Fiction for survival

The second time I went to the First Me church on Whitehomer Road was shortly after moving back to Clintonville looking for a job. (The first time was an Easter service way back during graduate school, which didn't stick and doesn't count.) But the second time, the minister was on vacation, so there were two lay speakers who talked about a method they had used as counselors to help people see themselves differently and find a way through their most sticky problems. Dave and Laura called it 'restorying'.

The major premise is that there is a narrative going on all the time. There's a postmodern school of literary theorists who like to call this the 'text'. Your job is a text; your family life is a text; your social life is a text; a basketball game is a text. Stanley Fish wrote a book called Does This Course Have a Text? So you get the idea: everything, not just printed, verbal accounts of things, can be seen and "read" as a narrative.

The minor premise, according to Dave and Laura, is that everybody constructs their own narrative of their own life, selectively working with the facts they are given. There's the rub! We don't choose our parents, siblings, birthplace, birth order, or what happens to us, but we do string together those facts in a way that somehow hangs together and makes sense. We also don't choose what other people choose to make of it, what conclusions they draw, and what meaning they give to the story.

It gets hairy when someone's version of the story does damage. That's when it's time for some restorying, according to Dave and Laura. My favorite novelist, John Barth, who is at least as serious about making art as Dave and Laura were about doing therapy, would call it fiction for survival. Barth is all about getting into the writing/living/rewriting of the life/story, which makes his writing convoluted and his characters complex. Like most people living an examined life.

This is a process I have returned to many times over the years, and most of it is boringly self-involved and not for publication. There have been other times where the writing of the song of myself spilled over the boundary in ways that should have been instructive, had I been paying attention. And maybe someday those episodes will find their way into a narrative I first committed to writing during graduate school, when the movement/discourse analogy began to crystalize into a group of fictional characters.

This miserable post has been sitting in my outbox fermenting for weeks (months?) now, so it's either ripe or about to "turn" - just as the would-be manuscript of self-revelatory metafiction has been sitting in a manila file folder and floppy disk so long there is no computer alive that will read it. But I continue to scribble Mitty-esque paragraphs that go in a drawer, because as Anthony Burgess said, the important thing is to keep writing.

This just in: grass greener

Pissed off? Dissatisfied? Fed up? Bored? Just plain tired? Had enough already? Honeymoon over? Everything gone south? In the toilet? Down the tubes? In the pits?

So quit. Leave. Get the hell out. Splitsville. Vamanos, hombre! There's bound to be something better out there. Slip out the back, Jack, make a new plan, Stan, and all that. I mean if the story isn't going the way you want, write a new chapter, right?

When I have this inclination, someone sagely reminds me of the conventional wisdom, and of course I don't do anything drastic and impulsive. Sure, there are better jobs, classier neighborhoods, hipper cities, and cooler living situations out there. But who knows what the unintended consequences would be?

This is not - repeat NOT - a "healthy dose of realism." I'm not acknowledging the necessity of what is, and I'm not affirming some kind of facts, irrespective of perception or perspective, that are true regardless of what anybody thinks. I'm not that far gone yet. I'm just too lazy or busy or complacent to do anything about it.

It's a lot of freaking work to make major changes happen, aside from the risks involved, and who has the time and energy? Learning the ropes of the new workplace, the streets of the new city, the habits and requirements of a new set of people? I have my hands full as it is, so I think I'll stand pat for now.

I asked the I Ching, and it said, "Wait in the midst of danger...take the line of least resistance...there is no way out for three years...(then) cross the great water with deliberation." Oracles - can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em.

vertigo in centro swingstatum

Can be induced merely by climbing (puff puff, pant pant) from the third floor to the fourth floor of a glass and steel office building. Look out the window. You can see the horizon.

It's so flat here that most of the time there is no visible horizon, so there's that building next door, and the one behind it, and the clouds. Now I look out the window from the vertiginous height of the fourth floor (facing southeast) and I see the ridge that rises slightly beyond two water towers, probably the rise that separates Alumni Creek from Big Walnut Creek east of Methodistville. Not exactly a birdseye view, but still a different view.

All due to the move that's part of a reorganization that's part of a merger. My department has been subdivided while being shifted up one flight of stairs, so I have new officemates as well as a cube by the window. We have yet to meet our incoming K-5 editors who either migrate from the Big Apple or join from somewhere else. For now, most work processes are continuing unchanged - if we can find each other in the new physical layout.

My biggest immediate challenge is conditioning my heart, lungs, muscles, and energy systems to walk up four flights instead of three. And I ain't taking no elevator, nosir.

Time passes. I walk - no, I stride - up the four flights every day without undue effort, albeit without boxes full of files, and I'm adjusting body and soul to the new space. Pictures are finding their way onto the walls of my cube - not all that were in the old cube, only those I can't live without - and I know where to find a pen or paper clip or dictionary when I need one.

In short, it's good to be up and running again and able to function in the rarefied air of southern Delaware County with the morning sun streaming in.

Givingthanks

A few unexpected blessings came our way this week for one of my favorite holidays.

My sister Jo Jo Golly came up to Swingstate from Crackerstate, something she has done several times in the last few years. Last year she dragged along her son, Bubba Golly Badly, who is around Jessi's and Zelda's age, and it was a lot of fun. He is a good sport, and it was fun to spend time with him, listen to music, talk politics, and hear his point of view. This year it was just Jo Jo, as Bubba spent the day with his girlfriend and her family in Atlanta, so we got to talk about him behind his back.

Zelda Golly came home from Northeast Swingstate University, of course, now careening anxiously down the homestretch toward the undergraduate finish line marked "B.A." Now that she has her own wheels, it's not as big a production to get her home for breaks and holidays, but it's still a big deal for her presence to be present in our presence. She and Jo Jo go way back, and Z takes after J in many ways. It's hilarious to walk into a room and see Zelda, Jo, and Gven sitting there talking and knitting furiously.

Equally strong is the vibe created by her brother Jessi Golly. A week ahead of time, we received word that he would be making the bus trip from New York, so we had a houseful. He rode in Wednesday morning on the Chinatown Bus, an independent budget busline that connects New York with several east coast cities, and now central Swingstate. Among other good news, Jessi is starting a new job this week at a comic book shop in the East Village called Forbidden Planet. We're relieved that he has a regular job and excited that it's doing something he's really interested in. He even brought a beautiful handwritten message to us from Alex, who was in Connecticut with her family.

So it was the five of us sitting at the table in the dining room of Om Shanty in Old Methodistville. Though it wasn't a very Methodist holiday. We linked hands and thanked the universe for being together. We listened to some old LPs of Phil Ochs and Peter, Paul and Mary that haven't lost their relevance in the 40 years since they came out. We ate turkey, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, dressing, asparagus, cranberries, pumpkin pie, and pecan pie. We drank a little rum and OJ, a little Cabernet Sauvignon and a lot of coffee. We sat by the fire, read a little, and talked about stuff.

Friday it was gorgeous outside, so we spent the afternoon at Inniswood, the gardens that were given to the county by the Innis family and made into a public park. Going there does what John Muir said about mountains: you find more than you're looking for. Saturday We walked around the backyard checking out the garden in November. Jo Jo is an experienced and knowledgeable gardener, so hanging out in the garden with her is like being in Baker Street with Holmes.

Jessi got in touch with his friends Andy and Andrew from high school, and they hung out at Andy's house, but not without great difficulty coordinating logistics with Zelda, who was meeting her friends Max and Jara from high school and hanging out at Ryan's house. It wasn't easy, and it never has been, but they worked it out. That was a recurring theme: my siblings aren't likely to stop doing the things that irritate me, and I'm not likely to stop being irritated by them. But we'll keep finding ways to put up with each other, and maybe learn how to act in ways that doesn't make it worse.

On that cheerful note, I'll just say that it was a great long weekend. Jo Jo went back to Atlanta Saturday afternoon, Zelda went back to Kent Sunday afternoon, and Jessi got on the Greyhound for the Big Apple at midnight Sunday. Leaving a post-Thanksgiving vacuum in their wake. Is this the post-holiday blues, or am I just getting a jump on the upcoming pre-holiday blues?

On melancholy

1 a: an abnormal state attributed to an excess of black bile and characterized by irascibility or depression... 2 b: causing or tending to cause sadness or depression of mind or spirit - Web10

Long story short, I'm for it. I join President Carter in doing my part to affirm our national malaise. I urge my fellow citizens to embrace their inner darkness, get to know their shadow, and enjoy a moment of personal gloom.

And why not? This is not a Disney movie, and we don't all live in a theme park called Happyland. Uh-oh, maybe I didn't get the memo. Is real life all about being cheerful 24/7? Okay, so we're not supposed to experience the ups and downs, and everybody is better off either ignoring or denying their reality. As the saying goes, I stand corrected.

Yesterday I was walking around the back yard - this is mainly what I do on weekends - picking apples off the ground, tossing some in the compost and putting some in a basket, pulling the odd weed, picking the last few peppers, beans, tomatoes. A faint tingle of sadness washed over me for no particular reason, and it occurred to me, okay, so this is fall. I happen to enjoy fall, but that doesn't mean I'm all buoyant and happy about it.

It's going to frost tonight, so I have to do something with the more tender potted plants. We'll need firewood soon. The furnace is already in use at night. I'll only have to mow a few more times until April. I already have some raking to do, and I'll wait until all the leaves are down before doing the serious pruning of trees. It's fall, nothing depressing about it.

Tell you what. I'll try not to drag anybody else down with me when I'm feeling down myself, okay? I won't insist that everyone around me see and acknowledge how dark thw world looks at the moment that it all looks hopelessly gloomy to me. And in return don't ask me to be happy, which is code for 'act happy when you're around me because I don't want to hear about it'.

Ravenna at night

Wood-Kortwright Funeral Home is on Main Street on the far side of downtown at the corner of Freedom Street. You go past Friend Construction, the Portage County Courthouse, and the bank; you can't miss it. I was driving up after work on Monday to join my wife and her mother, who were there to support Uncle Than and his family. Aunt Evelyn died last Thursday.

