Tom Lehrer – 1928-2025

Lehrer was the most positive force for my mental expansion in the wasteland of the 1950s. His first album of lancing parodies was a gift from my mother. I have no idea how she came to know of it – it was often that way with her, as with the stories by Theodore Sturgeon and Ray Bradbury, and earlier with the Pogo comic book subscription she got for me in the late 1940s, before the Pogo daily strip started.

Who told her about this stuff or directed her? She was tuned in to something unlikely that was little reflected in her bad cooking or her years as a church secretary.

That first Lehrer collection was initially distributed directly by him, before any label dared pick up his sneers against orthodoxy (this was the time when comic books, fore shit sake, were being banned). But it wasn’t just his anti-establishment outlook (or whatever it would be called today), but the fact that he wrote the funniest songs ever recorded featuring a sense of rhyme that met if not surpassed that of the tin pan alley greats. His eviscerations of “proper” outlook flowed out as neat and bitingly sweet as maple syrup on blueberry pancakes.

How many of you have listened to Lehrer lately? For anyone who’s missed out, grab his Songs and More Songs collection that includes most everything of note – including “I Got if from Agnes,” not released in the early years – oddly, though, not “The Vatican Rag,” which you’ll have to track down separately.

I won’t waste your patience listing the range of song titles or the realms of asininity that he lampooned. They’re all worth it. But I have special love for the “The Irish Ballad,’ wherein a daughter serves up her entire family in various cannibalistic dishes, and every verse ends with an  “in” rhyme that stretches language to its limits. And who else would give voice all “The Elements” in the periodic table in no logical or scientific order, but with a grand sweep of mind and memory.

A few years back, Lehrer released everything he’s ever written from copyright, free for any use whatsoever by whomsoever. Thanks, Uncle Tom, from myself and the entire thinking world.

Here’s a neat article of observations by several folks who have interacted with Lehrer:

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/jul/29/wit-of-tom-lehrer-by-those-who-knew-him

 One last aside: Lewis Carroll and Tom Lehrer were both mathematicians. This says something significant; I wish I knew what.

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Meshing of broken gears

As a child, I didn’t understand how the world worked – any of it. Virtually every aspect of existence was a mystery to me. The only distinction I held: there was me, and there was everything else.

Now, in my “second childhood,” I’m coming to re-experience how much terror lay behind  that vacant outlook, and how it never completely left over the years.

But along with that realization has come a wider one that weaves together a tapestry of negativities that could otherwise flap separately.

My life has been stymied by an underlying horror of making mistakes, something I’d not earlier taken into account in the past.

I think that it most likely arises from that sense of not knowing how the world works, leaving me continually afraid that I’ll say the wrong words or do the wrong actions in almost any situation, significant or insignificant, large and small. 

That, in turn, has released the intense, voluble anger I express when the slightest thing goes haywire – screaming imprecations against myself, the situation and the world, throwing tools, breaking machinery, hitting myself in the head with my fist (remember that Bob Dylan line?).

Basically, I cannot trust myself, because every action presents a new opportunity for error, and those perceived errors, however simple, coalesce to a form of overriding self-humiliation.

My first conscious memory of this comes from when I was four yers old and our Irish Setter, Shiela, managed to impale herself on the iron fence across the street from our Hastings Ave. house. Brother Vic lifted her down and got her to the vet, who fixed her up. When Vic brought her home, I was standing in the kitchen, to the left, by a window. I looked across at her and said, “She looks fine, just fine.” Instantly, I felt not only wrong but humiliated. I had spoken using the phrasing and cadence of an adult, which I had no right to use!

Today, I still have this lurking dread of wrongness, if not as excruciatingly as in my childhood: a fear of standing out of being noticed when I have no right to say or do whatever I’m saying or doing at the  moment. I dread asking questions or seeking advice or making suggestions because I’ll have acted like an dundering fool yet again.

