Sack of Potatoes startin' to look good—again



Potatoes doing what they do—nothing. Ya gotta love them.

I wrote a novel a while back entitled, Postal Service, which detailed the daily working of the USPS. Much of the novel centered on the relationship between management and the work force.

At one point, I suggested to a fellow carrier that we would be better off with a sack of potatoes as a supervisor. Naturally, when this got back to my supervisor—as these things always do—she jumped to the conclusion that I had accused her of being as dumb as a sack of potatoes.

I explained to her that anyone smarter than a sack of potatoes would know that wasn’t my intention. I told her she was an instigator, a trouble maker, someone constantly looking for a fight. I added that a sack of potatoes sitting at her desk, while unable to accomplish anything good, would nevertheless be incapable of creating so much havoc as she did on a daily basis.

Because of climate change, we are not even beginning to look a lot like Christmas, but it’s beginning to look like a sack of potatoes in the Oval Office wouldn’t be such a bad idea.

What if on November 8, 2016, Republicans who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary Clinton, instead wrote in the name, Sacko Potato? What if American voters put a sack of potatoes in the Oval Office instead of Donald Trump?

To be sure, nothing would have been accomplished in the last year, meaning we would still have a vacancy on the Supreme Court. Also, we wouldn’t have had...well, actually that’s the only thing we wouldn’t have. Nothing else has been done.

So what else might a sack of potatoes not done?

For starters, it wouldn’t have named a foreign agent as head of the National Security Agency.

It wouldn’t have named Cabinet Secretaries to departments they want to destroy.

It wouldn’t have pulled out of the Paris Accords, which now essentially include everyone except us.

It wouldn’t have insulted virtually every leader in the world who isn’t a dictator.

It wouldn’t have waged a year-long war-of-words with a thin-skinned, arrogant, ego-driven boy-man—in short, his mirror-image.

It wouldn’t have gotten into spats with every significant member of Congress—Democrat or Republican.

It wouldn’t have gotten into public feuds with the NFL or the NBA or athletes in general.

It’s safe to say it probably wouldn’t have received the support of white supremacists, who are very particular who they hang around with.

It wouldn’t have turned on the free press while, at the same time, embrace conspiracy theorists.

It wouldn’t have insulted American Indians, Americans living in Puerto Rico, Americans who didn’t vote for him, Americans it happens to disagree with, or any American with a basic understanding of history or a working knowledge of the English language.

It wouldn’t have put its self-interest ahead of the country’s best interest.

It wouldn’t have turned the White House into a pre-school playground.

On almost any day, you can hear the news coming out of this administration or read a tweet coming off the president’s phone and say, “No sir. A sack of potatoes wouldn’t have done that.”

In the end, there is a lot that a sack of potatoes cannot do and will never be able to do, but thank God, for all the things that a sack of potatoes cannot do and will never do. That’s the sack half full/sack half empty look at potatoes.

It’s why sometimes I wish there were a sack of potatoes sitting in the Oval Office right now, stinking up the place instead of the stinker we have.  

Poverty and Trips to Idaho

I wrote this story over 20 years ago when I worked for the Postal Service. Some of the incidents actually took place. Well, possibly just one incident. But in the ensuing 20 years, one thing hasn’t changed. Many Americans can’t get the idea out of their heads that poor people are screwing us. My only question is this. If they’ve been screwing us for this long, why aren’t they doing better?

  

    It’s that time of the year when offices start collecting for Christmas care packages for the needy. At my workplace, in addition to asking for non-perishable canned goods, we were also asked if we knew of any needy families on our route that might benefit from our generosity. The request came with one caveat.

“Make sure the families are truly needy,” we were cautioned. One year we brought food to a home and the family was away on vacation to Idaho.”

This seemed rather strange to me. I never took vacationing in Idaho to be a measure of one’s financial well-being or not-so-well-being, and yet the implication clearly was that the truly poor would not be vacationing there.

I don’t know. Having vacationed in Washington D.C., Boston and other tourist hotspots, I’d look at Idaho as a pretty cheap getaway, all things considered. I have never heard anyone say, “We’d like to go to Idaho this year, but I don’t think we can afford it.”

I generally set an income level of 15 to 20 thousand a year for a family of four as being in the struggling range and below that to be poverty. But maybe I’m naïve to be considering poverty based solely on economic indicators. 

Maybe there is something to be said for the Idaho/poverty connection. I checked out some books from the library and sure enough Idaho has one of the lowest number of people living off Uncle Sam.

So if you can’t live there and be in poverty, it stands to reason you shouldn’t be able to visit there either and be in poverty. You can’t have it both ways. Therefore it makes sense that you wouldn’t want to be giving someone visiting Idaho a Christmas care package. Or anything else for that matter.

I’m very careful about this now that I know. Like they say, a little bit of knowledge goes a long way—maybe not as far as Idaho but still a long way.

