Robert M. Katzman’s Amazing Story: www.differentslants.com/?p=355
© June 26, 2014
I can hear it far away
Weaving in and out
Sirens
Firetruck?
Better get outa the way
Wasn’t I painting something?
Mrs. Phillips, your boy has talent
You can tell that at seven?
 Usually, this space is reserved for poetry and short stories.
However, since 99.9% of the planet is unaware of my incredibly diverse vintage back-issue magazine store just north of Chicago in colorful Skokie, Illinois, I decided to intermingle my separate worlds. Â All five of my books are always available for purchase and signing, in case you want to meet the eccentric who wrote the following:
Mad Magazine. To those of you old enough to remember it when it was funny–a looooog time ago–I am selling out hundreds of them from the 1980’s to recent for $10 or 3 for $25. I also have a limited number of paperbacks which are collectible, from the 1950’s to the ’70’s, mostly one-of-a-kind. Nice gift for geezers. I also have a separate section where the more collectible issue of Mad, Crack and Sick are organized by artist. Nice when framed to decorate an office if you were fans of the styles of Jack Davis, Mort Drucker, Dave Berg, Al Jaffee, Don Martin and other notables from Mad’s early years. www.theoldmagazinestore.com where the unexpected gift can make someone smile for a long time (847) 677-9444
New store departments: Butterflies & Insects; Kurds, Eastern Europe & Russia; Michael Jordan; Dinosaur & Neanderthals; Scandinavia; British & USA Jazz mags; Dr Who (but only a few). Come visit a rare experience. Buy a present that shows someone you love, that you really thought about it first. Open Mon-Sat NYC, LA, Miami, Philly etc-Bet you wish you had an Old Magazine Store, too, like Skokie does. (847) 677-9444 The way stores used to be. Please like this page so that others will know about us, too. Thanks.
Imagine a homeless poster, gathering dust, cold, hungry, friendless, sleeping in the shadows. Time passing it by, its image gradually unrecognizable by succeeding generations.
Mom, Dad– who was Clark Gable? Â Who was Marilyn Monroe? Â Yoda? Â Elvis??
Why are there still posters existing with their pictures on them? Â Were they famous??
You can stop this travesty. Adopt a poster. Now. Today. Five dollars.
Make public radio wait. Skip a latte. Give a poster a home.
50,000 posters of every imaginable type formerly priced at $40 to $200 are now $5 and $10 each at the frequently incomprehensible Old Magazine Store.com in serene Downtown Skokie. Too serene.
Every poster must go. Pronto. Organization is totally random, so first come, first served. Expect chaos. Fun! Make a lonely poster smile.
Movie–Fantasy–Charts–Educational–Rock ‘n Roll–Crime–Military–Pinup (male & female)–Animation & Disney–Star Wars–Star Trek–Horror–Historic–Aviation–Trains–Cars–Jazz–Black History–Israeli Posters–Maps–Western–Farm Equipment–Film Noir–Chicago History & World’s Fairs (1893-1933)–Rockwell–Fashion–Motorcycle–
Cigarette–Asia–Beer–Native American–Famous Newspaper Headlines–Cops–Classical Music–Coca-Cola & Pepsi–French Ads–19th Century Industrial–Fireman–Hunting & Fishing–old sports– 1920’s-30’s mini posters of the Golden Age of Hollywood…
Cover your walls. Home Theater. Restaurant. College town stores e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e will all have the same boring posters. Give your kid something stimulating for their walls. Stock up for Christmas gifts now!! (847) 677-9444 Ask for Bob (a kindly person) Appt. possible.
Open every day, mostly.Saturday: 10–2 Daily: 10–5 (unless I’m seeking the meaning of life, and close at 4:30). Â Please like this page.
© March 16, 2014
Forward to Precision
In July 2016, I wrote
“David’s Star” www.differentslants.com/?p=3102
to express the never-ending insecurity of being ethnically indistinguishable and, at times the brutal consequences of strangers sometimes guessing wrong, and sometimes guessing right. A small room in Hell, and just my size. I stay there part time.