And I wonder, too, if that outlook is part of what pushed me to becoming a writer (insomuch as I am that). Internally, I sense the spoken word as a trap; once said, it can never be unsaid – it exists forever in the world exactly as uttered.

But once I’ve written a word – printed or cursive, long-hand or typed – for sense or clarity I can erase it, obliterate it before it’s seen by anyone else. No record of my humbling error, no need to ask forgiveness.

Oh, don’t mistake it, I do take pride in what I’ve written, whether anyone reads it or not, because each of us has a unique voice, even those who try hardest to sound generic. Whatever I’ve written, no one else could have written it exactly so.

Is that individuality likely to be erased once AI takes hold? I doubt it. AI creates a new assemblage from old creations, but can it then inject inspiration? Isn’t inspiration something more than or other than the complex interactions of what-was?

Taken further, all this may be why, for gaining knowledge, I generally prefer reading to listening. Something in me trusts the written word as having evolved, of having thought growing behind it, whereas the words of a podcast have a single, immutable existence.

OK, that makes no sense in the real world – but then, as I said, the real world makes no sense to me.

[Just the next chapter in Jenny’s story. Anyway, the news is too sickening to talk about.]

Words in a veiled box

Reb fucks like the whole world’s his personal vagina. It’s what Jenny needs, what the vagina aspect of her needs, but in every other way he’s becoming a growth on her skin, itchy and increasingly unwelcome. He stands too close, he follows her when she wants to be somewhere he isn’t, and makes jokes Joe Miller wouldn’t have put in his books. Something is brewing in her head, unfiltered grounds.

“Reb, what do you think about? When you’re alone, you know, before bedtime when I’m not there to get you off?”

“Jesus.”

“You think about Jesus?”

“Why are you yanking at me?”

“Because I want to.”

“Well, I don’t like it.”

“I don’t like celery. You know what I do with celery?”

“What?”

“I stay away from it.”

The massive stone church on 13th St. is the descendent of the one before which Ben Franklin raised his electric kite – or so the historical marker attests. Inside, it’s set up for confession in the old-school model. Here, the priest still lurks in a penitential closet behind an obscuring screen, the penitent still kneels. No relaxed face-to-face sin-discussions.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” Pause.  “That’s the right formula?”

“Yes. How long has it been since your last confession?”

“I don’t know. Maybe never? Probably never.”

“Have you strayed from the Church?”

“Poor little lambie? No Father… I don’t think I was ever consciously part of it.”

“Are you considering joining, or rejoining?”

Jenny rubs her nose, flexes her nostrils. “I don’t think so. No, I’m sure not.”

“What brought you here?”

“My feet. Bad pun. Bad penitent,. Sorry. What’s your name, Father?”

“Father Umble.”

Jenny stifles a giggle. “More sorry.”

His slight smile bleeds through the gauzy cloth separating them. “It has that effect on people. Some people.” 

He waits. Jenny delivers nothing more.

“How have you sinned?”

“I think I have a boyfriend.”

“That’s not normally considered –”

“I treat him like sh – whoa, don’t say that. Here. I act like he has no mind. But he does. He understands Bertie Russell, or maybe – Bertrand Russell, the mathematical philosopher or philosophical mathematician. With Whitehead. Never mind. Why am I nasty to people like Reb, the sort-of boyfriend. Almost nobody’s nasty to me. Mostly. Except when I deserve it. I give bad for good. Like it’s a motto I picked up.”

“Why do you feel that you do this?”

“Because the world deserves it and I can’t change the world –  I can’t change it. I hope. So I take it out on people. Like Reb.”

“Have you spoken to your boyfriend about this?”

“I hate that term, but everything else is worse. Insignificant other? He’s a… sexual mechanism. A human dildo. And we didn’t even have sex. The first time.”

Fr. Umble coughs and coughs again.

