Monday, September 9, 2013
Rain
We have rain in Novato, my yes.
Perhaps you’ll remember, however, that Novato is only one of the micro-climates of the San Francisco Bay Area. It is a desert micro-climate and features the polite rain Arthur sings about in Camelot:
…The rain may never fall ‘til after sundown,
By eight, the morning fog must disappear …
Our rain appears in November, after announcing itself with some mildly gray clouds for a few days. It departs in April, and if we get rain after Mayday there is much anxiety and talk of sacrifice to the gods.
Folks characterize San Francisco as the land of fruits and nuts. Not really. In it’s own way San Francisco is more button-down than Yale in the 50’s.
First, we don’t say “fruits.” Humor regarding our gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender brothers and sisters and whatevah is socially forbidden. Unless, of course, they’re Republicans.
We all love animals and rejoice when our friends show up at our homes with their dogs or wallabies or Komodo dragons. “Isn’t that long tongue just darling?” This is predictable behavior and any inkling that you don’t want any domestic creatures is close to an admission of sociopathy.
It’s predictable that San Franciscans accept any new idea that comes careening down the pike – Tibetan chanting medicine, American Native herbal sweat lodges, yoga coaches in the state assembly chamber. Being unkind to a new idea, no matter how illogical, will not be entertained. One idea is just as good as another; they all come from the heart, right?
The Bay Area is comfortingly predictable. Everyone loves children – so honest, so creative – and everyone consistently votes down property taxes that supports local education. Everyone advocates solar, wind and tidal power. True, the per-capita use of energy is enormous. The mighty and pious Prius electric is the People’s Choice for San Franciscan transportation. Even though the People dismiss energy audits that suggest the global manufacturing process and the shipping of Priuses (“Priae”?) to our shores via auto carriers that burn bunker oil all the way across the Pacific Ocean is not sound energy conservation.
Logic be hanged, it’s the heart that counts, and San Francisco social attitudes, seasons, politicians, traffic patterns, mating habits, and – yes – weather, are reliably fixed. The Wild West was tamed not by the Colt Peacemaker but by whorehouse madams and cheap railfares. San Francisco was tamed by the immigration of eastern yuppies with enough money to drive prices up. They sprayed the upscale, post-hippie, better-hygiene, young-professional ‘Frisco Culture with firm-hold hairspray and it’s holding firm.
I’m discovering that Florida is a more spontaneous and unpredictable place than San Francisco. Every Floridian is encouraged by the hothouse sub-tropical climate to go rogue at intervals and Shake Things Up, rant in the street in the front of the house. There’s no special disapprobation if you Bullit-drive after the floozy who, during the post-game party, looked moon-eyed at your man, screeching after her through the suburban streets and throwing high-heeled shoes at the hussy’s car from your own convertible. You tell her, girl!
Small churches are tucked into little country or city nooks, with their particular versions of Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses that would not merely irritate the Vatican, but confuse billy-hell out of the cardinals. Snake-handling, gay-bashing, Koran-burning, abortionist assassinating and full-gospel massed bagpipes are unusual but not, here in what’s-next extemporaneous Florida, surprising.
I’m discovering that Floridians expect to be surprised, and it doesn’t bother them that much. Last month, here is Gainesville, a large black bear was seen walking across 4th Avenue SE, about half a mile from the Gator Swamp stadium (it’s expected of me to add “Go Gators!” when it’s mentioned) at the heart of the city. Was there a hue and cry? Villagers with torches and double express rifles? Nope. “A bear? Humph. How ‘bout that?”
Weather is a tipoff. Yes, Novato has rain, but there is rain and then there is Rain.
Rain arrives here like a meteorite ploughing into your toolshed, whammo. Big rain. The kind of rain I’d forgotten about, coming down seriously so that the far side of 12th Avenue, NW, might have been washed away because we can’t see it. Rain crashing down in solid masses, raindrops as big as quail eggs. Rain that makes side streets tributaries to the sudden river of 12th Avenue, swelling a hefty current so that the big splashes appear to be hurrying west, down to the Gulf of Mexico, sweeping leaves and twigs rapidly past our porch. It roars, a soft monotone. It insists, then relaxes, reasserts. It can taper off across a day. It can stop now, a sun of enormous heat sliding out from behind the retreating clouds as if to say, “There! Good job of it!”
This is the sub-tropics (or as near as damnit), with heat and moisture pushing blooms, developing fungi and giant bugs, proliferating a riot of plant and animal life. Micro-climate? Hell, no. Florida is a big-assed macro-cooker for weather and unusual biota, including genuinely surprising characters. Hell, I’m becoming more unpredictable, myself.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself is savoring new territory. He hyperbolizes, but he always does. I'm not about to attempt behavior modification at this late date, and it's what he does best. He generalizes about San Francisco, which I know he loves, and he misses some of the adventurous factors in California life. But he's quite right about it being a more rigid social atmosphere than many other venues. Liberal, yes, but not malleable.
Thursday, August 29, 2013
G'ville
Yes, I will doubtlessly whine and moan about Florida's humidity, heat, hurricanes and lack of topography. But this is my home, now, so I can more readily share some of the qualities anyone would appreciate here.
It's a small town. True, it's home to a great university with world-class departments in archaeology, geography, history, and medicine, but it's still a tidy village. The streets are laid out sensibly; you wouldn't get lost easily, and you'd appreciate the amenities. One minor example: this is a great ice cream town, several local artisan ice creams. As another, the barbecue is splendid (Florida has a cabinet level position, Secretary of Barbecue). Satchel's Pizza (we'll be there tomorrow evening, a regular Friday night event) is as good as it gets.
The produce, from local truck farms and a long growing season, is bountiful. There are greens and field peas and fresh okra and cuts of meat that don't appear in middle-American supermarkets. The local honey – orangeblossom, saw palmetto, sourwood, and others – is exquisite. If I can persuade some local bakery to produce sourdough bread anywhere near Boudin or Acme quality, this could be a culinary hotspot.
Though it's only an hour and a bit from the coast, the seafood is not inexpensive. Why? A good mystery to pursue. Perhaps a good situation to remedy with rod and reel.
On my last leg of the migration to Gainesville, from Tallahassee, one of the quiet beauties of this new landscape presented itself: the highways cut across low country through unbuildable swamp and wetland in slight, hardly perceptible curves, so the broad concrete dual-lanes run between leafy walls of deep green, quite high and even. The median is intensely green. Palmetto and Spanish moss, invariably dramatic, feature the walls. This place is irrepressibly bursting with chlorophyll generators, green machines everywhere. Herbs and beans grow with little more than a nudge. Some say homegrown Florida tomatoes aren't as good as, perhaps, Vermont beefsteak reds, because they grow too fast, too easily. This would be bad country for winemaking: the lesson of Napa is that heat and lack of water "stress" the vines to produce a keener, smaller, sweeter and more complex grape. Grapes here would be fat and lazy, unstressed, flabby despite their best intentions.
Will I grow flabby here? I doubt it. My alarm clock is a pair of devilish boys who leap on me. They also bring my first Diet Pepsi of the day and demand stories. They'll return to the house from nursery and pre-school around 3:00 and I'll have dinner in the oven for an early meal. We have plenty of stories to make up, plenty of projects (they're helping me on "our" Dovekie), and a clutch of Arxea 703 secrets. Like our Crow-Planes – technologically advanced ornithopters, silent and disguised as mere crows patrolling the skies. Crow-Plane Alpha is piloted by Max, Crow-Plane Bravo by Luc. The black craft wait in a hangar under the lawn for immediate take-off and carry truly disgusting bad eggs from hens that occasionally lay under the house. These missiles of smelly disrespect are dropped on improper, stuffy, or overdressed people. The egg-bombed victims look up to find the source of their misfortune and notice only a pair of crows (heh heh heh) who couldn't possibly deliver such a blow to their composure. No, flab is not in the cards, mental or physical.
Even though I've arrived in G'ville, the Journey continues.
Braxinoso Speaks
The reception we received was unexpectedly enthusiastic, merry, relieved, welcoming in every way. We arrived as partners come to make life easier, not as visitors come to take our ease and advantage. They boys will be a handful of squirm and chaos. Like all the best cow-ponies, rally cars, sailboats and children, they are not "easy." They have personality and will. They won't be governed submissively. Pushing limits is their job description. Himself will get scraped and pounded but what joy to help raise them! Both of us feel younger.
Monday, August 26, 2013
Texas BBQ
"Roadfood" rates City Market in Luling, Texas, as one of the shrines of BBQ. Are they correct?
Yes and no. Here we encounter one of those "Wise Men of Hindustan" problems: seven wise blind men approach an elephant, each grasping one part of the beast, each defining the big fellow as his particular sampling – a snake, a wall, a tree trunk, a leaf, &c. Each is right for the trunk, the body, the leg, the ear – and each misses the nature of the elephant.
City Market BBQ meat is perfect.
Texas BBQ concentrates on quality of meat, spice rubs and slow process, not sauce. The ribs are fall-off-the-bone tender. The brisket is firmer but wonderfully succulent. The City Market signature sausage rings are among the best sausage I've ever encountered. Meaty, moist, natural casing, a hint of consolidating filler (which retains the tasty meat juices, a plus), and mildly spiced, not at all hot-spicy. The rings are in casings about 1.25" in diameter, looped into a 6" round.
Let your GPS find Luling and City Market. You could miss both. They do not stand out or shout superlatives of any kind. This is a neighborhood joint and you'll share your lunch (they don't serve dinner) with locals. As a courtesy to locals and as self-preservation, do not associate yourself with Abraham Lincoln, General Grant, or Harvard.
Ordering lunch is a two-phase operation. First, go to the meat room in the back where chunky men in white butchers gear and pale green sanitary gloves are carving and serving. The meat room has Lexan window-walls to keep the smoke in. It's thick. The menu is on the wall, a plastic "Coke" sign with small plastic snap-in-letters. But it's cohabited with the smoke for too long, the selections are hard to read. No matter, the choices are severely limited: beef brisket, pork ribs, sausage, Wonder bread or crackers, sweet or dill pickles, Saran-wrapped sweet onion thirds.
The fat butcher boys want to process you in and out briskly, "What you want? What can I getcha?"
I order half a pound of brisket and a sausage ring. The beef is cut, weighed, and slammed onto butcher paper with the sausage.
"Bread? Crackers? One or two? What can I getcha?"
I get two slices of bread and a dill pickle, pay about $8, and scoot out into the booths and tables.
Phase two, the counter at the front of the City Market space, where you can get a beer or soda and a stated amount of beans. I get a root beer and a pint of beans.
City Market doesn't take its reputation seriously. It's local joint, formica table tops and aluminum tubing chairs with vinyl cushions. Two utensils are available: plastic spoons for beans, plastic knives. No music, no funny business. Serious eating, some talk. Some men retain their cowboy hats, more retain their John Deere hats. The women are dedicated eaters, hefty redneck women, some black, some Hispanic, some with hospital scrubs or hair salon tunics. The light is dim, unenthusiastic light, which probably suits a place sitting in southern Texas heat.
There are two sauces, in bottles. One is standard hot sauce, the cheap Mexican red. The other is the City Market's barbecue sauce, a discouraging mustard-based yellowy-orange mix flecked with something.
Texans take their BBQ seriously, granted. What they don't take seriously is a meal. It's not enough to provide perfectly smoked, slow-cooked meat if you don't care about the meal around it. If you throw Wonder Bread and very bad big-jar dills into the butcher paper with exquisite meat, the meal goes downhill. The pinto beans are genuinely awful, without character, a pasty dried legume taste.
The City Market makes exquisite BBQ but they don't put any effort into the meal it makes. I like minimalist food, foh joints, holes-in-the-wall, even plastic utensils. But there is no respect for a meal, here, or for eating well, or for the magic balance of a meal. There's something smug and rural and wrong-headed about hunks of great meat served with disdain for anyone who wants more, like lunch.
I wish I could take half a dozen of those incredible sausages and eat them with a tasty salad and sourdough bread. At Bo's in Lafayette, Bo serves equally good BBQ supported by a real meal and careful tastes. The City Market is an experience in redneck stubbornness: you got your meat, you want fancy, too?
Yes. Why not? Food is one of the best things in our lives and it takes only a little care to elevate it to real cuisine. If that's fancy, yes; I want fancy, too.
Braxinoso Speaks
This is our second successful search for road food. We found it, we et it. I agree with Himself in this instance: it would have taken a tiny nudge of effort to make this world-class but some Texan sullenness keeps it "country," which may be a virtue to rednecks (and I consider Himself a prime redneck) but is a pejorative in cuisine.
We found the 50/50 burger – half ground bacon, half ground beef – and loved it. After City Market we finally found the much-touted Texas kolaches, a Czech pastry. Purely awful, cheap, nasty. It made us long for a nice cherry hamentaschen.
Yes and no. Here we encounter one of those "Wise Men of Hindustan" problems: seven wise blind men approach an elephant, each grasping one part of the beast, each defining the big fellow as his particular sampling – a snake, a wall, a tree trunk, a leaf, &c. Each is right for the trunk, the body, the leg, the ear – and each misses the nature of the elephant.
City Market BBQ meat is perfect.
Texas BBQ concentrates on quality of meat, spice rubs and slow process, not sauce. The ribs are fall-off-the-bone tender. The brisket is firmer but wonderfully succulent. The City Market signature sausage rings are among the best sausage I've ever encountered. Meaty, moist, natural casing, a hint of consolidating filler (which retains the tasty meat juices, a plus), and mildly spiced, not at all hot-spicy. The rings are in casings about 1.25" in diameter, looped into a 6" round.
Let your GPS find Luling and City Market. You could miss both. They do not stand out or shout superlatives of any kind. This is a neighborhood joint and you'll share your lunch (they don't serve dinner) with locals. As a courtesy to locals and as self-preservation, do not associate yourself with Abraham Lincoln, General Grant, or Harvard.
Ordering lunch is a two-phase operation. First, go to the meat room in the back where chunky men in white butchers gear and pale green sanitary gloves are carving and serving. The meat room has Lexan window-walls to keep the smoke in. It's thick. The menu is on the wall, a plastic "Coke" sign with small plastic snap-in-letters. But it's cohabited with the smoke for too long, the selections are hard to read. No matter, the choices are severely limited: beef brisket, pork ribs, sausage, Wonder bread or crackers, sweet or dill pickles, Saran-wrapped sweet onion thirds.
The fat butcher boys want to process you in and out briskly, "What you want? What can I getcha?"
I order half a pound of brisket and a sausage ring. The beef is cut, weighed, and slammed onto butcher paper with the sausage.
"Bread? Crackers? One or two? What can I getcha?"
I get two slices of bread and a dill pickle, pay about $8, and scoot out into the booths and tables.
Phase two, the counter at the front of the City Market space, where you can get a beer or soda and a stated amount of beans. I get a root beer and a pint of beans.
