I Stand Corrected

Lamar

2012-01-11T12:44:00.005-05:00

I picked up an Ohio State men's basketball schedule this morning and noticed that the nationally ranked Buckeyes played an early-season nonconference game against Lamar on December 20. By coincidence - if there is such a thing - the next day my thoughtful wife Gven Golly mysteriously invited me to ride along with her to beautiful Hilliard, Ohio, across town from our Methodistville home, to do some "holiday shopping." We ended up at the Capital Area Human Society, where I picked out my Christmas present, an eight-month-old black cat named Lamar.

The Humane Society is an amazing and well-organized place that performs an impressive set of services. Animals are well cared for, and every surface was clean. Staff and customers are asked to wash their hands every time they handle an animal. Everyone we encountered seemed, well, humane.

Gven and Jessi and I wandered from cage to cage checking out first the younger and then the older cats, and I quickly developed a fondness for the slinky little black guy who liked a lot of contact. I took my time looking around at others but came back to Lamar. I filled out the application, and Gven paid the fee (holiday special - $15 - included shots, neutering, tag, records, everything) and made an appointment for Lamar's surgery the following Tuesday.

The day after he was "fixed" our new cat was ready to come home. His upstairs loft was prepared, with litterbox, food and water bowls, and plenty of closets, dressers, and baskets to explore. Which he did, immediately and incessantly. The first week we kept the stairway door closed, so Lamar had the run of the upstairs while Ruby, the big rambunctious dog, stayed downstairs. Lamar made himself at home and continued to spend most of his time upstairs.

By the time the next weekend rolled around, we were ready to introduce the cat and the dog under controlled conditions. They were wary of each other, to put it mildly, and the process of getting acquainted will continue for a while, punctuated by some hissing when Ruby gets too close and an occasional wild chase when Lamar suddenly darts into the room. Most of the time each has his/her own space - Ruby on the couch, a big cushion, or the living room rug, Lamar in the two upstairs rooms and an increasing range of shadowy spaces downstairs - so this could take some time.

Meanwhile, Ruby spends a lot of time out in the yard, which is her domain, and Lamar scampers around inside getting his nose into every nook and cranny of every room inside. He likes to sit in my lap when I get home at night and stays close by when I sit down to meditate. So far, that's been our routine. I take my shoes off and plop down on the cushion, and he's right there by my feet. I think we're going to get along.

Happy Holidays, Family & Friends

2011-12-21T19:37:00.009-05:00

It seems that change is everywhere, rocking, if not raising, all boats in wave after wave of events local and global, economic and political, corporate and personal. Whether the tide is rising or falling, turbulent or calm, whether revolutions spiral upward or downward, we send our best wishes for a bright, buoyant holiday season.

This time last year, Gven and Sven went to New York with Jessi, missing a record-setting blizzard by a day. We roamed the Brooklyn Museum, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and some neat shops in Soho, then celebrated our thirty-second anniversary at the coolest little trattoria in the West Village.

In May, the Golly clan gathered in Milwaukee for the wedding of Sven’s nephew (Jeanie Beanie Golly-Gee’s son) Max. The ceremony in an old Presbyterian church included a ritual handfasting with the family tartan, and the reception on the lakefront was memorable.

In June, we all converged at a beautiful winery in Rochester, Michigan, to celebrate the marriage of another nephew (Anna Banana Golly-Gosh’s son) Todd following Todd and Liz’s wedding in Dubuque, Iowa. Gven and Sven then leapfrogged further north for a couple days of camping, horseback riding, and kayaking.

In July, Gven took her sister Annette Funicello Horton and their mother Layla Alexander, who called herself Lill but everyone knew her as Nancy, to the Quilt National exhibit at the Dairy Barn in Athens and the State Fair in Columbus. In August, we went with Nancy to her sixtieth high school reunion in Hillsville, Virginia, and the Alexander family reunion at an idyllic riverside spot outside Sylvatus, Virginia.

Sven’s parents overcame a couple of close calls and continue to amaze us with their hardiness and resilience. Mom didn’t let a little pneumonia and a fractured hip stop her from celebrating her ninetieth birthday in September, with Anna Banana, Jeanie Beanie, Jojo, Sven, Petro, and their spouses in attendance. She has been a real trouper in regaining her mobility by diligent physical therapy, strength of will, and Dad’s patient support. He has decided his driving days are over, but he and Mom are still very independent, maintaining their cozy house and wonderful garden on the scenic Cumberland Plateau.

