well, I grimace, plucking the last of the little balls of barbed wire from my undersurfaces, Bonzo is clearly the one creature in this truck who knows how to travel light.

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