11/30/06
Only Connect
A moment ago the cat was sitting on my desk, feet tucked under him and his tail wrapped around them, with the half-sleepy, half-wise expression he sometimes has when he's in a peaceful good mood. How many times at the old office I would have loved to have had him there, I can't tell you. Yesterday I met with people in their offices to discuss publicity for the upcoming year, and I made a remark about how it will serve them well to become a known source of information on aging concerns. Their new director of marketing gave me a look of recognition, the one that says "You and I think much more alike than I suspected until this moment." A moment later he said aloud that he very much agreed, but he didn't need to, I already knew. Almost the moment I got home, friends called: They were working on a home renovation project in town, and were going out for lunch. Later in the afternoon I dropped by the library to see how my websites were working on Windows machines; at home I use Macs. I found a problem, went home and took one letter out of a URL, then went back and it was fixed.
This morning I got a haircut. It's the second time there, they know me now, and we talked and laughed about a number of things, including the mishaps you get into fishing. The stylist's fiancé had gone camping and fishing with friends, and they had burned something in their campfire that acted the way poison ivy does when burned, and by way of reply I talked about "monkey butt," a problem you encounter wading shallow water in the tropics. It's a combination of salt, moisture, heat, and chafing, and it's best avoided. And then I went to the little hole-in-the-wall sandwich shop at the end of the alley in back of my place, and I picked up a BLT I'd called in. As I went in, I felt a gust of happiness, and wondered why. I've got plenty to worry about, if I chose to; plenty to feel sorrow and regret over if I allowed myself. But no—I'm just going through my day, vaguely but definitely happy. It's unseasonably warm today, tomorrow they're calling for wind and storms, then cold the day after that. It's all OK, the way I feel today. I've been engaging with the world, lately, much more than I have for years. Connecting, doing, acting. Living, in a word. There's a bioluminescent fungus called foxfire that you read about. That's how I feel this afternoon: not spectacular, not triumphant, necessarily, not extravagant or even very special. Just a fungus, after all, but quietly glowing. Which is nice.
11/29/06
It's Your Funeral
I just saw a news story about an illustrator's end, and it got me thinking. When we were kids, all we young guys agreed that the only proper funeral was a Viking funeral. If you weren't a teenage boy in the '70s, I should explain that we wanted to be placed on a Viking longboat which would then be pushed out to sea as the tide went out and set on fire. Cool! I actually think I'd still rather like that. I certainly can't think of a better way to make an exit, and now that I have some experience with funerals I don't think anyone has improved on that idea yet. I was involved for a long time with a woman who dreamed of a Nick and Nora Charles world the way religious people think of heaven. She dreamed of late-'30s style nightclubs with Art Deco décor and gowns and tuxedoes and sparkling conversation. But her entire family was from a working-class background, and occasionally when there wasn't anything else to brood about she would brood about how they were all too likely to give her a tacky funeral. I encouraged her to spell everything out in great detail in one of those living will things, but the fact is that with your own funeral you really have to delegate a lot of the responsibility and just trust that it'll be done the way you wanted.
Anyway, the reason I thought about this is that news story I mentioned. Here's a guy who lived a pretty good life, who undoubtedly did exactly the work he wanted to do. You don't become a celebrated comic-book illustrator because your father forced you into it, or anything, like you come from a long line of them and it's the family business. And you don't get famous at it if it's really not you, right? OK, so he had a good life. But I can just imagine that woman's face—eyes round with shock, jaw halfway to the floor, entire body rigid—if she were told that he died (diabetes complications) in Superman pajamas, covered with a Batman blanket.
Wow.
I mean, there's two ends of a continuum sort of meeting there. Pop culture and the Great Mystery. Touching, and yet faintly ridiculous. I don't know. I can't help seeing him as childlike, vulnerable, as though he was going backward in time somehow and then fading to nothing. My old girlfriend would be aghast, but it makes me pensive, it really does.
Well. I'd still prefer the flaming ship myself, but really that's just as much a pop culture thing as the pajamas and blanket. Probably if real Vikings saw the movies we guys were basing our funeral plans on, they'd slap their knees and laugh until they were sick. And then they'd say not to worry so much about your funeral. They were live-today types, those Vikings. I think that's what we young guys really liked about them in the first place.
11/28/06
Just Thought It Should Be Said
The other day I updated my browser to Firefox 2.0. I've used Firefox for ages now, and this one has even more gee-whiz features, but I noticed one odd thing: The favicon for Amazon.com is now showing up on my bookmark for this blog. I don't know why; certainly I didn't deliberately do anything myself to cause this. I don't have any business relationship with Amazon except that I buy a lot of stuff from them. But maybe the burgeoning popularity of this site has inspired Amazon to throw out a subtle feeler, because they'd like to collaborate with me in some way. If so, I'd like to say I'm certainly open to the idea. All very informal, you know, just sort of kicking around the possibilities.
We've had a lot of warm weather here, even though it's late fall, but you know it's just temporary. The temperatures are set to drop twenty degrees (Fahrenheit, but still) in the course of a week, and we'll click ahead one full season in a hurry. Personally that's fine with me. Maybe it's because I loved skiing when I was a kid, and I loved to have school closed by snow, but I don't mind winter much. Here's a photo from last year that I hope proves that winter furnishes some of the prettier and more dramatic scenery of the year. Now, once winter has settled in for a while—late January, say—I may be equally ready for spring. Of course, I won't have to drive to work every day through the slush and mud any more. Aaaahhhh!!!! Now, you don't challenge the more extreme seasons to do their worst, you don't say "bring it on," because they can and will. But I whine a lot less in winter than in summer, and I think we can all be grateful for that.
11/27/06
Make Learning Fun
I can understand technological things if they're explained to me simply and clearly. For instance, this Internet thingy is based on the concept of "packet switching," in which files are broken into small packages, transmitted by various routes with the maximum efficiency possible, and reassembled into its original form as pornography or, in rare instances, something else. I found a Wikipedia article that purports to explain this but frankly I found it pretty tough going. The article would blandly drop remarks like this:
It's also entirely possible to have to weigh the various metrics against each other. For example, reducing the hop count could increase the latency to an unacceptable limit and some kind of balance would need to be found. For multi-parameter optimization, some form of optimization may be needed.
Whatever. I think it goes without saying that this is a little over my head. But I discovered these university-trained British guys who've found a much easier way to explain it all so that you get a solid grounding to build on.
Public Service Announcement: As usual I'm probably about five years behind but I just found a source of lots and lots of good music of all genres free, gratis, and for nothing. Goodness knows there are lots of old techies who'll tell you "information wants to be free." This seems like we're putting words in information's mouth. Information is inanimate, insentient, lacking consciousness and thus lacking volition. It can't want anything. What's correct to say is that I, myself, would like information to be free. I'd also like information technology to be free, and while we're at it, I'd like cut rates on food, housing, transportation, clothing, cat litter and riotous nights on the town. But luckily it suits the business model or simple whim of certain musicians to just throw stuff out there, and tonight I'm sitting here listening to stuff for free because of it. Thanks, guys!
