5/30/07 The Mountaintop
Yesterday I found myself in an unusual situation: I was able to tell a friend that I was caught up, that I'd done everything that absolutely needed to be done that day. "What," she asked, "does being caught up feel like?"
Well, I'll tell you, by quoting passages from two different books. The first thing I felt was that now I'd done everything I had to do, I could contemplate the vast expanse of things I ought to do. This was disheartening. It reminded me of a passage from the book Alive, by Piers Paul Read, the story of a group of Uruguayan rugby players who survived a plane crash in the Andes in 1972. They were given up for lost, and spent two months trapped in the snowy cordillera. Finally two of them made the near-impossible climb over the mountain to the west, hoping that the villages of the Chilean foothills would come into view. Fernando Parrado, one of these last-hope expeditionaries, managed the near-vertical final ascent, and found himself on a narrow flat area that he realized was the summit. He straightened up, rushed to the far edge, and looked west:
Parrado's joy at having made it lasted for only the few seconds it took him to scramble to his feet; the view before him was not of green valleys running down toward the Pacific Ocean but an endless expanse of snow-covered mountains. From where he stood, nothing blocked his view of vast cordillera, and for the first time Parrado felt that they were finished. He sank to his knees and wanted to curse and cry to heaven at the injustice, but no sound came from his mouth....
That's pretty much what it was like, thinking about the things I ought to do. If I exaggerate, I do so only slightly. But Parrado felt a faint hope stirring in him in the next moment, and so did I. Someday, I said to myself, I could get enough done that I might be able to relax for a while. Or maybe it wasn't so much that I, myself, could hope for that—it was more that I saw it as a possibility, as something people generally might hope for and aspire to. And then I realized there was another passage from another, rather older book that was relevant:
And the Lord spake unto Moses that selfsame day, saying, Get thee up into this mountain Abarim, unto mount Nebo, which is in the land of Moab, that is over against Jericho, and behold the land of Canaan....
Because of his transgressions, it was Moses' fate to die on that mountain, but God cut him some slack and at least let him see the Promised Land. And sometimes that's enough, just seeing the goal in front of you, even if you're pretty sure you'll never get there. I can imagine what it's like—a hammock, a magazine, the jingle of ice cubes, and peace in my heart. For the briefest moment, I had a glimpse of it, up there on the mountaintop. And now, if you'll excuse me, I have an article due today and I'm behind on it, and I need to try to get caught up again.
5/29/07 Lost Causes
I don't know about your allergies, but I know when mine are worst: when the multiflora rose is blooming. You see it along all the roads, a tall bush that extends like a hedge for as far as you can see, thickly covered in late May with small white blossoms. It looks cheerful and springlike, but since I've come to associate it with the height of allergy season the cheerfulness seems to have a certain mocking quality for me.
But I've been doing some research and it seems that I can't blame this one plant. I looked up Pollen.com to find out—well, to find out what? I didn't really think about it. I suppose I had a vague desire to be told that if I just hold out a few more days I can stop sneezing and taking antihistamines and all that fun stuff. I wanted to know that relief is on the way, the cavalry are charging over the hill, that this particular annoyance is finite. But the only thing I found out is what I suspected: there are 36 significant allergens happening in my area right now, and multiflora rose isn't one of them. I'd like to be fair to myself and point out that I never actually accused the multiflora rose of being the culprit, even though it always just happened to be hanging around the crime scene when the police rolled up. But again, it seems the predominant allergens around here lately are oak, mulberry, and grass. How can I harden my heart against those guys? Mulberry messes up sidewalks and silkworms eat it: that's all I know about the mulberry. Oak and grass—well, they're family. So all the information I've gleaned just brings me back where I started: You sneeze for a while in the spring, and then it stops.
