One More, I Guess

The advent calendar thing means I got to almost-daily, a first.  In theory if you want to be read you have to post daily, if not more.  But I don't know - as a reader, with dailies, I wonder if there are episodes I've missed.

But the continuing theme here, and I bloody well mean it, is that it isn't about attracting readers.  (A good thing - currently I have maybe five.  I guess.  I don't know how to ascertain that, actually.)

What this is about is writing, and waving my arm over my head and saying "Here!"  As in second grade.  (Where I really took off as a hand-raiser.  I didn't stop until the second year of prep school, where coolness trumped everything, and hand-raising isn't very cool.)  (OK, no more parentheses...)

It's also about risk and choice, of course, and about the passage of time, and about searching for the Deity.  On the last front, last night as I worried my way through my nightly 3 am wakeup, I reencountered Martin Buber and I-thou.  He may be onto something.  At least it's a process, and lord knows I need one.

And Goodbye To All That

Sometimes this is just spilling, sometimes free-form thinking, sometimes with an agenda, sometimes just a compulsion to be here.  I'm here.  I'm breathing.  I'm typing with my eyes closed, but editing with them open.

There is not much good about the end of the year, a great pile of things left undone and ought not to have done, and I have only seldom loved the arrival of the New Year.  This one, 2012, has every indication of being just another in the pack.  But what a number - what a science fiction number.  By 2012 we were all going to be travelling on light beams and living forever in 28-year-old bodies and wisdom of the ages.

Still waiting for the light beam, with 32 hours to go.  As for wisdom, if it comes, all I know so far is that it won't come from some damn computer.

Christmas Eve and the new moon

A sliver of light that set early.  A long cold night but with stars, those sad remote stars.  Leading to daybreak, the third morning after the solstice.   Another year, another redemption.

A Solar Sail

"...a spacecraft propelled by sunlight. Whereas a conventional rocket is propelled by the thrust produced by its internal engine burn, a solar sail is pushed forward simply by light from the Sun. This is possible because light is made up of packets of energy known as “photons,” that act like atomic particles, but with more energy. When a beam of light is pointed at a bright mirror-like surface, its photons reflect right back, just like a ball bouncing off a wall. In the process the photons transmit their momentum to the surface twice – once by the initial impact, and again by reflecting back from it. Ever so slightly, propelled by a steady stream of reflecting photons, the bright surface is pushed forward."  From The Planetary Society's website.

Solstice

My ancestors, the Welsh, called it the "point of roughness".

I heard a story about its connection to Christmas.   That the propect of each day's light growing shorter was terrifying - was the sun going away... it has always comes back, but will it come back this year? Then, each time this year, the process stopped and the next day it reversed.  They'd wait three days to be sure - yes, the days were growing longer.  God isn't leaving us behind.  Calls for a holiday.

Time Travel.

One of those many times when I need it, since I failed to open a window yesterday. 

We think about it lot this time of year, as New Year's Eve approaches.  Through the magic of documentation and "as of" execution, we can often go a little back or forward.  But midnight on 12/31 - that's a tough one.

Only one I know that's tougher, and that's death.  Lots of things can be fixed while the client's alive.  Once he's gone, he's gone.  That Will better be right.

Cash

The gift that everyone loves.

But don't forget The Clovers:  your cash ain't nothing but trash.

"She said this ain't a circus and I don't need a clown."

What's Shakin'

It's a sampler album issued by Electra in 1966.  When music exploded.  Clapton, Winwood, Bruce, Butterfield, Bloomfield, Kooper, Sebastian, Tom Rush... opening a new world.

Advent Calendar 18.

(Just to show I'm keeping track.)

Fire.

The window ignites upon opening.

Your fingers are burned.  Hey.  What's festive about this?

Call it, in a cardboard window, only for a moment, an auto-da-fe.

A Christmas Tree

Which this year poses an ethical dilemma.  I can buy one at one of my traditional nurseries for, I don't know, around a hundred bucks.  But on Saturday I'm over at Home Depot, already a prime suspect in the death of enterprises I like, and there is a very good Frazier fir, eight feet, $36.99.  And a guy who looks just as woodsy and strange as the guys at the nurseries, who's prepared to saw off the bottom stub of the truck, trim up the branches, and run it through the machine that webs it up for the drive home.    (The beard on the guy. ZZ Top.)

So call me evil, and may God save the Republic, but I went with Home Depot.

Diner Food

Today a choice between a slinger and a meat loaf omelet with mashed potatoes and white gravy. Went for the latter. A good call.

Published direct from the cell.  Who knows how it will look...

Bald Eagle

This time of year they start to come back.  They love the Mississippi locks, not much ice, plenty of carp.

Just the coolest bird.  Their nests are made out of branches and logs, not twigs.

Placeholder

When all else fails.  Something to hold the place until the genuine article arrives.

Cousin to the seatfiller.  Someone who fills (duh) a seat (duh) at an event like the Academy Awards - especially while the true attendees attend to the call of nature.  So when the cameras pan the audience, no empty seats.  There's a whopping metaphor in there somewhere - some day I will suss it out.

Predator Drone

I'm sure predator drones are no laughing matter to the many people, bad and good, whom they have killed, but I have to note the irony.  Back before it was attached to technology, a drone was a "male bee... stingless, performs no work, and produces no honey..." (Webster's).   We've manned them up.

Nameless Dread

AKA "vague, nameless dread."  With a few minutes' googling it seems to come from A. Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet... but it sounds more like Poe.  (Through the miracle of the Search function it looks like Watson, in the same book, compares Holmes to a Poe character, and Holmes dismisses it.)  Sic transit dark 19th-century stuff - their version, I guess of noir.

What this is talking about, anyway, is the emotion of fear without knowing its cause.  In the middle of the night, not so surprising, could have come from a dream you don't remember.

But at high noon it's unwelcome.  Beat it.

Roadie

The guy you hire to haul gear to a gig. You can pay him most of what you make in a night, so you wind up playing for free.

Or the drink you pour for the road.  Usually a bad idea.  But after a gig where you've cleared zero and the crowd was calling for disco, it's hard to pass up.

Chicago

At 16F it's a little hard to love but still, the city with the best architecture.  Looking through the window from our room at The Tremont.

Advent Calendar 9

Faith.  A good thing that this calendar doesn't require tangible objects - for faith, all you can do is symbols.  A cross, or a candle, or a St. Bernard.

As a term, it's kind of religion-lite, at least in some contexts.  Faith-based initiatives.  A Sunday radio program, Speaking of Faith, now further secularized into a show called Being.  Communities of faith.  

But what interests me is the intersection between faith as another name for belief, and faith as in something you keep.   One has to do with a willing suspension of rationality and the other with steadiness.  In the searching-for-a-deity context each meaning makes sense.  And so, but maybe less so, when it comes to loyalty in the way partners, loved ones, and persons with government power treat their partners, lovers, and the governed.

Advent Calendar 8.

Literally out my window, the Eads Bridge over the Mississippi.

It's a famous bridge in engineering history, completed in 1874, still there, still in use.  I'm looking at it now, late afternoon light, a blue bowl of sky over it, the flat midwestern horizon behind.  This afternooon (not this picture) there's even the moon, about 7/8 full.

Eads's drawings are here at Washington University and they are as amazing as the bridge.

But there is nothing quite as amazing as James Buchanan Eads himself.

Advent Calendar 7.

And now a commercial.

Go see or go rent Margin Call.  It's brilliant.  Most of the stuff I've posted has been on my Facebook page but Strays is also here to promote it...

What a script, what direction, what a cast.

Advent Calendar 6.

Open the window
and there's another window
though which you see another window
and another, and so on, shrinking,
regression down to a point.

Bam.

