The Adventures of Ordinary Man!

By Ian Marshall

Faster than a receding mullet, more powerful than an ulterior motive, able to leap tall buildings in a single leap of the imagination, or with the purchase of an overpriced plane ticket. Look-down on the page! It's Ordinary Man!

On the surface Ordinary Man's adventures seem like mundane stuff: he drives to work, counts his farts, shovels s

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ian S. Marshall
• Release date: Nov 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9781088060339

Book preview

Ebook_Cover.png

Table of Content(ment)s

Foreword: The Cover of Ordinary Man that Could Never Be

1. Ordinary Man Wakes Up

2. Ordinary Man Drives to Work in the Morning

3. Ordinary Man Talks about Love

4. Ordinary Man’s Magic Bracelet

5. Ordinary Man and the Law of the Fart

6. Ordinary Man Says, Let There Be Light!

7. Ordinary Man Plays Tennis with the Dean

8. Ordinary Man Gets a Lesson in Compassion

9. Why Ordinary Man Likes Good Beer

10. Ordinary Man Reads the Tao

11. Ordinary Man in Plato’s Cave

12. Ordinary Man Maintains His Motorcycle—Which in Fact He Does Not Have

13. Ordinary Man and the Problem with Conflict

14. Ordinary Man Makes It through an Early Storm

15. Ordinary Man Contemplates the Path of the Hero and Finds Himself Lacking

16. Ordinary Man Reads the Encyclopedia Of Aberrations

17. One of Ordinary Man’s Superpowers

18. Ordinary Man Reads to the Mountain

19. Ordinary Man Practices Sudoku

20. Ordinary Man in the Second Person

21. Ordinary Man Reverses Sisyphus

22. Ordinary Man Considers the Glass Half-Empty

23. Ordinary Man Contemplates an Egg in a Cage

24. Ordinary Man Sits Down for a Q and A

25. Ordinary Man Expresses His Admiration for Superman

26. Ordinary Man Gets Things Done on Time

27. Ordinary Man and the Metamorphoses

28. Ordinary Man and the Power of Apology

29. Ordinary Man Considers the Possibility that the Story of His Life Is Told by an Unreliable Narrator

30. Ordinary Man Considers the Only Two Stories

31. Ordinary Man Resents the Finger that He Didn’t Deserve

32. Ordinary Man Considers the Snake

33. In Which Ordinary Man Rails Against Language Change

34. Ordinary Man Learns a New Word and Considers His Life as a Kerf

35. Ordinary Man Designs his Insignia

36. Ordinary Man Finds an Arrow in his Eye

37. Ordinary Man Checks his Watch

38. Ordinary Man Gets His Thoughts in Order

39. Ordinary Man Leaps Tall Buildings at a Single Bound

40. Ordinary Man Considers Something Completely Different

41. Ordinary Man in Self-Reflexive Mode

42. Ordinary Man and the Power of Selective Hearing

43. Ordinary Man Makes His New Year’s Resolutions and Vows to Become Betterperson

44. Ordinary Man Explains What Literature Is For

45. Ordinary Man Considers the Other

46. Ordinary Man Shovels Snow while it’s Still Snowing

47. Ordinary Man Shops for a Car

48. Ordinary Man Wonders Who’s the Sidekick

49. Ordinary Man Sucks at His Job

50. Ordinary Man Lends a Helping Hand

51. Ordinary Man Considers the Advantages of the Sisyphean Life

52. Ordinary Man Sees a Heron

Endnotes

About the Author

The Adventures of

Ordinary Man!

Ian Marshall

© ian marshall 2022

Copyright Material

The Adventures of Ordinary Man!

Text copyright © 2022 by Ian Marshall. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, or mechanical, including recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

ISBN 978-1-0880-6033-9 (ebook)

Ridge and Valley Press

State College, PA

Also by Ian Marshall

Story Line: Exploring the Literature of the Appalachian Trail (University of Virginia Press, 1998).

Peak Experiences: Walking Meditations on Literature, Nature, and Need (University of Virginia Press, 2003).

Walden by Haiku (University of Georgia Press, 2009).

Border Crossings: Walking the Haiku Path on the International Appalachian Trail (Hiraeth, 2012).

Reading Shaver’s Creek: Ecological Reflections from an Appalachian Forest (Penn State University Press, 2018).

Circumambulations (poems) (Foothills Press, 2018).

The Master does nothing,

yet he leaves nothing undone.

The ordinary man is always doing things,

yet many more are left to be done.

--Tao Te Ching

Disclaimer:

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons is purely coincidental. I made all this stuff up. There’s no such person as Ordinary Man.

