As news of a faith based corrections facility opening in Florida elbows out news of the first American Mad Cow, I find myself at work in a cheery Christmas fog. This year for sure, I thought all sentiment would be scoured from the holidays. No particular reason for it. Just fatigue, maybe. We got a house finally this year, Allegra is talking to Sara again, Cheney and Bob and Jeanne all came out from CA for a visit, and the squirrel feeder on the frozen deck is keeping a small legion of beady eyed rodents happy through the December before the election. So there is a plenty to be grateful for. But I seem to be running out of the bottomless optimism that has sustained me through the last decade, when there were few and far between objects of my gratitude.
I am even intrigued by the idea of Jesus again after so many years. I mean, if you put aside the rabble rousers who inspire fear and hatred in his name, he didn't have such a bad message. As somebody said, early christianity was the only game in town if you didn't own property and didn't come from a good family. It was the only organized religion that reached out to the runaway slaves, felons, exiles, homeless, etc of the time. Wealthy and healthy Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist, etc families might have made some charitable gestures toward the outcasts of humanity, but they didn't stand on street corners trying to get them to join their church.
Yesterday when Sara donated something to the bell ringer outside the grocery store, he said "This will help rehabilitate drug addicts and prostitutes". Her thought was to jokingly say "That's good because somebody has to help those scum" but she thought better, and smiled, and wished him and you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I say that advisedly, because if you want to wish me something closer to your faith and custom, I will receive it in good spirits, without resentment for its parochial tone, trusting in your good intentions and humanity. Namaste, too.
24.12.03
18.12.03
Modern heroes.
Cheryl Stearns is going to jump out of an open gondola 130,000 feet up in 2005. It will break the world record set in 1960 (!)...and prepare for emergency rescues of astronauts who could jump from space back to the planet surface without a vehicle....
The future of laptop government
Dean's "campaign on a laptop" as interpreted in this recent Washington Post article presages some major changes in ALL organizations, according to the writer. It might have enormous consequences for regional governments, too.
In a nutshell, Everett Erhlich claims that the Dean campaign does not even resemble the other presidential candidates' campaigns. It is run in a small, flattened information engine that completely eliminates the bloated campaign bureaucracies of the past, still used by his competitors.
Erhlich refers to the work of an economist named Ronald Coase, who wrote in 1937 that the cost of gathering information determined the size of the organization. This explained the size of a company like IBM, for example. It had to develop a mountainous management structure to organize and support the vast amounts of information processed through the operational structure.
(I am not entirely sold on this truism. Ford Motor Company, for instance, had enormous plants that did not grow from the demand for information, but for the demand for hard stuff...cars and the machines that could make them. The ratio between production size and production information volume, in this case, is radically different from the ratio maintained by IBM. For the sake of arguement, however, lets assume Coase is right.)
Dean's campaign, run on the internet and in the databases and email files of a net-savvy team, supposedly represents a new creature on the political landscape, a self-defined movement that can court the Democratic nomination but will exist with or without it. But the most important thing here, is the small, mobile nature of the information hub: essentially a laptop computer with, say, 40 gigs hard drive and some off the shelf management software.
Gone are the index card files, filing cabinets, and their entailed offices and warehouse spaces rented or even owned by the local party. Gone are the legions of clerical volunteers, the boiler room phone factories churning out personal phone contacts ward to ward, precinct to precinct. Gone are the fund raisers which must finance this huge middle layer of contacts, messages, agreements, contracts, analysis, positions, etc in labyrinthine paper stores. Gone are the people, real estate, phones, cars, expense accounts, dinners and lunches and gifts.
In their place, a laptop, an inch thick and weighing 4 lbs, available at a moments notice, capable of sharing, publishing, broadcasting or pointcasting information 24 hours a day. All documents, records, reports, positions immediately at hand. Ready to trigger smart mobs or dumb mobs into instant action. Capable of stealth or open provocations, responses, counter punches.
4 lbs of political nuclear fission. Available to anyone with a credit card.
It could well be the end of huge monolithic parties. I mean, it has been a long time since a New Hampshire Democrat really had much in common with a Manhatten Democrat or a Minnesota DFL'r....except for their shared opposition to the Right.
With the rise of laptop politics, the boundaries of political hegemonies will be like the boundaries of flocks of birds, shifting, porous, changing even as they are measured, but still indicating some kind of mass in flight, in contrast to the other life forms around them.
In a nutshell, Everett Erhlich claims that the Dean campaign does not even resemble the other presidential candidates' campaigns. It is run in a small, flattened information engine that completely eliminates the bloated campaign bureaucracies of the past, still used by his competitors.
Erhlich refers to the work of an economist named Ronald Coase, who wrote in 1937 that the cost of gathering information determined the size of the organization. This explained the size of a company like IBM, for example. It had to develop a mountainous management structure to organize and support the vast amounts of information processed through the operational structure.
(I am not entirely sold on this truism. Ford Motor Company, for instance, had enormous plants that did not grow from the demand for information, but for the demand for hard stuff...cars and the machines that could make them. The ratio between production size and production information volume, in this case, is radically different from the ratio maintained by IBM. For the sake of arguement, however, lets assume Coase is right.)
Dean's campaign, run on the internet and in the databases and email files of a net-savvy team, supposedly represents a new creature on the political landscape, a self-defined movement that can court the Democratic nomination but will exist with or without it. But the most important thing here, is the small, mobile nature of the information hub: essentially a laptop computer with, say, 40 gigs hard drive and some off the shelf management software.
Gone are the index card files, filing cabinets, and their entailed offices and warehouse spaces rented or even owned by the local party. Gone are the legions of clerical volunteers, the boiler room phone factories churning out personal phone contacts ward to ward, precinct to precinct. Gone are the fund raisers which must finance this huge middle layer of contacts, messages, agreements, contracts, analysis, positions, etc in labyrinthine paper stores. Gone are the people, real estate, phones, cars, expense accounts, dinners and lunches and gifts.
In their place, a laptop, an inch thick and weighing 4 lbs, available at a moments notice, capable of sharing, publishing, broadcasting or pointcasting information 24 hours a day. All documents, records, reports, positions immediately at hand. Ready to trigger smart mobs or dumb mobs into instant action. Capable of stealth or open provocations, responses, counter punches.
4 lbs of political nuclear fission. Available to anyone with a credit card.
It could well be the end of huge monolithic parties. I mean, it has been a long time since a New Hampshire Democrat really had much in common with a Manhatten Democrat or a Minnesota DFL'r....except for their shared opposition to the Right.
With the rise of laptop politics, the boundaries of political hegemonies will be like the boundaries of flocks of birds, shifting, porous, changing even as they are measured, but still indicating some kind of mass in flight, in contrast to the other life forms around them.
17.12.03
Looking down the barrel of the holiday
Everyone is under amazing pressure these days. Everyone. Even the chronic losers cannot take refuge in their escapist ways these days. The winners see the brass ring shaved down to a sliver, and hundreds more hands reaching, while the redemption value of brass is dwindling to nothing. The losers find their ruts of self-pity being foreclosed by the smiling images of drug addled patients loosed upon the land. No more depression, they tell us, no more anxiety. If you feel anything, feel great, feel American, feel first and think later.
I have a few presents squirrled away. I try to enjoy the view from the new house. I try to avoid thinking about the job that is being done on my 15 year old son in public school, and the jobs that are being lost in my workplace. I try to avoid thinking about the fantasy of cheer that is held out to us through a thousand glimpses into other people's dreams. Where are any of these dreams realized?
Whose dreams come true anymore? And why do we take it for granted that dreams coming true are better than realities lived on their own terms?
The holidays divorce the images of happiness from the routine of daily living. They create a kind of joy ghetto where you need a special pass to visit, and you can't take anything you find there back home with you.
Less pressure. It is as though we are all on a submarine that is sinking deeper and deeper into the inky cold water...as though it is just a matter of time before the hull caves in.
I have gone to many schools of pressure adaptation. The school that tells you to hold your breath, the school that tells you to thrash and grab, the school that tells you to stare straight ahead and wait until the pain abates of its own, the school that teaches the arts of displacement; how to push your pressure off into the skins of those weaker and more gullible than you.
What I have, finally, is just love. And the knowledge that love is not enough. It can't really slay dragons, or drain the floods or calm the angry storm skies. If anything, love keeps you more vulnerable. Everyone you love is a hostage held by the future. You must pay a ransom. And that ransom is your dreams.
In order to really love in this world, you cannot live in or for dreams. You must live in the dustballs and freshness-expired ordinariness of this world. Love or dreams, what a choice.
I have chosen though. I left small, unmarked dreams in a paper bag at the bus station. My love came out of the back of the waiting room, disheveled and blurry, but real. I would do it again.
That isn't what sells sugar water or huge vehicles. But it gets me through to tomorrow, and soon the holidays will be over, and we can wear our ordinariness without apology again.
I have a few presents squirrled away. I try to enjoy the view from the new house. I try to avoid thinking about the job that is being done on my 15 year old son in public school, and the jobs that are being lost in my workplace. I try to avoid thinking about the fantasy of cheer that is held out to us through a thousand glimpses into other people's dreams. Where are any of these dreams realized?
Whose dreams come true anymore? And why do we take it for granted that dreams coming true are better than realities lived on their own terms?
The holidays divorce the images of happiness from the routine of daily living. They create a kind of joy ghetto where you need a special pass to visit, and you can't take anything you find there back home with you.
Less pressure. It is as though we are all on a submarine that is sinking deeper and deeper into the inky cold water...as though it is just a matter of time before the hull caves in.
I have gone to many schools of pressure adaptation. The school that tells you to hold your breath, the school that tells you to thrash and grab, the school that tells you to stare straight ahead and wait until the pain abates of its own, the school that teaches the arts of displacement; how to push your pressure off into the skins of those weaker and more gullible than you.
What I have, finally, is just love. And the knowledge that love is not enough. It can't really slay dragons, or drain the floods or calm the angry storm skies. If anything, love keeps you more vulnerable. Everyone you love is a hostage held by the future. You must pay a ransom. And that ransom is your dreams.
In order to really love in this world, you cannot live in or for dreams. You must live in the dustballs and freshness-expired ordinariness of this world. Love or dreams, what a choice.
I have chosen though. I left small, unmarked dreams in a paper bag at the bus station. My love came out of the back of the waiting room, disheveled and blurry, but real. I would do it again.
That isn't what sells sugar water or huge vehicles. But it gets me through to tomorrow, and soon the holidays will be over, and we can wear our ordinariness without apology again.
12.12.03
The tragedy of the commons in new clothes
Call me Cassandra.
I am not optimistic today about the role of technology in politics.
My pal Howard says the commons is the source of wealth and innovation, and the new commons is the internet. The commons, in this case, being a reference to the halcyon days of New England, when the sheep roamed the town square, and livestock fed off the common ground without fences.
When the internet bloomed it was considered a vast, shared turf. Generosity was the attitude of choice. There was more than enough for everyone. It seemed.
That changed with the dotcom fiasco, in which "insiders" foreclosed on castles in the air for millions of investors.
Then came feral spam, and the escalation of viruses bred in the suburban bedrooms and dorms around the world. The clarion call of technical empowerment was a trumpeted with increasing bad breath.
On one level, the "commons" is becoming narrower, in terms of shared access to a common resource.
The real resource of the internet is the ability to connect in order to exchange. The illusory resource is the ability to see and be shown.
As the commons narrows down to the active, empowered few, however, the passive majority become a new commons: a new common resource of money, opinion, loyalty, interest, etc: the resources that politics is built from. The grass of the commons becomes the sheep that fed on it, and the sheep become the new commons. (Excuse the image, but Mighty Morphin Metaphors sold it as is, and has a no exchange policy.)
As the technical commons shrinks and becomes established turf among a minority defined by strength, the political commons becomes available through the new technology. We will see it shift away from the progressive agenda of 200 years of American history. And it will happen in radical, non-linear usurpations. Smart mobs. What moral tone? What values?
There is a fire sale in the history department. Kids are rummaging through the shopworn ideas, looking for new combinations that can energize them. It can't be long before they find the writings of the right wing thinkers from the early 20th century. Before they became radioactive comic villans.
They were the philosophers of minorities defined by strength. They called it fascism. It's seed are strewn in the turf.
If you want to read the history of our immediate future, read about the demise of Weimar, the rise of Primo de Rivera in Spain, Mussolini in Italy. Forget Stalin and Hitler, look to the farm teams where the ambivalent but authentic dilemmas of millions of "nobodies" got transformed into the annealed weapons-grade societies of the Axis.
History won't repeat itself. It spoke once, and if we weren't listening, that's too bad. But it starts the new movement, and the motifs are so familiar, so achingly familiar.
I am not optimistic today about the role of technology in politics.
My pal Howard says the commons is the source of wealth and innovation, and the new commons is the internet. The commons, in this case, being a reference to the halcyon days of New England, when the sheep roamed the town square, and livestock fed off the common ground without fences.
When the internet bloomed it was considered a vast, shared turf. Generosity was the attitude of choice. There was more than enough for everyone. It seemed.
That changed with the dotcom fiasco, in which "insiders" foreclosed on castles in the air for millions of investors.
Then came feral spam, and the escalation of viruses bred in the suburban bedrooms and dorms around the world. The clarion call of technical empowerment was a trumpeted with increasing bad breath.
On one level, the "commons" is becoming narrower, in terms of shared access to a common resource.
The real resource of the internet is the ability to connect in order to exchange. The illusory resource is the ability to see and be shown.
As the commons narrows down to the active, empowered few, however, the passive majority become a new commons: a new common resource of money, opinion, loyalty, interest, etc: the resources that politics is built from. The grass of the commons becomes the sheep that fed on it, and the sheep become the new commons. (Excuse the image, but Mighty Morphin Metaphors sold it as is, and has a no exchange policy.)
As the technical commons shrinks and becomes established turf among a minority defined by strength, the political commons becomes available through the new technology. We will see it shift away from the progressive agenda of 200 years of American history. And it will happen in radical, non-linear usurpations. Smart mobs. What moral tone? What values?
There is a fire sale in the history department. Kids are rummaging through the shopworn ideas, looking for new combinations that can energize them. It can't be long before they find the writings of the right wing thinkers from the early 20th century. Before they became radioactive comic villans.
They were the philosophers of minorities defined by strength. They called it fascism. It's seed are strewn in the turf.
If you want to read the history of our immediate future, read about the demise of Weimar, the rise of Primo de Rivera in Spain, Mussolini in Italy. Forget Stalin and Hitler, look to the farm teams where the ambivalent but authentic dilemmas of millions of "nobodies" got transformed into the annealed weapons-grade societies of the Axis.
History won't repeat itself. It spoke once, and if we weren't listening, that's too bad. But it starts the new movement, and the motifs are so familiar, so achingly familiar.
25.11.03
Rejection contains an ejection.
I got my submission back from Analog Science Fiction magazine. There was no comment anywhere, as they indict you to expect given the hundreds of manuscripts they get a week.
But there were TWO enclosures, one ambiguously providing extended writing guidelines for the magazine, which seemed to modulate the spartan rejection of the other form letter. Did "they" include writer's guidelines as a form of unsignatured encouragement?
Unsignatured contains a sign. It also contains a nature. It also contains a gnat....oh nevermind.
But there were TWO enclosures, one ambiguously providing extended writing guidelines for the magazine, which seemed to modulate the spartan rejection of the other form letter. Did "they" include writer's guidelines as a form of unsignatured encouragement?
Unsignatured contains a sign. It also contains a nature. It also contains a gnat....oh nevermind.
Resignation contains a sign.
I have almost completed the registration for Spring Semester at the U of M.
After an absence of 32 years. I considered that I was a sophomore all that time, and have the residue of sophomoric enthusiasms to prove it....
Now it is time to become a Junior.
My feeling is that I have resigned from the eternal nay saying of the drop out, and walked through a door into a blank scene. It will be painted in stroke by stroke as I reencounter the UofMolithic Bourgeoise assembly line. But it is a kinder, gentler assembly line, I trust.
My first experience with declaring a major and interviewing my College of Liberal Arts advisor on the phone convinces me to forgo the pleasures of an ironic commentary on these adventures. I must be serious.
Seriously.
A junior seriously, resigned at last to succeed.
After an absence of 32 years. I considered that I was a sophomore all that time, and have the residue of sophomoric enthusiasms to prove it....
Now it is time to become a Junior.
My feeling is that I have resigned from the eternal nay saying of the drop out, and walked through a door into a blank scene. It will be painted in stroke by stroke as I reencounter the UofMolithic Bourgeoise assembly line. But it is a kinder, gentler assembly line, I trust.
My first experience with declaring a major and interviewing my College of Liberal Arts advisor on the phone convinces me to forgo the pleasures of an ironic commentary on these adventures. I must be serious.
Seriously.
A junior seriously, resigned at last to succeed.
12.11.03
After the moon, after the brides gone, after time
After Veteran's Day, 2003
I sit beside the pool where the boys played.
They played at being men, defending
Women and Faith.
The pool is filled with the shadow of its memories,
Which resemble rotting straw and
Leaves. It is not odd in autumn to be umber,
Barren, grisly by association and dead in fact.
Nothing survives of the noise we made.