Advent Calendar 5.


A baseball.  I can't think of a more American symbol.  If there were a board game where the players were countries, and you needed a piece to represent each, ours would be a baseball.  (Except that it rolls, and pieces need a flat side to stay put.)

Stitched cowhide, with printing to tell its pedigree, rests perfectly in your hand, weighted and built to be thrown.

Each one is hand made.  Last I saw, in Costa Rica,  in conditions that are pretty tough.

Red waxed thread, white hide, blue printing.  We should change "American as apple pie" to "American as a baseball".

Advent Calendar 4.


And some days you forget to open.

Yesterday - a brick.  St. Louis is a capital of brick, so prized that people from New Orleans drive up here, find falling-down houses, load them up and take them home to help gentrify.  An interestingly symbol-laden area of commerce that combines the urban attributes of theft and beauty.

Advent Calendar 3.

When you do advent calendars, the whole thing is cardboard, you pry open the window, sometimes corners tear.  I wonder if there once were wooden ones, brought back year to year.  Or big ones, with a real candle behind each window.

Today's opens and there is, indeed, a candle.  A strange hybrid of utility and history and art.  We light them now for the table, because of their flattering light.  Once they were lit because they were the only light you could get.   So at night  everyone was candlelit. As in a Kubrick film that most people don't remember, Barry Lyndon.  I have never forgot the candlelit interiors.

Now we are lit by spirally fluorescent doohickies that, if they fall to the floor, make a toxic pile of glass and chemicals.  Drop a candle and your house could burn down.  But probably not. Usually there's just  a beautiful little puddle of wax.

Advent Calendar 2.

Open the window today and there's gravity.  Oh yeah - gravity.   Pulled trillions of pieces of matter together, forming Earth and, eventually, us.

I wonder why gravity was never a god.  Certainly the ancient god-designers knew that something was keeping them stuck to the earth.  Something made dropped things go down and not up.  But I haven't found Gravity, God of the Assembly of the Universe (although, I'll admit, I haven't looked).  Closest I've heard is Hawking's' statement that gravity, not god, made the universe.  Which sounds wrong.  Seems to me that either God made the universe - by definition, really - or no one did.

Gravitas is a Roman virtue, not a god.  It means, uh, gravitas.  Others are pietas and dignitas.  Man, we could use more of all three.

Advent Calendar Blog

Open the first window and there's.... December.   Winter's first chapter.  If the reason why we don't live in California is the change of seasons, here it is, without compromise.

In St. Louis the leaves are there on November first and gone by the end of the month.  We go to standard time, the darkness comes even sooner.  The tropicals and tender plants worth saving are brought inside, the perennials go to ground, the rest are doomed.  The fish in the  pond slow down and I rig a warmer to keep a hole in the ice, or they'd be doomed as well.

Today is sunny, that bright blue sky, bigger because the leaves are down.  Isabel, whose ancestors are from the West Highlands, doesn't want to come inside.

Bede's Sparrow

"The present life of man, O King, seems to be like the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your commanders and ministers, and a good fire in the midst, whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad.

"The sparrow, flying in at one door, and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry storm; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, into the dark winter from which he had emerged.

"So this life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are entirely ignorant."

From The Venerable Bede.  Told over a thousand years ago.

Confluence and Heart

We talk a lot about confluence here in St. Louis, because here the country's two mightiest rivers meet and flow together.  The Mississippi flows down from the North, from Minnesota,  and the Missouri flows in from the West, from Montana, and they converge in river bottoms, and as they start their journey to the heart of the South the first high ground, on the west bank, is St. Louis. 

Tonight this town rings with another kind of confluence, and beats with a tremendous heart.  It's a baseball town, likes to think of itself as the baseball town, and it's the capital of a huge region, seven or eight states, surrounding the tradition of its baseball teams.  It used to have two, a National and an American League team, the Cardinals and the Browns.  The Browns have long moved on, but what remains is this fine ball club, the center of what we call, proudly but not too seriously,  Cardinal Nation:  the St. Louis Cardinals.

"Go Cards."  I've heard it ever since I moved here.  At times like this it replaces "good-bye" or "see ya" in our conversations.

Tonight this tradition converged with a team, and the team won the World Series.

This 2011 team is a miracle.  For the last week I, and many others, have said "Cards in Seven", and it's not just municipal pride.  I'd make this prediction - before Game Six - because  this team plays with its back to the wall like no other.  It has come back from the brink literally dozens of times since August.   But I didn't really know how  true and deep their heart was, until Game Six, when the team was down to its last out, last strike, two runs down  - twice - and came back and won.  The gamest, biggest-hearted team ever.

Game Seven, tonight, was kind of a victory lap.  Not the firestorm of Game Six.  Just a steady, confident final act, eliminating any lingering doubt. This is one of the greatest sports teams America has ever seen.

Faith

From someplace on the Internet:

"In the 17th century, the people that we would now call atheists were called nullfidians. The state of insufficient faith was also of common enough interest to be given a name - petty fidianism.

"John Trapp, in his Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, 1647, recorded the term:

" 'O ye of little faith. Ye petty fidians; He calleth them not nullifidians.' "

I'm afraid I'm a petty fidian.  Never knew it before.  Always thought I had doubt, and that was okay because everyone does from time to time. 

At least I'm not a nullifidian.  What faith I have, I keep, and guard carefully.

Jubilee

Just when I was ranting about my inability to find anything insightful, I stumbled onto this in the Guardian.  It's George Monboit discussing a book by  Steve Keen, Debunking Economics:

"President Obama justified the bank bailout on the grounds that "a dollar of capital in a bank can actually result in eight or 10 dollars of loans to families and businesses. So that's a multiplier effect." But the money multiplier didn't happen. The $1.3 trillion that Bernanke injected scarcely raised the amount of money in circulation: the 110% increase in M0 money led not to the 800% or 1,000% increase in M1 money that Obama predicted, but a rise of just 20%. The bail-outs failed because M0 was not the cause of the crisis. The money would have achieved far more had it simply been given to the public. But, as Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy demonstrated over the weekend, governments have learnt nothing from this failure, and seek only to repeat it.

"Instead, Keen says, the key to averting or curtailing a second Great Depression is to reduce the levels of private debt, through a unilateral write-off, or jubilee. The irresponsible loans the banks made should not be honoured. This will mean taking many banks into receivership. Otherwise private debt will sort itself out by traditional means: mass bankruptcy, which will generate an even greater crisis."

Like they say, read the whole thing.  http://bit.ly/na6WnQ

There really is something going on here to which we should pay attention.

So What Planet Is This, Anyway

I've been hanging back, lurking really, to see if I can shake this impression that almost everything I hear lately is trite, half-baked, the opposite of insightful - outsightful?   - inblindful?   And it's not like I'm not looking.  I read the Times, listen to NPR and the BBC, watch CNN and both C-SPAN's - but it all seems like they all  - pols, journalists, pundits - are starting the day reading the same playbook and then come out spouting the same utterly conventional wisdom.  To mix a metaphor or two.

Not that I'm a bundle of insight, but I think I know it when I see it and I ain't seeing it.

More than ever, it seems to me the most intelligent things to do are listen to music, tend the garden, read history, and keep the day job.  Plus, in my own case, hit the keyboards and try to sound different every time.  Plus, I would say, look for simplicity without trusting it, but the thought isn't my own.   Alfred North Whitehead - now there's a guy with insight.

Ya. Hoo.


No good St. Louisan could watch how our beloved baseball team is doing and not comment.  The Cardinals had to come back from 8 games behind the Braves to get into the post-season, and tonight, in the last game of the regular season, they did it.  By just creaming Houston, 8-0, with Carpenter pitching one of the great games of his life, 2 hits, 11 strikeouts.  This team has heart, and it's a great time to be here.