Than (for Nathaniel) and Evelyn Alexander had lived in Portage County forever, it seemed. They both grew up in Carroll County, Virginia, but they raised their kids here in Swingstate. I've been hearing about Wade and Kay since I joined the extended family 30 years ago, but this was my first time meeting them. Kay has worked at the Northeast Swingstate University library for a long time and has three sons. We got to meet them while standing in line beside Evelyn's casket.

Wade married Pam, who grew up right there in Ravenna, and both of them taught school in Ashland County, a little west of there, and now they have a Christmas tree farm called Alexander Family Tree Farm. They have two kids, a boy and a girl, around our kids' ages. Trevor just passed the bar exam and works at a law firm in Capital City; Lindsay teaches middle school math in North Carolina. Nice kids.

Wade was standing between Kay and Than in the receiving line, and it looked like they were successfully getting each other through the whole experience. A couple of hours of greeting well-wishers, standing next to the open casket, must take its toll on one's endurance and emotions, but they held up very well. Evelyn had been sick for some time, so everyone had plenty of time to prepare themselves, but still.

Part of the Alexander family mythology, retold at every reunion, is the fact that Gven was born on her cousin Wade's birthday, and one generation later our daughter Zelda was born on Wade's son Trevor's birthday. Whoa. Maybe that's why Wade was always Nancy's - Gven's mother's - favorite nephew. As an in-law and relative outsider, I enjoyed stepping into the story, watching the family interact and reminisce, seeing the connection they have with each other.

After a while I sat down next to Uncle Clayburn, whom I first met at his place in the mountains when Gven and I were courting. He's had some health problems, but he looked good. Gven sat one row in front of us with her mom and Aunt Gail, whose husband Bobby sat next to Clayburn. That worked out well, as Clayburn and Bobby had plenty of stories to tell, while Nancy and Gail chimed in regularly with their versions of the truth. These people are part of a big family, and they've known each other for along time.

The whole event, a very traditional small-town ritual, caused Gven and me to appreciate their way of doing things and wonder about what our way will be someday, when the time comes. Our way will be somewhat different, but we haven't made out a will or made any definite arrangements for executors and all that. Which we should, of course.

Speaking strictly for myself, I'm mostly in denial of the inevitable end, and if I had to make those decision today, I am in doubt about the way it should be handled. Gven thinks a party would be appropriate. Church funeral or not? Burial or cremation? Family plot - where, I don't know - ashes in an urn or scattered in a garden or forest somewhere? Plain pine box floating down the Mississippi or sinking to the bottom of Lake Superior? Would 'I' rather turn into compost or smoke?

So I had stuff to think about on the drive home to Capital City, while Gven and her mother stayed overnight for the funeral the next day.

Detroit Stories

Gven Golly's friend Kate had the opening of her show at the new art department space over at Evangelical Brethren College Friday evening, and it was the least I could do to show up. As I confided to a co-worker at the end of another long week, it really was about all I could do. So I dutifully dragged my exhausted left brain across Alumni Creek to Collegeview Road to schmooze and let my right brain look at art.

Am I ever glad I did. Like the sign on the transmission shop across the street from Tiger Stadium at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull: LIMP IN, LEAP OUT! The gallery was a clean, well-lighted space full of vibrant visual stimulation, friendly people, and balm for my weary mind. The whole show was composed of narrative quilts linking the artist's family and friends with mythological characters, and they were beautiful, some of them emotionally touching, like dyed cotton fibers pieced together by human muscle fibers that drew upon memory fibers to penetrate deep cardiac fibers. I felt better.

By the time a bunch of people regrouped at the home of Kate's neighbor for a dinner in her honor, I was well on my way to accomplishing re-entry into the everyday world of social interaction - no mean feat. With a glass of red wine in my hand, I found the next portal in the company of Kate's main men - her son Tedy (Icarus), her husband Jim, and her father Dick (Zeus stirring his drink with a lightning bolt).

For the next couple of hours, the conversation flowed as freely as the wine, with Dick's stories about selling Fords for umpteen years - first in Detroit and then in Pittsburgh - and gambling in Biloxi. Dick likes to play poker and drink Crown Royal, thinks we should pump oil wherever we can find it, in the Artic or in your front yard, and he enjoys the perks of being a regular at the casino, the complimentary hotel room and meals, the quality competition, the occasional big win.

This was when the Tigers were about to play in the World Series, against all odds, so everything Detroit was briefly cool again. We shared our admiration for their old-school manager, their strong young pitching staff, and their few steady veterans. And how can you admire the '06 Tigers without paying tribute to the '84 Tigers, like Trammell and Whitaker, and of course the '68 Tigers, like the aging but peerless Al Kaline, the clutch pitcher Mickey Lolich, the psychotic and lucky and self-destructive 31-game winner Denny McLain.

For the elders, of course, that legacy goes back another generation, so Dick had stories about Charlie Gehringer, George Kell, and Hank Greenburg, who were playing baseball before my time except in legend. By this time, the party had thinned a bit. Tedy and his high school friends had gone to a dance club in the hot rod Lincoln his grandpa Dick gave him for his birthday. Jim and I listened eagerly to the tale of how Lee Iacocca rose like a meteor from selling Ford trucks in New Jersey to master-minding the company's comeback during the '60s by introducing the Mustang, which infuriated Henry Ford, Jr., and then bolting to Chrysler.

There was the night Dick walked into a bar at Nine Mile Road and Telegraph, and the bartender said, "Hey, Dick, don't make a big deal of it, but that's Lee Iacocca sitting over there." Sure enough, tie loose and jacket off, the boss had stopped in for a drink on his way home from work. He lived in Bloomfield Hills, you know, because the Fords all lived in Grosse Pointe.

Welcome to the world's largest dictatorship

Doesn't it make you proud to live in the richest, most powerful authoritarian state in the world? I can only speak for myself, but I'm bursting with patriotic fervor, knowing that the military-industrial complex is working 24/7 to keep me safe from information that might make me question my good fortune.

If you grew up in a Readers Digest environment like I did, where the only news is good news because all the "bad" parts are filtered out, disturbing facts are indeed disturbing because they are unexpected and sometimes suspect. How could this be - what with god on our side and all? So I'm slowly weaning myself of that habit, acquired as a wee sprout, of thinking that all is well in the land of the free and the home of the brave. So pardon me, younger readers who have known this all along, and older readers who never bought that fiction in the first place.

Today's wake-up call comes from MotherJones.com (MoJo Blog 10/27/06) under the headline:

When It Comes to Press Freedom, We're Number 53!

Reporters Sans Frontières recently released its annual ranking of press freedom around the world, and it's not good news for the United States. Our ranking's been steadily dropping since the survey started in 2002, when we were in the index's top 20. Now we're at a dismal 53rd place, down from an undistinguished 44th last year. That puts us in the same league as tiny democracies like Botswana, Croatia, and Tonga. To be sure, we're a long way from the atrocious rankings of Iran, China, Burma, Cuba, and North Korea. But it's nothing to write home about.

The United States' poor showing is largely to blame on the excesses of the war on terror. As RSF explains, "Relations between the media and the Bush administration sharply deteriorated after the president used the pretext of 'national security' to regard as suspicious any journalist who questioned his 'war on terrorism.'" And then there's the journalists we've got locked up, such as a Sudanese Al-Jazeera cameraman being held in Guantanamo, and Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein , who's been in U.S. custody in Iraq for 6 months without charge. That's just the official hostility to the press. During the past year, right-wing commentators debated whether the editor of the New York Times should be sent to the gas chamber or the firing squad for revealing a program to track terrorist funds. It's not clear whether this episode figured into RSF's rankings, but it was another sign of why, when it comes to freedom of expression, we've got a long way to Number One.

[Ed. Note: This week's Sports Illustrated carries an excellent column on Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, the San Francisco Chronicle reporters who used leaked grand jury testimony to blow the lid off the steriod scandal. They'll be heading to jail soon for failing to reveal their sources, and may still be in the big house when Barry Bonds, documented to have commited several crimes in Fainaru-Wada and Williams' reporting, breaks baseball's all-time home run record.

A detail from the column, which unfortunately is subscription-only: The Chronicle has received 80 subpoenas of reporters over the last 18 months, compared with five over the previous 18. That's the world's strongest democracy, leading by example.]

- Dave Gilson

Gagas for Degas

I learned so much over the weekend:

That it's not pronounced "DAY-gah" but "duh-GAH", because the painter was from an aristocratic family but favored the more modern spelling Degas rather than the traditional deGas.

That he also had family ties in Naples, studied and imitated the Italian Renaissance painters.

That he didn't see himself as an Impressionist or want to be considered one of them, with Manet, Monet, et al, didn't join in the general enthusiasm to get out of the studio to paint outdoors in the plen aire manner.

That he said, when walking past a painting by Monet, that he felt a draft.

That he wasn't crazy about all those dancers, wasn't a particular admirer of most of his women subjects, and was considered something of a misogynist. And when you look at the postures of some of the famous pictures of dancers, they're not all that flattering. And some of them are just a figure in the foreground of a landscape that's much more interesting. So that's what the exhibit was about - the landscapes.

A disclaimer is needed here. I like the museum, and I can get wrapped up in it, but I know nothing really. Other members of my immediate family know much more than the old man, but I do get into it. The rocks, hills, lakes, forest, mountains, and rivers figure prominently. Lots of downward vectors working across the plane of vision.

Gven's favorite was "The Return of the Herd" - animals moving resolutely through the streets of a village - which reminded me of a scene in the great Anthony Quinn movie "La Strada" where nothing much is happening except a huge horse walks past the camera. I especially liked the angular streets of the seaside town of Saint Valery where Degas liked to paint, the planar roofs of the houses at the foot of a hill, the way he left the sea out of the picture.

Then we went to a Greek restaurant in the Short North and ate appetizers, watched people go up and down High Street, listened to the loud laughing people in the back.

"progressive" or what?