11/26/06
Turtle Talk
I'll probably just jot things down today, little things that seem intriguing. Like over the weekend, I talked to my old friends E. and S., who are living in Virginia now after spending quite some time in Greece. (He—S, that is—is with the U.S. State Department.) They told me that instead of having dogs running around in the typical yard, like in the States, the Greeks have turtles. I accepted this, of course. It makes sense—you'd never have a problem with the turtle chasing cars, for instance, or getting aggressive with the postal carrier. And certainly E. and S. have never lied to me or made up tall tales. They're the kind of people who find the world richly amusing without any need to make things up—you could spend all day just pointing out the funny stuff and have plenty of conversational fodder left over at bedtime. But I thought I'd google it, just to find out more. Well, it's pretty google-proof so far. There are endangered sea turtles in Greece, but if there's anywhere that sea turtles are doing just fine, thank you very much, I haven't heard about it yet. Nothing at all about yard turtles. I'm a little disappointed—by way of comparison, I googled "egg cup" and got 2,310,000 results, and they're really about egg cups for at least twenty screens in. I think yard turtles are much more interesting than egg cups, myself. This is the kind of thing where initial frustration makes me dig my heels in and keep looking until I get the problem solved. But there are a couple of handicaps. This is not the kind of subject you can call up the local Greek restaurants or the consulate down in Philadelphia and bring up without giving the impression that you're next going to ask them if their refrigerator is running. It's going to have to remain a mystery for now, because I have to make a living. But I'll get to the bottom of this one day.
11/25/06
Streaming Video
Woke up late and had no pressing deadlines, so I went to the trout stream that you see below. I grabbed a few video clips just to have something to cobble into a home video when I got home, as practice at doing that. There's no fishing action. And no characters or plot. There's almost no reason to watch it unless you'd like to hear three minutes and fifty seconds of Beethoven, and I don't know why you wouldn't. But don't say you weren't warned about the rest.
About the only thing I did with my day besides fish was buy dried blueberries to put in the breakfast oatmeal. I got cultivated blueberries for $3.99, rather than wild ones for $4.99, because I don't think I'll ever be able to distinguish cultivated blueberries from wild in a blind taste test. The wild ones could be more expensive because the other kind are shot full of horrible growth hormones, the way they do with chickens, cows, and professional wrestlers. I don't know and I don't want to know.
11/24/06
How You Sink About It
So yesterday I'm puttering around the house and I glance at the sink. Hardly an edifying spectacle, is it?
But then I notice that with the sun falling lower in the sky as winter approaches, and with the bottle of dishwashing liquid happening by pure hazard to be sitting near the window just right, there's a spectrum in the sink, and I go up and look:
And I thought the colors, shapes, and textures looked kind of nice. This is where it gets fun, when you start taking things out of context and seeing what other sorts of combinations and juxtapositions you could make with them. You notice and rearrange and see what you come up with. Sometimes you come up with something that generous and not-too-judgmental people could call art.
And of course sometimes you don't.
11/23/06
Monkey Love
There's a famous photo by Diane Arbus captioned "A woman with her baby monkey, N.J. 1971." It shows a woman sitting on a threadbare couch, her feet awkwardly crossed, her entire posture painfully stiff, her expression grim. In her lap is a small monkey swaddled in baby clothes. I mention this because my Thanksgiving dinner last night wasn't quite the grotesque parody of family bonds you see in that picture and it wasn't quite Norman Rockwell either. Like most people's, I suppose, it was somewhere in the middle.
I let myself in and came into the darkened living room. Brother in law, niece, niece's college roommate, nephew, all pointed at the TV. Murmured greetings. I sat down and pointed myself at the TV for a while too, but soon got up and went in the kitchen. My mom, dad, and sister were talking about this and that. My father asked me, in a hushed and faintly scandalized tone, what I thought of my niece's new Monroe piercing. He happens himself to be one of the most eccentric people on the planet, but this most common of youth adornments is one of many things he's quietly shocked by. Personally I try not to be shocked or scandalized by this sort of thing myself, because that's really the unique and sole point of it. I've made the decision for myself that young people will have to do better if they want to scandalize me. I'm holding out until cannibalism becomes the big youth trend; that, I'll let myself be shocked by. At any rate, I don't remember really saying anything, just shrugging. He went on: didn't I think it would interfere with face-washing? Of course that was a fig leaf, one of the silly little charges prosecutors tack on when they don't really have much of a case. He just wouldn't do it himself, and like most of us, if he himself feels uninclined to do a thing he thinks nobody should do it. He has very strong feelings about the wrongness of ski jumping, for instance. He himself would not find it exhilirating to do ski jumping; ergo, ski jumping is wrong and bad and something only crazy people would do. When he sees it being done on TV, he says so. "That's crazy," he says. He would not, however, issue a fatwa against it or anything. He wouldn't even be impolite to a ski jumper's face. But he would be deeply disturbed by it, and would talk about it in hushed tones to everyone else when the ski jumper left the room.
At any rate, there was a rushed, sketchy sort of appetizer phase, then a rushed, sketchy dinner. Then more TV. I think my sister was joking when she said a few days ago that they had taped "Taxi Driver" for the occasion. We ended up watching Prison of Azkaban. I'm a fan of the Harry Potter books, and so is my niece. She once said that she didn't want to see the first film because it would interfere with her mental pictures of the characters, and I was inordinately proud of her. But last night we watched Azkaban, and it was mildly interesting because I hadn't seen it. I'm not nearly as much a fan of the films. It was OK, the special effects were especially effective, and at least the collegians and I had something in common to talk about. After a while my folks left, the young women went to see Borat, and the nephew went upstairs. And then, too weary and enervated to move or protest, I sat through the entirety of Topper Takes a Trip. Insipid fare, not bad enough to be good and not good enough to be good. And then it was 11 at night, and time to go.
I got outside, and looked up. The tall trees were bare and black, there were thin traces of cloud in the sky, and the stars shone coldly. And when I got in my car, I noticed the odometer had a very spooky number on it. And with the images of Hogwarts lingering in my mind, I decided that although it was a so-so Thanksgiving, it had the makings of a pretty good Halloween, and that was something.
11/22/06
In the Mirror
Well, would you like to know one thing I'm thankful for that I haven't mentioned yet? I'm thankful that people actually read this stuff. For the first ten months or so, barely anyone did. A few friends. I'd look at the statistics that my web hosting people offer, and it would consistently be about a dozen people visiting every month. In April of this year, though, 23 people stopped by. By the way, we're talking about what the metrics program calls "unique visitors:" No matter how many times you visit the site that month, you're counted once as a unique visitor.
In May, it was a hundred even. And at least half of them came back twice in a month. It's been going up since, and right now close to two hundred people visit in a month, and they come back—the average is 2.2 visits per month for each visitor. (That may not sound like so many, but it's around the top 10 percent for blogs. Which makes each and every one of you a person of taste and discernment.) Another thing that strikes me: In addition to the United States, people consistently visit who live in such places as Canada, the Slovak Republic, the European Union, Israel, Australia, South Africa, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Germany, Greece, Switzerland, Taiwan, China, Hungary, France, Belgium, Great Britain, Spain, and South Korea.