I went to a baseball game last night. In some circles, this is considered news. A couple of nights ago I told my brother-in-law that I was going to see a baseball game. "You're going to a ball game?" he asked. He seemed shocked into silence that such a thing could be. The silence lengthened to the point that it was growing awkward. "Actually," I said, "I'm getting together with a Communist knitting group." But really, I honestly did go to a ball game last night, Phils and Diamondbacks. Before I was invited to see the game, my awareness that there was such a team as the Diamondbacks hovered between vague and nonexistent. I'm not a huge sports fan, to tell the truth. I have a fishing buddy who prefers saltwater fish—"I fish for trout twice a year, whether I need to or not," he says—and that's the way I am about baseball. I like it fine, I had it explained to me long ago and I can appreciate its history and subtleties without actually knowing much about them. What I do like about it, besides the communally festive spirit of the park, is that it provides drama, certainly, but visual structure is loose and open—you can see everything. There's tension: The players are arranged in a certain situation, the pitcher throws, there's an outcome, and the tension is relieved. You have the same thing in football, but the players are all bunched up in an angry knot. It's the difference between the lovely, open geometry of a bicycle and the tight, concentrated, all-business drill bit they use in oil wells. Both assemblies get their respective jobs done, but I have a definite preference about which one I'd like to look at. Philadelphia has a nice new baseball park, so maybe I'll go more often, you never know.
What's that? Oh! Right. The Phils lost, 11–5. My season-ticket-owning friend and I left early, at the point where the Phils needed eight runs just to tie the game. But the big news is that although Ryan Howard left the game toward the end, it's only a leg cramp, so you don't need to worry.
5/28/07 Oh Hai. Bin Chekn Out Lolcatz.
I just discovered a new timewaster, and I learned about it the same way I learn about anything these days, by reading Slate. I'm not entirely hopeless—I mean, I know the Internets have lots of cat pictures and it's a tradition and all. But the Slate slideshow in question introduced me to lolcats, which have a certain style all their own.
It soon became obvious that true lolcats have captions with a certain type of misspelling, partly based on texting, partly on gamer slang, partly on general youth culture about which I know next to nothing, and partly on the sort of pidgin that cats and humans might create if they talked in words a lot. It's fun, in other words. The actual captions are often done in a font called Impact with an outline. So I tried doing one myself. But if you go to a site called I Can Has Cheezburger? you'll find many, many more. Many months ago I noted that a tech reviewer said something about Apple's .Mac service offering more space on their servers for subscribers and that was a benefit because "the world needs more pictures of your cat." I noted it with some annoyance—the world needs all the help it can get, and looking at pictures of my own and other people's cats doesn't seem like the absolute worst way I could spend my time. Where's the harm, really? And any rate, enjoy the lolcats (or lolcatz in lolcatspeak) and have a good Caturday, you all.
5/27/07 Jumbo Mumbo
I listen to the radio, you know, and I just shake my head. This Memorial Day sees the opening of the Creation Museum, a $27 million effort to prove that there was no evolution. I'm not sure what to say to people who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible or any other religious text, all of which were produced by people too ignorant to understand the mechanics of rainfall. (I suppose you could start by saying "Snap out of it!") But I have one question for Mr. Ham: OK, suppose the dinosaurs and cave people coexisted. Don't you think the cave people would have been moved, just once, to paint one? 'Splain me that!
And then there are some people who aren't quite convinced that the earth goes around the sun. (Really.) And there really are flat-earthers too. Why don't they have fancy museums too? It doesn't seem fair.
But let's get off this subject because it makes me wild. The arguments for evolution are overwhelming and innumerable; the arguments that an old man with a beard in the sky created everything all at once 10,000 years ago are rather weaker. End of story. If you want to be serious person you really need to come to terms with this. (Are you listening, presidential candidates?) Once, when I was four or five, I was told that if you hold a rabbit by its hind legs, its eyes will fall out. The young boy who told me that said it very confidently, and I supposed it might be true. Today, I have my doubts. So if you need to believe childish fables to get through your day, then all I hope is that the Flying Spaghetti Monster touches you with his noodly appendage and helps you grow some sense. And snap out of it!
