Letters to my fellow Homo sapiens featuring the wit and wisdom of a garrulous geezer "
We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine." -H.L. Mencken "
Always remember that, "The journey to enlightenment is better w/french fries."-Bilquis
"An obsession with untold stories is a source of energy." -Greil Marcus
Dear Gentlereaders,
Normally, I have a spare column or two stashed in the lower right-hand drawer of my hooge, custom-made roll top desk for situations like this.
I've been wrestling with my muse over a subject that...well, I've finally given up on. The main problem was trying to distill it down. Too many words and too broad a hypothesis. Too broad a subject to fit into a mere column or two?
Might just be me. I am a garrulous geezer after all, but I really wanted to "get it out there." I became slightly obsessed.
{What's the difference between obsessed and slightly obsessed?}
Usually, if I abandon a notion for a week or two, the problem resolves itself. I return to it with fresh eyes (a refreshed psyche?), and the solution reveals itself. Sometimes the solution is to click the delete button, but that's okay. The sense of relief, irregardless, is almost physical in nature.
I'm told this is normal among certain "creative" types, no matter the art form, but since I find such people to be highly annoying, I refuse to acknowledge that (even if only occasionally) I might be one. Let us never speak of this again.
Big BUT, in my defense...
I became slightly obsessed with trying to finish the project because I kept getting this close. In the interim, I published the backup columns that were in the now empty drawer, convinced I would resolve the problems of the column from hell by last Saturday and publish the damn thing. No Joy.
The good news is that I tossed it in the burn barrel, and I've been accepted into a highly regarded rehabilitation program. Also, while rooting through the aforementioned desk in search of a lost receipt that I need desperately because... never mind, I found a couple of partially finished, vaguely related, random randomnesses that will be published/posted as a single (shortish) column in a day or two. Wednesday, 5/20/25 at the latest.
I've already begun working on the next column after that at the suggestion of Dr. Freidrich Puffendorfer, director of the Puffendorfer Center for (mildly) Obsessed Writers and Other Mostly Unsuccessful Artistic Types, a.k.a. P.C.(m)O.W.O.M.U.A.T.
MEM
Scroll down to comment, share my work, or scroll through previous columns.I post links to my columns on my Facebookpage so you can love me, hate me, or call for my execution via social media. Cranky don't tweet (Xclaim?).
"If you can't look, you might as well be dead." -Reda Mehlmauer (my Mum)
Please Note: No doubt, at least some of you were expecting to encounter Confessions of a Popsicle Pusher, Part 3, and are wondering what's up. It's complicated...but part three may yet appear at a future date. In the meantime, I hope you find that what follows gives you your money's worth.
Dear Gentlereaders,
Generally speaking, male H. sapiens (a.k.a. men) of all stripes are effectively dogs who remain "in heat" most of the time.
{You have a keen eye for the obvious, sir. Doesn't everyone already know this?}
One would think so, but what was once considered simply a fact, basic biology, is now considered yet another outrage perpetrated by the patriarchy in certain circles.
I taught my daughter that all men are pigs in heat, including me, so she should live life accordingly. A woman I know, who accepts that this is true but likes men (in general) anyway, told me that for various and sundry reasons, she thinks dog is a better word choice, and I've come to agree.
I prefer to think of myself as a dog because I'm a bit of a clean freak, and I think of dogs as being much cleaner than pigs.
{You should think of yourself as a cat then.}
No, Dana, definitely not, please stop stepping on my metaphor. Anyway, we don't choose to be this way; we are this way. We also all share another, related fundamental characteristic: we are visually oriented creatures. We are visually oriented creatures with our dials turned all the way up.
{Once again, your keen eye for the obvious is on display! See, what I did there? Cool, right?}
Recently, the term male gaze wandered into my personal awareness zone but got away before I could capture and interrogate it.
{Huh?}
I had clicked on a link, male gaze, via the open in new tab option that had turned up in something I was reading online, intending to get to it later, but it escaped before I had a chance to do so. This is the price you pay for being a would-be polymath. One link leads to another, that link leads to...etc...and then someone tells you dinner is ready, and before ya know it...
