Terrible Analogies

My work schedule allows me to take every other Monday off, giving me a three day weekend every two weeks (for the record this is unimportant.  In fact, I’m unsure why I bothered to even mention it.).  While coming back from a quick bite at a local Greek joint on Monday I happened upon this electrical box labeled with the word “Mofoe”.

Is this an in-joke on the part of the electric company, or some form of social engineering graffiti courtesy of a bored miscreant?  I’m familiar with electrical boxes have addresses that end in “1/2″, but I’ve never seen one labeled by name.  

Perhaps this electrical box is notorious amongst electricians.  Perhaps it constantly breaks down, shorts out, and is the source of general grief and bitter annoyance.  And, like the Kentucky Derby of engineering disasters, perhaps this delicate green box of doom freezes up in stuttering fits of failure at the slightest hint of humidity, causing unending fits of pain and rage for the on-call government lackey unlucky enough to pull the shortest straw whenever the weatherman forecasts “a chance of overnight showers”, earning this box the distinction of the disreputable moniker of “mofoe”.

Of course I could be overanalyzing the whole thing.  My mind does tend to wander sometimes…

WARNING: A wall of text follows, but is well worth the read…

This blog post *was* going to be one of condescending opinions and twisted distortions of what I interpret to be reality…but that was before I downloaded a copy of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soapbox Movie and came to a deeper understanding what the eccentric Dr. Bronner, the man behind the soap, was all about.

If you’re not familiar with Dr. Bonner’s Magic Soap, it’s a product that has more than a dozen uses, one of them being soap, and it comes packaged in a wrapping containing nearly 3000 words that calls attention to what Dr. Bronner considered “The Moral ABCs”, which are guidelines for living a prosperous, positive life.

To quote generously from Dr. Bonner’s Magic Soapbox Movie:

“Emanuel H. Bronner was a master soapmaker from Heilbronn, Germany.  He immigrated to the U.S. in 1929 and began touring the country, lecturing on a plan to unite mankind under an “All-One-God-Faith.”  He called this plan “The Moral ABC.”  In 1947 he was committed to a mental hospital in Elgin, Illinois.  He escaped to California where he began making an all-natural peppermint soap.  To each bottle he attached a copy of “The Moral ABC.”  Today his heirs sell over 4.5 million bottles of “Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap” a year.”

With this condensed, direct opening we’re given a window into the sloped, erratic world of Emanuel H. Bronner (1908-1997) and the people whose lives he’s touched.

To make a long story stuffy, Dr. Emanuel H. Bronner was obsessed with selling a message of hope to the world.  Dr. Bronner’s mother and father died at the hands of the Germans while in concentration camps during World War II.  Through subversive means he managed to escape to America.  Obsessed with a message that we’re all children under the same God and that we should care for each other, he talked to whomever would listen.  While in college he would speak in a booming voice that echoed throughout the hallways where he argued his points and theories, full of fire and brimstone, in a voice that would crack with the shock of intense belief and devotion.  His fervent dedication to “The Moral ABCs” and the manner in which he delivered his thoughts was interpreted by some to be a public nuisance.  The police were called.  Unsure what they had on their hands they brought Dr. Bronner to a mental institution where he was forced to undergo six months of shock treatments (which he blamed for his blindness during his last thirty years of life).  He eventually escaped and made his way to California where, with money he won in Las Vegas, he started up a soap company.  Through this company he extolled the virtues of “The Moral ABCs”, “without which no one could survive free.”

Pearls of wisdom from Dr. Bronner’s Moral ABCs include:

“To keep my health, to do my work, to love, to live!  To see to it that I give and grow and give and give!”

“The intensity of a man’s emotions is a greater driving force than the sum total of his education, his money, or the size of his brain.”

“What I am at this moment is the result of past constructive action!  But all future generations depend on what I do with it at this moment!”

I think he and Tyler Durden would have a lot in common.  I wonder if Chuck Palhniuk modeled Tyler Durden, in part,  after Dr. Bronner?

Today Dr. Bronner’s company is still going strong.  Dr. Bonner’s Magic Soap Company believes in fair wages, fair living standards, and everything is produced naturally and is non-toxic to the environment.

In their own words: “We take care of our employees with generous salaries and benefits (no-deductible PPO health insurance and a great profit sharing/retirement plan that we fully fund), we cap executive pay at five times the lowest-paid position, and we give all profits not needed for business development to support progressive charities and causes.”  In recent years the company has given away over 70% of its net profit.  All of the Bronners have capped their salaries so that they make no more than fives times that of the lowest paid, fully vested employee.

Again, this was going to be a quick post about the fact that I live just a few miles away from Dr. Bronner’s warehouse (see the final two pics below) where they manufacture and distribute what I assumed to be a “hippy” product.  But after downloading and watching the documentary movie about their company and the good they do for the community, the less I wanted to poke fun at their product and the more I wanted to praise them for their generosity and humanism.

I wonder if they give tours of their plant?  I’d love just a five minute run through their building and take a few pictures.  Who knows, even get a chance to talk to Ralph Bronner for a minute?  I’m sure he’s a busy man, but to share a moment of his time would be amazing.

To get a better understanding of where I’m coming from when I speak of Dr. Bronner and his company, download the online version of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soapbox Movie.  The portable version is only $3, and is well worth the time it takes to watch.  I found it fascinating enough to want to purchase the DVD version.