Nothing survives of the shatter we visited
upon the sky's reflection.
I sit beside the pool where the boys played.
Other boys' voices under the hill
Approach.
There are women, and faiths yet.
The faiths change.
Only the women were worth it in the end, and
Now they play too.
Now they rake up the dry memories for burning
When the green has been spent, and the
Names are frozen in thier long black ice.
The pool is lovely in the sudden twilight of autumn,
A steep light, each star and wren
Falls off it
Into the pool, without
Ripples.
I sit beside the pool where the boys played.
They played at being men, defending
Women and Faith.
The pool is filled with the shadow of its memories,
Which resemble rotting straw and
Leaves. It is not odd in autumn to be umber,
Barren, grisly by association and dead in fact.
Nothing survives of the noise we made.
Nothing survives of the shatter we visited
upon the sky's reflection.
I sit beside the pool where the boys played.
Other boys' voices under the hill
Approach.
There are women, and faiths yet.
The faiths change.
Only the women were worth it in the end, and
Now they play too.
Now they rake up the dry memories for burning
When the green has been spent, and the
Names are frozen in thier long black ice.
The pool is lovely in the sudden twilight of autumn,
A steep light, each star and wren
Falls off it
Into the pool, without
Ripples.
5.11.03
My birthday today.
I finished the draft of the story and sent it to Analog.
Today is my birthday.
My hair guy showed me a picture of HIS manx cat sitting up on her butt like a human...something Maggie does and I thought maybe all cats did...but it helps that they have no tail.
I am 56 years old.
I am 14 years old for the 4th time. Yeah, that's more like it.
Today is my birthday.
My hair guy showed me a picture of HIS manx cat sitting up on her butt like a human...something Maggie does and I thought maybe all cats did...but it helps that they have no tail.
I am 56 years old.
I am 14 years old for the 4th time. Yeah, that's more like it.
23.10.03
The joys and terrors of writing again
I just finished the second draft of a science fiction story. That's why I haven't posted here for a while. It is 29 pages long, and it has taken about three weeks to get to the end of the second draft. I hope to do the third draft within the next few days, since most of the time spent on the second draft involved tracking down technical details. Now I just need to clean up the major and minor arcs of the story and integrate the structure.
Part of me wants to spend another month or year playing in the sandbox of the story, since it is a great escape from other things in my life.
But I also want to sell it, and a practical approach requires writing this amount of verbiage at a nickle a word every three days.
If anyone actually is reading this and wants to see the story, write me at zeitguide@yahoo.com and I will send you a copy of the draft.
Part of me wants to spend another month or year playing in the sandbox of the story, since it is a great escape from other things in my life.
But I also want to sell it, and a practical approach requires writing this amount of verbiage at a nickle a word every three days.
If anyone actually is reading this and wants to see the story, write me at zeitguide@yahoo.com and I will send you a copy of the draft.
9.10.03
mother-in-law
My mother-in-law is one of the most precious women I have known. She is 80 years old, and as vivacious as a debutante. Nick described her last year as "impossibly cute." Never at a loss for words, she is amazingly attentive to everyone around her while still keeping a firm grasp on situations that need leadership, as most do. Only her daughter is even more attentive and formidable in marshalling the loose ends of situations and offering them back in an artistic knot of advice, direction, and initiative.
She is visiting us with her husband, who is my wife's step father. He is famous among mystery fans for a prodigous output of books, radio dramas, short stories, etc which include the book for Orson Well's movie "A Touch of Evil."
Since Bob is so modest and sweet as a man, it is easy to forget that he has international stature as an artist. How many people do you know like that?
Last night we had baked salmon and rice with vegies after drinks and appetizers on the deck. The temperature was in the 80''s which is very unusual for October. We had a champagne toast and appetizers including Minnesota wild rice and artichoke salad. The oak and elm trees were going into peak color in the yards. The female berry-bearing elms in the front yard were like glorious gilded paintings seen through the living room windows.
During the conversation we discovered that Sara and I might be more old fashioned in our sense of etiquette than Bob and Jeanne. Jeanne provided presents, which included a deep red chenille shaw for Sara, some cooking spices and a framed picture of Sara for me, and a clever art deco alarm clock for Sam.
Bob and Jeanne think Sam is a wonderful, cultivated and socially adept young man. Bob has said on a few occaisions that he thinks highly of me because of how well my sons have been raised. I have to share some of the glory with Lisa and Sara and Neal, of course, but it makes me feel proud to have them recognize Sam for his character.
Jeanne looked like Gina Lollabrigida in her youth. She and Bob would dress for dinner and go out on the town in San Diego. They are clever and knowlegeable people who can hold forth intelligently on local and global politics, science and other issues.
I wish they lived here.
She is visiting us with her husband, who is my wife's step father. He is famous among mystery fans for a prodigous output of books, radio dramas, short stories, etc which include the book for Orson Well's movie "A Touch of Evil."
Since Bob is so modest and sweet as a man, it is easy to forget that he has international stature as an artist. How many people do you know like that?
Last night we had baked salmon and rice with vegies after drinks and appetizers on the deck. The temperature was in the 80''s which is very unusual for October. We had a champagne toast and appetizers including Minnesota wild rice and artichoke salad. The oak and elm trees were going into peak color in the yards. The female berry-bearing elms in the front yard were like glorious gilded paintings seen through the living room windows.
During the conversation we discovered that Sara and I might be more old fashioned in our sense of etiquette than Bob and Jeanne. Jeanne provided presents, which included a deep red chenille shaw for Sara, some cooking spices and a framed picture of Sara for me, and a clever art deco alarm clock for Sam.
Bob and Jeanne think Sam is a wonderful, cultivated and socially adept young man. Bob has said on a few occaisions that he thinks highly of me because of how well my sons have been raised. I have to share some of the glory with Lisa and Sara and Neal, of course, but it makes me feel proud to have them recognize Sam for his character.
Jeanne looked like Gina Lollabrigida in her youth. She and Bob would dress for dinner and go out on the town in San Diego. They are clever and knowlegeable people who can hold forth intelligently on local and global politics, science and other issues.
I wish they lived here.
8.10.03
Fortean Times Breaking News
Fortean Times Breaking News is the one stop shop for all your weirdness needs. Don't leave home on a spacecraft without it!
3.10.03
The Fleet Type Submarine Online
The Fleet Type Submarine Online is a fascinating and way too detailed look at the submarine service in wwII. See below.
out sick and submarines
Took two days off work to cough and loll on the couch, interrogate the cat about suspected activities, look for weapons of meow destruction, etc. Coughed successfully, but interrogation and weapons search turned up nothing. Also managed to read Tim Power's book Declare, and finish a book on WWII submarine experience called "Warfish" by George W. Grider.
Grider's book was an odd testament. Morose, vain, intemperate and ambitious, he was also evidently a very good captain of a submarine. Serving third or fourth officer under "Mush" Morton, he never managed to gain any glory or recognition however. A quick search of Amazon shows no Grider books in print. Morton's XO (executive officer) Dick O'Kane was given his own command just before Morton took the whole crew of the Wahoo to its death in the Sea of Japan. O'Kane wrote two books about his commands, and there are two other books about the Wahoo out there. It was a famous ship, and became a controversial story after the war when it was learned that Morton ordered gunfire on the men clinging to a troopship he had torpedoed...the men turned out to the Indian prisoners of war of the Japanese. What would be scandalously worried as an episode of shocking friendly fire deaths in "our" war was treated with a quick shrug and indifference in the world of 1942. C'est la guerre.
Submarines are fascinating to me now. It started with an idea for a science fiction story I am working on, and now I have about six books on the era and the technology and men of wwII submariner warfare. Nuclear subs aren't as interesting...there is something too doomsdayish, too eschatalogical about the whole nuke thing. WWII left room for individual character, and as Grider says in his postscript, sub warfare in WWII was actually a last vestige of 19th century warfare carried over into the 20th, when the gallantry and cowardice of leaders was clearly visible to their peers and subordinates. Character couldn't and wouldn't be hidden under a flurry of jargon or technology in those days, and character was the defining attribute of individuals, not systems. Grider finished his book with some ruefulness for the world his own son faced.
Grider's book was an odd testament. Morose, vain, intemperate and ambitious, he was also evidently a very good captain of a submarine. Serving third or fourth officer under "Mush" Morton, he never managed to gain any glory or recognition however. A quick search of Amazon shows no Grider books in print. Morton's XO (executive officer) Dick O'Kane was given his own command just before Morton took the whole crew of the Wahoo to its death in the Sea of Japan. O'Kane wrote two books about his commands, and there are two other books about the Wahoo out there. It was a famous ship, and became a controversial story after the war when it was learned that Morton ordered gunfire on the men clinging to a troopship he had torpedoed...the men turned out to the Indian prisoners of war of the Japanese. What would be scandalously worried as an episode of shocking friendly fire deaths in "our" war was treated with a quick shrug and indifference in the world of 1942. C'est la guerre.
Submarines are fascinating to me now. It started with an idea for a science fiction story I am working on, and now I have about six books on the era and the technology and men of wwII submariner warfare. Nuclear subs aren't as interesting...there is something too doomsdayish, too eschatalogical about the whole nuke thing. WWII left room for individual character, and as Grider says in his postscript, sub warfare in WWII was actually a last vestige of 19th century warfare carried over into the 20th, when the gallantry and cowardice of leaders was clearly visible to their peers and subordinates. Character couldn't and wouldn't be hidden under a flurry of jargon or technology in those days, and character was the defining attribute of individuals, not systems. Grider finished his book with some ruefulness for the world his own son faced.
30.9.03
murder in the workplace
The testimony of a former prison guard who knew David Berkowitz, "Son of Sam" is an interesting commentary on American life, murder, satanism, and male bonding. I ended up at David's personal website because last night Sara asked if there was any more information on Susan Berkovitz, who shot two people here at work yesterday. I thought she asked "were there any Berkowitz type information on the case?" referring to the Son of Sam, and implying there was some Satanic connection. My mishearing her intriqued me with the similarity of names (homophones, to the technical.)
A person was murdered in this building yesterday.
I wasn't in the building, since I slept in to fight off a cold, and came in an hour or so after the fact. There were camera crews on the public service level of the building, but no uniformed guards or police. When I asked the woman in the information booth what the big news story was, she said there had been a shooting on A-17. It sounded like a bus route number to me, and I coudn't understand why the news media were in our building over a bus shooting. Then it became clear the shooting had occurred upstairs in the building, in fact, it had occurred on the floor where our own offices had been temporarily housed a few years ago. I had climbed the 17 flights of stairs twice a day before my rheumatism got out of control.
In the office we had a debriefing with the building security chief. He was articulate, educated, and had recently been through a thorough evaluation of our building security by Sandia National Labs. We also had recently passed a building policy prohibiting the posession of illegal guns in the building, which was an exercise in "taking a position" among members of the county board more than anything else.
Our staff talked about the logistics of getting emergency information around during a crisis of this type. It turned out the woman at the information desk became a kind of defacto communication center, relaying information between security, law enforcement, building and county administration, and the PA staff and media. It was an unusual outcome, to say the least.
The gunwoman was a woman in her fifties who felt that the person in charge of her father's estate and the person's lawyer had been physically intimidating her, preventing her from seeing her father in his last years, and misappropriating funds from the man's estate. No simple news story could do justice to the convoluted values, motives, issues of mental health and personal justice, aging, etc that were pinged by this event.
County staff on the floor of the shooting were sent home, others offered counselling. I was involved in trying to get updated info to the County web site, which was a circus of erros and territorial nonsense, as usual.
I went home to a nice warm dinner with Sara, and despite our both feeling a little under the weather I was suddenly struck with a great happiness after dinner in our new house. I was alive.
A person was murdered in this building yesterday.
I wasn't in the building, since I slept in to fight off a cold, and came in an hour or so after the fact. There were camera crews on the public service level of the building, but no uniformed guards or police. When I asked the woman in the information booth what the big news story was, she said there had been a shooting on A-17. It sounded like a bus route number to me, and I coudn't understand why the news media were in our building over a bus shooting. Then it became clear the shooting had occurred upstairs in the building, in fact, it had occurred on the floor where our own offices had been temporarily housed a few years ago. I had climbed the 17 flights of stairs twice a day before my rheumatism got out of control.
In the office we had a debriefing with the building security chief. He was articulate, educated, and had recently been through a thorough evaluation of our building security by Sandia National Labs. We also had recently passed a building policy prohibiting the posession of illegal guns in the building, which was an exercise in "taking a position" among members of the county board more than anything else.
Our staff talked about the logistics of getting emergency information around during a crisis of this type. It turned out the woman at the information desk became a kind of defacto communication center, relaying information between security, law enforcement, building and county administration, and the PA staff and media. It was an unusual outcome, to say the least.
The gunwoman was a woman in her fifties who felt that the person in charge of her father's estate and the person's lawyer had been physically intimidating her, preventing her from seeing her father in his last years, and misappropriating funds from the man's estate. No simple news story could do justice to the convoluted values, motives, issues of mental health and personal justice, aging, etc that were pinged by this event.
County staff on the floor of the shooting were sent home, others offered counselling. I was involved in trying to get updated info to the County web site, which was a circus of erros and territorial nonsense, as usual.
I went home to a nice warm dinner with Sara, and despite our both feeling a little under the weather I was suddenly struck with a great happiness after dinner in our new house. I was alive.
26.9.03
Moving in, moving on, sitting down.
We have been in the house 5 weeks now. Each week has had its drama, its humor, its aha! moment. The sofa and chair-and-a-half didn't come until this last Saturday. I wanted that set in particular because when Sara sits next to me in the chair, we fall into a natural embrace. It is a kind of three way hug, with the chair providing the geometry, directing the gravity, containing us and holding us the way no other furniture we looked at could. How odd, to buy furniture with an eye toward a kind of menage-a-trois. Actually, it is a menage a quatre with Maggie the cat dividing her time between our laps.
For the last few years, Sara and I have made an effort to get up at 5 or 5:30 to have time for coffee and quiet conversation before hitting the chaos of the day at work. Since the move it is an effort to get up much before 7, but Sara manages it and we get about 5 minutes at best to sit together.
The chair holds us together. Never thought of furniture in that way before. I never would have thought of the virtue of such a resource, but one of the side effects of getting the house and fixing it up is a blunt reminder that the sheer stress of the physical world can create difficult emotional side effects in a partnership. Overcoming those physical problems is a bonding experience, but little things help bridge the gap. Little things like a great overstuffed chair-and-a-half.
For the last few years, Sara and I have made an effort to get up at 5 or 5:30 to have time for coffee and quiet conversation before hitting the chaos of the day at work. Since the move it is an effort to get up much before 7, but Sara manages it and we get about 5 minutes at best to sit together.
The chair holds us together. Never thought of furniture in that way before. I never would have thought of the virtue of such a resource, but one of the side effects of getting the house and fixing it up is a blunt reminder that the sheer stress of the physical world can create difficult emotional side effects in a partnership. Overcoming those physical problems is a bonding experience, but little things help bridge the gap. Little things like a great overstuffed chair-and-a-half.
22.9.03
The Galileo Mission to Jupiter and Its Moons
Scientific American has a juicy story about the Galileo mission, especially if you have any taste for the sciency stuff.
The mission confirmed that there are watery oceans inside the ice case of Europa, but it also revealed volcanic Io has not severed its umbilical cord of ions linking it to Mother Jupiter, Ganymede has a magnetic field unique among solar system satellites, and signs that Callisto too has an ocean.
I cannot forget the sense of wonder that was born in me as a kid thinking about the planets and the far reaches of outer space. I have spent years ignoring the faint calls of the constellations and milky way, pushing the allure off as an unspent charge of an untempered youthfulness that plagues my adulthood sense of purpose. But I have also ducked back under the tent of myth and mystery with a telescope or binoculars now and then, and stared in pretend understanding at mysteries which so dwarf human powers that they make it, finally, possible to exist among the known torments of our race.
The mission confirmed that there are watery oceans inside the ice case of Europa, but it also revealed volcanic Io has not severed its umbilical cord of ions linking it to Mother Jupiter, Ganymede has a magnetic field unique among solar system satellites, and signs that Callisto too has an ocean.
I cannot forget the sense of wonder that was born in me as a kid thinking about the planets and the far reaches of outer space. I have spent years ignoring the faint calls of the constellations and milky way, pushing the allure off as an unspent charge of an untempered youthfulness that plagues my adulthood sense of purpose. But I have also ducked back under the tent of myth and mystery with a telescope or binoculars now and then, and stared in pretend understanding at mysteries which so dwarf human powers that they make it, finally, possible to exist among the known torments of our race.
The Thomas Townsend Brown Site
The Thomas Townsend Brown Site documents the work of an American physicist who was inspired by Einstein's research to find the relationship between gravity and electricity. This site is a good introduction to the man who measured electrogravitational effects in his lab in the 1920's, and has been ignored or discredited by the "establishment." A trove of ideas and jargon for the sci fi writer.
Vimana Aircraft of Ancient india & Atlantis
Vimana Aircraft of Ancient india & Atlantis Tells about a description of flying warcraft that unleashed the power of the sun and universe on their enemies...from Indian texts that date back more than 4000 years.
