Own Goal

I think that's the term that damned Brit used for when a soccer ball is deflected into your goal by one of your own players. Happens. Shooting yourself in the foot, or worse, as happened a few years ago, The Dumbest Accident Of The Year, when a guy shot his penis, we can only imagine the tent-like ghost he thought he was seeing. Dirty day at the museum, the Wrack Show left a mess. I'm breaking in a helper, a necessity as D rises through the ranks and I assume more responsibilities. A janitor apprentice. He hasn't even been to school, still wet behind the ears, has no tricks and no tool kit. Raw clay. Little does he realize, thirty years from now, someone will watch him mopping, and say -you studied with Bridwell, didn't you?- or he'll be cleaning a plexi bonnet and someone will say -learned that trick from Bridwell, right?- We're a close order, like bagpipe players, we can trace who studied under who back generations. My mopping pattern goes back to Mad Tom A' Bedlam, that particular chevron, to the 17th century. It's what I learned. The Bedlam Sweep, which is really elegant, when you look at the possibilities. Swabbies, in the Navy, tend to mop vertically, because the hallways are so narrow beneath decks. There was a great course at Janitor College, required, always taught by the retired chair, C. Cummings Trip, always dressed in those 19th century short golf pants with plaid socks and a funny jacket that didn't fit. He was a hoot. Course called "Holistic Stroke Management", far and away the best mopping course I ever took. Dude knew his shit. In the second half of the Journals Thoreau is finding a voice, it's a huge thing, and it's happening right in front of us, his speaking voice becomes his writing voice. Read Thoreau closely and you're struck with word choice, what he says and what he doesn't say. An actor, playing a role. We're all that, and even worse, simple whores, playing another role to simply earn a living. The only life I could defend is my own, and I struggle with that, I have no defense, it's nothing, a way I present myself. Still, I pause, to think, I can't not; all those things I said, I'm not sure what I meant. As a reader, your job, is to figure it out.