digit

How the old grouch received xmas:

A book with pages you can turn (with your fingers) or count (on your fingers).
A gift card (digital) for a bookstore.
Sunday New York Times subscription (digital) and Sunday Times crossword puzzle book.
Picture of deer by a road (oops, analog).
Illustrated rose festival calendar (digital).
Silk longjohns (knit).
Black leather belt (stitched).
Microfleece bicycling gloves to keep digits warm.
Music CDs: "I'm Not There" soundtrack, Benny Goodman-Jack Teagarden collection.
Nikon camera (digital).

Dig it all.

gifts, gifting, gifted

I hardly know where to begin. And therein lies the problem. When in doubt, make a list.

1. It is good to receive.
2. It is better to give.
3. It is best when the intent of the giver, the suitability of the gift, and the recipient's taste (for which there's no accounting) are in alignment, and some sort of connection is made through the gift.
4. It is equivalent to getting a hole-in-one to achieve that trifecta, that harmonic convergence of intention, spontaneity, and fit. Like the year Gven Golly told her friend Kate that she wanted red cowboy boots for Christmas, which Kate understood intuitively, and they laughed about it. Miraculously Kate came across some red cowboy boots in a store - in Gven's size - and when Gven unwrapped them they really laughed.
5. It is not the thought that counts. It's the gift that counts. If it were the thought, then we would all just send thoughts and dispense with the shopping, the boxes, the wrapping, the gifts. More thoughts, but less money, would be in circulation. The money economy would suffer, and the thought economy would thrive.

If one is gifted in the ultimate Amerikan art of shopping, finding the right gift for the right person becomes an interesting, mindful, creative act that materially and spiritually connects two people. Amazing, transcendent, and profitable! On the other hand, if one is obtuse, reclusive, and stingy, navigating this ritual becomes more difficult. For want of a better metaphor, it's a crap-shoot.

I can go to a store I don't hate, spend some quality time browsing the racks of merchandise, and eventually find an item that appeals to me and reminds me of a certain person on my list. If I'm extremely lucky, they will be delighted. If not, I've just projected my desire onto someone else and given them what I would like, or what I think they should want.

I'm reducing my gift-giving this year to bare essentials. Let's just call it a kind of minimalism. If you can't write an epic or even a sonnet, find it within yourself to take a deep breath and scrawl a haiku.

Windows 2008

We're talking hardware, not software. We're talking vinyl, double-hung, dual-pane with argon, Lo-E, tilt-in-for-easy-cleaning windows. We're talking to one salesman after another, and they all have either the best window, the best installers, the best guarantee, or the best deal going.

Andy (good ole boy w/ shaved head, no hat) didn't have that much to say, asked a few questions, explained the process, gave me a single brochure describing the product, and quoted a price, which turned out to be the lowest bid.

Dan (tall, black suit, white shirt, gold star of David) gave an intelligent, slick presentation punctuated by a whole series of glossy brochures about his business, Zen Windows, and customer testimonials to read at our leisure. He told us about his family (need a good dentist? his wife is a dentist) and quoted a comparable price.

Tony (big, gregarious black guy) had a good eye and interesting ideas about color but read his presentation out of a binder: all about Sears being in business forever and having the best guarantee. The price was approximately double the others. This was during the Michigan game, and neither one of us wanted to be there.

Tom (older, buttoned-down, all business) methodically explained how the windows are constructed of extruded "virgin" vinyl (not recycled), was cautious about promising any modifications, and quoted a price slightly higher than the lowest but in the ballpark.

Chris (goatee, has three daughters who, he points out, are more important than windows) worked his way through school installing windows for another company, and now has the best installers because they're employees, not subconstractors. The windows are good, too, but it's all about having the best-trained people. Price was competitive.

I kept getting calls but figured five estimates was enough. Gven and I talked about our options and finally decided on - you guessed it - the first one. Andy can replace the four oldest windows in the front part of the house for a little less money. Therefore, we can rationalize over-extending ourselves to get a new kitchen casement window facing the back yard and a larger bedroom window, too.

Andy came back to review the whole deal and write up a simple contract. His company, through another mega-company, will finance it, so we can take a year to pay for six windows. Let's see, that's about one four-paned sash a month. We're not getting top-of-the-line windows, but they are expensive. And worth it in the long run. And needed in the short run.

Financing approved, we made an appointment with the installer to measure everything and firm up details such as color, materials, dimensions. They missed the appointment, not a good sign I'm thinking, and good ole boy is starting to seem more like doofus. They showed up on time for the second appointment, and Larry the installer-subcontractor, took over from there.

Larry (red baseball cap) was twice as cool, twice as wise, twice as old, and twice as good ole boy as bareheaded Andy. Larry measured all the windows and brought up some relevant factors in how to fill the space below the window that once was a door, then became an air conditioner below a stained glass window, and soon will have a limestone sill to (roughly) match the stone lintel above. I think it will look good, as well as bringing much-needed light into the dining room.

Because we took our time deciding, there will be no big ribbon on this project in time for Christmas, New Year's, or anniversary number 29 (our Vinyl Anniversary). Now we have three weeks to wait for the windows to be built and delivered, then we'll see if Larry and his crew can get a couple of nonfrigid days in January to do the installation.

New year, new windows, something to look out, in, and forward to. Now, about that old furnace.

Happy Holidays, Family & Friends

Winter greetings from the Golly family. It has been a difficult year in many ways: a time to learn new things, to relearn things we thought we knew, and to cope with change, which, of course, is not new. We are grateful for the chance stay in touch with you and to be together when that is possible.

Friends and family are again the theme as we count our blessings at the end of the year. Consider a single 24-hour period in April when Gven and Sven drove to Cleveland to see their friends Angela and Rick. The occasion was a Chagrin Theater production, in which Rick played a pivotal role, called “These People.” Hold that thought. A block from the theater the car engine dies in the middle of a busy street. It revives long enough to get us to the theater, where we enjoy a spirited, community-minded musical and a fabulous cast party afterward. The Accord quits only once on the way to Rick and Angela’s house halfway across town in Bedford.

First thing in the morning, we talk to the Honda dealer, which is practically around the corner, and the guy at the service desk, who happens to be the son of a friend at their church, thinks it might be the starter, and if it is, it might be the model recently recalled by the factory. We cross our fingers and eat a hearty breakfast (travel tip: breakfast at the Coffee Cup rocks) and decide to make a day of it at the Cleveland Museum, which happens to have a Monet exhibit, which turns out to be an absolute visual feast. When we check with the service guy, he says the car is ready – no charge. Angela feeds us chicken salad, and we are on the road heading home, feeling like the recipients of multiple unbidden gifts.

The garden had a hard time with a late frost and a dry June, although the weather evened out over time. We picked no apples, no beans, no eggplant, and few tomatoes. Flowers were sparse. Yet the strawberries came through in spite of it all, and warm fall allowed us to keep picking peppers well into November.

Zelda is thriving in the book trade. After starting at Half-Price Books in January, she quickly acquired more responsibility, keeping order in the fine arts section and learning to receive and track shipments. Maybe her medium of choice is books! Zelda stays in touch with her friends in Kent and remains tight with the Clintonville Posse. In August, she took a road trip with her friend Stephanie and Steph’s sister Kristin to Hilton Head, South Carolina, with a side-trip to historic Savannah.

In June, Zelda accompanied her dad on a weeklong trip to Minnesota via Chicago, and, in the opinion of the elder Golly, it was a blast. In Chicago, Zelda visited her friend David, who took us to a nice neighborhood bar (travel tip: have a beer at the Map Room in Logan Park). Sven visited his longtime friend and mentor Donald in Rogers Park for some major catching up. Together Zelda and Sven explored the Field Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, the ‘El’ system, and of course made a pilgrimage to the Heartland Café, still the coolest, earthiest, friendliest source of peace, love, and caffeine on the planet.

That was just the first two days. In La Crosse, Wisconsin, they joined the Anderson-Golly clan for a poignant celebration of the decennial Spring Grove Homecoming and the life of Sven’s uncle, A.B. “Chuck” Anderson. There were meals with brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, and parents at hot-spots like Schmidty’s and Fazey’s. There was a self-guided tour featuring a panoramic view of La Crosse from Granddad Bluff, our old house on Market Street, Hogan and Campus Schools, Asbury Methodist Church, Rudy’s root beer stand, and other old haunts.

There was a walking tour of Spring Grove, Minnesota, childhood home of Helen and Chuck. We ate ice cream at the new hangout on Main Street and looked at the art gallery that occupies the space that was once the iconic C&D (Chuck and Dunc’s) Café. Above all, there was a beautiful memorial service at Chuck and Marion’s church, where Chuck’s band played some of his favorite tunes and we were all reminded of his devotion to music and to his family. It was a classic happy/sad occasion to spend time with Marion, Kris, Lee, and Russ Anderson and to enjoy their hospitality.

Jessi and Alex visited us in Ohio for a few days in August, and as always it was great to be with them. They connected with Jessi’s friend Andy, and we all had a fun evening with our friends the Gormans just before Jessi’s protégé Tedy left for college. Abe took a leave of absence from Forbidden Planet in New York to harvest cranberries for eight weeks at Mann Farm, just outside Buzzard’s Bay, on Cape Cod. When he came to Columbus for Thanksgiving, he brought a huge box of cranberries, enough for turkey dinners and bread for at least the next year. We were glad to have Sven’s sister Jo Jo at our house again for Thanksgiving, and Kate, Jim, and Emma Gourmet also graced our table. Jessi returned to his house in Brooklyn and his job at the bookstore, but he’ll be back in time for a Solstice bonfire. Maybe cranberries will go with lutefisk and Grandma Helen’s lefse?! Oofdah!

Gven still manages and teaches at the Yoga Factory. This year she expanded the reach of her teaching to the Westerville Recreation Department, Columbus Health Department, Franklin County Courthouse, and State Farm Insurance, as well as the McConnell Heart Health Center. She still studies with Donna Winter at Balanced Yoga and with Ling's shaman training group.

