I was riding my bicycle out near the IHOP restaurant this morning when I happened to run into an old friend of mine, Samuel Clemens. Most people know him as Mark Twain. I’ve tried to tell him before that I consider it an unnecessary pretension that he insisted on being known as Mark... and “Twain”... “What the hell kind of name is Twain,” I once said to him. It’s exactly the kind of use of uppity language that would have made our mutual friend Huckleberry Finn laugh.

Anyway, there he was sitting on a bench outside the IHOP. He was reading a little book of poems by Eric Johnson, another friend of mine... said he thought the poems were more than pretty good... “damned good,” was the way he put it. I told him about Eric’s poetry reading at Open Door Books in La Jolla on the 14th of this month. He said he knew the store. He likes the store mainly because they keep his books in stock.

He and I have been friends since we were kids. I can’t remember exactly, but I think it was Huckleberry who introduced us... or it may have been Tom Sawyer. Whoever it was, we’ve had a good, long friendship. As much as anybody else, he helped me gain important insights into the nature of American culture when I was a young, green teacher.

I didn’t want to get him going about schools. I remember he liked to make fun of academics, especially academic jargon. On that subject he said once, “As concerns this question, our inspired ...founder,” I think he said... “instructs us that the fealty due from the Ultimate in connection with the subjection to the intermediate and the inferential, these being of necessity subordinate to the Auto-Isothermal, limited subliminally by this contract, which is in all cases sporadic and incandescent, those that ascend to the Abode of the Blest are assimilated in thought and action by the objective influence of the truth which sets us free, otherwise they could not.” You see what I mean.

I was also careful today not to get him going by talking again about name changes. Another friend of mine has changed his name twice, and I suspect Sam, or Mark, if he insists, has thought of a bunch of other names that he’s like to wear for awhile. I once suggested he try “Jerral” for size to see what it’s like to have a name that nobody spells right or even wants to spell right. He was a stickler for names of things.

He once wrote a letter to the Sacramento Union, a newspaper now long defunct, in which he argued that the Pacific Ocean had been wrongly named. Lots of people agreed with him. This is what he said in his letter to the Sacramento Union: “We hear all our lives about the ‘“gentle, stormless Pacific,”’ and about the ‘“smooth and delightful route to the Sandwich Islands,”’ and about the “‘steady blowing trades’” that never vary, never change, never ‘“chop around,”’ and all the days of our boyhood we read how that infatuated old ass, Balboa, looked out from the top of a high rock (I guess he may have been referring to Point Loma) upon a broad sea as calm and peaceful as a sylvan lake, and went into an ecstasy of delight, like any other Greaser over any other trifle, and shouted in his foreign tongue and waved his country’s banner, and named his great discovery “Pacific” - thus uttering a lie which will go on deceiving generation after generation of students while the old ocean lasts. If I had been there, with my experience, I would have said to this man Balboa, “Now, if you think you have made a sufficient display of yourself, cavorting around on this conspiciuous rock, you had better fold up your old rag and get back into the woods again, because you have jumped to a conclusion, and christened this sleeping boy-baby by a girl’s name, without stopping to inquire into the sex of it. In a word, the Pacific is “rough,” for seven or eight months in the year - not stormy, understand me - not what one could justly call stormy, but contrary, baffling and very “rough”. Therefore, if that Balboa-constrictor had constructed a name for it that had “Wild,” or “Untamed,” to it, there would have been a majority of two months in the year in favor and in support of it.”

You see how he is when he gets going. While I was sitting there, my friend Ed called me on my cell phone; and you should have seen how Sam reacted. He thought at first that I had lost my mind right there on the spot and was talking into my hand. I tried to explain cell phones and how some people are completely lost if they go out of the house without their cell phone, and then I realized that I don’t understand cell phones at all, so I gave up on the explanation and just relaxed into a conversation about other things.