A brilliant Rabbi, who knew I was a writer, at a now closed synagogue in Northern Illinois asked me to help him out when he was trying to advise depressed Russian Jewish immigrants who couldn’t comprehend the meaning of the word “depression” in English.
This was in 2002, before I had published any books or anything online, either. After a few weeks, the end result was:
“Depression, Despair and The Human Voice” www.differentslants.com/?p=72.
That Rabbi later told me what I wrote was perfect for his needs.
Later, I published it on my DifferentSlants.com website and it became my most read story for years. In it, I explicitly explained what it was like to live with depression from the inside out, before I was diagnosed with it and prescribed the correct medication.
In 2004, after learning that I had three, then four brain tumors, I had brain surgery in Chicago, once in January and again in April. In April while recovering, I unexpectedly was able to read my chart when my surgeon accidentally left my file on my bed. It said: Fantastic recovery! With an exclamation point. It made me wonder what he was expecting.
After my recovery, that same hospital hired me to read some of my stories to a room filled with brain surgery survivors. It was then that I saw what my life could have been like, instead of how it actually turned out. No one in that room looked at me for the hour I was there reading. They didn’t seem to notice me at all. They just kept looking around the room or doing nothing. I understood then how incredibly fortunate I was.
I wanted to write something about the experience or another situation involving an out of control brain . This time I did a lot of research to find a way to express the grim reality some people live with every day, all day, when their physical bodies are prisoners of their damaged brains. And no, this is not autobiographical. There’s enough wrong with me as it is.
The resulting title of the poem I wrote about a person having OCD, or obsessive compulsive disorder is “Precision”. It is intended to transmit the honest reality of rigidly living a life strictly within the lines.
All his lines are parallel
Boots side by side
Left on the left
Right on the right
There is a second pair
Waiting
For more serious weather
Drifts of snow
That may never come
But he is ready
Which is important
Robert M. Katzman’s Amazing Story: http://www.differentslants.com/?p=355
© June 26, 2012
This is a curious story about control, written at a time in America when few of us have control over anything. But also defiance, self-determination, art, science, isolation and confrontation. When I was nine years old.
It is also about killing wasps. The kind of wasps with six legs, not that other kind. Why would anyone think that?
The time of this story is summer, 1959. The place, southern Wisconsin.
I was nine years old. I was not afraid of flying stinging wasps. And that made all the difference.
When I was nine, my parents packed me off to an overnight camp for the first time ever. For two months. Maybe they thought I’d wander off in the woods and get eaten by something bigger than me. Most things were bigger than me. But I don’t think any experienced bear would find my skinny little body worth the trouble.
I was sick all the time from whatever weeds grew in the rural part of southern Wisconsin. There were no drugs in 1959. I want to think enduring the ragweed misery helped build my character, but there’s no evidence of that.
I didn’t want to be at that large camp with its mob of screaming children racing around and its tall athletic counselors who told us what to do, every-single-minute-of-the-day. Like my grammar school but worse. Around the clock supervision.
Two months to a nine-year-old was an eternity and just like that famous book about lethal children by William Golding, Lord of the Flies, published five years earlier, some situations bring out unexpected aspects of children’s personalities, like savagery or other characteristics. He was right.
© May 20, 2012
In 1984, late Fall in Evanston, Illinois I was trying to figure out Chanukah.
What could I do about Chanukah?
My nearly twenty-year-old Chicago international magazine store, Bob’s Newsstand, was ten months from closing. I had no income and no way to buy presents to celebrate the two thousand year old, eight-day Jewish holiday, the “Festival of Lights” for my three children. Lisa was nine, David was six and Rachel was four.
I was thirty-four and less than a year from my mid-life crisis and two years of unemployment. No one wanted to hire the formerly self-employed guy. They say we never stay.
What could I do that would charm them?
Sitting in my garage which used to be a barn one hundred years earlier, when the historic house was built in 1882, and which was then converted into two apartments, or coach houses as Evanston called them, now empty and perched above me, I sat among my numerous woodworking tools in the dim light of dusk.