David Kirby

The Nine Things Everybody Needs to Know About Everything

Want to know the difference between us and sloths?

Easy: sloths have long lives because they have evolved

            to be so slow that predators on the lookout for quick

nervous movements don’t even notice them. Must be nice

            not to have to think all the time, right? Not to wonder

when you dart into Starbucks if a jaguar is going to

            dash from behind a trash bin and drag you off

            to its lair or a condor sink its talons into your Carharrt

chore coat and yank you back into the sky as the woman

            going in for her peppermint latte with oat milk and a half shot

of espresso recoils in horror or the guy coming out with his

            drops it and thinks, “Dang, better him than me.” There’s still

a bunch of shit we have to pay attention to, though.

            E. B. White said, "I arise  in the morning torn between a desire

            to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world.

This makes it hard to plan the day." You hit that nail

            on the head, E. B. Best advice probably is just be

prepared. Did you know that every cardinal has already

            picked out his papal name? Why not? If you get tagged

for the papacy, you want to be Celestine or Boniface,

            not Harold or Billy. You want to learn the cheat codes,

            like saying anything is better than saying nothing

because saying anything works every time: if you ask

            the customer service rep what the eight-dollar charge

on your bill is, all they have to say is, “Oh, that’s

            our software upgrade fee—I don’t get it, either,

but Accounting says we have to add it in there,”

            and you say, “Okay, my credit card number is,” etc.,

            because what are you going to do, ask them to go back

to using the old software that’s obsolete and that they don’t

            use anymore anyway?  On April 13, 1742, 

Handel’s Messiah  was performed at the Great Music Hall

            on Fishamble Street in Dublin, and the event

was so popular that the men were asked to leave their swords

            at home and the ladies were required to take the hoops

            out of their hoop skirts. Little things. Details!

The best thing about a martini is the martini glass—

            okay, not, but the martini wouldn’t taste the same

if you drank it out of a jelly jar. Enjoy the accidents:

            it’s almost worth it to go to the hospital so you

can leave the hospital. When others have accidents,

            indulge them; as I type this poem, I hear Barbara

            telling our friend Elizabeth that our kitty pooped

on the couch last night and then Elizabeth saying

            Well, we’ve all pooped on the couch at one time

or another. After that, be a nut. You gotta love

            a nut: journalist Will Yolen, born in Waterbury,

Connectcut in 1908, made his living as a journalist,

            but his real passion was a kite flying to the degree

            that he once had 178 kites in the air at one time.

Of course, the synonym for “be a nut” is “be curious”

            or, even better, be as curious as Vladimir Nabokov,

who, as a child. was given a four-foot-long pencil

            that wrote, sure, but for how long, that is, is there

graphite in all four feet? Only one way to find out,

            so young Vladimir drills a hole and learns two things,

            the first being that, yes, there’s lead all the way from

the tip to the eraser, and the second is that there’s

            this thing called art for art’s sake that both mirrors reality

and magnifies it, as the pencil is far too big to use

            and, indeed, was never actually intended for that purpose..

The next to last thing you need to know is that

            it’s okay to lie as much as you want to as long as

            it doesn’t do any harm. Did you know that all male

action-hero authors make their hero one inch taller

            than they are. Ha, ha! Go ahead on, male action-hero

authors! Who cares if you personally have to stand

            on a box when group photos are taken at male action-hero

conventions and either ask tall people to hand you

            top-shelf items at the grocery store or else use one

            of those clutchy grabbers at the end of a stick

to do so as long as your big fella is racing through Paris

            or traversing the Sahara to get The Shiny Thing

or at least stop the villain from getting The Shiny Thing?

            Which begs the question, what is The Shiny Thing

and how does it work, since it always seems to border

            on the supernatural, the answer to which question

            is good luck, since the supernatural is off limits,

off the table, off the radar, out of bounds, taboo.

            The supernatural is a mystery, as indicated by the prefix

“super.” Trust the mystery, as it will teach you a lot

            more than the certainty will. The holy Qur’an tells us

that a man starving in the desert begged God to send him

            food and water, and instead God sent him a baby.

Price Includes Tax                  

Or maybe price doesn’t include tax. It’s hard to tell, isn’t it?

I’ve never understood money—all those zeroes and decimal points!

Come to think of it, isn’t money just a medium like air or water: you move through it, it moves through you?

Actually, money is a lot more like water than air.

You can't go for more than a couple of minutes without air, whereas you wouldn’t need water for days as long as you don’t mind thirst, dry mouth, and reduced urine output followed by hallucinations, rapid heartbeat, and organ failure.

And just as pipes break and fish tanks leak, the barriers surrounding money have a way of bursting as well.

When my niece started college, I remember my brother saying it was as though his bank account had hemorrhaged!

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Freud says we only value things we crave in childhood, like food and sex, and therefore money is meaningless to adults  because babies don’t know what money is.