City Market doesn't take its reputation seriously. It's local joint, formica table tops and aluminum tubing chairs with vinyl cushions. Two utensils are available: plastic spoons for beans, plastic knives. No music, no funny business. Serious eating, some talk. Some men retain their cowboy hats, more retain their John Deere hats. The women are dedicated eaters, hefty redneck women, some black, some Hispanic, some with hospital scrubs or hair salon tunics. The light is dim, unenthusiastic light, which probably suits a place sitting in southern Texas heat.
There are two sauces, in bottles. One is standard hot sauce, the cheap Mexican red. The other is the City Market's barbecue sauce, a discouraging mustard-based yellowy-orange mix flecked with something.
Texans take their BBQ seriously, granted. What they don't take seriously is a meal. It's not enough to provide perfectly smoked, slow-cooked meat if you don't care about the meal around it. If you throw Wonder Bread and very bad big-jar dills into the butcher paper with exquisite meat, the meal goes downhill. The pinto beans are genuinely awful, without character, a pasty dried legume taste.
The City Market makes exquisite BBQ but they don't put any effort into the meal it makes. I like minimalist food, foh joints, holes-in-the-wall, even plastic utensils. But there is no respect for a meal, here, or for eating well, or for the magic balance of a meal. There's something smug and rural and wrong-headed about hunks of great meat served with disdain for anyone who wants more, like lunch.
I wish I could take half a dozen of those incredible sausages and eat them with a tasty salad and sourdough bread. At Bo's in Lafayette, Bo serves equally good BBQ supported by a real meal and careful tastes. The City Market is an experience in redneck stubbornness: you got your meat, you want fancy, too?
Yes. Why not? Food is one of the best things in our lives and it takes only a little care to elevate it to real cuisine. If that's fancy, yes; I want fancy, too.
Braxinoso Speaks
This is our second successful search for road food. We found it, we et it. I agree with Himself in this instance: it would have taken a tiny nudge of effort to make this world-class but some Texan sullenness keeps it "country," which may be a virtue to rednecks (and I consider Himself a prime redneck) but is a pejorative in cuisine.
We found the 50/50 burger – half ground bacon, half ground beef – and loved it. After City Market we finally found the much-touted Texas kolaches, a Czech pastry. Purely awful, cheap, nasty. It made us long for a nice cherry hamentaschen.
Sunday, August 25, 2013
Two and a Half Texas Towns
El Paso, the U.S. side of an international, continuous city, is elevated, so that Ciudad Juarez spreads out below, to the south. At night the Mexican half of the bitty is an even matrix of white and yellow lights. In the morning it is even more regular, an uninterrupted texture of single-story block structures, gray and undistinguished by any architectural feature.
These Mexican border towns are well-documented sites of drug gang violence unchecked by the Mexican authorities. From most reports, the violence is – like the view of Ciudad Juarez – an even pattern of criminal brutality that doesn't distinguish between commercial cartel mayhem and official police mayhem. The profits made by these two antagonists as motive and product of the violence is evenly divided, as well. Perhaps it was my prejudice but the low, gray, crowded grid of Ciudad Juarez had a sinister look.
Leaving El Paso (with Marty Robbins' song clearly in mind) the Subaru and Dovekie and I traversed more striking desert. Toward the end of the afternoon we moved into hill country and dense, dark-green scrub trees.
I wondered how anyone could navigate among those trees and hills, and what a pain in the saddle it must have been to winkle longhorns out of that brush. The hill country seemed impenetrably complex.
Until I reached San Antonio. I-10 ported me into a web of interlocking, wandering highways headed in every direction and confused even more by massive signs hoisted a hundred feet up, above the second and third tiers of crossing superhighways. I have never been so assaulted by commercial come-ons – every possible service and product and blandishment, every business logo and catch-phrase. A defensive panic developed in my throat as a coppery taste and a headache accompanied it. I had been sweeping across landscape for too long, I suppose, to confront sudden advertising overload.
Overload. Like TV ads, one after the other but not from a screen. Every direction, every scrap of sky lit by hype and hyperbole. I had the skin-crawling feeling that a thousand hungry commercial claws were reaching for my bank account, blatantly, loudly, squalling at a volume like a dog pound when a fire engine passes.
The hardware store was once my friend. They wanted me to get along well, suggested tools and fittings, how-to suggestions. Maybe it still is, though it's all in Chinese, now.
The elevated signs above San Antonio's warren of oversized highways are not concerned for my well-being or health or consumer approval. Ask yourself: do we still believe businesses care about consumer approval? More likely, they go for the percentages and forget the dissatisfied. The masses will eat/buy/use/consume anything. Tell 'em what they want.
But it was late. I'd once again gone to the wrong Red Roof Inn and was using my iPhone GPS direction lady to guide me to the room I'd already booked from the iPhone while I was at the edge of the desert. I was disheartened, disoriented, unbelieving. Too much greed, too much advertising, too much of everything.
The GPS iPhone lady – an infuriatingly smug bitch I'll never meet, thank God – directed me through the briar patch levels and concrete thruways of San Antonio. She employed a doubtless logical but abstruse embroidery of turns and route numbers, once vectoring my car-and-trailer rig through a tiny neighborhood street where multiple pickup trucks sat before each bungalow. I was grateful she showed me the way, and I hated her all the same.
Tomorrow I will scoot out of San Antonio ASAP. Perhaps there are six or seven blocks of distinguished downtown beauty in this burg. I'm not encouraged to find them. The GPS iPhone lady will get me out of the briar patch and on the road. I'm too tired to eat, too discouraged to rejoice at geographic progress. El Paso and San Antonio are ugly blots on wonderful land.
How did we get this way?
Braxinoso Speaks
Himself is plentifully naive. And thin-skinned. He's seen the commercial grip tightening around life for, lo, these many years and he's contributed to it. We can't return to Walden Pond or the Little House On the Prairie, dammit. This is the time and society we've got. Cowboy up and do what you can with it. He needs to stop feeling "special" and admit that he's as much a part of this mess as the rest of us.
The Great Divide
I've crossed a great divide. I feel it.
Moving across the country is what we all must do from time to time, I'm certain, to get a feel of the American scope, the enormity of this nation, and to remind ourselves that nice little lawns and suburban shopping centers make up a tiny part of the United States.
We don't own this place. We belong to it. It isn't crowded but huge and remarkably lonely in its spaciousness. It's anthropomorphic narcissism to assume our nation is what we see in our own gerbil cages. Getting out onto the American ground is humbling and sobering.
Long, long desert stretches. Wide prairies, horizon to horizon. A few clusters of folks here and there. This is a major chunk of the world, and shortly we may wake from our doze and discover that rats and mice and cockroaches have been plundering our wealth for their own aggrandizement. When that happens, when we compare the real physical breadth of our nation and its weight of resources, we'll be obliged to squash the rodentine corporations that are squirreling away our wealth.
Who are these piss-ant speculators, juggling numbers and derivatives and robbing pension funds? Well-dressed, self-congratulatory, puffed-up thieves. At some point it's going to be critical that we remember our grampas. They worked willingly within codes of self-restraint and ethical boundaries that were essential to their identity. They couldn't respect themselves without the codes. They would not look kindly on legislating ethics, morality and logic out of existence, a process that's ongoing in Washington.
Seeing the big-ness of this nation puts the money pests in perspective as embarrassingly trivial frauds. Isn't it time to get angry?
This is a wonderful land. It's easy to hear Woody Guthrie out here on the road. Get out in the big spaces and listen.
One expects a mighty ridgeback for the Continental Divide but I crossed it this afternoon on a flatland Interstate, I-10. Without the sign, announcing the geographic fact and the height, around 4500' above sea level, I wouldn't have noticed. But that sign struck a harmonic. It occurred to me that my life has crossed over into another watershed phase, and that I'm following the downslope gladly, looking forward to a natural return to family and closeness. Big medicine.
The land speaks to us. No doubt about. It can sound like Woody, or it can sound like a brief thundering rainstorm whacking the windshield as you drive the desert floor, or like wind over gravel at a rest stop. I don't know for certain what it's saying to me, yet, but the message is crucial, stirring, important. I must listen louder.
Braxinoso Speaks
Himself has been in the car too long. He's gone a bit woo-woo on us. He's wringing significance out of desert rocks and finding messages in rainstorms. But this is what he does. It's my job to keep him on-task and out of bogs. Perhaps it's his job to hear language in running water. From each, according to his ability . . .
Saturday, August 24, 2013
Elegance Without Lushness
It's easy to be trivial about the desert, ripping across it at a skimming rate in air-conditioned pods. But even from such a patrician perch, the size and scope and hammering heat of it intimidates.
Beside I-10 East, as the Subaru and the Dovekie and I ascended a pass in one of the mountain ranges that lie athwart the Great Southwestern Desert, an old gravel road appeared again and again. I realized that the Interstate engineers had followed one of the old stage and freight passes. On reflection, it was the natural thing to do. The Old Guys tried every pass and settled on the best crossing. I began to feature mule-drawn wagons on that scrolling, wayward track whenever it reappeared, and to notice that it took every possible advantage of topography and natural shape. The Old Guys had shovels and blasting powder and an eye for advantage. Damn, the trip across these mountains was epic, unthinkable in our cushioned lives. The West wasn't "won," it was endured.
But the mountain passes may have been the easy part. How to cross sixty miles of desert between ranges in Sonoran heat? 110°F at the rest stop. so hot that I almost fell back into the car when I opened the door and stepped out.
Wagons moved at the pace of a slow jogger – though I don't know a jogger who could manage a 10 K in heat like this – making twenty or thirty miles on a good day, camping in the cold, starry nights among the inquisitive sidewinders and scorpions. How could you carry enough water for yourself and the mules? Jolting over rocks, avoiding big creosote bushes, finding eroded edges into and out of the waddies, constant focus in brutal sunlight that had to erode focus.
I crossed one waddie named Palen Ditch out on the vast, flat, gravel platter of the Sonoran Desert. Suddenly I was treated to a rainstorm in the bright sunlight. It lasted exactly thirty seconds and didn't darken the road a whit.
I crossed a larger watercourse, the Hassayampa River, but it was not being used at the time for carrying water. Perfectly good river, broad and deep, but no water. It was flanked by warnings against sudden dust storms that kick up quickly and reduce visibility to zero. I didn't experience one this crossing (yet) but this particular bit of local meteorology must have been plenty interesting from the seat of a freight wagon.
I enjoyed passing Sore Finger Road, plenty of Ditches (I'm not sure that having a ditch named for you is an honor or an official insult), and watching those giant Quixotic desert inhabitants, the high-tension electric towers, march across the planar land.
Desert colors are muted, though there are occasional gray-green bushes and stunted trees and saguaros. Like the old B&W cinema, however, the beauty is often in lighting rather than chroma. From the desert floor, the distant foothills have a horizontal hachure, a delicate texture seen at a low angle that resolves into parallel lines. At a distance, the creosote bushes resolve into a dot-stippling that shade the rugged hills. A joshua tree standing out among chollas and low bushes seems always like an event, and the saguaros, which top forty feet, are remarkable desert statements.
I remember reading a copy of an old letter at Death Valley National Park, commenting that some birds flew across the desert on their way to some bird rendezvous and simply dropped dead out of the sky from the heat. Understandable.
It would be terribly hard, but it would also be a thrilling challenge to ride with a few friends and some friendly mules across one of these desert stretches, to savor just how it felt, to camp out with a fire and a lot of snake repellant (I'm sure I can Google that), and to lie under the stars talking to the Old Guys.
I want to explore the desert at length if I can. It's spare and harsh and mysterious and elegant. Like Marlene Dietrich, but more gravel.
Braxinoso Speaks
Listen to him, as if. The desert requires lean young men who don't sweat much. Himself is an old fat man who sweats buckets at the least exertion. When we arrive in Florida, I'll nip at his heels a bit about losing weight. He needs to move fast with those boyos about.
Thursday, August 22, 2013
BON VOYAGE!
An alien place without hearth-gods, the lares fled – or were they imprisoned in the moving pod sitting under my computer studio window? Bare, dusty, tatty, the former den of an untidy bear.
No, I decided where my particular lares reside: in my Weems & Plath Admiral's ships clock, which chimes the half-hour watch bells. Clever lad, I boxed the clock and it rides behind my seat in the car. I can hear it faintly keeping faith with the time and my household gods, which will inhabit the Taj Garage with me and my boyos soon.
Tears, of course, hugging Laura who has been a strong, warm, loving friend. My advocate and spur. A daughter or a sister, but I often sat in the role of child. Of course, tears.
I 580 through Oakland could be Anyplace, USA. That ugly. No concept of architectural dignity, merely commercial ballyhoo wherever possible.
Once on I 5, however, my little cavalcade – Adkins, Subaru and boat trailing behind – rode south through an inimitable place: the vast, fertile plain of the San Joaquin Valley. Dry, dusty, with wind devils and tumbleweeds, but lavishly irrigated to grow marvels – garlic, artichokes, almonds, plums, pistachios, and wine grapes. Distant mountain ranges watercolored in light, cool shades that emphasize the mighty size of the Valley.
The boat trailers well. I'm happy for the money I spent getting new tires and lights and a bearing lube-job for the trailer. Cruise control is ducky on that long, long road, 60 to 64 mph all the way.
A surprisingly political journey through the Valley. An Adkins rule: ken the quality of the signage to judge the message. These were frequent, expensively painted, well-mounted, all-weather signs that blamed the Democrats for curtailing water, jobs, progress and human rights in the Valley.
"No Water = No Jobs"
"Democrats Kill Jobs and Plants"
"Dust Bowl Courtesy of Democratic Administration"
"Get Rid of Barbara Boxer and Get People Back to Work"
"Water Crisis! We All Need Water!"
Apparently some rich planters didn't get their water allotment and they're using their famously discretionary income to shout about it – without a word of argument or logic – to the passing motorist.
Impressive money. More impressive: a simple prestressed concrete overpass bridge patterned with hundreds and hundreds of perfect, tiny swallows' nests, natural architecture gracing industrial architecture.
And at dusk, passing from I-5 on CA 138 in a smaller valley, the purple somber shape of the hills against darkening indigo skies, with tiny red blinking lights of a high tension line defining the desert floor plane.
Even though I started crying, and continued by driving off with my local gas station's pump handle still stuck in my gas tank (a $173 tank of gas, all told), it was a lucky day full of sighs and long looks across.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself did well on the trip. Very little narcolepsy, a short nap in the shade of a building, walking around at rest stops. His right leg is cramping and the knee is bothering him but he's remarkably sane for a prime neurotic going through a massive change. He bears watching.
Monday, August 19, 2013
EXTRACTION
I hate moving.
Dr. Ludgero Gomez was a big man. He had been a mountain trooper
in the Army and did not look like a man who was often insulted. He was a
delightful person with many virtues but what impressed me most about him, and
what lodges in my memory, was how much brute force he applied as he bent over
me with a pair of pliers in my mouth.