Federalismo

The debate that's shaping up over the role of government is great; we small "l" libertarians have been waiting for this for years.  But the lawyer in me insists on pointing out the way the argument can conflate the questions of which level of government should handle things, and whether government should handle them at all.

There's a great example.  You hear all the time about the founding fathers, how they put restraints on government through the Bill of Rights.  (Well OK, most of them did - but it wasn't really the framers of the constitution who did it, it was the first Congress and the States - they were Ten Amendments to the constitution, after all, not there from the start.  Side point, but not the interesting point. )

Take the First Amendment.  It has a whole lot packed in there, but one idea I really like is separation of church and state.  So that means the founders - whoever - believed there shouldn't be, say, a state religion.  Right?

Not necessarily.  They didn't think the Federal Government should establish a state religion.  It was OK for States, and some did.  Connecticut didn't toss out the Congregationalists until pretty well into the 1800's.

Changed by the 14th Amendment, as were so many things - but that wasn't until after the Civil War.

The point is, distinguish between what's right for the federal government to do - or, a little more broadly, at which level of government should something be managed - and what's not right for any government to do.

It's a big part of my problem with Roe v. Wade.  That case and its progeny have said a lot, including the idea that the state has no role in the early stages of a woman's pregnancy.  My take is, fine, as to the federal government; I would prefer that it butts out of any stage of a woman's pregnancy.  But States have long had two roles:  defining murder and regulating the practice of medicine and there, from a legal standpoint, is where this issue is addressed.  So leave it to the States.  They could have  - and would have - worked out rules for abortion and the whole issue would have done so much less to wreck the tenor of the national debate.  There would have been differences, just as with divorce.  So what?

Of course it's still a judgment call.  Federal, State, municipal - or neighborhood association, parish, workplace - who makes the rules - or does no one make them at all.  I don't have an all-purpose key.  It's just a way of thinking about it that I think the founders did, and we do less.

Picking Losers

There's a lot to be said about the evils of direct government funding of businesses - the picking-winners-and-losers meme.  One company, Solyndra, really stands out.  The USA lent it about half a billion, and after a refinance we aren't even senior.  Now they are broke and now its officers are taking the Fifth, so you know it's all going someplace bad.  Maybe even someplace really bad for the Administration, its first major scandal.


The New York Times covered Solyndra in a piece the other day that was well-positioned but seemed awfully restrained.  One point stuck out for me:  the lobbying.  I certainly think it's basically wrong for the USA to lend money to a private company.  But it seems really, really wrong for them to spend $1.8 million of that money to go and lobby for more money.  There probably were restrictions on the use of proceeds - I know there are in an analogous situation, government procurements - but borrowed dollars are fungible.

The lobbyists are $1.8 million richer, we are $1.8 million poorer, and that's it.  No other benefit.  Pretty clear who's the loser.  We got picked.

Publish or Perish

I had forgot Bird by Bird, a book about writing that was pretty persuasive.  The main message:  don't wait for inspiration, just sit down and do it.

The problem is that the only-vaguely-inspired stuff can be tedious.  The stuff you crank, if you're just cranking, may be well written but that may be it.  Anyone who does this for the Fat Lady, as I do, and maybe for posterity wants it to be well-written and insightful and even interesting to read.  Will you always get there just by putting your butt in a chair?

Gets one to the difference between the kind of writing the Bird by Bird author, Ann Lamott, was writing about, and this blogging stuff.  If you're working on a novel or a play or a history you presumably generate a big pile of writing - OK, bird by bird - and then go back and reread it and edit it and then someone else reads and edits it and maybe someday it is published.

These squibs just emerge, a spellcheck if I remember, and off they go.

So if you do them everyday, whatever the inspiration or lack thereof, the risks of suckiness go way up.

But if you don't - in this medium, who wants to wait for a damn thing?

Calling Ronnie

I'm not part of that Reagan-Was-God crowd, but he had an amazing ability to see fundamental wrongs that everyone had got used to - or figured would never change -  and say they were still wrong.  Like the Soviet Union.  Like marginal tax rates of 80 percent.  Like nuclear war, as a matter of fact.

No one around with that kind of vision.  I don't know what's fundamentally wrong that everyone accepts - perhaps China? - but I know that 20 years from now, whatever it is, it will then seem obvious.

Battling Back

With the Fall coming in, I'm afraid Strays is going to turn back to some of that serious policy wonkie stuff that will reduce its readership from about ten to about one, but it's in the air.  With a jumpy philosophical twist.  So here goes, Mr. (or Ms.) Reader:

Back up on the table with the Republic of Equity.  The name - it is simply to imply the opposite of the Empire of Debt - means that we move back to a global society where more free people own more of their own stuff and rely less on borrowed money.  Top to bottom.  Drive that car after it's paid for.  Prepay the mortgage until it  hurts.  Let failed businesses fail. Let Greece default  and tell them - much as I like all the Greeks I know - that they can't borrow their way out, they will have to live on what they earn.  The point being, if we are coming to the end of a Kondratiev wave, let's get there.  Liquidate, take our lumps, reconstitute our moral strength, go to work, and move on.

And don't try to reflate the economy, don't monetize the debt by running the printing presses, and don't start another war.

I know it sounds a little like calling for the Dark Ages.  But I don't think we go back to that, or anything near, because technology has made intelligence and communication cheap.  Knowledge won't be limited to the monasteries.  There won't be a priesthood that can deny us heaven.

Labor Day

Oops... sometimes these babies hang up in draft....

As usual the day was for serious labor, including ducking into the chateau from time to time to bang out a contract.   Outside it was vines removal.  This puppy had been clinging to the NW corner and was home to many critters.

I figured I'd have a lot of angry birds, real ones.  The sparrows in particular inhabited this hanging forest throughout the winter, and I figured a few would stick around and make a claim.  But as it happened, not a sound.  No nests, no remnants of nests.  Some chewing or pecking away at some of the exterior, but mostly pretty clear, once the brush was down.

It's late summer.  They probably have more to worry about than some middle-aged guy on a ladder with a pair of clippers.

Engineered Cute

I was thinking again how cute - sorry, there's really no better word - is Isabel, our pup. And she really is.

But she is engineered, the result of generations of breeders breeding generations of Westies in order to sell them to people like me.   She is very intentionally cute.

Isabel doesn't know she's cute, or that she's engineered, but she does know that she's alive and, all day long, she wants to engage.  There's a huge hopeful point in there.

We too are engineered.  My parents did their parental things, and in this nature-nurture thing nurture still counts for something.  Add natural selection, a grand engineer, generations of breeders breeding lines of individual humans, all of whom survived long enough to procreate.  Which mine did, leading to me.

But there is a lot more engineering to come, tons more.  It's clear that we will be able to manipulate our offspring, and ourselves, and integrate a world of knowledge into each individual head.  Our parents (or the state, or the caliphate, or someone) will be able to bioengineer us from conception.  Once out, we can continue to invent ourselves, and not just through will power and resolve.  One wonders if we will still be people.

It doesn't necessarily sound good.  But as with Isabel, whatever the mods and intervention, engineered people should still be happy to be alive and ready to engage.  I don't think that can be engineered out.  I don't know how long it lasts, now or then - as to each of us, it may have a half-life - and maybe it should.  But for a time there will be a will to be human and survive.

River's Edge

Down in Texas they haven't had much rain in months and everything is drying up.  Here in St. Louis, the draught seems to be coming to town too, but it's different.  We are a confluence of two great and two pretty good rivers (OK, the Missouri, the Mississippi, the Illinois, and the Meramec), and there is plenty of water underground in Missouri.  So unless there is some kind of catastrophe, we will go on pulling water from our rivers and keeping our vegetation alive.