I was walking into a neighborhood K-mart the other day and there was a Salvation Army soldier manning the post. I walked over to him and casually struck up a conversation.

“I was just wondering,” I said, “but you don’t happen to know if this money or any of the stuff you buy with this money goes to people who vacation in Idaho, do you?”

He looked real smug, like he knew where I was coming from but at the same time didn’t want to be bothered—like he had seen me coming or something. He stepped back and pointed to a sign taped to his pot. It read: WE DON’T GIVE NO MONEY, NO HOW TO PEOPLE WHO VACATION IN IDAHO.

“Satisfied?” he asked.

“Very much so,” I replied, “and impressed I might add.”

“Well, let’s put some of the green stuff into the pot then.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Not so quick. Being satisfied and being willing to part with my hard earned cash are two different things. You know, I watch a lot of 60-minutes, so I’m not exactly walking around in a vacuum. I know there is a lot of fraud going around, especially amongst the poor. You read the papers, don’t you?”

“What are you getting at?” he asked, a little impatiently.

“How do you know,” I said rather deliberately so as to make my point perfectly clear, “that some woman doesn’t tell you that her family never visits Idaho and then after you’ve given her a turkey and a week’s supply of canned peas they don’t pack up and hit the road. How-do-you-know, eh, how-do-you-know?”

“I don’t know, I’ll ask her.”

“You don’t think she’d lie to you if she wanted the turkey bad enough? Maybe you should have her sign an affidavit.”

“Stating what?”

“That they aren’t going to Idaho.”

“Never, ever? For how long?”

“For as long as they want to be treated as poor people.”

“And maybe, I could drop you right where you stand,” he said, sounding not so much like a Salvation Army soldier but more like a real soldier.

I wasn’t taking any chances. I dropped a buck in the pot and took off. Still, something has to be done about this Idaho problem. I’m just not exactly sure what but something has to be done.

I’ll tell you what I would like to do, though. I’d like to take a trip to Idaho over the holidays. Then I could send postcards to all my friends.

“Merry Christmas from Idaho,” I could write. “Wish you were here. Wish you could afford to be here.”

 

I’d be the envy of all my friends. “Man, that Phil has it made,” they’d say. “He’s doing Christmas in Idaho. He must be rich.”

 

 

Fact or Fiction

What came first, the chicken or the egg?
What came first, the fiction or the fact? Or are they the same?

I wrote the fictional story, Hell on Earth, a love story that bears more than a little semblance to my own life. The main character in my story, a likable guy named Hank, who is, in fictional life, me, is writing a story about his life—much like I am doing. What a coincidence.

So, there you have it. One facet of my life is writing a story about it, which is the reason why one facet of Hank’s life in Hell on Earth is writing a story about his life. But there is a problem.

I think what I am writing is a fictionalized account of a real event.
So does Hank, since he is, in fact, the fictional me. But he doesn’t have a clue.
In my story, I have him being manipulated by outside forces, ones that he is unaware of, forces that lead him to write Hell on Earth, the novel, coincidently, that I wrote.

So a better question might be, “Who’s in charge?
The fictional answer is obviously, “The Erebians.”
The Factual answer: “Beats me.”

Angelina, the waitress at the pizzeria

The name of the sinner banished to Hell was going to be Rasmoth from the beginning. I don’t know why but like all names, after awhile it grew on me.

Hank Johnson, didn’t exist until I wrote Postal Service but once the writing of Postal Service became an integral part of the Hell on Earth story, I had to make Hank Johnson the earthly reincarnation of Rasmoth.

Angelina was a different story. She went through more name changes than Prince Rogers Nelson.

Sometime between when I first got the idea for Hell on Earth back in 1974 and when I finished it in 2011 I bought a couple of Louis Prima albums at a garage sale. I liked his sound but that would have been the end of it except that somewhere along the line Mazda also discovered “The Lip,” then “Jump, Jive an Wail” was back on the radio and suddenly there was a whole new world of Louis Prima enthusiasts. I found myself buying some CD’s to replace the scratchy albums I had stored away.

For a long time I had Rasmoth going to a diner after completing the story that led to his banishment to Hell but decided instead to offer a little tribute to Louis Prima by having him visit Angelina, the waitress at the pizzeria.

Postal Service, a novel

In 1971, Charles Bukowski wrote his first novel, Post Office, which described his ten-year career in the Post Office. His struggles with supervision became a backdrop for the personal story of his drinking, gambling and sordid affairs.

I joined the Postal Service a few year after it was reorganized into a newer, more efficient, more modern organization that could successfully take the company into the 21st century.

As I neared the end of my career I found myself having the same struggles with supervision that Bukowski experienced even though I didn’t come to work drunk and didn’t miss work to play the horses.

In the end, I concluded that the new, enlightened Postal Service wasn't a whole lot different than the old, outmoded Post Office. And, just as Bukowski had done, I decided to write a novel about it.