Postprandial Music for Winning by a Nose

Something Smells Bad

Proboscis monkey (Nasalis larvatus) male, Labuk Bay, Borneo, 2015 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license Photo by Charles J. Sharp, http://www.sharpphotography.co.uk/ Photo NOT modified by AI. Any actual resemblance between the pictured proboscis monkey and the author of this SubStack post is (mostly) coincidental

I have not posted anything for several weeks because I have been busy dodging bullets.

Not assassin’s bullets, but something just as deadly.

I have Mr. Magoo eyesight, but my proboscis can sniff out a chocolate cake at a hundred paces. I can also smell a telephone scam, an AI robot, a false narrative, or a rotten politician at ten parsecs. My wife and I credit my big nose for saving our lives.

At first, there was just a bad odor outside, an odor that seemed to emanate from the side-discharge of our forced air natural gas furnace located in the basement. But the odor wasn’t always there, and we were busy, so we filed it away in the back of our minds and carried on with business. Possibly a dead possum, I thought. Or, perhaps, it was a whiff of something foul blowing in from our nation’s capital, or from our state capital to the south.

Then, days later, the odor appeared inside the house, too, and it seemed to be coming from a heat register on the main floor. It was a curious smell - something like the methyl mercaptan odorant that is added to make natural gas leaks detectable. There was something else, something pungent, like the aftermath of a brush fire. This must be coming from the basement furnace, I thought... except that the smell was not there while the furnace was running. It only showed up well after the furnace had stopped running. Then it went away. We had always had our gas appliances regularly inspected by appliance professionals. The annual service reports gave us clean bills of health. The vents were not blocked. The furnace was spotlessly clean. It still looked brand new.

I diddled and fiddled because, after all, I was busy - all of us are always so damn busy - and the smell always went away like it does after an election cycle, at least for a while. And who wants to be a Chicken Little or wear a tin hat and whatever, and so on, and so forth, and all the other ways all of us procrastinate and put off dealing with what we suspect could be serious or expensive or bothersome and time-consuming.

Until one day the smell lingered longer. I called PSE, our local natural gas supplier. PSE told us not to answer the phone, not to light any matches, not to turn on any appliances, not to open the door to any fire-breathing dragons and not to write any incendiary SubStack articles.

PSE safety inspectors arrived within an hour. Their hazmat test equipment confirmed that it was not a gas leak. But it was something just as bad... the furnace was exhausting dangerous levels of... carbon monoxide, like the exhaust of an internal combustion car engine. The heat exchanger was apparently defective. The furnace was exhausting CO both outside and inside the house. In fact, the carbon monoxide level was so high that it blew right past the test equipment’s maximum read-out. What I had smelled was not the CO itself because carbon monoxide, just like natural gas, has no odor. What I had smelled was the incomplete combustion of the gas’s methyl mercaptan odorant and various other combustion smells as flames licked out from the back of the furnace’s heat exchanger and had begun to melt metal and burn insulation. We didn’t smell anything while the furnace was running because the blower dissipated the exhaust. When the blower stopped, the residual fumes became concentrated and we could detect the odor.

So, if not caught in time, we could have been lethally gassed. Then we might have been cremated after the house had caught fire. In which event it would have been unlikely that anyone would have figured out what had really happened.

Not one of our multiple methane or carbon monoxide alarms had gone off.

Hmm.

The inspectors capped the gas line and red-tagged the furnace. PSE’s safety inspectors told us: “You could have woke up dead one morning.”

In a manner of speaking, of course. We wouldn’t have awakened at all.

* * * * *

This is a true and very recent story.

It is also a metaphor for our times. What we smell can indicate that something is very wrong. Most of the time, however, we never get beyond that. Too busy, I think. Anyway, the smell usually goes away after the next election cycle - for a short while, at least.

In a parallel universe, I suppose, I am already dead from carbon monoxide poisoning. You wouldn’t be reading this post because I would not have lived to write it. In a parallel universe, I suppose, our political economic system is also already dead. But in that case, you wouldn’t be reading this post either.

In his last talk, Martin Luther King mentioned an attempt that had been made on his life at a Harlem department store in 1958. A woman approached MLK and knifed him during a book-signing. The blade broke off inside his chest and surgeons had to extract it. As Martin Luther King explained ten years later, his doctors had told him that the knife blade had lodged just a whisker away from the main aorta. Had he but sneezed, King would have bled out and died.

But he didn’t sneeze and he lived... at least for another decade. He was assassinated in 1968, one day after he gave this speech. In 1999, a federal civil jury decided that James Earl Ray did not do it. The jury verdict was that King was assassinated by a conspiracy of federal, state and local government agents.

Assassinations and regime change are an integral part of our history. They’re as American as apple pie. Rotten apple pie.

Recently, there was another attempt on Mr. Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner at the D.C. Hilton Hotel. Or maybe not, depending on what you believe about such things. The usual people lamented the fact that we’ve become jaded and cynical and nobody believes anything or anyone these days. But why should anyone “believe” when the “official narratives” are routinely riddled with outright lies, fairy tales and intentional misinformation?

Cynicism is the idealist’s self-protective hard shell. It protects us from parasites.