I actually got some interesting information today (this post was started way back in in May - jeez it's hard to finish things) from one of the worthy groups that have me on their mailing lists. Ian Mishalove, someone whose title is Online Communications Director of something called Campaign for America's Future, posits four definitions of progressive he has received from readers:

A progressive is someone who cares about the other guy. It's as simple as that!! (Lawrence F. - San Francisco, CA)

A progressive is someone who realizes that she did not get where she is completely on her own. She had help along the way ... and wants to make sure others have the same opportunities, no matter where they started. (Colleen R. - Silver Spring, MD)

A progressive ... believe[s] in liberty balanced with responsibility, economic opportunity balanced with just and open structures, and peace based upon being a global partner not a benevolent empire. (Norman B. - Cambridge, MA)

A progressive is a person who thinks the best is yet to come ... (Craig S. - Fort Collins, CO)

Disclaimer: I do not - DO NOT - mean to suggest that there is no difference, or no meaningful difference, between a 'progressive' and a 'liberal' or a 'radical' or whatever, or that the language used to describe a political ideology is unimportant. On the contrary, in some ways it's all about the language. Politics is talk. If "money is the mother's milk of politics," as the old saying goes, then language is the air. Most of it polluted.

Yet I don't buy the labeling conventions of being a liberal, being a conservative, being a progressive, being a radical, etc. My apologies to those who have patiently heard me harp on this theme before. I'm due for my annual rank on "Them's fightin' words where I come from." I've got issues, obviously, and this plays heavily into one that goes way back with me, at least as far as my very big, very bad graduate-school writing project, which took the onerous title Movement and Discourse in Educational Practice.

One of the arguments in that paper went something like this: a reciprocal relationship exists between the way people use language and the way they use movement. While language is primarily a medium of information and messages, it is also a way of doing things, making things happen. And while movement is primarily a means of gettin' it done and achieving results, it is also a medium of conveying information. Long dissertation short, there is some 'task content' in every verbal message, and there is some 'message content' in every physical task.

My point (and I do have one) is that in politics, the content is heavily loaded on the side of making something happen, leaving about 0.1 percent actual information. So, for example, the inspiring definitions of progressive above have a purpose - to make you want to be like them, to join the movement, and get with the program. If I'm being paid to sell something, of course I want to give it that kind of vibe. To borrow my engineer-manager brother's mantra, You're always selling.

If the salesperson can get you to buy the major premise - such as "Of course I'm a progressive, who the hell isn't?" - he or she is poised to carry out the remainder of their wedge strategy and get you to accept anything they package under the 'Progressive' label. I have run into plenty of well-meaning, nice folks who openly adopt whatever position they believe is the 'liberal' stance, just because they see themselves as a 'liberal', and by simply deduction, whatever other liberals are doing, it logically follows, must be right. Professed 'conservatives' do the same thing. Bill Frist or some other lying blowhard piously declares that conservative Americans want this or that, and people who like the sound of 'conservative' fall into line with the rhetorical call to arms. "Well, yeah, since I see myself as a conservative, I guess I'll let Doctor Bill do my thinking for me."

What was my point again?

Tigers

Where are you from?

My siblings and I had a discussion of that seemingly straightforward but oddly confusing question when we were together for my Mom's birthday two weeks ago. In our family, anyway, it's confusing, since we all grew up in a couple of different times and places, depending on birth order and the vagaries of adolescence and 'upward mobility'.

Anna Banana was almost 16 and in high school when we left LaCrosse, so she really grew up in Minnesota and Wisconsin. After graduating from high school in Michigan, she went to college at Winona (Minnesota) State, where Mom and Dad had met, so that part of the country is where she is from.

Jeanie Beanie was 14, almost grown up and in junior high school, when we moved from LaCrosse to Detroit. She went to college at Northern Illinois and Iowa State, still has ties to Chicago, and still roots for the Huskies and Cyclones.

Jo Jo was barely 13 at the time, a little less established in the social network of LaCrosse and therefore slightly more influenced by the culture of Detroit. She went to Michigan. Go Blue!

Do we see a pattern?

Like most patterns that try to discern meaning in other people's lives based on selected bits of information seen through a narrow lens, this one exists largely in my imagination. But I stand by it, figment or not.

Little Sven was just nine, less formed as an individual with fewer roots in ancestral soil, when transplanted to Garden City, Michigan, outside Detroit. I was 15 when we moved again, this time uptown to Birmingham, so I went to high school in Birmingham, although I was was from Garden City. Am I splitting hairs? After all, we were all from the Detroit area, Michigan, the Midwest, USA, Earth, etc. You can emphasize the sameness or the differences.

My brother Rock, the youngest, was born and raised in Michigan, so there's no doubt where he is from. He was four years old when we moved uptown and went K-12 through Birmingham schools. He went to college in Detroit and married a girl from Birmingham. Solid. Or maybe it just seems simpler from the distance of a few years in age, as my situation might have seemed simpler from the viewpoint of my sisters.

But what I want to talk about is baseball.

How about them Tigers! Has Jim Leyland done a remarkable job of managing a bunch of decent players, mostly no-names (Brandon Inge, et al) plus a couple of stars (Ivan Rodriguez) who are well past their prime? Have their pitchers developed into a strong rotation at just the right time? Are the fans filling Comerica Park with that rustbelt spirit, just as they filled Tiger Stadium in 1984 and 1968, when the team had bona fide stars like Al freaking Kaline - who lived down the street from a guy I knew in Birmingham - and Bill "go ahead and hit me" Freehan - who lived down the street from me? Was Henry Ford a genius? Was Walter Reuther a saint? Could Gordie Howe skate?

All I know for sure is that it does my heart good to see the Tigers kick the Yankees' large-market asses on TV, then move on and do the same thing to the A's. Bring on the Cardinals - just like in '68 with Gibson, Brock, et al - or the Mets, whoever that other league throws out there. They haven't got a chance, because the Tigers are a team of density!*

*with apologies to George McFly

Taiko

It's not every day that one decides to study to new art form. Sometimes it's an unexpected turn of events, and not "Gee, I always wanted to make pottery/poetry/paintings/paper/performance art." This one kind of snuck up on me.

I've been going to drum circles here and there for a year or so and having a great time just improvising. I'm not a "natural" musician, and I've never picked up an instrument quickly the way some people learn to play a guitar, for example, but I can usually keep time and follow a rhythm. I can't tell you what makes a rumba different from a samba or how a Cuban rhythm is different from a Jamaican rhythm. And it's been a long time since I was hanging with the bad boys in the drum section of the Burger Junior High School band - a long time. Color me 'novice'.

So I showed up at the once-a-month drum circles at the percussion store on High Street and had a grand time playing along with some experienced drummers. then, on a lark, I went to a taiko class that Eric "the Fish" Paden teaches at Capital University. I had never heard of taiko, but it sounded exotic and interesting when I saw it listed on an events calendar.

They have a lot of amazing instruments in the little old brick building nextdoor to the music department, and Eric clearly knows his stuff. To my surprise, this Japanese drumming form is all about movement and energy, in many ways resembling taiji, which I took up on another whim many moons ago.

We started with warmup exercises and learned the proper stance, and then we learned to shift our weight and move the arms and sticks in a circular path. So a lot of this is feeling very familiar. We tried to learn the Japanese words that punctuate a piece, and it's all very aural, so the words matter. Some of the beats coincide with steps and big, expansive gestures. In short, it was possible to graft parts of this whole new tree of information onto the rootstock of the existing body of information I brought with me, so even some fairly esoteric things started to make sense.

Ah, but there was a problem. I showed up in the first place at the taiko class only because there was a break between summer and fall sessions of my Monday night taiji classes at the local rec center. The start of fall quarter presented a schedule conflict, an ethical dilemma, and gnashing of teeth. I was committed to the taiji class, under contract, and a sufficient number of people signed up and paid their money to take it. So I would defer my continued taiko.

But wait! One of my new taiji students came to class exhausted from her dialysis earlier in the day and could barely make it through the hour. When I suggested that we change the meeting time from Monday to Tuesday, she and her husband were more than willing. The other students - also a married couple - indicated their willingness, and after a week of adjustment, we are making a successful transition to the new day and time, which is a miracle with most people's busy schedules.

Although I had missed a couple of taiko classes in the meantime, I was delighted to return, and the class welcomed me back. The other, more experienced, students are interesting people, too. A young man and his Japanese-American daughter; an older woman from Israel whose college-age daughter is spending the year in Japan; a mother and her daughter who attends Columbus School for Girls.

Can I keep up with them and learn the taiko form? Time will tell, but I'll be a fish out of water if I don't acquire the habit of practicing. That - and a poor memory, as well as lack of musical talent - is the present challenge.

Mom, apple pie

The Golly clan had a little reunion last weekend to celebrate my mother's eighty-fifth birthday. Helen Shuck Bye Golly is 85 years young. She looked great and seemed to really enjoy being surrounded by her five children, who converged on southern Indiana from five different states.

We all met in New Harmony, Indiana, at the suggestion of my brother Rock Golly, who had been there for a week-long business school orientation a couple of years ago. There is a hotel/conference center with a good restaurant. There are lots of things to see and do in a beautiful little town on the Wabash River with lots of history.

My sisters Jo Jo Golly and Jeanie Beanie Golly Gee shared a guest house with a garden and a couple of sitting rooms where we could all gather. Mom and Dad, Rock, sister Anna Banana Golly Gosh and her husband Fred Gosh stayed at the New Harmony Inn. Gven, Zelda, and I stayed at the Old Rooming House down the street. Nice comfy digs, and cheap.

The town is pretty amazing, full of gardens and public art, and not obnoxiously touristy. Quite a few building are still standing from the original 1814-1824 town center constructed by the breakaway Lutheran Rev. Rapp and his colony of Harmonists. According to the lovely tour guide, they were hard-working German separatists who were preparing for the Lord to return and end it all. So they built a town, and when the Lord didn't end it all, they sold the whole town and moved back to Economy, Pennsylvania, which was closer to markets for their products. She didn't say whether their beliefs changed along with the names of their towns.

Alas, the community didn't last long because, like the Shakers, they didn't believe in propagating their kind. They believed in work. So they built churches, factories, houses, farms, and towns. As the lovely tour guide put it, what else did they have to do?

