4/30/07
Beyond His Ken
Late one night long ago I caught this interview by accident. Tom Snyder talking to Ken Kesey and Jerry Garcia! Unbelievable! I sat up, astonished, and watched it unfold, two heroes of mine being interviewed by someone sadly ill-equipped to keep up with them. (But, to be generous, you have to give him credit: he tried. I mean, Johnny Carson wouldn't have had them on at all.) It was unforgettable, and I've been chuckling over it for 25 years afterward.Kesey was the Thomas Jefferson of the counterculture—he might not have made it happen singlehandedly, or he might have, it's hard to say. But it's hard to imagine it unfolding even remotely like it did without him. Garcia, of course, is Garcia. And the two of them giggle and laugh the whole time they're interviewed by Snyder because they're really, really bright guys with clever, uninhibited minds, and Snyder trails after them like a kid brother. They don't quite ditch him, they don't quite just take off and leave him, they're not that cruel, but there's this giddy tension the whole time, because they could.
If you have time, of course, go ahead and watch the whole thing, it's wonderful and hilarious. But if you're really, really in a hurry—if the building you're in is on fire, say—let it load and at least watch the eight seconds after the 3:12 mark. Snyder, with a mawkish sort of pseudo-tactful hesitation that will make you cringe, asks Kesey if he thinks all the drugs he's done in his life have caused him brain damage; Kesey answers with no hesitation at all. It's certainly the funniest response to an interviewer's question I've ever heard, and probably the funniest I'll ever hear. Without further ado:
4/29/07
The Matter with Mary Jane
Well, last night I took the horchata plunge. Back on the 22nd I mentioned that I'd identified the chalky white beverage available at the local Mexican ice-creamery as horchata, one of the Mexican cooling drinks called aguas frescas. It was a pleasant evening after a beautiful spring day yesterday, and people were coming in for ice cream in a steady stream, and the people behind the counters were dashing around to keep up. But the one guy smiled broadly when I asked for my drink and said, "You like horchata?" And indeed I do. It was delicious—as advertised, exactly like rice pudding except, of course, for the texture. I was struck by how this fellow was even more surprised and pleased than the other one by my interest. Lots of people like Mexican food in general, but asking for horchata seems to be like a secret handshake that gives you long-lost-cousin status.
I guess that's because rice pudding and related desserts are controversial, and feelings run high about them one way or the other. The first verse of A.A. Milne's poem "Rice Pudding" sums it up:
What is the matter with Mary Jane?
She's crying with all her might and main,
And she won't eat her dinner—rice pudding again—
What is the matter with Mary Jane?
I'll tell you what the matter is with Mary Jane—she's stupid. Rice pudding happens to be delicious, and so is the vastly underrated dessert called tapioca. There's a nice, old-world British quality to these things that I find comforting, plus which I like the taste and somebody else must like it too, because people still eat rice pudding and tapioca and drink horchata. Mary Jane and the rest of you are missing out and it's your loss.
I realize that all this talk about rice pudding and other comforting old-world desserts doesn't sound very butch, so to balance it I've reposted a picture of myself with a toothy fish caught on an uninhabited island in Belize. This may well be the most dashing moment of my life, and if I'm posthumously recognized as a benefactor of humanity and honored with a statue in a park, it is my wish that the design recreate this image. And thanks!
4/28/07
Senseless Beauty
If you're not a classical music fan, and many perfectly worthwhile people aren't, you may not be aware of a little kerfuffle set off recently by a couple of newspapers. The Washington Post took famous hottie violinist Joshua Bell, stood him up in a subway station like he was an ordinary street musician, and had him play to see what would happen. Which wasn't much, as it turned out. Most people rushed on by. It wasn't just us insensitive U.S. couch potatoes, either, in London they did essentially the same thing with Tasmin Little, with essentially the same results. This was presented with much sighing and tsk-tsking and sorrow that so many of us went rushing on by, ignoring something so obviously beautiful and special. And I think it's a shame, too. But I also think it's not quite that simple.
First of all, people are usually in subways because they're trying to get somewhere. Jobs, usually, is where they're going, especially during rush hour. Most of us working stiffs cannot come into work late and tell the boss we're sorry but we were listening, utterly enraptured, to a street musician in the subway. Yes, we should stop and smell the roses, and a good boss would encourage same—but on your own time, not the firm's.
Second, not everyone sees the beauty in a given piece of classical music. Even among classical music lovers, what enthralls one person leaves another pretty cold. It takes some familiarity to hear what's special in even the most widely loved artists' music. Art, music, nature, just about everything that's been accused of harboring beauty is at least partly an acquired taste. Unless you're a fan, the most exquisite pieces by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and the rest of the gang will sound simply and forgettably pretty, like a music box. (An aside: God damn any school district official who's voted to cut off funds for art and music education. And once more, with feeling: God damn you.)
So let's cut everyone some slack here. As I recall, the last time I was in Washington, I was walking back from the National Geographic building toward Union Station, talking with a colleague. We passed a street musician, a young kid doing percussion on plastic paint drums and so forth. He was damn good, and there was a crowd standing there, listening to him, and I remember wishing I could stop and get some video of him. But I went on by, big Philistine non-appreciator that I am. And a good thing, too, because about three blocks from the station, I casually looked at my watch. Five to one, it was. "Jesus Christ!" I cried. "I've got to get to my train!" So I ran, bobbing and weaving like a halfback, the whole way, and collapsed in my seat on the train with seconds to spare, a sweaty, disheveled mess. There might have been some music playing in the station, music so transcendently beautiful as to heal every wound my soul ever suffered, so beautiful as to bring tears to my eyes, to carry me and all the hearers round about to a realm beyond happiness and sorrow, a realm of the eternal and the true. There might have been, but I wouldn't have heard it—the blood was pounding in my ears from running three blocks with a camera and laptop in my briefcase in that mad dash to catch my train. If you really want people to stop and listen to some famous fiddler, put the fiddler in the park. The passersby would have more leisure to stop, listen, and maybe appreciate the music. You'd end up with at least as many people as the drummer kid on the street did—people who'd stop and say, "You know, that guy's pretty good." It would be a fairer experiment to offer the concert artist creating beautiful music in a spot where people would have a fighting chance of noticing and appreciating it. But of course it wouldn't be nearly as good a newspaper story, of course. Less sighing and tsk-tsking. But it would be awfully nice, all the same.
4/27/07
Water Under the Bridge
I'll often pick up a stray piece of paper and read what may be on it, hoping to find something interesting. As it happened, today I picked up an old piano exercise book (Czerny, if you're interested), and was flipping through it. A little piece of paper fell out, so I unfolded it. It was faded and hard to read, but when it came into focus and I saw what it really was, I couldn't quite believe it.
See, some twelve years ago, I was living a very different life. I was 39, living in the country, a few years into a new job. It wasn't much of a job, really, but I couldn't think of what else I wanted to do. It was pleasant, living out among the horse farms, but I had no real role to play out there. I was in one of those romantic relationships that aren't what you'd hoped for but still go on for years because you decide every day that even though there's much bad about it, much is good too. I had, in short, given up most of my ambitions, and I lived life day to day. I didn't feel old, exactly, just done.
There was a rod and gun club down the road, and I had Fridays off at this relatively new job, and since most people I knew worked on Fridays I had to find something to do with myself. So I got to wondering if it wouldn't be fun to fish on Fridays at the pond the gun club had. I went to my parents' house, rooted around in some old bins, and sure enough, there it was—my old fly rod from when I was a kid. I was nuts for fishing when I was little, and since all the books said fly fishing was the highest form of the art, I wanted to try it. And even for my ten-year-old self, it became something of a passion. But in a short while, adolescence settled in and I wanted to do the stuff the other guys were doing, and that wasn't fly fishing. A quarter of a century went by without much fishing in it.
Until that spring. I took the old rod, and a few old flies I still had, and caught fish. It was still fun. So to stock up I went to the local fly shop, and the guys there helped me understand that my equipment was outmoded by several decades and I'd do well to modernize. We went out on the lawn and swung a few rods, and I could see the modern ones were far better. I was strapped for cash, but this seemed important, so I purchased a modest but very serviceable kit—rod, reel, line—and I was ready to go.
In the twelve years since, a whole hell of a lot has happened. Fishing became a passion, an addiction. I've traveled from Belize to British Columbia to catch fish, and around home I've spent countless hours prowling up streams, catching trout with the rod and reel I bought that day. I spent day after day, all those years, crouching by streams, walking over meadows and through forests. I sat at night tying flies and dreaming of more fishing.
"I don't know exactly what fly-fishing teaches us," says author John Gierach, "but I think it's something we need to know." I needed to know something back then, without being sure what it was, and eventually I came to know it. Not only because of the fishing, certainly. But the fishing didn't hurt. And now my life is very different. Since that day I've found I still care about things I thought I'd given up on—music, photography, writing, my own life. Things have very much changed, since I bought that first kit. Much lost, certainly but much gained, and much regained. Sometimes you run across some little object like that receipt, and suddenly the past is there, in your hand, to be examined and considered, poignantly tangible. There, in your hand, is a souvenir from the day your life changed.
A few minutes after I first found it, I looked a little more closely. It wasn't merely twelve years ago that I bought that rod. If you've looked at the image, you'll see what I only saw after those few minutes. No, it wasn't merely twelve years ago. It was twelve years ago today. And since it was at 2:47 p.m., that's the exact moment I'll post this. Twelve years of my life, a very eventful and change-filled segment of it, full of joy and grief and defeat and discovery, all of it framed on the far end by this faded piece of paper that fell out of a book I opened only by the merest chance. Twelve years ago today, it was.
4/25/07
You Will Pass Pleasant One Time
OK, we're doing this right today, I've got one amusing bit of fluff to pass on and then I really must get down to work. It's not even 7:30 a.m. yet, so you can't say I'm dawdling the day away. Now, a number of years ago a friend sent me an e-mail that ended with three paragraphs of near-unintelligible gibberish and a link. Thinking to decipher this cryptic message, I clicked on the link, of course, but it just got weirder and weirder when I saw where I'd landed. Part of it was simply bad translation—oh, man, there's no doubt about that—but also there are some cultural things that just don't translate either. Let's just say that I never thought my own cat would benefit from the products offered here and I think I speak for him as well when I say that.
Naturally I showed the site to friends around the office, and we all howled. But soon after that, the translators must have showed their copy to someone who actually knew something about English, because it became noticeably more comprehensible. I'm glad to say it's gone back to its original glorious insanity. I wondered for about a millisecond how that happened, and then it occurred to me that the original writers didn't care about the opinion of people who actually knew—they liked it the way they'd done it the first time. If you're a doctor, lawyer, writer, editor, parent, child, legislator, voter, contractor, shoe salesperson—if, in other words, you've ever been in a position to give people some good advice and watched in dismay as they failed to take it, you'll appreciate this. It's an example of how wrong you can persist in being if you don't listen to people who actually know something. And in conclusion, let me say, like the Cat Prin people do, "You will say then, without forgetting the language of gratitude to a cat. "–– be flooded –– a way –– good –– having done one's best –– ! –– "
4/24/07
Disoriented Times One
I think that a while ago I mentioned those occasional moments when you feel weirdly dislocated. I was crouching by a trout stream once, I think I said, and made a short cast to some rising fish. The leader unfurled toward them, straightened out, and began to fall toward the water. Then it stopped. And began rising. The laws of gravity seemed to have been overturned for a psychedelic moment, and then I saw that a dragonfly had seized the leader in mid-fall and was trying to fly away with it.
Well, yesterday I was at the bank. They come on as serious people at most banks, and when they assert a thing you unconsciously assume it's probably true, right? I was making a deposit, and while the clerk was stamping things I looked up. The wall calendar, the kind where you tear off the top page each day, said "Wednesday, April 25." Hmm. I looked at the slip she'd given me. "4/25/07," it said. I began to feel groggy, and leaned in to her to ask a discreet question.
"Excuse me," I said. "But isn't it Tuesday today?"
All the tellers started nodding at once, like horses in their stalls. Indeed it was Tuesday. But after 3 p.m., it's officially tomorrow at this bank, they explained. "You're OK," they said reassuringly.
But I was still a little discombobulated. If you're very sick, or drunk, or in insulin shock or crazy or whatever, the health-care folks will ask you if you know who you are, where you are, and the date. This is called being "oriented times three." I found it a little disturbing to wonder, even briefly, if I was really sure about all three, and it must have showed, because they repeated "You're OK" several more times as I walked out.
4/23/07
April, Memory, Desire, Etc.
I'm sure it looks odd on the occasional evening when a grown man walks through town with a fishing vest and the two halves of a fly rod—crossing the street, walking past the storefronts, seemingly far away from any place a fish might lurk. But it happens that the park on the northeast end of town has a couple of good bass lakes in it and it's only a 15 minute walk from my front porch. And it also happens that if you drive, it's easier for them to chase you out when dusk falls. So I walk. I walked there last night, a beautiful, soft, warm night, with spring coming on more and more. It was bright and sunny in the day, which makes the fish nervous (it makes it easier for predatory birds to see them), but I figured when the shadows fell on the water the bass might be on the prowl.
And so they were. I only got one strike, but it only takes one when you walk to the park after dinner for an hour. I tried various techniques and spots after that, but I decided I'd had my ration of fish action for the day and headed home. It was getting dark, and the underbrush was full of murky shadows along the path that winds up through the forest and toward the street. The tree trunks and branches, still waiting for leaves, were stark black against the purple glow of the sky as you looked up. Occasionally a bat would flit along above me. And overhead a thin veil of clouds moved along through the halo of light cast by the half moon.
Trying to be discreet—I could just imagine someone calling the police to say a man with a gun and an ammunition vest was walking down the street—I took what alleys I could. One went past an old folks' home. I could see in a window, and there was a television going. Then I saw a woman sitting by the far wall, nicely dressed and coiffed, but her head was hanging, and she had her hand to her face, as if she was in pain. I hope I was wrong, of course, but she looked lost and alone. And the wish came to me that I could float into the room unseen, like one of the incubi the medievals imagined, demons that seduce you while you sleep. But I would be a more benevolent incubus, of course. My only aim would be to draw her out on the porch. She would get up and go out there, without really knowing why, and smell the warm night air, the tree blossoms and flower beds, the grass and earth, and she would remember a similar night some sixty years ago, the first night she walked out with a boy she liked. They stopped under a dark tree, perhaps, or along a fence, or anywhere private, and she felt his hands moving on her, and desire filled her for the first time, like the wind filling a sail. I'm sure that she'd have remembered such a night, if some spirit had moved her to go out on the porch, the way it was last night, with dusk falling, and the breeze so moistly warm and fragrant.
4/22/07
Six Months Or So
I just paid my mortgage, car note, and medical insurance this afternoon, and when I compare the figures from the morning and now, it looks like my bank balance took a sucker punch and doubled over, gasping for air. But I've got three checks to deposit, and I'm saving them for tomorrow, like they were dessert. More checks are on the way. The warm springtime breeze is blowing in the window, and I've got the B-52s' first album blaring from iTunes, which would have attracted a few glances at the charnel house I used to work in. It was more than six months ago I left the place, and I've eaten every day since. The cat is snoozing in the bedroom on one end of the house, and I'm sitting here blogging in the office at the other. I still have title to the house, is the point. This freelancing thing is working out, if only day to day. That's really how you live your life, although you can kid yourself to the contrary.
I have a red Swingline stapler sitting next to me on the desk. It reminds me of the days when the movie "Office Space" helped me understand that constant, daily vocational misery is not a good way to live your life. When I worry about how much money might be coming in or going out, it reminds me that hating yourself and feeling trapped, tied down like Gulliver, is worse than any mere worry. I just thought of the passage in Huckleberry Finn where Jim tells Huck that his hairy arms and chest mean that one day he'll be rich. "Yes—en I's rich now, come to look at it," he says. "I owns mysef, en I's wuth eight hundred dollars." Jim, a slave, was about to be sold down the river, and he took matters into his own hands and escaped. He was a hunted fugitive, of course. But free. He owned himself, and he was worth eight hundred dollars. Today (the breeze continues; iTunes has switched to The Magic Flute) I feel like I own all eight hundred dollars worth of myself.
I wanted to ask a guy in an ice cream shop a question yesterday, but I waited until he was done ringing up my mango water ice. This is a Mexican-run ice cream shop called La Michoacana, and it seems to be a chain. Whattaya know? But they seem to be the real deal—in addition to the normal Murrican ice cream flavors they have tropical fruit like mango and papaya and an ice cream flavored with corn, of all things. I was getting my money out, and suddenly I saw the beverage dispensers as if for the first time. One was purple, another some other color, but the third was a pure white. Hmmm! I had a suspicion.
"Excuse me," I said. "What's that white drink there?"
The guy seemed a little hesitant. "It's a kind of drink like rice pudding," he said. I suppose he expected me to make a face or something. He had no way of knowing it, of course, but this was not a surprise.
"Oh, horchata," I said. A friend turned me on to this a few years ago. It's like the guy said, reminiscent of rice pudding in its flavor, but thin and light enough to be a cooling, refreshing drink, agua fresca in Spanish. It's something honestly different and unusual—I doubt they serve it at Taco Bell—and it's good, too. Good if you think so, I guess—lots of people would make a face. Lots of people make a face at anything they're not familiar with. Lots of people are stupid, to put it bluntly. But anyway, I'd heard of this, tried it, and liked it and knew the name,
"Right, horchata," the guy said. The italics indicate his correct pronunciation. He didn't fling his arms around me like a long-lost brother, of course. I don't think my knowing and liking horchata will bring world peace much closer, or anything. But that trace of wariness he'd evidenced was gone, and I was glad about that. I'm also glad to have a source of horchata. It's really pretty good, assuming you like rice pudding.
4/20/07
Having to See
My friend T. is not a person who exaggerates the interest, importance, or coolness of any given thing. Her judgment in those realms is close to impeccable.
But when I went out to visit her the other day at her soon to be former home in York, Pennsylvania, we went to lunch and on the way back she said "There's something you have to see before you leave" and so we went to see it. It's the famous Shoe House, which is pretty much what it sounds like. It was created by a philanthropist who sold shoes. Since then, when people visit York they are steered at some point to the Shoe House because when you're in York you have to see the Shoe House. You just do, that's all.
Nobody is better off for having seen the Shoe House, of course. Few people would look back over their lives and think that life was richer for having see the Shoe House. It's not especially beautiful. It's not especially interesting, frankly. You don't learn any life lessons from the Shoe House. The Grand Canyon may encourage you to reflect on the immensity of the universe, the vastness of time, the whatever of whatever. A Calder mobile says something about whimsy—it comes close to capturing the play spirit, the skipping of a child, say, in a way you can hang in a museum or living room and appreciate forever. The Shoe House tends to resist any attempt to see anything in it. Some crackpot decided to build a house that looks like a shoe and that really all there is to it. Any number of communities have absurd things like this, things that are unusual without actually being interesting. And when you have visitors in town who've never seen those things then they have to see them because they just do. You can protest, you can say that it's silly, that life is too short, you're not interested, you have a plane to catch, but it won't do any good. Taking you to see the whatever is an iron law. It's simplest just to get it over with.
By the way, I was just looking at the picture and noticed the sign. It's got one of those pointy hand symbols on it, which is helpful if you're reading the sign and wondering what direction to turn your head in order to see the actual Shoe House.
4/18/07
A Dose of Montanamine
You know, back in the bad old 19th-century days, when they didn't know much about curing sick people, they would send people with tuberculosis (called "consumption" then) to the mountains. Sometimes the people would get better—the dry air was in some way helpful, and the scenery bracing. Well, I think I'll call up my insurance company and remind them of that. I've been to several doctors over the years, trying to get my sinus problems cleared up, and nobody has managed to achieve more than a temporary placebo effect. They've given me every drug in the book. They've given me pills and sprays and whatever else. I've spent plenty of money on antibiotics and antihistamines and steroid sprays and expectorants—you'd be surprised how much an expectorant can cost just by itself, when all it does, as I understand, is make your nose run. How much total has the insurance company spent? Hundreds and hundreds, I should think—thousands, when you add it up.
So here's my offer. Send me to Montana. I'll fly standby, whatever. Put me up in a cheap fishing lodge. The screen door is falling off its hinges and could use a lick of paint? Perfect! The food is monotonous and the bedsprings past their prime? Love it! I just need to go fishing for a month or so in that dry, clear air. I'd have health-giving outdoor activity, less pollen, less humidity, and more inspiring vistas than the office window offers. It wouldn't cost that much. And it would cure me. And there's a precedent for it in the history of medicine. And nothing else has ever, ever worked.
But until my visionary solution is put into effect, I have to drag my headachey, miserable self around and try to be constructive when even concentrating is a challenge and a half-hour of housework leaves me exhausted. If you're having sinus problems lately you have my sincere sympathy.
4/17/07
Braking It Off
I opened a letter today, and sighed. Evidently I had missed an anniversary. It completely slipped my mind, but L. wanted me to know she was still thinking about me. It's been 18 months since I bought my used Camry from this dealership in the town where I used to work.
It's a good car. I'm satisfied. I was sort of hoping to get a Prius eventually, but sometimes you have to settle. I wasn't prepared for how enthusiastic the used car salesperson L. and the team at the dealership were, though. They kept impressing on me how committed they were to my ongoing happiness. In fact, they wanted to come to some sort of new owner ceremony where they made a fuss over you, welcomed you into the family, lavished you with gift certificates for oil changes and so forth. I demurred. I've bought cars before. It's no big deal. You sign a bunch of papers and drive away.
Or so I thought. The letters kept coming, and the phone calls. I would get a phone call every couple of weeks. "Hi, Matt!" the voice on the phone would say. "Hi," I'd say back. "It's L.!" "Oh. Hi, L. What can I do for you?" "Just making sure everything's OK with the car?" "Everything's fine." "Well, don't forget, if you know anyone who's in the market for a used car, mention my name." "I'll be sure to, L."
It was suffocating me. I never had the heart to spell it out for her—that while I appreciated the role she had played in my life, that role was now over. I wanted her to move on with her life, to forget about me and find other people to sell cars to. I haven't heard from her in a few months, actually, just the occasional impersonal note from the dealership about a special on oil changes. But evidently L. hasn't forgotten. It's touching, in a way, but sad, too. You see, L., I have to be honest—I just don't want a relationship with you. All I ever really wanted was a car, and I have that now. I'm happy, and I hope you are too. But if any of my friends ever want a used Toyota, and they want to deal with a competent, assiduous, knowledgeable salesperson—a salesperson who can come off a little needy, but who among us is perfect?—I'll have them get in touch.
4/16/07
Supp'd Full
In an hour or so I'll go and have dinner with my parents and my sister's family, since it's her anniversary, and my father will ask me if I heard about that thing at Virginia Tech. As a matter of fact, I have. Everyone has. But a long time ago I told myself to ignore the disaster du jour as much as possible. As I've often said, if you could experience one millionth of the pain that's felt every day on this earth, you'd immediately go insane. Every morning on the radio there's a new horror from Baghdad or Baquba. The other day, dozens of people in Thailand were swept over waterfalls by a flash flood. Famines, massacres. I can't make it stop. It's the human condition. And the media fascination with it, the rubbing of our noses in it, the it-bleeds-it-leads type of journalism—no. I say no. But I can't make my dad understand that. He thinks I'm cold and heartless. So I'll say yes, I heard about that thing at Virginia Tech. It was terrible, that thing.
In Act V of Macbeth, the title character hears women screaming somewhere in his castle. By now he's an embattled multiple murderer, and he notices, calmly, that this screaming doesn't upset him. "I have supp'd full with horrors," he says. Well, earlier today I supped with my former division director. She's one of the toughest, smartest people I've ever met, and one of the ones who enjoys life the most too. She likes to keep in touch with her former employees, so we get together, and today we met up at a local Japanese restaurant. It was cold, rainy, and blustery outside, but inside the restaurant it was dark and warm, and we settled happily into our seats.
"Are you having a glass of wine?" she asked. She's a bon vivant, and if it's not a high-powered business meeting she's always glad to have a glass of wine. I said I was, and when the waitress came I asked for hot sake. The former boss thought that was a good idea and joined me. The rain and wind and cold lashed the parking lot, but we poured our warm sake and laughed about the world's follies, and in particular we laughed about the follies of certain people we had the pleasure not to work with any more. And eventually we were done, and as I drove away in the wind and rain I heard about that thing at Virginia Tech. Yes, I heard about it. I hear about everything. I just wish that when my dad asks about it, that I could tell him the news that a couple of old colleagues had miso and sushi and warm sake, and it soothed and cheered them, and the rain and wind had to stay outside and do their ineffectual worst. No death, no screaming, no horrors. Just conversation, and a tasty lunch, and small cups of warm sake. That's my lead story tonight.
4/15/07
Pastels and Provocation
We've had several inches of rain overnight and today, and I'm sure the creeks are raging, the areas that always flood have flooded again, and that people have been inconvenienced and all. But I've enjoyed it, for the most part. I went into the basement to see if the water had come in, and it hadn't. When it does, it runs along the wall by the dryer, ironically enough, but it was dry today. I bent down to look behind the dryer and there, looking pugnaciously up at me, was a large brown spider.
Long ago I acquired from the first chapter of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn the notion that it's bad luck to kill a spider, and it's not good practice in purely rational terms either (they eat mosquitos, I assume and hope) so I don't. Live and let live, is my spider policy. I was about to say arachnid policy, but I remembered about scorpions. I think the presence of scorpions is a suggestion from God to look for another place to live. Venomous arthropods that crawl into your shoes are a deal-breaker for me, I'm afraid.
But I digress. It was a soft, gently colored day, with the solid overcast and steady rain, and the trees are in bloom lately. There's something about the mass of glowing color they offer on such days that may bring a reminiscent smile to those of you who, like politicians say, "experimented" with psychedelic drugs in your younger days. Colors can be brighter, but rarely richer, than the colors of tree blossoms in the light of an overcast day. You can see it here, of course. It's like an Impressionist or Pointillist painting, like Seurat, I think. The picture doesn't do it justice.
I've been meaning to mention the reindeer you see there. They caused a bit of to-do around here a few weeks ago. Obviously the homeowner in question digs them, and that's all there is to it—if he wants to have plywood reindeer in front of his house as spring comes on, well, as we used to say it's a free country. But someone wrote him a letter, and not the ordinary anonymous snippy neighbor letter either. It was from a woman who said she drives down the street regularly with her children and the reindeer make them scream in terror. She said if he didn't remove them she would take unspecified steps to make him regret it. She said not to try to dust the letter for fingerprints because she had wiped them off.
The neighbor called the cops and a squad car came by. I don't know whether they dusted for fingerprints, just in case, but I doubt it. I think the neighbor did the right thing in calling them, though, because you never know. I also think he did the right thing in defiantly keeping his reindeer on duty as spring paints the neighborhood with more and more life and color. If we put our reindeer in the basement, the terrorists will have won! It's not about Christmas, it's about your right to have reindeer on your lawn when you damn well please. Personally I like to have Indian corn hanging from my porch light all year round. Some people think I should only have it in the fall, but Reindeer Guy and I aren't backing down.
4/14/07
Bet-Hedging
If it's good enough for people who make airplanes and tall buildings, it's good enough for me. They're paid well, and they must know something. I'm talking about the date, if you must know. And it is, after all, today.
The BBC did a story about a creationist museum, and I was interested in their belief claim assertion that cavepersons shared the earth with dinosaurs. It made me think—you know all those cave paintings we have? The ones that show aurochs and mammoths and all kinds of fun critters but don't, um, show dinosaurs? No tyrannosaurs that I've seen, no stegosaurs, no pterodactyls. Seems like a remarkable omission, really. Just wondering.
4/12/07
Hunkering Down
Never mind the day listed above, you know what day it really is. I'm not taking any chances myself—not calling anybody for more work, not interacting with known volatile people, not doing anything at all dicey until midnight. I'm not all that superstitious, but I don't think you should ask for more trouble. Enough comes without the asking.
But I do have the occasional rational moment on the subject. Often, as I edge down the aisle of a jet, I notice there's no row 13. And I chuckle—how much unluckier is row 13 likely to be than row 11, or row 24? I mean, the way things go with airplanes, if row 13 has a bad day it's likely to be very nearly as bad a day for everyone else.
BTW, I love the phrase "have a bad day" as a euphemism and acquired it long ago while watching a TV show about stunt pilots. This one military aviator was talking about the hazards of flying upside down when you're only 20 feet or so above the ground. In addition to the obvious dangers of roaring along so close to the trees and building and such, he pointed out an extra one: in any moment of sudden stress, the pilot's natural impulse is to pull the aircraft sharply upwards. When you're flying upside down close to the ground, this guy said laconically, "that can cause you to have a bad day." I loved that.
So if you find yourself in an unusual situation today, keep your presence of mind, OK? The first morning some friends and I went fishing in the Bahamas last spring, one guy offered to drive, and he was going along cautiously on a narrow country road, getting used to driving on the left side. Soon another car came bombing toward him on the right. It's unsettling, at first, seeing a car roaring toward you as if it were on the wrong side. A guy who'd been to the Bahamas before leaned forward from the back seat, toward the driver's ear. "Left left left," he said. So if you're driving on what feels like the wrong side, or flying upside down, or just trying to get by generally, please remember what day it is and keep your wits about you. I don't want you to have a bad day.
And just for extra luck, here's a picture of a nearly black cat.
4/11/07
Busy, busy, busy
That, of course, is what you say whenever you are struck by the interlocking complexities of existence if you are a practicing Bokononist, a religion that was a theme in the novel Cat's Cradle, which was the master's thesis of a young WWII veteran named Kurt Vonnegut, who died yesterday. Vonnegut is easy to dismiss—decades ago someone called his work "sugar pills with a bitter coating"—but I think there was much to value in it. His style was direct and unsophisticated—that's one of the things that makes him easy to dismiss—but I think it's also one of the reasons to view him with respect and affection. One of his recurring characters was the science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, of whom Vonnegut said, "His prose was frightful. Only his ideas were good." Vonnegut's prose was hardly frightful, though, and he had many wonderful ideas. One was (from Cat's Cradle) the concept of the granfalloon, which is a group of people who believe themselves associated and similar but who really aren't. Even as a very young person, this made sense to me—I could see people who were loudly proud to belong to a certain religion, ethnicity, or whatever, something that was simply an accident of birth. I was born in Pennsylvania, but I cannot claim any particular honor merely because other Pennsylvanians have done worthy things; Pennsylvania is a granfalloon. I understood this better in later years when I read Language in Thought and Action, but that book only expanded on ideas Vonnegut had planted in my mind years before.