“Wow, sorrier. I drink a lot. Why do I drink a lot? Well, I like it. It’s not like I’m drinking motor oil. Anger’s why, I said to him that time. Or to somebody. Maybe because of the things, a thing anyway, that my mind… can’t… accomplish. A hole in my thought-works.”

“You seem concerned about your mind.”

“I’m an intelligence snob.”

“Do you consider yourself more intelligent than most people?”

Jenny pauses. “Everybody. Almost everybody. Everybody I’ve met.”

“If your assessment of yourself, of your intelligence, is correct, do you feel that gives you permission to act poorly toward the rest of humanity?”

“No. Yes. I don’t know.”

“But you suspect that it does not.”

“I, uh, suspect that I’m lost in some place I don’t understand. The world, life, the universe, I don’t understand any of it. Not enough experience? But if I really am brighter than everybody, shouldn’t I be able to understand the way things work? The way they don’t work? And if I understood, wouldn’t I maybe be good for something? Useful to getting it to work?”

“Perhaps you are too hard on yourself.”

“My life’s easy as pie. I can’t make pies, they get gooey. I ride on easy street and bitch about it. You’re in there, in your box, Father, but you’re doing something. You make it better for people to be alive. To feel like it’s better anyway. It doesn’t matter if it’s true. Well it does. Truth  matters. But not much… in regard to feelings. People don’t think about what’s true when they decide things, just what it looks like. Feels like. I’m little. Inside, I’m so tiny I could fall through a crack in the floor. But even a roach can be useful, down in the crack, a roach with a mind. I – this isn’t going anywhere, doing anything.”

“Wait.” Jenny is half risen from her knees to leave. “Are you looking for absolution?”

“We haven’t figured out my sins. It’s a sin to be me? This morning I woke up and I was me: I’m sorry, and I confess it. Does absolution make it OK if it can’t be changed?”

“If you have contrition for true sins, that allows absolution to take effect, for forgiveness to enter.”

“I’ve got old sins in the closet, in the clothes hamper, so go ahead. I’ll take what I can get.”

He makes the sign of the cross and bestows three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys as penance for an unstated collection of possible sins. The sign of the cross reaches out like the Gregorian Chant she listens to on her iPod. An unrecalled symbol.

She drops at the altar rail and tries to remember prayers she should never have known, never been taught. Yet there they are, in bits and pieces at first, then spread like a tattered tablecloth of benediction. Where could they come from? She must haul them out, examine them.

“Why the hell aren’t you there when I call? I thought I was sober, almost, when I left that message, but can’t remember anything I said. Did I say something really horrible? What an ass –”

“You are the most self-concerned human being this side of St. Augustine.”

“Oh. Hi. When did you read St. Augustine?”

“I didn’t – read the Cliff Notes. Are you drunk now?”

“No, wish I was.”

“I’m coming over.”

“It’s the middle of the night.”

“Think about that when you wake me up with the goddam phone.”

“I confessed today.”

“To what?”

“I don’t know.”

… and month, and year, and century…

On the way back from one of our numerous visits to one of our multifarious medical specialists, Linda and I stopped in Towanda, 20 miles north of us, to visit on odd little café we’d been to once before. I remembered it to be, yes, odd – interesting and, in some ways a bit unsettling – but I couldn’t remember exactly why.

We recalled as soon as we walked in the door.

The menu.

It hangs, a good 4 feet high, and runs the full length of the serving counter, which must be at least 25 feet long, posted on a collection of separate blackboards, listing every imaginable edible or drinkable, in no, to me, obvious order, hand-written in semi-cursive with white chalk.

Since this is a modern-era coffee shop, a least a couple of those blackboards catalog all the various insidious combinations of ingredients that can be injected into a serving of coffee.

I hate coffee – the smell, the sight, the thought of its taste. My father drank coffee incessantly, until it gave him a headache, then a bit later he’d take  more coffee to cure the headache. Beside it’s general repugnance, this impressed on me that there is no rhyme or reason to coffee’s use.

So, to start off, Linda and I both ordered hot black tea.