Acknowledgments

The help, support, encouragement, smarts, and expertise of many good folks have made The Adventures of Ordinary Man! possible. For formatting help, manuscript prep, and digital hand-holding through the publication process, thanks to Paige Barrera of Infinity Flower Publishing. For the cool cover art, thanks to Gary Val Tenuta, who seemed to get it from the get-go. For the fun and the miles underfoot, for the intellectual discourse, academic and otherwise, for the IPAs, and for wanting to know What’s your project? and getting me going on this, thanks to the Corpse of Discovery: Mike Branch, John Lane, Mark Long, David Taylor, and Jim Warren. Thanks as well to John Tallmadge, who was one of the first readers of The Adventures of Ordinary Man! and who early in my career showed that it was possible to combine good work with a good life. Thanks, too, to my faculty colleagues at Penn State Altoona, who do extraordinary things every semester, in and out of the classroom, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. And thanks most of all to Megan Simpson, the first trial audience for The Adventures of Ordinary Man!, for Significant Othering of extraordinary quality.

Foreword: The Cover of Ordinary Man that Could Never Be

Ordinary Man can’t draw worth a darn, so you’ll have to use your imagination here. Picture a comic book cover, with The Adventures of in blue and Ordinary Man in larger letters, in red, italicized. The lettering should evoke the old Superman comics. But in the graphic, instead of Superman in full flight streaking upward on the diagonal, one fist raised in the direction of his travel, think of a guy at a desk, in a rumpled suit with tie askew, moving a piece of paper from the overloaded in pile to the skimpy out basket. He’d be drawn by R. Crumb, sort of a Mr. Natural Does the Dishes kind of thing, but no, it’s not Mr. Natural behind the desk, not even a shorn version. It’s the guy from Keep on Trucking, wispy-haired and prominently proboscised, but he’s not trucking, he’s just behind a desk. Is he bored sitting there, chained to the chair, yearning for a long stride on the open road?

Nah, he doesn’t think about it, just moves the papers from the in pile to the out pile. Does his job. Counts his pay. Is not aware that he’s a cartoon figure.

As it happens, Ordinary Man knows someone who knows Crumb, who is friends with Crumb, trades old blues records with him. How extraordinary! He wonders if he could ask his friend to ask Crumb to draw the cover for him. But no, that would be imposing on his friend. And why would Crumb want to be bothered by Ordinary Man? That would be not just an imposition but an intrusion. He’d say no of course, and there’d be bad feelings all around.

It occurs to Ordinary Man that it’s not so extraordinary that he knows someone who knows someone famous. Just about everyone does, or they know someone who knows someone who knows someone. But what if he were the friend who actually knew the famous guy? Wouldn’t that be extraordinary!

It never occurs to Ordinary Man that maybe someday he could be the famous person himself—or if it does occur to him, he quickly puts it out of mind, chastises himself for being unrealistic. Quit daydreaming. There are things to do. He knows there are things to do because he’s got them numbered on his daily list of things to do. And yes, the list includes make today’s list of things to do.

All that would be clear from the expression on Ordinary Man’s face as he sits behind the desk pushing paper on the cover of The Adventures of Ordinary Man!

1. Ordinary Man Wakes Up

Ordinary Man wakes up in the morning and heads straight to the kitchen. The coffee grounds, two spoonfuls, look like dirt, and he remembers that in fact coffee plants do grow from the earth. He pours a big cup of water into the top of the coffeemaker, watches the first drips, hot and dark and thick, fall into the pot. Thus does he turn water into a beverage of wakefulness.

Sacred acts—the voiding of self and the ablution of self, both of which require the transfer of liquids—take place in the bathroom, and then Ordinary Man dresses, gets the newspaper and the coffee, settles into his favorite chair. The news of war on the front page, the weather on the back—both are things he can do nothing about. What kind of hero is he, you might ask, and so might he as well, but right now he savors the first slurp of coffee hitting the tongue, sliding down the throat. It is bitter, and he likes it because it is bitter. That comes from a poem, he remembers—this may well be his first conscious thought of the day—though he can’t remember which poem. The coffee is magic potion. He remembers another poem, about a king who takes a bit of poison every day, so that when his enemies try to poison him he has already built up his immunity, and he lives to a ripe old age. In the poem, the poison is a metaphor for poetry, and Terence, the poet in Housman’s poem, suggests that poetry too is a small palatable dose of poison that gets us ready to live in the world.

Ordinary Man wonders, then, if his coffee is a poem, readying him for the day, the first small and effective dose of bitterness. Perhaps he should start adding sugar. Or would that defeat the purpose?

2. Ordinary Man Drives to Work in the Morning

Driving to work in the morning, Ordinary Man grips the wheel