They call him a cynical humanist in the Wikipedia entry, and that's succinctly true, I'd say. I'd guess, never having known him, that he had kindly impulses, and viewed the human condition with great pity. He was intelligent, obviously. He was an anti-authoritarian, but he came by it honestly. An infantry scout in WWII, he was captured and sent to Dresden, and survived the firebombing. So you have an intelligent, insightful, articulate humanist, crawling out of the rubble and seeing what his own army had done—seeing, in the end, what people had done, have always done, still do. In Slaughterhouse-Five he'd said of his war veteran friends, "The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who'd really fought." Say what you will about Vonnegut, that he was a writer for adolescents or whatever. But he argued as forcefully as anyone ever has that bad leaders will use the abstracting power of language to dehumanize the enemy and start unnecessary wars. He came home from Dresden and spent the rest of his life trying to get people to think better. He was kind and funny and hated war, and his ideas were mostly good and his prose was more than adequate to express them. And that, I think, is enough to justify a life.
4/10/07
Next Question?
Anyone who visits my little literary rummage sale here is, of course, as welcome as the flowers in May, but sometimes when I look over some of the tracks people leave I scratch my head. It's fascinating to look at the "key searchphrases" list, which gives me the top 25 phrases used to find me here. Sometimes I'm simply astonished to see how many people are interested in mansard roofs—it's a perennial favorite, but not an itch the blogosphere in general spends much time scratching, so welcome, architecture buffs. I'm a newbie, but find it interesting.
But other phrases just make me wonder. The current month's oddest, most inexplicable one is this: "Snake smells of onions." Someone typed that into a search engine, and for the life of me I can't imagine why, and I'm not sure I want to know. And what I really can't imagine is how that brought them here, but I guess if life held no mysteries it would be a far poorer thing. And now I have to bolt, so I'll see you tomorrow.
4/9/07
Overview
Just read an article about the next big thing Twitter, which simply asks you "What are you doing?" You answer, and the world knows. Obviously the appeal is to get a kind of psychedelic awareness of what's going on everywhere. And as I thought about this, I suddenly remembered a story I'd read as a kid in an anthology called "Best in Children's Books," which Nelson Doubleday put out back in the day—assuming, of course, that "back in the day" can refer to the late '50s and early '60s. These books would come in the mail to the houses of all us little boomers. They're all over the used book sites now, and they're fondly remembered by me and I suppose others too. At any rate, there was a wonderful story in one of those books back then about these kids who go to a magical curio shop. One of the things there was a large globe, and if you looked more and more closely at, say, Africa, you could see herds of impalas leaping across the savannahs, and lions prowling the watering holes. Some forty years later, when I encountered Google Earth, I was, of course, amazed that you could fly over the entire earth from your desktop. But I'd also been there before, through that unknown author's imagination, so for me it was déjà vu all over again.
Oh, and do your kids a favor—read to them. Buy them books. And read yourself, too. Show them it's a good thing. I'm serious about this. Thus endeth the sermonette, and now we conclude our broadcast day.
4/7/07
Taking No Comfort
Well, there used to be road bikes, mountain bikes, and hybrid bikes. But now lately they seem to have invented something called a "comfort bike," which I guess is what they call it because "relaxed fit bike" didn't make a lot of sense. It has shock absorbers to soften the ride and an extra-large seat. I object to this. When the road is bumpy you just raise up on your legs to absorb the shocks, which is something everyone ambulatory should be able to accomplish. And I work hard to keep my own seat within reasonable size bounds and I think my bicycle should maintain the same standards.Frankly, I think we're drifting further and further away from any concept of outdoor effort here, we're sliding down toward rickshaws and recliners. And then there's another objection, the real and true one—for a few moments there, as I read about these comfort bikes, I thought they might be right for me. I don't want to be on the road any more, they're too crowded around here. I just want to bop around town on the quieter streets, maybe wheel around on the trails in the park, or go out to an orchard a few miles out of town. Mellow, you know? But I'll be damned if I'll buy a comfort bike, even if that might be what I really need. I just saw, to my intense relief, that you can get a hybrid that's meant more or less for my purposes. So as long as I'm in what I have decided to call the Denial Years I'm not opting for the comfort bike, thank you very much.
4/6/07
Happy Eostre
If your family doesn't get together for the important Christian holidays—perhaps because they're not Christians, for instance—you can still be part of the festivities at Christmas. A reasonably friendly and outgoing heathen or infidel can still usually find friends who will offer an invitation to their Christmas gatherings; it just seems like part of the general spirit of the thing.
Easter is different. Easter seems like it's for people's families and that's about it. I remember one Easter I hadn't bought any food, and searched the countryside nearly in vain for an open restaurant. Finally I found a place in a nearby shopping center, the Hong Kong something or other, a Chinese buffet that has the worst, blandest, most insipid food I may ever have eaten in a place that offers food in the expectation of payment. I kept shoveling it in, hoping to find some flavor in it somewhere, like a bloodhound baying through a dark forest, following a fast-fading scent. There's a local newspaper editor who's said to like the place, but my guess is she's beguiled more by the quantity—you can eat all you want—than by the quality.
At any rate, this morning I felt like going out for breakfast, so I went uptown and saw that the old-fashioned sandwich shop place was closed. This shocked me—they never close, but it's Easter. My one hope was the more yuppified new breakfast place in the next block. And yes, they were open. I wasn't dressed up, I was dressed for the grizzled old-timers at the traditional place, but I had a copy of Macworld in my hand, and if that's not a kind of passport into any upscale, yuppied-out public refreshment business like Starbuck's or whatever then I don't know what is.
There was one family of four who caught my attention by bursting into laughter at some remark. They were upscale, like the environment. The father was one of those keen, alert people who have a professional air and don't seem as though they would suffer fools gladly. He was slender, the kind of thinness that seems to grow from a very deep-rooted discipline. Mind and body serve the state! Flab is decadent! A doctor, I figured, or academic. The mother was a bit thicker through the body, which gave her the air of an empress. She held her jaw high, and it seemed formidable, like an icebreaking ship's prow. I could see her giving the people in a print shop hell about a party invitation: "I specifically asked that the paper be cream. This is bone. I asked that the copy be flush left. This is centered." And so on. A teenage daughter, a son about 11 or so. And after the burst of laughter settled, the son got up and gave his father one of those embraces that are a little overdone, a little theatrical, a little satiric, but that still are about 85 percent genuinely affectionate. "Oh, Dad," he said, "your cruelty is like music to me."
