Birch

By Richard Segal

A journalist once famously remarked that it is only possible to fall in love with one war, but do cold wars count, and how does it play out if many are too young, or too much time has passed, to really remember?

What began with the intention of four good friends to meet for a quiet short gathering at ones remote retreat quickly became anything but, with a were not leaving until mentality, if by default. Four grew to nine as the far-fetched concept of tenderfoots forming a band transitioned toward a geopolitical food fight, in which neither hill-climbing trekkies nor Harringay Ladder hipsters were spared, and the only form of victory was being on the right side of history. The croaky-voiced Patsy from behind the convenience store counter joined the acerbic filmmaker Martyn to prop up the mosh pit, as the days felt more like a size 11 than a size 9 affair.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Jan 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781504998772

Richard Segal

Richard Segal, an American citizen, resides in London, England, and works as an economic and financial consultant. He has written widely about matters relating to global public policy over the years. His most recent novel was The Man Who Knew the Answer.

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2016 Richard Segal. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 01/25/2016

ISBN: 978-1-5049-9878-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-9877-2 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

My House, My Scissors

Putting the Band Together

Your Name is Luka

Mortgage Rates at all Time Low

The Ideal Gas Law

The Replacement Filters

The Wig my Father Wore

The Elephant in the Room

Avogadro’s Ladder

Why was Steve Seasick?

The Man on the Moon

Unexpected Item in Bagging Area

The Albatross in the Room

Brothers in Arms

Songwriters on Stage

La La La, Figaro, Figaro

Wheels of Steel

Act 1Ext. The White Lion of Mortimer

INT. The White Lion of Mortimer

INT. Sable, a French pastry shop

Ext. The White Lion of Mortimer

Ext. The Water Alchemist, a canalside vegetarian café

Ext. The White Lion of Mortimer

The End? No, it is Just the Beginning

The Billy Webb Defence

No Reservations

The Three Questions (read by Paul and Rick in unison)

ACT II

To Olivia

Do you know the author?

Int. KV Medical Center

It was a fairly typical day in the emergency room, with the exception of my presence. I was timetabled to host a brief gathering of friends that evening, it was not intended to become a no one gets out of here alive affair, really it wasn’t, but I wasn’t going nowhere with a tube stuck in my eye and a screaming drug addict across the corridor. I, at least, had slept the night before.

Context is everything, for example the drive to my cottage that I visualized to be occurring while instead I had these tubes in my eye sockets, cleaning the I say shrapnel, you say debris, that might have scratched more than my lid and lash earlier that morning. Who’ll stop the rain became run through the jungle, but it wasn’t raining, and there was neither asphalt nor jungle within anyone’s viewfinder, day or night time. It was only a symbol, they were only symbols. With the right melody and the right context any lyric will work, but the words won’t translate when out of it, the context that is, not my neighbor across the hall.

It is a theme both that forgetfulness is part of the plan and anything goes, but when I say anything goes, I mean within reason. Freedom of speech means nothing without responsibility, and though there’s a fine line between hate speech and over-sensitivity, there’s arguably no greater crime than unnecessary noise. I couldn’t believe it when I was freed from the shackles of self-censorship, but who am I fooling, there will always be another shackle, the only difference is that sometimes it takes me until the end to realize this, this time I get it out of the way at the beginning. It lasted for 24 hours, the freedom, before the reality of a pocket veto set in, and the rest.

Moreover, I’m immobile in this hospital bed, acting the part of the yesterday-fit man in a coma, seemingly suffering from a massive brain hemorrhage, but unknown to the doctors and nurses, am fully mentally aware of my surroundings, and am merely suffering from motion depletion, but it is total. It is one form of hell, but it is total, as I listen to lady across the corridor lob c-bombs and f-bombs at her carers, possibly in that order, shrieking from the ignominy of it all, eyes as glassy as any 1970s rock & roll lead guitarist, playing in front of a packed Albert Hall audience. My eyes cleansed, the nurse will remove the tubes and I will walk away, hospital the richer thanks to my insurance company and my deductible, and my policy excess, but her drug-fueled crazy, which may yet launch into full-scale behavior disorder, will continue. The mind, after all, is adaptable, it can deteriorate to conform with its surroundings. The noise, the jarring noise, if I wasn’t figuratively in a straitjacket, I’d lift myself from this bed and muzzle her physically myself. No, there’s only room for one on the narrow gauge low road, so I took the high road.