Dr. Gomez was extracting two wisdom teeth. It was not an elegant
or subtle operation. It required a basic gripping tool, an artist’s deft
experience, and muscle. In simple terms, Ludgero was pulling out a pair of four-rooted
bone processes firmly grown into my jawbone. The mandible is a formidable hunk
of material. He was muscling against living bone, tightly clinging tissue, and
ripping out perfectly fine wiring in the case of multiple nerve fibers
connecting teeth that had expected to stay in place and bite things.
It was a struggle. Dr. Gomez and dental science won. The
aftermath was grisly, painful, disorienting, bloody and unpleasant for me and
everyone around me. The only person who dealt with it well was my mentor, Dr.
Matt Finn. I walked unsteadily from the Gomez Dental Office down the Main
Street of Wareham, and stepped from Town Dock onto Matt’s Tartan 36 for a
sailing cruise out to the Vineyard and Nantucket. Matt handed me a very naval
tot of rum. “It’s an old anaesthetic but it still works,” he said. I told him I
was already taking some opiate pain killer. “You bet,” he said, “get that rum
down, now.”
Logically, we don’t expect to retain our wisdom teeth past a
given age. But your jaw doesn’t know that. It needs opiates and rum to realign
its reality.
Logically, we don’t expect to live in the same place for the
balance of our lives. But your emotions don’t know that. Your indwelling,
heedless heart’s logic balks at the insane ripping out of perfectly good wiring
and the foolhardy destruction of comfortable navigation ordinals: this is where
my jacket hangs, here is my spoon, there is my favorite chair, I look out this
window to Mt. Burdell’s golden slope. all is well.
You only think you’re a
logical being. In your picayune life you make decisions based on what you want
to happen, on self-interest, on ethical principles, on goals. Yet in retrospect
your life is most likely a surprising series of mistaken premises that you can
now see were often self-destructive. “Why did I sign up for that?” or “What was
I doing with that dame?” Your emotional life isn’t practically accessible but
hidden behind camouflage all of us are childishly willing to accept.
“Yes, but I’m older and wiser, now. I’ve got my ducks in a row
and I’m on top of the game.” Good luck with that. Your ducks are sniggering at
you, and you’re once again convincing yourself that will and sense will overawe
deep needs. We do our best, which is all we can do, but the real truth is that
we aren’t completely in control of that world of feelings and hurt and wishes
beneath the concrete pavement of our street life. What changed the twentieth
century as much as electricity was the revelation that the unconscious – the
hidden awareness beneath conscious thought – not only exists but exerts more
powerful leverage than daily decisions.
I’m reminded of marine architects designing sea vessels, strong
and powerful, proof against anything. Once offshore, logical engineering and
strength of materials are subjected to primally limitless forces, stresses and
loads no one can foresee. In the early 60’s a Royal Navy cruiser more than 600
feet on deck plunged into one of the freak troughs the Agulhaus Current produces
and went down. To the bottom. All hands lost. The ship was a marvel of modern
engineering and enlightened understanding. To the bottom. Is your life as well engineered as a Royal Navy cruiser? Perhaps
yours is; mine isn’t. Facing the brute forces of Life, I can expect to be
battered even when my ducks seem lined up in Prussian precision.
My point is that moving is emotionally dangerous and shouldn’t be
lightly regarded by you or by your friends. “You’re going to love the new
place!” one says, certain that your discomfort is mostly indulgence in
illogical thinking. Heartily patronizing, friends tell you that moving is
healthy and you shouldn’t sweat it. Why worry about it? Look on the bright
side! You’re getting yourself in a lather over nothing!
Anglo-Saxon epithets don’t have the punch they had before HBO and
can’t really address this kind of puffed-up posturing. Thinly disguised behind
a friend’s “assurance” is the self- aggrandizing pity: “Poor Adkins. He
believes in faeries and UFOs and global warming. Of course a person of such
weak mind will crack under the mild stress of simply moving.”
Recollect the lares.
For the Romans these were household gods. (The singular is lar.) They differed from the great gods in that their influence was
localized, operating only with a given household. Each family home had its own
chosen lares. Beyond the home, there
were local lares for glens and brooks
and waterfalls, shops, bridges, and streets. These were short-range deities but
powerful, and they were intensely important to the families or the artisans
that acknowledged them. Later lares
were the Scottish brownies and the Anglo-Saxon elves, localized spirits caring
for homes and inhabitants.
Strange territory for a science reporter but lately I’ve been
confronting the idea that principles of the heart and feelings are not
incompatible with scientific principles. Do I believe in brownies? I do not.
But I believe that they may be a cipher for important emotions and ideas about
home and hearth and the holiness of places. Any scientist who has sat in a
redwood grove for more than a few minutes will admit to a feeling beyond simple
observation.
It’s possible that we disturb the household gods at our peril.
They don’t have the power to curse us but they are avatars of ideas important
in our human development – this is a significant place, a home, a small place
of safety and calm my heart knows well.
I’m moving. I would do so gently and without Ludgero Gomez’s
massive strength of demolition. My heart is sore and my emotions are flighty. I
am probably the Wimp of the World, and yet I believe that moving one’s heart is
perilous and painful.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
You would not credit the
mumbling, rapid breathing, lower tract distress and angst Himself has invested
in this cross-continental endeavour. Even I, as the voice of reason within the
home, caution him to pay attention to these intense feelings and not to throw
himself too rashly at the game. Beyond the emotions raised like dust around the
moving, both of us look forward to being part of a sweet family with boys and
the new little girl. I’ll have new challenges to meet with those little
Adkins/Burger larvae. Both of us are excited. Half way across the Great
Southwestern Desert, we may begin to rejoice.
Monday, August 12, 2013
The Arrogance of Patronizing Blue Collars
The following is a diatribe directed at John Fahey, the chairman of the board of the National Geographic Society. It's from Society Matters, a blog for which I'm an advisor and occasional contributor; it's a band of ex-NGS employees who are concerned about the editorial direction the magazine has taken, and even more about the dreck presented as factual and educational on the Society's cable channel.
It should be said that Geographic, following the gimlet-eyed greed of its former president, Gilbert Grosvenor (the grandson of the first editor-in-chief, Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor, son of the great e-in-c Melville Bell Grosvenor, but "the blood ran thin") sold 70% of the channel to the King of Sleaze, and the Enemy of Journalism, Rupert Murdoch. Even so, the channel carries the Society's "brand" and is cheapening the venerable image built painstakingly by extraordinary explorers, writers and photographers. My nine years at Geographic were proud times for me. The Society's standards today are much-degraded.
But this isn't merely about Geographic. There is a corporately imposed disconnect between learning, journalism, honesty and the working people of our country. Giving citizens bread and circuses is cynical but understandable. Giving citizens lies and assuming your own citizens are cattle is short-sighted, wrongheaded, and enormously damaging to the fabric of society with a small "s."
I'm a fussy elitist in my own way. But I have enormous respect for the American working citizen. I reject the notion that working people are lazy, prefer welfare, are stupid and dull. No. It simply isn't true. We had, not too long ago, a lively and discerning middle class. With a few notably dented exceptions, everyone I've ever met would prefer doing good work to being given government doles. We're in a crisis when the Geographic Society and the politicians in DC consider the citizenry as a herd of biddable, predictable, mindless sheep.
"The fix is in. Everyone's crooked. You'll do anything for enough money. If you don't do it, someone else will – you might as well get paid for doing it. Miracles don't happen and governments are corrupt; it's always been that way, always will be. Why complain about politics? It's all a show. People are so dumb and lazy that it's worthless to offer them anything of quality. Joe Six-Pack likes it dumb."
This is what Alexander Pope was worried about in his "Essay On Man":
Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As to be hated needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.
Our Devolved Geographic Society is operating on the cynical principle that its audience is so imbecilic that it will only favor bright lights, candy and scandal. This debased Society also embraces the fiction that "reality shows" are something the public desired.
First, Joe Six-Pack is a hell of a lot smarter than the TV vice-presidents and the boardroom think. He lives in a complex world of compromised possibilities and is more aware of broader issues than his grandfather or great-grandfather. Joe has been exposed to more cultures and religions and places. He's been relieved of much sentimental surety about faith and politics and permanence. He's seen the world change drastically. He is trying – and this is an ongoing, difficult effort – to retain balance.
Joe didn't want "reality shows." They were a function of the Writer's Strike in the 80's, when it was discovered that a small production company that paid only a few of its subjects could – by being in-your-face provocative – provide passable air-time for less money. The formula was so successful that "reality TV" proliferated.
Given a chance, Joe Six-Pack could make intelligent decisions. Cleverly, his corporate government has narrowed his access to information and overview by actively restricting information, unashamed propaganda, disinformation, and even by flooding the internet with spurious data (we're beginning to learn that much of the right-wing no-climate-change web myth has been generated by oil-paid bloggers).
Not only does Joe's government try to confuse his balance, but a venerable ally of education and exploration – The National Geographic Society – has surrendered its virtue to the myth of Joe's idiocy. A Society that once addressed cutting edge technology and revealed archaeological wonders is serving up junk-food – scripted soap operas insulting their subjects and disregarding facts. These "shows" play to gullibility, lubricity and scorn. They stray as boldly across the lines of good taste as Hiram Bingham strode boldly through Inca jungles.
The central and most damaging principle on which the Devolved Society functions is that it MUST provide such dreck programming. If it doesn't, John and his boardroom cronies suggest, the Society could fail, lose its audience, disappear, go the way of the dodo.
Very well, then. The National Geographic Society has had a good run, has done great work, and perhaps it should close its doors before it disgraces itself so grievously that its stellar reputation is tarnished beyond retrieval.
Sell, off, John: the buildings and equipment – location, location, location – are worth a mint! Give up! Conclude finally that Joe Six-Pack doesn't deserve good journalism or honest facts, tidy up your desk, and everyone goes home with a nice bonus.
The alternative is more difficult. It will require a trip back into the Age of Reason to fetch the notion that Man Is Perfectable, that given tools of truth and skill Joe Six-Pack could see the world more clearly. It would require effort on an Herculean scale, John, and a few – ahem – shifts in policy. It might even require the dreadful admission that "after some thought and soul-searching, we've decided to re-direct our editorial navigation and get closer to the spirit of the Society's founders and the giants who made it great."
You could be one of those giants, John. Honestly. It wouldn't be easy! My God, the flak you'd take, and you might lose some advertisement, too. You could lose a lot. But you might regain the soul of the Society.
Relying on a perceived stupidity should be more dangerous than it is. The only explanation for getting away with it is that elections and Congressional decisions are so predictably in favor of corporations over citizens, that to recognize the corruption would mean the whole damn system is broken. If it is, we'd all be obliged to go through a vast social upheaval to build a new system. This loss of surety, comfort, predictability and the specter of real discomfort is – even to the intelligent working people I trust – unthinkable. We're stuck for a time in a denial mode: "No, it's the pendulum swinging. We're a democracy. We just gotta get to the polls and vote in the right folks."
That time is past. The big corporations control both parties. The parties determine who will run. We're given a choice between senatorial and presidential candidates who are all approved by big business. Choose one party or the other and we're still powerless.
What's the answer? Unthinkable.
Braxinoso Speaks:
Himself is about to make an enormous shift from California to Florida. Out of the frying pan, so to speak. He plagues himself with these ponderous problems of state, injustice, human rights, heritage, revolution. Honestly, I wonder if he is merely avoiding practical focus on the problems HE has. He makes sense but he has no real forum, no following, and before he leads a charge he must feed his horse. It's my task to persuade himself to be prudent of his time.
Sunday, July 7, 2013
July 4, 2013
Both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died within hours of each other on the Fourth of July, 1826, fifty years after the Declaration of Independence was signed. They were friends and opponents, each deeply respectful of the other's intelligence and humanity and even of their opposing views. Jefferson died around one in the morning. Adams died around four, before sunrise, with the words, "Independence forever," and "Jefferson survives." He was wrong. Twice.
Both Jefferson and Adams regarded the growing power of political parties with suspicion but for different reasons. They argued bitterly about this trend. Both saw the possibility of abuse if overwhelming power were to be invested in blocs of influence. Neither imagined the disaster of two massive parties controlling the political dialogue of their nation. Neither conceived that the death of their hopeful and logical social experiment in democracy might be a logical step away from two-party control: the ultimate oligarchy of both parties quietly controlled by the same billionaires and global corporate "entities."
How refreshing it would be if our billionaires were progressive humanists. Alas. The global megacorporations that fund both parties are massive and massively powerful clay "men" without souls or ethics or – most dangerously – nationality.
This Fourth of July, 2013, may be significant to future historians as the end of Jefferson's and Adam's ideals for a nation. We are governed by a legislature and presidency and court that makes extravagant claims of democracy, diversity and morality, but the difference between this administration and the last is disappointingly monotonous. Better diction, same results: a seamless erosion of basic legal rights, privacy, dignity and volition.
A recent article in The New York Times reveals a shadow government controlling the daylight laws by which most of us live. Suddenly and without our consent there are secret courts trumping the rights we assumed were absolute.
It seems to work in an Animal Farm way: there are laws for sheep (that's us), and secret, overriding laws for pigs (that's the unrestricted Gestapo of Homeland Security and the NSA). Most of the time we have the right to a trial by jury, the right to counsel and legal procedure, the rights against self-incrimination, &c. Most of the time, in sheep matters. But when a matter interests pigs, we have no rights. By pig-law, under Homeland Security legislation, we can be arrested, imprisoned, tortured, even executed without counsel or formal charges IF the pigs declare us a threat. What are their criteria for threat? Dunno, it's a pig secret.
In the article you'll find that there are eleven judges on the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court, ten appointed (not elected) by the conservative right of the two-party-same-funders power bloc. One judge reviews and signs off on about 1800 requests for data gathering (what we might in days of yore call "search and seizure") each year. To date, we're told, not one has been refused. Little wonder: this comprises about 5 legal documents a day, a heavy "case load." No refusals.
The pigs have law, power and surveillance completely controlled. The sheep have a desperate need to believe their pastures are the greenest, sweetest, most moral farm in the world. If they didn't believe that, they'd be obliged to protest against a monolithic power structure, they'd be upset and nervous and sad, and many of them would be disappeared. Pigs and sheep thus achieve a balanced harmony. Jefferson and Adams would both be in the custody of Homeland Security, somewhere, and proud of it.
Braxinoso Speaks
Himself talks about the NSA's surveillance lightly, as if he isn't subject to it. Their algorithms connecting firebrand words and patterns have almost certainly earned him at least a file among other dissidents. What the NSA can't plumb is that my inkfish master is about as dangerous as a grumpy groundhog. Still, we hope for literate and pleasant cellmates in the FEMA camp, the NSA lockup, or Guantanamo. There's also the possibility that he only hopes to have a file. A case of wishful paranoia.