That's one way the rivers prop us up, and there are others.  You can drink the stuff, based on treatment systems that have been around for 100 years.  You can track your culture - and previous cultures, like Cahokia - that expanded and contracted with the rivers.  They flood, but for the most part the floods come slowly and they always recede.

What surprises me a little is that we don't seem to have a distinguished architecture built around this.  There are houses at the rivers' edges that anticipate the floods, but they usually look impoverished, or at least unlovely.

(A photo taken for its irony.  I'm sure there are way better illustrations of the point.)

I don't see why there can't be a wonderful river's edge architecture.  It seems perfect, first of all, for treehouses - the real deal, houses in trees.  Or wonderful cantilevered things with giant balconies.  Or how about houseboats, moored but ready to float -  hearkening back to riverboats.

Well, maybe not.

Could be a class thing, or an economic thing.  River people are pretty down-market.  I think they are proud of that, but they sure don't seem to be celebrating their lifestyles in their structures.

Aphorism Blog

It's an OK idea, but:

There's nothing badder than a bad aphorism.

Darkness, Darkness

It's the name of a tune from the Youngbloods, 1969, my most wonderful and terrible year.

A tune as seductive as the Buckleys, Tim and Jeff, have turned out to be.  Father and son, gifted, each dying young, maybe suicide, maybe accident, maybe foul play.

So if the good die young, how good?  How young?  The better, the sooner dead?  Should it be, rather,  some of the good die young - or are all the rest of us baddies, still walking around.

What I do know is,  you can't retrieve lost virtue.

You die when your dreams die, and some days I think I died in Hong Kong.

Take more risk, make riskier choices.

I wonder if this is becoming an aphorisms blog.

Click.

The Middle Way

For some reason over the past few days I have heard cheerful-sounding guys who believe that we should follow our dreams, there's only one life to lead, live the one you want, you will be happy and as prosperous as you need to be.

Really.  Isn't it way more complicated than that?  Isn't all this living a series of compromises, leaving you with days that consist of some things you like to do, some things you don't, some people you love, some you like, some you don't.  And you navigate along, trying to inflict as little damage, on yourself and ones around you, as you can?  But not so self-denying that you line up for Early Check-Out?

I guess it depends on the protagonist.  I remember a conversation in my mid-20's, explaining my decision to go to law school, yeah a lot of work, but it will take me into a practice where I can do what all these other talented hard-working people do, it could lead to whatever, blah blah... I could be a star.  The guy I was talking to was very thoughtful, I figured he'd get it.  He said:  "Yeah, and good luck.  But I don't want to go for the top.  I want to go back to my home town, line up a decent job, play a lot of golf, cook a lot of barbecue, and raise a family."

At the time I was shocked.  I thought everyone wanted a shot at the top (whatever it is.)  I thought he and I were just different species, he Status Quo Man, I Sky's the Limit Man.

Indeed we were different and I'm sure we've had very different lives.  But Status Quo Man, pedestrian as he may have sounded, knew something.  He came a lot closer to the advice I started this piece with - he had a dream, he followed it, and for all I know he is supremely happy and thinks he never had to compromise a bit.  And feels not a bit boxed in by the life he now inhabits.

Sky's the Limit Man, on the other hand, sooner or later, and then more than once,  has to contend with limits lower than the sky.  Life pushes back, he compromises.  And navigates a long, complicated decision tree and finds himself, sooner or later, on a branch with, let's say, more starlings than he'd foreseen.

And he makes friends with the starlings, and it's all good.

But from time to time he looks across at one of the other branches...

Dumb Like Fox

This is in the nature of one of those topical things that I try to avoid, because they seem so dated later, but I can't help it.  I just think almost everyone is missing the boat on Obama and the budget compromise he reached.

As I understand, he got the debt ceiling raised until after the next election.  Congress has agreed to some kind of suicide pact where if sufficient additional reductions aren't agreed to, there will be huge cuts in programs that no one wants cut hugely. The Bush tax cuts and cuts in estate and gift tax  - cuts which, philosophically, he must hate - will be repealed on January 1, 2013 unless a bill (which he can veto) keeps this from happening.

I think it's brilliant.  The Republicans have now taken shared ownership of the economy.  If a compromise isn't reached by the end of the year, he will have a new chance - and about $1 billion in campaign funds - to make his case.  If the Republicans don't cave, they will be blamed for the economic Armageddon to follow.  And Obama can spend most of 2012 reminding voters who the bad guys are, and who is looking out for the guys on the souplines, as unemployment goes back into double figures.

It's Rooseveltian.  And we are in for a long, tough slog.  I only hope songwriting and music flourish the way they did in the 1930's.

Hollowed-Out Night

I crash when I retire for the night, after about one page of whichever book from the pile came to hand.    And that's great.  And like most of the rest of the human race, I do not spring out of bed in the morning, I crawl out, and do not really wake up until I'm outside with the dog.

But sandwiched in between, every night, somewhere, for some minutes or hours, I'm awake.  And I used to say, "I do my best thinking" when I wake up in the middle of the night.  Until a few years ago, when a very wise partner of mine said, "Strange.  Most of the thinking I do in then is dumb, way off base, and useless in the morning."

I think she was half right.  I now think of the litany of to-dos, fantasies, and mild obsessions as a list:  things that are bothering me, and need to be addressed.  It's not the list, it's the solutions that come to me in the darkness, that are usually useless.

The name of this entry, "Hollowed-Out Night", came to me last night in that middle period.  I don't think it fits what I'm saying here, by day, but I'm keeping it.  Maybe there was more, and I can't remember.  And maybe it was dumb.

Ennobled by U-Tube

There are probably thousands of ways that the modern computer world is a richer one than before, but for me there is nothing like the ability to see great musicians performing great music.  Ten years ago I could have heard about Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and hoped to catch her on the radio.  Today (and presumably forever) she is right there in front of us.  Alive.

If you have not seen this before, be prepared to be astonished.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQlt1UxjvWU

Driving Home

Back in St. Louis, but why?  When you drive from the temperate stone walls and beaches of Rhode Island to a place that's right about 100F with 50 percent humidity and lots of sun, well, it seems downright nuts.

And as you drive, you cross over 1000 miles of America that look pretty good and not so insanely hot.

Nonetheless, I'm glad to be back.

Hard to figure, and I'm sure it's all just the way things worked out, and could have been different, and if I'd wound up in a different place I'm sure I would have an explanation.  But the explanation here is pretty good:  St. Louis is the capital of Cardinal Nation, a giant footprint in the Midwest, people from at least nine states who love the baseball team with the birds on the bat.  As I run west I could pick them up from a radio station in Jasper and would be able to carry on at least until Ponca City.

Baseball and St. Louis, each at the heart of America.

The team is making another pennant run, as it almost always does.  The population curses the heat, gets past it, and cheers them on towards October.

Walking La Jolla Blues

Not that I had time to kill, but I needed a long walk.  So I walked from the village back up to Torrey Pines (OK, with a short shot on the bus in the middle) and it was mostly about close-up views of how California is really a creature of the automobile.  But in the last leg I got to the Salk Institute, took a left toward the Pacific, and found myself in a huge dirt parking lot with a truly spectacular view.

I was hoping to find the golf course, and navigate back to my room from there, but it seemed impenetrable until I spotted a gate across the moonscape of the lot.

But when I got there, the gate was chained and locked, so I wound my way to the left, towards the ocean, and wondered when they would run out of chain link fence.

Eventually they did, and the views in most directions made it pretty clear why lots and lots of people want to live here.

I walked through the brush (I'm in a suit, but no tie, and tennis shoes) and found myself on a deep back nine hole, greeted by five rabbits.  Three stuck around for a photo.