Just in time for the Rose Festival at Whetstone Park and the Arts Festival downtown, Gven’s sisters Sharon and Annette came north for a few days in June. We had a convergence of important birthdays in August, so Gven and Sven took the opportunity to drive to Georgia. First we met Sharon, Jim, and family; Annette, Ron, and family; and their dad at a great restaurant in the historic gold-rush town of Dahlonega for Gven’s mother Nancy’s 75th birthday. (No, wait, she can’t be 75! She seems much younger!) It was a perfect afternoon in the mountains and a nice chance to see how Nancy’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren are growing up. Then we went to Jo Jo’s condo in Atlanta for her 60th. (No, wait, she can’t be 60! She seems much younger!) It was great to see Jo Jo’s new place, see her husband Burt, and visit a neighborhood garden around the corner from Abe’s birthplace. In an odd twist of fate, we were able to enjoy an awesome photography exhibit despite arriving at the High Museum just in time to get drenched by a thunderstorm, which was much needed in drought-stricken Georgia.

On the way to Georgia, we stopped overnight with Sven’s parents in Tennessee. Besides catching up on their many projects, we discussed a piece of property they had held onto in Michigan. Sven decided to have a look for himself and went up north to camp for a weekend in September. He was sufficiently taken with the setting – inland from Traverse Bay near a little lake – to take on the responsibilities of ownership for some undetermined future use… picture a cabin in the north woods with cross-country skiing, a sauna, a canoe…and dream on.

Meanwhile, back in reality, Sven got his red-pencil back in the freelance game after a few years’ hiatus, copyediting new books on subjects such as river ecology, phenomenology, anarchy, and he can’t wait to see what’s next. He is also the production editor for a high school Law textbook at Giant Publisher, Inc. Sitting at a desk too much exacerbates his general, gradual decline, although he hasn’t lost the capacity for sweeping generalization. Besides taiji and qigong, he seeks balance by riding his old Schwinn.

Best wishes for a bright, warm Christmas. Have a passionate, pioneering, and practical Year of the Rat.

Peace on Earth,
Sven, Gven, and Zelda
Dali (dog) and Isabel (cat)

The Holiday Letter

Show of hands. How many of you send an annual Holiday Letter? You know the kind - it's almost as infamous as fruitcake - the letter that people send to their friends and relatives bragging about their new yacht, their kid's Fulbright Grant, their vacation in Tuscany, and their lunch with the Dalai Lama.

I am one of those people. My family and friends have come to expect (dread) it, and they would wonder what horrible thing happened to me if they didn't get The Letter. Every year around this time, my compulsion kicks in, I spend an inordinate amount of time and energy writing and rewriting it, and it comes out just like last year's Holiday Letter: carefully worded to be informative enough to give the impression that everything is fine, yet not too informative. Most of the recipients don't want to know too many details.

It's part creative writing assignment, part essay exam, and part editing test. The purpose is to keep in touch with more people than you have time to write to personally, and therefore runs the risk of coming across as impersonal, which it is. It's supposed to bring folks up to date on your family news, and therefore runs the risk of disclosing more than Aunt Myrtle really wanted to know about your colonoscopy.

Like golf, it's guaranteed to be either too long or too short or otherwise off the mark, and someone is sure to take something the wrong way. Some people avoid saying the wrong thing by making their letter a photo essay and saying very little. Others play it safe by saying the same thing every year, updating the kids' ages and the specifics of their vacation. If you're smart, you realize that brevity is the soul of wit, and you don't include every 'A' on every report card, every athletic trophy, and every science fair blue ribbon.

Then there's the dilemma of to whom to send this tome. I have reduced my mailing list over the years to those who bother to send a card or write back. For reasons I will never know, people drop off the Flat Earth of correspondence, move and leave no forwarding address, by omission or commission decide to break it off. So Brett in Prudenville is gone. Brucie in Chicago is gone. Karen in Indianapolis is gone. Most, but not all, old girlfriends are gone. Most, but not all, old pals and roommates are gone. For most of them I must take responsibility for not holding up my end. This year, while addressing envelopes, I decided to do a little demographic study and track where they're going. The geographic breakdown is:

1. 18 Ohio
2. 5 Michigan
3. 5 Illinois-Wisconsin-Minnesota-Iowa
4. 6 Georgia-Florida-Tennessee-North Carolina
5. 4 Missouri-Kansas-Texas
6. 5 Washington-Oregon-California
7. 2 New York

What conclusions can be drawn from this statistical blip? Not much. My network is very limited, midwestern, provincial, domestic, parochial. I can live with that. I'm looking forward to getting a few choice words back from that relatively small circle.

save water, shower with a friend

Somehow that old rallying cry doesn't sound as daring as it once did, but that's okay, maybe it's a good thing that the social revolution made such things commonplace. Now, according to Slate.com there's a corollary:

Are you a real environmentalist? If so, you might want to consider staying with your spouse long after the love is gone. Turns out, divorce is just one more thing that is bad for the environment. The LAT and WP report on a new study that reveals couples who live together use energy and water much more efficiently than those that have split up. In one year alone, divorced households were responsible for using as much as 61 percent more resources per person than before they split. "If you don't want to get remarried," the study's author explained, "maybe move in with somebody you like."

Will this this awareness spark widespread cohabitation by friends who just want to save the planet? Will it keep couples from splitting just so they can reduce, reuse, and recycle their irreconcilable differences? Will it spawn a wave of urban and rural communes populated by green post-hippie post-feminist post-boomers?

I doubt it. Yet it does make strange bedfellows of so-called social conservatives and so-called environmentalists, although the latter are probably the more conservative in a literal sense. And yes, it adds another dimension to the old family-values argument - another phrase that seems to have lost traction - to know that material, moral, and ecological 'values' coincide. In short, breaking up is expensive.

Be lean and mean it

Warning: the following contains a confessional diatribe in which I castigate myself for inviting a cold virus to take me hostage, which it did.

It has been a couple of years since my last confession - and a couple of years since my last cold. I say this, not to brag about how healthy I am (the good ole boys used to say if it's true it ain't braggin' but that's bullshit), but to make the observation that these things aren't random. I brought it on myself. I have sinned, and when one strays from the path of righteousness, clean living, and daily workouts, one pays the price by reaping a harvest of head congestion, runny nose, frequent fog-horn blasts into a soggy handkerchief, and horribly mixed metaphors.

I sowed the seeds of the first cold of the year by spending the time I woulda coulda shoulda been moving around out in the fall weather but instead sat at my desk hunched over an editing project that was due. Make that overdue. I consciously chose to do the sedentary yet profitable task of vigorously moving a pencil around a two-dimensional surface instead of going outside, riding my bike, tai-ing my chi, walking the dog, balancing the internal energy - and instant karma's gonna get you.

And so it did come to pass that my body welcomed the ever-present virus, which made itself at home in the warm, moist cellular environment of my weak, vulnerable mucous membrane, where the virus and its progeny lived a long and healthy one-week lifespan disrupting the normal healthy functioning of my upper respiratory tract, making me blow my nose every hour on the hour. All because I skipped a few workouts. Like I needed further evidence that nobody gets away with anything in this life.

My body (and probably yours) is like a small but complex ecosystem, in which organ systems, like little cell cities, take in nutrients in order to do their work. Some of what they produce is toxic sludge that must be disposed of or it will poison the environment and make the system break down. The thing is, once the organs are conditioned to a certain amount of internal cleansing through daily exercise, fresh air, water, and the occasional habanero pepper, any interruption of that cycle causes a bad reaction. Ergo, if I don't work out, my usually clean system reacts more than one might expect, because it expects the toxic sludge to be gone.

It also happens to be getting colder outside, but that's not why I "caught a cold" - the misnomer that keeps people inside in the winter. On the contrary, my experience is just the opposite: I'm less likely to get sick if I go outside every day, rain or shine, hot or cold, and condition my internal ecosystem to adapt to the external elements. Typically I'm a little chilly (hands, feet, nose) for the first ten minutes, and then the internal furnace kicks in and I warm up.

The warmed-up body, pumping blood and breathing deeply, brings energy to the limbs and releases toxins to the atmosphere (thank you, trees and other flora for taking over the clean-up at this point). Voila! Mobile immune system in action, warding off bad karma by playing outside.

Just for the record, I'm feeling much better now. My message to the universe: wake-up call received, will not skip any more workouts than absolutely necessary, whatever that means, because the margin for error is as thin as the insulating fat layer on my skinny body.

I'd like to thank...

"...God and my family and my teammates." That may not be an exact quote, but that's the gist of what the young man said to the TV announcer after leading his team to victory. He went on to describe what went right for Illinois and what a long way they've come since they lost to Ohio State a year ago.

As postgame on-field interviews go, it seemed harmless enough. The kid, Juice Williams, had played remarkably well, making smart plays at crunch time in a huge win against the number-one-ranked team in the country. Considering that he is a college sophomore, probably 19 years old, playing quarterback in the Big Ten, getting this kind of attention on national TV, I thought he conducted himself well. Rather than acting like God's Gift to Football, he gave all the credit to the people around him and his notion of a higher power. What's not to like?

I was somewhat stunned the next morning in church when Rev. Susan, whom I like and respect for her depth and humor, voiced her superficial and humorless objections to the young man's remarks. What she heard - that he thanked God for His help in defeating the other team, for blessing the Illini instead of the Buckeyes - was quite different from what I heard - that he credited others for his success, that he was grateful for being able to play so well. I guess it's a fine line.

Back in the days when the Boston Celtics ruled pro basketball, their center was an enlightened being named Bill Russell. Besides being an extraordinarily quick and strong six-foot-nine, Russell was a defensive genius and a team player par excellence who had a knack for raising the performance of everybody on both teams to another level. After his retirement he wrote an article describing the fleeting joy of taking part in the kind of competition (LL "seeking together" according to Web10) where who wins or loses is almost beside the point.

Almost - not quite - because everybody is trying; otherwise they wouldn't be "seeking together" or raising each other to a higher level of performance. Dig?

Blessing and being blessed are complicated, and to Rev. Susan's credit, she went on to unpack some of the complexities of giving thanks, and it is that time of year. What I find irritating is the assumption that the big jock sure can run, he sure can throw, but he's too simple-minded to conceive of anything more subtle than "Please God Help Us Win" - the sports equivalent of "God Bless Our Troops." Righteously indignant nonathletes are quick to judge those who actually play the game (rather than sitting on the couch) and quick be appalled at the silly tribal behavior of both players and fans.