Lots of structures remain from the next wave of utopian British socialists led by Robert Owen, who bought New Harmony from the Harmonists in 1824. The Workingman's Institute, for example, is still the oldest functioning public library in the state. There is also a theater and opera house, converted from a Community House that was like a coed dormitory for the celibate Harmonists. Owen and his group were scientists and other intellectuals who had big ideas about reforming civilization - or at least a little corner of it. Unfortunately, they didn't have the skills and know-how to make their vision happen, and the experiment essentially ceased.

One of my favorite places is the Roofless Church, built by Philip Johnson in 1960, a remarkable place sitting at the edge of town just off Main Street near the Inn. Inside a low wall are walkways, benches, a grove of trees, a couple of very modern, expressionistic sculptures, a tiny shrine-like installation with little icons, and a six-sided domed gathering place near one end, all overlooking a soybean field. Nextdoor there's a pottery studio and across the street the New Harmony Artists Guild.

Although it rained briefly, the weather was awesome for walking around looking at things and talking with the folks I've known all my life. Apparently we still have things to talk about. We all gathered at the Yellow Tavern on Church Street Friday night for a beer and a sandwich. Okay it was more than one beer, and it wasn't just any sandwich but a pork brain sandwich, and we ended up closing the place, but it was fun and just the right place to get together and catch up.

The next morning we managed to find each other at the Main Cafe for a hearty Hoosier breakfast. Then the men took off walking to explore the town, while the women went from one antique shop to another for an unbelieveably long and no doubt fascinating shopping adventure. We regrouped for a very nice dinner at the Red Geranium and then went to Jo's and Jean's for cake, coffee, and cards.

There were plenty of tales to tell, news to share, and progress reports on all the grandchildren, nieces, nephews, uncles, and aunts. Turns out Zelda was the only one of her generation who could make it, and she was a joy to have around. She's a good sport, and she has more tolerance of some of the crazy family dynamics than I do. The extended birthday party ended with eggs and apple pie for breakfast Sunday morning before the drive back to Ohio, Michigan, Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida.

compart mental

If you know me at all, this will come as no surprise, but I thought it would be therapeutic, cathartic even, to get it off my chest cavity, clear my head, or purge it from my abdomen, as it were - that I tend to compartmentalize, categorize, and pigeonhole things.

My name is Sven, and I'm compartmental.

It isn't easy being compartmental. If anything is out of place, it's a problem, and let's face it, most things are out of place most of the time. And it isn't easy living with a person who is compartmental. They have to put everything IN something - a container, a category, a conceptual scheme, a taxonomy, a genus and species, an organizational chart, a box.

They (we) have a compulsion to sort things, organize big piles of stuff into several little piles of stuff, arranged by size, shape, color, texture, material, or other criteria, referably written down but always subject to change. Definitely subject to change. Otherwise, what would the terminally compartmental do when they feel the need to re-compartmentalize?

There is no cure, but there are measures that can be taken to live a full and productive life as a compartmental adult. First of all, embrace your compartmentality. Seek to understand, explore, and exploit your special gift. Compartmentalize EVERYTHING around you. Excel spreadsheets are very useful - all those rows and columns! Shelves are good, drawers are okay, shadowboxes can be wonderful. And be thankful that you're only compart mental and not complete mental.

aufheben

Rent for half of a two-bedroom apartment near campus...$500/month.

Undergraduate tuition...$4,215/semester.

Hearing Zelda talk about her upcoming quizzes in the Art of the Sixties (on Jackson Pollack) and Chinese Art (on the Shang through the Han), the paper that's due next week on Heraclitus and his influence on the Stoics; learning from her that Hegel's dialectic doesn't involve 'synthesis' at all, but aufheben...

Priceless.

There is no adequate English equivalent to the German word Aufheben. In German it can mean "to pick up", "to raise", "to keep", "to preserve", but also "to end", "to abolish", "to annul". Hegel exploited this duality of meaning to describe the dialectical process whereby a higher form of thought or being supersedes a lower form, while at the same time "preserving" its "moments of truth". - The journal Aufheben

everybody's got the blues

Look around you. Do you see anyone who isn't down in the dumps, in the doldrums, under the weather, in a pickle, in a slump, or otherwise experiencing an existential malaise? I guess they all have their reasons, some of which can be shared with others, some of which are too private for casual conversation, a few of which might actually explain something, and some of which are beyond the pale of description.

No matter where I look, everybody's got the blues.

Some of them are clearly physical - the aches and pains in my lower back after a weekend of yard work, my son's sniffles audible on the phone, my boss's broken foot, and others far worse - but who's kidding whom, just because the symptoms are "physical" doesn't mean the causes and side-effects aren't connected to other issues, other decisions, conditions, habits, situations, and their unintended consequences.

No matter how smart or successful, everybody's got issues.

Some people wear them on their sleeve. Take my co-worker in the next cubicle - please! The sun doesn't rise without the world inflicting some grievous harm on her undeserving, put-upon self, and every day is a lament. But I'm no different, and neither is anybody else; she just happens to specialize in paying vocal, articulate, loud, and repeated attention to the unfair, stupid, painful drama that is this life.

Lawd have mercy, everybody's got the blues!

On the other hand, some people seem to strive mightily to put a bright, uplifting face on it. You know, always turning lemons into lemonade, pointing out the upside of every downer. And some have developed ways of turning their malaise into art - or some other constructive or creative or at least benign way of working through the hard, dark, unyielding stuff.

And maybe it's just the time of year, the change of seasons, turning colder, and I'm just making it worse by belaboring the fact. Yeah, I think that's it. It's the end of the summer, every day get shorter, my projects' drop-deadlines are looming, I don't have enough time to do what has to be done, my bills still need to be paid, and I'm not getting any younger. Oh, yeah, I think I've found it, now just let me writhe around in it.

It's all good

It's just the parts that suck.

Rev. Susan talked last week about the large over-arching theme of whether "to save or to savor" the world. It's a common dilemma among people who give a hoot about the social problems that plague this planet, whether in a religious context or a political arena or whatever front you choose to confront. It's impossible to enjoy the pleasures this life affords without facing the ugly problems stemming from the many injustices and imbalances that are seemingly everywhere.

She unpacked the question in terms of the Sufi practice of whirling as a kind of meditation meant to center oneself in a peaceful place. Sufis are a mystical order of Muslims, so I gather their practice starts with an inward focus. Which can be said of Unitarians, too, who aren't particularly know for their mysticism, but who do advocate inquiry as well as action.

All of which reminded me of Rudolf Laban's movement theory, which I used to study, in which almost any human efforts can be observed to embody either "fighting" or "indulging" qualities, depending on the attitude and intention of the human agent. People work, play, walk, talk, dance, eat, cook, you name it, in a combination of fighting or indulging qualities, depending on their attitude toward space, time, weight, and stuff like that.

So take that, Hamlet, to save or to savor (or to fight or to indulge), that is the question.

It was a better than average church service. Thinking these thoughts, I drove down route 23 to the Coop in Clintonville and stocked up on flour, beans, fruit and nuts. It's a very different place on Sunday, country music and middle-class housewives instead of hippies and hip-hop. The clerk confiscated by out-of-date membership card, so no more discount for mister delinquent member. It was a pretty day, so I stopped by the nursery while I was in the old neighborhood and impulse-purchased a couple of salvia, a rhododendron, a redbud, and a dawn redwood (metasequoia glyptostroboides, I'm not showing off, I just like that name). Everything was half-price, so I splurged on plant material. Went home and spent most of the afternoon planting perennials and small trees. Savoring.

Or was it fighting the good fight every gardener relishes? I'm not sure I can save anything by putting things in the ground, adding to the flora of our tiny corner lot in Methodistville, but it's something to do.

Canoe canoe?

In my youth, there was a coolly erotic television ad for a men's cologne called Canoe. Understated, patient, it made its point. And it must have made an impression on my adolescent mind that there is something intimate about floating across the water together in near-silence punctuated by paddles breaking the surface as they enter and exit the water.

Alienated after church, in spite of the Ingathering service that marks the official start of the church year, in spite of the annual water celebration in which congregants pour a vial of water - from Lake Erie or the Niagara River or the Mediterranean Sea or wherever they have been over the summer - into a common bowl and describe in one sentence where they have been. In spite of dedicating the new religious education building in a loosely organized ritual of passing the chalice from person to person in a line stretching from the meeting hall to the new space across the street, I was feeling a bit "off" on the heels of this jolly, well-meaning, in-group occasion.

Gven Golly in her wisdom suggested that we put the canoe in the water, so I said sure. But when? We could do all the chores, all the baking, all the miscellaneous stuff, and then go when it cools off; or we could just go. I ate breakfast, drank coffee, wrote notes on some overdue birthday cards, read the paper. Let's just go.

So we loaded the old blue fiberglass canoe on top of the truck, tied it down securely enough to make it two miles out Walnut Street to Hoover, and put it in the water. We decided at the last minute to bring the dog along, so there was that bit of unpredictability. Dali was just a bit freaked out at first, never having been in a boat before, and her lurching back and forth evoked a few choice words from me. Eventually she settled down, kept a low center of gravity, and wasn't a problem.

The rest of the excursion was like a relationship in miniature. It was a lot windier on the water than in town, which I might have anticipated but didn't, and the water was a little choppy. It took us a while to get the hang of paddling directly against the waves, instead of diagonally across them, and eventually we centered ourselves and our surrealist canine friend without getting wet.

It's always an exercise in adaptability, paddling across the water, adapting to conditions and each other's paddling style, keeping our distance from fisherfolk, other boats, sandbars, and waves hitting us broadside. Going far enough without over-extending, having a somatic experience without creating a medical or marital emergency.

Long story short, Gven in the front found a rhythm of changing from right to left that worked for her, and Sven in back managed to pull hard enough and switch sides whenever we needed to change direction. So we cruised a ways up past the County Line bridge and back, not a major excursion but lots of fun.

Somehow that short, hourlong trip changed the rest of the day. We loaded the canoe, drove back up Walnut Street, unloaded the boat, and enjoyed a cold dark beverage. There was still plenty of time to bake bread and apple pie, grill salmon, and watch a very strange movie. Somehow the joint effort transformed otherwise ordinary things into really satisfying stuff, but now that I've been back on land for a while, words don't seem to get it. You had to be there, in the canoe.

White Mustang

As I'm rounding the corner into the parking lot from Orion's Belt, the local public alternative is doing its segue from the news into morning programming with an ethereal techno number that immediately becomes the soundtrack of this rainy scene of people with umbrellas walking from their cars to the entrance of the building, somehow reminding me of last night's dream involving an elusive white Mustang.

I learned to drive in a light blue '66 Mustang, 3-on-the-floor, straight-6, AM radio, very basic, very cool. When I was a senior, it became essentially "my car" which it eventually was halfway through college, when the whole adventure started really taking off - often in road-trips in the light blue Mustang.

Ford introduced the Mustang halfway through the 1964 model year, a clever marketing decision that Hank the Deuce, Lee Iacocca, and their people in Dearborn no doubt planned carefully. We lived in Garden City at the time, a working-class suburb on the Westside of Detroit. Bob Solano, scion of a prominent Garden City family with a big house on Ford Road and a pool, was the first person I knew to own a '64 1/2 Mustang. He could be seen driving his own royal blue convertible to and from GC High School with a select group of friends. Classy.

We were GM people mostly - Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick - although Chas Golly went in for the exotic and bought a cute little gray Renault once, and a light blue Falcon. I guess it was like big GM family car and the small EuroFord for economy. My older sisters got to share the Falcon while they were in high school. After the girls had graduated, we moved to a more uptown suburb, and I got the Mustang to myself. No sexist double-standard here, just the luck of the birth-order, sure, uh-huh.

Mac, my best friend in high school, drove a yellow Mustang. Marco, my best friend in college after I transferred to Michigan, drove a red Mustang. This was Detroit, of course, where cars define people, though it's probably not much different anywhere in America - you are what you drive. Think of "American Grafitti," the pop culture testament to existential lust, youthful longing, and hot cars. Most of us were part Richard Dreyfus, on a quest for the white Thunderbird, and part Ron Howard, torn between big city, bright lights, State U., and hometown Peggy Sue.

So what the heck is this white Mustang doing in my rainy morning dreamspace, now that I drive a gray Ranger to my office job? Maybe I don't want to know.

Year of the Dog

Every 12 years, each of us has a birthday that completes a cycle in the Chinese zodiac, that big wheel of time where each year has its spirit animal. So if you were born in the Year of the Rabbit, you will have (with luck) your 12th, 24th, 36th, 48th, 60th, etc., birthdays in another Year of the Rabbit. Each of those 12-year birthdays will occur in a different 5-year cycle of the elements, so if you're born in a metal year, you will cycle through the water, wood, fire, and earth years and on the fifth cycle of 12 years, return to your birth animal and element.

My middle sister, Jeanie Beanie Golly Bert, celebrated her fifth cycle of 12 this past June, right in the middle of the Year of the Dog. I'm too lazy to look up which of the five elements rules this year, possibly because I was born in the Year of the Sloth. I was not able to attend the big surprise party that her cool, thoughtful husband Barney Bert threw for her down in Flower State, but I bet it was fun.

To add to my guilt, I've been carrying around a card (with pictures of dogs) all summer, neglecting to mail it for one reason or another. Which I finally did this weekend, three months late, and don't give me that "It's the thought that counts" bullshit because it's the act that counts. Knowing Jeanie BGB, she noted the slight, took it personally, forgave me, and retained her doggedly loyal, tenacious, devoted, fiercely protective, watchful character, birthday or no birthday, card or not card. I will see her at another family gathering at the end of September, on the occasion of another momentous birthday, and we'll talk. Maybe we'll talk about dogs.

This weekend was also my son's birthday. Jessi Golly was also born in the Year of the Dog, about three turns of the 12-year wheel after his Aunt Jeanie Beanie and therefore a different element, but he has some of the same protective, loyal, tenacious character. I sent him a card, and I talked to him on the phone. He was at a party, having fun among his friends, and his girlfriend Alex had made him a cake.

MoreGardens summer camp is over for the year, and the kids took a field trip to a farm upstate for their culminating camp experience. They got to hang out with the animals, help out with the gardening, had a great meal, and apparently it went really well. Jessi got around to re-assembling his bike, so he's been riding it, and life is good. He won't be at the other family gathering this month, so I'm glad to get to talk to him.

There's no definitive time line for these things. A few years ago, my friend Bay, who works at Old Progressive College and incidentally has a son around the same age, made the observation that Jessi and I were 'friends'. I said no, not really, the father-son relationship was much more tangled than that, but we were still able to communicate on fairly good terms, though I wouldn't call us 'friends'. I guess the wheel has turned enough since then to make a difference, and at this point I would say that Bay is right.

farm follows function

What could be more obvious than the truism that gardening is grounding? And how many ways can I belabor the fact? You stick a shovel in the ground, you sow seeds in the ground, you plant seedlings in the ground, you pull weeds from the ground, you slice ripe tomatoes that grew (magically) out of the ground, and you go back to the office the next day with some of the ground still under your fingernails.

So this weekend, Labor Day Weekend, I ritually observed the unofficial end of summer by doing some seasonal transitional chores that couldn't be much more mundane and put me into the rhythm of the earth, as if I could ever leave it.

Like thinning the little patch of lambs ear to make a border the whole length of the walk. Then dividing some of the daylilies to fill in gaps in the same bed. Next year it will look fuller.

Like moving three big, mound-shaped perennial geraniums from a back bed next to the veggies to a central location close to the patio, then transplanting three spindly little columbine from the same bed, where they weren't doing well, to a sunny spot near the salvia, where they might do better. Then thinning the strawberry patch to fill up the space left by the geraniums and columbine. Next year, with any luck, there could be twice as many strawberries. Then watering everything in. Buckets, hoses, whatever.

Like dividing the big, thick hostas with a slice of the spade and transplanting the dividends to the edge of the wedge-shaped bed to expand it further into the back corner where Gus the cat rests in peace. Then digging up clumps of mint (or lemonbalm, or whatever it is) that's been steadily encroaching on the hostas and anything else that's in its way, moving it to the weedy wasteland of the front corner, where the oldest, biggest Norway maple shields the sun and rain from everything under it, so nothing much grows there; we'll see if the mint/lemonbalm survives there long enough to cut back the tree and let some light in. That's a chore for later in the fall.

Like picking up apples and trying to find ways to use them up. A few fall every day, and half of them have bites out of them by the squirrels, or worm-holes, or they're too small to bother with, and those go in the compost. So by the time the weekend rolls around I've got a basketful of winesaps to do something with. What? So far, I've made apple cobbler, Gven has made apple crisp, and we've frozen a few.

It's labor-intensive, time-consuming work to peel, wash, core, and slice, even before the actual mixing, baking, and all that. But it's something to do on the weekend when I'm not copyediting, checking, tracking, proofing, revising, or answering e-mail. And I'm convinced that it's a lot more ergonomically correct to walk around all day carrying a shovel, moving from one plot to another, as long as I remember to switch hands. And you know what? I sleep better.

snakes in the plains: a midwestern kundalini dream

But first a little backstory. I hadn't been sleeping soundly, and it was one of those nights. First the dog was whimpering. Then my legs were aching. My own fault for eating a late supper and neglecting the usual physical practices that I depend upon to work out the kinks. And who knows what other issues found an outlet in dreamspace.

I'm in a camp or small rural settlement with a row of small buildings. I need to find my backpack and bring it with me. I seem to be going somewhere to teach or attend a class, and there is something I need in the pack. Flat, expansive landscape, semi-arid with only a few small trees.

When I reach the last cabin and find my backpack, there is a small snake lying still beside it on the floor. When I reach to pick up my pack, the snake wakes up and gets aggressive, raising its head off the floor the way you see in pictures of cobras. But instead of striking, it just got in the way, and when I tried to push it to the side, it resisted with surprising strength. The little sleeping snake grew into a long, thick, tough animal, even though its actions were benign, not a threat, just a nuisance.

With the snake out of the way, I took my pack out the door and down a long incline, then remembered that there was something else I needed for my class. Walk back past the cabins to a big square frame house. Go upstairs in the house to an empty room. Find the missing item. Into the house comes my old friend S.H. with his usual sly half-smile. He asks me something about the house; I reply something like yeah, pretty nice house.

fight fascism everywhere

In government, in the workplace, at home, at school, in your relationships, in yourself.

When someone justifies their arbitrary and unilateral use of power by saying they'd rather ask for forgiveness than ask for permission.
When someone tells you what you have to do, because that's the way it's done here.
When someone informs you that from now on, all questions will go through him/her, and if they want your input, they will ask you for it.
When someone says you can forget those old rules you used to follow, they are no longer in effect, and they will tell you what the new rules are, and if you have a problem with that, they're sorry but according to the new rules, that's your problem.
When someone takes your stuff and says it's really their stuff, because they need it for something more important than whatever it was you were going to do with it.
When someone says your ideas are fine, but here's how we're going to do things.
When someone says everybody here is equal, except those other people, and we all know who they are and why they're not as good as us, and if you don't understand or agree, you're probably one of them.
When somebody says they're doing this for your own good, and you'll thank them later, but they can't tell you why because it's better that you don't know.
When somebody says your ideas are interesting, but everyone knows that in reality things are very different. When someone says your ideas are just like theirs, so you must be right.
When someone says that it offends her/him, therefore it is morally wrong, unjust, unfair, and unfit. When someone says they like it, therefore it is morally right, just, and correct.

Owners approve expansion of solar system

The dateline in Wednesday's paper is WASHINGTON. So now we know where the owners of planetary franchises have their headquarters. And the reportage provides insight into how business decisions are made on the macro-level. As predicted by ESPN, NYSE, and IAU analysts, expansion has once again hit the solar system. It seems nine planets don't provide a big enough viewing audience, so we're going to a 12-planet league.

What's next - revenue sharing? Think of how a 12-planet format will affect the playoffs! This could be as influential as the BCS (Bowl Championship Series to the layperson). Or not.

To solar system purists, of course, this is an outrage. Geez, they're letting Charon, Xena, and Ceres in, next every freaking asteroid between Mars and Jupiter will want planetary status. Then it will become an entitlement. What's to keep every large hunk of celestial debris from thinking it's a planet? What was wrong with the nine real planets anyway?

"More planets will be added later," astronomers from the International Astronomical Union (IAU) stated. Ya see? You let three upstart heavenly bodies into the solar system, and there goes the neighborhood. Like Reagan said about the Panama Canal, it's OUR solar system, and we intend to keep it.

Besides, it says right here that two of the newcomers - Charon and Xena - are "distant odd-balls wandering outside Neptune in weirdly shaped orbits," just like Pluto. You know, Pluto never did really fit in. Too small, too peculiar, too far out, it just wasn't like the other, normal planets, and frankly it didn't get along, you know, traveling in an irregular orbit as it does. So now the weirdos are called "plutons" but we have to treat them as if they were regular planets, sort of an affirmative action program.

The other newcomer, Ceres, was apparently treated as a planet back in the nineteenth century, and now it's a planet again. Sort of. Kind of a small-market planet, like Pittsburgh. It's been around for a long time, so we might as well call it a planet, in a marginal, tolerant kind of way, you know, like Milwaukee, even though it will never be in a position to compete with the big planets - your Jupiters, your Saturns, Uranuses.

Speaking of bureaucrats, all this is still very much "up in the air," so to speak. Nothing is final until the recommendation of the Planet Definition Committee is approved by the 3,000 astronomers of the IAU meeting this week in Prague. Imagine the tension in the air. The conditions for planethood include being at least 500 miles wide, and Ceres just barely squeaks in at 580 - much smaller than our moon. It has to be round, and it has to orbit a star.

At least there are standards, like roundness, even though Earthlings are bound to be suspicious of any aspiring planet with an irregular orbit. So don't get any big ideas, you plutons! We'll always know you're different. And those other icy bodies out there lobbying the IAU and their local chapter of Planned Planethood, don't think this leaves the door open for just any asteroid to join the planet club.

suspicious behavior

The recent experience of a couple of young guys from Detroit should be a lesson to all of us: you are subject to arrest and detention if you are ABC (Arab Buying Cellphones), AQA (Anyone Questioning Authority), or DWB (Driving While Black).

The latter category of criminal activity, of course, has been well known for some time here in the land of the free and the home of the owners of the factors of production. Regardless of region, state, or neighborhood, you are putting yourself in jeopardy with law enforcement officials (LEO) if you choose to engage in suspicious behavior such as Driving While Black (DWB). Like DWI (Driving While Intoxicated), Driving While Black automatically makes one a threat to law-abiding citizens (LAC), at least in the perceptions of vigilant LEO. Whether you are driving a Cadillac on the South Side of Chicago or a pickup truck in Macon, a new Range Rover in Beverly Hills or an old Saab in Columbus, real Amerikan LEOs and LACkeys know enough to use common sense and avoid DWB, ABC, or AQA.

AQA has also been a crime for long enough that any fool should know better than to Question Authority. It didn't just start in the 1960s, when a large collection of dissenters started dressing funny and otherwise disrespecting the police, the military, and other protectors of freedom by asking questions. The gall. The nerve. There have always been troublemakers on the lunatic fringes of respectable society for as long as there have been authoritarian fear-mongers to protect us from deviants, malcontents, and ourselves. It's only recently that it has explicitly become public policy that dissent = treason.

The events of last week, not only in British airports but on U.S. highways, are only an extension of that proud tradition. Two young men of Southwest Asian descent can't buy cell phones in quantity without being arrested for conspiracy to commit terrorist acts. Okay, so Sheriff Bubba from southern Ohio got a little carried away in his patriotic zeal to nail a couple of foreign devils, can ya blame the guy when it's the policy and practice from the top-down to report and detain those who are guilty of, you know, "suspicious behavior"?

I know I'm over-reacting; that's what I do in this space. I'll try not to harm any human or animal subjects in the process. What this "suspicious behavior" issue - and the zeal with which patriotic citizens are encouraged to report each other - reminds me of some other incidents I have encountered.

Back in the day when I was between freelance jobs, I did some landscaping for an acquaintance in the campus area of town. We met several times to discuss their needs in the back yard of their large, beautiful home on a ravine, and I spent several hours a day for several weeks working alone in the yard with hand tools and ladders. I had conversations with his wife about the condition of the trees, the shrubs, the groundcover, and the weeds. I knew their son, a well-connected lawyer. I met some of their neighbors.

One day when the family was on vacation, someone broke into their house, tripping an alarm system that alerted the police. A vigilant law enforcement officer in his high-tech vehicle spotted me from the ravine carrying landscaping stones and called for backup. The LEO questioned me, heard my explanation of what I was doing, handcuffed me, and locked me in the back seat of his car. An hour or so later, when my identity had been confirmed, he let me go, rationalizing his actions by saying that if it were my house, I would have wanted him to do just what he had done.

No.

Style, text, world

A bizarre three-part dream ran through my sleeping mind the other night, the loopy kind that keeps repeating with only slight differences the same general plotline, then looping through it again, and again, pretending to change and faking the dreaming self into believing the changes, only to fiendishly return with the same damn problem embedded in the style/text/world of the dream.

The problem that kept recurring was, simply put, that changing the style - the presentation or appearance of the work - doesn't necessarily alter the actual text - the content of the information in the message of the work - that the style is intended to shape; and even when you succeed in altering the style in a way that makes it possible to convey a change in the text that actually says something differently, the disparity in the world that the text refers to remains untouched.

It wasn't a restful night, and it took a while to get myself in gear the next day, but function I did in the two-dimensional space of writing words on pages. It did help to sort it out in this space, however, to put into words the multivalent experience of what can't be done with words. Then at lunch it was very therapeutic to describe the dream to my favorite intern in the universe, who understood what I was talking about. A miracle.

State Fair

Perfect weather. The sheep barn, shearing ewes, just a touch-up by a practiced hand, and judging the rams, hanging onto the big curly horns of the willful beasts. The butter cow, butter Brown, butter Bengal, and butter boy; ice cream hits the spot on a hot day.

The beef cattle show in the Voinovich building is a lot like a football crowd, with human sons and daughters resembling their beefy fathers and mothers as they stand around and talk the talk after showing their animals. Nextdoor in the coliseum ponies pulling wagons, getting ribbons from the pony queen, smiling and standing gamely in the soft dirt in her heels and gown, while the organ plays on, one continuous farm medly blending "Anchors Aweigh" with the Marine Hymn, the Notre Dame fight song, "If They Could See Me Now," and finally "God Bless America."

A cow gives birth to a calf in front of a small outdoor audience. Swine lounge and nap in fresh beds of clean wood shavings, twitching slightly as they dream of corn, or soybean meal, or other swine, or pearls, who knows what hogs dream of?

We stroll out past a stage where gypsy music from several eastern Mediterranean lands suggests dancing and centuries of trading tunes and riffs on the violin, guitar, and bass. We take our time looking at visual art from all over Ohio, a few quite arresting and a lot more all over the map in quality, subject, and medium, like the folks viewing it. We did see one painting called "Searching," which is what my eye was doing, by a friend named Sky.

Finally arts and crafts, quilts, stitchery, leather, barrel making, woodworking, jewelry, and a Lego City that looks just like downtown Columbus. I bought a pair of stoneware baking pans from a pottery in Zanesville, and on the way home a six-pack of Old Speckled Hen.

Let the harvest begin

The first ripe tomato of the year. The last of the mesclun greens for a salad.

The second bean picking might be the last because the Japanese beetle invasion has devoured most of the leaves, the remnants of which look like a lacy network of green, more space than leaf. The third or fourth week of slow and steady pepper picking, mostly the light green Hungarian peppers, a handful of tiny cayenne, and that's it; the experimental planting of peppers at the far end of the garden might be backfiring, or maybe they just need rain. A couple of small cabbages might make a little sourkraut. A basket of onions and more where they came from.

It's fun to pick vegetables, put them in containers, and look at them for a while before washing, cooking, storing, eating.

Mating Habits of the North American homo sapiens

Does everyone I know have relationship problems, or is it just my imagination? No, not everyone, only those who are in a relationship. Members of my family, my small circle of male friends, my co-workers. It must be the mating season. Or the unmating season.

So much hinges on timing, so much depends on readiness. Let's say you meet a really beautiful, fantastic person who answers something deep inside you, and the feeling is mutual. There's physical chemistry, there's an intellectual connection, there's a spiritual phenomenon that's hard to explain but impossible to deny, and if you're really lucky, there's a time and place to be together and have some common experiences. Maybe, just maybe, you discover that you care deeply about the same things.

An amazing time. You might as well enjoy it, because it doesn't happen every day, and I'm not sure it happens every lifetime.

In how many ways do the stars have to align for this to work - even short-term? Is one person or the other, or both, at a point in the trajectory of their life where they're able to make a major decision about the direction of their life? At what point is a growing, changing, autonomous individual ready to start operating as half of a couple? When do you start making long-term plans? At best, a person can know what they might be doing in one or two or five years. When do you start remodeling, renovating, or revisiting those long-term plans?

What makes it complicated is that nothing is ever evenly balanced and equally shared. The romantic/erotic picture takes on more shades of blue when love is unrequited, or when one flame burns hotter than the other, or one light shines brighter than the other, or one is ready to make commitments and the other isn't. The variations on those themes fill works of literature, and usually someone gets hurt.

Should I go the autobiographical route? The short version goes something like this. High school sweetheart goes away to K College and, to her parents' enormous relief, meets a guy who better meets their standards. Good for her, bad for me, or so I thought. I saw her at a class reunion 20 years and two kids later; she was divorced and I wasn't, so who's to say.

Kind of like "Groundhog Day," I guess I had to make that mistake a few more times before I got it right. There was that girl from Canada whose parents didn't approve, and they were right, it wasn't meant to be. There was another girl from high school, but that was something different, more like an intimate friendship; we still communicate, but she went her way and I went mine. It wouldn't have worked.

There was someone pretty remarkable the second time around in college, when I was ready to discover there are more kinds of fish in the sea. So my education continued for quite a while, as I explored different waters and made enough mistakes with other people's feelings to last a lifetime, sometimes receiving pain and sometimes inflicting it. I'm probably still working off some of that karma. Is that just the way it works - when it doesn't work? Does it even out in the end?

I have several close acquaintances who are going through relationship transitions. That sounds cold, clinical, and impersonal. They're going through some shit with a lover, okay? Nah, that's not it either. They've got some issues. Who doesn't? They're in a world of pain. Too dramatic. Things are not working out. Understatement. Mid-life crisis? Cliche.

I'm not naming names, and I'm not disclosing incriminating details - or else I won't have any family, friends, or co-workers left. There's the guy about my age whose wife abruptly left him after 30-some years. There's another who has had a few girlfriends since splitting with his wife several years ago. And another who's been divorced for ten years, and his most recent and most healthy girlfriend just moved in with him. Is there something in the water? Everybody I know needs healing, and I wish them all luck.

None of these stories is over, of course, and some of them are already novel-length sagas, not adolescent coming-of-age tales. The awful truth is that there's no formula, no rule, no magic key to working them out. Dr. Phil, Rev. Rod, Judge Judy, my Dad, and every other self-appointed Source of Great Wisdom will quote you a simple rule that makes it all clear. They're either lying or deluded.

full moon spontaneous film reflection

Not a review, not a recommendation, not an endorsement, not a critique, analysis, or interpretation of the Columbus premiere of The Journal of Short Film, 90 minutes of the world's best short films.

"Romantic" was the only thing I could say, although I'm not sure what that means. Wanting to do things that are worth writing about, wanting to write about things that are worth doing, wanting to go outside in the evening air and make something up, write something down, tell somebody about it. "Gravel" was great. Not great as in big, stupendous, extraordinary, but diamond-in-the-rough grate as in hard and shiny and a little irritating but also sweet. "High Plains" was gripping at first because I wanted to be there, I could imagine myself doing that, and then I didn't and I couldn't, and then the visually hypnotic physical location kind of took over. You never know what the filmmaker has in mind, what he or she is driving at, except maybe wanting to be watched. The one about the personals was well-done, compact, and well-written, starring the Murphy bed. Stillwell's animated figures were beautiful and compelling, reminding me rhythmically of the Triplets of Belleville but without the discernible story line, so I lost the thread and forgot to pay attention for a minute when I didn't know what those lovely figures with interesting eyes were doing exactly. "Formalist" is another word, as in what you can do with a puppet, dance, image to entertain the eye.

The House of Burgess

Read The Devil's Mode, an unusual book of short stories - and one novella called "Hun" that takes us inside the tent and mind of the dreaded Attila (which means "little brother," being the diminutive of Atta, hmm) - that could only come from the slightly crazed pen of Anthony Burgess. Read it now. If you dare.

Travel with Edward Burbage, Will Shakspere, and other players to the Spanish court in the years, post-Armada, when rough and ready Englishmen were not terribly popular in Spain. See them scorned for their crude table manners and ignorance of literature. Observe the venerable Cervantes reluctantly receiving them, only to have them eat with the wrong fork and say things like, "Novel, what's a novel?"

Then read The Pianoplayers, a singularly intoxicating and sobering novel about a young girl and her musician father surviving by their wits in the hurly-burly streets of early-twentieth-century England. "She was a working girl, Northern England way, now she's hit the big time..." The characters are well-wrought, the dialog is saucy and sharp, and the narrator is one smart young lady. [Side note: the author is a leg man.]

spatio-temporal disconnect on the astral plane

Last night I had a dream,
You were in it, and I was in it with you.
Everyone I know and everyone you know was in my dream.
Started out in a barnyard with the sun down,
Everyone was laughing, and you were lying on the ground,
You said honey can you tell me what your name is,
Honey can you tell me what your name is,
I said you know what my name is.
- Randy Newman, "In My Dream"

I'm in Ann Arbor, visiting old friends at someone's house I guess, people I've seen maybe twice in the 30 years since we were all at the University of Michigan. Three of us - Dave and Mark and I - are making arrangements to meet at a restaurant, some campus hangout we're all familiar with, but we're all going separately for logistical reasons - driving, walking, timing, parking, whatever. I start out walking, knowing how to get there, but halfway there, the streets and buildings morphed into something else that looked different from what I remembered. Crossing a particular street, (State Street or South University?), I came to a divided stairway that was new (or new to me), so I just kept walking forward and to the left, along with the crowd of pedestrians, mostly younger. It was kind of like a subway entrance in New York, with steel handrails and lots of people hurrying to get where they're going, but they know their way, while I'm not in such a hurry but don't know the way. Finally I get to the restaurant - at least I think it's the right one - but it looks like a different place, maybe just dramatically remodeled - and looks strange, unfamiliar, disturbingly new. Did I go to the wrong place? Did I go to the right place, but it has changed? Where are Dave and Mark? I find a seat and decide to wait.

Chicks Rock!

I had never been to a concert at the Schottenstein Center before. Hell, I had never been to a ballgame there either, delinquent alumnus that I am. And I'm not a fan of the Dixie Chicks, so I didn't know what to expect from their concert in the big arena.

It was, like the Grand Canyon is rumored to be, quite large.

Here's the back-story: Gven Golly's longtime student Tom showed up in class Sunday morning bearing gifts - two tickets to the concert he couldn't go to. Gven and her sisters (not to mention her friends, her sisters' friends, and her friends' sisters, etc.) have been fans of the Chicks since long before the notorious Bush statement, so she gladly accepted the tickets. I figured what the heck, so we had a date.

We walked the length of the big parking lot, past other big athletic-complex buildings, to the big arena and got a good look at the big, girly crowd. We found our seats (on the Huntington Level, whatever that means, never mind, I know what it means, it's a corporate university) and settled in with a salty pretzel and a Coke.

The crowd was raucous - in a middle-class, midwestern, girly way - but what do I know (I'll tell you) not much. The acoustics were bad, and the video was worse. Note to engineer: when the fiddle player has a solo, don't project an image of the banjo player watching her; when the banjo player has a solo, don't show the singer complaining to the sound man. That said...

They rocked the place. Tell you what, that Natalie Maines can sing. Leather dress and all, the girl looks tough, commands the stage, and uses her big voice to full effect without over-playing her hand. The banjo player, Emily Robison, with the long dark hair and the long legs, played well and contributed harmony vocals and a smiling, chiseled face to complement Maines' impish scowl. The fiddler, Marty McGuire, holds up her end too, with fine instrumentals and a pretty smiling face on her end of the stage. They make a fine bluegrass trio and thankfully have not devolved into "Natalie Maines and the Dixie Chicks." At least not yet. With the 8-piece band, driven by a little too much drums and bass, they hold their own as a country-rock act. But what do I know (I'll tell you) not much.

Yet it was the crowd that really rocked. Bad sound, unintelligible lyrics, random visuals, and all, those people loved what they heard, and they showed it. It must have been cool for the musicians to hear 10,000 women singing "Wide Open Spaces" back at them.

memory kite

A very peculiar dream crystalized in my consciousness last night, so let me try to gather the threads of memory and put it into words. My friend Bob says externalizing it brings understanding. We'll see about that.

My co-worker Flipper is putting together a large structure made of paper and string that looks like a giant kite. Or a kind of flat, car-shaped collage made up of newspaper clippings, book pages, and other memorabilia stitched together on a wood frame. I am drawn to it and curious about its purpose and design. Flipper explains that by carefully placing each sheet of paper and attaching it with thread, she can connect past events with the present situation so that both make sense. I'm impressed and even more drawn to the construction. If this is true, the past is not lost and the present is not without context and structure. I look closer to see how the individual pieces are attached, and I see that the whole work is not flat but also has thickness, depth, three-dimensionality. But will it fly?

Whoa. Doctor.

Hostas Riot!

Run for your lives! They're out of control. They are running amok. They're taking over the yard. Beware, those who dare to enter by the back gate. The hostas are in bloom and nothing can stop them.

I kid you not. Some of them are 4-5 feet tall and reaching across the brick walkway. Those cute little asparagus-like shoots are now wide open and bright purple. Later in the season, when their midsummer frenzy has passed and it is safe once again to venture into the northeast corner of the yard, measures will be taken to thin the herd. I have a nice spot picked out for a dozen emigrant hostas, a weedy patch of lawn in front of some pine trees, where I think they will thrive. For now, it is advisable to remain calm, stand back, and behold the power of the hostas.

It must be a sign of high summer. The heat, the humidity, the hazy sky, the scattered thunderstorms. The neighbor to the south mowing the lawn at 8 in the morning, the neighbor to the north playing cornhole til 10 at night. Daylilies dancing at all hours, coneflowers congregating along the back fence, wildflowers running - wild!

I can see the strawberries sending out runners, too, so I'll have to thin them and use the transplants to colonize the bed next door. The beans have climbed to the top of the tripod of poles, and their little white flowers are turning into little finger-sized green beans, yum. Something had been chewing on the bean leaves, and then I saw several pairs of Japanese beetles making out in the morning. Coitus interruptus, I flicked them off to save the bean plants. I reckon they will mate somewhere else. Tis the season.

Let the harvest begin: I picked the first batch of Hungarian peppers, enough to fill a frisbee.

Jaws of Life

The James McMurtry CD I've been listening to repeatedly - while unpacking, sorting, and shelving books in the office/workshop, as the finite hours of my finite life go by - has a bunch of well-crafted, reflective songs and one or two real knockouts. Is it a coincidence that the best songs grapple with ghosts of the past, missed opportunities, and flat-out mistakes? Sure.

The record is called "It had to happen," and maybe that's McMurtry's conclusion in coming to terms with years of lugging around his own personal baggage. And there's a lot to be said for accepting what can't be changed. I'm not so sure myself. In his own words, "I keep my distance the best I can, living out my time here in Never-neverland, I can't grow up, cause I'm too old now" (Peter Pan). That I can relate to - one of those great lines that even a competent writer can hang an entire song on. And he's more than competent.

Another line from another song (Stancliff's Lament) that gets me: "It's behind you, it's behind you, the worst was over long ago." Leafing through the refuse of my academic and occupational past and the textual evidence thereof, it's a relief to weed out the excess and recycle it, put the keepers away in a file drawer, lighter by about two-thirds, knowing I don't have to go through it again. But I have to ask: if the worst is over, is the best over too? (My good buddy Bob used to quote Dickens when we were helping each other survive graduate school: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.")

There's a perverse kind of pleasure in going through all those old class rosters, meeting minutes, grade sheets, syllabi, outlines, keeping the papers and tossing the notes. I strangely enjoy unpacking boxes of books and finding shelf space to put them in some kind of order. Zelda stopped by last night and asked what my system was: fiction here, nonfiction there, one shelf for art, one for education, one for sport, one for history, two for philosophy, a long row of smaller paperbacks, two shelves of children's books. There must be a librarian gene somewhere in this family. I won't alphabetize or catalog, but it is reassuring to look up and see like items together.

I guess this is where I take note that Gven and I have known each other for 30 years. The anniversary of our first meeting came and went two weeks ago; that's what the fireworks were all about the weekend of the Fourth. Do the math: we first laid eyes on each other the weekend of the bicentennial, and nothing has been the same since. One tends to look back - and forward - at times like this, and if one is a complete fool and a glutton for punishment, one tends to rethink some of the crucial decisions one has made and assess the damage.

We've had a great adventure that so far only gains texture and depth as it continues. The callow youth that ran into the bright-eyed redhead in Atlanta in 1976 has had time to mature since that fateful day - but decided against it. Some powerful forces were at work and still are, so like McMurtry's last and best song (Jaws of Life), "It makes no difference what you thought or who you are, you still get caught in the jaws of life."

Roadtrippy

More musings on the theme of moving from place to place on the planet by one means or another. I just checked my site meter, which could be lying or could truly show that someone in Rapid City, Rancho Cordova, Richmond Hill, Ansonia, Augsburg, Pretoria, Pomona, Portland, Petaling Jaya, Sofia, Skvde, San Diego, Brasilia, Buffalo, and the Bronx has recently visited this site. Those are all "real" places, physical locations in space as we know it, whereas this site is a place in a different sense, an electronic or virtual place, and where this line of thought is going I'm not too sure, except that it's neat to be able to go all those places without really, like going there.

Rhetorical pause.

Holy shit, I'm "in" Boston (on BostonPete.com) listening to a smooth jazz station that's playing a duet by Joe Cocker and Al Jarreau, whom I wouldn't have put together but it works, a couple of old dudes from different parts of the pop spectrum whose voices have morphed a bit over the years but are still doing what they do well, which is turn a song over and around and inside-out, in this case a song called "Lost and Found" about being in the wrong place at the right time, which fits the theme, doesn't it, so it wasn't a digression after all. I can't believe I'm listening to this stuff, and you know what, it isn't bad.

End of seemingly spontaneous segue. Beginning of saga.

The Return of Zelda
Part One: Intern Out

Last week my smart and hard-working daughter went to Georgia with her friend Zanna for a couple of family visits and some independent adventures. What is life for, but going away and coming back, being out on your own and then returning to re-establish contact. Her new car performed well; they got to see Aunt JoJo's new condo in Atlanta, hang out with cousin Bubba, and eat at an interesting Thai restaurant. Then they went to see Gven's mother in north Georgia and spend some quality time with the cousins. Lots of time to listen to Nanny's stories about this and that.

And the other thing.

Now she is back in central Swingstate, working away at her computer in her cube on the second floor of a big office building in America, learning about the use of images in the publishing business, art, history, geography.

A friend shared more tales of Iceland. Another friend just put his daughter on a plane for Tomsk (not far from Omsk) for the summer, and is on his way to New York for his son's wedding. Another friend from the same circle just sent his new e-mail and postal addresses from his new home north of Seattle. A co-worker is making arrangements to go to her niece's opening at a gallery in Chicago. Another co-worker is leaving in a week to move to New York to go to school. Another co-worker is leaving in a month to move to Boston to go to school. Another just got back from Italy, and another is in Arizona at this moment.

Not that any of this is unusual. It's summer, and people go places.

Travel is good for ya

But you knew that. As Zelda (I've decided to rename my daughter, and no, I'm not a hippie) and her friend Zanna make their way south on a midsummer road trip to Atlanta, I am reminded of the virtues, as well as the challenges and the pleasures, of travel. For evidence that travel inspires good writing, see a message MGL sends from NYC.

My friend LibraryMan was talking the other night about some people he met on his recent trip to Iceland. Never mind the endless hassles of airports and airlines, never mind the delays, the missed connecting flights, the uncertainty of flying stand-by, and the general anxiety of getting from here to there, it's the journey, not the destination, right? Well, yeah! He arrived just in time to catch the tour bus going around the perimeter of the island with a really interesting group of folks from all over the world. But it was one British lady in particular, a 90-year-old traveling by herself, who made the greatest impression, walking proof of the adventurous spirit.

It must be in the air. A day or two later I was at the gravel pit picking up half a yard of limestone when I heard a story on the radio about some real estate developers in Iceland who had trouble getting clearance on some land because the neighbors didn't want to disturb the elves. The snarky NPR announcer in Chicago made it sound quaint and archaic, but I find it refreshing that there are places in the civilized world where the presence of other life forms is common knowledge. Take that, rationalists!

Meanwhile, I got an e-mail from my brother Rock with information about an upcoming family gathering in southern Indiana. He's suggesting the little town of New Harmony as a central meeting place between our far-flung siblings in Georgia, Iowa, and Michigan. New Harmony was originally a utopian community founded by Robert Owen and other freethinkers on the banks of the Wabash. I went ahead and reserved a room at The Old Rooming House on Church Street, a few blocks by foot or bicycle from some cool historical and architectural sites, gardens, a labyrinth, and a Roofless Church.

Hey, that was Zelda herself on the phone, calling from Forsythe County, Georgia (pronounced for-SYTHE, as in "Forsooth!"), where she is visiting her grandmother and cousins on her mother's side. Everybody's fine, everybody sends their love, and back atcha.

Lifestyles of the loose and random

When did everything get this out of control?
Why does it bother me?
What am I going to do about it?

The long Fourth of July weekend provokes a bunch of conflicting reactions to life's persistent questions. One of those is the feeling that I'm struggling to stay afloat, treading water with no real prospect of actually swimming across the great water - or even getting to the edge of the pond - in which I'm such a little fish. The domestic economy and ecology of Om Shanty, our little niche in the larger world, is not the orderly place I would like it to be, and it irritates me.

The garden, as usual, is a great symbol of life and it's place in the universe. The warmer weather, coupled with abundant rain in central swingstate, has made everything grow faster. So while I celebrate the hosta and daylilies blooming, the tomatoes and beans vining upward, and the eggplants and peppers bearing fruit, I can't keep up with the weeds, which I define as any plant I don't want to be where it is.

I'm not god, just the referee in this game/match/microcosm. If I say the creeping charlie is out of bounds, that means it's out of bounds. It's a rule-bound game where I make, interpret, and apply the rules. The appeal process, which is out of my jurisdiction, involves natural selection, and there I'm just another player. I guess the long weekend gave me additional time to try to keep up, without making any discernible progress in the battle to bring order out of chaos.

Both of the major projects I had contemplated for this weekend - raising the level of the patio approaching the back door and erecting a bonafide wood shed - never got off the ground. I made a decision early-on to chip away at some other tasks instead of concentrating on starting and completing one big thing. The ongoing garden is one continuing diversion, of course, always worth some puttering and never finished, but I've found an even better way of killing major blocks of time: reorganizing and purging files.

I've kept some old files in boxes since our last move, and it's high time they found their way into a drawer where I can forget about them again. Our garage/workshop has been slowly evolving into an office/workshop with places for tools, shelves for books (soon to be liberated from their own boxes), and space for files that have been stuck away in folders and forgotten at the end of a job, degree program, conference, committee term, school year, workshop, fiscal year, or other life event.

There are tattered manila folders from classes at three different undergraduate and one graduate institution, several jobs at several schools, publishers, bakeries, and one-man landscaping outfits. There are papers I wrote, notes I scrawled, articles I photocopied for some unknown later use. There is correspondence from family, friends, and colleagues, newspaper and magazine clippings on art, sports, literature, language - the usual suspects - and children's artwork, report cards, fee statements, schedules, and other artifacts from three grade schools, two middle schools, two high schools, and two colleges. There are folders full of letters applying for jobs and others informing applicant that the position has been filled.

Weeding through the reams of paper is a trip down memory lane and a powerful reminder of where I've been individually and where we've been as a family. The thing that hit me in the face as I separated the wheat from the chaff, saving 30 percent of it and recycling 70 percent, is that I still care about most of what I collected and put out in those earlier stages of the game. I still believe the things I wrote in papers, articles, and essays in the later stages of undergrad education. Even my writing style hasn't changed fundamentally - whether that's a good thing or not - even though the narrative voice has dropped down an octave in the course of the narrative.

Maybe the continuity of my written self from 30 years ago shouldn't surprise me, and it's reassuring in a way that I'm the same person I was. I didn't completely lose my way or turn away from what I was trying to do. Just as surprisingly, it wasn't depressing to look back at the documentary evidence of the many projects that didn't turn out as I thought they would. Nor did it make me all nostalgic for those times and places, when things were wonderful and I supposedly had my whole future in front of me.

It did, however, make my back hurt to sit in the office/workshop for hours at a time, so I took breaks to go outside and pull weeds. So the contest continues: which will run out first, the papers to be sorted and filed away or the plants to be pulled and transplanted? It's all foliage, and there's more where that came from.