They seem to live a good life, these guys.  I saw about a hundred as I made my way back to the hotel.  Not tame, exactly, but they didn't seem to regard me as a predator.  Which I'm not.  Unlike some of the golfers... there was one who had hit way too close to another group, said the sun was in his eyes, he was sorry, but the targets were unforgiving.  So he yells, "If you can't accept my apology then kiss my ass!"

I'll take the rabbits.

Waiting for Insight

OK in the last ten days I've motored 1500 miles, checked out the Atlantic, walked New York City when it's over 100, and flown West and checked out the Pacific.  Confronted stacks of paper, dealt with a few, ignored many, and embarked on the usual resolutions.  Done the right things, done some things I'm not sure are right, opened doors, closed none.   In other words, vacation, of a kind, with a bunch of work mixed in, and a few moments, a few new hopes.

Great barreling insight doesn't come with this, whether asked peacefully or frantically... do we ever really change?  Only when we pull ourselves by the scruff of the neck, and is that a change, or did it always take scruff-pulling, and that's no change.

Life just opens up, day by day, and closes down, day by day.  A guy I liked, a banker, my age, fought cancer as I did, but yesterday he lost.  Or, the last day and threshold came to him sooner than to me, which you can treat as a loss or not.  Goodbye Bob.  Hello San Diego, today, and hello to the rest of my days.

Ring Finger, Left Hand

Maybe I read the wrong stuff, but I don't see much about this principal custom of our tribe: the "I'm Married" sign that people wear, all the time.

Mostly women, I notice.  Men, not so much, and those who do have a faint aroma of Ashley Wilkes.

But women really do do it, not just a band but almost always a big-ass engagement ring along side.  And I am probably delusional, but even now, and for my whole adult life, I've think I've had it waved at me.  Usually subtly,  a re-crossing of hands.  See there, buddy boy.  I'm married, and back off.

I get it with flight attendants, who must spend their lives being hit on.  But what is it with all the rest of the babes out there?

C'mon.  I'm married too, and I'm not on the prowl.  Am I staring?  Maybe, if you are gorgeous; it's a genetic thing.  But most of you, my dear ladies, are not gorgeous.  You are, however, women.  Which to me makes you presumptively interesting to talk to.  At this age and body mass that's about all my eye contact means.

I really don't get it.  Why do women - so many of whom are so fiercely independent in all other respects - want to parade their marital status at all times?  Is it really just to fend off the creeps?

Why isn't there a movement of cool women who don't want to be Melanie Wilkes?

Patriotic

I think of myself as a pretty steady Eddy, but when it comes to

Lump In Throat At National Anthem vs.
Patriotism Is The Last Refuge of a Scoundrel,

I swing back and forth.

Or maybe I'm a scoundrel, so I'm patriotic, so it all fits.

Hooray the Fourth.  Time to go light a fuse.

Red Hot Mommas

Yesterday was a pretty crappy day but it was made much better because I happened to see a fair number of pregnant woman walking around town. 

Used to be that these ladies would dress in muumuus and it was great, they were demure and near-matronly and peaceful.  Now, the style seems to be tight tops and lots of exposure, as if to say, "Hey, I'm pregnant!  Deal with it!"

Either way, and any other way, I'm a big fan.  Pregnant woman are disarmingly beautiful.  They capture motherhood, sex, peace, the future, hope - practically everything that's worth a damn.

I know it's not always much fun for the participants, especially the final act.  (I had a friend who said that for her, childbirth was like pulling your lower lip over your head.)  But what a process, and how magnificent they are while great with child.

Risk

What pervades the business world, at the least the world of claims in business that I see so often, is the way we handle risk.  Not just enterprise risk, or economic risk, but the risk that someone who works for you will do some damn fool thing and you'll get sued.

The first thing is insurance, and there is a bunch of that available.   You can insure everything from an executive harassing an underling to a stockholder saying your directors are crooks, in addition to the usual slips and falls and traffic accidents.

Where it gets interesting is when you can't buy insurance.  So you manage, with training and well-drafted contracts and avoidance of situations where the risk exceeds the reward.

Makes you wonder how less risky things would be if there were no insurance.  We'd all try harder, as we do with the  non-insurance solutions.

Just as I've wondered how risk would be managed if the people making decisions would be held personally liable if they screw up.  We lawyers, and the doctors, and some others face this, and we seem to do OK (but we have insurance....).  What if the financial types who manage others' money thought they'd be personally liable if, say, they put their clients into the wrong fund, or derivatives that they knew were only riding a bubble?  Would they insist on a little more caution?

I think it was that way more often in the past.  My grandfather was a director, senior executive and shareholder in a bank in the '30's, it was closed in the Bank Holiday, never reopened, and he spent much of the rest of his life in litigation.  Based, as I understand it, on state law at that time that held out personal liability for bank directors  - my Mom used to call it "double indemnity".  For him it was too late - I guess he "won", but his career was ruined.  I would guess that his peers, however, through the rest of the decade, seeing what happened to him and others, became a lot more careful.

And maybe the big boys don't see that as a good thing.  If the financial people are careful, they shy away from risk, maybe the result is depression in the '30's, stagflation in the '70's, and whatever this economy turns out to hold in the teens.  Bad politics.  But if it liquidates all the undeserving debt, maybe a good new start.

Missing Cancer

I hate to go all dark & stormy on Strays but I can't shake the feeling - not constant, but maybe every day - that there is something to a short-term death sentence, a kind of deck-clearing impulse that helps address the background, adult-stage, low-level ADD that I, and I think many of us, find so troubling.

One way to deal with it is to try and remember that we are all under a death sentence, no matter what the immediate prognosis.  But I have always found this hard to believe, and not because I am blind to what has always been a 100 percent proposition.  (I am reminded of what one of my trusts and estates partners said when a client asked how a certain Will provision would play out if he died.  My partner said, "It isn't if you die.  It's when you die.") 

I can't quite take inevitability to heart because the futurist in me says that sooner or later, but probably pretty soon, this whole death thing will be come a lot more postponable, if not avoidable. So not only do I not have the spur of Mr. C's you-could-have-90-days, I'm not really sure it's going to happen at all.

But we need that belief, or at least I do.  Some guys get out of bed thinking about how to achieve the latest incentive their employer put before them in order to make mo' monah.  I wish I were like that, but instead I'm thinking about whether or not I'm thinking about the right things to think about.  That's a guy with time on his hands.

And there may be more to it than that.  Once you believe that there is a final curtain about to drop, you can stop worrying about the fact that you didn't discover a new continent, write a novel, or make it to the Supreme Court, or even come close to any of them.

So when I'm asked how I'm doing, which I still am all the time, I answer "Great!", because that's what everyone wants to hear, and it's true.  But at some level, it's with regret.  Odd.

The Coolest Thing Obama Could Do

If he really wanted to be transformative, the President could decline to seek a second consecutive term.

I have decided to concentrate for the next 18 months on restoring growth to America's economy and leading a successful and honorable conclusion to our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  These efforts are too important to bear the distraction of another political campaign, or accusations that what we do is designed to help my re-election.


It doesn't mean I am gone from political life forever.  The Constitution gives an American two terms to be President; I do not see why they have to be consecutive.  If after another four, eight, twelve years I think I should run again, I will.


It would give his opposition fits.  It would re-convince his base that he is a post-partisan, transformative man.  It would in fact let him focus on bipartisan solutions to some big issues.  And his presidency would be able to claim pulling the county through economic ruin, ending two wars, setting the terms of a national health benefit, and killing Bin Laden.  He could rank with James Polk as a great one-termer, and keep his powder try for a second act.