Zelda decided that it’s time for more formal education, so in January she is starting the Master of Library and Information Science program at Kent State. She will keep her assistant manager’s job at Half Price Books and commute to classes at the State Library of Ohio near downtown Columbus. She and her friend David have a new apartment in North Campus/South Clintonville, strategically located between work and school. Zelda spent Halloween in Chicago exploring new and old haunts with her Kent roommate Megan.

Jessi has worked on art handling projects with a moving company that specializes in fine art, as well as renovating apartments in Brooklyn and Manhattan. His baseball team played a home-and-away series with a team from Pittsburgh, complete with live bands, cookout, and friendly competition. In August, he took a week-long bicycle trip along the Maine coast with three friends in the wake of Hurricane Irene. This fall, he shouldered added responsibility as head honcho of the screening shed during the cranberry harvest in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts.

Sven’s Mom, Dad, and sister Jojo made the trek north to Central Swing State for our traditional Thanksgiving feast, featuring world-class pies by Gven and Zelda. Jessi and his friend Flora joined us straight from the cranberry farm.

Gven keeps finding creative ways to bring a serious, respectful, personal yoga practice to a broad demographic cross-section of Central Ohioans, with the Yoga Factory in Methodistville as her home base. As soon as our new furnace is installed in the nick of time just before Christmas, she will be back in her studio applying chaos theory to the construction of architecture-themed art quilts.

On weekends, Sven can usually be found in the garden outside Om Shanty, weeding, pruning, planting, watering, or splitting and stacking firewood, his favorite form of fiber art. So far, he has kept his day job at the Hill, the newly independent, downsized, digitized, not-your-grandfather’s-textbook company.

We lost a dear friend in October. Our brother-in-law Bart Badly – Jojo’s husband – died after a battle with cancer. We will miss his wit and passion for life.

Jessi and Zelda are home for the holidays; the tree is up; a fire is in the hearth; lutefisk, potatoes, and peas are on the table. I guess some things don’t change so much. Have an energetic, dynamic Year of the Dragon.

Realignment, continued (indefinitely)

2011-12-06T16:55:00.008-05:00

The world being what it is - always in flux and constantly shifting in the winds of economic necessity - it is time to revisit the realignment of college sports, the congressional districts of Central Swing State, the map of Europe, and most volatile of all, the publishing industry. Common sense occasionally plays a role in this process, but that depends entirely on whose common sense you are considering. I propose the following alignments based on physical and cultural geography, historical alliances and rivalries, and my personal bias as a sexagenarian with letters after my name, which means you have to listen to my opinions.

First and foremost, the Big Ten needs to expand further east to include Syracuse and Pittsburgh and further west to include Kansas and Oklahoma. The Southeastern Conference, you know, the NFL subsidiary with colleges attached, can have Missouri, Texas A&M, whatever. The Atlantic Coast Conference, which at one time was comprised of universities in close proximity to the Atlantic coast, should look at a map and consider adding Rutgers and Connecticut. The remnants of the Big 12, including Texas, Kansas State, Oklahoma State, Baylor, and Texas Tech, might want to return to its Southwest Conference roots by incorporating New Mexico, Colorado State, Utah, Brigham Young, and UNLV. If the various commissioners and/or university presidents would like me to join the conference calls in which these arrangements are made, I would be happy to fit them into my schedule.

Those agreements will be child's play compared to getting a couple dozen Ohio legislators to agree on a map of the state's reduced number of congressional districts. I suggest that they think the unthinkable, and simply look at the de facto demographics of the state county-by-county, and draw the new lines to balance district populations. Although it will take all the fun out of the ruling party's celebratory gerrymandering, redrawing lines to create 17 districts from the existing 18 should not be rocket science, and these state legislators are NOT rocket scientists. If they can wrap their parochial podunk minds around groups of contiguous counties forming a district, I think the white, rural counties would elect a member of Congress they can live with, and the multi-ethnic urban counties would elect a member of Congress they can live with. This will happen when hell freezes over.

Across the pond, where tribes have fought for longer and made progress toward civilized coexistence, the EU should just excise the UK, which can form its own economic community - perhaps with Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Finland, and - thinking outside the box just a bit - Russia. Britain has never been part of Europe anyway, and the Norman conquest didn't make it so. The European Union can then become a true continental entity by building around the core nation states of France, Germany, and Italy and the historical inner ring of Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Austria, Spain, and Portugal. Given sufficient democratic and capitalist development, the EU will then extend eastward to include Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and yes, Greece. That hole in the middle, of course, is Switzerland, which someday should take its place as the Eurozone's official banker and protector of the Euro.