But why? Again, there are hints on that metrics page. I don't use the really scary kind of statistics programs that could tell me your name and how many fillings you have in your teeth and whether you slept at home last night. I don't really want to. But there are interesting facts all the same. Some 54 percent of you use Macintosh computers. I've been using them since 1986 or so, so maybe there's an affinity there, but for whatever reason it's a remarkable percentage. Think different, man! And 56 percent of you use Firefox. Again, high-five me, you're just smart people and you use good stuff. (No offense if you use Windows and IE, but I'm telling you, life could be better. But hey, use what you like! I don't want to alienate 40 percent of the folks who visit.)
And then there are the search phrases. Nine people found my maunderings because they were looking for things about Tintin, and I'd commented that men's hair styles now have a little cowlick sticking up in the front that reminds me of him. (My own hair looks more like the dog Snowy's.) Five people were searching on the phrase "mansard roof," of which we have a lot in my little 19th-century town here. Two people were looking for "boxing gloves," which for the life of me I can't remember mentioning. One person searched on the phrase "caught between a dog and a fireplug or how to survive public service book reviews" and found me. That's actually a little disturbing—if I typed those words in anything like a row I certainly apologize; we all have good days and bad days, and I have plenty of that second kind. One person was looking for tips on dealing with stress. I'm more a consumer than a producer of such tips, but I do try to offer calming images and ideas if I can, because I need them as much as anyone.
There's a list of keywords that brought people here. One of them is the word "or," and another is the letter "T." Just that. I'm not as categorical and dogmatic as some, so maybe the word "or" is one I use a lot, I really never thought about it. I use the letter "T" as much as anyone, I guess. If I didn't, I couldn't Talk abouT Thanksgiving aT all. Like, for instance, I was feeling bad a few days ago because I was ragging on some of my family members about how they don't seem to want to enter into the spirit of the thing. Then a couple of days later my sister called, because she's hosting the evening and wanted to make sure I was coming. They usually watch a movie on TV when the evening winds down, and she said they'd taped one. The film was Taxi Driver. Oh well! I had to laugh. It's not exactly the warmest and fuzziest film ever made, but that's OK. I'm just glad to have a family, and friends, and I'm really glad that a few friends from places near and far—friends I've already met in person, and friends I haven't met but would probably like a lot if I did—I'm glad these folks drop in to read what I'm thinking about lately. Maybe it means there are lots of us who notice and care about the variety of moments one pretty good poet listed this way: "passions of rain, or moods in falling snow; grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued elations when the forest blooms; gusty emotions on wet roads on autumn nights." So be happy and healthy, everyone, and I hope you have many, many moments that make you stop, and think, and be thankful you're alive. What else is there, really?
11/21/06
Liking Rockets More
The speaker at our writers' group meeting last night was a successful science fiction writer, and I wondered before I met him if he'd fit the stereotype, and it turned out that in some ways he did. He was slightly built, wore glasses, and had an unruly thatch of hair. He spoke in a kind of clipped, almost British way, the way some graduate instructors do, and he spoke a lot, in rapid-fire bursts of verbiage. But he was witty and engaging, and told all sorts of stories about coming up through the publishing business. And the thing I noticed most of all was that he knows of the strong prejudice directed against people, especially grown men, who like science fiction. People who don't regularly go to Star Trek fan conventions have a certain mental image of the kind of person who does, let's face it. Our speaker last night has a strategy for this. On three different occasions when he met new people I heard him say, "I admit it, twenty years ago I was one of those people running around the airport Hilton with a costume on."
The difference was that he'd been interested in writing from a young age, and a chance acquaintance suggested to him, at a time he felt like a change, that he should come to New York and look for publishing jobs. He soon found one, and in short order became a science fiction editor. From there he began doing novelizations, and today that's what he does for a living. The companies producing science fiction films give him a screenplay, and he turns it into a novel. He does six or so of these a year, and makes a fine living at it.
He told us a lot about the various challenges this poses, and I learned a lot about the process he uses. But the thing that struck me most was how he'd taken a passion that lay people regard as faintly to strongly ridiculous and turned it into something that worked well for him. He'd studied chemistry in college, he said, but even then he realized that in his spare time he was hanging around with people who were interested in science fiction. Chemistry just wasn't him, it wasn't the best thing he had to give to the world. He was steeped in science fiction, and he found a way to make a living in which that knowledge was vital. In other words, he took what he valued and spun it into value for other people.
I read my share of science fiction myself when I was a kid, and I remember a Ray Bradbury story about a group of kids in the then-future who want to fly rockets. Only one gets picked to go to rocket school, though, because he "liked rockets more." That was it, really. But I think our friend has a much more interesting story. In the Bradbuy piece, everybody wants to fly rockets. Nobody thought such a desire was ridiculous. In real life, liking science fiction more than most people is more complex, socially. But our guy has risen above all that. And if you thought his social life is confined to sitting around the TV on Saturday night with a bunch of friends watching Buckaroo Banzai for the kajillionth time, you'd be wrong. He's got a long-term significant other. I met her. She's rather attractive. She's an artist, actually—a sculptor. She makes her own living by taking two-dimensional renderings of famous comic-book figures and fleshing them out as clay sculptures. These are then manufactured and sold widely. These two nice people have a large and charming brick Victorian home not far from here, with cats and dogs and the cheerful clutter you often see in creative people's houses. I didn't ask how they met. I really didn't have to, did I? Since they were in the same field, more or less, they might well have met at a convention somewhere. In a Hilton, say, out by the airport.
11/20/06
Wanting What You Get
Well, it's that time of year when people begin planning to gather together in the yearly ritual dedicated to the old-fashioned and touching belief that maybe it would be nice just this once, for Christ's sake, to have a peaceful Thanksgiving without everyone bickering at each other. I know for a fact that there are families who manage this. I've seen them. But I've also seen the craters on the moon, and I become more convinced every year that it's not likely I'll be in one any time soon.
My own family is composed of two camps. One is made up of people who want the occasion to be warm and sentimental. But if everyone in that camp all dropped dead right in the middle of the living room, the people in the other camp would calmly step over their bodies on the way to the sofa, into which they would collapse gratefully, knowing that now they can just relax and watch the football game. All they really want is to be left alone. So nobody's happy.
It's the age-old conflict between idealists and realists. Idealists think people could act better if they would just try. Realists think people are going to act pretty much the way they always act. Both, of course, are correct. I'm not sure what to do about that. If you are, could you tell me? I'd really like to know. Me, I just try to find amusement in things. Like the fact that the Puritans spent a lot of time in an English town called Scrooby before they left for the New World. I was told a lot when I was a kid about the desire for religious freedom being their motivation. I think it's possible they just got tired of people asking "So where are you Puritans living these days?" and then falling around laughing when they heard the name "Scrooby." Anybody would, when you think about it. And then they wind up in a land where every place is called something like Oobopshabamanocket, or whatever. I just read, for the first time, that the first things the Puritans did when they literally touched land was to run around desecrating graves and stealing stuff from the natives. I'm not a person who's always going on about how awful Westerners are past and present but I think we can agree this is bad behavior. The natives shot some arrows at them and eventually everyone just decided they'd all better get along, life being hard enough, so they did. And had Thanksgiving, in a spirit of at least tolerance, if nothing warmer. We should probably, idealists and realists alike, just regard it as a harvest celebration and leave the family bit out of it. Most of us aren't really connected to the earth's natural cycles, unfortunately. I'll bet that more kids than not in my once-rural county have never actually seen a live cow. But if you've had a good enough harvest, in whatever sense, that you can reasonably hope to eat regularly through the winter, well, then, there you are. Something to be thankful for, and I hope that's your situation.