Homing Device

Back when I travelled a lot and my marriage had ended I wondered, from time to time, where home was.  But my Fox Terrier, Henry, had stayed with me and I realized eventually: home is where your dog lives.

Maybe not meaningful to those poor souls who don't have a dog or cat or someone else who provides love (in the dog's case, unconditional; in the cat's, more measured) and whose daily life is generally geared to yours.  Maybe it can happen with something unconscious like a plant or inanimate like a house, but it never did for me.  What mattered, what still matters, is another thoughtful animal to whom I say goodbye when I leave and who greets me warmly on return.

Music Man

Even though each is different, in among listening and playing and composing there are threads of the same stuff, music stuff, a kind of mental perfume.  I don't know if it has to do with training, or exposure, because I've had a little of the former and a lot of the latter, and whether or not they matter this essential stuff is there, swirling around.  It's no more organized or logical than the smell of leather or nutmeg or a woman's hair.  Some other conception is at work.

I hang on to this even though I don't listen enough, or to the right things, and I spend way too many hours listening to talk on radio and podcasts, when I could be searching out and listening to, say, Alan Hovhaness, or Bobby Blue Bland.

I don't play enough, and I sure don't compose enough - mostly my solo sessions devolve into working on the perfect blues run or trying to conquer ragtime.  When it's with others, there's more progress, but nothing like it should be.

But the music stuff still floats around, and on a good day it knocks me off of my stupid stride.  I open my eyes, breathe in, there's a clear but non-logical reason to take the next step, with a slightly better course.

Decapitation as Policy

I'm becoming increasingly non-interventionist, even Fortress Americanist, except in one respect:  how to deal with the really bad guys.

I guess Bid Laden  - The Final Chapter was what tipped me over on this.  For a long time I bought into the notion that assassination - not to put too fine a point on it - was bad policy.  Not sure why, but I guess the reason was that we wouldn't want them to do it to us.

But how about we put the bar high.  We don't intervene, much less assassinate, if the leader refrains from genocide and from actively working to murder innocent American civilians.  But if he does do either of these, we go kill 'm.

Then we don't stick around to try to make his state into Belgium.  We just say to the locals, here's why we did it.  We hope for the best for you.  Don't elect or anoint or empower another one who flunks one of these two tests or we will be back.  Otherwise, we won't.

And what if they apply the same standard to us?  I'm OK with that.  If we have a leader who commits genocide or plans the murder of innocent civilians of another country, and we don't take him out ourselves, I can bend a little on sovereignty.  Come and get him.

Otnemem

This online journal business has a certain backwards quality to it, in that the standard narrative reads forward, you start at the beginning and end at the end.  But if you read these entries in the order in which they appear, they go back.

A little like a wonderful film called Memento.  It's a narrative - a mystery, and how - which is told going back in time, with each chapter followed by the preceding chapter.  The mystery is compounded by the fact that the protagonist has no medium or long term memory, and by the end of each chapter he has forgot the beginning predicate.  But it's not truly backward, it's really a series of loops, because each entry itself has to play forward in time.

Another way to say this is that as far as I know there is no way to duplicate verbally the visual presentation of a movie running backward.  Follow to hard too be would it...

Goody Goody

Meeting a colleague in a few minutes at Goody Goody, one of those institutions that are badges of honor to a particular place and time.  It's in a part of St. Louis, Goodfellow and Natural Bridge, that most (white) St. Louisans regard as totally off bounds, part industrial, part ghetto.

It is a clean, amiable restaurant, decades in St. Louis in the same place.  Diner food, a little southern, white ownership but mostly African American clientele and staff.  Also police and politicians.

I will be having mashed potatoes and gravy, among other things, which ever since my rounds with Mr. C has been a staple.  Without putting too dramatic a point on it, I think this is a place where they know about healing and redemption.

I don't think this is patronizing or slumming but I guess that's in the eye of the beholder.  I know it's good food, a welcoming place, and a revelation to most of my friends I take there.

This could be the world, damn it.

Calhoun County, Illinois

Looking towards St. Charles County, Missouri.  Between here and the horizon, down a bluff, is the Mississippi.  Jim and Huck rafted past here.

Homage forte

A quick detour into near-pedantry.


A peeve of mine, pet or no, has been the quasi-educated use of the term "homage" with a French accent.  Omazh, with the accent on the second syllable.


It's an English term, feudal origin, from Middle English, probably earlier from Old French, originally meaning the acknowledgement of fealty by a vassal to his lord.  It is pronounced with the accent on the first syllable, and a hard "j" sound, not a "zh". With or without a silent "h".  It isn't, as far as I can tell, a French word -  I have two French dictionaries in the office and "homage" isn't in either one.


Anyway, it's an interesting animal - an English term that looks kind of Frenchy and therefore the semi-literates use a French accent.  Unique?


Non.  Take forte, which my father always insisted on pronouncing like the thing with a moat around it.  He was right.  Dad's forte  - his strong suit - was, indeed, the English language.


But time and the same predilections have caused the plebes to pronounce it for-tay, accent second syllable.   Which makes no sense.   It's a noun, for goodness' sake.  Why make it sound like it has an accent aigu?  (OK, it may not be misplaced French.  It may be Italian - the forte you see in music.  Where the "e" is, of course pronounced.  But I think not.  I think it's more wannabe Francophilia.)


Anyway, the sad part is that the dictionaries seem to have folded, and for-tay is now an OK second pronunciation.  As will probably happen with omazh.  Lordy, can the apocalypse be far behind?

Betrayal

Odd that there seems to be no single noun in English for the betrayed one.  "Dupe"? "Victim"?  "Sucker"?  "Mark"?  None of these, necessarily.  And unless it's a man and it's about sex, not the nasty-sounding "Cuckold."  Nothing that means, solely, the betrayee, which isn't a word.

The perps get, at least, "betrayer" and "traitor".  But those on the receiving end appear to have no single, dignified name.

You can be an avenger.  You can, I am given to understand, be a forgiver.  And you can move on.

*******************************************************************

And so we play on... with abstractions, words that are only the skins of meaning, ellipses, the coding of the emotions below.  That play and coding are what this typing - and shit, that really is all it is - is about.

Back to Cahokia Mounds

Driving downtown, every so often, I just blow off the last exit in Missouri and keep going across the river, towards Horseshoe Lake and Cahokia Mounds.  The area just beats with history, what for America is old history.  A lake made out of one the bends that the Mississippi abandoned ages ago.  Humans living in the area for 10,000 years.  At the mounds, the site of what was once, long before Columbus, the largest city in North America.

I keep looking for simplicity (and still mistrust it).  Here at Monks' Mound, for some reason, I find it and sign on.

Hubris-O-Rama

Can't help noting that I wrote this about a year ago, re Afghanistan.

I would focus on how to climb down from this war and make a graceful exit. Just as we can tolerate no new 9/11, we cannot ever be in a position of evacuating our embassy on short notice and leaving supporters behind to be slaughtered, as we did in Saigon in 1975. Avoidance of that should be the objective in Afghanistan.

How? We find a reason to declare Al-Qaeda crushed and declare victory. How that? Well, finally killing Bin Laden or finding his remains would be nice. And if not that, I bet there is something else the Pashtuns and/or the Pakis could serve up if they were offered the right mixture of money and guns (in their hands, at their heads, or both). Whatever it is, we follow it up with a nice parade through Kabul, us and our allies, and we're gone. With visas and a great evacuation plan for our local friends, who I'm sure will make fine Americans.

Not exactly a prediction, but it does seem to kind of resonate today.  Killing Bin Laden could make a good pretext for exiting a bad war.  Hmm...   There is a conspiracy theory in there somewhere.

