*An Entropy Weekend

Vertical and Grateful

I'm having an entropy weekend: My sliding glass door has developed moisture between the panes of glass, just at  autumn's "peak viewing" season; my CD disc player is skipping and no cleaning device helps the wavering laser; and my 1984 (now "officially antique") Z-28. T-top, Camaro needs a muffler, brakes, and a few rust-spot touch-ups.

All 'luxury problems' I might add, especially when you consider the floods, starvation, and ecological disasters scourging the world at this very moment.


"Everything falls apart", Willy Loman complains at the end of the first  scene of Death of a Salesman when Linda, his wife, tries to divert his attention from a spiteful argument with their son Biff, to a dripping bathroom faucet, instead.


It's part of Miller's famous depiction of the futility of the American Dream in the the now more than half-century old stage masterpiece; the futility of trying to "come out number one," or even, trying just to "get ahead," a futility which Linda poignantly underscores in her elegiac farewell over Willy's grave: "I made the last payment on house today ... and there'll be nobody home."


Well I'm philosophical.


I know it's all futile, a fact Willy and Linda Loman  (and I think Miller is suggesting, most Americans in 1949, didn't know --and still don't in 20l0) : "He was even finsihed with the dentist" Linda laments after Willy's suicide.

 I got news for ya, Linda:  NOBODY is EVER "finished" with the dentist, even if all your teeth have been pulled.


And me? 


To quote an old Italian friend of mine from New Haven (entropy weekend or not), I'm just "glad my feet hit the floor when I got up this morning."