To be fair, I too rage at some of the gifted assholes who get rich and famous while abusing their bodies, their opponents, their peers, the public, their spouses, and their drug of choice. The sports section of the paper is full of their names and their egos. I also have major theological differences with the Illinois quarterback, which I hope to discuss with him while we throw the ball around.

But it's not the theological question of where the blessings come from that has me steamed up. It's the distribution of blessings. When warmonger patriots proudly plant "God bless our troops" in their front yards, they are explicitly directing their pious request at the armed forces attacking and conquering another country, implicitly excluding Iraqi troops (evildoers) from that blessing. When liberal intellectuals decry the sophomore quarterback's thanking his god for a good game, they can't conceive of a universalist deity showering strength, speed, and agility on 22 undergraduates at one time and enjoying the game.

Thank you, earth and sky, wind and water, birds and beasts, flowers and trees, all cells of one body.

gang colors

Yo, where's your gang colors?

Sorry, I'm not in uniform today. My OSU hoody shrank from XL to M ten years ago, and I last saw my only remaining Michigan T-shirt when using it to wash windows some time in the eighties. My old Oberlin T-shirt is a threadbare shadow of its former self, and it's too cold to wear a T-shirt anyway. I still have some Kent State gear, but I wore that last year, prompting one compassionate conservative co-worker to inform me, "That's where they kill students."

Thank you, B, I didn't know that.

That covers most of my college allegiances. So I chose to wear a dark green plaid in honor of Oregon. I never went to school there, but I have a friend who did, and one of my Ann Arbor roommates now lives in Eugene - does that count?

I'm tempted to wax philosophical about the significance of adorning our bodies with totemic symbols of group affiliation, but I don't have the energy. I guess the warrior archetype got beat up in the parking lot by the worker-drone archetype, and the shaman archetype just looked the other way. And no, I'm not packing heat, unless the Swiss Army knife in my briefcase qualifies as a weapon and is therefore banned on school, um, company property.

Hey, where's your school spirit? (I left it at the office.)

Parker

I have a secret crush. Promise not to tell anyone? She is the cutest, funniest, strongest, smartest, most adorable, honest, fearless, clever...

Actress.



I realize it's not the same to have a crush on a movie star as it is to have a crush on your ninth-grade Spanish teacher (remember Mrs. Forrest in Garden City? Woo-hoo!) or the co-worker half your age (doesn't everybody over a certain age?) or the debutante-dancer-Platonist of the first midlife, um, event (which is another story), but still, crushes are harmless infatuations, right? It might as well be Parker Posey as Mrs. Forrest. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely a figment of my overactive imagination.

The fact is, I am now able to declare openly that for several weeks, in the privacy of Om Shanty, in the company of the mostly-tolerant Gven Golly ("He's going through a phase"), and under the bemused gaze of Zelda Golly ("Whatever"), I've been staging, attending, and enjoying a Parker Posey Film Festival. A brief, critically annotated filmography of what I've seen of her oeuvre so far:

Adam & Steve - Slightly gross (to get your attention) and well-intentioned coming-out story about oddly matched gay couple, with Parker as supportive friend.
Best in Show - Hilarious send-up of dog owners with Parker as yuppie control freak.
Blade Trinity - Live-action comic book action hero Wesley Snipes and mod squad fight archcriminals, including Parker as twisted villainess.
Broken English - Probably her best work to date, as a grown-up urban sophisticate learning to deal with jerks, idiots, nice people, and the difficulty of all relationships.
Clockwatchers - Cute, ironic tragicomedy of alienated office workers' loyalty and spite, with Parker as spite.
Daytrippers - Remarkable ensemble cast as urban family with issues, with kooky sister Parker alongside Hope Davis, Liev Schreiber, Stanley Tucci, Ann Meara.
Fay Grim - Sequel to 'Henry Fool' with aging actors reprising roles with remarkable finesse, but you should see 'Henry' first if you want to follow a narrative.
For Your Consideration - Over the top movie-making character types.
Frankenstein - Strong role as police investigator in weak movie that's mostly dark, damp, industrial atmosphere.
Henry Fool - Oblique drama of family dysfunction, outsider art, domestic violence, survival, and coffee, with Parker as brittle sister.
Laws of Attraction - Never mind, Parker typecast as crazy rock and roll girl.
The OH in Ohio - Brilliant, how you say, coming with age comedy with help from Danny DeVito and other devices.
Party Girl - Delightful urban coming-of-age comedy in which Parker has an epiphany with the Dewey Decimal System.
Personal Velocity - Three short films of great power, with Parker in the middle as a conflicted editor working through tough father, mother, and other issues.
Scream 3 - Never mind, Parker typecast as superficial Courtney Cox wannabe.
Superman Returns - Disappointing in so many ways, even Kevin Spacey's Lex Luther with Parker as sidekick can't salvage it.
Waiting for Guffman - Forgetable, forgotten.
You've Got Mail - Never mind, Parker typecast as teddy-bear Tom's evil girlfriend and foil for good-girl Meg.

There's even a decent interview with her in the current issue of Bust, in which she says "Hi" to the man staring at her in the restaurant, and gives the following enlightened answer to the age-old professional woman question of whether she wants to have kids: "If it happens, it happens. I just want to have interesting experiences."

STRIKE

A writer friend has brought up a subject I haven't heard mentioned in a long time. I also haven't read Harper's in a long time, so maybe it's just my being out of touch. And to many people just the words general strike sound very Sixties French New Left. Anyway who has the time? Who hasn't bought into the the neofascist security state, if only by silent submission? Can they send all of us to Guantanamo?

If someone were to suggest, for example, that we begin a general strike on Election Day, November 6, 2007, for the sole purpose of removing this regime from power, how readily and with what well-practiced assurance would you find yourself producing the words “It won’t do any good”? (Garret Keizer, Harper's, October 2007)

Correct me if I'm wrong, history geeks, but my understanding is that groups of people go on strike when they are excluded from other means of influencing policy, either public or private. When workers have no leverage because their interests are not represented, when prisoners are silenced or otherwise treated as objects, or when students without rights are herded like livestock through the diploma mill. Everyone can draw their own conclusions about whether voters fall into that category.

An Election Day general strike would set our remembrance of those people free from the sarcophagi of rhetoric and rationalization. It would be the political equivalent of raising them from the dead. It would be a clear if sadly delayed message of solidarity to those voters in Ohio and Florida who were pretty much told they could drop dead. (Keizer)

Tell me to get over it, but is anyone really convinced that the electoral process was served in Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004? And remind me again how it helps the general public to accept unquestioningly the results of a rigged election. (Chorus offstage: It's a terrible system and far better than European multiparty chaos or any other current system. It isn't perfect, but it's stable, and changing the election process would be too disruptive. Elections and the illusion of majority rule have always been corrupted by money and influence, so how is this any different?)

But we don’t have to do it, you will say, because “we have a process.” Have or had, the verb remains tentative. In regard to verbs, Dick Cheney showed his superlative talent for le mot juste when in the halls of the U.S. Congress he told Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy to go fuck himself. He has since told congressional investigators to do the same thing. There’s your process. (Keizer)

Maybe what I should do it let other's make their case. Here are some other voices on this issue

My frustration shows whenever I speak about this maimed democracy, as it did the other night in an otherwise calm conversation about the ghost of stolen elections past. I think what is most damaging is the complicity of the losing parties - both the political party that loses the election and the voters who vote against their own interests, e.g. tax cuts for the wealthy - in this perversion of "free elections."

Grant me the energy to do what I can do, the serenity to sleep at night when it doesn't work, and the wisdom to wake up and smell the coffee. Or something like that.

lies, falsehoods, prevarication

Smells just as foul by any other name.

We are all capable of halting and even reversing the aging process. Exercise in general, and strength training in particular, has been scientifically proven to help achieve such results. In this seminar, participants will learn the basics of designing and performing an overall exercise program, with an emphasis on strength training; there will be an overview of major muscle groups of the body. With the fitness skills and nutritional guidelines taught, participants will learn how to condition themselves so that they can live each day as though they were 10 or 20 years younger.
(promotional blurb for a well-intentioned, deceptive, manipulative corporate program [my emphasis])

Did you know that aging can be stopped or reversed? It's been scientifically proven! Don't believe me? Just ask an ignorant hack writer of PR blurbs for the benevolent, altruistic, worker-friendly corporate program. Conclusion: If I join the program, I won't get any older; if I join it wholeheartedly, I'll get younger. All this plus an overview of major muscle groups! I (heart) corporation.

The Prophet Clint Eastwood sayeth: Some people believe you should exercise less as you get older, but you should exercise more. I subscribe to that belief. I also believe that one must exercise more carefully, more mindfully, i.e. more responsibly as the years go by. But Clint doesn't claim that exercising more will make you less old, that time and its physiological effects magically shift backward. The Prophet Clint doesn't think we're all idiots.

So where does a person find reliable information? TV, of course, where the totally truthful drug ads tell you to "Ask your doctor whether red Lebanese hash is right for your unexplained sensations, the urge to move, or other disturbing symptoms of RLS (gasp!)." One of these days I'm going to put my restless leg through the TV screen.

Which reminds me of the Gestalt therapist Fritz Perls, who said (or is said to have said), "Half of what people say is lies, and the other half is bullshit." Unless it's the kinder, gentler department of human skill-sets, which always tells the truth.

Paradise

Donald Barthelme, may he rest in something akin to joy with a sharp edge of erotic tension, if not in peace, wrote some remarkable pieces of fiction, mainly during the seventies and eighties I think. Now that he has left this earthly plane, he will presumably write no more amazing literary morsels for his readers to savor, but they are in print, thank you Gutenburg, so that's something.

I've read most of his books - Barthelme, not Gutenburg - novels and short stories I guess you would call them, though they don't follow the usual narrative conventions - and they seldom fail to surprise, provoke, and entertain. I laughed, I cried, I reflected, he shot himself.