They also don’t know what sex is, either, though they know they want warmth, cuddles, snuggles, caresses, and breast milk.

Most definitely babies know what food is, mainly that they want lots of it, starting with breast milk.

So maybe kids do know what sex is, though anybody who says so should be ashamed of themselves, depending, of course, on what they think sex is.

The names we give things really do determine how we feel about them, though, so if I say money is like a drug  to rich people, that’s the same as saying that money actually is a drug to rich people, by which I mean people who are already rich.

The rest of us realized long ago, probably when we were children, that wealth beyond our wildest dreams is unobtainable, which is why we’re happy just to save a few dollars here and a few there, get free shipping on an order over $100 (which is not cost-effective but appears to be and therefore is), buy a large three-topper and get a medium pie for free.

That’s just good sense and not druggy at all.

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Not good to get greedy, but here let me tell you about the speaker who visited our school and whose air ticket was paid for by her university who then tried to get reimbursed for that same ticket by our university.

Big mistake for two reasons, the first being that, boy, did she ever piss off our departmental accountant, and the second being that, if there’s one person you don’t want to piss off, it’s the departmental accountant.

Oh, and a third thing: you don’t want to piss off the departmental accountant because the departmental accountant is the one who not only reimburses you for your air ticket (or not, in this case) but also is responsible for cutting the much larger check for your honorarium.

I’m sure that second check was issued in this case, though I imagine it was delayed for a good long time.

Actually, I hope it was delayed for a good long time, a desire that is unworthy of me but which I can’t help feeling because of the fourth reason why you shouldn’t piss off the departmental accountant, which is that she’ll tell everyone, for example, me, who is now telling you.

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Just to let you know what a financial genius is dishing out the advice here, once a magazine offered me a whopping $250 to write an article on the Augusta, GA music scene, to which I said, "Jeez!"

Then I figured, why not: it was summertime, I had nothing else to do, it was a semi-paid vacation, I'd hear some fabulous music (which I did), and I’d get a tax write-off (ditto), all of which happened.

But here's why Harvard professor Paul Krugman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics that same year and not me: on the way home, I got a speeding ticket in aptly-named Omega, GA in the amount of $253, meaning my fee for the magazine piece was minus three bucks.

I had a great time, though. Made a lot of friends, which is its own form of wealth—of all the forms of wealth that are not really wealth, friendship is right up there at the top.

I think that’s called Social Wealth or should be.

Aristotle spoke of friendship as one of the highest goods, and since he was right about everything else, who should know better?

                                                               ❧

The real problem is unwanted Christmas presents.

Did you know estimates show that  $921 million worth of Christmas presents will end up in landfill this year and that 48% of the citizenry would prefer that people not buy them Christmas presents at all?

Those figures are for Australia, by the way, but surely similar numbers would be true for our country or your country if the you who is reading this is not American.

Surely the Aussies aren’t that different from the rest of us.

Surely they, too, know that there are many varieties of wealth in addition to the monetary kind, for example, the Social Wealth mentioned earlier.

Then there’s Intellectual Wealth, about which I say big deal—highly overrated, if you ask me, and hard to measure.

There’s also Spiritual Wealth, also hard to measure.

Just think of the last person you heard say, “I’m spiritual” and how creepy he or she is.

                                                               ❧

Thinkers as different as Immanuel Kant and Gandhi promoted Moral and Ethical Wealth, but that sounds a little too much like Spiritual Wealth to me.

Sorry to be so cynical.

Okay, but then there’s Freedom and Autonomy, a type of wealth endorsed by thinkers as different as John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Now you’re talking—high five, John and Jean-Jacques!

And Nietzsche and Emerson both stood up for Creative Expression as a form of wealth that enriches both society and the individual, especially important if the individual is a poet.

Oh, wait, I know—Physical and Mental Wealth!

What could be more important than that?

Mens sana in corpore sano, as the old Romans had it, as does the YMCA, which adopted “Sound mind in a sound body” as its official motto.

                                                               ❧

The big wealth, though, the wealthiest wealthety-wealth-wealth, is Time.

You are the greatest show on Earth, Time.

You are large, you contain multitudes.

I have seen men spit flames under your big top.

I have seen women swallowing swords.

The Human Cannonball is fired every afternoon, yet here he is again at the evening show.

The lion threatens to devour his trainer and then curls up at her feet like a kitten.

I have eaten at Dal Pescatore, said to be the best restaurant in the world, yet no wine is finer than your watery lemonade, no entree more savory than your hot dogs.

No wonder Horace said, “Seize the day.”

No wonder Bernard Berenson, who was worth millions, said, "I would willingly stand on a street corner, hat in hand, begging passers-by to drop in their unused minutes.”

Yet you’re always packing up, Time, and moving on to a new town.

Time, you always leave me richer.