In any event, whatever happened at the Washington Hilton Hotel this month, it was not the work of a professional killer. The telltale sign of amateurishness was that it failed spectacularly. This is good. I would celebrate Mr. Trump’s impeachment, removal from office, trial and conviction. But I think that Mr. Trump is more a symptom than a root cause of our disease. Rabies is not cured by blood-letting and brain cancer is not treated by cutting off your head.

The “professional“ hits - like the Israel-United States sneak attack and the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei (and multiple other political leaders) - typically “succeed” in slaughtering their targets... and, indiscriminately, massacring a lot of other people as “collateral damage.” As a matter of fact, the so-called civilized nations of the Western World have been assassinating people and overthrowing foreign (and domestic) governments for so long that it barely garners a yawn anymore. Which is both sad and startling because it means that we have become jaded when we ought to be outraged.

Which is like ignoring a really bad smell when you ought to do something about it.

* * * * *

Just days after the failed assassination attempt, the Democrats started quacking their usual rhetoric about nonviolence and the worrisome trend toward disrespectful political rhetoric. Their sermon is that, somehow, if only we would be law-abiding, acquiescent, disarmed and obedient - even when confronting lawlessness, rape, mugging, and murder - then we might reap the tranquility of domestic farm animals raised in pens and fenced pastures; domestic farm animals who, eventually, are shorn, slaughtered and barbecued. Just ask the Iranians, the Palestinians and the Lebanese how sensible this sermon of passivity is not.

The Republicans, meanwhile, used the occasion of the thwarted assassination to once more promote Mr. Trump’s construction of an extravagant White House Ball Room for his wealthy donor friends (and the lid for a massive military operations bunker beneath it, so it appears). The Republicans also argued that the failed assassination attempt was good cause for the prompt renewal of the totalitarian-state Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Referencing the assassination threat, Republicans again threatened the non sequitur of the annihilation of Iran if it did not promptly surrender to the United States and Israel.

Barely a week passed since the alleged assassination attempt when Mr. Trump put up on the Internet a Rambo-like picture of himself standing in front of a burning war zone, wearing sunglasses, posing like some kind of Al Capon, brandishing an AR15 and threatening, again, to obliterate Iran. The caption read “No More Mr. Nice Guy!“ This is clearly a strong argument why children of Mr. Trump’s age and temperament should not be allowed to use social media.

Mr. Trump then repeated his threat to wipe out “Communist Cuba” and to build a “golden fleet” of boondoggley battleships that look like they were set designs for a George Lucas Star Wars movie. He called, again, for Israel to “pardon” Benjamin Netanyahu for his domestic crimes. No doubt, one of the President Trump’s last acts as President will be to pardon Giselle Maxwell for her sex-trafficking convictions. One has the ineradicable suspicion that Mr. Trump, like so many of the world’s politicos and plutocrats, is in thrall to the Israeli state blackmailers who for years cynically planned, facilitated and recorded the kompromat generated by the Epstein boys and girls club for ungentlemen.

Amazing.

In space, we have circled the dark side of the Moon. Back home, we continue to circle the dark side of Earth.

* * * * *

But Martin Luther King survived that first attempt on his life. He did not sneeze.

And we did not breathe the CO. We, too, are still breathing!

We were saved by a nose.

Iran has taken a beating from bullies, but it’s still standing tall. I respect that. Palestine and Syria and Lebanon have also taken a beating. Their people, too, are still standing tall. I respect that.

In a nod to the nose, therefore, that allowed us to sense the foul smell so that we might all survive, I am posting something uplifting. It is postprandial music, a little after-dinner tune. Let’s call this triumphant post-war music: “Winning by a Nose.”

Unlike my previous musical posts, this one was first played as a concert grand piano. Then, using my E-Mu synthesizer, I converted the Midi data to an organ piece. That sounds easier than it actually was because it took weeks to figure out how to build the digital file using Qtractor to play the Midi track, Audacity to record the audio and Jack, a digital patch board, to let these programs play nice together.

I have always been fascinated by those gigantic cathedral pipe organs with three or four or five full-size keyboards plus a bank of 50 foot pedals and myriad stops and tone controls. I have always imagined myself playing one in a Kafkaesque Gothic cathedral with the volume on high, the stones quaking to the flying buttresses and the stained glass windows shuddering with every bass note. I’ll never play one, of course. It would take a lifetime to learn how to play. I cannot imagine the training and practice and concentration that allows musicians to actually perform Bach or Buxtehude on one of these enormous instruments. It seems to me that you need to be something like an octopus with at least eight arms and feet to play them properly.

No, I am not at all comparing myself to any great composer or musician. Nor even the not-so-great composers and musicians! This is a very simple, upbeat song for complex, downbeat times. “Winning by a Nose” is basically just a riff in the C Major scale with a few variations. Kind of like a fugue. Well, very, very distantly like a fugue, kind of, sort of. Ah hem. Well, not really. But I like it anyway, and that’s all that counts.

I have no idea what my synthesizer sampled for the organ sounds. I imagine myself at the keys of a powerful and gigantic cathedral organ. More than likely, however, the E-mu engineers sampled a Mighty Wurlitzer from an old silent movie theater. Or maybe a child’s toy keyboard played by a ten year old only on the white keys. Whatever. I like it. Winning by a Nose: