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.