Why I missed this one (1986) I have no idea, but there it was on the shelf at the public library, where I was looking for something by John Barth, whom I discovered about the same point in my disjointed cut-and-paste undergraduate years. Did I read a review? Did someone hand me a copy and say you gotta read this? Snow White was my first encounter with Barthelme, and it was hilariously freaking absurdly beautiful in an archetypally tragic and tubular way. Then, as now, I wished I could write like him. To wit:

Q: What did you do, after work, in the evenings or on weekend, in Philadelphia?
A: Just ordinary things.
Q: No special interests?
A: I was very interested in bow-hunting. These new bows they have now, what they call a compound bow - Also, I'm a member of the Galapagos Society, we work for the environment, it's really a very effective -
Q: And what else?
A: Well, adultery. I would say that's how I spent most of my free time. In adultery.
Q: You mean regular adultery.
A: Yes. Sleeping with people although legally bound to someone else.
Q: These were women.
A: Invariably.
.... [something about a haircutter]
A: What if she stabs me in the ear with the scissors?
Q: Unlikely, I would think.
A: Stabs me in the ear with the scissors in an excess of rage?
Q: Your guilt. I recognize it. Clearly, guilt.
A: Nonsense. The prudent man guards his eardrums. The prudent man avoid anomalous circumstances.
Q: You regard yourself as prudent.
A: I regard myself as asleep. I go along, things happen to me, there are disturbances, one copes, thinking of the golden pillow, I don't mean literally golden but golden in my esteem -
Q: Let me play this track here for you, it's by Echo and the Bunnymen -
A: I'll pass.
Q: I also have a video of the Tet offensive with Walter Cronkite...
(Donald Barthelme, Paradise, NY: Putnam, 1986, p. 47)

Sorry, that was a bit on the long side, but you get the idea. Or not. I'm not going to try to unpack it because the packaging is already so well done. I'll do what D.H. Lawrence did in his essays about Hawthorne and Melville, which was essentially to let them write it for him, which he did brilliantly of course.

Veronica told him that she had flunked Freshman English 1303 three times. "How in the world did you do that?" he asked. "Comma splices," she said. "Also every time I wrote down something I thought, the small-section teacher said that it was banal. It probably was banal." [....] "We all went through this," he told them, and Dore said, "Yeah, and you smart guys did the Vietnam war." Simon had opposed the Vietnam war in all possible ways short of self-immolation but could not deny that it was a war constructed by people who had labored through Psychology I, II, III, and IV and Main Currents of Western Thought. "But, dummy, it's the only thing you've got," he said. "Your best idea." "I have the highest respect for education," she said. "The highest. I'd be just as dreary when I came out as I was when I went in." (Paradise, p. 169)

It's like trying to explain a joke, which is always a mistake, for the same reason that Isadora Duncan told the journalist, when asked what the dance means, that if she could tell him what it means, she wouldn't have danced it. Or maybe it was Martha Graham. On the other hand, what good is a review that says, This is a good book, and you should read it? Not much. Is that enough filler between slices of fresh fruit, enough bread to clear the palate before the next sip of wine?

"One day there won't be any wives any more."
"Or husbands either."
"Just free units cruising the surface of the earth. Flying the black flag."
"Something to look forward to."
"Do you really think so?"
"What about the children?"
"Get one and keep it. Keep it for yourself. Hug it and teach it things. Everything you know."
(Paradise, p. 200)

National Corporate Master Appreciation Day

Do you know what today is? It's National Boss Day, aka Kiss-Ass/Brown-Nose/Suck-Up Day, which means it can't be long before National Corporate Master Appreciation Day, and soon after that National CEO-Robber Baron Love-Fest Week, followed by Guantanamo/Abu Ghraib Warden/Guard Adoration Month.

The little spectacle on this cube farm took the form of a contest between departments over who would out-do the other in fawning over their beloved manager, and within the department over which serf could gush the most over how great thou art. Excuse me while I gag on the cake.

Vaccinium macrocarpon

The common cranberry. An Amerikan tradition. A Thanksgiving staple. A group of evergreen dwarf shrubs or trailing vines...found in acidic bogs throughout the cooler parts of the Northern Hemisphere.

When I talked to Jessi Golly two weeks ago on the phone, he had just arrived in Buzzard's Bay, Massachusetts, to begin work on the cranberry harvest. He had given his notice at Forbidden Planet, having made arrangements with his housemate Gabriel to work at the cranberry farm. Gabriel has worked there before so he knows the drill. Thursday was Jessi's last day at the bookstore, and he will have his job back after the cranberry gig, which lasts until just before Thanksgiving.

So on Monday he took the Chinatown Bus to Boston, then the southbound train to Buzzard’s Bay, where Gabriel picked him up in his truck and brought him to the farm. For the next six weeks he has a room in a doublewide, sharing a kitchen and bathroom with five other people, some of whom he already knew from New York.

It was good for me to talk to him after he had arrived and gotten situated. He's an adult, he's been on his own for a few years now, but to me and Gven he's still The Boy. We need to be reassured every now and then that The Boy and The Girl are okay. We appreciate their having their own adventures, and we can even enjoy the ride vicariously sometimes, but it isn't fun to be out of touch for too long.

Zelda came in the door just as I was hanging up the phone with Jessi. I hadn't really seen her in a few days. Monday is receiving day at her bookstore, and she had spent a long day unpacking, sorting, and tracking a shipment of books from the warehouse, making sure everything was there, recording errors and irregularities, like a nonfiction book is recorded as fiction.

There happened to be a lot of errors and irregularities, so sitting in the den with the crickets chirping outside, I learned a lot about the way they handle book shipments, and she is very good at breaking down the process in terms I can understand.

It had been an interesting day for me too, as in the curse “May you live in interesting times.” Work was slow, and office communication has been uneven, shall we say, making for some minor unease and frustration, which I managed to work out of my system with qigong and handstands in the fitness room and a bike ride home.

That night there was a small, peculiar drum circle at the percussion store on High Street, so I also got to indulge in the group therapy of improvising rhythms by wailing on stretched animal skins. You never know who will show up at these things, and this one was mostly old people (meaning anyone born before 1951) plus one hipster with dreadlocks and great chops on hand drums. The guy could really play, and a couple of times we got into a pretty good jam, with him in the lead and me providing mainly bass.

None of which has anything to do with cranberries, except circumstantially, in which case all of the above is closely connected, if only because it all happened to me within a short time-frame in which I was paying attention. This is the metanarrative, where I talk about the way random stuff occurs, and then it occurs to me to write it down.

A few days later Jessi called me at my desk, and I got a lot more information about what he actually does out there on the farm. It's a little more than the grunt labor I had pictured. Some days are long, like 16-18 hours, depending on the size of the order they have to get out. The crew of six does all phases of the process - from bog to bag - harvesting, processing, and packaging, so it's not too monotonous.

Some days they do a wet harvest: flood the field and use a machine that cuts and then pulls the floating berries through a long tube to the conveyor for and processing. Wet berries don't keep well, so this is only done when they are being sold to Ocean Spray for concentrate.

Other days they do a dry harvest, which involves another machine that works like a large self-propelled lawnmower. Someone drives it down the rows of plants, and it cuts berries, separates the stems, and collects the berries in a bag. It's tricky if the ground is uneven.

Another machine screens out the berries that are too small or not ripe. Additional sorting requires people to sit by the conveyor and pick out any remaining substandard berries before they reach the bagging stage. There two people fill up 12-ounce plastic bags, seal them shut, and pack them in boxes. When there are enough boxes filled, they stack them on pallets and load them on the truck for delivery to the buyer.

It's a family farm on Cape Cod that's been doing this for like four generations. It's agriculture. Plant, cultivate, weed, water, worry, harvest, package, sell. It sounds like a great experience, and I think he will learn a lot. When I was talking to Rachel about it during a pause from checking proofs before releasing files to the printer, I saw how Jessi is doing what the motto says is the mission of the college he dropped out of: Learning and Labor.

Go Yeomen!

seven-minute bio

My Wednesday night men's group was given the assignment of presenting a brief biographical sketch. My response was to pile as many details as possible into a small container, shake vigorously, and see what comes out, although I think I went over the seven minute limit. In the interest of reducing, reusing, recycling, and revealing, I reproduce it almost verbatim here.

Born 1951 in a small town in Minnesota. It was the postwar era, I had three older sisters, both my parents had college degrees, and upward mobility was a major theme.

When I was three, we moved across the Mississippi to a larger town in Wisconsin. What I recall most vividly is the house on Market Street, riding my red Schwinn, and walking to Hogan School two blocks away. I remember learning to read and do long division, playing a lot of baseball, basketball, football, and war with the other boys in the neighborhood. The Milwaukee Braves, Minneapolis Lakers, and Green Bay Packers were our teams. In war it was still us versus the Germans. I spent a lot of time alone, and that was fine with me. My parents were a steady presence, and we were a close-knit family.

Grandpa Anderson died in 1960, just before we moved to Detroit, which was a whole new world populated by the Detroit Tigers, Pistons, and Lions, new schools, new friends, reading the Detroit Free Press, and some influential teachers and coaches. I cared about being on the team, getting good grades, getting to know girls; I read a lot of biographies and histories. My brother was born when I was eleven, and I enjoyed having and being a brother.

In 1966 we moved to a more affluent suburb, and I started to learn about wealth and status. I played basketball, found out I liked to write, and got some recognition working on the high school newspaper and then the town newspaper. I liked being known. I found out that having a car was important (this was Detroit in the 1960s) and I liked driving my 1966 Mustang. I also learned about limitations: I wasn't the smartest, coolest, fastest, strongest, or most talented guy around, and I never would be.

I went to school in Ohio for two years and tried to do everything. I was in the Honors College, dorm government, on the track team, intramural sports, into politics, and eventually serious 'partying'. When I transferred to Michigan, I got an apartment with two friends from high school and did more 'partying' than studying - but it was SERIOUS partying. In and out of school for two years, I had very little academic focus, but I did connect with a couple of really interesting women.

I moved to the Upper Peninsula with a friend in 1974, and a whole new adventure began. When not traveling to Texas, Georgia, Indiana, or Florida, I worked in a candle shop and a food coop, drove a school bus, lived in a tent, played ball, played music, and gradually migrated west from Munising to AuTrain to Deerton to Marquette, where Northern Michigan University provided my first exposure to yoga and modern dance - and a couple of really interesting women.

Instead of staying in the UP, I accepted my sister Jo Jo's invitation to go south. I moved to Strawberry Mountain Farm in north Georgia in 1976 and met my future bride. We worked and played for two years among a loosely organized group of people attempting to build a therapeutic community. Helping run health-related workshops with folks from the city gave us a lot of opportunities for gardening, hiking, fun and games, taking care of horses and cows, as well as human interaction, miscommunication, and conflict.

Gven and I moved to Chicago for a year, where I met an important teacher and started to study taiji. Gven made a lot of friends working at a great restaurant called the Heartland Cafe, and I worked first for a weekly newspaper and then for the phone company. We made good use of the resources of city life: museums, libraries, restaurants, theater, music, and public transporation. That December we returned to Atlanta to get married. We initially moved to Ithaca, New York, where we met a very good teacher, and almost went to school at SUNY Cortland, but changed our minds and landed in Oberlin.

We spent two years in Oberlin, where I met another important teacher and learned a little about philosophy and its relation to everything. I learned more taiji and got the chance to coach both basketball and track as a student assistant. I also had a nice job writing for the faculty-staff newspaper and learned a little about academic politics. After graduating, I got a one-year job teaching at New Garden Friends School in North Carolina. Shortly before Jessi was born in 1982, we migrated back to Atlanta.

Jessi and Zelda were born in Atlanta 20 months apart. We lived in three different houses in three different neighborhoods. I worked for a carpenter, a psychologist, a retail nursery, a landscaper, and a tree-planting crew. I taught taiji at Emory, Clayton, Georgia State, and a dance studio. When I got a paper published, we decided it was time for graduate school, so we moved back to Ohio. The kids were toddlers.

At Ohio State I connected with a couple of influential teachers and learned a little more about philosophy, history, literature, language, research, writing, and more taiji. I also connected with a couple of peers in a drinking and discussion group we called the Physical Club after our heroes William James, C.S. Peirce, and their friends, the original pragmatists, who called themselves (tongue in cheek) the Metaphysical Club. Gven went to massage school and had a thriving practice in Grandview. The kids were starting school, playing soccer, and making friends.

When I graduated, we went to south Alabama for a one-year teaching job that didn't work out. We moved back to Ohio, this time to Clintonville, where the kids made new friends in a new school and started to discover their own gifts. I worked here and there doing landscaping, baking bread, doing I Ching readings on the psychic hotline, teaching ethics and critical thinking at a community college. Freelance copyediting for SUNY Press helped me get into textbook editing at LDA, which helped me get into production editing at Megacorporate Publishing, where I've been for almost eight years.

Jessi and Zelda grew up in central swingstate and went through pretty good public schools. I was able to be present in their soccer teams, coach their basketball teams, scream my head off watching Jessi run track and cross country, go to Zelda's band concerts, and witness their friendships, adolescent struggles, and college transitions. Gven and I moved to a smaller house in Methodistville, and now the kids are grown, mostly on their own, but still very much part of our lives.

(That's over the seven-minute limit, but it's hard to decide what to leave out. It's also hard to tell what larger truth, if any, emerges, aside from the obvious horizontal mobility.)

Contemporaryfictiongurl

Look! Up in the sky! Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's Contemporaryfictiongurl!

It's late September and cool in the morning. I walk around and check the pepper plants, which are starting to ripen, and pick a handful of cherry tomatoes.

I sat out on the patio and read a couple chapters of Snow Crash while I ate my fried egg sandwich with a second cup of coffee. A hacker named Hiro Protagonist is hot on the trail of a neurolinguistic conspiracy to reverse the Tower of Babel story by reprogramming everyone to speak in tongues. Some would call it "science fiction" because that's the section where it is shelved in the bookstore. Others would call it "cyberpunk" because that's the subgenre where its fans say it fits like a nanotechnological glove. I'm just looking for a live story.

This is the suburbs. Name's Sven Golly. I'm an editor.

After breakfast I mixed some dry yeast with warm water and sugar, let it sit, added flour, and set the bowl of whole wheat sponge out in the sun to grow into dough. Then I started a second batch, pouring sourdough starter into a bowl, adding a little oil and water, some flour, and setting it in the sun to encourage select microorganisms to propagate and grow in that nutritious, moist medium and carry their informational structure into their organic environment. A culture spreads in a community; software informs and instructs hardware; viruses attach themselves to a habitable medium and change it.

I hear a dog's sharp bark down the block and look around for Dali. A minute ago she was chasing a squirrel up a tree, but I don't see her anywhere in the yard. She isn't napping in her usual chair in the house, so I worry. Did I leave a gate open? I walk to the corner, where some new neighbors, Rita and Dennis, are sitting in lawn chairs having a yard sale. "Nice bike. You haven't seen a little spotted dog, have you?" No, they haven't, and the barking is their golden retriever. I hadn't even noticed their moving in (this week?), or Brian's moving out (last week?), or the for-sale sign being taken down. That's how disconnected I am from my immediate environment.

Is there a story here? Can one be crafted from the scant material available? Does the mind make one up anyway, filling in the missing facts as needed to make sense of it all? I decide to check one more place, and Dali is found whimpering in the upstairs bedroom where she has locked herself in. Mystery solved.

I decide to pickle some cherry tomatoes in a sealed jar of saltwater and see how they react. It works with peppers, why not tomatoes?

Something purple has dripped on the pale pink ceramic tiles of the patio table, staining it in irregular blotches. A few little bundles of brown pine needles mixed in, smearing the purple pigment. Some kind of berries? Bird poop from the overhanging maple tree? One perfectly radiating purple splatter looks like photos of solar flares leaping from the surface of the sun, or Jackson Pollack's careful randomness, or an ink blot on paper.

Zelda wants me to read The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. I don't know why, but she thinks I'd like it. I saw a copy of it lying on the floor of her room. She declared her intention yesterday to read a "classic" once a month to make up for the many great books that weren't assigned while she was in school. I had to ask what defines 'classic', and for her purposes it's canonical literature - Beowulf, Dickens, Hemingway. I think she knows what she's doing: she calls herself a "contemporary fiction girl." She wants to broaden her knowledge base, and she's in a good position to do it now.

When I found the dog up in Zelda's room, there was stuff all over the place: clothes, art books, paperbacks, cigarettes, empty cups and glasses. Yet I sense an orderly, self-contained fermentation taking place in that warm space.

Terra Cotta

They call it Mabon in the Old Religion, aka Autumnal Equinox in the Latin updated postpagan cooptation, or the First Day of Fall in good old Amerikan. Whichever way you slice it, something is Turning. I'm told that Yom Kippur, at least in part, is about turning away from something and toward toward something else. People ritually look at what is left behind and what is ahead. So I'm told.

At this point in my life, it's important for me to take stock, assess the damage, and prepare to move forward and make the same mistakes all over again. I figure you can either have the life you want (cake) or share it with someone (eat it). It's at times like this that I like to stop and take a moment to defoliate the roses.

To celebrate the Turning of the Seasons, Gven Golly and I floated the blue canoe out on Hoover Reservoir for the last couple of hours of daylight, paddled across to the east shore, up to the Sunbury Road bridge, and back down the west shore. Almost no wind and not much boat activity, a couple of pontoon boats, a small sailboat, and a few little motorboats making a mild wake. When it got dark, we went to Old Bag of Nails for a Guinness and some fish and chips.

Up to that point, it was a cloudless late summer day in the back yard working with terra cotta tiles, re-doing the walkway that leads from the gate to the patio. The patio itself is finished, at least for this year, but the walkway was in bad shape.

It was the day of the Michigan game in ought-three that I bent the formerly straight walkway to angle in toward the middle of the patio so it would be more like entering a room. My craftsmanship was somewhat less than permanent, so here I am again, shoring up the sides, smoothing out the sand and gravel, placing earthen pavers about the size of a brick but thinner a little tighter and a little flatter - for a while.

We didn't have the bonfire I'd had in mind, and we didn't drink mead and dance and drum. I did remember to plant four bulbs in a little planter box to see if they bloom. Then I planted several tiny garlic cloves in the garden under the moonlight, hoping some kind of magic happens and plants come up next spring. It's all pretty unsystematic, so who knows.

Winterizing

It's not a rational thing at all, like checking things off a to-do list. It's more like a Jack London tribal wheel turning in the base of my skull and making me put on wool socks. Like a goose flying south, all it takes is a little nip in the air for me to hunker down, prepare my cave for winter, and start laying in the firewood. That's not quite true. It takes a village, or at least a neighbor who has a tree service come and take down a big silver maple in their back yard so I can pick up the pieces.

We woke up to the sound of chainsaws on Labor Day, and their giant chipper was right there, and I didn't want to see good firewood turned into mulch, so I asked the boss, and he said, "Take what you want," so I made several trips across the street with the wheelbarrow with whatever I could lift. I figure it's around a cord. Now, will it dry in time to burn this winter, or will it have to wait until next year?

A few days later, my friend Jim spotted a pile of cut-down trees while running in the the woods near the Sanctified Brethren campus. Being a stand-up guy, Jim went to the source and asked the college grounds crew if those trees were spoken for, and they said, "Take what you want," so Jim led me to the spot and we loaded whatever we could lift in the truck. I figure it's another cord or so.

One thing leads to another. I didn't take the truck to Michigan, because Gven's car gets better mileage, and I saved about a tank of gas by driving her Accord. But as luck would have it, the truck got a flat right-front tire my first day back, and long story short, I went tire shopping the following Saturday. Discount Tire on route 23 had a good deal, so I had them replace both front tires in time to go home and listen to the football game on the radio.

In the meantime, I had an hour to kill, so I walked across route 23 to Meijer, where I'd heard they have Converse All-Stars, and my old ones are falling apart. To my surprise, they had black high-tops in my size (25 percent off!), so I decided to replace both shoes at once. I know, last of the big spenders.

That little episode made me think about the fall of 1975, when I was living in the Upper Peninsula and my beloved, neglected 1966 Mustang was breaking down. I drove it to the shop in Marquette, but because I was short on cash, I decided not to have the work done and bought a new pair of Chuck Taylors instead. Watershed moment. The Mustang sat outside the cabin in Deerton all winter while I hitched rides to and from Marquette. I sold the Mustang to a student the following spring just before hitching to Georgia.

But I digress. I've been breaking in the new Chucks this weekend, but this morning's primitive sense memory said, "Wear boots," so I put on the old brown Rockports I got at Galyan's (50 percent off!) with a gift certificate given me by a group of dear students. They looked pretty sad this morning - the boots, not the students - so I cleaned them up with saddle soap and rubbed neatsfoot oil into every crease, crack, and seam. Now they're as good as new - better in fact - and I have no doubt they will get me through another winter.