So I decided they probably were a happy family, but high-achievers, the kind where foolishness isn't suffered gladly and the conversation is like a volleyball game—you have to pay attention every minute, and be quick when your time comes. And they're all at least in the "gifted" intelligence range, and the kids are what used to be called "precocious:" they make remarks that are far more multilayered than the average dopey kid. And The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker arrive in their McMansion mailbox (or maybe they've rehabbed a stone farmhouse, I wouldn't be surprised).
The old breakfast place (it's called "Fran Keller's Eatery") has the better omelet, IMHO. And it has an old-world country folk American ambiance that it achieves without going to the trouble of putting old plows and pitchforks up on the wall. It's actually from that older world, one of the last vestiges of it around here, and it has a certain endangered-species preciousness to me because of that. But they've got great pancakes in the new place, and I've got to admit that "your cruelty is like music to me" is a pretty good crack for an 11-year-old. I could have sat in Keller's for a thousand thousand mornings and eaten a thousand thousand omelets and never have heard a kid say anything remotely like that to his father. So the different worlds here in the county are harmoniously mingling this Easter Sunday morning, and people are doing church and early dinner things with their families, and since the coffee shop is closed for the holiday, I have to make myself a cup if I want one. And if you'll excuse me, that's what I'm going to do.
4/5/07
Performance Anxiety
It was the first First Friday of the year here in town, which means various businesses set out blocks of cheese, baskets of crackers, and a little herd of half-filled plastic wineglasses and waited for the public to arrive. Which it mostly did, I'm glad to say. Some towns that lost their commercial reason for existing after the rise of suburbia simply give up, but others hang in there and reinvent themselves, and my town is doing that. Its purpose is to provide recreation to the surrounding suburbs. And why not? So you go into an art gallery, and there are people milling around, talking and commenting and checking prices and seeing and being seen.
I hang out too much in the library and I've gotten to know the people there—yeah, I'm a wild child, what can I say—so I stopped in there because I knew they had an evening program going. It turned out to be a combination of a folkie string band performance and little skits that brought to life some of the dialect poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar. And once again I'm amazed at how much literature gains by being spoken by actors. And once again I experienced the mixed emotions of being jammed into a small room dominated by earnest amateur performers. As usual, they were about 85 percent compelling, but the other 15 percent offered moments that made you cringe a little. And it isn't dark, and you're not in a large hall, and you can't look at your watch or read the ads in the program or look around at the audience or just zone out. No, they're right there, and they've come all this way to charm you and you will, by God, be charmed. So you smile genuinely most of the time and with a strained, false expression the other 15 percent. At one point they had a dance, and this woman came up the aisle and held her hand out insistently—I was being ordered to get up and caper about as if I was an experienced hoedown habitué. I managed to convince her, with a kind of performance of my own involving earnest and intense words, facial expressions, and body language, that I was waiting for a much colder day before I would get up to swing my partner and do-si-do. I was ready to plead that it was a medical thing: I'd embarrassed myself so much already in my life that any more could be fatal. See, people who go on stage think that everyone else wants to be like them, but we're too shy and need encouragement. But really, if you're one of those performers types and you're reading this, for once try to understand: Some of us simply don't want to. OK? We don't want to get up in the front of the room and clap and leap around like buffoons and get a laugh. Truly. OK? You believe me? Good. That's why they make chocolate and vanilla.
Since I haven't posted a photo for a while, here's one I took in the course of doing an article. Just kinda like it, and maybe you will too.
4/4/07
Hmmm.
Years ago I heard about an incident in a dentist's office in which a patient was given some form of anesthesia that caused him to become belligerent, to the point that the police were called and ended up shooting him to death. Something like that, at any rate. My experience at the dentist's office yesterday was less dramatic but there were a few wrinkles nonetheless.
I had gone to get my filling (well, a big gold molar filling called, I think, an "onlay") put back in my head after it came loose during the consumption of a macaroon. The dentists told me he'd use a stronger glue this time. Since I am the soul of tact, I wondered silently, to myself, why he hadn't used that stronger glue last time. It's more carcinogenic, maybe? It costs 12 cents more per dispenser? No idea. I just gave him a thumbs-up sign, since my mouth was full of cotton and steel tools and people's hands.
He replaced the onlay in the molar to see if it still fitted well. Then he had a spot of bother getting it out again, since it seemed to fit very well indeed. He was commenting on that, and I wanted to say I might as well be going, then, but I couldn't say it for the aforementioned reasons so I just waved bye-bye. But he didn't laugh—he was occupied, and he's a quick, nervous fellow generally. He's really a good dentist, but he should relax more, I think.
They shot air at my tooth to dry it—they often comment on how much saliva I produce, and I feel bad. I don't go around drooling or anything, just so you know. And I can't help it if it's a problem for them. I try to cooperate with people but I just don't have much control over this. The thing is, dryness is essential for gluing. So they're hovering over me, the dentist and the technician, and they've doubled up on the suction thingies and she's blowing air at the tooth and then he puts the glue in, puts more on the onlay, and puts it in.
And then he tells her, "I didn't want you to do that."
Hmm, I think to myself. Do what? There's a hubbub now. He's about five times more nervous than usual. He's got the tools going. "Suction," he says to the technician. "Quickly." And now he's got the onlay out again, and he's scraping away all the glue.
Now they put five of those cotton roll things in my mouth. I imagine I looked like a hamster on that side, but I'm just staring up at the light and can't see anything. More air on the tooth, and evidently the second time's a charm. I've had two meals since then, and all seems to be well. But it was interesting, sitting there with things going wrong and myself wide awake, wondering how the show would turn out. For a second or two I imagined myself heading to the hospital for emergency glue-related mouth surgery, or something l like that. I'm an optimist generally. I assume that I'll be in the majority to whom bad things generally don't happen until the Big Bad Thing comes along. In other words, I assume that like most people, the little things of life like dentist visits will transpire uneventfully and emergency-free. But for a second there I wasn't complacently sure about it—the possibility of a real problem suddenly seemed quite a bit likelier than usual. It was interesting. All's well that ends well, of course. But such things do make you say "hmm."