{You're seventy-something and regularly subject to getting lost in the links?}
I'm fascinated with (and by) the power of this phenomenon, but it turns out that the male gaze can also be just male gaze (without the the) and doesn't refer to exactly what I thought it did. I know this now because I've since done a bit o'-googlin' on the subject; please stay tuned. In the meantime...
I've been a biologically male H. sapien (a.k.a. man) for almost 72 years now. I've had a lot of straight, gay, and confused friends and acquaintances over the years who are also men.
I've never known a hormonally captured biological male who didn't automatically react to visual cues that coincided with their personal sexuality. Coach Skynyrd confirmed this in high school health class. He also told us that while we can't help but look, a gentleman should attempt to be discreet and not be a pig about it.
Granted, this was a long time ago. Society was still suffering under the illusion that male and female H. sapiens are radically different creatures separated by more than mere plumbing. This was so long ago that boys and girls in my high school attended same sex health classes, even though my school was coed.
{Seriously?}
Now, most (alright, many) men aren't as dumb as women think we are and are quite aware of the fact that many women don't think twice about exploiting our visual obsession for fun or profit, both benignly and malignantly.
Of course, this is unlikely to be true of most of my female gentlereaders; I'm certain the majority of them are above that sort of thing. For example, they would never wear that dress/outfit to a job interview just because they knew they were going to be interviewed by a man.
I'll wager that most of the happily married/"partnered" ones wouldn't be caught dead dressing a certain way for "girls' night out" just to see how much attention they might get, and/or how many men might hit on them.
More importantly, I'm sure none of them are the irrational sorts who claim that women, and even girls, have the right to dress as provocatively as they please and then call men who get caught looking, pigs dogs.
However, being a more or less responsible columnist with millions of gentlereaders, I went a-googlin' to see what the worldwide web of contradictory knowledge might have to say about this sort of thing. I thought I might sniff around and discover what female H. sapiens (a.k.a. women) might be saying about this matter to enlighten myself and my male gentlereaders.
Hoo-Boy... I fell down THE RABBIT HOLE TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH! Earth, Earth,Earth...
{What are you...}
I figured out how to write an echo. Cool, right?
It turns out the male gaze is a RBFD, and I had it all wrong.It's such a big deal that when I googled the term, themale gaze, the first hit returned was a lengthy Wikipedia article, Male gaze.
"In feminist theory, the male gaze is the act of depicting women and the world in the visual arts and in literature from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer."
Right... So if you're a straight dude and you depict women and the world, in art and literature, from your masculine perspective, it's not just because that's how you see the world, it's because you deliberately sex everything up for your, and other straight dude's, personal enjoyment?
Since my interpretation might be wrong, I read on. No joy. But I only have 39 documented college-level credits, so the fact that I found the article poorly written as it wanders all over the place...
{Wanders all over...are you calling the kettle black, your garrulousness?}
The Wikipedia entry credits one Laura Mulvey, "British feminist film theorist and filmmaker" (you've no doubt seen one of the handful of avant-garde movies she made back in the '70s and '80s), with this concept, which she explored in her famous (in certain circles at least) 1975 essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema".
So I clicked on that link, as should you, as you will discover a lengthy treatise, not Ms. Mulvey's essay, but a Wikipedia article that reads like one, that explains all...in great detail...and then some.
The anonymous author of the Wikipedia article informs us, among many many other things, that according to Ms. Mulvey, "...the paradox of the image of ‘woman’ is that although they stand for attraction and seduction, they also stand for the lack of the phallus, which results in castration anxiety."
Ouch.
More confused than ever, I thought I should cut out the middleperson and read the essay in question myself. It's not easy to find in an easily readable format. There are lots of badly executed PDF files out there if you want to read it for yourself. But as a service to my gentlereaders, here is the opening paragraph, which I suspect will tell most of you all you need, or want, to know.
"This paper intends to use psychoanalysis to discover where and how the fascination of film is reinforced by pre-existing patterns of fascination already at work within the individual subject and the social formations that have moulded him. It takes as its starting-point the way film reflects, reveals and even plays on the straight, socially established interpretation of sexual difference which controls images, erotic ways of looking and spectacle. It is helpful to understand what the cinema has been, how its magic has worked in the past, while attempting a theory and a practice which will challenge this cinema of the past. Psychoanalytic theory is thus appropriated here as a political weapon, demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form."