“Would you like that in a cup or a disposable mug?”

I assumed by “cup” he meant something non-disposable, therefore, “A cup, please.”

The sandwiches seemed to be relatively contained on a single blackboard. Linda ordered some form of quesadilla. I ordered whatever was the last line of the menu because it was the most clearly legible. What was it? Ummm… can’t say I remember, but it turned out to be pretty good. 

Once we had wrapped up the order, the counter dude asked, “Will that be for here or to go?”

Think about that a moment: a couple minutes before, he’d asked if we wanted our drinks in porcelain cups, before knowing if we planned to plop our order in a bag. Would he have let us out the door with two of their cups sloshing around in a paper bag?

We were handed a black plastic block with the number 2 on it, to take to a table of our choice. We supposed the order would be delivered thereto. Just as we sat down, two cups of tea were placed on the serving counter and left there. Were they ours? Had anyone else ordered tea? Should we pick them up?

We did, and they were the proper temperature for tea – near boiling. Good. So we began studying the massive paintings on the side wall. They were three framed landscape snow scenes, maybe 5 x 6 feet, sear and overwhelming – tortured bare tree limbs in all three, and an orange fuzzy globe slightly above the middle of the central one, which could be the sun rising, or setting… or it could be Mount Doom.

I immediately christened the whole “Mordor in Winter.” Then I noticed that the three pieces were continuous, possible (probably?) a mural cut into sections and framed. Ummm… why?

The sandwiches, delivered to the table, were both quite good, satisfying. But the real treat of the day was sporadic. A tall, enticing young woman in an almost floor-length dress of possibly Mideastern design floated past from somewhere up front, passing us to the back, then from the back to the front, then back again to the back. She seemed to carry a magic inner light with her, sexual, certainly, but a whole lot more, an outpouring of essence. As far as we could figure, she was a patron visiting the rest room in the rear. But if so, what a lovely journey for such a basic purpose!

You don’t generally get such an array of impressions in a somewhat overpriced coffee shop. The memories we brought back will linger more clearly than they did from our first time. But I think we’ll pass on a third visit.

*   *   *   *

The sadness of the gone cows.

Sometime back I wrote an appreciation of the abandoned cattle farm down the road from us that reopened maybe 10 years ago. At the time, I gave something of its former horrific history:

In the 1950s, the then owner was grinding feed for his herd on one of those immense upright machines for chopping corn and grain. You stand near the top and hurl in the raw feed. Somehow, the owner managed to drop himself in. Please, don’t think about it. You’ll have  a much pleasanter night.

The farm was abandoned for the next 60 years, owned by a woman in Florida, presumably his widow, who made no ongoing attempt to sell it. Perhaps she died, perhaps she needed the late income, but she at last sold the place to someone (we’ve heard that it was two partners) who decided to raise cattle, mostly Black Angus, for market. 

First, the barn, in a state of near collapse, was fixed up. Gradually, over the next half decade, trees in the swampy area by the road were cut down, the swamp itself drained and filled, and peculiarly expensive fencing was put up in places that didn’t obviously relate to how the land was being used.

A new small herd of cows would arrive every year –  new mothers and calves (we call all the bovine inhabitants “cows” out of probably misplaced fondness) – be fattened up, then sold along to the next stop on on the road to slaughter.

Huge bales of hay arrived, loads of gravel were moved from one area by the barn to another, a couple horses spent time in a secondary barn for several months, then were replaced by a smaller herd of cows. A path was cut through a small wooded area but never used. Things we constantly being done, but it seemed like the disordered motion of our national government, a massive wind of whim.

Then, a few months ago, the fattening cows were picked up and… no replacements arrived. There’s now a sign that says “acreage for sale.”

All of the farm, some of it?

Meanwhile, where the hell are our cows!? They were our friends.

*   *   *   *

Suggested update of the song  “Simple Gifts,” in honor of our current national administration:

When true complicity is gained,

To bow and to scrape we shall not be ashamed,

To squirm, to squirm shall be our delight,

Till by squirming, squirming we prove our might.

The US Supreme Court is going out of its way not to make significant decisions. In almost every major case of the last year, they have chosen to limit their decisions to borderline issues, then tossing the matter back to the district and appeals courts for further comment without examining the basic issue under discussion.

Compare this with Brown v. Board of Education [1954], that ended segregation in schools, under chief justice Earl Warren. Under Roberts, the current Supreme Court is an example of having a chief justice with no real backbone. He’s a swing vote, true – but how does a Chief Justice become just a swing vote?

Coney Barrett is a true swing vote who responds to her concept of what the law demands. That has pissed off Lump, but it is exactly what was said of her when she was nominated. Her religious peculiarities have masked this, but whether I agree with her decisions or not [as in most cases], I do see her following her view of the law, not of politics.

Neither the Roe or Dobbs decisions – nor any decision on abortion or other major health issues – should be decided by the courts, but by the medical community. But what happens when the entire social outlook is corrupted? Who is left to decide?

There’s no obvious or unequivocally true way to determine this, and if the administration decides to defy the courts and ignore the Constitution, what can those concerned effectively do?

Very little, immediately, but I trust in the youth of the world [not just this country] to form the new basis, once they see how fucked up the current situation is for their and coming generations.

There are no eternal truths, so how do we or they build a working middle truth? What do we pick as our guide or as our goal? And why should we do so – is it imperative to have a commanding vision?

At the highest level, there is no arbitrator, no basis for a universal set of ethics outside specific religious mandates. Decisions have to be made on the basis of what works to what ends.There is only fallible humanity, ever in the midst of its failed social evolution.

*   *   *   *

Dream #6 (lucid)

A bunch of us are celebrating in a little restaurant, but I’m not feeling connected to anyone. Then they all leave and I am walking alone near 40th and Market Sts. in Philly (an area where many of my dreams take place). Someone I vaguely know gets out of a car. He’s wearing a tophat, has massive curly hair and a clown-like mouth, like Richard Basehart in La Strada.

We start walking together, odd stuff happening around us, and I mention it’s like my dreams. I reach down and feel the wet grass and say it’s all too real for a dream. A little later, the street ahead becomes an alley or a pathway, and I say, “Oh damn, it  is a dream.” From then on, he and I talk about it being a dream.

I try to stay on the main roads, which keep changing to the lanes where I always get lost in my dreams. I turn 90 degrees, trying to find a way out of the dream, becoming pissed that I can’t turn it off.

Along the way, I invite him to visit us some time, then we talk about the fact he can’t do that because he isn’t real and has no way to talk to the real person he represents.

By this point, he’s become stocky, short-haired, with glasses, and I wonder why the dream would do that. I climb over a wall into an open area with low stone mounds a bit like gravestones, though it’s obviously not a graveyard. As I turn toward the street, a woman (my wife? my ex-wife?) comes up and tells me her father is dead and I need to come with her.

This is the trigger to wake up.

I started having lucid dreams only a few years ago, and never another one with such open discussion of it being a dream.

*   *   *   *

Got the top of my head removed last week… well, a half-inch circle that included the whatever it is lump that’s the problem and likely cancerous [haven’t got a report back on the biopsy, but it doesn’t concern me much]. The lancing lady gave Linda a bunch of sophisticated bandages to change every 2 to 3 days – since I can’t get a clear view of the top of my head to do it myself – that include some newfangled collagen-infused gunk that teaches the cells around the edge of the circle how to regenerate the missing center. I really, really like this woman, one of the few medics at any level who seems genuinely concerned not just with some indefinite “patient welfare,” but with treating the patient as an individual human being. Great fun to joke with while she was prying my scalp loose. 

*   *   *   *

Ad slogan for the Bob Hope’s invention of a water-filled bra:

“Tanks… for the mammaries”