A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

That's the subtitle. The title is The Diamond Age. It's my first exposure to Neal Stephenson's work. I think it was the dialog that first hooked me in this book.

"Well done, Hackworth! But must know that the model to which you allude did not long survive the first Victoria."
"We have outgrown much of the ignorance and resolved many of the internal contradictions that characterised that era."
"Have we, then? How reassuring. And have we resolved them in a way that will ensure that all of those children down there live intresting lives?"
"I must confess that I am too slow to follow you."
"You yourself said that the engineers in the Bespoke department - the very best - had led interesting lives, rather than coming from the straight and narrow. Which implies a correlation, does it not?"
"Clearly."
"This implies, does it not, that in order to raise a generation of children who can reach their full potential, we must find a way to make their lives interesting. And the question I have for you, Mr. Hackworth, is this: Do you think that our schools accomplish that? (Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age, NY: Bantam, 1995, p. 20)

The violence didn't shock me too much, although it wasn't what I'd expected. The nanotechnological future, like any good science fiction, seemed plausible enough to at least see where it was leading. But I need character(s), and Stephenson is very good with character(s). The engineer Hackworth and his boss, the Equity Lord Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw, seem to hit it off despite their different stations in life, and they develop a quasi-business relationship that sets in motion some far-reaching effects having to do with a new kind of book.

The new kind of book Hackworth has designed is stolen by street thugs who don't know the value of such things, so it falls into the hands of the younger sister of one of the abused urchins, a girl named Nell. And a couple hundred pages went by without marking any particularly illuminating passages, probably because I was getting to know Nell and her unfortunate brother Harv, her school friends Fiona and Elizabeth, their sadistic teacher Miss Stricken, the workings of Castle Turing, the professional ractor and narrative catalyst Miranda, and her brilliant agent Carl Hollywood, not to mention the venerable Judge Chang and his adversary Dr. X!

"The Vickys have an elaborate code of morals and conduct. It grew out of the moral squalor of an earlier generation, just as the original Victorians were preceded by the Georgians and the Regency. The old guard believe in that code because they came to it the hard way. They raise their children to believe in that code - but their children believe it for entirely different reasons."
"They believe it," the Constable said, "because they have been indoctrinated to believe it."
"Yes. Some of them never challenge it - they grow up to be small-minded people, who can tell you what they believe but not why they believe it. Others become disillussioned by the hypocrisy of the society and rebel - as did Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw."
"Which path do you intend to take, Nell?" said the Constable, sounding very interested. "Conformity of rebellion?"
"Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded - they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity."
(Stephenson, p. 323)

Touche. If this novel has a weakness (and it does), it is that too many of the characters appear and disappear, never to be heard from again. Too much like real life. I'd like to know what became of them after they served their narrative purpose in helping propel the heroine Nell forward in her quest, but that's because I'm an old-fashioned romantic in the postmodern landscape of the Coastal Territories under seige by the Harmonious Fists of the Celestial Kingdom. So there are discontinuities, but it's worth it for the ride.

"Are you of it? Or just in it?" the Clown said, and looked at Hackworth expectantly.
As soon as Hackworth had realized, quite some time ago, that this Dramatis Personae thing was going to be some kind of participatory theatre, he had been dreading this moment: his first cue. "Please excuse me," he said in a tense and not altogether steady voice, "this is not my milieu."
"That's for damn fucking sure," said the Clown. "Put these on," he continued, taking something out of his pocket.... Hackworth realized that the clown was mechanical. "Put 'em on and be yourself, mister alienated loner steppernwolf bemused distant meta-izing technocrat rationalist fucking shithead."
(Stephenson, p. 379)

Needless to say, the wild comic adventure story is also thought-provoking and worrisome, if you think about the shifting economic powers that are jockeying for dominance in Asia, Europe, and Anglo-America. I think I'll read either Snow Crash or The Big U next and see how they compare.

Michigan seems like a dream to me now

"It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw, I've gone to look for America." (Paul Simon, Bookends) Whatever you picture ahead of time, it will turn out to be something different, so I'm not sure what to expect. My friend Jonathan used to say it's best to expect the worst, then you won't be disappointed. Yet somehow the mind conjures images of what it wants to happen.

My parents bought a small lot in a kind of recreational/residential development in the northern part of the Lower Peninsula. This was back in the early eighties, when they still lived in Detroit. We went up there with them to go cross-country skiing once before we had kids. Mom and Dad like it where they are in Tennessee and haven't looked back. So there's this plot of land that might be useful to someone, and I'm curious.

I loaded a backpack, a tent, a sleeping bag, a bike, and a bag of food in Gven Golly's Honda and drove north on Friday morning. Past Delaware, Marion, Findlay, Perrysburg, Toledo, Blissfield, Milan, Ypsilanti, South Lyon, Brighton. It started to rain as I ate lunch at the rest stop off US-23 outside Fenton. Past Flint, Saginaw, the Zilwaukee Bridge, Pinconning, West Branch, Houghton Lake, Higgins Lake, Roscommon, Grayling, and off I-75 at Waters.

The weather changes drastically en route, from warm to hot to overcast to wind to rain to downpour to clear to cool and back to warm. The landscape changes from flat farmland to rolling hills to industrial cities to wooded marsh to pine forest to swamp to wooded hills to sandy ridges with lots of smooth stones.

I find the development and go directly to Lot 1000. It has grown up some since I was last here, with bigger trees and more groundcover. There are a few maples, some wild cherry, and lots of poplars. There is a neighbor on the left with a house, garage, driveway, and toolshed. On the way in I saw a few log cabins, A-frames, ranch houses, and faux chalets widely spaced along the three or four paved main roads and branching gravel roads. I threaded my way up to the campground and picked a site under some trees. The forecast called for storms and high winds, and it started to rain while I was setting up the tent, but nothing much got wet. I ate some rice and beans, read a little, and slept reasonably well on the ground.

"Pass me a cigarette, I think there's one in my raincoat. We smoked the last one an hour ago."

Saturday morning I looked at some maps and planned my itinerary: check out Lake Harold, the clubhouse, the riding stable, the sales office; find out about property lines and building restrictions; get the lay of the land. The folks at the sales office/airstrip were friendly and helpful. A small plane took off while I was there. Armed with more maps, I settled in at the golf course restaurant with a veggie omelet and coffee to fortify me for a day of exploring. Golfers coming in for lunch watched the Michigan State game on the tube. I'm hearing the Michigan accent and feeling the temperature change on a cool, clear day. I'm taking in the landscape of logged-over plains where you can see hundreds of stump remains from turn-of-the-century giants.

"So we bought a pack of cigarettes, she read her magazine, and the moon rose over an open field."

Pencil Lake was a major bright spot. Completely surrounded by woods, it has a few houses near it but none right on it. There is a tiny beach, and no one was there, so I went for a swim. The water was clean, the bottom was sandy, and there's a little raft you can swim out to. Nice. Off to the side is a little cove with a boat launch, but no motors, only rowboats and canoes. I like this place, but it's two miles from Lot 1000, so I wonder: would we use it?

Feeling refreshed, I return to the campground and go for a bike ride while it's still light out. The hills are moderate enough for easy cycling, and if you go out Pencil Lake Road and take a left, you go up a hill to the Winter Sports place, where they have cross-country ski trails and an ice skating rink. But would we go there in the winter?

This time I built a fire at my campsite, so I had something to do in the evening besides eat and read. No rain tonight, but I happened to look up between the trees and saw about a million stars. No kidding, the sky was full of stars. Okay, I probably don't get out of town enough, so the night sky up north was really amazing, and just looking up for half an hour, seeing the Milky Way encircle the Earth, was worth the trip.

The ride back to Ohio on Sunday was an emotional roller-coaster. I'd accomplished about all I could for the time being, but I hadn't reached any conclusions. I found a great spot for a workout, however, under a beautiful scotch pine at a rest stop off I-75. I took the M-14 exit into Ann Arbor on a lark and meandered down State Street until I found a parking place by Pizza Bob's. (It's still there!) Fearing my bike would be stolen if I left it on the car, I decided to ride around instead of walk around: east on Hill, north on Forest, east on South University, north on Walnut, and east on Geddes to the Arboretum, where I locked it and walked a little. Then north on Observtory, west on Ann, north on Ingalls, and west on Kingsley, where I found my old house (which is now a coop), south on Thayer to the Bell Tower Hotel, where I used to work (still there but now very upscale), and around the corner to Moe's Sport Shop, where I also worked for a while. (Bud Sr. wasn't there, but Bud Jr. was, and I bought a baseball cap.)

I probably should have gotten coffee before leaving town, because the next hundred miles took me through the melancholy of missed opportunities and things left undone in the distant past before I left Ann Arbor for the UP and left the UP for Georgia, when everything changed. So I stopped for some really really bad coffee in Findlay, and things (that is, my attitude) got better as soon as I turned off the main highway to go south on route 68 through Dunkirk, Kenton, and Bellefontaine, listening to Jessi's mix tape, including "Frozen Lake" and other songs of hope and possibility through shared action.

It only took two tanks of gas, and I saw a lot in a couple of days, but I still don't know if it makes rational sense to maintain a place in Michigan. At least now I have some firsthand data and a bunch of smooth stones on which to base my indecision.

Oak trees, sisters, rain, photographs, fish

A few days ago, Gven Golly and I put some miles on her Honda named 'Olive' and got together with some important people in our lives, so our long weekend trip deserves to be chronicled.

At Charlie and Helen's

We got to the Cumberland Plateau and Fairfield Glade, where my parents live, in time for supper. While Mom cooked, Dad took Gven and me on a tour of their neighbors' home renovations, where he has scavenged a lot of lumber that otherwise would have gone to some landfill. Charlie is resourceful that way, and he is careful to check with the contractor first. If they're throwing stuff away, he saves them the trouble. Then he showed us the basement floor he has constructed entirely of 2x10s, 2x8s, 2x6s, and 2x4s left by the builders. It's quite a piece of work.

We enjoyed a nice dinner of pork, rice, and broccoli, went out for frozen custard dessert, and talked about this and that. Mom and Dad are going to Seattle in September for a reunion with Dad's sisters. We brought along a few of our family photos for Aunt Marilyn to include in the updated edition of the Golly family genealogy. Charlie's two brothers are both dead now, and his three sisters all live on the West Coast (Washington, Oregon, California).