5/26/07 You Mean Run, You Idiot
I think my life might have been quite a bit different—not better, necessarily, but certainly different—if I had felt good about going to school. I never did, really. I've always enjoyed learning, but school was not synonymous. I was telling a friend last night that first of all, my class was famous for having no "school spirit"—we felt no special attachment for or loyalty to our school at all. Once in ninth grade they trooped us outside one day for a pep rally. We had no idea what a pep rally was, or what role we were supposed to play in it. We all sat on a grassy bank, and watched the cheerleaders do cheers. We watched them silently, perplexed, as I say. Then we were trooped back inside.
This was a brand-new school building with a brand-new principal, and in a few minutes his voice came over the loudspeaker. In a tone of dumbfounded near-rage, he told us that when we had a pep rally we were supposed to cheer for our teams and our school. We would do the pep rally over again tomorrow, he said, and he expected cheering.
Well, we thought, these continuing pep rallies could stretch out until the crack of doom if we didn't give the man what he wanted. The next day, the cheerleaders cheered, and we cheered too. We didn't feel any differently about things, but it just didn't seem worth making a stand over.
The principal never really had control that year. There was clearly a philosophy that the students would have the maximum amount of freedom and responsibility. It worked reasonably well, but I don't think the principal, a former minor-league baseball player, was really committed to it. I think it was forced on him, and he didn't like it a bit, actually. He made a big speech in the beginning of the year. "This school will be student oriented," he said ominously, but it will not be student ran!" We never found out exactly what "student oriented" meant, exactly. If you're familiar with the educational world, you know that it tends to use terms that don't seem to mean much. Clearly he didn't like the idea much himself, but for my part I just sort of stopped taking him seriously after he said the school would not be "student ran." Probably a lot of us did. When you're a ninth-grader and your knowledge of proper English surpasses the principal's, it shakes your confidence in the man as an educator. Another thing that lowered our opinion of him was his focusing on water pistols. There was a vogue for water pistols that year, with many a pitched battle fought in the hall, and the principal seemed to take this as an affront. (More innoncent days, yes, I know.) He spent a lot of time searching for and confiscating them, and eventually acquired several shopping bags full of them. Again, we thought less of him for it, assuming that he had better things to do, but as I say, the times were more innocent and we were younger then.
Another thing I recalled as I mused on my schooling last night was the penchant the gym teachers had for paddling the boys. You'd be paddled (hard enough to raise vivid welts) for certain minor infractions, but you'd also be paddled for being the last into the gym after changing into your gym clothes. This seemed not quite right to me—logically someone had to be last, no matter how frantically everyone scrambled not to be. This suggests, of course, that the teachers liked to paddle young men. In today's less innocent age, that raises eyebrows, of course. I didn't suffer this fate much, but I still remember those petty tyrants with enough resentment that I'd enjoy running into one at a bar and having a frank exchange of views. I wouldn't even mind taking a poke at one—they'd be in their seventies by now anyway, and I'd have a pretty good shot at carrying the day.
"Maybe they'd apologize," said my friend, who has had little experience in her life with male gym teachers. I dismissed this with a lazy wave of my hand. "Their broken jaws," I said, "will be apology enough."
5/25/07 Summer With a Capital B
It's the Memorial Day weekend, the traditional start of summer, and it's not even 10 a.m. yet and it's hot. The sky is a blinding white, not a trace of blue. Even down here on the ground, the sunlight seems like a semisolid, an amber-colored viscous substance in which the houses, trees and steets are held fast. The old lady two doors down went out just now and put one of those metallic dashboard protector things inside her windshield. The few people who appear on the sidewalks stumble along slowly, evidently trying not to get themselves sweaty. I'm sitting on the porch myself, and to type this I have to squint against the glare of the great tyrant star. And it's still not even 10 a.m.! The people two doors down in the opposite direction from the old lady have a parrot, and its squawkings add to the oppressive tropical feeling. A guy went by with his car windows open just now, loudly singing an opera aria, and clearly trying to stand out as the first person of the summer to go out of his head from the heat. Just now I looked up the Noel Coward song, Mad Dogs and Englishmen, which pretty much sums up my feeling on how much sense it makes to go out in the hot sun. ("Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun; the toughest Burmese bandit can never understand it...") And the opera guy just went by again. I'm going to retreat inside before his fate becomes mine too.
5/24/07 Not Rich Yet
I didn't wake up fabulously rich yesterday. I didn't wake up fabulously rich today either, but yesterday it was at least a distant possibility. Sunday I had been coming home from an outing and I had a feeling—just one of those feelings you get—and my feeling told me to buy a Powerball ticket. For you foreign visitors, that's kind of an unofficial national lottery here, and the grand prize is always at least a million dollars. On Sunday, it was up to 63 million dollars, and I had a feeling that I could win. It was stormy as I drove home with my maybe-winning ticket. At one toll booth, I could see a rainbow up ahead, the kind at the bottom of which you find a pot of gold. I pointed it out to the toll booth attendant. "It's your lucky day," she said. I smiled—you don't know how lucky, I thought.
I had a couple of days to think about what I would do with all my money. Travel, certainly. I'd buy houses so I could conveniently stay in places I like—the Bahamas and France come to mind—but I didn't really think in terms of buying objects. If you offered me any car in the world as a gift, on condition that I didn't turn around and sell it, I might tell you to save your money. I have a perfectly good car already. (If you want to offer me something, offer me central air conditioning. That would improve my life in a way I'd really appreciate. I don't love cars, but I hate being hot.)
I think that if I suddenly became fabulously wealthy, I would travel for a while. Then I'd settle down to learn things. I'd go back to studying drawing. I'd study music and photography. I'd work at producing really good print and Web content, and offer it to people who didn't care how much money I had but only wanted good content, and if they said it was good and took it I'd feel proud and glad. And I'd help cats. There are lots of other philanthropical efforts devoted to all sorts of causes, but I personally think there are too many cats that need protection and help. People neglect cats without compunction and single them out for cruelty and I hate it. I'd love to have a vast estate, fenced in and patrolled by heavily armed guards, and inside it cats would be cared for and would live happy, safe lives. Occasionally I'd leave, to go do a travel story somewhere about fishing or food, and I'd come back and ask how all the cats were, and my staff would inform me that the cats were just fine.
But as I said, I woke up Thursday and I hadn't matched one blessed number. So much for feelings and all that The Secret gobbledygook. I guess I'll just keep on going out into the marketplace and offer words and images for money and then actually live on the money I'm given for them. I'm fairly content with that. The car runs fine, the house keeps the rain off, there's a window-unit air conditioner in the basement I can lug upstairs and put in the window, there's yogurt and granola in the kitchen for breakfast, and I just checked on the one cat I can afford to shelter. He's fine, just lying in a patch of sunlight, enjoying the calm morning. He doesn't care if I'm rich or not. And really, neither do I.
5/22/07 Nothing Crazy (Well, Maybe A Little)
I'm sitting on my porch again, it being a pleasant afternoon, and at the moment I'm not being accosted by irritating strangers, but that wasn't true not long ago. I had just gotten back from a meeting, and someone at the front door was giving it a vigorous knocking. This was odd—I don't get very many drop-ins, and it just didn't seem like a friend's knock, somehow. It was all business, the knock. I opened the door, and two well-dressed young fellows were there. I immediately started figuring out how to tell them my soul didn't need saving today, thanks anyway, but the guy was ahead of me. "Nothing crazy," he said. He introduced himself. We shook hands. He introduced the other guy. I shook hands with him too. "We're just here to talk about Pat's Pizza," the leader guy said. "Have you ever ordered from Pat's Pizza? I allowed as how I had. "This is one of our prime delivery areas," the guy said, "and we're going door to door, talking about about a new program we have for giving away free pizza." I made a face. The guy took it as a sign that I was very excited about getting free pizza. He started unfolding some sort of thick booklet with little coupons in it. "I just want to walk you through it, if you have the time," he said.