11/19/06
No Sale
I happened to be in my home town, West Chester, Pennsylvania, yesterday, and I got walking around and went into Taylor's, the good old music store. I played keyboards for a living (I was about to say "professionally," but that might imply I played them well) when I was in my early twenties. I found that music stores still give me a sense of well-being the way bookstores and libraries and colleges do—they're places that make the world seem bigger, deeper, richer. (Put airports on the list, while we're at it, and train stations. And mountaintops.) I had one actual specific question to ask: I've always wanted to sort of retire a strange instrument called a Yamaha Electric Grand that's currently making my very small living room look even very smaller. I thought I'd replace it with a spinet piano, the smallest kind you could get. I've played a few of them over the years, and many, but not all, sound tinny. I figured I'd just pick a non-tinny one and be all set. So I'm greeted at one point in the piano showroom by an enthusiastic sales guy, and I mentioned that I was in the market for a spinet piano.
"They don't make them any more," he says.
I've gotten used to this. There's lots of things I like that they don't make any more. I like licorice, for instance. Do you see a lot of licorice in your travels? I didn't think so. And one time I was looking for regular plain non-microwaveable popcorn to put in my crusty old hot-air popper. I didn't see it one day on the shelf in the supermarket where they used to have it, so I went up to the store manager and asked about it. "We're not stocking that any more," she said. "Nobody buys it."
I paused masterfully and said, with mock-aggrieved dignity, "Well, I wouldn't say nobody." She laughed, and clapped me on the shoulder. And suggested I buy the microwaveable kind.
At any rate, the piano sales guy sensibly pointed out that console pianos, the next bigger size of piano, aren't wider, they're just a little higher. I saw one for a pretty nice price. So I took his card, and told myself that someday I'd claw myself to a level of respectability where I had a nice console piano conferring some discreetly sized dignity on the living room. But the guy wasn't done. As I was walking out, he started showing me the digital pianos. He turned one on and started pushing buttons, and it started playing but itself and red lights flashed in the keys to show you which ones to press. The guy was babbling about how you can learn that way, but I was faintly scandalized. The keyboard was flashing like the marquee of a casino. Then the guy sat down and started pressing more buttons, and this cheesy bossa nova rhythm section started playing—it was exactly like those old Wurlitzer console organs. It brought back to mind this guy Larry Ferrari, who had an organ music show in Philly for about 40 years. He was by no means a bad or evil man, but he may very well have the the unhippest musical act that ever, ever was. And I haven't forgotten about musical saws when I say that. So I think I'll just get a piano and pass on the other thing. I can supply all the unhipness necessary, thank you very much.
11/18/06
Weakend
Ugh, this was one of those bear-eats-you weeks, with little going right. I was supposed to go to a business networking thing for "sustainable" (read: green) businesses, and was naive enough to believe the address on their website. Comes the appointed hour, I'm peering into a darkened, locked, and for-lease building. Bang bang bang. Nuttin'. Check the calendar. Right day, sure enough. Walk out in the middle of the sidewalk and turn slowly in place, looking up and down the street, hoping the universe will provide some sort of answer. Nope, just people walking around town. So I drive back home, enlarging my carbon footprint needlessly the whole way. I pretty much spun my wheels like that the whole week. This caused me to wake up early and toss and turn. Which 18th-century French military leader said something along the lines of "Cast off your worries when you cast off your clothes?" (And wipe that look off your faces, gutterminds.) I'm seriously asking, because when you try to google that you get stuff like this. I've got enough trouble in my mind without having to picture naked would-be Druids.
On a lighter note, there's a potential meteor shower tonight, around midnight. I'll be dragging but there's nothing quite like a meteor shower.
All right, this is too weird. Of all the figures in history I can think of, Marcus Aurelius always seemed like the most serious. Totally rational, intelligent and hard-working, devoted to duty, the last of the "Good Emperors," Stoic philosopher, all-around grownup. So last night I'm telling myself that I shouldn't worry, I should just be like unto Marcus and remain steadfast and trust that good efforts will yield results and if they don't at least you tried and so forth. And here I read just now that the old boy "habitually took opium to sleep and to cope with the difficulty of military campaigns." He was human after all, the old hophead! I guess it's easier to be stoic when you're stoned. Sure, I fret over stuff sometimes, but I try to stay cheerful most of the time and I try to make myself useful. We all have something to contribute. So if you've been trying to live up to Marcus Aurelius's example and feeling inadequate, just cut it out right now. Pobody's nerfect.
11/17/06
Catch Ya Later
Hey, just doing a hi-and-bye right now, gotta write like a demon and then run to a meeting but! I have one thing: I've found a perfect example of the difference between a wit and a wag. I'm browsing yesterday and I find a guy who's musing: Why didn't Frodo just have one of the eagles fly him direct to Mount Doom? To be honest, I chuckled at that—it would, in fact, cut out the middleman—but it's not really a trenchant literary insight or anything. So I guess a wit is someone given to making clever remarks in which there's a kernel of truth; a wag is someone whose clever remarks contain a kernel of pointlessness.
My birdwatching has never been very wren-intensive, for some reason, so I was glad to have one of these perky little numbers (the top one, a male Carolina Wren) visit my back porch just now:
And in the immortal words (sound file, wage slaves) of Bart Simpson:
At least they haven't started charging for the air we actually breathe. Something to be thankful for, I suppose, if you don't have anything else to be thankful for on Turkey Day.
11/16/06
Mild Mannered Reporter
I'm in that pleasant state of anticipation one gets waiting for a package to arrive. I've got a couple books on the way, but that's not what I'm pleasantly anticipating right now. No, I've just used a world-changing information management technology to discover that at 5:24 a.m., my underwear is Out For Delivery. So those long underwears that I've been musing on are on their way. I decided not to go with silk. (Cabela's sells the silk, though, so let's have no more discussion of whether it's a sissified way to keep warm. If Cabela's sells it, it's butch, end of story.) I decided to go with Cabela's Military Tech Silk Weight Polartec Power Dry Crew and Cabela's Military Tech Silk Weight Polartec Power Dry Drawers. Actually I opted for black, not brown, but the guy in the pictures of the black ones didn't have a gun and a guy in skivvies with a rifle is just funny, I don't know why.
So they should arrive today. The only problem is the temperature is perfectly warm and comfortable and will be for the next few days. That's kind of a shame. I'd much rather it was that kind of penetrating cold that seeps into your bones. Then I'd put these things on and say aaaaahhhh—do your worst, weather! That's why I bought them, after all. Then I was thinking more about all this and it occurred to me that you see people running around at gyms and out hiking and so forth wearing what are basically shiny tights. I always thought it was a little strange. I don't know what they're made out of, but they're skin-tight and shiny and they're usually decorated with dramatic angular slashes in various eye-catching colors: purples, yellows, greens, lurid colors that make people look like giant bass lures. This always seemed a bit much for me to just go out and jog in, but hey, knock yourself out if that's what you like. But with my own new clothing on the way, I got to thinking that I could sort of reproduce that look, at least in the privacy of my own home. It's really a superhero look, when you think about it. But then I considered further—I'm in reasonably good shape, good enough that doctors are pleased and I look OK in regular clothes and all. But the superhero look really requires more buffness than I can muster at present. (Wearing glasses since fourth grade is another factor that messes up this fantasy.) And tights if you're not seriously buff—well, the look would be all wrong, that's all.