18.9.03
Putting info in context
CNET.com puts a context out there for you and me in this example. Instead of just putting one puzzle piece on the table, they try to keep the whole picture in perspective. This is an important trend for the internet, but it takes committment.
It is similar to blogs, because it tries to present important information in a network of consequence, but it is the opposite of blogs in that it is initiated and maintained by the organization for the good of its clients, not by individuals.
It is similar to blogs, because it tries to present important information in a network of consequence, but it is the opposite of blogs in that it is initiated and maintained by the organization for the good of its clients, not by individuals.
17.9.03
New Studies a Mixed Bag for Diet and Alzheimer's
New Studies a Mixed Bag for Diet and Alzheimer's
This whole alzheimer's thing is scaring the heck out of me. I am looking for stats on its rise in the general population over the last century or so.
This whole alzheimer's thing is scaring the heck out of me. I am looking for stats on its rise in the general population over the last century or so.
16.9.03
Cooper's Hawk
we have a Cooper's Hawk in our backyard. this morning I heard a strange, gargled cry and looked out the bedroom window. the hawk was sitting on the gate, with its wings hunched above its back, and its head turning from side to side as though it were looking for a mate or prey. The noise was very disturbing. Maggie leapt to the chair back by the window and stared at the hawk with baleful tension. I had thought the hawk a peregrine falcon the first days we had moved in, and it seemed like a good omen. But the Hawk preys on squirrels, chipmunks, and more importantly, other birds. That is why we haven't seen mourning doves or the cardinal recently. Most birds stay well away from an area where the cooper hawk nests.
Ironically? I was editor of the Cooper High School Hawk's Quill in 1964.
Seeing the bird made me think of high school, and the predatory environment it represents.
The latin name is accipiter cooperii. Accipiter means, roughly, bird eater.
Ironically? I was editor of the Cooper High School Hawk's Quill in 1964.
Seeing the bird made me think of high school, and the predatory environment it represents.
The latin name is accipiter cooperii. Accipiter means, roughly, bird eater.
12.9.03
Zeitguy on Slate magazine, part I
One of my first SLATE posts gives you some feel for the furor I caused with my hyper style of writing. Click on "more by this user" at the top of the post to see more of my early writings for Moira Redmond, then the Fray editor who encouraged me to such garbled glory. Click on the posts underneath to sample the responses I generated.
Over time I will give us a tour of more SLATE foolishness.
Over time I will give us a tour of more SLATE foolishness.
UFOs
UFOs is a page with good basic links and a fascinating list of linked names at the bottom of the page. If you like conspiracies, here is a good place to start. I have never seen a UFO and my main interest in them is as metaphors, or analogies, for the sense of strangeness which pervades our culture.
Johnny Cash and his Voice
What a voice. It sounded like a 200-year-old barn hand-made of burr oak falling to the earth in slow motion, never touching bottom, light shining through all the warped planks.
11.9.03
September 11, 2001
A poem for what falls
The beast slouched,
and crouched and shat.
The believers carved their faith
into an enamelled sky
with 10000 blades,
razors in the throats and eyes
of an astonished people.
In the hearts of the uncertain,
uncertainty becomes a siren wail,
unbearable, and they ask to be lashed
to the mast of revenge.
Men and women
bet their own lives
on the odds that strangers
struggling in the instant ruin,
clenched by steel fingers, breathless, dead
in the long day of gravity and fire,
were not breathless or dead.
They define goodness
in the dim white
of their own bone dust
and the fading black
of their own blood, dust
in the powdered ground.
They define goodness
in their own
reassuring smiles
guiding the accidently damned
toward the safety
they would not allow themselves.
Tell their stories,
and remember their names.
In the sprawling tons
of failing steel and cement,
mere flesh was pinched of its life
and its wetness...
death dry before it hit the ground
for those inside.
Death silent and diving down
in a rag doll trance,
down like a flung cat
down like a baby slipped
from its mom's grasp
at the door of heaven,
slipped from the hot metal breast
of the astonished building.
Men and women prop up
the melting heart
with shards of rage.
But the heart melts,
and seeps into the ground,
where its red becomes
the black dust of tomorrow,
and then the wind.
The wind sweeps
the smell of terror
out to sea.
The brooms of the wind
sweep and sweep the stones clean again.
Carve the names
of the reckless saviors
into the stones.
Return the shards
out across the waters.
Fill the blue sky
with blackness
and fill the graves
of the good innocent
with the ashes.
Without songs,
and the names of the brave,
we are the dust
the wind will sweep.
We are the dust of our own forgetting.
Sing them praise,
and remember their names,
the reckless saviors
of the day of gravity and fire.
The beast slouched,
and crouched and shat.
The believers carved their faith
into an enamelled sky
with 10000 blades,
razors in the throats and eyes
of an astonished people.
In the hearts of the uncertain,
uncertainty becomes a siren wail,
unbearable, and they ask to be lashed
to the mast of revenge.
Men and women
bet their own lives
on the odds that strangers
struggling in the instant ruin,
clenched by steel fingers, breathless, dead
in the long day of gravity and fire,
were not breathless or dead.
They define goodness
in the dim white
of their own bone dust
and the fading black
of their own blood, dust
in the powdered ground.
They define goodness
in their own
reassuring smiles
guiding the accidently damned
toward the safety
they would not allow themselves.
Tell their stories,
and remember their names.
In the sprawling tons
of failing steel and cement,
mere flesh was pinched of its life
and its wetness...
death dry before it hit the ground
for those inside.
Death silent and diving down
in a rag doll trance,
down like a flung cat
down like a baby slipped
from its mom's grasp
at the door of heaven,
slipped from the hot metal breast
of the astonished building.
Men and women prop up
the melting heart
with shards of rage.
But the heart melts,
and seeps into the ground,
where its red becomes
the black dust of tomorrow,
and then the wind.
The wind sweeps
the smell of terror
out to sea.
The brooms of the wind
sweep and sweep the stones clean again.
Carve the names
of the reckless saviors
into the stones.
Return the shards
out across the waters.
Fill the blue sky
with blackness
and fill the graves
of the good innocent
with the ashes.
Without songs,
and the names of the brave,
we are the dust
the wind will sweep.
We are the dust of our own forgetting.
Sing them praise,
and remember their names,
the reckless saviors
of the day of gravity and fire.
What do they harvest down on the Body Farm?
The Body Farm is the last word in secular uses of the human body. The University of Tennessee keeps a farm where human body parts are left to decompose in different soils and water. Tracking the process, and the interaction with vermin, etc, gives investigators a way to decode the condition of bodies found outside.
Since the stone age, dead humans have been treated with superstitious or spiritual respect. In Madagascar the bones of one's ancestors are dug up and given a party, so the ancestors don't forget about the living.
Are we the first society to scatter the bodies of dead people around the back yard just to see how they rot.
Since the stone age, dead humans have been treated with superstitious or spiritual respect. In Madagascar the bones of one's ancestors are dug up and given a party, so the ancestors don't forget about the living.
Are we the first society to scatter the bodies of dead people around the back yard just to see how they rot.
Monkey ( Chinese Epic Heroes)
Monkey makes a monkey out of himself before Buddha steps in and gives him a hand.
This is a powerful story, and is one of the most popular pieces of literature in the entire world given China's population.
What is the secret of this story? It is a sophisticated portrayal of an outsider who gains insider status, abuses it, and is punished, then recast as a hero of an entirely different kind once he has been initiated into subtle values.
This is a powerful story, and is one of the most popular pieces of literature in the entire world given China's population.
What is the secret of this story? It is a sophisticated portrayal of an outsider who gains insider status, abuses it, and is punished, then recast as a hero of an entirely different kind once he has been initiated into subtle values.
10.9.03
Tom's Place :: Fun with philosophy
Tom's Place :: Fun with philosophy should be checked for feasibility.
Nosebleeds and me
I sat with my back to the cubical opening, hunched over a wastebasket, for several minutes yesterday while my nose dripped brilliant red magnolias of blood onto a paper towel in the office wastebasket. I had tried pressing the nose shut to no avail. Thoughts of brain tumors, ebola virus, pranks I could play, etc scampered through the attic of my reveries while i watched the truly beautiful red life fluid drip onto the white paper. It seemed to go on forever, but only lasted about 4 minutes.
Nosebleeds are not a common thing with me. I could only vaguely remember that I had one before, but couldn't remember when or where.
Earlier in the day, I had dropped Sam off at his bus stop. The other kids milled around, and at first he wanted me to drop him off half a block from the stop. I said "You don't want your friends to see me and this minivan, eh?" and he sighed and indicated I should move up to the actual stop. He turned to speak out the window to a pal just as I sensed something damp on my nose. Touching it, my hand came away covered in blood. As the young highschool students watched with the innocent horror of reebok antelopes watching one of their own be devoured by a lioness, I wiped tissue after tissue full of blood from the gore faucet of my nose.
After the office episode, while I imagined variations on sympathy and disgust playing over my coworkers faces, and imagined asking for the guards to administer some kind of first aid, I finally called the doctor.
I used my lunch break to duck in and confirm it was nothing serious. My doctor forced himself to give the standard warning: " I know this isn't too dignified, but it's really important to keep your fingers out of your nose."
A teaspoon of mortality painted in the wastebin does wonders to make you appreciate the good things in your life.
Nosebleeds are not a common thing with me. I could only vaguely remember that I had one before, but couldn't remember when or where.
Earlier in the day, I had dropped Sam off at his bus stop. The other kids milled around, and at first he wanted me to drop him off half a block from the stop. I said "You don't want your friends to see me and this minivan, eh?" and he sighed and indicated I should move up to the actual stop. He turned to speak out the window to a pal just as I sensed something damp on my nose. Touching it, my hand came away covered in blood. As the young highschool students watched with the innocent horror of reebok antelopes watching one of their own be devoured by a lioness, I wiped tissue after tissue full of blood from the gore faucet of my nose.
After the office episode, while I imagined variations on sympathy and disgust playing over my coworkers faces, and imagined asking for the guards to administer some kind of first aid, I finally called the doctor.
I used my lunch break to duck in and confirm it was nothing serious. My doctor forced himself to give the standard warning: " I know this isn't too dignified, but it's really important to keep your fingers out of your nose."
A teaspoon of mortality painted in the wastebin does wonders to make you appreciate the good things in your life.
The Music of the Spheres in the key of B flat
The music of the spheres acquires a new meaning, a new magnitude today with the release of this discovery.
Ancient Vedic (Indian religious text) lore describes the universe as being made of sound. In the early 20th century, Hazrat Inayat Khan, an Indian mystic and philosopher, came to the west to teach. He married an American woman, and published many books. His legacy lives on in many forms, including a profound influence on musicians and philosophers who became interested in his teachings about music.
"when one transcends Christianity, Judaism or Islam, there one finds Music" -Hazrat Inayat Khan
The music of the spheres acquires a new meaning, a new magnitude today with the release of this discovery.
Ancient Vedic (Indian religious text) lore describes the universe as being made of sound. In the early 20th century, Hazrat Inayat Khan, an Indian mystic and philosopher, came to the west to teach. He married an American woman, and published many books. His legacy lives on in many forms, including a profound influence on musicians and philosophers who became interested in his teachings about music.
"when one transcends Christianity, Judaism or Islam, there one finds Music" -Hazrat Inayat Khan
9.9.03
Bush is getting $87 billion for Iraq for one year.
U.S. Department of Education Budget Office reports that $63 billion are being spent by the Federal Government for all American children in all the schools in all the school districts in America.
There are 53 million students, 15,000 school districts, 92,000 public schools in the U.S.
Bush is sending an amount that could provide every single student in the US with $1641.50 in additional educational funding. That buys a lot of books, a lot of instruction. It reduces class sizes dramatically, ensures social support services and nutritional supplement in poor districts, repairs a lot of failing infrastructure, upgrades transportation, pays for curriculum development and counseling, restores music, art and sports in extracurricular programs.
My son went to a local elementary school with 850 kids in it. The amount sent to Iraq would provide about $1,400,000 to that school and every other school of its size in America.
92,000 public schools.
53 million students.
One president, one Halliburton, one debacle.
U.S. Department of Education Budget Office reports that $63 billion are being spent by the Federal Government for all American children in all the schools in all the school districts in America.
There are 53 million students, 15,000 school districts, 92,000 public schools in the U.S.
Bush is sending an amount that could provide every single student in the US with $1641.50 in additional educational funding. That buys a lot of books, a lot of instruction. It reduces class sizes dramatically, ensures social support services and nutritional supplement in poor districts, repairs a lot of failing infrastructure, upgrades transportation, pays for curriculum development and counseling, restores music, art and sports in extracurricular programs.
My son went to a local elementary school with 850 kids in it. The amount sent to Iraq would provide about $1,400,000 to that school and every other school of its size in America.
92,000 public schools.
53 million students.
One president, one Halliburton, one debacle.
8.9.03
A story for Karen from Brainstorms
When I moved out of the family home my sophomore year at the U of M, I moved into a room in a converted whorehouse on the west bank of the Mississippi in Minneapolis. It was owned and run as a rooming house by a colorful local cab driver named Red Nelson.
One day my roomate Irving and I were lounging around and this guy opens the door with a key and lets himself in. He looks startled to see us, then looks around the place and says "Where's my goddam stuff?"
It was John Koerner, to whom Red had originally rented the room. When John went to Denmark for a few months, Red had a friend build a false wall on the end of the room, stash all of John's stuff behind it, and re-rented the space to Irving and me.
Tony, John and Dave played upstairs in Red's after-hours place most weekends, where the fridge was stocked with beer you paid 25 cents for on the honor system.
The first time I hitchhiked to California, Red gave me a dime and a $20 bill. He said "Keep the dime in your pocket for a phone call or in case you get robbed, and keep the $20 bill in your shoe in case you find yourself on a date with a woman who is worth a good bottle of wine."
Koerner bought my Bell and Howell WWII vintage 16 mm wind up movie camera a few years later. He was intrigued with the idea that it was built to army specs which required it could be used as a weapon in hand to hand combat and still continue to function as a movie camera.
When I moved out of the family home my sophomore year at the U of M, I moved into a room in a converted whorehouse on the west bank of the Mississippi in Minneapolis. It was owned and run as a rooming house by a colorful local cab driver named Red Nelson.
One day my roomate Irving and I were lounging around and this guy opens the door with a key and lets himself in. He looks startled to see us, then looks around the place and says "Where's my goddam stuff?"
It was John Koerner, to whom Red had originally rented the room. When John went to Denmark for a few months, Red had a friend build a false wall on the end of the room, stash all of John's stuff behind it, and re-rented the space to Irving and me.
Tony, John and Dave played upstairs in Red's after-hours place most weekends, where the fridge was stocked with beer you paid 25 cents for on the honor system.
The first time I hitchhiked to California, Red gave me a dime and a $20 bill. He said "Keep the dime in your pocket for a phone call or in case you get robbed, and keep the $20 bill in your shoe in case you find yourself on a date with a woman who is worth a good bottle of wine."
Koerner bought my Bell and Howell WWII vintage 16 mm wind up movie camera a few years later. He was intrigued with the idea that it was built to army specs which required it could be used as a weapon in hand to hand combat and still continue to function as a movie camera.
Drive he said
The average commute is 26 minutes, and the range is from 3 minutes to over 3 hours.
My morning commute for the last 9 years was a 12 minute shot up a largely vacant city street, a jog through some run down neighborhoods, and a dash into the parking ramp.
Since the move, I have been on the freeway for 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in the afternoon. Other than the freeway encounters with people who think of merging as merging souls with the afterlife, it is pretty uneventful. There are numerous opportunities to sit quietly on the freeway in peaceful reflection, waiting for the traffic to start moving again. I can floss, change the cd, and compose emails in my imagination.
Today was the first time I took Sam to high school on my way to work. I couldn't take the freeway, I decided, since his high school was considerably further east of downtown than the freeway. This has doubled my commute time. But the space time logistics were just a small part of the over all psychic logistics of driving him to school this morning.
The situation was fraught from the beginning. When we told Sam we were moving, his first thought was for his school arrangements and his friends convenience in dropping by and staying for three days, as Ryan in particular is wont to do. We allayed his fears about Ryan's round the clock access by making sure Ryan was heavily involved in the move, and that Ryan had a Ryan-approved futon sofa in our house where he could spend the night as occaision permitted.
The school thing was/is something else.
Because of the joint custody arrangement, Sam still goes to the City high school. He might be interested in transferring to the Bloomington high school this year, but for now he maintains the same schedule from his mom's house for a week, then stays with me and I must get him to school and home again without benefit of school transportation being provided. I must, in short, drive him to school every morning, and arrange for him to come downtown and sit and do homework until I am off work. He just signed up for the cross country team so there will be a few days when he is practicing after school. Other days he might go home with a friend until I get off work, or get a ride to our house with a friend who drives. It will sound complicated for a while.
It took me 50 minutes to get downtown this morning. The 50 minutes in my case were spent driving east about 7 miles on a side street, hooking up to a main thoroughfare north for another 5 miles which entailed several stoplights, then a jog on a semi-freeway section to another main thoroughfare north, which funneled into a city street with streetlights every 4 to 6 blocks, and required infinite alertness and patience dealing with those pick-up truck drivers whose mother and father had purchased long stretches of city streets and thoroughfares for them as birthrights.