How sad, I commented to one of the nurses, about the lady’s condition, attempting to comprehend what she was undergoing internally, given its manifestation, which is no solace to the emergency room employees subjected to her verbal abuse, as I sign my exit forms and walk outside some time later. She listens to my observation without commenting, except possibly to acknowledge my compassion for the fellow human being. Maybe lady is a regular visitor. However, it was one of those situations in which time stands still, was I lying there with tubes poked into my eyes for 90 seconds or was it a full 45 minute horror show? In any case, I was late, I was very late, because even in the best case scenario, it’s not just the minute and a half of c-bombs and f-bombs, it’s the preamble, the triage, the beard stroking of the chemical cleaning mixologists, the wind down and the warnings not to do this again: Wear safety goggles next time. Bend your knees, twenty dollars please, said the amateur tennis coach, but he on the other hand was right.

Car keys pulllese, I mean please, I’m sighted enough to drive, and I know this route by auto-pilot, I plead to the imaginary arbiter of automobile safety, and prepare to engage the gears of my wanna-be jalopy. I cringe, because I know the first thing I’m going to do once I’m out of the parking lot is turn on the radio, and either the song will render me self-righteous, or the nameless, shameless and faceless advertisement will the more so. Haven’t I just walked out of hell of my own volition?

My House, My Scissors

You can’t do that, John protested.

Why not? I asked.

Because it’s his hair, not yours, he continued.

Skip ad, I replied.

How would you like it if- he began.

I would hope that if my hair looked as ridiculous as Ringo’s, someone would have the decency to cut it to a respectable length during the middle of the night after I had passed out. Besides, I was careful, it looks better now and I destroyed the evidence, I reasoned.

So that would explain the smell from the fireplace last night. Early this morning, John speculated.

Burning hair doesn’t smell, I countered. At least I don’t think it does. That was the scented candle the last guest left behind that Paul didn’t like either. The smell is more waxy.

What’s he gonna say when he wakes up? he asked.

I’ll say he agreed to it, and it will grow back, or he could go into town and have it trimmed professionally, I closed. Another good idea, I rationalized. His regular barber would only make it worse.

It was 9:30 am and even so, John and I were the only ones awake, because Ringo and Paul were still sleeping it off. I felt fine, so I must have started later or paced myself, and I’d been up for hours already, commencing with the coffee duties, because what’s not to like about a large pot of coffee after an unintended sleepover, and another one, so I could start on the cathartic duty of cleaning up. Perhaps I made too much noise during this process. What’s that awful racket? I’m trying to sleep off my hangover. It’s George, accomplishing the cleaning up, so you won’t have to. Oh, OK, fair enough.

It had been nearly 24 hours since I was discharged from the emergency room and clearly a lot had happened, which I ought to explain, as I should about the nicknames we adopted, but first, another pot of coffee, because the early edition was becoming stale.

I like the first hour of the morning when no one else is awake, there’s a serenity to the stillness, a sort of spirituality without having to do anything to achieve it. My new TV is internet ready, but the early morning programs are designed for those who want or have to become alert quickly, rather than remain unwound, and the remote control is impossibly byzantine. Therefore, no A/V accompaniment either. Thus, I had an hour of serenity to process the previous twenty three of them, which I had intended to squander in deference to tranquility.

I had been meaning to install a sauna, because there’s nothing like twenty to twenty-five minutes of dry steam to open and cleanse the pores, providing breathing space for the toxins to exit, and the mind will thank the body for its heat tolerance later. Moreover, there existed the perfectly sized unused space downstairs. However, it was too complicated a project to pull off, and the blueprints remain on the drawing board.

What were these three responsible friends of mine still doing here? Last night’s gathering was designed as a meeting to hold a meeting, and nothing more, nothing less, so what were they all doing here still? Sure, I was concerned I wouldn’t get out of the hospital in time to greet them when in the event I was early and sitting on my hands waiting. I must invent a modern alternative to the antiquated locking mechanism so that guests can enter with a four digit code instead (and why are PIN codes always four digits?), but that will have to wait for someone else’s inspiration; no, just someone to create a product which is scalable. Scalability is everything these days. It is the new ‘implementation,’ it is key.