We also talked about a piece of property in the northern Lower Peninsula, near the tip of the pinkie, that Mom and Dad have held onto for quite a few years without building on it. I'm planning to go up there soon to check it out and see what's what. So if you don't hear from me for awhile, it's because I headed up the country and pitched my tent at Lot 1000, Manistee Heights.

At the Oarhouse

It rained that night good and steady, but it was a pretty morning's drive across southeast Tennessee and north Georgia to Dahlonega and the picturesque site of the restaurant beside the river (Oostanaula?) where we held Gven's mother's 75th birthday party. It's called 'the Oarhouse' because its right on the river, not 'the Orehouse' because Dahlonega was the site of a gold rush in the 1820s, and not 'the Whorehouse' just because.

The whole gang was there: the three sisters and their husbands, three of the five grandchildren, two great-grandchildren, a grandson-in-law, a grandboyfriend-in-law, and even an ex-husband. Sharon had her video camera going almost continuously, and several other cameras were roaming the room recording the moment. One-year-old Chase was the star. Happy birthday, Nancy.

We feasted on another fabulous meal (I recommend the salmon) and a chocolate mousse cake made by the grandson-in-law chef from Macon, then regrouped at my sister-in-law's house outside Cumming. Some of us watched Warner-Robins, Georgia, defeat Lubbock, Texas, in the Little League World Series.

We checked on the progress of Nancy's newly constructed apartment on the ground floor of her youngest daughter's house, and it looks great. Then it rained pretty hard, which was welcome in that parched part of the country, and after a minor bit of miscommunication, Gven and I went on down Georgia 400 to my sister's new place in the city.

At Jo Jo's

I had never been to her condo around the corner from the Emory campus, but the neighborhood is familiar, and it seems like a good fit. Jo Jo and her husband Burt now live in separate houses, and it seems to be working out well. She made Gven and me comfortable in her spare bedroom and made blueberry pancakes in the morning. We talked about her job in the Ethnic Studies Program at Emory, my job at Publishing Conglomerate, and the politics of language, a subject we always seem to find our way back to.

Our Sunday itinerary took us over to the old house on Haygood Drive, where we picked up Burt, and into Decatur, where we visited Jessi's birthplace and Oakhurst Community Garden. Someone has put a lot of work into turning a vacant lot into a great big garden. We managed to kill an hour (or two?) cruising Candler Park and Little Five Points, finally stopping for lunch at Grandma Luke's on Euclid (the hummus is excellent) before finally making our way to the High Museum in Midtown.

As soon as we got there, it started raining buckets, so we got a little wet between the garage and the entrance. No matter. We had all the time we needed in the Annie Liebovitz portrait exhibit; the images of William Burroughs, Lance Armstrong, Johnny Cash and family, and Cindy Crawford were well worth it. That night we went to Top Spice, a Thai/Polynesian restaurant in Toco Hills, where the Tiger beer and Thai catfish are out of sight.

With very little pomp and ceremony, that was our celebration of Jo Jo's fifth time around the calendar of 12 lunar new years, the birthday where a mature person has experienced all the astrological animals in all five elements. Not that anyone we know is mythically inclined enough to dwell on the transformative power of living in a garden among giant trees, little potted plants, feeding the birds on the balcony, and nurturing the souls of visiting friends. Happy birthday, Jo Jo.

There and back again

Remember the John Prine song "Illegal Smile"?

Woke up this morning, things were lookin' bad,
seemed like total silence was the only friend I had.
Bowl of oatmeal tried to stare me down and won,
and it was twelve o'clock before I realized I was havin' no fun.
Ah, but fortunately I had the key to escape reality.

A bicycle! It was more like 5:00 p.m. and I wasn't getting anything done OR having fun, so I decided to try to salvage the day before it completely drained away. I had a video to return, and getting on the bike immediately felt like the right medicine for my condition, so I headed southwest in the bike lane for some Schrock Road therapy.

It takes about half an hour to get to the New New England Library; it didn't matter that it was closed on Sunday; I dropped the video in the slot, considered a longer ride, and pointed myself toward Tucker Drive. My friend/mentor Janet told me about this hidden gem of a street tucked away behind Thomas High School, a quiet half-mile of architectural good taste that leads directly to the Olentangy bike trail.

Where I turned south on a whim and went back in time. Rolling past Thomas down to Antrim Lake and beyond was revisiting my old stomping grounds. Where MacKenzie and I used to take a long run every Sunday. Where Jessi and I did our first runs together. Where he trained like a madman for three years of high school competition.

Crossing into Whetstone Park was revisiting the scene of almost daily running or cycling, many track and cross country meets, soccer practices, dog walking, taiji classes, almost an extension of the back yard up the street before it was bulldozed. But the park remains almost unchanged, thank goodness, except for an amazing wildflower prairie of tall black-eyed susans down by the river just above Northmoor.

Crossing Broadway into the other half of Clintonville, the landscape was almost as familiar, and I even recognized one of the walkers, a young mother who used to come to my class on and off a couple of years ago and is now walking her growing boy on the trail. Although I was an hour out, I couldn't stop. Crossing the bridge and passing the University wetland, I saw the sky darkening to the southwest and against all reason kept going into Tuttle Park, where there's a convenient loop to turn around.

An out-and-back is like that. According to MacKenzie's Laws, you have to gauge the time, the wind, and the distance ahead of time, and then take your chances. As luck would have it, the rain started just as I reached my turnaround, so I sought shelter under some trees beside the rec. center and waited.

Half and hour later, the rain was looking like a steady downpour, so I (reasonably) called Gven Golly on my cell. She was home, not terribly busy, and said she would be there shortly with the pickup truck. Five minutes later, as luck would have it, the rain stopped, so I called her again. She had only gotten a couple of blocks from home, so I said never mind, I'd rather ride home, but thanks anyway. To ask to be rescued and then not need it was less humiliating than actually being rescued.

The ride home was a breeze, except for the inevitable mud spattered on my butt by a wet rear wheel. There weren't as many people on the trail or in the park, and I couldn't take the corners as fast, but a few hardy souls were still out there, and I was glad to be one of them. Because I took it slow, I never hit the aerobic wall, even coming up the hill toward High Street on Wilson Bridge Road. I had just enough daylight and energy to cruise the last couple of miles on almost-deserted roads and roll into Methodistville in time for dinner.

So, what's this little allegory all about? Nothing very subtle. I'm very attached to my tenuous hold on the physical mobility I discovered at about age nine, and it's hard to let go of, given the probability of flat tires, sprained knees, and cardiovascular decline. In the meantime, it's fun to push the envelope just a little.

Wicca-pedia

If you've ever heard Margot Adler on National Public Radio, you know she's a skilled radio news reporter. She also happens to be the granddaughter of the pioneering psychologist Alfred Adler, a less famous contemporary of Freud and Jung. I ran across her book Drawing Down the Moon (NY: Penguin, 1986/2006) because it was on a minister friend's recommended reading list. At first I was just curious, then astounded by her erudition, critical questioning, reasonableness, and fairness. If you have even the remotest interest in what is sometimes called "Earth-centered spirituality," this book has something for you. To wit:

James Hillman’s essay “Psychology: Monotheistic or Polytheistic”....said that psychology had long been colored by a theology of monotheism, especially in its view that unity, integration, wholeness, is always the proper goal of psychological development and that fragmentation is always a sign of pathology....Carrying this idea to the extreme, Hillman suggested that the multitude of tongues in Babel, traditionally interpreted as a “decline,” could also be seen as a true picture of psychic reality. (p. 28)

I remember once at a yoga retreat in north Georgia, it was Sunday afternoon and everybody was feeling good, the event was winding down, and someone was playing a guitar and singing "We are one, we are one," and my friend Alex turned and quietly said, "No, we're not." There is a giant prejudice in Amerikan culture toward unification, standardization, and monoculture, with a concomitant fear of pluralism, differences, and multiple anything (species, languages, religions, sexual orientations, ethnicities, narratives, histories, deities). E Pluribus Unum maybe should be E Unibus Plurum.

Here's another excerpt that might (or might not) make sense in this context:

Often our conceptions of psychic reality and the magical techniques we might use are simply a function of the particular culture we live in. Robert Wilson humorously observes:

Modern psychology has rediscovered and empirically demonstrated the universal truth of the Buddhist axiom that phenomena adjust themselves to the perceiver....The fairy-folk are like that. They come on as Holy Virgins to the Catholics, dead relatives to the spiritualist, UFOs to the Sci-Fi fans, Men in Black to the paranoids, demons to the masochistic, divine lovers to the sensual, pure concepts to the logicians, clowns from the heavenly circus to the humorist, psychotic episodes to the psychiatrist, Higher Intelligences to the philosopher, number and paradox to the mathematician and epistemologist. (p. 161)

Maybe I'm just bored with the usual religious vocabulary, but I'm looking forward to learning more about this kind of thing. I'm sure there are plenty of unreliable sources, wacko practices, and people I don't want to associate with, but I have a feeling there might be some interesting folks out there on the fringes.

No, thank YOU

It was the most ordinary of days. I was pulling weeds, mainly to have something green to put on top of the newspaper laid on top of the week's compost. Weeds, compost, newspaper...it's all about layering.

Zelda came out to ask me some questions about her car. Jiffi-Lube had changed the oil but not topped-off all the fluids, as she had expected, and told her she needed a new battery, but she was skeptical. We took a look, and her Focus clearly needed coolant and transmission fluid. We had just enough of the latter in the garage to fill it to the 'full' line. She looked up 'coolant' in the owner's manual and asked me to go to Advance Auto with her.

Are you kidding? Of course I'll go.

We hop in her car and drive the mile down State Street while she tells me about seeing a former co-worker in the art department at Publishing Conglomerate Inc., Paul, who was at her bookstore, Cheap Books, to sell some books and mentioned his brother, Joe, who coached soccer with me when we lived in Grandview and our kids were little. Well, Joe now works at another Cheap Books store near Grandview, where Zelda was helping do inventory for a couple of days last week, so she talked to Joe (who says hi) and learned that his son Cole, who was a good friend of Jessi's in second grade, is now going to school at CCAD.

All this in like two minutes.

The service guy at Advance Auto was very helpful. Zelda ask him about coolant, and we quickly figured out that we didn't need Polykryptonite Zirkon-encrusted Special Coolant, we needed regular coolant.