11/15/06
You Can't Make This Stuff Up
Well, if you had told me any world leader other than Stalin had thought this idea up and acted on it, I'd have said you're nuts. But some of us, like Stalin and Robert Kennedy, dreamed of things that never were and said, "Why not?" In Stalin's case, the answer is "Not" because the idea is just not right.
But enough history for today. I spent a few hours yesterday trying to figure out how to create a Flash movie slideshow. An old colleague from my newspapering days had one on his website, and it was monkey see, monkey do—I had to have one too. This is a collection of some of the better photos I've taken over the past couple of years. I'm going to include them on my professional website, so they're kind of business-oriented, some of them. Still, I hope you like them. I could have included music, but I figure you might be at work and would appreciate a touch of discretion.
11/14/06
But Erin Isn't Human
Slate has become one of the websites I read with my coffee, like the morning paper, and this morning I'm reading about a confusing ad on TV. I haven't seen it, but it's sort of my business to glean information about why ads work or don't, in the event that someone pays me to write one some day, and it seems this one features an animation with a young woman. And wouldn't you know it, it's become kind of a thing where there are men—oops, I mean guys—who think she's hot. Her name, if you please, is Erin Esurance. Now, I'm not suggesting this is sick or evil, exactly, but when guys are thinking amorous thoughts about cartoon figures like this one and Lara Croft and God knows who else, we're reaching a zone where things are starting to get weird. I hate to come off as the finger-wagging old coot but we boomers did not get crushes on cartoon ladies as a rule. We got them on Diana Rigg and you can hardly blame us.
11/13/06
Social Disease
no, wait...
Social Unease
A couple of months ago I contacted an acquaintance to find out how he planned certain public programs. He wrote back to say that some were planned collaboratively with other groups, and some he planned himself "in brooding dictatorial solitude." Which I liked, because brooding dictatorial solitude is how I spend a lot of my own time, but occasionally other people offer me a bit of human contact which I suppose is all right in small doses. Friday I had a nice dinner-and-DVD deal at a friend's house. Saturday I stopped by the library, which was a mistake, because our old friend W. works there sometimes and she got her hooks into me about taking the air conditioners out of her windows. When W. asks for a favor, it's like old Nikita Krushchev waving his fist in the air at the United Nations, a long, angry litany of favors she's done that remain unreturned and injuries done her for which reparations must be paid. I pointed out to her that she spends a large chunk of her abundant leisure time (she's a freelance editor) at the gym, and if this didn't make her capable of taking an air conditioner out of a window then I wasn't sure what good it was doing her. But no dice, with W. it's simplest just to take the air conditioners out and get it over with.
While I was over there I glanced at her bookcase and remarked on how people in the publishing business often have to buy books that friends have written, books that you never would have bought if a stranger were the author. She listed a few that she had like that, and a couple were by a photographer whose work I happen to admire, so I checked them out, and they were really very good. W. used to pal around with this guy, so to speak, and she mentioned another photographer she palled around with more recently, a guy nicknamed Jimner. Their parting was rancorous—she threw a shoe at him at one point—and she asked me pointedly where his book was, the point being he had produced no books.
I mulled this over, furrowing my brow and studying the floor. The two photographers in question are both talented guys. But the first was always ferociously ambitious and aggressive, with a fierce appetite for success in his career. The second, Jimner, was more easygoing. His appetite was more focused on food and beer, and for all the time I knew him myself (we worked together at my first newspaper) he was at least 40 pounds overweight. I considered all this, and then unfurrowed my brow again and looked up.
"Jimner isn't as hungry," I said.
Then yesterday I got a call from a lovely and talented couple I don't see often enough. They were passing through town, looking for lunch, so we met up and had a couple of Guinnesses and got caught up. And after taking regretful leave of them I turned around and went to another friend's house. He runs a fly fishing tackle shop and likes to have people over for fly-tying sessions. Beer, burgers, bonding. All very nice. But today it's the dictatorial solitude again—working away, Haydn on iTunes, the cat asleep in his favorite corner of the closet, and outside there's the kind of steady rain that helps you understand that you'd better get working or you'll lose your house and be homeless and cold and wet. So that's what I'm going to do right now. Get working, I mean. Later!
11/12/06
Every Picture Tells a Story
They should, at any rate. I think this one does, and the reason I'm posting it is because I'd like this space to be something of a public service now and then. So I want to say to everyone, and especially you young people out there, don't let this happen to you. Please, please be careful when you're out driving and they're painting the yellow lines on the road.
11/11/06
Staying Current and Other Miseries
The other day I had a freelance job that involved describing drinks for a cardboard thingie that will set on tables in bars where young people gather. (The base of all the drinks is an energy drink similar to Red Bull and so forth.) The problem was that I don't have kids or a TV and I don't teach and while I'm youthful and vibrant for my years I'm really not a young guy any more. But I'm in the communication business and it's kind of important to be able to speak to that crucial 18- to 34-year-old demographic. Which means I'm in the ignominious position of having to sniff around and find out how young folks are talking these days and what they're thinking about. When I myself was young, the efforts older people made along these lines were unbearably cringeworthy. I didn't want old people to talk to me and find out what I was thinking and feeling. I thought the more appropriate thing for them to do was drag their stinking carcasses gravewards and leave me alone.
At any rate, the years passed and here I am. I occasionally become aware of things that are going on. Like the Da Ali G Show, for instance. I was looking at clips of that on YouTube and laughing my butt off. I saw one where Ali G is talking to C. Everett Koop, the former Surgeon General of the United States, and at one point he asks him, "Does everyone have bones, or is that just something the media want you to believe?" But that's not enough; I felt that I needed a broader overview to begin with. So I was pretty psyched the other day when I read an article in Slate by this young person complaining about how Zach Braff was considered the voice of this person's generation. Aha! In particular, this guy mentioned that the movie "Garden State" had a soundtrack that was like an of iTunes celebrity list of popular indie-rock tunes and could be considered an overview of what those perplexing young folks are listening to. Perfect!
So I rent it and check it out. Not bad, I guess. But not that great either (the guy in Slate got it right, pretty much). The music was all OK, sort of moody and atmospheric for the most part, typical adolescent angst. Frankly, I prefer the best rock music of my own generation, although I mostly subsist nowadays on a steady diet of classical and the B-52s. But it was OK. The actual film was again, what I expected. Quirky bits, incongruities. Young men who sit around and party if they do anything. The character just sort of stares into space a lot. I don't want to give away what story there is, but the character has been robbed of his feelings, which is supposed to explain why he stumbles around on the fronts of his feet like a zombie. All the characters, in fact, just drag themselves around like broken-winged birds. In the end, the character resolves to feel things. And love conquers all. I couldn't tell what it conquered, but I guess it must have been something. The Braff character was in love with Natalie Portman's character but had to leave Jersey and go back to L.A. because he had to for reasons he didn't state, and then he didn't after all. Whatever. Frankly, if the story in a film could be thought of as its skeleton, this film didn't have one—that's just what the media want you to believe. I didn't learn much about young people today that I didn't already know. They like music that strikes me as morose, but I knew that. They like quirky stuff—jester hats, and so forth. I knew that too. Some of them can't figure out what to do with themselves (but many more can). Nothing new there either. And they like to party. Well, duh! That's why I was describing the drinks in the first place! I think I'll stop worrying about whether I have the knowledge necessary to communicate with the vital 18- to 34-year-old demographic and just do what seems most sensible and have fun with it. That almost always seems to work out.