Scroll down to comment, share my work, or scroll through previous columns.I post links to my columns on my Facebookpage so you can love me, hate me, or call for my execution via social media. Cranky don't tweet (Xclaim?).
"My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate." -Thornton Wilder
Dear Gentlereaders, first, atrigger warning. This column mentions a product once called an Eskimo Pie, a cultural abomination that has since been remedied.
The first time I made my living by peddling popsicles in the '80s and became a Good Humor Man Person, I had no idea that Good Humor was once an RBFD dating back to the 1920s, a former American institutionthat's now just another American brand,aproduct licensed to be manufactured and marketed by various and sundry firms who knows who, who knows where, and distributed here, there, and even way over there.
{The Donald may have inadvertently put an end to that.}
That's why you might be familiar with the name Good Humor even if products bearing that name weren't widely available in stores and you had never actually seen a real Good Humor Ice Cream truck.
The Good Humor Bar was invented by Harry Burt, owner of a candy store/ice cream parlor in downtown Youngstown, Ohio, a significant city of the Hooterville Ohio Metropolitan Area. As my millions of regular readers already know, I've been a temporary resident of Hooterville for the last 40 years.
The original Good Humor bar was fundamentally an Eskimo Pie, a small chunk of vanilla ice cream coated with chocolate (which had already been invented and which in no way resembled a pie) with a significant twist. As the story goes, Burt's daughter thought that Eskimo Pies were messy to eat (I agree), and he was inspired to produce a version that came on a stick, and thus invented the ice cream bar.
Please don't start hyperventilating; the name's been changed to Edy's Pie because Eskimo is "...a term considered offensive by some for American Inuit, Yupik, and Aleut peoples," according to Wikipedia. Nowadays, it also comes on a stick and looks less like a pie than ever. Go figure.
Oh, and shame on those of you who immediately thought of at least one rude joke involving the term Edy's pie.
Mr. Burt hung a set of sleigh bells on a dozen trucks and sold his new invention directly to his customers, thereby also inventing the ice cream truck. This was in the early 1920s. By the middle of the '30s, Good Humor "sales cars" were everywhere, driven by men in white uniforms who were subject to strict company Rules&Regs and three full days of training before being entrusted with a coin changer.
By the 1950s, roughly 2,000 Good Humor trucks were roaming the streets of America, ringing their bells and being chased by neighborhood kids. There was even a mainstream movie, The Good Humor Man, an "American slapsticknoiraction comedy film"released in 1950.
(In case you're wondering, the first of those three goofy movies you're thinking of was released in 1978.)
By the time I became a "Goody Bar" man person in the early '80s, commercials were running on TV advertising the fact that boxes of Good Humor bars could be had at your favorite supermarket (at prices street vendors couldn't match). Individual vending-sized bars were significantly larger, but try explaining that to a cash-strapped mom or dad.
Regular readers are aware that I've been plagued with a tendency to be a day late and two (inflation-adjusted) dollars short in the course of my life with disturbing regularity.
{Wait-wait-wait. What did you mean by a "real" Good Humor truck?}
If you see a Good Humor truck out and about, it's probably not a Good Humor truck.
Back in the day, as they say, the company used to have fleets built to their exact specifications (the truck I eventually personally owned was one of those, a "step van" (think bread truck, made out of galvanized steel). You may encounter a truck that says Good Humor on the sideand that features Good Humor bars, but it's unlikely to be one of the versions commissioned by Good Humor, which haven't been manufactured for quite some time.
Being a civilian, you're unlikely to know the difference, but an experienced driver who's driven a generic version of an ice cream truck...
{You mean old?}
An experienced driver knows that it's equivalent to a Cadillac vs. a Chevette.
{They stopped making Chevettes in 1987.}
Thanks for the update, Dana. There are still a few around (both Chevettes and real Good Humor trucks), and there are restored "jump" trucks that were no longer produced after 1969 that you may encounter. They turn up at car shows and are used for marketing events. Properly restored, they can sell for better than 50k.