We had ideas and inspiration and aimed to utilize these two to bridge a gap in the marketplace, because the airwaves were filled with drool, dross and trivia and there must be an outlet from which we could compile better than average existing material and broaden into a global brand. There was no risk of losing the first mover advantage, because if someone else or another nameless and faceless corporation was going to step on this, it would have already. Moreover, no gambit of ours would prove expensive, because hardly anyone expects to be paid for content any more. After all, bloggers believe the right to write is more than worth, worth more than a payment. With four heads and a network that was at least a multiple of this, we could surely produce a business plan interactively and remotely within a few months. It had to work, whether or not we had direct industry experience, because the world is flat and none of this is supposed to matter anymore, either. Therein: our decision to meet briefly last night to agree a blueprint, a set of individual and backup responsibilities, and an inviolable timeline. Moreover, all of us had very busy weekends in front of us.

It was sixty or so degrees in the early evening shade, good beer drinking weather indeed and I recalled that the only sun to have appeared in my last book was the bright winter sun, when it was far from an escorcher outside. Also note that good moods and uncluttered minds are beneficial for unbridled brainstorming about no proposal being silly, and good beer drinking weather equals good moods a lot of the while.

Rather than move straight to the point, we began with pleasantries and ice breaking, which quickly sidelined into a jokey idea that as we were four, we should play roles either of a famous quartet or as four individual celebrities. In this light, a proposal that as an interim step we should manufacture a band for practice isn’t surprising, at least in retrospect, even if none of us could play or compose, and only two of us could write. Paul attended a musical recently and was inspired, whereas a counterpart would merely have been transported. Both of these contributed to his suggestion to put a band together, or perchance it was all three, and remember this, because it is going to prove important.

There’s a theory running around that the internet has destroyed the music industry, that musicians deserve unlimited copyright protection, and so forth. Those in the know believe there is some unknown quantum that beatifies music above other creative forms, in which a commissioned piece of sculpture or a visual artwork can be owned by the entity funding the endeavor, yet the composer of a musical article retains first right of ownership unless specifically dedicated otherwise or sold, and it is presumptive that the commissioner will lose exclusivity after an interval, if he has any at all. However, where do you draw the line, in which there are a certain number and combination of sounds the human can take in, and when does a slight variation or rearrangement become proprietary? The lifecycle of a patent is by its nature limited, yet the ownership of a single lyrical melody is in practice infinite. Moreover, the fair use policy appears relevant to the written word but not the hummed word, unless you’re an insider, in which case you can ‘sample’ at will. The un-self-styled handle Mr. Copypaste does not translate if you’re a person who thinks he can get away with it.

Do I have to bop my head to the musical beats? Can’t I just listen? I wondered figuratively. If we’re in a club and a pop singer remakes her song into jazz so that it surpasses the objectionable bozone layer, it is good, John will smile and bop his head, and Paul will follow. They look at me funny, but if I can still hear without my head moving and if I can comment favorably afterward, does this mean I share no due appreciation? No, you must bop your head foolishly to the beats, without inhibition, otherwise you are a square.

If there was a theme to my musical theories, it was based around four tenets, those of the melody, the lyrics, the vocals and the instrumentals. By contrast, Shep wore his color organ on his sleeve, playing whatever tune popped into his head without cogitating beyond that. He could have been a cross between Captain Crunch and Colonel Sanders, plugging a home recipe for oven fried chicken coated by children’s cereal. If a scene called for a bit ‘a action, he’d mime a car engine revving up or the opening tiffs to Love Shack, but not in my shack, although if it was a true tragi-comic moment, he’d search his brain cavity for the denouement of a classic cartoon moment, when a coyote believes for a split second he can outwit gravity, or a dinosaur does. To the molecular musicologist, though, the song has to start with the melody and move on from there. If you try it the other way around, meaning with the lyrics - ‘this ole crew’s got a job in its hands’ - the tune ends up flat and forced. The vocals and the instrumentals, they should follow naturally. Now, do it the right way, and you end up with the sublime, the personification of pre-old school. Do it the wrong way and you end up with the theme song to Nuns on the Run. There is accounting for taste and Shep is going to prove important too.