11/10/06
Wholly to Blame
Yeesh—last night was a particulary vehement romantic encounter for the neighbors, I must say. They have at it every second or third evening about two in the morning, and I've gotten used to that. Usually it's only loud enough that I slowly rise to wakefulness. But last night I suddenly came wide awake, like someone had dropped an armful of pots and kettles on the floor right in the room. And I wonder—will they go back to the old level, or have they reached a new plateau? I'd be happy for them if their love life has become even more fulfilling than before. But maybe it would be even better with ball gags? I'm not sure how you suggest that to neighbors who are really only casual acquaintances.
Last night was also the monthly meeting of the local Sierra Club group's executive committee, and since I'm a board member for the moment and newsletter editor I go. It's held at a Whole Foods store in downtown Philadelphia, which is already ironic; the actual meeting is held in a room upstairs from the vast and beautiful store floor. It's dingy and gray and industrial up there, and the room is cramped, full of boxes and stuff that doesn't belong anywhere else. You might as well be in some compartment belowdecks in a freighter. It's not very outdoorsy, is my point. But the Whole Foods store is very nice. We have dinner there before the meeting, usually, and that's kind of a treat, since they have all sorts of tasty prepared food.
I have nothing against the organic and natural food they specialize in, although pesticides are something I've just chosen not to be concerned about. I like the store, though. The stuff is mostly high to very high quality. Naturally (no pun intended) those snarkmeisters at Slate have put Whole Foods in their sights. They're like dogs who smell fear: When a certain type of journalist senses that someone is trying, in an admittedly ad hoc and not-perfect way, to make the world a slightly less miserable place, that type of journalist will set about debunking that effort. And so it is: Slate found that while the store offers a vague sense of virtue, there's much that's wrong about it. Oh well! The article argues that Wal-mart's approach to organic food might turn out to be more sustainable. Well, fine. That's an intriguingly ironic contrarian argument and I'm something of a contrarian myself. But Wal-mart doesn't have nearly the selection of fresh olives, OK? Pobody's nerfect.
We settled down to start the meeting, and a new guy was introduced. We advertise that the meetings are open to anyone, but we should qualify that: They're incredibly boring and if you're interested in the outdoors you'd do better to go on one of our outings. The guy made me wonder—he wasn't even a member, just a local South Philly guy, a carpenter, with no evident interest in environmentalism. We were talking about the recent election, and he remarked that he didn't read the papers, and there was a brief silence. Then he said he didn't think the papers had any useful information anyway. This was just faintly uncomfortable. Nobody else in the room believed that newspapers were perfect, but I'm not sure how you form opinions if you don't have some source of information to base them on. He had a faintly combative air, like he might be one of those people with a free-floating sense of resentment, and then he started to also seem like one of those people who talk too much. He was just looking for new things to do, he said, and he ate at the store often and heard about it and thought he'd drop in and see what it was all about and blah blah blah. I drive an hour to this meeting and an hour back, and I didn't want him breaking in with long-winded comments, but as it turned out he soon settled down. Occasionally his cell phone would go off and he'd jump up and go out in the hall, but otherwise he sat there for the whole two hours and listened to committee reports. We all waved cheerily when he left. I don't think he'll be back.
I'd had to rush in, because the traffic was heavy and I was late getting there, so I browsed a little on my way out. I'd had a hankering for cheese and chocolate, and this was the place to get them. I found some Venezuelan chocolate—that seemed unusual to me, but think about it: Where does chocolate come from in the first place? So it made sense. And I picked some French cheese (Saint Nectaire, from the Auvergne). French cheese makes sense because it just does. So I got a small piece of cheese and a small piece of chocolate—five bucks and change total. No need for a bag, I could carry them both easily in one hand. Just a little treat, because to tell you the truth I've been feeling vaguely virtuous myself, lately.
11/9/06
Turning Wheels
You never know what will suddenly bring back a long-gone moment of your life. I saw this yesterday, and the idea of people learning to ride bicycles in middle age brought back an evening out with a local hiking group some fourteen years ago. A woman there caught my eye, and we ended up talking quite a bit during the hike. Somehow the subject of bicycles came up. It seemed her mother, a fearful sort, had never allowed her to learn, thinking it wasn't safe.
I was mildly outraged. I could list and tell you about every bike I had as a kid. I'd grown up in the suburbs, and it wasn't up for question there: kids had bikes, as surely as cowboys had horses. A kid had a bike, and went everywhere on it. I told the woman in no uncertain terms that she had to learn to ride a bicycle. We ended up becoming involved, and eventually we started living together. And one day we went out to the Amish country, where bicycles are an important form of transportation for young and old alike, and we went to a store there where a young Amish woman, barefoot, as I recall, sold my girlfriend her first bike. We spent evenings a few doors away from where we lived, in the parking lot of a Quaker meeting house, shaded by a centuries-old oak tree of enormous height, and she wheeled about shakily, learning to ride. Of course I knew her story by then—her childhood had been stolen from her, never mind how, and her adult happiness greatly impaired, but I was resolved that she would reclaim what she could, and it did my heart good to see her progress, learning to coordinate pedals, shifters, steering and brakes. She was giddily nervous as she learned, but learn she did, and I remember one summer evening when the girls who lived at the farm next door were out in the circular driveway between the house and the barn. My girlfriend joined them, and she went around and around with them, a grin blazing on her face, still a little shaky but filled with the triumph all kids feel when they're finally up and riding free. A summer twilight, and woman in her thirties who had just stolen back a moment of joy the world had long owed her. Just going around, so happy, with those kids who took such moments for granted, as their due. A summer evening, so long ago.
We parted ways, but she still has her bike, and I hope she rides it now. There's nothing quite like a bicycle, no form of transportation that's quite so carefree. The road glides under you, the trees and fields sail past. It's had quite a revival among adults in the past ten years or so, I've noticed. I see hordes of grim-jawed middle-aged men, pushing the envelope, going farther and farther, bodies hard and minds harder. That's fine, I guess. I used to bike for health myself, when the roads were less crowded. But I always built in some time just to wheel along, watching the world go by. I hope those people who are just now learning let themselves do that, and I hope the hard-jawed men do, too, and I hope my former girlfriend does. I don't care who you are, bicycles are one of the things in life that add a bit of joy to your days. They're good things, bicycles.