Then we looked at batteries and compared the Silver 3-year warranty $75.00 battery and the Blue 2-year warranty $59.95 battery, but the service guy offered to test her battery for free. "It will take two minutes." He wheeled the machine out to the parking lot, right next to where Smackie's Barbecue was feeding the throngs of people in black tee-shirts out to ogle the customized motorcycles and classic cars on an August afternoon in Methodistville.

Turns out her battery is fine, so for the cost of a gallon of antifreeze Zelda was good to go. However, I got in my Ranger and went directly back to Advance Auto to have my battery tested. (A little back-story: it's been running a little rough, and once last week refused to start while parked in front of Ron Order of the Arrow's house. Ron had jumper cables, and his neighbor gave us a jump, but that gave me a warning.) Service guy's machine told me my battery was "bad" and wasn't holding enough of a charge; there was corrosion on the terminals, and it was probably overworking the alternator. You can use the same machine to test an alternator, but only if you have a good battery, so first things first. I bought a new battery - the cheaper one - and service guy installed it on the spot.

Was it my imagination, or was the Ranger running a little smoother after starting right up?

Zelda was amused that her car checkup led to my getting a new battery. She was also immpressed with the service guy for answering her questions directly, for treating her as the customer, and for addressing the appropriate information to her, not her old man. I allowed as how he had also treated me with respect, too, instead of patronizing me as some mechanics would.

She went out the back gate to her evening activities and called back to me, "Thanks for helping me today, Dad." You're welcome. Then a hawk flew through a gap in the trees about ten feet above my head and across the back yard to a pine tree.

State Fair 101

Syllabus:

I. Do your chores first, dontchaknow.

A. Bake bread - yeasted and sourdough - oh ya.
B. Take out recycling, trash, compost.
C. Wash dishes, do a load of laundry, water plants.
D. Eat something (e.g., eggs, toast, rice, beans). Keep it simple.

II. Get going by mid-afternoon.

A. Bring water, money, hat, sunglasses.
B. Find free parking on Dora Lane (alley off 17th Ave. and 4th St.) in front of Xenos Christian Fellowship.
C. Find ATM in convenience store, get more money; experience small inner-city, multicultural, bilingual confrontation; awaken to the fact that all adventures involve things going other than as planned.
D. Enter at 17th Ave. gate.

III. Go directly to the sheep barn.

A. Take time to observe things you don't have on your agenda.

1. Sheep: their appearance, habits, character.
2. Sheep owners, handlers, families, judges: their appearance, habits, character.
3. Other fairgoers: their appearance, habits, character.
4. Consider a career as a shepherd.

B. Peruse the raw wool and wool products on display in a side area of the sheep barn.

1. Suggest to spouse that a couple of wool-bearing animals might make a good sideline if/when we move out of town.
2. Receive skeptical response.

IV. Go to the dairy barn.

A. Watch the Jerseys, Guernseys, and Brown Swiss.

1. Remember Ms. Red, our cow at Strawberry Mountain Farm in Walker County, Georgia, whom we milked every morning and evening for about two years, whose milk we made into yogurt, skimming the abundant cream, which we drank in our coffee and ate with our oatmeal.
2. Notice similar traits between breeds, ask a dairy farmer, who patiently explains a few simple things for the city folks.

B. Get a chocolate shake.

1. Use a spoon; it's way too thick for a straw.
2. A large shake will last the rest of the afternoon if you work it right, perfect on a hot August afternoon.

V. Go to the beef cattle barn.

A. It's a completely different crowd/subculture.
B. Think NASCAR.

VI. Go to the amphitheater.

A. Oh, well, there are no performances this afternoon, so we missed all the cool horseshowmanship.
B. There is, however, a single horse trotting round and round the arena with a teenage rider who takes obvious pleasure in the rhythmic movement of the big animal.

1. Note the somatic (physical, psychic, emotional, etc.) connection between the horse and the rider, how they respond to each other instantaneously.
2. No wonder the ancients were fascinated with centaurs.

VII. Go look at chickens and rabbits.

A. These are probably the prettiest hens in the whole state, otherwise they wouldn't be living the high life at the state fair, right? But they are quite beautiful.
B. The roosters are much smaller, but they make up for it in magnificent crowing.

VIII. Go to the fine arts building.

A. Finish your ice cream first, because you can't take a lidless container inside and spill your chocolate shake all over the objets d'art.
B. As in any gallery or museum, take your time. Walk around, don't stop at every piece, but let something grab you by the throat to take a closer look.

1. This show was carefully hung by someone who knows what they're doing, and there were three well-selected paintings hung together just inside the entrance: same size (large) but very different styles in similar palette of reds and oranges. I bounced from one to the others and back, finally transfixed by the one called "Sun Salutation," which had a lot of energy.
2. Only a few other pieces really made me want to keep looking - a pair of prints playing off Japanese printmaking and calligraphy, especially - but I like the way they include a huge variety of media and subjects. It's the state fair, after all.

IX. Winding down, check out the cool Andean music coming from a band at a little tent on the edge of the midway!

X. Quilts and other crafts are in a building on the north side of 17th Ave.

A. Gven Golly's Aunt Irene has a few exquisite traditional quilts in the show, as usual, and they are fine work indeed.
B. Gven's friend Kate has a whole bunch of small quilts on display that her students made with a cow theme: Andy Warhol-style, each kid in her class in Sandusky made an original color combination from a common shape (head of cow), and the assemblage of cows is dazzling.

XI. Epilog: Rumba Cafe on Summit St. is a perfect respite.

A. We were ready to call it a day but not ready to go home; Gven Golly suggested a beer; I suggested a place where my drum teacher plays sometimes.

1. Now for something completely different: polished wood, quiet for an early Saturday evening, the Browns exhibition game on the tube, and a decent selection of beers.
2. As the band set up inside, we found a table out on the patio. As our neurons processed a day of high stimulation and rich midwestern (agri)cultural ethnography, we relaxed into wide-ranging conversation.

B. We had a lot to talk about.

Prodigal son of a prodigal son of a prodigal son

Surreal Monday morning bus station Ohio, waiting for arrival of son and friend. It could be any bus station in any city: chairs, bags, ticket desk, TV, snack bar, all kinds of people. This ain't no party, this ain't no country club, yet there are certain rules of decorum, and bus station people seem to know how to act in a bus station.

The bus from Philly to Pittsburgh to Columbus is running an hour late, so I have some time to contemplate the son and his girlfriend, their arrival and reception in our humble home, their first impressions, their second impressions, their levels of comfort and discomfort, their adaptability in a midwestern middle-class alternative funky works-in-progress cultural milieu. I watch a little quality daytime TV, something about vampires, check my messages, make some notes, try to be patient.

There they are, both tall and angular and slightly rough around the edges, a little tired after an all-night bus trip. Jessi's hair is longer than last I saw it, and Alex has a new lip ring. I hug them both at once, and we walk out to the car, drive north from downtown to our little suburb. We talk about Alex's dream and a Neal Stephenson novel Jessi is reading, the way a fictional dystopia can be part of the problem instead of part of the solution, and for a minute it's like old times, talking about books with the kid who remembers long chains of detailed narrative while I chime in with analytical observations, but now his critical analysis goes way beyond mine, and it's fun to vainly try to keep up.

It's only a little bit shocking to see them, somewhat changed since their last visit last year from a very different subculture in a very different city, but then so am I. It will take a day or so to settle in, relax into a comfort zone, and enjoy a few days together. We are already finding ways to accept and overcome these surface clashes and really see and get to know each other. Kafka meets the cyberpunks.

J and A spent the day settling into the upstairs room that Zelda kindly gave up so that they could be comfortable. I had a longish, nerve-jangling day at the office and came home haggard to a scene that immediately lifted my spirits. The two of them enjoying the backyard that is my labor of love. Jessi was walking around the vegetable beds checking out the volunteer squash (or melon?) vines, tomatoes, pappers, and the compost setup. Alex was moving from room to room within the yard with her large-format camera, framing and shooting various angles and elements of the space. I think they have accomplished re-entry on Planet Methodistville.

Jessi and I had a few minutes to sit and talk in the den that looks out on the backyard. He told me about the chicken they have at their house in Brooklyn and about some issues with the neighbors, the landlady, the housemates, and the chicken. Zelda and Gven came home, and we decided on a place to go for dinner. The margaritas at El Vaquero were sweet, salty, and delicious; the food was predictable and tasty. I don't remember what we talked about, but it felt good to sit in a booth, kill the fatted burrito, and have a meal together.

Tuesday was another longish workday, and "the kids," as Gven is now calling them, spent the evening at Jessi's friend Andy's place. This could have been my opportunity to get some work done on a manuscript that's sitting on my desk, but no. I chose to watch Part 3 of the Ingmar Bergman Film Festival that is currently taking place in our living room. Bergman died last week, and I missed the first two or three waves of his popularity in the second half of the last century. I'm only now beginning to appreciate his work. By the library reserve lottery, I checked out 'Scenes From a Marriage', 'Saraband', 'Autumn Sonata', and 'The Magician' and watched the first three. Besides being visually amazing - large parts I would gladly watch again without any sound, they are shot so beautifully - the writing comes across well, even in subtitles, and the musicaly soundtrack seems to play a major role. And who wouldn't want to look at Liv Ullman for two hours?

Wednesday was busier yet, but I had the advantage of a taiji class before coming home to Zelda, Jessi, and Alex sitting peacefully on the patio on probably the hottest day of the year. After a brief negotiation, we ordered pizza and opened a large bottle of chilled white wine. The spider lilies that Grandpa Golly gave us a couple of years ago chose this week to bloom - long, thin, white petals with bright orange-tipped stamens - five of them in big pots on the patio. By the time the table was set, the pizza was delivered, and our friends the Gormans arrived with ice cream, it was cooling off on the patio. By dessert I was the most contented man in the universe. Good food, a tiny bit too much wine, people I care about, and conversation to die for, no amount of pre-planning could have made it more right.

We had to get up early Thursday morning to make it to the bus station on time, but we did, and saying good-bye so soon was bittersweet. I will review this time in my head for the next few days: wishing I had said things I forgot to say, wishing I hadn't run my mouth so much, wishing we'd had time to go to the state fair, wishing we'd had a chance to go for a bike ride, hoping there will be many more opportunities, but mainly grateful for the time toegether.