4/3/07
Declining Molars Nowadays
Usually eating a macaroon doesn't produce any news or consequences. You put the macaroon in your mouth, chew it up and swallow, and there's one less macaroon in the world. Then you eat another macaroon.
But last night I was having dinner with my parents and there were macaroons for dessert. I chewed a number of them up without incident, and then with one there was a hard nugget mixed in with the usual softer stuff. A stone? I extracted it, cleaned it up a bit with a napkin, and gazed at it in dismay. It gleamed beautifully, with the luster and weight of solid gold. The filling it was, from a back molar. Damn.
The day was otherwise a fine one. Met with a new client, and they have a good job for me. Nothing wrong with that. Then I went to the Apple Store to get a replacement multifunction printer for the defunct (and no longer manufactured) Epson CX4600. I got a Canon Pixma MP460, and so far it's fantastic. When you printed with the old one, it took ages and there was all this shaking and juddering and tapocketa-tapocketa noises. The new one makes a few fierce-sounding preliminary snorts, like a cartoon bull about to charge, and then thrusts the printed piece out at you zung! like that, in a rush. I scanned something and applied the optical character recognition software that came with it, and frankly the software reproduced the typed original with fewer errors than I probably would have made myself just typing it in. Long story short, I feel like I've wasted the best years of my life with the Epson when the Canon and I could have been happy together. Ah, well! Let it go! Live in the present! I'm sure all my friends are happy for the Canon and me, that we've found each other late in life this way.
And then the molar. So it was a day of ups and downs. I have a call in to the dentist. I told them it was a semi-emergency. It's painful if I try to drink anything hot or cold or eat anything solid. Other than that it's not a big deal.
4/2/07
Knowing It All Along
It's over. And I saw it coming from the first. I always knew. The Epson Stylus CX4600 multifunction printer and I simply have come to the end of our time together. I don't believe it, really, on one level. But on the other, as I say, I always saw this day coming.
It started out well, of course. It scanned, it printed, it copied. We were happy. It drank too much—I was always concerned about that, because its ink cartridges would suddenly be empty again and it would cost be about sixty bucks to replace them. But nobody's perfect, right? And it would get clogged in the summer—the Epson has its print heads in the unit, where Hewlett Packard has them on the replaceable ink cartridges themselves. The holes on the HP are bigger; the small holes in the Epson print more dots per inch, but tend to clog. So hey, it's high-strung, right? A little needy, a little neurotic, prone to having issues, but again—am I perfect myself? Assuredly not. So we lived together and the months went by, and despite my doubts I told myself things were OK.
And then yesterday came. Yesterday. I turned the unit on, and all the lights lit up at once and the copy-number area had a big letter "E" showing in it. "E" is not a good message for a machine to send. I had not seen an "E" from this machine before. So I unplugged it. When I plugged it back in, nothing. No lights. Silence fell, the eerie silence that fills a room when a machine is—is—
Sorry. I'll just have to spit this out—I can't quite believe it, but I think it had some sort of electronic equivalent of a stroke. Between one moment and the next, it gave up the ghost. No amount of unplugging and replugging seems to make any difference. I have to face it—it's over. And since I had it for two years and only paid 30 bucks for it when you figure the rebate in, I guess I got my money's worth.
But I can't help thinking back on that wintry day when I took it home for the first time. Your mind does range back, doesn't it? It was so new, so fresh. I took it out of the box, knowing that nobody had ever touched it before, that it was all mine. And yet, that shadow of doubt. You know how it is, when a new lover tells you, "My freedom and independence are very important to me." You may be envisioning a white picket fence, green grass and buttercups, toddlers frolicking, and that lover waving from the door as you come home. But you also know it isn't going to happen.
Well, that's how it was, that first day. They brought the box out, and right on the side, it said, "Great for fun, everyday projects." Which of course is marketing-speak for "If you look at this damn thing the wrong way, it'll break." And I knew, deep down, in that moment, that this day would come. We had fun. We did everyday projects. But the time has come for the Epson Stylus CX4600 multifunction printer and I to go our separate ways. The day I always knew was coming—that day, alas, is here.
4/1/07
Laffs
This morning NPR had a little feature about an organization I've patronized quite a bit back in the day, the S.S. Adams Company. Even when I was six, I knew all these things were incredibly corny, the whoopee cushions, the joy buzzers, the fake vomit and all the rest of it, that it wasn't actually meant to be used to fool people and play jokes on them, at least not by people in my g-g-g-generation. I'd look at these things, fascinated, as they hung on their rack in the hobby shop, and the corniness would radiate out at me in strong waves, like a powerful stench. But I think that's what was so compelling about them, really. It suggested there was a whole other world out there of disreputable but fun-loving folks having laffs at each other's expense, loud, braying laffs, like in the comic books—"Haw haw! That's rich!"—and so forth. I had this one uncle who was a sleekly satisfied successful business guy, but he had pictures from his youth on the wall in his foyer, and he was clearly a wise-guy street kid during the Depression. He seemed like a link to that raucous, vividly colored, disreputable world of wise guys in wide ties, drinking highballs and playing practical jokes with whoopee cushions and snakes jumping out of cans of peanuts and so forth. That world seemed tantalizingly close then, but astrally distant now. Tacky people amuse themselves with other ways today. And peanuts don't come in cans any more. But the S.S. Adams Company has those same cloth-covered spring snake things available these days in a yogurt package, which is comforting to know—they're adapting. And they have a camera that I'd actually like to own. It squirts people, of course. Stupid, I know. But then there's a little switch you turn unobtrusively. Then you give the camera to your victims and offer to let them have a revenge squirt, and it shoots backwards and gets the victims again. It's idiotic on one level and brilliant on another. And the company is located in Neptune, New Jersey. It just gets perfecter and perfecter. I think I love the S.S. Adams Company.
And just because I listen to NPR don't get the idea that I drive around in a Volvo with a bumper sticker that says "You can't hug a child with nuclear arms." I don't think bumper stickers are really up to the task of serious sociopolitical discourse. And Volvos are expensive to fix. I have a Toyota and if it has political views it keeps them to itself.
© Copyright 2007 by Matt Freeman. All Rights Reserved.