11/8/06
Hopping the Slogs
Well, for a couple of weeks there things were pretty hectic, but it's calmed a bit. Catch your breath, straighten up, ease the kinks. There's plenty still to do, but no emergencies at the moment. I wrote to a former boss that for a while I felt like the chores I had to do resembled a swarm of poison-fanged bats that I was trying to fight off with a badminton racket. But some chores are more fun than others. As a newly fledged business dude, I've discovered that sending out invoices is one of those happy, jolly chores, like baking cookies. Then I've got another job today that involves taking recipes for alcoholic drinks and making them sound more appetizing. This is work, whether you believe it or not. I'm not familiar with Grey Goose vodka, so I have to look it up, and I discover that it's a premium French version. OK, how do we use the associations people will have with all that and contrast it with the flavor of the power-juice drink I'm actually hawking here to make the drink in question sound appealing? And it all has to be done in the smallest number of words possible. There's a bit of research, thought, and judgment involved. But there's no denying that this is more interesting and fun than, say, being a toll-taker on the turnpike or selling tickets out of a guichet in the Métro. So I'll take about two hours on that, then once the client's happy, ask if I can go ahead and bill it, and send the invoice. A few more cookies for the cookie jar, a few more groceries in the pantry.
It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time: A friend sent me this, and I certainly found it a remarkable tale. I didn't know mice were flammable, but I'll remember from now on. And while I'm not sure there's any real justice in the world, it does seem like one lesson you could take away is that maybe throwing a mouse on a fire is medievally harsh. The mouse's only crime, really, was being a mouse.
11/7/06
Another Busted Romance
A young woman who used to work at my old job gave it up some time ago and decided to spend some incredible amount of time, six months or so, gadding about Europe. (Maybe that's not the verb. Do people still gad any more?) I just heard from her—she's in Barcelona, studying the habits of the local wildlife. Men give women the business everywhere, but she says they're very bold in Spain. One man rushed up to her and started in on her, asking where she was from and so forth. She told him New York. That's not really where she's from, but it's easier while traveling to name the biggest town in day-trip distance that the locals would be likely to have heard of. This delighted her would-be new friend: They had something in common. '¡Mi esposa es de New York!' he cried.
The young woman was surprised at his candor (Your wife is from New York?) and sought further information.
'¿Su esposa ahora?'
He nodded enthusiastically, she said. His current wife was indeed from New York. So she patted his arm and walked away. The poor man was left on the sidewalk, where he loudly called '¿Por qué? Por qué?' at her departing form. Why, indeed? What had he said?
For me personally, faithfulness works. Relationships are hard enough without one or both partners leaping like rabid wolverines on any willing third party. But I know not everyone feels that way; I've been to a few conferences in my day. There are people who've institutionalized the process of adultery. They impose certain rules, and for them it works. I knew a couple years ago who had a rule: You could sleep with someone else if you were more than 100 miles out of town. I understood the rationale—there's less chance of a marriage-threatening ongoing entanglement that way—but somehow the 100 miles thing sounded like a regulation from the tax code or something, just a bit cold-blooded. I had another friend who was getting the come-on from this guy quite strongly until she got divorced, at which point he began sniffing elsewhere. A divorced woman might actually want to have a relationship. These folks seem to view romantic life simply: Marriage has its virtues, so you want to stay married. But you want your bit of slap and tickle too, so you make a little system. Slap and tickle good, entanglement bad. Simple.
In other words, there's no earthly reason in this guy's mind to hide the fact that he's married. He doesn't aspire to fidelity, doesn't feel that it confers any grace or dignity, doesn't believe that it's a way to honor a person you love and spare him or her the unspeakable pain of betrayal. He's not an idealist; he's not thinking in terms of virtue and vice. He just wants what he wants. Me, I feel differently. I think if you vow to be faithful, in a public ceremony or in a private conversation, that means something. Some of us feel there's something sad and ridiculous in the spectacle of a man shouting, "Why? Why?" to a woman who's ended a conversation and walked away down the sidewalk simply because he mentioned that his wife, his current, right-now wife, is from New York. And others don't, and really can't, see the problem. So you can't blame her for not turning and explaining. He likely wouldn't have understood, even if she had.
11/6/06
Skunked
We'd only just gotten to the trail leading to the beach yesterday when we saw a guy trudging back to the parking lot. "No bait, no fish," he said. "I'd consider going somewhere else."
But things can change with the turn of the tide, or when the temperature goes up, or for no apparent reason at all. All of a sudden huge schools of game fish can show up and start slashing into schools of bait fish. So we marched the half-mile or so through the sand to the water. For the moment, the guy was right. There were no schools of bait in the water, and that meant that there was no reason for the predatory game fish to be in close enough to reach with a fly rod. So we spent the entire day practicing casting. A fish could happen by, just a single fish wandering around, and if you have a hook in the water you might catch it. Of the five of us, two got quick tugs from such passing stray fish. But that was it. For something like seven hours. But one reason I like fishing with this crowd is that they understand that such days are part of the game. A game wouldn't be a game if it didn't have some randomness built in. The trick is to enjoy the sand and sky and water, to watch the passing boats and airplanes, to talk with people walking by, to observe the way the tides and beach structure cause changing patterns of water flow. So that's what we did. "It's good just to be out," is what you're suppposed to day, and the happier anglers mean it when they say it.
In the second half of the day, some bait did show up. A lot of it, in fact: It darkened the water we stood in. Tiny fish, like swimming matchsticks, but incredibly numerous. That's how bait fish manage the vicious world they live in, constantly being attacked by vastly larger and fiercely predaceous fish. The form into huge clouds with so many individuals that no matter how numerous and voracious their attackers, a good number of the bait fish will be left to carry on. It's as though they point at each other and say, "Eat him." Not a heroic way of life, but heroism isn't for everyone.
Yesterday, though, they were calm. Fish don't actually have rich emotional lives, but if they aren't showing signs of alarm they're called "happy fish," and these ones were. There were simply no game fish around, or no game fish that were in the mood to attack the bait. They just held their places in the calmer water. I watched them as they swam around me. We had certainly hoped that once we found the bait, that the game fish would show up to eat them. But when it became clear they wouldn't, it was all right. It was good to be out. And it seemed nice, actually, that at least for a little while the bait could get a break from being attacked. No huge, toothy maws hurtling toward them, no churning mayhem or sudden death. The next time I go fishing, I will sincerely hope to see that all hell has broken loose. But just this once, it seemed right and proper and only fair that the little creatures should have the occasional good day, and that I should be there to know it.
Sometimes you look at a thing and say, "OK, that's kind of weird." I mean, I know people like to monitor things. Some people who have never perpetrated or been the victim of a crime still like to have a police scanner in the house. When the cop car rolls to such and such an address, they know, and find it gratifying. Me, I think it's fun to watch the variously colored blobs of weather roll toward me on the Weather.com radar. But who really wants to monitor local flea activity?
11/5/06
A Day at the Beach
I'm going to bed early tonight, so as to be able to get up at 3:30 a.m. or so and meet friends at 5 and head for the northern New Jersey beaches to fly fish for striped bass and anything else that wants to bite. It'll be in the low 30s (that's Fahrenheit) when we get to the water, and I'm sure it'll be pretty dark. Why do we do this? Because we're gluttons for punishment. And this is when we're all free. And it builds character. (It does, actually. It gives me practice in suppressing the lazy whiner aspect of my personality.) But it'll be cold enough to bring misfortune to a brass monkey and the day starts early, so if I'm to have the physical and psychic energy to do much good out there I'd better hit the hay. I hope the rest of you have a nice, late morning and a lovely brunch. Shiitake omelets, mimosas, that sort of thing. I would, if I could, but I can't. Pleasant dreams! If I catch fish I'll tell you all about it later tomorrow.