Wednesday, April 24, 2013
ADDICTION AND BOSTON
THE GREAT ADDICTION isn't drugs, alcohol, sex, religion or even money. The most abused addiction is Drama. Every parent of a teenager, especially in the new era of entitled children and laissez fair parenting, should recognize this. Give any kid the tiniest opening for High Drama and he/she will make the most of it.
There's a counter-intuitive factor, here: Drama is desirable whether it's positive or negative. Over and over we watch our children and our grandchildren "stir the pot" to their own disadvantage; they seize an opportunity for spinning up the drama even when they know they'll lose privileges, make us angry, alienate themselves from friends. Drama – high-contrast life, crisis, anxiety, wailing, pain – is more seductive than quiet approval. "Please, God, rescue me from normal!" In many, many young people drugs and alcohol are merely symptoms of drama addiction.
Of course kids live in a world of exaggerated drama. They take their cues from frantically dramatic music and, I'm ashamed to say, from current journalism.
I still consider myself a journalist, and I still regard journalism as one of the noblest professions. But I was embarrassed for my profession as I watched the "coverage" of the Boston bomb incident (note the exclusion of the word "massacre" or "terrorist" or "attack"). Even sober veterans like Wolf Blitzer were scratching and begging for sensationalist, flammable material, the ghosts of maybe-truths, "opinion" and speculation, snap-crackle-and-pop to fill the space between commercials.
The public and official reaction was hyperbolic. Tanks in the streets of Boston (okay, APCs), "lockdowns," and de facto martial law out of 1984. The jumped-up "security" did NOT help capture the culprits; brother 1 was mortally wounded during a sudden firefight; brother 2 was noticed by an emerging citizen after the lockdown, and might have been noticed far earlier on streets with pedestrians and normal traffic. The fact is that the officials wanted to stir the drama pot, as well, to look authoritative and feel powerful, to trot out their black vests and crisis faces, "Back into your homes! This is the police!" Cops want drama, too, and only serious training can convince a law officer not to overreact to every situation. No one in charge of the Boston Incident counseled against overreaction. Everyone had a fine old melodrama.
More fact: We've dramatized ourselves into more domestic terrorism. Copycat, homegrown, wannabe jihadists will now come out of the woodwork to embrace the fame and esteem (remember, "good" drama and "bad" drama are equally appealing) the Chechyan Brothers got, and will hope that an afternoon's work will bring them into a blaze of attention. Forget self-interest, fear of death, and common law. Leaping onto the world stage is an emotional lightning storm, not a discussion group.
The only hope we have to avoid constant domestic strikes is to drain the drama from our electrified anchor-people, to promote sober and factual reporting of facts, filter out speculation and rumor, to minimize sensationalism and sentimentalism in sidebar interviews and features, and to portray "terrorists" as largely half-baked neurotics rather than blazing dragons of evil. Leave "evil" to sermons. Killers are garden-variety whackadoodles and don't deserve vast terms. Call a sicko a sicko, not a glittering demon.
We don't need the might and glory and authority of a super-power nation to suppress violence. This will only yield a police state (Boston during the lockdown) and more drama, more reasons to rebel against The Man. Who will come forth, please, as a sober, calm Grampa Walton to settle our fears and refocus our panic toward getting back to our work? We need maturity much more than Sensational New Developments After the Commercial!
Braxinoso Speaks:
Himself is making sense. We lived on those Boston streets and know those people. The brothers who planted crude bombs, in a pitiful attempt at glory, and the overlarge "crisis team" of officials took Boston for a softer, more sheeplike city. Traditionally (and that's Boston all over) that city doesn't take kindly to royal OR federal mandates and martial control. One Revolution started there. Another is due.
There's a counter-intuitive factor, here: Drama is desirable whether it's positive or negative. Over and over we watch our children and our grandchildren "stir the pot" to their own disadvantage; they seize an opportunity for spinning up the drama even when they know they'll lose privileges, make us angry, alienate themselves from friends. Drama – high-contrast life, crisis, anxiety, wailing, pain – is more seductive than quiet approval. "Please, God, rescue me from normal!" In many, many young people drugs and alcohol are merely symptoms of drama addiction.
Of course kids live in a world of exaggerated drama. They take their cues from frantically dramatic music and, I'm ashamed to say, from current journalism.
I still consider myself a journalist, and I still regard journalism as one of the noblest professions. But I was embarrassed for my profession as I watched the "coverage" of the Boston bomb incident (note the exclusion of the word "massacre" or "terrorist" or "attack"). Even sober veterans like Wolf Blitzer were scratching and begging for sensationalist, flammable material, the ghosts of maybe-truths, "opinion" and speculation, snap-crackle-and-pop to fill the space between commercials.
The public and official reaction was hyperbolic. Tanks in the streets of Boston (okay, APCs), "lockdowns," and de facto martial law out of 1984. The jumped-up "security" did NOT help capture the culprits; brother 1 was mortally wounded during a sudden firefight; brother 2 was noticed by an emerging citizen after the lockdown, and might have been noticed far earlier on streets with pedestrians and normal traffic. The fact is that the officials wanted to stir the drama pot, as well, to look authoritative and feel powerful, to trot out their black vests and crisis faces, "Back into your homes! This is the police!" Cops want drama, too, and only serious training can convince a law officer not to overreact to every situation. No one in charge of the Boston Incident counseled against overreaction. Everyone had a fine old melodrama.
More fact: We've dramatized ourselves into more domestic terrorism. Copycat, homegrown, wannabe jihadists will now come out of the woodwork to embrace the fame and esteem (remember, "good" drama and "bad" drama are equally appealing) the Chechyan Brothers got, and will hope that an afternoon's work will bring them into a blaze of attention. Forget self-interest, fear of death, and common law. Leaping onto the world stage is an emotional lightning storm, not a discussion group.
The only hope we have to avoid constant domestic strikes is to drain the drama from our electrified anchor-people, to promote sober and factual reporting of facts, filter out speculation and rumor, to minimize sensationalism and sentimentalism in sidebar interviews and features, and to portray "terrorists" as largely half-baked neurotics rather than blazing dragons of evil. Leave "evil" to sermons. Killers are garden-variety whackadoodles and don't deserve vast terms. Call a sicko a sicko, not a glittering demon.
We don't need the might and glory and authority of a super-power nation to suppress violence. This will only yield a police state (Boston during the lockdown) and more drama, more reasons to rebel against The Man. Who will come forth, please, as a sober, calm Grampa Walton to settle our fears and refocus our panic toward getting back to our work? We need maturity much more than Sensational New Developments After the Commercial!
Braxinoso Speaks:
Himself is making sense. We lived on those Boston streets and know those people. The brothers who planted crude bombs, in a pitiful attempt at glory, and the overlarge "crisis team" of officials took Boston for a softer, more sheeplike city. Traditionally (and that's Boston all over) that city doesn't take kindly to royal OR federal mandates and martial control. One Revolution started there. Another is due.
Thursday, February 23, 2012
SITTING PRETTY
MY FATHER AND MY UNCLES had many tales about the Great Depression. They remember being lucky because their father ran a business people needed as long as rain fell – roofing. Even so, the Depression was a threat to everyone. Grampa’s family brought in the outliers – Great-grandma Baltz, Great-uncle Valden and a few others that fit under the wing. They scraped and scrimped but were better off than most. Nevertheless it left an indelible mark on the Adkins Boys.
A lot of their tales were happy – odd ways of making a dollar, “making do” creatively, losing a dime through a crack in the stairs and hunting all afternoon for it. Scrimping folks stayed at home, so the Boys remembered a lot of family times, laughter around the card table, working on some new invention made of scrap from the shop.
Some were not so funny. It seems that there was a stratum of the white-collar unemployed who couldn’t admit, even to their family, that they’d lost their jobs as managers, clerks, bookkeepers. The Boys told about men who dressed in suits and ties every morning, kissed their wives and children, and went off to “work,” even though they were no longer employed. They spent their days trying to find menial jobs, selling what personal possessions they could, peddling fruit and vegetables from a basket (an odd apparition, the suit-and-tie potato peddler) and, yes, begging. They were proud men who stayed away from soup kitchens and from social workers. They weren’t part of anyone’s statistics, off the books. Some couldn’t bear the shame and dropped from one of Wheeling’s bridges into the Ohio River. Only then would their family and friends learn they hadn’t been at the plant or the office for months.
We’re careful to call our own financial storm a “recession,” as if this word will make it less toxic than That Other Word.
A friend recently described one of her colleagues to me, a figure from the boom 70’s, a high-rolling consultant to major corporations. I’ll call him Calvin. She’d had several lunches with him over the past few weeks and he seemed chipper, snappy in a cashmere sport jacket, tie, fresh shirt. Business as usual.
But she tripped over an open seam in Calvin’s narrative and plucked at the edges until a new truth emerged. Calvin no longer has clients. Or a home or a bank account or a source of income. He lives out of his car, a small import. The driver’s seat reclines. This is his bed.
How did this happen, she asked.
“I’ve been sick. I got sick and my health has just never gotten back to where it was,” he said.
Calvin doesn’t look sickly. Indeed, he’s gained a little weight. He’s managed to establish a blog, working from library computers, and it rates food at various shelters as if he’s filing for Saveur, but charity cuisine is heavy on starches.
He’s proud of his very toney address, a short block in an extremely wealthy neighborhood near the Presidio. This is where he parks his car at night, reclines his seat, and lays him to his rest.
What’s even more surprising about his address is that there are four other car-dwellers who “inhabit” the block. The residents must realize there are mobile squatters among them, something they didn’t expect as owners of select San Francisco property. They must see the same cars each morning with their windows opaque with vapor. It’s likely that, seeing them every morning, they recognize the drivers/livers. It’s doubtful if the car dwellers and home owners speak as neighbors. Well-off owners may not know quite what to say or what the Law might stipulate for pavement dwellers. The mobile homeless avoid calling attention to their situation. They don’t want to back the brick-and-mortar residents on “their” block into calling the police. If it remains unspoken it w-rung position.
Calvin has neighborhood pride in his “home” address. It’s a safe neighborhood, handsomely landscaped lawns, very low crime. He feels secure there. His sense of place is important. Some of the property owners are probably more ambivalent about the block than he is. He shakes his head about less desirable neighborhoods. Hundreds of inhabited cars park street on warehouse streets near the Bayside docks, close to the ballpark. Rough neighborhoods. “Those guys get rousted, robbed, beaten. That’s what you get with easy parking. Those guys don’t want to risk finding a good neighborhood.”
He gives himself some credit, here, and a ghost of the old consultant’s confidence returns: he’s feathered his nest cleverly, found safety in boldness and decision, he’s sitting pretty.
My friend is among the most generous souls I know. Immediately she offers help: he can sleep at her house until things get better.
No, he thanks her, he’s already been offered similar shelter – rooms in other friends’ homes. Calvin insists that his new life is brave, refreshing. It’s free and open-ended. Then he continues in a less adventuresome tone, “It’s better in my car. If I had a real room I’d get a computer and I’d be on the Web more than I am, maybe all night. No, this way I’m out in the world among real people, doing real stuff.”
What does Calvin do during business hours? He spends a lot of time at library computers blogging about his brave new life. He also does research – web-topics like current business theories, New Age beliefs, and of course his health.
Calvin may be too old to retread with an entirely new trade. Perhaps he could manage as a retail clerk or a waiter but the competition for these jobs is brisk; they usually go to young people. Age discrimination is illegal but very real in hiring practice. He manages to get a few hours of spot work now and then but he wants to keep his “research time” free, his self-imposed computer vigil on the Trends: vast and mysterious political cabals and conspiracies, miracle cures forgotten by Western Medicine, and the unsubstantiated digital folk tales that grow like hothouse flower in cyberspace. He’s looking for a wormhole, a backdoor to employment in a New Age, honorable profession. It’s a slim hope but he’s probably correct in assuming that only an extraordinary path, a chance encounter or a message on the jungle drums, will set him up again.
My friend begins to perceive the tics and tells of serious mental problems in Calvin’s affect. Your health, she asks, are you seeing a doctor?
“No, no, no,” he rejects this notion hastily, “They don’t really know what’s wrong with me. I’m researching it on the Web. I’m taking care of it, myself.”
She has a sense that she’s talking to a man about to step into an open manhole.
She throws another line of help toward him: There must be social services that could help you, places you could go, have you applied for any help at all?
“Oh, yes,” he’s casual about this, “I had a case-worker.” Obviously the social worker is no longer in his orbit. He’s not resentful about the case-worker though he may be as ill-disposed toward her bureaucratic methods as he is toward Western Medicine. When he first approached the social service system’s formidable stone face he filled out dozens of forms listing homely data, personal facts, exhaustive description of his penury.
Quantifying this data upset Calvin, who feels his is a regular fellah weathering a few hard knocks. Filling out even more forms, waiting for the vast system to creak into movement in his behalf, he began to wonder if he needed help after all.
This is the pride of the suit. He isn’t a single mother with many children. He’s not in a wheelchair, not desperately sick. He’s sitting pretty. Declaring himself a social incompetent rankles him. The machine of State won’t, can’t help him. Why? Why must he supply the evidence of his failure, or document catastrophic poverty? He’s disinclined to hound case workers, bureaucrats, clerks and supervisors to receive the dole. He’s educated, worldly, and he has no focus to spare on the byzantine welfare process. He won’t, can’t let the state help him for reasons that probably aren’t clear to him.
Calvin was once a recognized figure in the hard-waxed halls of commerce and finance but as of this moment he registers on no one’s radar. He’s not a statistic because he no longer has a file. The State doesn’t know him. He no longer exists except as a name on a car registration and a driver’s license, uncorrelated with employment records. He’s not part of a “recession” because he doesn’t officially exist.
Those of us still clinging to our conventional stations assume that anyone in a suit and tie, clean and smart, must be normal. This is our delusion. The reality is that this current version of the Great Depression targets the mid-ranks of management especially – those below the decision-making ranks and above essential blue collar workers. Consultants, those “what if” speculators of theory and betterment, are always dispensable. For white collar employees this “recession” may be more dangerous than the Great Depression.
Trade and government have quietly defanged the unions over the past few decades. Workers can count on little help from organized labor which, at its own decision-making levels, has become indistinguishable from Wall Street speculators. The old bare-knuckle union bosses have given way to MBAs who share the same club locker rooms with corporate management.
The glue of job security, that momentum of employee loyalty that created a shared business voice, has been worn away. Most employees have become accustomed to three or five year commitments, and to skipping from one job to another in search of the Big Break. It was once a common belief that a man had two marriages: one to his wife, another to his job. The glue has gone out of both unions.
Calvin’s car is his home in a bleakly modern sense. He has no home. He has an ex-wife, ex-kids, ex-parents, and an ex-hometown. The shit has demonstrably hit the fan but for this respectable man in his jacket and tie there’s no going back to Smallville. In “The Hired Man” Robert Frost said, “Home is where they have to let you in.” But he doesn’t have a reconciliation to make, he can’t return as a prodigal son, no amount of mea culpa will convince his ex-wife’s new husband to take him in. Home is no longer a continuum. Calvin has no hearth or doorstep to which he can return. Returning Odysseus will find that Penelope married one, then several of the suitors, and that Ithaka has been leased by Club Med.
The factor that amplifies employer/employee alienation is the business school abstraction, “hours is hours.” Belief in the wunderkind, the prodigy, the extraordinary employee has faded. Ten hours from employee 415242A is the same as ten hours from employee 655773H; they’re interchangeable elements, no better or worse. Both are regarded with equal suspicion and reduced to corporate-friendly statistics by that corporate food-blender, Human Resources.
When the Great Depression clamped down on my grandfather’s family he dipped deeply into his savings. Most middle class Americans maintain credit card, mortgage and car loan debt that, even in adjusted earlier dollars, would have appalled our grandparents. Yet the index of normality moves with us, our own horizon of what’s real. Service-level banking has encouraged and, in a few subtle but powerful ways, enforced debt as a normal and even desirable situation. We’re told by bankers and we’re reminded by credit reporting databases that unless we borrow, we won’t be able to borrow. This only appears to be circular logic; the financial reality is that year-corrected wages are lower, buying power is reduced, prices for homes and transportation have ballooned, and borrowing is often unavoidable.
The indispensible membership card to our society is the car. Unless you live in one of the few cities with a good subway or light-rail system you need a car to shop, work, take kids to school, everything. There was a brief flurry of outrage in the 70’s and 80’s about superstores and malls draining business from Main Street, leaving town and city centers shuttered, derelict. The more lasting consequence is that downtown neighborhoods are no longer functional living places but bedroom bases from which services are available only by car.
Our “recession” stuns middle class citizens at their most vulnerable: they owe more than they can make, their deepest investments are worth less than the paper on them, they have a long way to fall and bankruptcy is only a stopgap solution.
My friend is concerned that the “health” Calvin worries over is a cipher for mental derangement. She believes he may be clinically disturbed. He is.
Is his psychiatric imbalance organic? Perhaps not. It’s possible that he’s been unbalanced by cognitive dissonance – the difference between what we’ve learned and what we see.
For more than forty years Calvin was inculcated with society’s virtues. One of the central articles of faith has always been the rewards of labor: work hard, stay honest, play nice and you’ll make your way in the world. With luck, you’ll prosper, but even if the breaks go against you, work is your salvation. This is the unquestioned dogma of the middle class and the central component of the “American Dream.” Our economic bad times have confuted all our inherited assumptions. Calvin may have been forced into a psychotic break by clinging to social faith when economic reality began to diverge more and more..
The upward migration of wealth and the weakened financial situation of most workers have made the old assumptions inoperative. Yet the Salvation of Work and the Cult of Progress may be an essential, indispensable part of our American vision, a central article of belief, our worldview. Accepting new realities too readily may be mentally dangerous, a contradiction of basic verities that are part of us.
Work is not a hotshot salvation today. A very few bad breaks can put a comfortable consultant with a cashmere coat and nice habits on the street in a few months. It’s not just Calvin who’s been shaken by cognitive dissonance. We’re seeing that our conception of society, most of what we were taught about America the Beautiful, is no longer operative. Most of us are shaken. Is it possible that a significant percentage of the population is experiencing a kind of mass psychotic break? Has this society become seriously dysfunctional?
We can hazard the question, how far are we from this kind of break? We’ve watched years of ideologue economics bring our culture to the brink of collapse. We voted for a candidate who promised to turn it all around but we’ve discovered that he’s continuing almost every policy, business as usual. Even though we elect leaders the global corporations hold all the cards and all the legislators. What we believed as basic to our national identity is no longer relevant.
When we were young we were told that any one of us could be President. But you had to be smart and brave and tireless. Today, the bar seems to have been lower than we expected. Would our young selves ever believe a real President could be so embarrassingly inept and crassly ignorant as George W? Would any of us in our middle-school classrooms believe that the Attorney General of the United States of America would redefine torture as a law-enforcement tool? Would we have believed that even an apocalyptic catastrophe like 9/11 would be enough excuse to dispense with rights of privacy, search and seizure, and even the suspension of old black-letter Magna Charta’s assurance, habeus corpus? Weren’t those values of intelligence and fairness and decency the fabric of our country?
Calvin is proud of his new life, his neighborhood, his tiny makeshift mobile home. He feels that he’s sitting pretty, ignoring consumer hype, perhaps even making society work for him, for a change. He’s also a danger to himself. The cold wind of Reality will, more than likely, blow through the cracks of his cashmere armor and, sometime soon, confront him with the alternate view of his brave new urban world. Can Calvin survive his adventure? Can we?
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself has somehow been repoliticized by the Occupy Wall Street Movement. His mother, Dixie, was a crypto-socialist and perhaps even a proto-anarchist who despised the rich as "hypocrits." Who know what we inherit in the hard-wiring? But he's convinced that the entire system is evil and unworkable and, alas, unfixable, since the only workmen available are the Party Pols who feed off the system. I'm not so concerned about the faceless Calvin as I am about his cognitive dissonance and disillusionment with his profession and the economy.
A lot of their tales were happy – odd ways of making a dollar, “making do” creatively, losing a dime through a crack in the stairs and hunting all afternoon for it. Scrimping folks stayed at home, so the Boys remembered a lot of family times, laughter around the card table, working on some new invention made of scrap from the shop.
Some were not so funny. It seems that there was a stratum of the white-collar unemployed who couldn’t admit, even to their family, that they’d lost their jobs as managers, clerks, bookkeepers. The Boys told about men who dressed in suits and ties every morning, kissed their wives and children, and went off to “work,” even though they were no longer employed. They spent their days trying to find menial jobs, selling what personal possessions they could, peddling fruit and vegetables from a basket (an odd apparition, the suit-and-tie potato peddler) and, yes, begging. They were proud men who stayed away from soup kitchens and from social workers. They weren’t part of anyone’s statistics, off the books. Some couldn’t bear the shame and dropped from one of Wheeling’s bridges into the Ohio River. Only then would their family and friends learn they hadn’t been at the plant or the office for months.
We’re careful to call our own financial storm a “recession,” as if this word will make it less toxic than That Other Word.
A friend recently described one of her colleagues to me, a figure from the boom 70’s, a high-rolling consultant to major corporations. I’ll call him Calvin. She’d had several lunches with him over the past few weeks and he seemed chipper, snappy in a cashmere sport jacket, tie, fresh shirt. Business as usual.
But she tripped over an open seam in Calvin’s narrative and plucked at the edges until a new truth emerged. Calvin no longer has clients. Or a home or a bank account or a source of income. He lives out of his car, a small import. The driver’s seat reclines. This is his bed.
How did this happen, she asked.
“I’ve been sick. I got sick and my health has just never gotten back to where it was,” he said.
Calvin doesn’t look sickly. Indeed, he’s gained a little weight. He’s managed to establish a blog, working from library computers, and it rates food at various shelters as if he’s filing for Saveur, but charity cuisine is heavy on starches.
He’s proud of his very toney address, a short block in an extremely wealthy neighborhood near the Presidio. This is where he parks his car at night, reclines his seat, and lays him to his rest.
What’s even more surprising about his address is that there are four other car-dwellers who “inhabit” the block. The residents must realize there are mobile squatters among them, something they didn’t expect as owners of select San Francisco property. They must see the same cars each morning with their windows opaque with vapor. It’s likely that, seeing them every morning, they recognize the drivers/livers. It’s doubtful if the car dwellers and home owners speak as neighbors. Well-off owners may not know quite what to say or what the Law might stipulate for pavement dwellers. The mobile homeless avoid calling attention to their situation. They don’t want to back the brick-and-mortar residents on “their” block into calling the police. If it remains unspoken it w-rung position.
Calvin has neighborhood pride in his “home” address. It’s a safe neighborhood, handsomely landscaped lawns, very low crime. He feels secure there. His sense of place is important. Some of the property owners are probably more ambivalent about the block than he is. He shakes his head about less desirable neighborhoods. Hundreds of inhabited cars park street on warehouse streets near the Bayside docks, close to the ballpark. Rough neighborhoods. “Those guys get rousted, robbed, beaten. That’s what you get with easy parking. Those guys don’t want to risk finding a good neighborhood.”
He gives himself some credit, here, and a ghost of the old consultant’s confidence returns: he’s feathered his nest cleverly, found safety in boldness and decision, he’s sitting pretty.
My friend is among the most generous souls I know. Immediately she offers help: he can sleep at her house until things get better.
No, he thanks her, he’s already been offered similar shelter – rooms in other friends’ homes. Calvin insists that his new life is brave, refreshing. It’s free and open-ended. Then he continues in a less adventuresome tone, “It’s better in my car. If I had a real room I’d get a computer and I’d be on the Web more than I am, maybe all night. No, this way I’m out in the world among real people, doing real stuff.”
What does Calvin do during business hours? He spends a lot of time at library computers blogging about his brave new life. He also does research – web-topics like current business theories, New Age beliefs, and of course his health.
Calvin may be too old to retread with an entirely new trade. Perhaps he could manage as a retail clerk or a waiter but the competition for these jobs is brisk; they usually go to young people. Age discrimination is illegal but very real in hiring practice. He manages to get a few hours of spot work now and then but he wants to keep his “research time” free, his self-imposed computer vigil on the Trends: vast and mysterious political cabals and conspiracies, miracle cures forgotten by Western Medicine, and the unsubstantiated digital folk tales that grow like hothouse flower in cyberspace. He’s looking for a wormhole, a backdoor to employment in a New Age, honorable profession. It’s a slim hope but he’s probably correct in assuming that only an extraordinary path, a chance encounter or a message on the jungle drums, will set him up again.
My friend begins to perceive the tics and tells of serious mental problems in Calvin’s affect. Your health, she asks, are you seeing a doctor?
“No, no, no,” he rejects this notion hastily, “They don’t really know what’s wrong with me. I’m researching it on the Web. I’m taking care of it, myself.”
She has a sense that she’s talking to a man about to step into an open manhole.
She throws another line of help toward him: There must be social services that could help you, places you could go, have you applied for any help at all?
“Oh, yes,” he’s casual about this, “I had a case-worker.” Obviously the social worker is no longer in his orbit. He’s not resentful about the case-worker though he may be as ill-disposed toward her bureaucratic methods as he is toward Western Medicine. When he first approached the social service system’s formidable stone face he filled out dozens of forms listing homely data, personal facts, exhaustive description of his penury.
Quantifying this data upset Calvin, who feels his is a regular fellah weathering a few hard knocks. Filling out even more forms, waiting for the vast system to creak into movement in his behalf, he began to wonder if he needed help after all.
This is the pride of the suit. He isn’t a single mother with many children. He’s not in a wheelchair, not desperately sick. He’s sitting pretty. Declaring himself a social incompetent rankles him. The machine of State won’t, can’t help him. Why? Why must he supply the evidence of his failure, or document catastrophic poverty? He’s disinclined to hound case workers, bureaucrats, clerks and supervisors to receive the dole. He’s educated, worldly, and he has no focus to spare on the byzantine welfare process. He won’t, can’t let the state help him for reasons that probably aren’t clear to him.
Calvin was once a recognized figure in the hard-waxed halls of commerce and finance but as of this moment he registers on no one’s radar. He’s not a statistic because he no longer has a file. The State doesn’t know him. He no longer exists except as a name on a car registration and a driver’s license, uncorrelated with employment records. He’s not part of a “recession” because he doesn’t officially exist.
Those of us still clinging to our conventional stations assume that anyone in a suit and tie, clean and smart, must be normal. This is our delusion. The reality is that this current version of the Great Depression targets the mid-ranks of management especially – those below the decision-making ranks and above essential blue collar workers. Consultants, those “what if” speculators of theory and betterment, are always dispensable. For white collar employees this “recession” may be more dangerous than the Great Depression.
Trade and government have quietly defanged the unions over the past few decades. Workers can count on little help from organized labor which, at its own decision-making levels, has become indistinguishable from Wall Street speculators. The old bare-knuckle union bosses have given way to MBAs who share the same club locker rooms with corporate management.
The glue of job security, that momentum of employee loyalty that created a shared business voice, has been worn away. Most employees have become accustomed to three or five year commitments, and to skipping from one job to another in search of the Big Break. It was once a common belief that a man had two marriages: one to his wife, another to his job. The glue has gone out of both unions.
Calvin’s car is his home in a bleakly modern sense. He has no home. He has an ex-wife, ex-kids, ex-parents, and an ex-hometown. The shit has demonstrably hit the fan but for this respectable man in his jacket and tie there’s no going back to Smallville. In “The Hired Man” Robert Frost said, “Home is where they have to let you in.” But he doesn’t have a reconciliation to make, he can’t return as a prodigal son, no amount of mea culpa will convince his ex-wife’s new husband to take him in. Home is no longer a continuum. Calvin has no hearth or doorstep to which he can return. Returning Odysseus will find that Penelope married one, then several of the suitors, and that Ithaka has been leased by Club Med.
The factor that amplifies employer/employee alienation is the business school abstraction, “hours is hours.” Belief in the wunderkind, the prodigy, the extraordinary employee has faded. Ten hours from employee 415242A is the same as ten hours from employee 655773H; they’re interchangeable elements, no better or worse. Both are regarded with equal suspicion and reduced to corporate-friendly statistics by that corporate food-blender, Human Resources.
When the Great Depression clamped down on my grandfather’s family he dipped deeply into his savings. Most middle class Americans maintain credit card, mortgage and car loan debt that, even in adjusted earlier dollars, would have appalled our grandparents. Yet the index of normality moves with us, our own horizon of what’s real. Service-level banking has encouraged and, in a few subtle but powerful ways, enforced debt as a normal and even desirable situation. We’re told by bankers and we’re reminded by credit reporting databases that unless we borrow, we won’t be able to borrow. This only appears to be circular logic; the financial reality is that year-corrected wages are lower, buying power is reduced, prices for homes and transportation have ballooned, and borrowing is often unavoidable.
The indispensible membership card to our society is the car. Unless you live in one of the few cities with a good subway or light-rail system you need a car to shop, work, take kids to school, everything. There was a brief flurry of outrage in the 70’s and 80’s about superstores and malls draining business from Main Street, leaving town and city centers shuttered, derelict. The more lasting consequence is that downtown neighborhoods are no longer functional living places but bedroom bases from which services are available only by car.
Our “recession” stuns middle class citizens at their most vulnerable: they owe more than they can make, their deepest investments are worth less than the paper on them, they have a long way to fall and bankruptcy is only a stopgap solution.
My friend is concerned that the “health” Calvin worries over is a cipher for mental derangement. She believes he may be clinically disturbed. He is.
Is his psychiatric imbalance organic? Perhaps not. It’s possible that he’s been unbalanced by cognitive dissonance – the difference between what we’ve learned and what we see.