But when I got to work I was whistling. I drove around down town for another 15 minutes to get to my parking space, and early in that meander I actually passed my office. But I was happy.
Sam and I didn't have any meaningful conversation on the way in. Sharing the time with him, listening to him complain about the noises in the new house and his stomach distress from getting up too early, put me in a generous frame of mind toward the universe.
Sam is my son, and his minor problems are infinitely more interesting and worthwhile to me than the morning talk show jabber. With any luck, I will get to drive him to school for a couple of more years before he gets wheels of his own or we cave in to rational pressures and find a bus for him.
For now, this morning commute is more of a family communion, and it is good. If you are me.
The average commute is 26 minutes, and the range is from 3 minutes to over 3 hours.
My morning commute for the last 9 years was a 12 minute shot up a largely vacant city street, a jog through some run down neighborhoods, and a dash into the parking ramp.
Since the move, I have been on the freeway for 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in the afternoon. Other than the freeway encounters with people who think of merging as merging souls with the afterlife, it is pretty uneventful. There are numerous opportunities to sit quietly on the freeway in peaceful reflection, waiting for the traffic to start moving again. I can floss, change the cd, and compose emails in my imagination.
Today was the first time I took Sam to high school on my way to work. I couldn't take the freeway, I decided, since his high school was considerably further east of downtown than the freeway. This has doubled my commute time. But the space time logistics were just a small part of the over all psychic logistics of driving him to school this morning.
The situation was fraught from the beginning. When we told Sam we were moving, his first thought was for his school arrangements and his friends convenience in dropping by and staying for three days, as Ryan in particular is wont to do. We allayed his fears about Ryan's round the clock access by making sure Ryan was heavily involved in the move, and that Ryan had a Ryan-approved futon sofa in our house where he could spend the night as occaision permitted.
The school thing was/is something else.
Because of the joint custody arrangement, Sam still goes to the City high school. He might be interested in transferring to the Bloomington high school this year, but for now he maintains the same schedule from his mom's house for a week, then stays with me and I must get him to school and home again without benefit of school transportation being provided. I must, in short, drive him to school every morning, and arrange for him to come downtown and sit and do homework until I am off work. He just signed up for the cross country team so there will be a few days when he is practicing after school. Other days he might go home with a friend until I get off work, or get a ride to our house with a friend who drives. It will sound complicated for a while.
It took me 50 minutes to get downtown this morning. The 50 minutes in my case were spent driving east about 7 miles on a side street, hooking up to a main thoroughfare north for another 5 miles which entailed several stoplights, then a jog on a semi-freeway section to another main thoroughfare north, which funneled into a city street with streetlights every 4 to 6 blocks, and required infinite alertness and patience dealing with those pick-up truck drivers whose mother and father had purchased long stretches of city streets and thoroughfares for them as birthrights.
But when I got to work I was whistling. I drove around down town for another 15 minutes to get to my parking space, and early in that meander I actually passed my office. But I was happy.
Sam and I didn't have any meaningful conversation on the way in. Sharing the time with him, listening to him complain about the noises in the new house and his stomach distress from getting up too early, put me in a generous frame of mind toward the universe.
Sam is my son, and his minor problems are infinitely more interesting and worthwhile to me than the morning talk show jabber. With any luck, I will get to drive him to school for a couple of more years before he gets wheels of his own or we cave in to rational pressures and find a bus for him.
For now, this morning commute is more of a family communion, and it is good. If you are me.
7.9.03
Getting in touch with your inner yellow-jacket wasp.
Today a yellow-jacket wasp was buzzing around the bedroom, wreaking havoc with our sense of bedroom security. I didn't want to smash it on the fresh paint job, so I got a plastic grocery bag, the tissue-thin ones you use for frozen food. By surrounding the wasp with the opening of the bag and waiting until it flew into the belly, I trapped it and then threw the bag onto the deck. The bag was translucent, I could watch the wasp angrily dart around in the wrinkles of the plastic, looking for an escape route.
At first I thought it was stuck in one furrow of plastic, but I noticed that it darted around in an energetic but apparently random fashion, pushing into openings, following seams of air, expanding its tiny field of movement. What really struck me was the energy it put into the apparent randomized attempts to push through or follow out an opening. That, in its essence, was life.
Our culture has put so much freight on the idea of learning abstracted from the point of learning, that we have reached a kind of inverse tipping point, an implosion point, where the weight of accumlated patterns seems to be crushing the will of the learner. We reward "learning" for its own sake by making an excess of learning a prerequisite for simple economic survival, i.e. you must have way too much education in order to be employed, and even more education than that in order to have some economic self determination in your career.
What if the wasp was in the bag with the strong admonition to "only buzz right until the opening is more than a millimeter, then consult the buzz authority for further direction..."
Obviously the wasp would sit there and die, happily obedient to its education and those who rewarded it for becoming educated while neglecting everything else that might give it a life.
Our cat came and watched the insect evolve an increasingly complex space of discovery within the folds of the bag. She didn't bat it around, as she usually does those things which buzz. The plastic relaxed in the warmth of the day and opened gradually. Finally I tickled it slightly with the broom and the wasp was free. Okay, I played god and ruined the symmetry of my homily, but there you are. I am just buzzing in my own plastic bag for you. Do you have the heart or decency to wield a broom handle on my behalf?
Today a yellow-jacket wasp was buzzing around the bedroom, wreaking havoc with our sense of bedroom security. I didn't want to smash it on the fresh paint job, so I got a plastic grocery bag, the tissue-thin ones you use for frozen food. By surrounding the wasp with the opening of the bag and waiting until it flew into the belly, I trapped it and then threw the bag onto the deck. The bag was translucent, I could watch the wasp angrily dart around in the wrinkles of the plastic, looking for an escape route.
At first I thought it was stuck in one furrow of plastic, but I noticed that it darted around in an energetic but apparently random fashion, pushing into openings, following seams of air, expanding its tiny field of movement. What really struck me was the energy it put into the apparent randomized attempts to push through or follow out an opening. That, in its essence, was life.
Our culture has put so much freight on the idea of learning abstracted from the point of learning, that we have reached a kind of inverse tipping point, an implosion point, where the weight of accumlated patterns seems to be crushing the will of the learner. We reward "learning" for its own sake by making an excess of learning a prerequisite for simple economic survival, i.e. you must have way too much education in order to be employed, and even more education than that in order to have some economic self determination in your career.
What if the wasp was in the bag with the strong admonition to "only buzz right until the opening is more than a millimeter, then consult the buzz authority for further direction..."
Obviously the wasp would sit there and die, happily obedient to its education and those who rewarded it for becoming educated while neglecting everything else that might give it a life.
Our cat came and watched the insect evolve an increasingly complex space of discovery within the folds of the bag. She didn't bat it around, as she usually does those things which buzz. The plastic relaxed in the warmth of the day and opened gradually. Finally I tickled it slightly with the broom and the wasp was free. Okay, I played god and ruined the symmetry of my homily, but there you are. I am just buzzing in my own plastic bag for you. Do you have the heart or decency to wield a broom handle on my behalf?
4.9.03
Science Fiction appeared as a complex, self-contained microcosm in the fourties, with first rate minds enlivening what was considered a low-brow form of diversion. How did writers like Heinlein and Asimov learn how to write science fiction? They way other writers learned to write literature: by doing it until they did it better then doing it more. Now you can attend classes that help you write better aliens.
The best aliens were always simply the reader of the story.
The best aliens were always simply the reader of the story.
The human presence on this planet increasingly seems to be the presence of a foreign or alien formation, a kind of infestation on the skin of the planet. When I first heard the idea that humans were a space-borne virus which has infected the Earth, I thought it was a clever and macabre invention. Now I am not so sure.
Heraclitas states that war, or at least friction, depending on your translator, was the father of all things. It is both disconcerting and reassuring, then, to find out that something as chummy, friendly and innocent seeming as a lunch box was in fact a commodity given life and meaning from the fierce competition between Hopalong Cassidy and Roy Rogers...
Next we will find out that jello was the outcome of research into making munitions grade glue...
Next we will find out that jello was the outcome of research into making munitions grade glue...
Cabela's Pinnacle™ Zipper Hunting Boots with Supprescent™ may or may not be what I need to get into the duck pond and get rid of some of the litter on our shoreline. But at least I am sure my feet won't stink after an hour or so of rescuing old pop cans and bleach bottles from the muck.
3.9.03
New Yawkish memories
I actually went out to New York in the early 70's when SoHo was just jelling as a cultural matrix. I earned a certain amount of street cred by living in abandoned buildings, painting on doors I found discarded in the bowery, reading poetry at St. Mark's Place, exchanging views with Edward Allbee and drinking beer with Willem DeKoonig.
Here is a Dekoonig story. He was pretty old by the time I would run into him. I tended to stay down at the Broome Street Bar where the pretty waitresses were. The Name artists would come down there at times, and sometimes they would set foot in the fancy decor of the Spring Street Bar, but mostly they stayed up at the Cedar Bar, tending the dimming flames of what they called Heterosexual Alchoholic Abstract Expressionism to distinguish themselves from the gay pop/ straight minimalist crowd. One day my friend Bill invited me to meet him at the Cedar. When I showed up, he waved from a corner booth near the door, where he was sitting next to a gnarled old guy in rumpled work clothes. "Jeff, meet deKoonig. Bill, this is Jeff" my friend said. DeKoonig, and it was him, looked at me with piercing blue eyes. I don't remember much of the afternoon, but I remember him telling me about how he came to terms with a certain shade of blue in one of his paintings. "I had this red, here" he indicated a spot, "and I wanted to put this blue here" he said, jabbing a spot adjacent to that where the red lived. "I asked myself how could I put that blue next to that red. I thought about what the guy that was coming over to look at my paintings would say. I said to hell with it and just DID IT." He laughed, and Bill and I laughed but we didn't know why we laughed and we all drank and we all knew exactly why we drank...
I met a lot of other famous and near famous artists, and worked briefly as a studio assistant to a guy who had about thirty shows going on all over the world at any given time. He had an aggressive agent in Holland who kept his work moving, and he made a ton of money painting floor to ceiling paintings of individual flowers in a kind of neo - manet style, think the bull fighter with its totally abstract background and curiously unsentimental rendering of a fairly dramatic subject.
Today "N" called and complained that an 80-year-old woman sculptor beat him out of a commission for the new library. Anyone who has ever entered a competition for real work can empathize with him for not winning. But you'd think he could crack a smile about being beaten by an 80-year-old woman. Nah. He expected me to commiserate, and I couldn't.
I told him about the ordeal of the move, including how I went blind in my left eye for a week after giving up the keys to the old place. He was very sympathetic, and asked if there was anything he could do to help me. I believed he meant it, and said if I could think of anything I would let him know.
The idea of "art" as an identity or career is not real high on my list of interests at the moment. I haven't reached the nadir of cultural disaffection that moved Goebbels to say that everytime he heard the word "culture" he reached for his revolver. But I am not likely to cross the street to see an art show these days.
Today, driving to work, I thought about adversity. I am tired of adversity, but I am always ready for it. I am not tired of art, but I am never ready for it.
Maybe I will do some drawing on the deck this evening. Who knows, maybe I will put some blue next to some red in the drawing, and laugh with the best of them.
Here is a Dekoonig story. He was pretty old by the time I would run into him. I tended to stay down at the Broome Street Bar where the pretty waitresses were. The Name artists would come down there at times, and sometimes they would set foot in the fancy decor of the Spring Street Bar, but mostly they stayed up at the Cedar Bar, tending the dimming flames of what they called Heterosexual Alchoholic Abstract Expressionism to distinguish themselves from the gay pop/ straight minimalist crowd. One day my friend Bill invited me to meet him at the Cedar. When I showed up, he waved from a corner booth near the door, where he was sitting next to a gnarled old guy in rumpled work clothes. "Jeff, meet deKoonig. Bill, this is Jeff" my friend said. DeKoonig, and it was him, looked at me with piercing blue eyes. I don't remember much of the afternoon, but I remember him telling me about how he came to terms with a certain shade of blue in one of his paintings. "I had this red, here" he indicated a spot, "and I wanted to put this blue here" he said, jabbing a spot adjacent to that where the red lived. "I asked myself how could I put that blue next to that red. I thought about what the guy that was coming over to look at my paintings would say. I said to hell with it and just DID IT." He laughed, and Bill and I laughed but we didn't know why we laughed and we all drank and we all knew exactly why we drank...
I met a lot of other famous and near famous artists, and worked briefly as a studio assistant to a guy who had about thirty shows going on all over the world at any given time. He had an aggressive agent in Holland who kept his work moving, and he made a ton of money painting floor to ceiling paintings of individual flowers in a kind of neo - manet style, think the bull fighter with its totally abstract background and curiously unsentimental rendering of a fairly dramatic subject.
Today "N" called and complained that an 80-year-old woman sculptor beat him out of a commission for the new library. Anyone who has ever entered a competition for real work can empathize with him for not winning. But you'd think he could crack a smile about being beaten by an 80-year-old woman. Nah. He expected me to commiserate, and I couldn't.
I told him about the ordeal of the move, including how I went blind in my left eye for a week after giving up the keys to the old place. He was very sympathetic, and asked if there was anything he could do to help me. I believed he meant it, and said if I could think of anything I would let him know.
The idea of "art" as an identity or career is not real high on my list of interests at the moment. I haven't reached the nadir of cultural disaffection that moved Goebbels to say that everytime he heard the word "culture" he reached for his revolver. But I am not likely to cross the street to see an art show these days.
Today, driving to work, I thought about adversity. I am tired of adversity, but I am always ready for it. I am not tired of art, but I am never ready for it.
Maybe I will do some drawing on the deck this evening. Who knows, maybe I will put some blue next to some red in the drawing, and laugh with the best of them.
2.9.03
Return to the scene of the time
I have moved back to the suburbs after living in the city since, basically, my second year of college in 1967. That is 36 years. I really only lived in the 'burbs from 58 to 67, not even as long as I spent at my last place, a duplex in South Minneapolis. But they were the years between me at the age of 10 and me at the age of 19: not years to be trifled with.
In the suburbs. Well, New Hope in the late fifties barely qualified as a suburb. It was more of the exurb, the last ring of city serviced townships before the wholly rural landscape took control. We lived in a small, less than five block, development and frankly I think we were on bottled gas and unpaved streets until 61 or 62. Much of the summer for the first few years was taken up with building forts in the surrounding stands of oak and pine among the farmers fields. And we built professionally, because the development was churning constantly with new blocks of houses going up from the foundations. One of my clearest memories is standing between newly masoned cinderblock basement walls and the dirt sides of the foundation hole, hiding in a game of tag, or just breathing the perfume of fresh dirt and cement mingled.
As good Christian kids we wouldn't steal anything of much value, but the broken or cast off two by fours, flooring grade plywood off cuts, bent nails, conduit, junction box punchouts, etc we did find made for first rate hideouts and forts. I had been in the kid-sized building trades for a year already, thanks to living next to a landfill in Omaha that received entire houses as offerings. When I showed the kids in New Hope how to hammer, straighten out bent nails, draw a guide line with a pencil and a straight edge for sawing: they knew they were in the presence of someone who wanted to spell fort with a capital "F." Since I had four sisters and one of them could beat any two of us up, we didn't advertise the "no girls allowed" much less spell with a backward "s".
This past weekend I mowed my own lawn with my own lawnmower, more or less (story below) for the first time since the summer of '92. But for reasons it will take me years to understand, I feel as though this house is really my very first house that I really own, and Sara has said the same thing despite her sharing title to one house and responsibility for several others.
Moving to the suburbs happened so quickly in a setting fraught with so many extenuating circumstances, that I barely acknowledged the fact. At one point I thought our new home was due south of our family home at what had been 8124 Zenith back in '58. But a check of the map proved we were many blocks east.
Going into Home Depot with a list of items the first time was a valhalla like experience for me. Especially since I had given myself permission to go a few thou into debt in honor of the magnitude of the event of owning a home with Sara finally. We got a fireproof pad for the Weber for our deck. We have a deck! I got shelves for the garage. We have a garage! and so on...
But the incident that really drove home the point of living in our own home, and living in the suburbs, happened Sunday night, when I was lying next to Sara as she went into an early sound sleep, precious and well earned by her unpacking efforts all day long. I had the sunday paper. Instead of the news and arts sections, or metro and sports, I turned to the first of the ad inserts. It was for Menards lumber, and featured garage doors and shed kits, dispose-alls and 2x4's. I read every page. I proceeded to read every insert, for mattresses and furniture, siding and garden hose, you name it. After I had read every insert, I read every ad on every page of the regular paper, skipping the articles. With each offer, I imagined the small or large transformation of our new suburban home implied by its acceptance. I stopped at the classifieds. Even my romantic nature didn't have the stamina to tackle that gargantuan lode of material lures.
In the course of an hour or so I redid the bathroom several times, converted the garage into a workshop, then a bedroom, then two bedrooms, then back to a workshop, and built a new garage out into the driveway. I built a shed in the backyard, an observatory, a treehouse. I opened the wall between the kitchen and dining room, tried out several combinations of leather and microfiber furniture arrangements in the living room. I put on vinyl and steel siding, then went back to wood. I rebuilt the deck, reroofed the house, installed zone controls in the heating air conditioning and several competing styles of skylights and vents in the bathroom.
As page after page of the fat paper slipped onto the floor, and I narrowed the pile down to the home electronics superstores which would have me outfitted in floor standing speakers, surround sound in several rooms, wireless audio throughout the house, and cable and satellite feeds both driving the 40" plasma televisions in every room, I began to drift off. The paper was getting too heavy, and I was blurring the distinction between reality and dream. But I realized, that after all these years, with the best friend in the world next to me helping me out, I was finally building the one thing I had been dreaming of all my life. But I still wouldn't be spelling girls with a backward "s" on this, my last best Fort.
I have moved back to the suburbs after living in the city since, basically, my second year of college in 1967. That is 36 years. I really only lived in the 'burbs from 58 to 67, not even as long as I spent at my last place, a duplex in South Minneapolis. But they were the years between me at the age of 10 and me at the age of 19: not years to be trifled with.
In the suburbs. Well, New Hope in the late fifties barely qualified as a suburb. It was more of the exurb, the last ring of city serviced townships before the wholly rural landscape took control. We lived in a small, less than five block, development and frankly I think we were on bottled gas and unpaved streets until 61 or 62. Much of the summer for the first few years was taken up with building forts in the surrounding stands of oak and pine among the farmers fields. And we built professionally, because the development was churning constantly with new blocks of houses going up from the foundations. One of my clearest memories is standing between newly masoned cinderblock basement walls and the dirt sides of the foundation hole, hiding in a game of tag, or just breathing the perfume of fresh dirt and cement mingled.
As good Christian kids we wouldn't steal anything of much value, but the broken or cast off two by fours, flooring grade plywood off cuts, bent nails, conduit, junction box punchouts, etc we did find made for first rate hideouts and forts. I had been in the kid-sized building trades for a year already, thanks to living next to a landfill in Omaha that received entire houses as offerings. When I showed the kids in New Hope how to hammer, straighten out bent nails, draw a guide line with a pencil and a straight edge for sawing: they knew they were in the presence of someone who wanted to spell fort with a capital "F." Since I had four sisters and one of them could beat any two of us up, we didn't advertise the "no girls allowed" much less spell with a backward "s".
This past weekend I mowed my own lawn with my own lawnmower, more or less (story below) for the first time since the summer of '92. But for reasons it will take me years to understand, I feel as though this house is really my very first house that I really own, and Sara has said the same thing despite her sharing title to one house and responsibility for several others.
Moving to the suburbs happened so quickly in a setting fraught with so many extenuating circumstances, that I barely acknowledged the fact. At one point I thought our new home was due south of our family home at what had been 8124 Zenith back in '58. But a check of the map proved we were many blocks east.
Going into Home Depot with a list of items the first time was a valhalla like experience for me. Especially since I had given myself permission to go a few thou into debt in honor of the magnitude of the event of owning a home with Sara finally. We got a fireproof pad for the Weber for our deck. We have a deck! I got shelves for the garage. We have a garage! and so on...
But the incident that really drove home the point of living in our own home, and living in the suburbs, happened Sunday night, when I was lying next to Sara as she went into an early sound sleep, precious and well earned by her unpacking efforts all day long. I had the sunday paper. Instead of the news and arts sections, or metro and sports, I turned to the first of the ad inserts. It was for Menards lumber, and featured garage doors and shed kits, dispose-alls and 2x4's. I read every page. I proceeded to read every insert, for mattresses and furniture, siding and garden hose, you name it. After I had read every insert, I read every ad on every page of the regular paper, skipping the articles. With each offer, I imagined the small or large transformation of our new suburban home implied by its acceptance. I stopped at the classifieds. Even my romantic nature didn't have the stamina to tackle that gargantuan lode of material lures.
In the course of an hour or so I redid the bathroom several times, converted the garage into a workshop, then a bedroom, then two bedrooms, then back to a workshop, and built a new garage out into the driveway. I built a shed in the backyard, an observatory, a treehouse. I opened the wall between the kitchen and dining room, tried out several combinations of leather and microfiber furniture arrangements in the living room. I put on vinyl and steel siding, then went back to wood. I rebuilt the deck, reroofed the house, installed zone controls in the heating air conditioning and several competing styles of skylights and vents in the bathroom.
As page after page of the fat paper slipped onto the floor, and I narrowed the pile down to the home electronics superstores which would have me outfitted in floor standing speakers, surround sound in several rooms, wireless audio throughout the house, and cable and satellite feeds both driving the 40" plasma televisions in every room, I began to drift off. The paper was getting too heavy, and I was blurring the distinction between reality and dream. But I realized, that after all these years, with the best friend in the world next to me helping me out, I was finally building the one thing I had been dreaming of all my life. But I still wouldn't be spelling girls with a backward "s" on this, my last best Fort.
29.8.03
Lawn Boy's arrested development.
Maggie, the prior owner of this house, offered us her lawn mower when we closed. She said it was a commercial quality Lawn Boy worth about $300 - $400 new and that it was only five years old. I said if that was the case I would give her $150 for it.
My first few hours in the new house I was overwhelmed by the impressions, the needy parts and great views and neglected parts and great light inside and all the little glimpses of damaged door frames, missing molding, drawer pulls, dangling cables, odd dark patches in the ceiling paint, etc. One of the impressions was that the lawnmower had aged a few decades in the scant five years of its alleged youth. It was also evidently not used to having to work for a living. The oil and grass crust on it was dry as bone.
We had noticed the general neglect of the yard when we were going through the purchase process. The day before closing Maggie said she was having a lawn service over to spruce up the yard and landscaping, chores her able bodied teenagers had rebelled at before they hit puberty and weren't about to adopt now.
It was a dry summer. The neighbors had brown spots on their lawns. Neither immediate neighbor seemed particularly anal about their lawns, and I was glad for that.
So forgive me if a few weeks past closing I am just getting to the mowing part. Sara and I had a marriage to test against the ineluctable modalities of moving homes. Which, since you ask, we are doing quite well at.
Okay, so the Lawn Boy. Allow me to laugh. I don't know which five years Maggie was under the impression constituted the age of the mower, but one of them was probably 1989. I looked up the serial number on the web and there was a recall notice on the model from 1989, something about a gas tank that was likely to crack open and burst into flames, stealing a march on the poor mower's barbeque intentions for later in the day, no doubt.
My options were many, but they all boiled down to getting a new mower or trying to play out the string of inherited karma to its bitter frayed end and get the damn thing repaired. I am a karma gambling addict. You know who you are. If I have a choice between a clean break with the past or a visit to the abbatoir of intentions through salvage-laden memory, I choose to nose around in the old sleeping bag of lessons, debts, half-fulfilled promises, broken parts, kits and souveniers whose source is forgotten with the sweats and ecstasies of the trip they mementoed.
Why start fresh when you can start with a green grey crust of dried grass, insect parts and 40 weight oil baked into a death mask on your cooling fins and carbeurator? That's what I always say. And that is what Sara fears to hear the most, running from the room in frustration with my backward ways.
I had the tools out and the mower on its side on the driveway when some 12 watt light of reason came on in the brain. If I had to salvage the mower, at least let someone else do it somewhere else, and keep my time free for unpacking and organizing the things that really cried out for our attention.
Thus it was I discovered the Penn Lake TruValue hardware store, where an elderly gnome ran the cash register while his second and third generation DNA experiments chased each other with hose couplings and crescent wrenches in the back room. He allowed as they could look at it for the twenty dollar minimum, tune it up for $54, and fix it for a price to be determined on inspection. I agreed to that, to a new astro turf door mat, to cable tv accessories and the phone numbers of a hauling company and a yard aerating company. "Don't do this critical job yourself" the yard aerating company warned sternly. I was agreeable, and slightly saner than at any time in the last seven weeks as I signed the credit card chit, mused cheerfully with the woman behind me in line about the trees and rain and prospects for an early fall.
We might not survive the move, but we will move on from the selves who moved. And that is the ultimate karmic gamble.
You know who you are.
Addendum, Sept 2.
That same day....
Sara got off work early, and convinced me that I needed to visit Marshall's discount store with her for a good laugh and maybe a bargain. On the way I told her about the Lawn Boy. As I recounted the Lawn Boy saga, my gorge rose and spilled over just as we passed another hardware store with a sidewalk display of used mowers. I whipped into the parking slot in front of a bright orange Ariens autothatcher, 6 horsepower, its tread still distinguishable on the rubber tires, a hallmark of youth noticeably absent from the majority of used mowers. The affable hardware shill met us, hand out and eyes crinkled with humor at the thought of actually selling one of these moribund industrial lawn aids.
"There are two ends to the continuum of lawn mowers" he began...
"As there are two ends to most continuums" I suggested, helping him gather momentum.
"Ah! Right. Well, over here, " he indicated by wagging his soft, turnip-shaped left hand, "Here you have the lawn owners eager for a maincured look"
"Right down to the buffed clear coat and moon shaped cuticle!" I hollered in assent
He stared at me, and then proceeded to wag the right hand, which revealed a gentle lack of blemish or callous belying his authority among handtools and the rough gasoline fueled disciplines of do-it-yourself yards.
"Over here, then, you have those who just want to get off the sofa long enough to say they mowed the yard and don't care what things look like when they are finished."
I imagined myself on the sofa, my back to the yard, reading the Times editorials and raising my gorge to the level it might propel a Lawn Boy or Toro through the thatchifying abundance of my fescue and buffalo grass. Yes, the sofa.
"So which are you?" He inquired, twisting his head on his neck like an owl.
"Oh, the sofa. Definitely the sofa end of the continuum." I hastened to reply, lest he think I meant to spend real money on an upscale used machine.
"Which of these is the best of the lot?" Sara said, coming back to our show-and-tell from a quick survey of the green, orange, rust and sand colored retirees from the lawn wars.
"Well, " our Virgil, our guide through the purgatory of Home Ownership which begins at the front curb and ends before you get to siding and plumbing said, " Well" he allowed himself time to actually check his inventory at this point, something which seemed to take the starch out of his uniform shirt.
"Hmm, well its the end of the season, of course, not much left here."
"Hmmm. Yeah, you don't want those" he indicated the entire north limb of the l-shaped display, where, I noticed, the under - $100 workhorses patiently awaited their last owners.
"What about that one?" I asked, pointing to the bright orange Ariens. It seemed to stand at attention, its vital forces undimmed by a decade or two of abuse and bad lawn maintenance habits.
"Well, they sure have their own way of doing things" our guide insinuated sinisterly, taking me by the elbow and turning me toward the exceptionally long TORO with its rear bag, drop blade clutch, three speed self propelled variable throttle 5.5 horsepower and discernable tread on its tires. "I say this is the best deal on the bunch" he asserted. "This is one of the best. See this bar?" He wrestled with the large lawn appliance festooned with cables, levers, rubber flaps, kevlar bullet proof bags, sensors, struts, spars and a mizzen mast. Pushing it free of the pack of suburban disjecta, he put one foot on the cowling of the enormous motor and pulled the starter rope. It sputtered to life, then, as he pulled aforesaid bar up, amazingly, sputtered and roared into second life, as though there were two independant but symbiotic engines of vanquishment under his control. I noticed that the rear bag engorged with an almost mammalian enthusiasm for the task of deflowering the lawn when he in fact pulled what I came to think of as the man-bar. He shouted like a midshipman on the aircraft carrier deck as the f-18s came to land. "This is the clutch bar, it lets you engage the blade without stopping the motor."
What I heard was "Thib ikluus barrets jake jay wib wobbing wober"
I thought it was a magical incantation, similar to the Ghost Dancer's prayer to the Great Spirit to make them invisible to their enemies. I could see how a suburban lawn warrior might need such protection.
Without making him explain the other lanyards, jibs and fo'csles on the craft, I said I would take it.
We packed it into the van, and Sara sighed with the forebearance of a truly good woman. As we walked to Marshalls, which was a dozen doors down the mall, she began to perk up. I phoned the TruValu and explained that I had betrayed the tenuous trust established this morning in the act of surrendering my Lawn Boy to their repair ministry. "You want it what?" the hardware guardian yelled into the phone when I explained that I wanted to get the Lawn Boy back with no repair. It was beyond his scope of duty or insight as to why a person who had already paid the twenty dollar minimum for inspection would want to get the machine back untouched. I made up a lengthy, subtle lie concerning my arrangements with the previous owner of the machine, the career of those arrangements, the crisis point coming when she would not repay me for repairs, and as I blathered into the cell mouthpiece I sensed a gust of indifference emanate from the man.
"Its on the truck right now. He's driving it away. You want it off the truck?" he interrupted me, and I knew why there was no hope for great literature in a culture that insisted on the blunt contrast between "on the truck" and "off the truck" as the true hinge on which the door of discourse must swing open or shut.
"Yes" I conceded with my most monosyllabic effort to date.
Sara stood patiently. "You want a laugh?" she said, as though offering lemonade to Joan of Arc as the flames licked up around her calves.
She led me to the lamp display. "Now, tell me this is funny" she said, pointing to what at first glance looked like a vaguely victorian, ornate import bedside lamp. On closer inspection, I saw that tiers of bronze-colored plaster fronds wound up the lamp neck, barely concealing beneath them the three monkeys of "hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil" fame.
"Is this a subtle critique of my handling of l'affair du lawnmower?" I asked.
She giggled and reassured me it was not meant as a critique of my hypocrisy, male obsessions, or poor taste in totem animals.
We bought the lamps, to her joy. I had paid off a few minutes of her hour's investment in my lawn crusade so far.
The story really continues...
Sara offered to drop me off and go pick up the Lawn Boy. I set up the Toro and started in with a fierce love of the land in my heart and white knuckles gripping the several safety and function bars which controlled the beast which in turn controlled my lawn. Up over the first turn, so far so good. First patch of real green grass after a long run of brown grass, pesky little fists of weeds and dirt, and the mower coughs, chugs down an extra shot of raw 30 weight, tries to rev up to a survival level of rpms but fails, falls out of gear and sits there idling, its blade surely still as the night before christmas. I drop the clutch bar, as instructed, raise it and see a linkage at the front of the cowling respond by engaging the clutch. Then it seems to change its mind, on its own, disengages the clutch and the motor happily prattles on like a golfer at a cocktail party telling of his latest battle with par to an empty couch.
I drop the clutch bar and slam it back up in a more manly fashion, pretending that this sort of thing happens and I am the sort of man who doesn't let it define the larger moment. In case anyone is watching the new neighbor through their picture windows: I imagine them martini in hand, their contracts with the professional lawn service proudly matted, framed and hung in the den.
Again the thingy does the whatchy and briefly engages, then drops out of gear. I roll the beast without benefit of self propulsion to the driveway, and turn it off. A brief examination of the several sets of numbers and numbered indents scattered throughout the superstructure reveals there to be about 8 basic places that settings can be set, and most of those range over 3 to 5 choices. A brief averaging and mental accounting yeilds my guess that there are 8 to the fifth or 5 to the eighth permutations of settings on what is beginning to appear as the Lawnship Enterprise to my timorous command. I resolutely drop it into neutral, disengage the clutch, engage the deadman throttle control to fast, but not full rabbit icon fast, and yank the starter rope as though I were decapitating several used lawn contraption salesmen with one dull garotte.
It brays back to life, and I drop the clutch bar and slam it home one more time. Sara has returned and is watching with deep affection for my masterful imitation of a slowly disintegrating lawn amateur among the pros. "Something smells like it is burning" she observes. I think it is my shirt collar as my rage at the still blade boils blood, but she is right, a thin line of blue smoke is coming from the cowling. I shut it all down. Now what to look at? Having looked at everything on top, I tip it over and there is the source of the problem: two small tufts of grass, the size of thimbles, have jammed between the tips of the blade and the housing. I start to pull the grass out by hand, but am stopped by visions of the feral mechanism coming to life and flinging my bloody hand into the neighbor's yard.
I use the stake of the sprinkler which I could never get to work to clear the jam. Upright, I start it up and drive up the first shoulder of the lawn. Toro takes the challenge in mighty gulps, until it hits the same patch of 7 straight inches of green grass again. Once again the blade comes to a halt, the clutch thingy flips me off. But I have Knowledge, this time. I push the machine quickly to the drive, declot, and then ponder. How can I mow a 75' by 35' front lawn in 6" increments? "Maybe it is set too low for the length of the grass" Sara suggests, her love and admiration for my heroic antics undiminished by the complete lack of progress or savvy I am demonstrating to the world beyond our lovenest's kerb.
Sara is not just smart. She is really smart, and observant. More punishingly, she is kind and patient as well, skills honed in front of a blackboard in front of senior high mutations of the human species. The entire 100 or so grams of my throbbing forebrain knows that she is right, she is helpful, she is loving in her choice of words and tone to convey to me an idea that might help me achieve my goal. It is the tiny, 2 or so gram weight of lizard brain remaining in my medulla that takes offense, not because she is wrong or evil, but because it is a lizard brain which has been highly aroused by the sight and smell of effort, however wasted so far. I sublimate my lizard's ire to taking the machine back to the drive one more time. A quick more intense inspection reveals that each wheel is capable of being set from "a" to "e" height. I have them all on "b" so I change them to "d", start up and et voila, the machine continues for a full 12 feet before once more bleching to a motorized but bladeless state of apathy, a violent but harmless turmoil in my hands.
I realize at this point that there is no setting, or combination of settings that will put me out my misery short of returning the mower to the store.
At mcDonalds, after giving up the promise of a Bull that turned out to prefer the smell of flowers, the Ferdinand of lawn champions, I am self-medicating with cheeseburger and lemonade guarenteed to contain 0% juice. Sara, swathed in the raiment of consoling silence that only a loving wife can wear so well, watches me confront the ebbing tide of confidence in my skills or desires to meet the Homeowner Survivor challenge of the moment. The very blades of grass are voting me off the island.
We return home and juggle the mystery boxes of the move, and I grow more morose. We both realize that I cannot suffer the unmanning of my dream by an aptly named Toro without once more donning the suit of Lights, taking up the red cape and entering the ring again before the discontents of the audience have become embedded in a Reputation. "Oh, him," I hear the smirking neighbor's say, " he couldn't even mow his own lawn the first week he moved in. Word has it he never left the house again...sits in the basement reading old Esquire magazine's and hasn't gotten out of his dressing gown in two years..."
Refusing to be bested by a machine, in the sight of neighbors, on the battlefield of my lawn, refusing to have my front yard become the Waterloo of my home ownership dreams, I stood up suddenly, a light in my eye and a new resolve in my voice. "Honey, the Sears in Eden Prairie is open for another hour. I am going to go get a new mower!"
Sara stood up, and backed up to the wall, seeking support as she trembled with pride in my rededication to our destiny, our suburb. "Don't you want to wait until tomorrow?" she offered, aware of the toll the days events had taken on my stamina, my judgment and our credit.
"A man has to do..." I summarized, and pushed past her to enter the green lists one more time.
Outside the Lawn Boy sat forlornly on the drive, the job ticket still stapled to its handle. After my dance with the demon Toro, the smaller, less complicated outlines of the LawnBoy had a certain appeal, a certain pathos with which I could relate. I stopped and looked at it. What if? I thought. What if the journey to the hardware store had somehow loosened some obstruction in the fuel line, or what if I had flooded it and it was now ready to run? WHat if the hardware grunts had looked it over before sending it off to the repair shop and set one of the knobs or levers differently, in the code known to men with flagstone fingernails and firebrick wrists?
Sara had come to the door to say one last thing of wisdom and love before I drove off in the Mercury, my new Rosinante, to joust at the 4-cycle windmills. She saw me touch the Lawn Boy and her eyes widened in concern. I had gone off the deep end, and now hallucinated a friendly machine among the massed spite of all the mowers that would never work for me. I grasped the pull cord, put my foot on the cowling in comradeship, not mastery, and pulled as though the centrifugal force of the green machine's magneto would spin love out to blanket a surly world.
It blurbled into life.
I whapped the throttle to its proper setting, on the rabbit icon's ass. I imagined its ears jerked up in surprise. I headed toward the large unmowed triangle of shame in the middle of my lawn, and did it justice with a few manly passes. On the last turn, I saw Sara standing on the drive, her eyes glistening with the pride of a woman who had seen her husband come back from the dead. She raised her hands and gave me a slow, heartfelt ovation.
It was the reason there are men and women. It was the reason women stay with men who stay with their pain. It was the reason there are homes and yards and the reason there are green things in the yards, where children play and old folks doze in sanctuary from their unfinished dreams.
It was home, and we had put our mark on it. And it was good.
Maggie, the prior owner of this house, offered us her lawn mower when we closed. She said it was a commercial quality Lawn Boy worth about $300 - $400 new and that it was only five years old. I said if that was the case I would give her $150 for it.
My first few hours in the new house I was overwhelmed by the impressions, the needy parts and great views and neglected parts and great light inside and all the little glimpses of damaged door frames, missing molding, drawer pulls, dangling cables, odd dark patches in the ceiling paint, etc. One of the impressions was that the lawnmower had aged a few decades in the scant five years of its alleged youth. It was also evidently not used to having to work for a living. The oil and grass crust on it was dry as bone.
We had noticed the general neglect of the yard when we were going through the purchase process. The day before closing Maggie said she was having a lawn service over to spruce up the yard and landscaping, chores her able bodied teenagers had rebelled at before they hit puberty and weren't about to adopt now.
It was a dry summer. The neighbors had brown spots on their lawns. Neither immediate neighbor seemed particularly anal about their lawns, and I was glad for that.
So forgive me if a few weeks past closing I am just getting to the mowing part. Sara and I had a marriage to test against the ineluctable modalities of moving homes. Which, since you ask, we are doing quite well at.
Okay, so the Lawn Boy. Allow me to laugh. I don't know which five years Maggie was under the impression constituted the age of the mower, but one of them was probably 1989. I looked up the serial number on the web and there was a recall notice on the model from 1989, something about a gas tank that was likely to crack open and burst into flames, stealing a march on the poor mower's barbeque intentions for later in the day, no doubt.
My options were many, but they all boiled down to getting a new mower or trying to play out the string of inherited karma to its bitter frayed end and get the damn thing repaired. I am a karma gambling addict. You know who you are. If I have a choice between a clean break with the past or a visit to the abbatoir of intentions through salvage-laden memory, I choose to nose around in the old sleeping bag of lessons, debts, half-fulfilled promises, broken parts, kits and souveniers whose source is forgotten with the sweats and ecstasies of the trip they mementoed.
Why start fresh when you can start with a green grey crust of dried grass, insect parts and 40 weight oil baked into a death mask on your cooling fins and carbeurator? That's what I always say. And that is what Sara fears to hear the most, running from the room in frustration with my backward ways.
I had the tools out and the mower on its side on the driveway when some 12 watt light of reason came on in the brain. If I had to salvage the mower, at least let someone else do it somewhere else, and keep my time free for unpacking and organizing the things that really cried out for our attention.
Thus it was I discovered the Penn Lake TruValue hardware store, where an elderly gnome ran the cash register while his second and third generation DNA experiments chased each other with hose couplings and crescent wrenches in the back room. He allowed as they could look at it for the twenty dollar minimum, tune it up for $54, and fix it for a price to be determined on inspection. I agreed to that, to a new astro turf door mat, to cable tv accessories and the phone numbers of a hauling company and a yard aerating company. "Don't do this critical job yourself" the yard aerating company warned sternly. I was agreeable, and slightly saner than at any time in the last seven weeks as I signed the credit card chit, mused cheerfully with the woman behind me in line about the trees and rain and prospects for an early fall.
We might not survive the move, but we will move on from the selves who moved. And that is the ultimate karmic gamble.
You know who you are.
Addendum, Sept 2.
That same day....
Sara got off work early, and convinced me that I needed to visit Marshall's discount store with her for a good laugh and maybe a bargain. On the way I told her about the Lawn Boy. As I recounted the Lawn Boy saga, my gorge rose and spilled over just as we passed another hardware store with a sidewalk display of used mowers. I whipped into the parking slot in front of a bright orange Ariens autothatcher, 6 horsepower, its tread still distinguishable on the rubber tires, a hallmark of youth noticeably absent from the majority of used mowers. The affable hardware shill met us, hand out and eyes crinkled with humor at the thought of actually selling one of these moribund industrial lawn aids.
"There are two ends to the continuum of lawn mowers" he began...
"As there are two ends to most continuums" I suggested, helping him gather momentum.
"Ah! Right. Well, over here, " he indicated by wagging his soft, turnip-shaped left hand, "Here you have the lawn owners eager for a maincured look"
"Right down to the buffed clear coat and moon shaped cuticle!" I hollered in assent
He stared at me, and then proceeded to wag the right hand, which revealed a gentle lack of blemish or callous belying his authority among handtools and the rough gasoline fueled disciplines of do-it-yourself yards.
"Over here, then, you have those who just want to get off the sofa long enough to say they mowed the yard and don't care what things look like when they are finished."
I imagined myself on the sofa, my back to the yard, reading the Times editorials and raising my gorge to the level it might propel a Lawn Boy or Toro through the thatchifying abundance of my fescue and buffalo grass. Yes, the sofa.
"So which are you?" He inquired, twisting his head on his neck like an owl.
"Oh, the sofa. Definitely the sofa end of the continuum." I hastened to reply, lest he think I meant to spend real money on an upscale used machine.
"Which of these is the best of the lot?" Sara said, coming back to our show-and-tell from a quick survey of the green, orange, rust and sand colored retirees from the lawn wars.
"Well, " our Virgil, our guide through the purgatory of Home Ownership which begins at the front curb and ends before you get to siding and plumbing said, " Well" he allowed himself time to actually check his inventory at this point, something which seemed to take the starch out of his uniform shirt.
"Hmm, well its the end of the season, of course, not much left here."
"Hmmm. Yeah, you don't want those" he indicated the entire north limb of the l-shaped display, where, I noticed, the under - $100 workhorses patiently awaited their last owners.
"What about that one?" I asked, pointing to the bright orange Ariens. It seemed to stand at attention, its vital forces undimmed by a decade or two of abuse and bad lawn maintenance habits.
"Well, they sure have their own way of doing things" our guide insinuated sinisterly, taking me by the elbow and turning me toward the exceptionally long TORO with its rear bag, drop blade clutch, three speed self propelled variable throttle 5.5 horsepower and discernable tread on its tires. "I say this is the best deal on the bunch" he asserted. "This is one of the best. See this bar?" He wrestled with the large lawn appliance festooned with cables, levers, rubber flaps, kevlar bullet proof bags, sensors, struts, spars and a mizzen mast. Pushing it free of the pack of suburban disjecta, he put one foot on the cowling of the enormous motor and pulled the starter rope. It sputtered to life, then, as he pulled aforesaid bar up, amazingly, sputtered and roared into second life, as though there were two independant but symbiotic engines of vanquishment under his control. I noticed that the rear bag engorged with an almost mammalian enthusiasm for the task of deflowering the lawn when he in fact pulled what I came to think of as the man-bar. He shouted like a midshipman on the aircraft carrier deck as the f-18s came to land. "This is the clutch bar, it lets you engage the blade without stopping the motor."
What I heard was "Thib ikluus barrets jake jay wib wobbing wober"
I thought it was a magical incantation, similar to the Ghost Dancer's prayer to the Great Spirit to make them invisible to their enemies. I could see how a suburban lawn warrior might need such protection.
Without making him explain the other lanyards, jibs and fo'csles on the craft, I said I would take it.
We packed it into the van, and Sara sighed with the forebearance of a truly good woman. As we walked to Marshalls, which was a dozen doors down the mall, she began to perk up. I phoned the TruValu and explained that I had betrayed the tenuous trust established this morning in the act of surrendering my Lawn Boy to their repair ministry. "You want it what?" the hardware guardian yelled into the phone when I explained that I wanted to get the Lawn Boy back with no repair. It was beyond his scope of duty or insight as to why a person who had already paid the twenty dollar minimum for inspection would want to get the machine back untouched. I made up a lengthy, subtle lie concerning my arrangements with the previous owner of the machine, the career of those arrangements, the crisis point coming when she would not repay me for repairs, and as I blathered into the cell mouthpiece I sensed a gust of indifference emanate from the man.
"Its on the truck right now. He's driving it away. You want it off the truck?" he interrupted me, and I knew why there was no hope for great literature in a culture that insisted on the blunt contrast between "on the truck" and "off the truck" as the true hinge on which the door of discourse must swing open or shut.
"Yes" I conceded with my most monosyllabic effort to date.
Sara stood patiently. "You want a laugh?" she said, as though offering lemonade to Joan of Arc as the flames licked up around her calves.
She led me to the lamp display. "Now, tell me this is funny" she said, pointing to what at first glance looked like a vaguely victorian, ornate import bedside lamp. On closer inspection, I saw that tiers of bronze-colored plaster fronds wound up the lamp neck, barely concealing beneath them the three monkeys of "hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil" fame.
"Is this a subtle critique of my handling of l'affair du lawnmower?" I asked.
She giggled and reassured me it was not meant as a critique of my hypocrisy, male obsessions, or poor taste in totem animals.
We bought the lamps, to her joy. I had paid off a few minutes of her hour's investment in my lawn crusade so far.
The story really continues...
Sara offered to drop me off and go pick up the Lawn Boy. I set up the Toro and started in with a fierce love of the land in my heart and white knuckles gripping the several safety and function bars which controlled the beast which in turn controlled my lawn. Up over the first turn, so far so good. First patch of real green grass after a long run of brown grass, pesky little fists of weeds and dirt, and the mower coughs, chugs down an extra shot of raw 30 weight, tries to rev up to a survival level of rpms but fails, falls out of gear and sits there idling, its blade surely still as the night before christmas. I drop the clutch bar, as instructed, raise it and see a linkage at the front of the cowling respond by engaging the clutch. Then it seems to change its mind, on its own, disengages the clutch and the motor happily prattles on like a golfer at a cocktail party telling of his latest battle with par to an empty couch.
I drop the clutch bar and slam it back up in a more manly fashion, pretending that this sort of thing happens and I am the sort of man who doesn't let it define the larger moment. In case anyone is watching the new neighbor through their picture windows: I imagine them martini in hand, their contracts with the professional lawn service proudly matted, framed and hung in the den.
Again the thingy does the whatchy and briefly engages, then drops out of gear. I roll the beast without benefit of self propulsion to the driveway, and turn it off. A brief examination of the several sets of numbers and numbered indents scattered throughout the superstructure reveals there to be about 8 basic places that settings can be set, and most of those range over 3 to 5 choices. A brief averaging and mental accounting yeilds my guess that there are 8 to the fifth or 5 to the eighth permutations of settings on what is beginning to appear as the Lawnship Enterprise to my timorous command. I resolutely drop it into neutral, disengage the clutch, engage the deadman throttle control to fast, but not full rabbit icon fast, and yank the starter rope as though I were decapitating several used lawn contraption salesmen with one dull garotte.
It brays back to life, and I drop the clutch bar and slam it home one more time. Sara has returned and is watching with deep affection for my masterful imitation of a slowly disintegrating lawn amateur among the pros. "Something smells like it is burning" she observes. I think it is my shirt collar as my rage at the still blade boils blood, but she is right, a thin line of blue smoke is coming from the cowling. I shut it all down. Now what to look at? Having looked at everything on top, I tip it over and there is the source of the problem: two small tufts of grass, the size of thimbles, have jammed between the tips of the blade and the housing. I start to pull the grass out by hand, but am stopped by visions of the feral mechanism coming to life and flinging my bloody hand into the neighbor's yard.
I use the stake of the sprinkler which I could never get to work to clear the jam. Upright, I start it up and drive up the first shoulder of the lawn. Toro takes the challenge in mighty gulps, until it hits the same patch of 7 straight inches of green grass again. Once again the blade comes to a halt, the clutch thingy flips me off. But I have Knowledge, this time. I push the machine quickly to the drive, declot, and then ponder. How can I mow a 75' by 35' front lawn in 6" increments? "Maybe it is set too low for the length of the grass" Sara suggests, her love and admiration for my heroic antics undiminished by the complete lack of progress or savvy I am demonstrating to the world beyond our lovenest's kerb.
Sara is not just smart. She is really smart, and observant. More punishingly, she is kind and patient as well, skills honed in front of a blackboard in front of senior high mutations of the human species. The entire 100 or so grams of my throbbing forebrain knows that she is right, she is helpful, she is loving in her choice of words and tone to convey to me an idea that might help me achieve my goal. It is the tiny, 2 or so gram weight of lizard brain remaining in my medulla that takes offense, not because she is wrong or evil, but because it is a lizard brain which has been highly aroused by the sight and smell of effort, however wasted so far. I sublimate my lizard's ire to taking the machine back to the drive one more time. A quick more intense inspection reveals that each wheel is capable of being set from "a" to "e" height. I have them all on "b" so I change them to "d", start up and et voila, the machine continues for a full 12 feet before once more bleching to a motorized but bladeless state of apathy, a violent but harmless turmoil in my hands.
I realize at this point that there is no setting, or combination of settings that will put me out my misery short of returning the mower to the store.
At mcDonalds, after giving up the promise of a Bull that turned out to prefer the smell of flowers, the Ferdinand of lawn champions, I am self-medicating with cheeseburger and lemonade guarenteed to contain 0% juice. Sara, swathed in the raiment of consoling silence that only a loving wife can wear so well, watches me confront the ebbing tide of confidence in my skills or desires to meet the Homeowner Survivor challenge of the moment. The very blades of grass are voting me off the island.
We return home and juggle the mystery boxes of the move, and I grow more morose. We both realize that I cannot suffer the unmanning of my dream by an aptly named Toro without once more donning the suit of Lights, taking up the red cape and entering the ring again before the discontents of the audience have become embedded in a Reputation. "Oh, him," I hear the smirking neighbor's say, " he couldn't even mow his own lawn the first week he moved in. Word has it he never left the house again...sits in the basement reading old Esquire magazine's and hasn't gotten out of his dressing gown in two years..."
Refusing to be bested by a machine, in the sight of neighbors, on the battlefield of my lawn, refusing to have my front yard become the Waterloo of my home ownership dreams, I stood up suddenly, a light in my eye and a new resolve in my voice. "Honey, the Sears in Eden Prairie is open for another hour. I am going to go get a new mower!"
Sara stood up, and backed up to the wall, seeking support as she trembled with pride in my rededication to our destiny, our suburb. "Don't you want to wait until tomorrow?" she offered, aware of the toll the days events had taken on my stamina, my judgment and our credit.
"A man has to do..." I summarized, and pushed past her to enter the green lists one more time.
Outside the Lawn Boy sat forlornly on the drive, the job ticket still stapled to its handle. After my dance with the demon Toro, the smaller, less complicated outlines of the LawnBoy had a certain appeal, a certain pathos with which I could relate. I stopped and looked at it. What if? I thought. What if the journey to the hardware store had somehow loosened some obstruction in the fuel line, or what if I had flooded it and it was now ready to run? WHat if the hardware grunts had looked it over before sending it off to the repair shop and set one of the knobs or levers differently, in the code known to men with flagstone fingernails and firebrick wrists?
Sara had come to the door to say one last thing of wisdom and love before I drove off in the Mercury, my new Rosinante, to joust at the 4-cycle windmills. She saw me touch the Lawn Boy and her eyes widened in concern. I had gone off the deep end, and now hallucinated a friendly machine among the massed spite of all the mowers that would never work for me. I grasped the pull cord, put my foot on the cowling in comradeship, not mastery, and pulled as though the centrifugal force of the green machine's magneto would spin love out to blanket a surly world.
It blurbled into life.
I whapped the throttle to its proper setting, on the rabbit icon's ass. I imagined its ears jerked up in surprise. I headed toward the large unmowed triangle of shame in the middle of my lawn, and did it justice with a few manly passes. On the last turn, I saw Sara standing on the drive, her eyes glistening with the pride of a woman who had seen her husband come back from the dead. She raised her hands and gave me a slow, heartfelt ovation.
It was the reason there are men and women. It was the reason women stay with men who stay with their pain. It was the reason there are homes and yards and the reason there are green things in the yards, where children play and old folks doze in sanctuary from their unfinished dreams.
It was home, and we had put our mark on it. And it was good.
28.8.03
Attraction and Albatrosses
You are helpless before your attractions. Whether the Earth or a gnat, you must approach your desires, and as you do so, you change them, and are changed by them.
We moved from a duplex to a single family home with a great back yard: split level deck and leafy back yard on the shore of a tiny duck pond in the midst of the city. Best of both worlds.
We couldn't start moving, however, until I had cleared out an attic filled with books. REALLY filled with books...seventy boxes, probably close to 2000 books. The attic had been struck by disaster: an immigrant roofing team had shoveled the roof shingles off without noticing that the plank roof has inch to two inch gaps open to the attic beneath. They filled the attic with dark, dry powder and greasy pitch shards, chunks of sharp asphalt and nails. They covered the books.
The boxes had all been opened prior to our going on vacation. I was going to create a database and enter the whole library, maybe sell some on the net. We came home and the landlord mentioned that the roofers had dropped shingles in the garage on Sara's year old Saturn. I immediately thought of the attic, and rushed up to find the mess there. It took several lawyers, insurance investigators and various unidentified flying gumshoes nine months to reach a settlement with me. In the meantime, not trusting anyone, I left the scene completely untouched, in case new rounds of skeptical settlers had to parade through the evidence and did not believe the digital photos I had collected. Of course, the settlement came a scant month before the move began, and I could only work on weekend mornings, by and large, due to the intense heat of the attic after 10 am or so and my work schedule.
Sara tried to help the first few days, but the sight of me wandering in a grim fog among the wrack and flotsam that had been my book collection was too much for her. She stayed at the ready, but stayed downstairs, knowing that I had to find some entry point to the trauma that I could use to collect, connect, reclaim.
After a few days, I finally imagined a staging area by a dormer window. I vacuumed a spot free of debris and the kind of volcanic drift that covered every square inch. I wondered if the people living near Mt. St. Helens or Vesuvius had similar feelings of loathing for the scene of their respective aftermaths.
My first step was to contact a local bookseller. Mary was in her twenties, and had worked in PR for a while before opening a neighborhood shop across the lake from us. She came over after I had a weekend to do some preliminary sorting, and was surprised to find a number of good classics and mid-list novels and non fiction in the boxes I set aside for her. She offered a few dollars a box, and carted off about 400 books in the course of an hour one hot morning. I felt positive about the disaster for the first time, because I had to come to terms with getting rid and getting over, and she had been enthusiastic about her "discoveries." I could have done better with a little more work sorting and checking at half.com or the equivalent source of buyer info on the web, but I was happy to see her get a break in her new business, and I was happy to see some books start to leave the dismal attic.
The books were an albatross around my neck. . And more than books, there were many boxes of bills and records from the divorce and after, souveniers of the many trips I had taken with the boys, photos and letters from various girlfriends I had between the divorce and remarriage. It was the scene of a symbolic murder, in a tangible and richly sense-laden way. A hell of memories and unresolved stuff, clinging to me, weighing me down, drowning me in the dense air of fears and postponed resignations.
You are helpless before your attractions. Whether the Earth or a gnat, you must approach your desires, and as you do so, you change them, and are changed by them.
We moved from a duplex to a single family home with a great back yard: split level deck and leafy back yard on the shore of a tiny duck pond in the midst of the city. Best of both worlds.
We couldn't start moving, however, until I had cleared out an attic filled with books. REALLY filled with books...seventy boxes, probably close to 2000 books. The attic had been struck by disaster: an immigrant roofing team had shoveled the roof shingles off without noticing that the plank roof has inch to two inch gaps open to the attic beneath. They filled the attic with dark, dry powder and greasy pitch shards, chunks of sharp asphalt and nails. They covered the books.
The boxes had all been opened prior to our going on vacation. I was going to create a database and enter the whole library, maybe sell some on the net. We came home and the landlord mentioned that the roofers had dropped shingles in the garage on Sara's year old Saturn. I immediately thought of the attic, and rushed up to find the mess there. It took several lawyers, insurance investigators and various unidentified flying gumshoes nine months to reach a settlement with me. In the meantime, not trusting anyone, I left the scene completely untouched, in case new rounds of skeptical settlers had to parade through the evidence and did not believe the digital photos I had collected. Of course, the settlement came a scant month before the move began, and I could only work on weekend mornings, by and large, due to the intense heat of the attic after 10 am or so and my work schedule.
Sara tried to help the first few days, but the sight of me wandering in a grim fog among the wrack and flotsam that had been my book collection was too much for her. She stayed at the ready, but stayed downstairs, knowing that I had to find some entry point to the trauma that I could use to collect, connect, reclaim.
After a few days, I finally imagined a staging area by a dormer window. I vacuumed a spot free of debris and the kind of volcanic drift that covered every square inch. I wondered if the people living near Mt. St. Helens or Vesuvius had similar feelings of loathing for the scene of their respective aftermaths.
My first step was to contact a local bookseller. Mary was in her twenties, and had worked in PR for a while before opening a neighborhood shop across the lake from us. She came over after I had a weekend to do some preliminary sorting, and was surprised to find a number of good classics and mid-list novels and non fiction in the boxes I set aside for her. She offered a few dollars a box, and carted off about 400 books in the course of an hour one hot morning. I felt positive about the disaster for the first time, because I had to come to terms with getting rid and getting over, and she had been enthusiastic about her "discoveries." I could have done better with a little more work sorting and checking at half.com or the equivalent source of buyer info on the web, but I was happy to see her get a break in her new business, and I was happy to see some books start to leave the dismal attic.
The books were an albatross around my neck. . And more than books, there were many boxes of bills and records from the divorce and after, souveniers of the many trips I had taken with the boys, photos and letters from various girlfriends I had between the divorce and remarriage. It was the scene of a symbolic murder, in a tangible and richly sense-laden way. A hell of memories and unresolved stuff, clinging to me, weighing me down, drowning me in the dense air of fears and postponed resignations.
Moving.
It is at the heart of the world's oldest philosophical problem and my newest philosophical dilemma.
(You might object that the problem is not the world's oldest, since it dates to the 6th century b.c., but versions of this paradox have been found in the vedas, which vastly predate the Greek.)
In a nutshell, if you move, who is moved to and who is moved from? Motion implies change, and who exists at the end of the change? Am I going to be a person significantly determined by my new surroundings, such that I am no longer the person of the old surroundings? How can I adapt or plan for this?
You can't of course.
When you move, you leap into the darkness. All your reserves of strength, faith, insight are called upon, drained and discarded in succession, leaving you still days out from the big push and in a hole so deep there is no word for darkness there.
During the move each nerve in your body is successively named, attached to a memory, boiled, misplaced, and discarded. At the end of the move you have only the connective tissues of your body, the ruin of digestive processes impelling you to crises by the hour, and no nerves left, no adrenalin left, no strength to regain the strength required to hide from the ongoing demands, and the renewed demands that start before you even shut the door in your house for the first night's sleep there.
Its moving.
Sara and I discovered that, hidden beneath the familiar layers of selves which we had become so enamored and successful with, mutually, there are layers of other untouched selves, or touched but unfathomed selves, whose masks and tones and poses scared away the intimate confidence we had so earnestly acquired, for months and years prior to the move.
Death, divorce, loss of jobs, major surgery, car accidents. And moving. All rank up on the top of the stress tote board. All dredge up personae we do not need nor want to wear for far the most days of our numbered days on this planet.
The 21st century is moving beyond psychology and psychoanalysis, even as it questions the other great truisms of the 20th century: gravity, speed of light, Marx, the Pope, and McDonalds. We are emerging from a culture that rationalizes the ineffable in the form of scientific jargon, to a culture that allows the return of the chthonic and mythical in the midst of the everyday.
Nothing is more everyday than moving house. And nothing releases stranger monsters into the midst of daily innocence. More on this later. For now, I am almost done shaking, and almost have my eyesight and nerves and digestion returned to a viable, if not normal, level.
If you want to hear the whole story, take my advice. Don't move.
It is at the heart of the world's oldest philosophical problem and my newest philosophical dilemma.
(You might object that the problem is not the world's oldest, since it dates to the 6th century b.c., but versions of this paradox have been found in the vedas, which vastly predate the Greek.)
In a nutshell, if you move, who is moved to and who is moved from? Motion implies change, and who exists at the end of the change? Am I going to be a person significantly determined by my new surroundings, such that I am no longer the person of the old surroundings? How can I adapt or plan for this?
You can't of course.
When you move, you leap into the darkness. All your reserves of strength, faith, insight are called upon, drained and discarded in succession, leaving you still days out from the big push and in a hole so deep there is no word for darkness there.
During the move each nerve in your body is successively named, attached to a memory, boiled, misplaced, and discarded. At the end of the move you have only the connective tissues of your body, the ruin of digestive processes impelling you to crises by the hour, and no nerves left, no adrenalin left, no strength to regain the strength required to hide from the ongoing demands, and the renewed demands that start before you even shut the door in your house for the first night's sleep there.
Its moving.
Sara and I discovered that, hidden beneath the familiar layers of selves which we had become so enamored and successful with, mutually, there are layers of other untouched selves, or touched but unfathomed selves, whose masks and tones and poses scared away the intimate confidence we had so earnestly acquired, for months and years prior to the move.
Death, divorce, loss of jobs, major surgery, car accidents. And moving. All rank up on the top of the stress tote board. All dredge up personae we do not need nor want to wear for far the most days of our numbered days on this planet.
The 21st century is moving beyond psychology and psychoanalysis, even as it questions the other great truisms of the 20th century: gravity, speed of light, Marx, the Pope, and McDonalds. We are emerging from a culture that rationalizes the ineffable in the form of scientific jargon, to a culture that allows the return of the chthonic and mythical in the midst of the everyday.
Nothing is more everyday than moving house. And nothing releases stranger monsters into the midst of daily innocence. More on this later. For now, I am almost done shaking, and almost have my eyesight and nerves and digestion returned to a viable, if not normal, level.
If you want to hear the whole story, take my advice. Don't move.
27.8.03
Bank Shot
Let's see if I got this straight.
When we decided to use a fairly dormant bank account recently, it turned out that Sara was not on the account. We decided to get her on the account. If you heard this one before, stop me.
She worked by a branch of the Famous Bank, and I worked by a branch, fairly far away. We cooked up a plan to save time and trouble.
She went into her branch with a paycheck and said she wanted to deposit it and get on the account. They took the check, and had her do some mysterious bank things. "Now Jeff just needs to go into his branch and sign an authorization, and you are all set" the charming woman told her.
I go to my branch. The manager is at the Personal Banking counter, and eager to help. I explain what the Other Branch Banker told Sara. He has no idea what I am talking about. He stares at me, thinking so hard that I can almost hear it happen.
"So do you have the form?" I ask, interrupting his furious cognitive gymnastics.
He looks startled to see me talk.
"There is no form like that" he asserts and transfers the intensity of his attention to the computer screen. After watching him click and drag and peck and point and click a few minutes, I interrupt again.
"Isn't there a form for adding your wife to your account?" I ask, innocent in perpetuity of Bank Process.
"That's not what Brie was doing here. She put some kind of code in, and I need to find out what it means." he said, pointing the to the screen as though I could see his dilemma.
"Doesn't someone here know the codes?" I ask, even more innocently, if that were possible.
"I'm the manager, I know the codes." he said, standing up straight and reassuringly after several minutes of confidence-draining keyboard meandering. "Let me put a call in to Brie."
Having been in government for almost a quarter of a century, all my alarms went off at the sound of "let me put a call in" but I kept my peace, smiling vaguely and unthreateningly, catching the Los Angeles car chase on the wall mounted television tuned to CNN.
Why was there a wall mounted tv tuned to CNN in the personal banking area, I wondered.
Before the thought could turn into an outloud provocation of the Manager, I squashed it. He was Putting A Call in, and I didn't want the odds stacked any more precariously against Brie answering in person by an idle question.
I watched him punch in a series of numbers and codes while still thinking faster than the speed of light in a dark pail. Finally he announced his name, purpose of his call, time of his call, number where he could be reached just as instructed by the voice mail coach who answered.
He leaned forward on the counter and started drumming his fingers, staring over my shoulder. But not at the tv, where the car chase continued.
Why wasn't the manager riveted on the car chase like all the other people in the Personal Banking area?
"Brie isn't in?" I inflected upwardly, indicating uncertainty despite the declarative form of the sentence.
"She will return my call" the manager smiled, drumming his fingers in a complex 7/5 time.
"Is there some way to fill out a form and have my wife added to my account without waiting for Brie to return the call?" I asked as innocent as the birth of baby Jesus, by any account.
"Oh, certainly, " the manager responded spilling a giant bag of reassurance at my feet, friendly as the owner of the winner of the Kentucky Derby.
I waited a few minutes, slightly distracted by the fact that the driver of the chased car had leapt into the freeway and was being chased by his hostage, a woman carrying a baby. There was something very wrong with the picture but I couldn't put my problem solving energy in its account.
"Could we just do that?"
"Oh, no, I need to find out what this code is" he smiled, rowing the boatload of his agreement across the canal of doubt that had opened between us.
"Could you call anyone in this branch for an explanation?" I asked, as innocent as baby Stalin at the age of conception.
His eyes clouded over, and I began to fear he was reminded of a Seinfeld episode where Jerry tries to rent a car in the single most sarcastic car rental exchange in sitcom history. Then they cleared and he again punched numbers and codes into the phone. A human answered, and the Manager rattled off the situation and a request to explain the code if the respondant would get to the appropriate computer screen. "Um hum." "Ah." "Ah hah." "MMmmmm" he punctuated the litany of the respondant with his ululative and fricative sounds of assent.
"It was the code for the business account of the company she works for." The manager said after putting the phone back.
A minute passed. "And...?"
"I guess there is no online form." He tendered, shoulders hunched and palms outward in the pose of a man eager to share his confoundment with his new found friend.
"So...?"
"Brie will call back, and she can fax us some forms." The manager had put the keystone in an arch of burnished Bank marble, an unshakeable edifice of process, order, and security.
"Isn't there a form here I can sign, give to my wife to sign, and then give to Brie?" I ask, innocent as the first hydrogen atom in the universe one femtosecond after the big bang.
His eyes widened at the simplicity of the notion. "Sure! We can do that!"
He went back to the computer. For a long time. Finally he said "What is the spelling on your name, Jeff?"
And for minutes we went like that, incising with a photon chisel the adamantine facts of my wife's and my names and middle initials in the obdurate phosphor surface of the computer screen.
In the meantime, there was a huge gasp as the woman running with the baby caught up with the gun waving driver in the middle of the freeway. Black and white squad cars executed flawless emergency brake assisted j-spin maneuvers to encircle the absurd couple, and one brushed by the perp, discharging a patrol officer who took the whole shebang of improbable bodies down in one bruising tackle. The mother, her baby intact, struggled to her feet and ran off, while dozens of other officers converged on the body of the hijacker.
"Okay," the manager said. "Just need to print this."
The printer worked. That was like the dog that didn't bark in the Sherlock Holmes story. The whole point was the dog didn't bark. The whole point was the printer worked. Several employees wandered over to watch the forms emerge uneventfully. One pulled out the top sheet and passed it around to the others for their inspection.