{I'll bite, what's a jump truck?}
The driver has to "jump" out of a cab and walk around to the back of the truck to serve customers out of "the box." When I first hooked up with Good Humor Pittsburgh, there was at least one of these still working the streets (HT: Courtney), but almost nobody wanted to use one. Who wants to have to keep getting in and out of the truck all day, not to mention being at the mercy of the kids when you do?
I took to being an ice cream man like the proverbial duck to water. By my last day, many years later,my feathers were turning grey and falling out and I couldn't wait to quit. But at first, I loved it.
My first assigned route was Greentree, Pa, a Pittsburgh "borough" that shares a border with the city. In short order, I was "promoted" to a much more lucrative route that included various townships in the vicinity of the Pittsburgh airport out in the Western suburbs.
Shout out to Moon township, where I made some good money and met some good people, particularly the ones I confess I sometimes partied with after work up in Mooncrest. There was a brief period of my life when I was living in a small town, Mars, Pa, and peddling popsicles in Moon Township
My quick "promotion" was simply due to the fact that I was reliable and showed up on time every day, recently showered, and was not prone to drama. There are legitimate reasons many people associate ice cream truck drivers with Cheech and Chong.
I arrived when ice cream street vending was past its glory days and had begun its slow slide down a slippery (icy?) slope, and when America's industrial base was packing up and heading to East Asia. Rustbelt cities like Pittsburgh had begun rusting and were about to have some very grim years decades.
Big BUT...
Good Humor trucks were still a well-established Pittsburgh area tradition, and most people (me, anyway) didn't know how bad things were eventually going to get.
And I had access to an up-to-date route book.
Most civilians, and even most former ice cream truck drivers, unless they drove a Good Humor truck before Unilever turned Good Humor bars into just another global brand, don't know what a route book is, or rather was.
When I took a geographic cure for a broken heart, mentioned in part one, and was briefly pushing popsicles in Austin, I found myself driving what I thought of as the generic ice cream truck. It was made out of aluminum and creaked as you drove down the road.
The freezer box worked about half as well as the one in a G.H. truck, and you might find yourself selling softened product by the end of the day in the Texas heat. They were manufactured by a company called International Mobiles in Boston that's no longer in business, as best I can tell.
They probably manufactured more ice cream trucks than anybody, and there are, relatively speaking, many still around and are easy to spot if you know what to look for.
{Route book?}
Oh, yeah. When I was a Goody Bar Man in Pittsburgh, all the "routes" were just that, well-established routes that could be followed by using a route book that supplied directions from the moment you pulled off of the company lot that including the best way to get to the area you were assigned, how to work it street by street, and how to find your way back again.
Sometimes they mentioned where you should be by a certain time and/or came with tips pencilled in by someone who previously had worked that particular route. I assume this was a practice put in place when Good Humor was still serious about street vending. Irregardless, it was a common-sense practice that enabled newbies to extract maximum profits from a given area in short order...
As opposed to,
Being assigned a given geographic area, having to find your way there, and then wandering around finding out where the kids were on your own, which was how my employer did things in Austin. I'm led to believe this was normal for most companies of any size. With enough trucks on the road, you could make money despite high driver turnover, high prices, and poor customer service.
Which way was better, at least from a business perspective? The latter, I assume, given that it required much less work. From a quality of life perspective, not so much. Now that ice cream trucks and plenty of kids are no longer a daily feature of most neighborhoods, I guess it's a moot point.
This just in: I found a company online that operates soft ice cream dairy products,and pizza trucks, in a handful of New Jersey cities.
"We always use premium ingredients and pair food with feel-good music and exceptional customer service!"
"Premium Klipsch Outdoor Speakers." No brass bells (another feature of a real Good Humor truck) or even obnoxious electronic music box endlessly repeated renderings of Turkey in the Straw or The Entertainer.
Customers register with the company. They text you when they're headed to your area so you can place an order, and a bright and shiny, sanitized truck will come directly to your bright and shiny, sanitized house, Home Owners Association Rules&Regs permitting.
It's all carefully/efficiently controlled via artificial intelligence software, and you can buy a franchise for as little as $300,000.
Scroll down to comment, share my work, or scroll through previous columns.I post links to my columns on my Facebookpage so you can love me, hate me, or call for my cancellation/execution via social media. Cranky don't tweet (Xclaim?).