For more than forty years Calvin was inculcated with society’s virtues. One of the central articles of faith has always been the rewards of labor: work hard, stay honest, play nice and you’ll make your way in the world. With luck, you’ll prosper, but even if the breaks go against you, work is your salvation. This is the unquestioned dogma of the middle class and the central component of the “American Dream.” Our economic bad times have confuted all our inherited assumptions. Calvin may have been forced into a psychotic break by clinging to social faith when economic reality began to diverge more and more..
The upward migration of wealth and the weakened financial situation of most workers have made the old assumptions inoperative. Yet the Salvation of Work and the Cult of Progress may be an essential, indispensable part of our American vision, a central article of belief, our worldview. Accepting new realities too readily may be mentally dangerous, a contradiction of basic verities that are part of us.
Work is not a hotshot salvation today. A very few bad breaks can put a comfortable consultant with a cashmere coat and nice habits on the street in a few months. It’s not just Calvin who’s been shaken by cognitive dissonance. We’re seeing that our conception of society, most of what we were taught about America the Beautiful, is no longer operative. Most of us are shaken. Is it possible that a significant percentage of the population is experiencing a kind of mass psychotic break? Has this society become seriously dysfunctional?
We can hazard the question, how far are we from this kind of break? We’ve watched years of ideologue economics bring our culture to the brink of collapse. We voted for a candidate who promised to turn it all around but we’ve discovered that he’s continuing almost every policy, business as usual. Even though we elect leaders the global corporations hold all the cards and all the legislators. What we believed as basic to our national identity is no longer relevant.
When we were young we were told that any one of us could be President. But you had to be smart and brave and tireless. Today, the bar seems to have been lower than we expected. Would our young selves ever believe a real President could be so embarrassingly inept and crassly ignorant as George W? Would any of us in our middle-school classrooms believe that the Attorney General of the United States of America would redefine torture as a law-enforcement tool? Would we have believed that even an apocalyptic catastrophe like 9/11 would be enough excuse to dispense with rights of privacy, search and seizure, and even the suspension of old black-letter Magna Charta’s assurance, habeus corpus? Weren’t those values of intelligence and fairness and decency the fabric of our country?
Calvin is proud of his new life, his neighborhood, his tiny makeshift mobile home. He feels that he’s sitting pretty, ignoring consumer hype, perhaps even making society work for him, for a change. He’s also a danger to himself. The cold wind of Reality will, more than likely, blow through the cracks of his cashmere armor and, sometime soon, confront him with the alternate view of his brave new urban world. Can Calvin survive his adventure? Can we?
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself has somehow been repoliticized by the Occupy Wall Street Movement. His mother, Dixie, was a crypto-socialist and perhaps even a proto-anarchist who despised the rich as "hypocrits." Who know what we inherit in the hard-wiring? But he's convinced that the entire system is evil and unworkable and, alas, unfixable, since the only workmen available are the Party Pols who feed off the system. I'm not so concerned about the faceless Calvin as I am about his cognitive dissonance and disillusionment with his profession and the economy.
Friday, November 4, 2011
AUTUMN GHOSTS
GHOSTS
I see ghosts. Not everywhere
But here and there. I know them
By their peculiarly beseeching
Watch – eyes longing for the
Familiar, the aura pulse of
Warmth in the air around
Children, the crystals of
Laughter around young
Women.
Wednesday morning, the corner
Of my eye caught a ghost
Grasping the chainlinks around
Corte Madera’s tennis courts.
Looking in, longing, watching
The yellow-green blur of
Life flying from racquet to
Racquet. He is a recurring
Ectoplasm, a Senior who can’t
Afford the forty dollar key to
Tennis playground, but always
Hopes to hit a few with players
Whose partners are stuck in
101 traffic, just a few rallies,
A bit of rhythm between the two
Sets of taut strings. Longing for
Connection.
I have been a ghost
And will be again, longing
For connection.
I am a Senior by Actual Count,
Experiencing the tidal suck
Of life from old marrow, the
Invisibility and inconsequential
Station accorded by the young
To creatures from the dark ages
Before Universal Access and
iPhone intrusion in toilet
Stalls and crosstown busses.
We invented youth! Sixties’ hippies,
Trust no one over thirties,
We declared holy the noble
Naïf, unspoiled by ancient letters
Dusty romance, pro patria poems.
We cooked insouciance
With a side dish of Scorn.
Now we antic, pacifist warriors are
Over Thirty and we see ourselves.
It is us, grasping the
Chain links of years, looking,
Longing, into the playground,
Wheedling connection, response,
Rhythm, a few rallies. At length
We recognize how dead we’ve
Become. Marley’s Ghost, did he
Wander familiar streets unseen?
Sit too deep in familiar chairs?
Weep dry tears as the living
Passed unseeing? Did his
Agent never call, his lovers
Forget his scent, his children
Refigure their lives without
Reference to Marley?
We ghosts cobble up our own
Walhalla, where the young, straight
Men of the tribe come to our tents
To seek wisdom and poetry,
Advice on taxes and women,
To hear elders discuss with
Authority the game paths and
Planting cycles, to plan
Intelligently, soberly, with the
Stabilizing feathers near the
Arrow’s nock, giving the tribe
Its wise spin of continuum.
Like all Walhallas, ours is a
Fraud, a coffee klatch of
Old men complaining in
Comfortable lies.
Ghosts stay until
Transparency becomes
Tedious, then fade
Gladly like dew in
Sunshine.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself is not fading. He's between books, eating compulsively, exercising infrequently, looking for a consort without fangs, and generally making a nuisance of himself. But there is a slight up-tick in his demeanor, a few new stories, and some hope for his heart, even as the light dims too, too early. This is a dangerous season for the old Depressive. I'll be attentive.
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
SUMMER
A view of summer from water level. I love these long, warm days.
SUMMER WATER
Summer and water,
Sure as mittens and snow
(Winter forgotten,
Disremembered,
Pushed under
Like tax forms
Far from April).
Wave slaps hull
Like a trucker’s pat to a
Broad-beamed waitress, then
The Four-Knot Hiss in the hull’s
Wake as it shoulders wind,
Leaning gladly into discipline
More compelling than taxes:
Wanting to move, plug into the
Big Machine, scamper, schoon.
Hisssssssss, click click click:
An old-fashioned lawn sprinkler.
Chattering bite of steel-shaved ice
From an ice-house block for
Sno-cones. Ridiculous fairy-tale
Jingles too loud from itinerant
Ice-cream trucks wandering circuits
Of ball-kicking-hot, yelling-thirsty
Playgrounds, jingling their bright
Sweet frozen water on sticks.
Night ringing jubilation
By careless halyards in an
Anchorage of summer loving
Boats disremembering
Their winter months of cold
Under wet tarred canvas
In the pitiless yard.
Forget. Remember only
Summer.
JanAdkins
Novato, CA
25 July 2011
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself remembers too much and does too little. He works through these beautiful days when he should be sharing them with family, friends, loved ones. I should kick him in the ass but I'm too cynical.
SUMMER WATER
Summer and water,
Sure as mittens and snow
(Winter forgotten,
Disremembered,
Pushed under
Like tax forms
Far from April).
Wave slaps hull
Like a trucker’s pat to a
Broad-beamed waitress, then
The Four-Knot Hiss in the hull’s
Wake as it shoulders wind,
Leaning gladly into discipline
More compelling than taxes:
Wanting to move, plug into the
Big Machine, scamper, schoon.
Hisssssssss, click click click:
An old-fashioned lawn sprinkler.
Chattering bite of steel-shaved ice
From an ice-house block for
Sno-cones. Ridiculous fairy-tale
Jingles too loud from itinerant
Ice-cream trucks wandering circuits
Of ball-kicking-hot, yelling-thirsty
Playgrounds, jingling their bright
Sweet frozen water on sticks.
Night ringing jubilation
By careless halyards in an
Anchorage of summer loving
Boats disremembering
Their winter months of cold
Under wet tarred canvas
In the pitiless yard.
Forget. Remember only
Summer.
JanAdkins
Novato, CA
25 July 2011
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself remembers too much and does too little. He works through these beautiful days when he should be sharing them with family, friends, loved ones. I should kick him in the ass but I'm too cynical.
Sunday, April 17, 2011
A BIT OF VERSE
Aquifer
Long spring rains. The boys had rushed
Along the Open Space fire road
To see, hear the culvert spew mighty
(Or what passes for boy mighty)
And watch the well-known rock gully
Sluice lively, insistent with water
Pushed by the aquifer beneath
Our surrounding hills.
Screeching, hooting to surmount the damp
Roar they lean over the galvanized, fluted
Conduit out of the hills’ damp burden,
Fascinated. Of course, water being
The original magic.
One golly-gawk, and Kobe’s retainer,
Five hundred dollars worth,
Leaves his mouth for the culvert’s,
And becomes the tumbling, sounding,
Gamboling, unfamiliar freshet moving.
O, the funereal step toward home,
O, the awful confession, blaming
Appliance for a suicidal leap, for
Treacherous betrayal, for choosing
Wet burbling chaos over dental order
Sublime.
So now expedition, booted we go,
Chivalrous accoutered with lance-like
Long pool net to plumb the whirl silent
Beneath the loud culvert lip, but most
Of us make a high-boot passage along
The exquisite mosaic of armored
Stream bottom – varied, pied, speckled,
Dappled with earth hue like the freckled
Back of a woman you love, holding her
Hips amorously, just as freshly, loudly
As this rushing aquifer extension
Yearning.
The fugitive appliance will be pink
And white, and gleam with white
Intractable metal, it will be obvious,
And soon, we are sure, we surmise, we
Assume.
And we are booting guilty for our joy
At wading childish instead of expense
Solemn and dental serious, courting
The known, unknown stream we see
All silent summer, now noisy and
Somehow girlish.
The boys are useless, thank God, because
Each little turn leads them away from
Serious to discovery delight, why is this,
Why is that? Is this, they ask over the
Burble, a Rapid?
I think of ten ton standing waves
Misted with danger and ungovernance,
Nearly heart-stopping, rock-fleshing like
Ms. Gorgon’s face, furious danger even
To gaze scars the soul and sobers wise rafters,
Making rills and riffles insignificant but
I answer, Yes,
Unwilling to sit them on the muddy bank
And tell and tell and plead for them to know
That the aquifer of fresh and love and hope
Is pitifully shallow and will, when the awful
Sun dries the grass gold, give out and the
Singing stream will fall dumb and we will
Forget how cool and strong love was on
Our limbs, knowing the rain will not refresh
An aquifer before winter closes the door again.
Yes, I say, a rapid. Small, but rapid. Boot
By boot I go ahead of their magpie delight at
Something, anything, a small rapid wonder
Behind me.
And I am flirting with the evanescent stream
That will be dry rock in weeks, and wishing
Love were still walking with me.
Jan Adkins
Novato, CA
17 April 11
Braxinoso Speaks
I'm even older and more crotchety than himself, so my initial response is to tell him, "You're getting old. Get over it. Stop whining." But telling anyone to get over being old is a dangerous command.
Long spring rains. The boys had rushed
Along the Open Space fire road
To see, hear the culvert spew mighty
(Or what passes for boy mighty)
And watch the well-known rock gully
Sluice lively, insistent with water
Pushed by the aquifer beneath
Our surrounding hills.
Screeching, hooting to surmount the damp
Roar they lean over the galvanized, fluted
Conduit out of the hills’ damp burden,
Fascinated. Of course, water being
The original magic.
One golly-gawk, and Kobe’s retainer,
Five hundred dollars worth,
Leaves his mouth for the culvert’s,
And becomes the tumbling, sounding,
Gamboling, unfamiliar freshet moving.
O, the funereal step toward home,
O, the awful confession, blaming
Appliance for a suicidal leap, for
Treacherous betrayal, for choosing
Wet burbling chaos over dental order
Sublime.
So now expedition, booted we go,
Chivalrous accoutered with lance-like
Long pool net to plumb the whirl silent
Beneath the loud culvert lip, but most
Of us make a high-boot passage along
The exquisite mosaic of armored
Stream bottom – varied, pied, speckled,
Dappled with earth hue like the freckled
Back of a woman you love, holding her
Hips amorously, just as freshly, loudly
As this rushing aquifer extension
Yearning.
The fugitive appliance will be pink
And white, and gleam with white
Intractable metal, it will be obvious,
And soon, we are sure, we surmise, we
Assume.
And we are booting guilty for our joy
At wading childish instead of expense
Solemn and dental serious, courting
The known, unknown stream we see
All silent summer, now noisy and
Somehow girlish.
The boys are useless, thank God, because
Each little turn leads them away from
Serious to discovery delight, why is this,
Why is that? Is this, they ask over the
Burble, a Rapid?
I think of ten ton standing waves
Misted with danger and ungovernance,
Nearly heart-stopping, rock-fleshing like
Ms. Gorgon’s face, furious danger even
To gaze scars the soul and sobers wise rafters,
Making rills and riffles insignificant but
I answer, Yes,
Unwilling to sit them on the muddy bank
And tell and tell and plead for them to know
That the aquifer of fresh and love and hope
Is pitifully shallow and will, when the awful
Sun dries the grass gold, give out and the
Singing stream will fall dumb and we will
Forget how cool and strong love was on
Our limbs, knowing the rain will not refresh
An aquifer before winter closes the door again.
Yes, I say, a rapid. Small, but rapid. Boot
By boot I go ahead of their magpie delight at
Something, anything, a small rapid wonder
Behind me.
And I am flirting with the evanescent stream
That will be dry rock in weeks, and wishing
Love were still walking with me.
Jan Adkins
Novato, CA
17 April 11
Braxinoso Speaks
I'm even older and more crotchety than himself, so my initial response is to tell him, "You're getting old. Get over it. Stop whining." But telling anyone to get over being old is a dangerous command.
Sunday, March 6, 2011
RAINY WEATHER POEM
Lay Day
Gray low skies drop
Weekend rain, warmer
Than workday rain for
Construction trades,
Colder for desk trades.
It clings on the fall
To standing rigging,
Stainless cable tautly
Faithful, then rills
Down and down – what
Miniscule, complex
Currents hum in the
Descent along the
Spirals? – to spill
Across adamantine
Bronze and stainless
Fittings, flood the deck,
And exit scuppers,
Homecoming to the
Bay.
Abraxas fidgets at her
Docklines, nudges her
Pig-snout tough
Bumpers, pulls and
Relaxes forgiving
Nylon fibers, doing
Nothing more than
Enduring. Until
Her skipper arrives,
Unable to stay away
Too long, and clambers
Aboard, unbuttons her
Tenderly, enters.
Untouched rain-beaded
Sailcovers, untouched
Shroud still mourning the
Holy wheel and binnacle.
A lay day.
Nautical term: day
Without necessity to
Nose out through chop,
No gray heroics,
Weather-cancelled.
“It’s not dangerous
To sail,” the Prudent
Mariner insists,
“It’s dangerous to
Sail no matter what.”
