Author Archive
June 30, 2015 by Jerry Kurtz
Against “Give Me the Boy for a Year”
In May or June 1956, when I was 12, my parents planned a summer trip into Mexico with several of their best friends. I would be sent to Blue Mountain Camp in the Catskills, near Pine Hill, New York. But to enhance their trip, they hired a large stately black man with graying hair, a Dr. Marc Desgraves, a Haitian, to teach them some Spanish. Now as it happened I had started my own study of Spanish nine months earlier, in Señor Zago’s twice-a-week class at just-opened Van Wyck Junior High in Queens. I had been picking it up quickly, in part because I loved the language itself, and I enjoyed teaching myself the Latin American pronunciation instead of the proper — but in my mind less useful — Castilian that was then taught students. Spain had another decade or two to go under Franco, and who would want to visit there in the meantime?
May 5, 2015 by Jerry Kurtz
Tirade Against What My Friend Raja Said
When he was 25, my friend Raja, then known as Alvin, said seemingly brilliant things. For example: “No one can be beautiful all the time.” “But almost everyone is pretty much nice-looking.” These dicta have stood up well over the years. To them can be added Denis O’Donovan’s insight that no one is sexy all the time. It should be mentioned that someone must have said, “Being sexy is a matter of thinking you’re sexy.” Whoever said it, that’s held up pretty well too. Denis the great 70s Gestalt therapist said, I think, there are days when everyone is attracted to you, everyone, even dogs and cats follow you. But there are other days no one can be bothered with you no matter what you do, people turn up their noses, those same dogs and cats find they have better ways to spend their time. Wow, there are so many stories of people trying to be sexy, to be “hot,” but nothing works. You can’t trick people. It’s like interviewing for a job.
March 10, 2015 by Jerry Kurtz
Tirade Against Lumps in Farina
Lumps in farina — often hidden so that you had no chance to brace yourself — were a scourge in childhood. Scary and creepy… When your tongue senses the advent of one of these you feel something is terribly wrong. It’s not just disgusting, you’re way beyond that: something has gone wrong on a universal level. A gear has broken, the toilet is flowing backward, you can’t get air into your lungs any more. Perhaps this is how it feels an instant before true death. “I’m dying, Archibald,” you might say as the absolutely shocking certainty of the thing mounts.
October 7, 2014 by Jerry Kurtz
Tirade Against the Car Behind You
(and Machismo’s Dirty Little Secret) Don’t you feel it’s a kind of weakness when the car behind you is tailgating — when you feel like they’re somehow “pushing” you to go faster on this scenic road through the pine woods — and instead of ignoring them, instead of enjoying the beauty and the air, you find yourself speeding up as though to accommodate them! You imagine you’re lessening the focus on your slowness, you imagine your surge in velocity makes them less unhappy with you… How annoying. I’m ashamed but sometimes I find myself doing something very like this. On other days, to reduce the pressure, I make a point of repeatedly using hard-to-find turnouts or pulling onto the shoulder when it exists, to let a bunch of cars pass so that I can continue on my way peacefully enjoying where I am until the next line of cars creeps up.
August 5, 2014 by Jerry Kurtz
Tirade Against Top-Squeezers
Most of us have had the sad experience of dealing with someone who has no interest in replacing the cap that the rest of us believe belongs screwed back on the toothpaste. These individuals regard our concern as fastidious and evidence, more than likely, of Obsessive-Compulsive behavior (a so-called “disorder” — “OCD”), or worse. Our mental health, they imagine, varies inversely with the firmness with which we screw this cap back on. They are proud of how they’ve helped some like us and remain on the lookout for those who use pliers (Pliers-Using Nuts, “PUNs”— sent to therapy) or a wrench (“WUs” — admitted to psych ward). They themselves? “Laid back.” “Easy going.” For sure. The offending party may be one we are living with, traveling with or just dating. It can also be a friend or out-of-town guest we are accommodating at our own homes. Puzzlingly, researchers found only a 10% positive correlation between Toothpaste Top-Squeezers (“TTS”) and cap-offers (“COs”). Psychologists speculated that COs had Other Issues (“OI”). Correlation with how these people hug you. Unsurprisingly, it was reported that male TTS-types have a 33% inclination to squeeze women around the shoulders rather than around the back, waist or
June 10, 2014 by Jerry Kurtz
Tirade Against Binoculars and the Myth of ‘One Right Path’
There were rare occasions when I took a trip and did not bring my good binoculars. Reliably there would be paragliders coming off a distant mountain or a colorful bird in the field across the way; something of interest whose details I couldn’t, with the naked eye, make out. But whenever I brought them — which was virtually all the time, out of fear I’d miss them if I didn’t — reliably, I never needed them.
August 24, 2013 by Jerry Kurtz
Tirade Against Venice
On our very last international trip we returned to Italy, where — two years earlier — we had arranged to spend a year. After my wife Grace’s devastating metastasis, that year was reduced to a mere 2 weeks. But now we were back in our town in the Cilento, in Campania, 2 hours southeast of Naples, and then later in the village in Umbria where we’d stayed 9 years earlier. And finally, on our last two nights, with Grace struggling but then feeling well enough to take the bus from Maestre on the mainland, we reached Venice, which had been so beautiful in the past.
April 4, 2013 by Jerry Kurtz
Against Dating Problems: Which Shirt Did I Wear?*
Okay, you’ve had a hot date with a sexy — what we used to call ‘together’ — woman, you think this has possibilities. You meet a week later — more of the same. And tonight you’ve got a third meeting set up, you figure this is fish-or-cut-bait time. But now a problem. “What shirt did I wear?” If I wear that black already-outdated corduroy thing again, will she think I’ve got only two shirts? Or was it the dinner with that other woman where I wore it? Damn, I need a clothes database!
April 4, 2013 by Jerry Kurtz
Tirade Against Sightseeing
Tirade Against Sightseeing (Oh Come On Jerry!); or At Least Juliet’s Balcony On the whole I’d say I’m still “battling.” So that means I haven’t given up, I haven’t been “defeated.” I’m in there fighting. The battle sways back and forth; it’s hard but sometimes it feels like I’m “winning” (and sometimes the other way). Once in a while I feel “above the battle,” I see it in perspective. As though the battle is only one battle going on in a far corner of the world, there are many battles throughout the universe, but they are all subsumed in what I can very dimly perceive as a kind of overarching ‘peace.’ So what’s all that got to do with “Sightseeing” or even “Juliet’s Balcony”? We [your audience, remember us?] already guessed which Juliet this is but where’s the rub? Okay, okay people, keep your goddamn shirt on. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Yes I know, clichés won’t save me either but I’ve got to calm you down if you’re going to be receptive to anything I say, right? Doesn’t matter if you agree or not, I know that that is true. No, I’m not going to start on
April 3, 2013 by Jerry Kurtz