The neighboring league across the Bosporus will eventually become a friendly, or at least non-hostile rival, a Southwest Asian Union (SWAU) that includes Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kurdistan, Iran, and Pakistan, with Israel as its Switzerland. We're talking long-term. Next door to the aforementioned Shekelzone will be the Rupeezone, based in India but also including Nepal, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia. You can guess what rival league looms across the Himalayas: the Yuanzone, otherwise known as China, along with its regional trading partners Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines.

Okay, so the socio-economic map of the world has been settled. Now comes the hard part, reorganizing the industry that collects, compiles, composes, and disseminates information to the aforementioned markets. Call it the knowledge business, if you will, or the content management business, or educational products and services, or some other five-dollar phrase that hasn't been coined yet. This is an economic entity in flux if there ever was one, and the only thinking that even addresses reality occurs outside a box that isn't made of paper. Printing on paper will continue, of course, but as a small appendage of the real publishing action, which is already occurring in pixels, not pages.

Cycling = Life

2011-11-23T12:56:00.004-05:00

A recent Bicycling magazine article outlined eight admonitions - call it a manifesto - for cyclists. Thinking I could benefit from someone else's hard-earned wisdom, I jotted them down for my own edification. Feel free to apply these thoughts in your next bike ride, workday, family outing, or any other venture, and see if it holds up. (My notes are in parentheses.)

1. Take the lane. (It's called a 'right of way' for a reason: there's a way, and it's your right to use it. Like other rights, they don't mean anything if nobody exercises them, and the right of way will be acknowledged when more people use it.)

2. Eat real food. (Duh. The best performance-enhancing substance is the stuff that grows out of the ground - you know, whole grains, fruit, vegetables, legumes, nuts - and not some space-age snake-oil energy bar/drink or, heaven forbid, fast food.)

3. Stick with your group. (When you're a Jet, you're a Jet all the way, from your first cigarette to your last dying day. When you're a Jet, let them do what they can, you've brothers/sisters around, you're a family man, etc. There's safety in numbers, bro.)

4. Clean your shoes. (Whether you're going to the library or the Appalachian Trail, you don't want to carry around more mud and gunk than you have to; you don't want to compromise the surface where you're putting your weight; and besides, cleaned, polished, brushed, or oiled shoes/boots fit better and feel better. Your feet will thank you.)

5. Carry a frame pump and spare tube. (Okay, this one doesn't have quite the existential pop the other Commandments do, but if you substitute pen, pocket knife, phone, condom, or money, you're prepared for most contingencies.

6. Embrace the rain; dress appropriately. (There are exactly four options: a. Go out on a limb and prepare for the worst; b. Play it safe but prepare for the worst; c. Go out on a limb and screw the consequences; d. Play it safe and screw the consequences. If you're going to stay inside because the weather isn't perfect, watch someone else's life on TV!)

7. Stop for ice cream. (There are two archetypes for the serious seeker after enlightenment: the ascetic and the ecstatic. Hermann Hesse characterized them as Narcissus and Goldmund, and in his fictional world, they were both polar opposites and best friends. Clearly, most of us have at least a little of both in us, so it's a balance issue, so reward yourself and enjoy the ride home.)

8. Keep your perspective. (Enough said)

Rite of passage

2011-11-17T23:58:00.007-05:00

This is the road not taken, the eulogy not delivered, the public statement of comradeship and respect kept private. My brother-in-law Burt died in late October, and my sister Mary Jo, her son Ben, and her step-daughters Suzie and Sheryl have absorbed a major loss. I don't have special insights into Burt's life. His brothers know him better than I do, yet he was like a big brother to me, and I am richer for having known him, so I want to mark this rite of passage.

Burt really liked to play. Volleyball at the farm, throwing the frisbee anywhere, hiking up to Droll Knoll, or passing the pineapple like a football while dodging trees on the way back down the mountain. Let's see how many puns we can pack into one long run-on sentence. He had strong political opinions, and if you're game for a good argument, go for it.

He was an ally and an advocate. When my friend Scott and I were traveling around the country following Hank Aaron's quest for his 715th home run, Burt and Mary Jo took us in, put us up, and cheered us on. When Scott and I were held up at gunpoint outside the old Fulton County stadium, a couple of street characters took our wallets and Scott's car, so we were stuck for a few days. But we were resourceful, so we hitch-hiked to Florida and hung out with friends in Gainesville. Meanwhile Burt called up the Braves' PR man, Bob Hope, told him our story, and procured complementary tickets to replace the ones that were stolen along all our money and Scott's Vega.