So the skipper reminds
Himself that he could
Sail. He could. But
Prudence trumps
Possibility. And he
Lights the bulkhead
Stove to hiss and flame
Merrily behind its
Oven-glass firebox
Port, yellow dancing
Of diesel combustion
At a low order of
Utility but filling
The familiar saloon
With grateful warmth.
For projects, chores,
Repetitive, comforting
Checks, new catalogue
Schemes of stowage,
The dream of even
More miraculous
Software. Radar, GPS,
Sounder, chart display
Unawakened.
No sane, no bright,
Will grant kindness
To objects. Only
Romantics observe
That fidgeting has
Become rocking,
Enduring became
Protection, and
Abraxas could. It
Could. If the warmed
And occupied skipper
Breathed, thought,
Deemed an order.
Jan Adkins
6 March 2011
Novato, CA
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself is grateful to Chris Northcutt for buying a splendid 37' cutter and encouraging him to crew often. It's not the Bay he knows but it's sailing, and Chris is a skillful skipper who questions everything. This questioning fascinates and nourishes an adventure side for Himself. He needs that adventure quotient in his life or he gets stale and cranky.
Gray low skies drop
Weekend rain, warmer
Than workday rain for
Construction trades,
Colder for desk trades.
It clings on the fall
To standing rigging,
Stainless cable tautly
Faithful, then rills
Down and down – what
Miniscule, complex
Currents hum in the
Descent along the
Spirals? – to spill
Across adamantine
Bronze and stainless
Fittings, flood the deck,
And exit scuppers,
Homecoming to the
Bay.
Abraxas fidgets at her
Docklines, nudges her
Pig-snout tough
Bumpers, pulls and
Relaxes forgiving
Nylon fibers, doing
Nothing more than
Enduring. Until
Her skipper arrives,
Unable to stay away
Too long, and clambers
Aboard, unbuttons her
Tenderly, enters.
Untouched rain-beaded
Sailcovers, untouched
Shroud still mourning the
Holy wheel and binnacle.
A lay day.
Nautical term: day
Without necessity to
Nose out through chop,
No gray heroics,
Weather-cancelled.
“It’s not dangerous
To sail,” the Prudent
Mariner insists,
“It’s dangerous to
Sail no matter what.”
So the skipper reminds
Himself that he could
Sail. He could. But
Prudence trumps
Possibility. And he
Lights the bulkhead
Stove to hiss and flame
Merrily behind its
Oven-glass firebox
Port, yellow dancing
Of diesel combustion
At a low order of
Utility but filling
The familiar saloon
With grateful warmth.
For projects, chores,
Repetitive, comforting
Checks, new catalogue
Schemes of stowage,
The dream of even
More miraculous
Software. Radar, GPS,
Sounder, chart display
Unawakened.
No sane, no bright,
Will grant kindness
To objects. Only
Romantics observe
That fidgeting has
Become rocking,
Enduring became
Protection, and
Abraxas could. It
Could. If the warmed
And occupied skipper
Breathed, thought,
Deemed an order.
Jan Adkins
6 March 2011
Novato, CA
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself is grateful to Chris Northcutt for buying a splendid 37' cutter and encouraging him to crew often. It's not the Bay he knows but it's sailing, and Chris is a skillful skipper who questions everything. This questioning fascinates and nourishes an adventure side for Himself. He needs that adventure quotient in his life or he gets stale and cranky.
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
FLYER
FLYER
Wonders. Wonders arrive daily.
Spectacular offers; by mail,
e-mail. My cellphone vibrates
With exciting text notices:
Free! Free! Freedom
Was never this close,
This easy, this cheap.
Surely news of the
Second Coming was caught
In my spam filter.
Free at last, free at last,
Thank god o’plenty,
Free at last.
Bonus points! I may
Have them without doing
My Boy Scout’s daily
Good Deed (“Sorry,
Madam; I’ve done
For the day. Perhaps
Another, needier Scout
Will pass this way?”)
And the miles given
Absolutely free that
I may soar above the
Clouds! Free Flyer Miles
Angels know naught of,
Because they fly
On the clock.
I may have won a
Timeshare condo in
Iceland or Biarritz
With coupons for
Milk and Honey.
Free.
I may extend my penis
To reach luscious teen
‘Tang or webchat with
Naughty luscious MILFs
Disrobing, disrobed,
Disturbed to distraction by
Needs to satisfy my
Luscious lascivious.
Free.
Founding Fathers
Feel fulfilled, such
Free Dom: Mistress Stiletto
Offers Free humiliation
And chastisement. (Bless
You, Mistress, but I’ve
Done H & C for the day.)
Last Tuesday
I sat in my car,
Agape, appalled, filled with
Gratitude and dread,
Holding an offer from
The Trident Society
(Note to Poseidon: I
Had nothing to do with
That Troy business)
Trumpeting in print
On its tasteful
Envelope, “Free! Inside!
You may have won a free
Cremation!”
I declined to open
This envelope, hoping
This constitutes
My polite and grateful
Decline of the kind
Offer. My fingers
Handled this tasteful
By its edges, Depositing
It gently, warily in the
Recycling bin near
The mailbox as if
It were a Free Offer
From Unabomber,
Knowing even then
That it would return,
Recycling too damn swiftly,
Appearing innocuously
With a coupon for
Adult Incontinence
And a followup text
Message from Death:
“Today Only.”
Braxinoso Speaks:
How he does go on. Ever the "other," he crouches outside the mainstream in the thin parts of the bell curve and watches society glide past, delighting in this or that bit of sparkle, plucking random shininess like a jackdaw, a perennial rube.
Wonders. Wonders arrive daily.
Spectacular offers; by mail,
e-mail. My cellphone vibrates
With exciting text notices:
Free! Free! Freedom
Was never this close,
This easy, this cheap.
Surely news of the
Second Coming was caught
In my spam filter.
Free at last, free at last,
Thank god o’plenty,
Free at last.
Bonus points! I may
Have them without doing
My Boy Scout’s daily
Good Deed (“Sorry,
Madam; I’ve done
For the day. Perhaps
Another, needier Scout
Will pass this way?”)
And the miles given
Absolutely free that
I may soar above the
Clouds! Free Flyer Miles
Angels know naught of,
Because they fly
On the clock.
I may have won a
Timeshare condo in
Iceland or Biarritz
With coupons for
Milk and Honey.
Free.
I may extend my penis
To reach luscious teen
‘Tang or webchat with
Naughty luscious MILFs
Disrobing, disrobed,
Disturbed to distraction by
Needs to satisfy my
Luscious lascivious.
Free.
Founding Fathers
Feel fulfilled, such
Free Dom: Mistress Stiletto
Offers Free humiliation
And chastisement. (Bless
You, Mistress, but I’ve
Done H & C for the day.)
Last Tuesday
I sat in my car,
Agape, appalled, filled with
Gratitude and dread,
Holding an offer from
The Trident Society
(Note to Poseidon: I
Had nothing to do with
That Troy business)
Trumpeting in print
On its tasteful
Envelope, “Free! Inside!
You may have won a free
Cremation!”
I declined to open
This envelope, hoping
This constitutes
My polite and grateful
Decline of the kind
Offer. My fingers
Handled this tasteful
By its edges, Depositing
It gently, warily in the
Recycling bin near
The mailbox as if
It were a Free Offer
From Unabomber,
Knowing even then
That it would return,
Recycling too damn swiftly,
Appearing innocuously
With a coupon for
Adult Incontinence
And a followup text
Message from Death:
“Today Only.”
Braxinoso Speaks:
How he does go on. Ever the "other," he crouches outside the mainstream in the thin parts of the bell curve and watches society glide past, delighting in this or that bit of sparkle, plucking random shininess like a jackdaw, a perennial rube.
Thursday, December 23, 2010
A DECEMBER POEM
CROWS ON FROST
A murder of crows in black, in black:
They strut and flap and hop, complain
Upon the frost-tipped grass across
The Lane. A field of stubborn growth
In California winter (mild
Beside the Bay), with spiteful ice
And bitter green, the frothy hue
Of spinach creamed, black peppered
With, of course, the crows, who would
Be proud to be coarse ground or even cracked,
To match their rasping voices which,
To me, are welcome more than
Fruity songs on winter days. Prefer
The wise-ass caws of skeptic crows
To birdsong in a season of short
Days and long cold nights; sarcastic
Quips in muttered sotto voce jibes
Have kept a crew alive through hardship
More than lyric songs. Good bos’uns cultivate
A crow caw voice, and reprobate demeanor
As they croak “I seen it all, and this ain’t bad
As it might be so grab your socks and hit the
Deck you sons of bitches.” Crows continue
Day by day to say, to say, this very speech
To one another, rain or shine: it ain’t as bad
As it might be. Sure, watch them fly sometime:
Though masters of the art they joke,
Cut up, play silly buggers in the air,
To say “This flying gig is not so tough
That we can’t screw around. Without
A joke what’s worth a fart?” And this is sound
Advice on frosty mornings.
Jan Adkins, 23 December 2010, Novato, California
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself has always been fond of crows. They're black, dire, difficult to categorize, hardy and foolish. Of course he has a connection to them. He doesn't write about cute little birdies, probably because he has a tendency to talk tough. Creampuff.
A murder of crows in black, in black:
They strut and flap and hop, complain
Upon the frost-tipped grass across
The Lane. A field of stubborn growth
In California winter (mild
Beside the Bay), with spiteful ice
And bitter green, the frothy hue
Of spinach creamed, black peppered
With, of course, the crows, who would
Be proud to be coarse ground or even cracked,
To match their rasping voices which,
To me, are welcome more than
Fruity songs on winter days. Prefer
The wise-ass caws of skeptic crows
To birdsong in a season of short
Days and long cold nights; sarcastic
Quips in muttered sotto voce jibes
Have kept a crew alive through hardship
More than lyric songs. Good bos’uns cultivate
A crow caw voice, and reprobate demeanor
As they croak “I seen it all, and this ain’t bad
As it might be so grab your socks and hit the
Deck you sons of bitches.” Crows continue
Day by day to say, to say, this very speech
To one another, rain or shine: it ain’t as bad
As it might be. Sure, watch them fly sometime:
Though masters of the art they joke,
Cut up, play silly buggers in the air,
To say “This flying gig is not so tough
That we can’t screw around. Without
A joke what’s worth a fart?” And this is sound
Advice on frosty mornings.
Jan Adkins, 23 December 2010, Novato, California
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself has always been fond of crows. They're black, dire, difficult to categorize, hardy and foolish. Of course he has a connection to them. He doesn't write about cute little birdies, probably because he has a tendency to talk tough. Creampuff.
Friday, June 11, 2010
POEM FOR OLD MEN
GETTING OLD is much harder than growing up, and doing both at the same time (witness me) is murder. I was cycling back (uphill) from the village this week and began to compose a poem about the shame of age, the inevitable self-flagellation that goes with reviewing life with any kind of clarity. Bad idea, but insuperable.
HELL ROCKER
GOD PUNISHES old men,
Year by year rebuilding
The boy-skill of fantasy
To mercilessly efficient
Memory,
Indexing all our sins
Of vanity and cowardice
For rapid recall
Retrieval, review,
In collated sequences
Demonstrating our lack
Of grace in learning
Simplicity.
So an unguarded word
Of pique precedes
A tragic avalanche of
Hopeless recollection
Punitively complete
In every torturing
Detail of scent and texture.
(Could the skin beneath
Her ear have been
That soft and
Fragrant?)
In this efficient way
We pay and repay for
Sins exponentially
In proportion to
Repetition.
Alas, God is just,
And God recycles.
Perhaps shame hunches
Old men’s shoulders
More than years.
Sitting quiet on porches
(Avoiding avalanche),
Rocking,
We burn.
June 2010
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
I've seen to Himself for so many years that I know what will work and what won't. I've never found a workable ploy that can turn him away from the anger he feels for his younger self. Yet we were all young, presumably we all made mistakes, perhaps none of us were as careful or even as ethical as we might have been. The difference is that Himself has a first rate memory, and that he is a damn good editor. He sees the flaws, yearns and burns to correct them with some cosmic blue pencil, yet can't touch the ms. No one's arms are long enough to revise his own story. I persist in my hope of finding some balm for his conscience, and in helping him lay down his guilt as I've helped him with more mundane matters. In for a penny, in for a pound. Himself is not a simple job.
HELL ROCKER
GOD PUNISHES old men,
Year by year rebuilding
The boy-skill of fantasy
To mercilessly efficient
Memory,
Indexing all our sins
Of vanity and cowardice
For rapid recall
Retrieval, review,
In collated sequences
Demonstrating our lack
Of grace in learning
Simplicity.
So an unguarded word
Of pique precedes
A tragic avalanche of
Hopeless recollection
Punitively complete
In every torturing
Detail of scent and texture.
(Could the skin beneath
Her ear have been
That soft and
Fragrant?)
In this efficient way
We pay and repay for
Sins exponentially
In proportion to
Repetition.
Alas, God is just,
And God recycles.
Perhaps shame hunches
Old men’s shoulders
More than years.
Sitting quiet on porches
(Avoiding avalanche),
Rocking,
We burn.
June 2010
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
I've seen to Himself for so many years that I know what will work and what won't. I've never found a workable ploy that can turn him away from the anger he feels for his younger self. Yet we were all young, presumably we all made mistakes, perhaps none of us were as careful or even as ethical as we might have been. The difference is that Himself has a first rate memory, and that he is a damn good editor. He sees the flaws, yearns and burns to correct them with some cosmic blue pencil, yet can't touch the ms. No one's arms are long enough to revise his own story. I persist in my hope of finding some balm for his conscience, and in helping him lay down his guilt as I've helped him with more mundane matters. In for a penny, in for a pound. Himself is not a simple job.
Monday, June 7, 2010
MARCHING BEHIND THE SAINTS, WITH PARASOL
I DON'T GET INTO THE CITY, MUCH. True, I often scuttle in on Tuesday nights to cook for the Dolphin Club but that’s boats, an obsession that overrides my obsession with staying put. But last Sunday afternoon I took a special excursion.
I play tennis with a friend, Neal Vahle, a writer. Neal is 76 and still wallops me on the court. He’s also a deep old file, a thinker and a theologian who lived for several years in a Wisconsin monastery. I know, I didn’t think they bothered with monasteries there but took stark Lutheran doom straight, by the book, because simply keeping warm in the winter occupied so much effort. Jesuitical contemplation on alternate theory might have slowed them down long enough to freeze to death.
Neal and I were talking about raising children with spiritual values in a secular age. Saturday morning at temple or Sunday morning at church is as rare as rolling hoops and knickerbockers, nowadays. How should my grandsons Max and Lucas be raised to have spiritual values? more importantly, how can they become part of the six millennium heritage that carries so much of our core culture? They might wander away from the powerful river of Judeo-Greek, Christian-Roman, Renaissance-Protestant stories, values, fables, metaphors and history that floats us today, makes us who we are. In tossing away the shallowness and frequent hypocrisy of contemporary churches, liberal parents are almost literally tossing the baby out with the bathwater.