Well, friends, I think life is damn well complicated enough and getting more so all the time, and I wasn't interested in acquiring pizza in any way that required explanation. "I don't really have the time," I said. "I guess you're going out," Pizza Guy replied, gesturing to the laptop case I still, thank God, had slung around my shoulder because I'd just walked in. He started talking about coming back.
This has to be stopped and stopped now, I thought. I gave him a look. "I don't really want to talk to anybody about pizza," I said.
The guy made a mark in his book and started backing up. "Hopefully no one will come back and bother you," he said, but he didn't make any promises about it. I could have added that we both hope that, but I just let it go. But I'd like to add here, for anyone reading this who's connected with the marketing department at Pat's Family Restaurant, which has 42 locations, I'd like to add that I think it would be pointless for you to send anyone else around unless they actually have some pizza for me to try. I don't want anybody to talk to me, I don't want anything explained to me, I don't want to be walked through anything. If I want pizza, I'll just go and get some. Please don't come around, trying to sell pizza like it was insurance, or a religion, or anything else that requires long conversations and much consideration. It's a small town here, and if you make really good pizza then word of it will come to my ears, I assure you. Let's not complicate pizza, OK?
5/21/07 Now
I took a few minutes to sit on my porch, after the day's exertions, and watch the world go by. Not much of it went by, actually: a few birds, a few cars, a few people walking down the sidewalk. The warm breeze moved over me, not even so much a breeze as just air calmly moving. Power tools, cars on other streets, birdsong, the neighbor parking her car and talking on her cell phone. Birds hopping on the lawn, listening for worms, lighting on branches, landing on railings. Squirrels flirting about. A jet, moving slowly through the sky. And me, just taking it all in. I had a feeling just now that I understood wasn't nostalgia—it was more like I was remembering similar times in my life. I'd be at a concert, or a picnic with friends, or sitting on someone's porch of an evening, different things, really, but similar in that I was always content to be where I was for the moment, content just to be. That was how it was just now. I wasn't looking back and yearning for some other time, place, situation, whatever. I was just content to be where I was, and glad I'd had other moments like that. Glad to be here at the party, you know? Glad just to be.
5/20/07 Red in Tooth and Claw
It seemed like a fairly prosaic thing to do, taking coffee grounds (not grinds, people, if you don't mind) to the trash out back. I suppose it seemed like an ordinary morning to the mourning doves too, until a hawk slashed down and landed in the alley with one of them in its claws. They all started screeching at it, and I ran into the house for the video camera, but my coming back out disturbed the hawk and it flew away with its prey, over the shed two doors down and out of sight, the other doves yelling the whole time. I'm sorry, I'd have loved to offer you an avian snuff film, but it certainly did present me with an exciting little slice of nature right there, literally, in my own backyard. The raptors are something. When you watch them migrating or circling high over a field, they seem to represent our highest ideals and aspirations: freedom, nobility, all that. But they actually make a living by using their vastly superior sight, speed, weaponry and strength to rip open any member of a prey species that relaxes its guard. (We do tend to admire the predators, don't we?) A couple of years ago I was fishing along a beach in the Keys. A couple of teenagers and I watched an osprey fly calmly by with a mullet in its talons, heading on home. We were close enough to see the mullet's face. It looked embarrassed. The osprey held it firmly, and flew steadily on, and the mullet clearly had very little to look forward to. "Game over," one kid said. The osprey was just going about its business, after all, and presumably the other mullet resumed their ordinary activities as well. And everything's back to normal in my backyard now too, except there's one less mourning dove.
This, by the way, is what mourning doves say when a hawk is opening up a member of their neighborhood association:
