Busted clavicle

For a teenage boy driver, the metal horses they put on subdivision streets are racing gates, allowing you to slalom through the neighborhood.  I recall it vividly.   But for middle ager on a bike, his head hanging low because the ride is getting long and sweaty, the horses are bad critters.  I ploughed into one the other day and went airborne, slo-mo, reconsidering my many faults, and landed with a crunch on my shoulder.

A broken collarbone, the left clavicle.  On the x-ray it looked like a busted branch.  May need surgery, but in the meantime I'm in a sling, looking like a kind of disabled vet.  I tried to spruce up the sling by using a madras necktie, but it looked a little crazy.  Like I really didn't know what to do with a tie, and so used it to hold up an arm.

Recalibration

This business of writing up in the Internet sky has changed a lot in my 10+ years of doing it, and I have tried to navigate the head winds, but the methods have spread me too thin and the result is really nothing I care about. So I could go back to writing for the drawer, but as I've posted here plenty of times, for me writing for the drawer means no writing at all. I still need the - what? - the mixture of choice, and risk, and spraying-my-tag-on-a-public-wall I get from putting my stuff out into the ether.

So now I'm out there, lots of ways. I'm in Google and Facebook and Twitter and wherever my Mac Air puts me. But I'm sick of seeing that I have become a dossier, a big fat file of marketing opportunity. I'm really sick of seeing other people - and their programs - attributing pictures, items, articles, places to me. I could go further up into all these social network levels, and many newer ones, and I probably would if I wanted to have, sooner or later, my own 15 minutes of fame. But Andy - I don't. I want what I deserve, no more, no less.

I hope I deserve the occasional reader, who will almost always be a friend from the rest of my life. So for the next tranche it's back here, back to this one place, Strays. Where I started. The readers will come and go one by one, via word of mouth. If it falls back to just one - me, when proofreading - and stays there, fine. This isn't a survey, or a convocation, or a collection plate. It's words, slung sidearm or overhand and curved, changed up, or fast. That's all.

Big Snow

When it's like this, the shrubs are smashed down and the trees lose their limbs.  Other than that it's simply radically beautiful, especially the day after, when the sun comes out.

Something about this is so evocative of childhood.  Maybe because I grew up in the land of Lake Effect, east of Cleveland, where like Eskimos we had different names for snow.  Yesterday it was what we called Good Packing Snow, hell to shovel, fair for sledding, and great for snowballs and snowmen.

Maybe also because it means you go out bundled up and come back wet, tired, and looking for hot chocolate.  Like a kid.  Only now the reason for the outdoor effort is to make sure the paths are clear and you can drive to work the next day, not in order to snowface your brother.

Heaviest snow we've had here in St. Louis, heaviest since a blizzard in the early '80's.  But everything is pretty well organized, no one died, and the world is covered with meringue.

Hiding from The Big Guy

There aren't many stories from the Bible that stick with me but two do clang in my head, off and on.  The first is right up there early in Genesis, when Adam hides from God because Adam knows enough to know he is naked.  The second is the terrifying parable of the talents, where one servant hides his talent (a nicely ambiguous term) rather than putting it to productive use.  In both cases, the hiding man suffers.

I do know enough to know that I'm still hiding myself and my talent and that, well into my seventh decade on the planet, I'd better come out and start to produce something with meaning or I'm looking at quietly sinking beneath the waves, with nothing but a reputation for being a pretty nice guy.

It's more than sitting in the front row and raising your hand a lot, because I did that.  It's more than volunteering for tricky assignments, because I've done that too.  It has something to do with coming out and standing in front of The Big Guy, and standing up to that authority.  Saying, here's my best shot.  And pulling the trigger.

Waking in the middle of the night

4 a.m., and try to think through what's worrying me, or what's worth planning.

One day, years ago, I said to a woman co-worker:  "My best thoughts come to me in the middle of the night."

To which she replied:  "Not me.   Mostly what I come up with the middle of the night isn't worth a damn."

Now I think I was wrong, misquoting something I'd heard in another context, and she was right.  With quite a few healthy decades of middle-of-the-nighters behind me, now I know:  by the next morning (a) what seemed brilliant seems, by morning light, pretty ordinary and (b) what seemed scary now seems like no big deal.  And it's a stew, of everyday reality and that night's dreams, brown and complicated.

Damn

Snow coming back.  This winter thing is just going on too long, as usual.

I wish Global Warming would sort itself out.  I was nurturing a theory for years that we were really in a secular cooling trend, and that putting all that greenhouse gas up there was cushioning the blow.   The contrarian in me would still like to believe that; or, conversely, that in fact the waters really are rising and before long St. Louis will have a view of the ocean.

But the truth seems to be that it's just weather.  This winter isn't going to be the longest or shortest or coldest or warmest or wettest or driest we've ever had.  Just the usual, pain-in -the-butt winter.  A big, grey view to the east, over a leafless landscape, to the horizon; no ocean. A blast of cold at the end of the day, as I march into the garage, heading home.

Leading shoot

More of the ideas that lead me.  I just want to stand on shoulders.

"In fact I doubt whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that he is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes  and realizes that a universal will to live converges and is hominized in him.

"In such a vision man is seen not as a static center of the world - as he for long believed himself to be - but as the axis and leading shoot of evolution, which is something much finer."

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, from the Forward.