We all had suggestions for projects we could organize during the next get-together, but the host’s prerogative is to ask the opening question, or go first. Mine was as follows, no it wasn’t as follows, it was to create a TV microsite for insertion into a daily three hour block on a metropolitan cable network, in which we would be no more than the platform. Three hours per day, most likely in the early morning, with scattered reruns on weekends. We’d run experimental theatrical content, in which we’d sublet our airplay to directors themselves seeking a platform for their work, one hour at a crack or half an hour if they didn’t mind paying a slightly higher hourly rate. Their fees cover our network rental costs, and our profit is generated from the advertisements we’d run. The kicker is that the director can have the entire hour to himself if he buys the commercial space, too, although no more than that. He’s only entitled to one hour of programming in any given three month period. These are hours of the day and cable channels typically devoted to infomercials, but these are dead expanses that can be put to far better use, and the creative types - directors and watchers - are probably not the 9-5 office types anyway, although it’s also prime time for taping for later.

It is said that programming and viewing habits are migrating from the traditional television monitor and toward smartphones - not even tablets can get a look see apparently - but try telling that to the engineers still perfecting the large OLED curved TVs with super-around sound. This would be perfect for directors believing in their ability and product, and wishing to build an audience. Sure, there’s the internet, but how do you drive traffic to your offering when everyone else is trying to do the same, and smaller screen viewers are more likely to prefer shorter clips than we would broadcast. There are, after all, a limited number of cable channels, which are very visible to anyone with a remote, whereas the internet is the mother of all true haystacks. Moreover, as the directors will seek to maximize the number of potential viewers of their program, they will promote our channel a lot more than we will have to, and this process will become self reinforcing. Watch it live, watch on tape, it doesn’t matter as this is your escape. A management team of four would be ideal in addition: one to oversee the channel and the relationship with suppliers such as the main network, or the so-called EPG broker, one to seek the content and manage relationships with the directors, one to source advertising and one to run the website. It would be a lot of work, but it wouldn’t take long to build and the work would be rewarding all around. Could this brainchild be copied? Yes, but not until it’s too late.

Putting the Band Together

Let’s do this ourselves, Paul had urged the previous evening, as soon as we had taken seats.

Do what? John asked.

Create a band like in the musical, like in the movie version of the musical. Exclamation point for emphasis! It was infectious! The musical, he explained.

We can’t do that, John ruled immediately and immaculately.

Well why not? Paul asked. People copy others all the time.

It’s not about the copying, John continued.

Then what is it? It would be fun, and it wouldn’t cost anything, Paul reasoned. Don’t be so negative.

He’s not being negative, George piped in, it’s not realistic. None of us know anything about music, or writing songs, or marketing, and I’m the only one who knows how to write, except for John that is, he closed meekly.

Spoil sports, Paul opined childishly.

Well what do you think, Ringo? George asked.

Well, Ringo started in a fake Southern drawl, just as his nickname for the evening was fake, It would be entertaining.

How so? John asked.

Talking about it, Ringo replied. Even if it goes nowhere, drawing up the outline, an outline, it would be fun, assigning and volunteering responsibilities.

You can find musicians on the internet, Paul added. The world is teeming with musicians who hope to get noticed. They’ll take the job to pad their resumes and get some practice. We create a website and everyone will assume we’re a real music producing, band starting, company. No one will care.

What if they look us up, George asked, and discover the website is only two weeks old?

They won’t, Paul went on. They want the job too much, they believe they’re better than someone else at the guitar, or singing.

Interesting, John observed, the famous musicians, the celebrities, with the professional voice coaches, are wracked with self doubt, but the amateurs believe they’re the best.

Always the philosopher, George ribbed.

So we’re going to do it? Paul asked.

No, John ruled again, in his view definitively.

Why are you so eager? George wondered.

I dunno, Paul replied. I guess it would be cool to do something together, to be organized about it, organized about something, to see if we can do it, and if nothing pans out-

Nothing ventured, nothing gained, Ringo interrupted by way of conclusion, but they played for winner takes all.

Ringo was right. This precis wasn’t about manufacturing a band, or copying a musical, it was about aspiring to do something, it was about teamwork, and about an endeavor a little more ambitious than making plans to get together for an evening. Paul was right too, there is so much mediocrity out there, out there. This was his objective all along, to bring this subject to our attention as quickly as he could, and he had the taste, to strike while the iron was hot, whereas we believed the gathering would be devoted to sitting in easy chairs, drinking for a little while and brainstorming for the next get