I heard once about a woman who used to write to her husband who was at the front during WWII.  Her predictions were so insightful that the FBI paid her a call to make sure she wasn't a spy.  Who knows if true, but I always liked the idea that you could just read the papers, apply your brain, and be a kind of soothsayer.

But you can't predict Black Swans, almost by definition.  If the next big thing is a Black Swan all we can hope is to be nimble.  And maybe stock some soup and water in the basement,

Valerie At Sunset

They come into our lives, these dogs, and become our best friends, and then they leave.  They are killed, or they run away, or are stolen, or have to be given away.  Or, most painfully, they give their lives to you and then you get to the place where their happy lives are over, and you have to put them down.

Valerie would say it's been well worth it, and when I've recovered I will agree.  She and I had many great times together, many times just we two, her treeing a squirrel and me cheering her on, driving for days together every summer, people saying what a great dog at the stops on the highway, exploring parks where neither of us had ever been, me taking the risk of letting her off the lead, she always, always, sooner or later, coming back.

Today's the day she goes and doesn't come back.

She loved and was loved by family and many of our friends.  (Other dogs, not so much.)  She was dignified and graceful and fine, and when not outside scouting she slept at my feet.  When I was home in recovery from cancer she never left my side.  She was ours for thirteen Christmases, with her own stocking.

Farewell old girl.  Now I can only promise to remember you.  I promise.

Cairo, Illinois

They have blown levees that protected Mississippi County in Missouri in order to save Cairo, Illinois.  The good farmers whose land and homes are being inundated think the proposition is absurd.  Let that city go, they say.

Cairo sits at the confluence of the Mississippi and the Ohio.  It was once a prosperous place, Grant's first major command headquarters, where Civil War troops were assembled and gunships were built, launched and anchored, and, as shown in a famous incident involving Grant, a center for the telegraph that revolutionized the conduct of war.  It was a commercial crossroads, exemplified by the Custom House, built in 1872.

But mostly it's a ruined ghost town now, with or without a flood, fewer than 3000 desperate souls, with a very troubled racial history.

I'm not sure about the trade-off.  If saving what's left of Cairo means that there will be a new effort to make it into a place people might actually want to live...  well OK, I will listen to that.  But if it leaves a lot of still-rotting buildings, instead of letting them wash away - I'd be in favor of the washing away.  The river has taken islands, land, even towns before.  Maybe we should have given Cairo back.

Bin Laden

Hard to watch this go by and not comment.  The reactions here seem to range from celebration, to reproach for celebrating the death of a man, to fear of reprisal.

Me, I think a guy who is responsible for and exults in the slaughter by stealth of 3000 innocent men, women, and children has a special place in the annals of evil.  He deserved much worse than he got.

As to the politics, I note my previously-blogged position - that this creates a fine time to declare victory in Afghanistan, assemble and issue green cards to the people who helped us, and bring them and our people home.  That point of view is not heard much, and when it is, it's regarded as craven.

I guess it was also craven when Reagan pulled us out of Lebanon after hundreds of Marines were killed in their barracks in 1983.  But I bet it saved a lot of American lives, and avoided taking sides in a fight where there wasn't a good side to take.

Lucky Enough To Be Asked

I am lucky.  Lucky lucky lucky.  And I do like people, and being with them, and seeing those I don't usually see.  And I'd be churlish to whine about being asked to dress up and hang out at charity events with eats and drinks in abundance and occasionally a good band.

But whine I must, a little. I just can't help thinking this is another way we are back to the 1930's - think of My Man Godfrey - only these things today are both more politically corrent and more tacky.

It's the auctions, most of all.  Fun like a trip to a stockyard.  Some earnest husband - or worse, some minor celebrity - trying to extract money from people who are already feeling taken or, way worse, who want to show how prosperous they are.  The latest I've seen is handing everyone a little iPhonish unit that allows you to keep bidding from the bar.

OK call me jealous.  And cheap.  And ungrateful for all the hours that very decent people put into organizing these events, and the good causes they support.  Call me all of them, then please call me early for the coffee and a graceful exit.

Guy Noir Wrecks My Plans

The idea is to come up with 15- or 30-minute radio-of-the-air pieces that we can produce here with a local theater company, peddle them to Sirius or via the iStore, but we need scripts.  Which I've been trying to write in my head as I drive to and from work.

All I can think of is cases handled by a kind of uber-me, a lawyer/fixer who carries a gun,  does more than way more than contracts, takes on beautiful women and dangerous men, but how to I get around the cliches?  It all sounds like Guy Noir, Garrison Keillor's detective from St. Paul.

She walked in and at first all I saw was legs, down to 4-inch heels, down to toenails painted chocolate brown.  I'm thinking, "Not too early for dessert"  but all that came out was "May I help you?"

Stuff like that.

I need to get from funny to cool...

The Threshold Theory

Here's as far as I go on this whole life-after-death thing.

Your whole life you've been telling yourself stories about yourself, often deceptive or at least non-factual.  The best example being dreams, where you show yourself in a narrative and you wander through, as though awake, taking in the world you've created.  At some level you  - the deep you - must know that the dream world you've created isn't "real".  But the dreamer in you believes the whole story, until you wake up.

And as you grow older and wiser you learn that telling these stories to yourself doesn't only happen while you are asleep.

OK so far.  Basic stuff, I guess, but I was no psych major so this wasn't taught to me, and neither was what's next.

The threshold theory is that at the moment of death - at the threshold - a final narrative unfolds.  Deep-you shows dreamer-you what's next.  Who knows what it will show you, any more than you know any night what dreams you will dream.

So, you're at the moment of death, at the threshold.  Maybe you will look out at the afterlife you believe in.  If you believe you're going to hell (a proposition I find utterly ridiculous, by the way - take that, Satan!), well then maybe you're looking at brimstone and pitchforks.  If you believe you're going to heaven, maybe you're at a really well-appointed hotel, and all the dogs who preceded you to the hereafter are running towards you, tails wagging.

If you're a lights-out guy, maybe you're looking into black.

Or maybe what dreamer-you believes has no bearing on what deep-you serves up at the last moment.

In any case I'm pretty sure that deep-you knows what is going down.  All the circuit breakers are being tripped,  the fire curtain is coming down, and it's time to trot out the last big dream.

Whatever it is, whatever the final story you tell yourself, at the threshold, that's it, that's eternity.  The frame freezes at one last blink, the lids stay closed, you don't wake up.

Rabbit Rabbit

OK that was a mixed thing.

Giving up the Internet for 40 days was a great conversation piece but otherwise, for the most part, irritating.  It was like giving up the phone book, the dictionary, the atlas.  You can do it, and you can find the paper alternatives, but the process takes longer and the results are less complete.

You miss a lot of the pushed popular cultural references, the bad behavior of movie stars and politicians.  But you don't lose track of weather killing people in Japan, or dictators killing people in Libya, or the mass US civics lesson that is playing out over federal budgeting and debt.  As to these, maybe you've missed (how to know, since you've missed it) some of the nuance, and certainly you're missed a lot of punditry and chatter.

You do waste less time.  Every second is precious and gone forever, so that is a good thing.  The avoidance of lost time was most apparent when I strayed from the vow, because ten minutes into an Internet hunt for something (usually music) I would realize where I was and go back to where I belonged.  So, better time management.

But, generally:  kind of a yawn.  Next year maybe I will give up something even more fundamental, like walking... ooh there's a thought.  Conduct life at a run, a trot, or a crawl.

 Which brings me, at this 40-day pace, mostly walking, to Easter.  I find I'm becoming a practicing Christian - emphasizing "practicing" - but this holiday is still where I come up short.  My father used to say that religion is about what happens when you die.  Not for me.  For me it's about what happens before you die.  I do not believe that we maintain any kind of separate personality after we die, or will arise again as we were or want to be, whether we follow Jesus or not.  I think, subject to the Threshold Theory, that when we die it's lights out.  And I'm OK with that.  How we get there, that's the hard part.