11/4/06
Sketchy
What would you do if you had a million dollars? To be honest, today it would need to be two or three million if you wanted to live at all comfortably on just the interest without having to (shudder) work for a living. But that's what I mean. How would you spend the day? After you got up from the breakfast table, what's the next thing you would do?
One thing I was always interested in was drawing. I did a little when I was a kid. A shirt hanging from a chair in my room, the sneakers on the floor, a steam pipe in my homeroom at school. I was amazed at how you could evoke things with a pencil, bringing out the outline, the shadows that defined the forms. I only dabbled in it, but that stuck with me.
Then two years ago, I saw a brochure for a local arts center, and it had a charcoal portraiture course in it, so I took it. And loved it. Like anything else, like any of the arts in particular, it's plain hard work. The artistic sense will tell you why, but never how—how is always, inescapably, that darned old plain hard work. But I plunged in as best I could, and for a few months it was the most exciting thing I was doing. I got the results that you see. You'll have to trust me that these are likenesses, but they are. I was tremendously excited at the time, even though I knew it was really just a decent start. (The first class, the teacher gone around with a critical eye. "Well," she'd said approvingly, "you've all got humans.")
Then came house-hunting, involvement with the writers' group, more freelancing, learning skills more germane to my actual paying work, serious important stuff for people who can't live just on interest and dividends. And I had to let the drawing go. But I got some likenesses. I'm a bit concerned that this may have been the one brief period of my life in which I get to focus on paper and charcoal. I didn't get all that far. But I remember this wonderful old episode of "The Honeymooners" in which Ralph makes a fool of himself, of course, and at the end explains to Alice in apology that he had wanted to play the trumpet once, but could never manage to hit the high note, and that just once, he wanted to accomplish something exceptional. It was a touching explanation for his continual overreaching and monumental failures. But, he went on, he did hit the high note once—the day he married her. She's touched, of course, and they embrace. Emboldened, he goes to the closet and gets his long-abandoned trumpet. Just once, he says, he's going to hit that high note. And he puts everything into it, and for a moment gets a clear, ringing, Maynard Ferguson sort of clarion call, but then it falls apart into a raucous blatting. The show's filmed live, and there's nothing for Gleason to do but cry, "That's a piece of it, Alice!" and give her a hard embrace as the audience applauds. Well, I don't know how much time I'll ever have again for drawing—those millions remain elusive—but I did get a small piece of it once, and that's something.
11/3/06
Cold Comfort
A friend who's been there had advice for freelancing in the winter: get silk underwear, to help with lowering heating bills. I recoiled in not-exactly horror, but this seemed a little luxurious to me. I could see opera stars wearing silk underwear, I suppose. Or decadent Middle Eastern pasha types of yesteryear, like King Farouk. But maybe I have it all wrong, and what silk represents is an old-world, low-tech way to have a thin base layer that helps keep you warm. Edmund Hilary probably had silk underwear on the way up Everest. It's a tough-guy thing, in other words. The Mongols used silk underwear. It helps stop arrows. (I'm not kidding, OK?) Early skiing mail carriers in Colorado in the 1880s wore—well, you'll never guess. Like I say, it's a tough-guy thing. But still, I'm going to go with synthetic thin fleece for a base layer. Silk underwear is still available and all, although I think the colors this outfit has chosen—Fudgey Wudgey Brown, Visions of Sugar Plum Purple, Vanilla Whip Cream, and Join the Navy Blue—don't help. If the Mongols were around today and read that, they'd probably opt for the fleece, and so will I.
11/2/06
Weary Slog
Well, some days you can recall any number of truisms that point out life's general difficulty. We're told life is not all beer and skittles. We're told that momma said there'll be days like this. The Book of Genesis comes to mind, actually. And so it goes—heavy grey clouds rolling overhead and through my mind, the weary slog to be taken up once again, tons of stuff to do and not enough time and ducks nibbling at my legs. Sometimes, all you get is the right to fall on your cot, suffer through a few hours of fitful dreams, and wake up to the same. And then other times, the muddy road comes to higher ground, the fog clears, and you see that you've arrived some place like this. That hasn't happened yet to me today, but hey, it's early. That's Halong Bay, by the way, near Hanoi. I'd like to see it some day.
From the ninth, mind you, paragraph on a story about the upcoming election and how right the polls might or might not be: "The answer on who was right, it can be argued, will be known only after the actual votes are cast..." Yep, that could be argued.
11/1/06
Onslaught
I know, it's yesterday's news at this late hour but Halloween caught me off guard again. I'd been forewarned—having been here last year I knew what I was up against. So I had assembled what my best estimates say were something like 180 KitKat bars and other good candies. Zillions of kids trick or treat in Kennett, so I needed a lot. I don't give out lollipops or hard candies; I remember being a kid, and knowing what I wanted. Jack-o'-lantern? Well, you can't see me doing it, but I'm hanging my head. I love jack-o'-lanterns. I'd have one on my porch every day of the year, if I had the time. But I was busy, so terribly busy, and I just spaced it out. So no jack-o'-lantern. The kids didn't complain. They took their KitKat bars and thanked me, for the most part with lovely manners. One young girl exclaimed that KitKats were her favorite, and I wanted to give her another but she had already boogied for the next porch. There were the usual older kids, some with a cursory attempt at costumes and some without. I announced at one point that I wasn't giving any candy to anyone taller than me. One kid, not especially old but certainly a bit more of an operator than most, said, "In Mexico, they give money on Halloween." After three weeks as a freelance writer, with more serious bills to pay than this 9-year-old kid probably has, I was not a good target for such ploys. "You're going to give me money?" I cried. "Cool!" The conversation went no further.
Some of the kids were very young, two or three. One of them, the most darling little girl you could ever imagine, came up my walk on hesitant feet. I sat on my porch steps and made myself as small as I could, while her father squatted out on the sidewalk, beaming. Her eyes—I can only say that it was like seeing a tiny bird, and marveling at how much life can be in such a tiny bit of stuff. Everything that can be in a human being was shining in those eyes, a little scared, but playing the game, having been encouraged to participate. I dropped a candy bar in her bag, and she went to the next house. Then she and her father had moved down to the corner. I called to my neighbor. "I think that she was the cutest living creature I've ever seen," I said.
That was the high point. Then the pace picked up, and more and more waves of kids came. I saw that I was going to run out. Trick or treating was scheduled from six to eight, and just after seven I could see that reserves were running low. I'm not proud of it, but I ran upstairs between waves and fired up the printer. I threw a skull and crossbones on a page, and an apology: Sorry, but there's no more candy! We ran out! Then I printed it out and ran downstairs and taped it to a chair. For the next hour, I sat behind my closed door and listened guiltily as kids went down the street. But somehow, as soon as the door was closed, my cat Panther knew he didn't have to be nervous about all those strange sounds and stranger strangers at the door any more. He came right down, and jumped up in my lap, and we had a nice visit. He's a black cat, after all, and he often arches his back just like the cardboard black cats we'd put in the windows when I was a kid. In other words, it's his holiday too—he's in costume for it the whole year—and I was glad to give him some quality time at the end of it. Next year, if Allah permits, I'll have 400 or 500 of those damned KitKat bars, and maybe I'll actually have a few left over to have with my coffee.
© Copyright 2005 by Matt Freeman. All Rights Reserved.
