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.
30.9.03
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.
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