Located in San Marcos, CA

Misspelled sign on the "botteling room" door. Yet another charming hallmark of this company...

The entire caption read "Missiles are absolutely anti-social". Who can disagree?

The institution where Dr. Bronner was held for six months

One of the many interesting characters Ralph Bronner talks to in Dr. Bronner's Magic Soapbox Movie

Karin and I swung by the warehouse this afternoon. This is the front of Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap Company as it looks today. It was very windy, and tree bark littered the parking lot.

Another picture we took. Signs warning of dire consequences to trespassers abound.

I was ready to wrap it up for the day.  It was near midnight, Karin and I had just finished watching Delecatesin on DVD, and I had to get up early for work the next day.  I promised Karin that I’d be following her upstairs as soon as I “quickly straightened up the living room”, which in reality is code for “I’ll be upstairs after I channel surf for a few”, and she knows it.  

There I was, alone and…well, alone.  The wife had gone upstairs leaving me to my own devices. With thumb pressed firmly on the “up” button of the remote I scrolled through a myriad of infomercials, syndicated reruns, and strongman competitions, but paused when I saw something…unusual.  At first I was unsure what I was watching.  Was the twitching kid on stage writhing in pain or in the throes of religious rapturous fervor?  Bewildered, I continued to watch for several minutes before I finally became convinced that what I was viewing wasn’t an alcoholic deep in the throws of a D.T. induced seizure, but rather a competitor in what was the 2007 Duncan Yo-Yo championship.

Fascinated and unable to turn away, from 11pm to midnight I was glued to the television watching these kids bounce, juggle, and twist their yo-yos through gyrations and practiced programs that at times blurred the vision of even the most eagle-eyed observer.  At first I was confused, then amused, then I found myself cheering for some of these competitors as they leapt and convulsed their way through undulating, dexterous, whirlwind routines.

I’m the kind of guy who enjoys going to track and field meets and local power-lifting competitions.  I hunt down and attend the small but important discus meets (my personal favorite spectator sport because you can get up and close to the competitors, and for the fact that my dad taught me how to throw).  I enjoy lifting weights and participating in road races.  Given all of this, even I could respect the skill of these competitors as they ran through complex and delicate yo-yo routines.  Under the pressure of the lights, cameras, and a live audience these guys show what a little dedication and a metric ton of practice can produce.  For such a niche scene these kids really shine, and for that a bow down to them.

Stayed home sick today.  Funny, I got a flu shot this year but still came down with a bug.  I did still manage to log in and slog through a few hours worth of work before I finally had enough.  I eventually shut down the computers, grabbed a few random books off of the shelves, and retreated to the comfort of the couch.  Flipping through my copy of Who’s Who In Hell (which can now be found free online, but a physical copy is much easier to thumb through) I spotted the following passage:

You’ll note the typo in e-mail #2.  I’m sure the author meant “phase” and not “phrase”.  Also, the formatting is off on this entry, with the bullet point to #3 aligned to the right instead of the left.  This is a massive tome of a book clocking in at an encyclopedic 1,237 pages, and errors like these are bound to slip through, but I still blame the editor.  It’s his/her job to catch these things, and they dropped the ball.

If you do manage to make your way over to the online version of WWIH, a few interesting and/or amusing passages can be found under the subjects of “Logic“, “Freemason” (which describes admittance to the group and their secret handshake), and “How To Obtain A Wife“.

I first laid eyes upon the movie Naked Lunch while wandering through a video store late one night in Japan.  Why I was in Japan sporting two rows of stitches in my face isn’t important, but there I was looking for a video to watch whilst lost and stranded in a foreign land when I happened upon a bin of used VHS movies.  Casually pushing around the chaotic jumble of Japanese packaging looking for anything resembling an english film I spied an eerie alien face peeking through the suffocating pile of torn cellophane and crushed blunted corners of cardboard packaging.  Extracting it from its analog tomb I had in my grasp an english version of the movie Naked Lunch.  What this movie was doing in a nondescript store on a quiet street in Morioka I couldn’t say, but I held in my hands a cheap english movie in a strange land, and for that I was grateful.  It was something I could watch in my phone booth sized hotel room to help me pass the time while I figured out how the heck I was going to get back to America without a passport.

Man, what a mind frack this movie was to my then twenty-year-old mind.  Having read Junky I was familiar with William S. Burroughs, but I wasn’t familiar with David Cronenberg and how warped his imagination was.  I had to pause the movie and take a breather when the orgasmic talking insect typewriters began to verbally rape the protagonist of the film.  

Since then I’ve come to appreciate David Cronenberg and his version of Burroughs’ unfilmable novel Naked Lunch.  I can’t imagine anyone other than Robocop playing the bug poison addicted fugitive.  Peter Weller pulled off an amazing Bill Lee (Burroughs’ real-life alter ego)…and kudos go out to the lactating alien, without whom this movie would be but a shadow of its glorious self.  

I’ve since purchased three different versions of this film (and if it ever comes out on blu-ray it’ll be four), the last of which happens to be a Criterion release.  I’ve scanned a few pages from the included booklet for your amusement.  I would like to recommend this film, but that’s difficult to do because I know some people simply would not be able to handle the notorious weirdness that Croenberg is infamous for.  If you can handle Videodrome and the much tamer eXistenZ (both of which are amazing films), then I think you’re ready for a screening of the sublimely twisted Naked Lunch.

Again and as always, click the images to embiggen…