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.