I think about this often. Neal and I talk about it sitting on the bench when serves change. So Neal suggested that I attend a “fellowship service” at the Unitarian Church in San Francisco to hear Doug Fitch speak. Doug is a small, wiry black man with enormous and expressive hands, long-famous as a spell-binding orator, and for many years the minister at Grace Church in the City. Fitch left Grace because there is a mandatory retirement age of 70. After he left, a band of a hundred or so folks began using the Unitarian Church as a Sunday-afternoon venue for a non-denominational spiritual gathering. That's as close to religion as they choose to describe it. So now the gentle spellbinder, born into fundamentalist evangelical faith, now calling on his involvement in Eastern meditation and traditions, holds forth at this odd gathering of Unitarians, Jews, Buddhists, lapsed Catholics, loose Lutherans, and even (so I’m told) some Muslims.
It was a wonderful experience. There was a stunning choir, theatrically skillful, with a young, electric choirmaster. They were backed by a band (puh-lease) of keyboard, drums, trumpet and electric bass. The mix was remarkably black for a San Francisco gathering, almost half. The choir reflected this proportion, which was fortunate because the three black basses were sonorous and emphatic, especially when the choir sang some African chants in Swahili – or some dark continent langridge – from the surprisingly strong Christian tradition in large parts of Africa. Amazing.
We sang one hymn but it didn’t count as a Sunday church song since it was “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Loud and lusty, it was no more go-to-meeting than the second-liners returning from the graveyard, twirling parasols behind a New Orleans funeral. A lot of clapping. Some hands waving in the air, a joyous noise. We didn’t have that at the Thoburn Memorial Methodist Church in St. Clairsville, Ohio. Nothing close to it. Sigh.
I can’t call Fitch’s talk a lecture or a discourse. No. It was a sermon. No talk about religion, no mention of Jesus. These folks are anti-Trinitarian, viewing Father, Son and Holy Ghost as a philosophic mischief perpetrated by Constantine in the 5th C. That is, they approach God through the intellectual side door. Of course the sermon had no Bible verse. But, crikey, the rolling rhythms of great religious oratory swept everyone along. We heard the unmistakable notes of Martin Luther King’s Pentecostal heritage – repetition, rhythm, sudden changes of pitch and volume, calling out and asking response, loud exhortation and quiet reflection, shifting from the intimately personal to the abstract whole.
And how could any speech from a pulpit be a lecture if it had (mirabile dictu) an Amen Corner. Yes. No shit. A running basso continuo from a few male members of the choir sitting on the aisle: “Yes. Yes! Tell it. Oh no! Amen. Amen. Yes, brother. Speak the word. Mm-MM! [This last an admonitory expression of anger and disappointment at injustice, obviously the work of the anti-Trinitarian, Satan-less, abstract devil.] DO tell! We hear it. We feel it. We know it. With you now. Yes, brother.” It’s appropriate that the choir members constituted the Amen Corner because it became obvious to me that good Amen-ing is closely akin to scat-singing, a skill that sounds casual and easy to any singer who hasn’t tried it. I was forced to admit that I didn’t have the experience or skill to become a competent or even an unembarrassing Amen-er. Sorry.
Fitch. The little man filled up the vast space under the Gothic hammer beams and inside the colorful, geometric, unreligious but inescapably religious stained-glass, above the unnoticed hard wooden pews. Oh, yes. Tell it. Mm-MM! His body language had expression, authority, and a mime’s wit. He plied the skillfully subdued but operatic magic of his dancing arms and hands. His flashing palms were pinkish orange in contrast to his weathered tobacco complexion. His modest, light suit suggested a boardroom but Fitch revealed a lion chewing on the horse-haunch of a premise. And we listened. We hear it. We feel it. With you now.
It wasn’t empty oratory but a logical, well-built discourse on the importance of continual learning, a constant opening of viewpoint through education in any form in life. “More learning, more life” was the theme but it twined around the critical role of tragedy and defeat in human learning, the regrettable but indispensable tutor of grief, the place of frustration and anger, the path with many thorns leading to the loveliest views. There were many “Amens” from Fitch as affirmations: “This I believe.” There was confession and humility, the little man vaulting above us but remaining one of us – ignorant as we were, blindsided as many times as we have been. He was, he assured us, determined not only to learn all his life but to live a long life (“I intend to reach ninety-nine years. Oh, yes,” to applause) and to savor every glittering drop of it.
This was no Happy Meal Sunday treat with fries. Indeed, it was strenuous in a way. I can’t imagine anyone who could remain a spectator, there. The pulse of spiritual stirring was so involving and strong that we ran to keep up with it. We sorted through old fears and freed pent-up desires. We centered ourselves in silence but we did so as a body of humans together. It was intellectual work.
This community of striving for quiet clarity may be something we lack in a secular life. It’s easy to grow narcissistic when you live with your own echoes. Quiet meditation – which could be called “centering” or “prayer” or even more casual reflection – is not the same experience as solitary meditation. Somehow it draws more amperage from you.
There was one familiar church artifact: the collection. These folks pay the band, support the choir, rent the hall, subsidize Doug Fitch’s enormous labor of preparing his “sermon.” They’re also politically and socially active, righteous San Francisco liberals supporting all the initiatives of justice, peace and diversity that damn near save the Californian Spirit from triviality. So the collection, counted and notated by my painstaking friend Neal, is honest and painless. We got a band, after all. The bass guitarist looked profoundly bored and was doubtless looking toward some livelier gig with more women in less, so he should be paid for his time. And, hell, it probably touched a part of him. After all, California’s mission system was based on paid converts.
Afterward there was the familiar milling crowd noshing on potluck brownies, cakes, nibblies and (Fitch's favorite, we were warned to save some for him) lemon bars. Very nice people. I placed them in the same drawer as my real, kind, jolly Dolphin Club friends.
It was altogether nourishing, refreshing, fertilizing, joyful. I’m ignoble enough to state that I managed to fall in love with every female member of the choir. Oh, yes. Tell it. And no one at my college bar would believe that I could someday moon from actual church pews over a speckled-pup cute woman who would in a more ecclesiastical setting be called a “deaconess.” Oh yes, brother. Speak it. In my defense this certainly had much to do with reawakening spiritual banks dormant in me for years. Amen. Or I may be merely a dirty old man whose shame has eroded sufficiently that I can admit these things. Mm-MM!
Altogether a wonderful time. It couldn’t be better, even with fireworks. First and third Sundays of the month. With you now, brother.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Anything that gets himself out of the studio can't be all bad. And this was a therapeutic event. It had a high mensch-ratio and a low piety score. Not bad for Sunday in a church of any kind. About education, I can't fear for himself. He's compulsive about learning damn near anything, and he tries mightily, with his limited tools, to string everything together in a logical way. Given the reports of low senility rates for scholarly nuns, we hope this constant, bubbling mental activity will fight off Alzheimer's. This would be an especially serious malady in my already odd friend because we couldn't see the symptoms for years.
I play tennis with a friend, Neal Vahle, a writer. Neal is 76 and still wallops me on the court. He’s also a deep old file, a thinker and a theologian who lived for several years in a Wisconsin monastery. I know, I didn’t think they bothered with monasteries there but took stark Lutheran doom straight, by the book, because simply keeping warm in the winter occupied so much effort. Jesuitical contemplation on alternate theory might have slowed them down long enough to freeze to death.
Neal and I were talking about raising children with spiritual values in a secular age. Saturday morning at temple or Sunday morning at church is as rare as rolling hoops and knickerbockers, nowadays. How should my grandsons Max and Lucas be raised to have spiritual values? more importantly, how can they become part of the six millennium heritage that carries so much of our core culture? They might wander away from the powerful river of Judeo-Greek, Christian-Roman, Renaissance-Protestant stories, values, fables, metaphors and history that floats us today, makes us who we are. In tossing away the shallowness and frequent hypocrisy of contemporary churches, liberal parents are almost literally tossing the baby out with the bathwater.
I think about this often. Neal and I talk about it sitting on the bench when serves change. So Neal suggested that I attend a “fellowship service” at the Unitarian Church in San Francisco to hear Doug Fitch speak. Doug is a small, wiry black man with enormous and expressive hands, long-famous as a spell-binding orator, and for many years the minister at Grace Church in the City. Fitch left Grace because there is a mandatory retirement age of 70. After he left, a band of a hundred or so folks began using the Unitarian Church as a Sunday-afternoon venue for a non-denominational spiritual gathering. That's as close to religion as they choose to describe it. So now the gentle spellbinder, born into fundamentalist evangelical faith, now calling on his involvement in Eastern meditation and traditions, holds forth at this odd gathering of Unitarians, Jews, Buddhists, lapsed Catholics, loose Lutherans, and even (so I’m told) some Muslims.
It was a wonderful experience. There was a stunning choir, theatrically skillful, with a young, electric choirmaster. They were backed by a band (puh-lease) of keyboard, drums, trumpet and electric bass. The mix was remarkably black for a San Francisco gathering, almost half. The choir reflected this proportion, which was fortunate because the three black basses were sonorous and emphatic, especially when the choir sang some African chants in Swahili – or some dark continent langridge – from the surprisingly strong Christian tradition in large parts of Africa. Amazing.
We sang one hymn but it didn’t count as a Sunday church song since it was “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Loud and lusty, it was no more go-to-meeting than the second-liners returning from the graveyard, twirling parasols behind a New Orleans funeral. A lot of clapping. Some hands waving in the air, a joyous noise. We didn’t have that at the Thoburn Memorial Methodist Church in St. Clairsville, Ohio. Nothing close to it. Sigh.
I can’t call Fitch’s talk a lecture or a discourse. No. It was a sermon. No talk about religion, no mention of Jesus. These folks are anti-Trinitarian, viewing Father, Son and Holy Ghost as a philosophic mischief perpetrated by Constantine in the 5th C. That is, they approach God through the intellectual side door. Of course the sermon had no Bible verse. But, crikey, the rolling rhythms of great religious oratory swept everyone along. We heard the unmistakable notes of Martin Luther King’s Pentecostal heritage – repetition, rhythm, sudden changes of pitch and volume, calling out and asking response, loud exhortation and quiet reflection, shifting from the intimately personal to the abstract whole.
And how could any speech from a pulpit be a lecture if it had (mirabile dictu) an Amen Corner. Yes. No shit. A running basso continuo from a few male members of the choir sitting on the aisle: “Yes. Yes! Tell it. Oh no! Amen. Amen. Yes, brother. Speak the word. Mm-MM! [This last an admonitory expression of anger and disappointment at injustice, obviously the work of the anti-Trinitarian, Satan-less, abstract devil.] DO tell! We hear it. We feel it. We know it. With you now. Yes, brother.” It’s appropriate that the choir members constituted the Amen Corner because it became obvious to me that good Amen-ing is closely akin to scat-singing, a skill that sounds casual and easy to any singer who hasn’t tried it. I was forced to admit that I didn’t have the experience or skill to become a competent or even an unembarrassing Amen-er. Sorry.
Fitch. The little man filled up the vast space under the Gothic hammer beams and inside the colorful, geometric, unreligious but inescapably religious stained-glass, above the unnoticed hard wooden pews. Oh, yes. Tell it. Mm-MM! His body language had expression, authority, and a mime’s wit. He plied the skillfully subdued but operatic magic of his dancing arms and hands. His flashing palms were pinkish orange in contrast to his weathered tobacco complexion. His modest, light suit suggested a boardroom but Fitch revealed a lion chewing on the horse-haunch of a premise. And we listened. We hear it. We feel it. With you now.
It wasn’t empty oratory but a logical, well-built discourse on the importance of continual learning, a constant opening of viewpoint through education in any form in life. “More learning, more life” was the theme but it twined around the critical role of tragedy and defeat in human learning, the regrettable but indispensable tutor of grief, the place of frustration and anger, the path with many thorns leading to the loveliest views. There were many “Amens” from Fitch as affirmations: “This I believe.” There was confession and humility, the little man vaulting above us but remaining one of us – ignorant as we were, blindsided as many times as we have been. He was, he assured us, determined not only to learn all his life but to live a long life (“I intend to reach ninety-nine years. Oh, yes,” to applause) and to savor every glittering drop of it.
This was no Happy Meal Sunday treat with fries. Indeed, it was strenuous in a way. I can’t imagine anyone who could remain a spectator, there. The pulse of spiritual stirring was so involving and strong that we ran to keep up with it. We sorted through old fears and freed pent-up desires. We centered ourselves in silence but we did so as a body of humans together. It was intellectual work.
This community of striving for quiet clarity may be something we lack in a secular life. It’s easy to grow narcissistic when you live with your own echoes. Quiet meditation – which could be called “centering” or “prayer” or even more casual reflection – is not the same experience as solitary meditation. Somehow it draws more amperage from you.
There was one familiar church artifact: the collection. These folks pay the band, support the choir, rent the hall, subsidize Doug Fitch’s enormous labor of preparing his “sermon.” They’re also politically and socially active, righteous San Francisco liberals supporting all the initiatives of justice, peace and diversity that damn near save the Californian Spirit from triviality. So the collection, counted and notated by my painstaking friend Neal, is honest and painless. We got a band, after all. The bass guitarist looked profoundly bored and was doubtless looking toward some livelier gig with more women in less, so he should be paid for his time. And, hell, it probably touched a part of him. After all, California’s mission system was based on paid converts.
Afterward there was the familiar milling crowd noshing on potluck brownies, cakes, nibblies and (Fitch's favorite, we were warned to save some for him) lemon bars. Very nice people. I placed them in the same drawer as my real, kind, jolly Dolphin Club friends.
It was altogether nourishing, refreshing, fertilizing, joyful. I’m ignoble enough to state that I managed to fall in love with every female member of the choir. Oh, yes. Tell it. And no one at my college bar would believe that I could someday moon from actual church pews over a speckled-pup cute woman who would in a more ecclesiastical setting be called a “deaconess.” Oh yes, brother. Speak it. In my defense this certainly had much to do with reawakening spiritual banks dormant in me for years. Amen. Or I may be merely a dirty old man whose shame has eroded sufficiently that I can admit these things. Mm-MM!
Altogether a wonderful time. It couldn’t be better, even with fireworks. First and third Sundays of the month. With you now, brother.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Anything that gets himself out of the studio can't be all bad. And this was a therapeutic event. It had a high mensch-ratio and a low piety score. Not bad for Sunday in a church of any kind. About education, I can't fear for himself. He's compulsive about learning damn near anything, and he tries mightily, with his limited tools, to string everything together in a logical way. Given the reports of low senility rates for scholarly nuns, we hope this constant, bubbling mental activity will fight off Alzheimer's. This would be an especially serious malady in my already odd friend because we couldn't see the symptoms for years.
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