The Threshold Theory - next post.

For Tom, I Suspend

An old friend, a classmate, a bandmate from many years ago, is dead.  We only find out now, a year later.  Just a death notice, no details.

I sent this to the class, and he deserves much more.  At the suggestion of another classmate, I'll risk perdition and post at least this:

**********************************************************

Chambers was a front man. Had he been in the Rascals he would have been way better than Gene, and Eddie and Felix couldn't have stood the competition.

He introduced me to Winwood, Clapton, Hendrix. He loved hooking up his very impressive stereo at the beginning of a term and taking it down at the end. In the meantime he slept as much as possible because, he told me, it made time go by more quickly. He could not wait to get on with life.

He bedded great looking girls.

There was a tape of us playing the 25th. We all kind of showed our age, but Tom did at least one break that wiped me out. I found myself shouting.

Awful to find out this way, but he was hiding from us. I think - based on very little evidence - that he was ashamed that he did not live up to his potential. And he did not. Because if he had, he would have been a star.

Shrove Tuesday

For a lot of reasons I'm going all in on the 40 days.

Used to be, giving things up for Lent meant I'd suspend consumption of some things that were bad for me.  Say, desserts.  And I'd backslide a lot.

My Mom had a wonderfully tailored approach.  She'd give up smoking in the car.

But I've had friends point out that there is supposed to be an element of sacrifice here, not just an excuse to diet or self-improve.  And I agree with that, especially today, right now.  The events, the changes, the risks, the choices keep flying at me from all directions and I need to focus, hunker down, and figure out how to balance out the reality of 60 years under my belt.  And use the mechanic of giving up something that matters.

So I'm going to give up the Internet.

Like Mom, tailored:  still there for emails, legal research, reservations, and driving directions.  But not news, blogs, Wikipedia, or the links people send along.  And not Strays.

Back on Easter Sunday, hunting eggs.

Remarkable

I attended an Evensong service last night, and it was just brilliant.  Mostly sung, by the choir, even the Apostle's Creed.  We - the handful that of congregants was there, in a Church near where I live - spoke only a few prayers, but they were the way up on the top of my list.  The Lord's Prayer, at first said by the congregation, later choir-sung (without the doxology at the end, which I often omit - it's how we spoke it in boarding school.)   And a general confession that I really love, from my childhood, with this:

****************************************************

We have left undone those things which we ought to have done;
And we have done those things which we ought not to have done;
And there is no health in us.
But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders.

***************************************
Just knocks me out.  Is it some kind of masochism?  I don't think so.  Incredibly honest, say I.

Tyrants

I guess at this point we are waiting around to see if Ghaddafi can be brutal enough to survive.  Let's not forgot that Detestable 20th Century Dictators Nos. 2 and 3 - Mao and Stalin - died in their beds.  (I will always give No. 1 status to the half-eunuch who sought the Final Solution.)

But Ghaddifi has a pompous, unbending ridiculousness to him that has in the past proved fatal - I'm thinking, Mussolini, with whom G has some historical links.  And Ceausescu - and, coming out of his hidey hole - Saddam.  Those three, all dead at the hands of their people.

The liberalizing dictators, on the other hand, don't seem to be able to hand onto power but do hang on their scalps.  Marcos and the Shah.   Mubarak and the dude in Tunisia.

The elephant in the room - the blue whale in the room - is the royal family in Saudi Arabia.  They won't shut down the Internet, or use tear gas, or shoot rubber bullets, in order to stop protestors.  The Saudis will hang them.  It'll put this Administration in a really tough position, but BHO won't be dumb enough to side with the opposition there.  He won't.  He won't?

More Back of the Brain

And I had lunch with a guy the other day whose brother is a TV sports game-caller.  Those guys call the game, naming the names, describing the plays, while there is a production booth in one ear and a computer screen in front of them, channelling "color" - stats, what's on deck, whatever.  The game-caller assimilates all that and comes out (one hopes) with a coherent narrative.

Can't see a computer doing that, either.  Just too much humanity involved...

Back in the Back of the Brain

Yesterday, just for grins, while driving, I tried voicing a detective story.  Just to see if I could.

And it came out.  Unrehearsed, unplanned, with a plot line and characters - I left off as the new female client was telling me about this creepy guy who had made up lies about her in high school, had reappeared in her life, was showing up, without a word, wherever she went, and just looking at her...

OK can't say it's very original, and it may even be unlistenably bad, but the point is:  where does that come from?  I was driving.  There was nothing in it recognizable from my past, at least nothing conscious... wait.  Maybe that's really the point.  The unconscious is what puts together a narrative, just as it does in dreams.

I think we explain all this on the basis that there is some kind of meaning behind the story.  We tell a story because we are trying to make a point.  But I am not persuaded that that's how the unconscious operates - I think the meaning comes later, we retell our stories and impose ideas by jiggering the plot. The unconscious just streams stuff out.  It's synapses firing.  It comes out in words because we know words.  And it isn't gibberish because there is some kind of superfast mental process saying yeah-now-what-happens-here-is-a-choice-I'll-follow-it playing out in the background as the words are coming out - a logic, to that extent.

The good news is that they will never make a machine that can do that.  The old query was whether androids dream.  Maybe so, but I don't see how they ever will just riff, free-form, make up stories from the air.

Keeping the Plate Full

OK last week we went to Sundance to see our kid's husband's premiere, then I quit my old firm, then I joined my new firm, then over the weekend we went and brought home a brand-new Westie:

And next weekend I am scheduled to take up beekeeping.  Plus the band's got another gig coming.

And maybe take up bridge.

And biking season will be back when this Winter finally ends.

One thing I'm starting to learn:  don't wait.  Live life.  Once in a while, when you can, get a puppy.

Two Days Past Groundhog's Day

And so, if he sees his shadow, there's more Winter to come, and he goes back underground.  If not, he stays out because winter is over.  Just not good science.  There sure was no sun that day, it was close to a blizzard, and today the temperature is about 5 degrees and the snow is firmly packed.

But it's an ancient holiday, the marker of mid-season, like its cousins Halloween and May Day.  It is about breaking light and lengthening days, a confirmation that Spring will come.  I hope he did go back underground, it's freezing out there, but I'm on board.

Land Ho

I left my old firm yesterday and joined a new one today.

The story of how I got here is long and occasionally fierce.  I can't think how to dress it up in metaphor, so I won't, and I won't tell it straight, so that's that.  Maybe there will be later musings on lessons learned and vengeance.  But nothing really, at least nothing for now.

Today what matters is that I have sailed into Plymouth, the Indians are friendly, and under the watchful eye of the Big Guy the landscape looks well lit and promising.

Storm Coming In

This season has been a bitch, and it looks like it isn't over yet.  Another one rolling in.

This could be the big one, at least here in analogy-land.  Be sure to keep the lines open.

Among the Stars

Everyone should have the kind of close encounters with movie stars that we had at Sundance.  Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Demi Moore, Stanley Tucci, Zachary Quinto, and Simon Baker were among the cast, and were all beautiful and talented and probably extremely wealthy.  But at a gathering after the premiere they were also genuine and perfectly willing to engage in friendly, normal (if you consider the movie business normal) conversations with us, the in-laws.  It was probably a testimony to JC and our daughter, whom they had befriended.  But it also challenged the idea that fame and fortune inevitably corrupt.  These were just our kids' colleagues.  It was as if we had gone to their office party.

I happen to the think the movie, Margin Call, is spectacular.  Of course I'm biased.  But I do think this, and to hell with anyone who disagrees.