"Printer's working." The manager nodded, champion of our intimate rondezvous with chance. Finally he collated the two pages of paper and stapled them. Then he set them in front of himself, while the other employees wandered off absently, a commercial for rage-suppressing serotonin-uptake inhibitors furling across the screen in pastel yellows.
He read every word on the form, coming at last to the two lines at the bottom of the second page. There were "x"s at the head of each line. He carefully drew "X"s in ink over the printed "x"s and slowly pivoted the page toward me.
"You sign here, Jeff." He looked up and met my glazed gaze. "Jeff, wasn't it?" He waited for me to sign, moving his head involuntarily as I added the last flourish to the date.
He took the form back, and carefully circled the "X" he had drawn over the "x" on the second line.
"Sara signs here." He said, pivoting it back to me like a Baron indicating to the king exactly where he was supposed to sign the Magna Carta.
At this point, I notice a woman employee on a stool two slots down the counter. She had been watching us for a while. She catches my eye and smiles. "May I see that?" she asks the manager as polite as a Dallas cotillion caterer catching a bus boy in the act of filching a shrimp.
He hands it over to her carefully, as though the laser printed letters were actually lead shot balanced on a teflon blade, likely to spill as not.
She read through it quickly, clicked a few keys on her keyboard, and pointed to the electronic signature device. "Would you please sign there, Mr. B?" she indicated solicitously.
I did. "All done." She stated, as though we were kids at a drinking fountain who had played enough in the water for the day.
The manager glanced over her shoulder, then beamed broadly at me. "IS there anything else we can do to help you, Jeff?" he asked, placing his palms together in the gesture of prayerful supplication. "We are here to help you if there is anything we can do for you let us know."
Let's see if I got this straight.
When we decided to use a fairly dormant bank account recently, it turned out that Sara was not on the account. We decided to get her on the account. If you heard this one before, stop me.
She worked by a branch of the Famous Bank, and I worked by a branch, fairly far away. We cooked up a plan to save time and trouble.
She went into her branch with a paycheck and said she wanted to deposit it and get on the account. They took the check, and had her do some mysterious bank things. "Now Jeff just needs to go into his branch and sign an authorization, and you are all set" the charming woman told her.
I go to my branch. The manager is at the Personal Banking counter, and eager to help. I explain what the Other Branch Banker told Sara. He has no idea what I am talking about. He stares at me, thinking so hard that I can almost hear it happen.
"So do you have the form?" I ask, interrupting his furious cognitive gymnastics.
He looks startled to see me talk.
"There is no form like that" he asserts and transfers the intensity of his attention to the computer screen. After watching him click and drag and peck and point and click a few minutes, I interrupt again.
"Isn't there a form for adding your wife to your account?" I ask, innocent in perpetuity of Bank Process.
"That's not what Brie was doing here. She put some kind of code in, and I need to find out what it means." he said, pointing the to the screen as though I could see his dilemma.
"Doesn't someone here know the codes?" I ask, even more innocently, if that were possible.
"I'm the manager, I know the codes." he said, standing up straight and reassuringly after several minutes of confidence-draining keyboard meandering. "Let me put a call in to Brie."
Having been in government for almost a quarter of a century, all my alarms went off at the sound of "let me put a call in" but I kept my peace, smiling vaguely and unthreateningly, catching the Los Angeles car chase on the wall mounted television tuned to CNN.
Why was there a wall mounted tv tuned to CNN in the personal banking area, I wondered.
Before the thought could turn into an outloud provocation of the Manager, I squashed it. He was Putting A Call in, and I didn't want the odds stacked any more precariously against Brie answering in person by an idle question.
I watched him punch in a series of numbers and codes while still thinking faster than the speed of light in a dark pail. Finally he announced his name, purpose of his call, time of his call, number where he could be reached just as instructed by the voice mail coach who answered.
He leaned forward on the counter and started drumming his fingers, staring over my shoulder. But not at the tv, where the car chase continued.
Why wasn't the manager riveted on the car chase like all the other people in the Personal Banking area?
"Brie isn't in?" I inflected upwardly, indicating uncertainty despite the declarative form of the sentence.
"She will return my call" the manager smiled, drumming his fingers in a complex 7/5 time.
"Is there some way to fill out a form and have my wife added to my account without waiting for Brie to return the call?" I asked as innocent as the birth of baby Jesus, by any account.
"Oh, certainly, " the manager responded spilling a giant bag of reassurance at my feet, friendly as the owner of the winner of the Kentucky Derby.
I waited a few minutes, slightly distracted by the fact that the driver of the chased car had leapt into the freeway and was being chased by his hostage, a woman carrying a baby. There was something very wrong with the picture but I couldn't put my problem solving energy in its account.
"Could we just do that?"
"Oh, no, I need to find out what this code is" he smiled, rowing the boatload of his agreement across the canal of doubt that had opened between us.
"Could you call anyone in this branch for an explanation?" I asked, as innocent as baby Stalin at the age of conception.
His eyes clouded over, and I began to fear he was reminded of a Seinfeld episode where Jerry tries to rent a car in the single most sarcastic car rental exchange in sitcom history. Then they cleared and he again punched numbers and codes into the phone. A human answered, and the Manager rattled off the situation and a request to explain the code if the respondant would get to the appropriate computer screen. "Um hum." "Ah." "Ah hah." "MMmmmm" he punctuated the litany of the respondant with his ululative and fricative sounds of assent.
"It was the code for the business account of the company she works for." The manager said after putting the phone back.
A minute passed. "And...?"
"I guess there is no online form." He tendered, shoulders hunched and palms outward in the pose of a man eager to share his confoundment with his new found friend.
"So...?"
"Brie will call back, and she can fax us some forms." The manager had put the keystone in an arch of burnished Bank marble, an unshakeable edifice of process, order, and security.
"Isn't there a form here I can sign, give to my wife to sign, and then give to Brie?" I ask, innocent as the first hydrogen atom in the universe one femtosecond after the big bang.
His eyes widened at the simplicity of the notion. "Sure! We can do that!"
He went back to the computer. For a long time. Finally he said "What is the spelling on your name, Jeff?"
And for minutes we went like that, incising with a photon chisel the adamantine facts of my wife's and my names and middle initials in the obdurate phosphor surface of the computer screen.
In the meantime, there was a huge gasp as the woman running with the baby caught up with the gun waving driver in the middle of the freeway. Black and white squad cars executed flawless emergency brake assisted j-spin maneuvers to encircle the absurd couple, and one brushed by the perp, discharging a patrol officer who took the whole shebang of improbable bodies down in one bruising tackle. The mother, her baby intact, struggled to her feet and ran off, while dozens of other officers converged on the body of the hijacker.
"Okay," the manager said. "Just need to print this."
The printer worked. That was like the dog that didn't bark in the Sherlock Holmes story. The whole point was the dog didn't bark. The whole point was the printer worked. Several employees wandered over to watch the forms emerge uneventfully. One pulled out the top sheet and passed it around to the others for their inspection.
"Printer's working." The manager nodded, champion of our intimate rondezvous with chance. Finally he collated the two pages of paper and stapled them. Then he set them in front of himself, while the other employees wandered off absently, a commercial for rage-suppressing serotonin-uptake inhibitors furling across the screen in pastel yellows.
He read every word on the form, coming at last to the two lines at the bottom of the second page. There were "x"s at the head of each line. He carefully drew "X"s in ink over the printed "x"s and slowly pivoted the page toward me.
"You sign here, Jeff." He looked up and met my glazed gaze. "Jeff, wasn't it?" He waited for me to sign, moving his head involuntarily as I added the last flourish to the date.
He took the form back, and carefully circled the "X" he had drawn over the "x" on the second line.
"Sara signs here." He said, pivoting it back to me like a Baron indicating to the king exactly where he was supposed to sign the Magna Carta.
At this point, I notice a woman employee on a stool two slots down the counter. She had been watching us for a while. She catches my eye and smiles. "May I see that?" she asks the manager as polite as a Dallas cotillion caterer catching a bus boy in the act of filching a shrimp.
He hands it over to her carefully, as though the laser printed letters were actually lead shot balanced on a teflon blade, likely to spill as not.
She read through it quickly, clicked a few keys on her keyboard, and pointed to the electronic signature device. "Would you please sign there, Mr. B?" she indicated solicitously.
I did. "All done." She stated, as though we were kids at a drinking fountain who had played enough in the water for the day.
The manager glanced over her shoulder, then beamed broadly at me. "IS there anything else we can do to help you, Jeff?" he asked, placing his palms together in the gesture of prayerful supplication. "We are here to help you if there is anything we can do for you let us know."
Mars versus character defects
Mars is beautiful. I spent some time last fall reading the history of Mars as an idea, in a wonderful book by William Sheehan, who is a practicing psychologist here in Minnesota.
Mars is beautiful. I spent some time last fall reading the history of Mars as an idea, in a wonderful book by William Sheehan, who is a practicing psychologist here in Minnesota.
No feedback please, I am cyber-intolerant.
Interactivity is for vending machines. I have finally gone over the edge, after 23 years of computer intensity and 17 years of online existence, I am finding the idea of feedback to be anathema to civilized existence. Artists, Picasso said, paint because they want something interesting to look at. I write because I want something interesting to read.
Interactivity is for vending machines. I have finally gone over the edge, after 23 years of computer intensity and 17 years of online existence, I am finding the idea of feedback to be anathema to civilized existence. Artists, Picasso said, paint because they want something interesting to look at. I write because I want something interesting to read.
26.8.03
Moving In story 2
The birds.
When I moved out of Chateau Place in '92 I had two parakeets, Marge and Homer. They lived a number of years: Marge died because I went on vacation and the landlord forgot his promise to feed and water the pets. Homer lived for a while by himself, then Nick's friend Davis offered the cage and birds from his home, as his mom didn't want any birds any more. That brought the population up to three parakeets.
They provided a continuous cascade of musical interest from their perches, but they had become hyperaggressive physically. We couldn't put our hands in the cage after the two new birds moved in...one in particular had a nasty talent for getting its beak point directly under the cuticle of an approaching finger, causing an intensity and subtlety of pain that the Marquis de Sade himself would have appreciated.
But to me the music was worth the mechanical problem of cleaning the cage and keeping the food and water fresh. After a few years, as the grief of divorce subsided and I began finding new ways to measure myself against the rule of existence, I began to take pride in the simple act of changing the bird's water and keeping fresh food in their plastic bins.
When it came time to move to Bloomington, a few weeks ago, Sara pleaded with me to leave the birds with someone else. I was torn, because I love her and don't want to cause her pain, but I felt a Buddhist sense of obligation to the life energies of the parakeets.
Finally I decided to follow Sara's suggestion and offer them to a young woman who had carried out a dozen boxes of books from our attic to her new bookstore on Nokomis. Her name was Mary, and she was game to try having some birds in her bookstore.
I left them with her feeling good about the loss of my little song beasts, whose reptilian aloofness and constant quarrelling had animated my kitchen with the small similacrum of familial energy for the long days when I was alone. With Sara I was never alone and with the birds, Mary's little bookstore would have antic talismen, feathered tchotchkes worthy of comment by all and sundry.
Since Mary seemed a little apprehensive about the care required, I said she could call before two weeks were out and I would take them back, if they proved to be too much to care for.
I didn't hear a peep from her. Finally today I called her up and asked about the birds. There was a long silence, then she confessed that one had died within a few days of arrival at her store. She was distressed, too distressed to tell me on the phone.
I felt badly for her, and tried to say something, but it seemed awkward. What had I given her? Not a gift. I had given her death and loss.
Well, she decided to keep the one bird, the green one, and put some effort into its welfare and comfort. In the meantime several clients had taken a liking to the bird. I don't know what did the little beaky tyke in, allah rest its soul in budgie paradise. But it is evidence, if you need any, that all change is attended by loss, but you cannot predict what exactly the loss will be, and cannot be intimidated by its process as the wheel of life turns on.
The birds.
When I moved out of Chateau Place in '92 I had two parakeets, Marge and Homer. They lived a number of years: Marge died because I went on vacation and the landlord forgot his promise to feed and water the pets. Homer lived for a while by himself, then Nick's friend Davis offered the cage and birds from his home, as his mom didn't want any birds any more. That brought the population up to three parakeets.
They provided a continuous cascade of musical interest from their perches, but they had become hyperaggressive physically. We couldn't put our hands in the cage after the two new birds moved in...one in particular had a nasty talent for getting its beak point directly under the cuticle of an approaching finger, causing an intensity and subtlety of pain that the Marquis de Sade himself would have appreciated.
But to me the music was worth the mechanical problem of cleaning the cage and keeping the food and water fresh. After a few years, as the grief of divorce subsided and I began finding new ways to measure myself against the rule of existence, I began to take pride in the simple act of changing the bird's water and keeping fresh food in their plastic bins.
When it came time to move to Bloomington, a few weeks ago, Sara pleaded with me to leave the birds with someone else. I was torn, because I love her and don't want to cause her pain, but I felt a Buddhist sense of obligation to the life energies of the parakeets.
Finally I decided to follow Sara's suggestion and offer them to a young woman who had carried out a dozen boxes of books from our attic to her new bookstore on Nokomis. Her name was Mary, and she was game to try having some birds in her bookstore.
I left them with her feeling good about the loss of my little song beasts, whose reptilian aloofness and constant quarrelling had animated my kitchen with the small similacrum of familial energy for the long days when I was alone. With Sara I was never alone and with the birds, Mary's little bookstore would have antic talismen, feathered tchotchkes worthy of comment by all and sundry.
Since Mary seemed a little apprehensive about the care required, I said she could call before two weeks were out and I would take them back, if they proved to be too much to care for.
I didn't hear a peep from her. Finally today I called her up and asked about the birds. There was a long silence, then she confessed that one had died within a few days of arrival at her store. She was distressed, too distressed to tell me on the phone.
I felt badly for her, and tried to say something, but it seemed awkward. What had I given her? Not a gift. I had given her death and loss.
Well, she decided to keep the one bird, the green one, and put some effort into its welfare and comfort. In the meantime several clients had taken a liking to the bird. I don't know what did the little beaky tyke in, allah rest its soul in budgie paradise. But it is evidence, if you need any, that all change is attended by loss, but you cannot predict what exactly the loss will be, and cannot be intimidated by its process as the wheel of life turns on.
A narcoleptic in the chicken coop of history: notes of a passive aggressive philosopher, part 1
Is it possible to work locally and think globally as the old activist slogan exhorts us? What if we want to, but i our hands are tied, our brains are quietly liquifying in the solvent of information? What good does a glimpse of the blue marble do us anymore?
When did mankind begin to think of the globe as a factor in individual life? When Napolean III commissioned the massive renewal of Paris, beginning with the excavation of eight lane radial boulevards radiating from the center of the city, engineers and planners were amazed to discover families of Parisiens who had never ventured more than 4 blocks from their home in the course of several generations! Now that is parochial. But it stands for the vast majority of humanity who do not have global horizons projected onto the inner surface of their hi-tech augmented thought goggles.
For the record, I was one of the kids who came of age with a Saturn rocket lighting up the night skies, the lunar lander a metallic zygote touching the great egg/moon with an act of fertilization which promised to give birth to the New Man. It was a moment midwifed by the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG and consecrated by the martydom of a King and a Royal Pretender.
I am sobered by the failure of my generation to make the new man stand upright in any form except a wooden effigy, however soulful and cool it might be.
The New Man is supine, a horizontal figure that recalls the image of Marat in his bath, Gulliver wired by the Lilliputs, Siva sleeping despite the attentive entreaties of Shakti.
Shakti entreats. The active feminine is empowered to rouse the sleeping masculine spirit from its irresponsible slumber, to join the dance. It is a fraught dance, but it is life.
How does the globe, and global consciousness, help or hinder this romance?
Is it possible to work locally and think globally as the old activist slogan exhorts us? What if we want to, but i our hands are tied, our brains are quietly liquifying in the solvent of information? What good does a glimpse of the blue marble do us anymore?
When did mankind begin to think of the globe as a factor in individual life? When Napolean III commissioned the massive renewal of Paris, beginning with the excavation of eight lane radial boulevards radiating from the center of the city, engineers and planners were amazed to discover families of Parisiens who had never ventured more than 4 blocks from their home in the course of several generations! Now that is parochial. But it stands for the vast majority of humanity who do not have global horizons projected onto the inner surface of their hi-tech augmented thought goggles.
For the record, I was one of the kids who came of age with a Saturn rocket lighting up the night skies, the lunar lander a metallic zygote touching the great egg/moon with an act of fertilization which promised to give birth to the New Man. It was a moment midwifed by the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG and consecrated by the martydom of a King and a Royal Pretender.
I am sobered by the failure of my generation to make the new man stand upright in any form except a wooden effigy, however soulful and cool it might be.
The New Man is supine, a horizontal figure that recalls the image of Marat in his bath, Gulliver wired by the Lilliputs, Siva sleeping despite the attentive entreaties of Shakti.
Shakti entreats. The active feminine is empowered to rouse the sleeping masculine spirit from its irresponsible slumber, to join the dance. It is a fraught dance, but it is life.
How does the globe, and global consciousness, help or hinder this romance?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