We got the car back with minimal damage done, and we watched Hank Aaron break the record the following April. My account of that adventure was never published in Rolling Stone because I never wrote it. The many other adventures not recorded for posterity will also have to run the course of oral history, fragments of memoirs, tales for grandchildren, and stories between friends.

It was two years and several trips later that Burt and Mary Jo introduced me to my wife. I had emigrated from Michigan to their farm in north Georgia and was spending a weekend in the city helping them move to a house closer to their work. A beautiful young yoga teacher who also worked there was also helping them move. Thereafter, nothing would ever be the same.

It was several years later that Burt and I worked together at his counseling office on North Decatur Road, and in between confirming appointments and answering the phone, I helped him put together a little manual called the Wellness Workbook. Show of hands: how many of you know what the Four Cornerstones are? [Answer: fitness, nutrition, stress reduction, and spirituality]

I decided not to get up and speak at the Burt Bradley Memorial celebration in the Emory University Hotel and Conference Center last weekend. Burt's best friend Dr. Frank Asbury from Kentucky spoke; his friend Dr. Dick Stewart from Atlanta, who incidentally provided prenatal care for Jessi and Zelda Golly and consulted with their midwives, got up and spoke; Danny Joe Bradley, Burt's younger brother, spoke tellingly, movingly, eloquently; Father Bruce Schultz, our mutual friend and Dominican priest, was the emcee for the evening.

Basically the assembled survivors filled a hotel meeting room, got something to eat and drink, talked among themselves, and listened as a line of gray-haired men spoke about their connections and their memories of another gray-haired man who was close to them. I was glad to be present and a member of the club, to talk to each of them one-to-one, and to re-connect with many other family members and friends who were present.

I already had a privileged position in the events without having to tell my stories in front of a microphone. A 22-year-old version of me was in one of the photos in a slide show during the memorial event, along with photos of Burt as a child, Burt with his parents, brothers, cousins, wives, children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, colleagues, and friends. If the purpose is to set aside time to celebrate some shared experiences, like climbing Stone Mountain with my sister, her husband, and my friend Scott from Detroit on a beautiful day in 1973, then it was a success.

During intermission, I chatted with Burt's brothers, the voluble Danny and the taciturn Phil. Then a second series of speakers spoke: former clients, students, employees, and workshop graduates who had learned how to lose weight, quit smoking, overcome fear of flying, or manage relationships, anxiety, or stress. With the exception of our mutual friend Bob, a minister turned carpenter, these speakers tended to be half the age of the septuagenarians who spoke earlier and spoke twice as long, but maybe they needed to talk it out one last time, since their counselor was gone.

After the second wave, I joined my siblings and their spouses upstairs in the hotel bar for more conversation before calling it a night. This was the posse that had earlier convened at Everybody's Pizza, an institution across the street from the Emory campus, and would reconvene at Burt's condo the next morning for breakfast of sausage gravy and biscuits cooked by Mary Jo and Gven. It was a pleasant, peaceful morning spent with a convivial group. I took a walk around the block with Mary Jo and my 90-year-old mother admiring the gardens of neighbors in Decatur and enjoying the warm autumn weather.

Big 10 expansion revisited

2011-09-21T16:26:00.005-04:00

Nothing against New Braska, which I think is one of the fly-over states out there beyond West Consin, but the Big Ten Conference is being way too conservative in its bold restructuring plan. I like the fact that the Cornhuskers are joining the oldest, most stable, classiest, old-school college league in the country. I liked it when they added Penn State, which fits like a glove, with their plain blue uniforms and flagship state university status. Let's take a moment to feel just a little bit superior.

With the rest of the NCAA in disarray, this is an opportune time to move decisively to outflank the other, lesser conferences. While the PAC 10-12 adds teams a thousand miles from the Pacific, the ACC adds teams a thousand miles from the Atlantic, and educators bemoan the geographic ignorance of kids nowadays, let's consolidate our midwestern base around the economic and cultural hub that is Chicago.

To wit: Don't just add Nebraska from the old Big 12 (formerly Big 8), add Kansas and Missouri, solidifying the heartland fan base and absorbing the St. Louis-Kansas City TV markets. While we're at it, consider Oklahoma and - gasp - Texas. NOT Kansas State, Oklahoma State, Iowa State, Texas Tech, etc. This is an exclusive Old Boys (and Old Girls) Club called the Big 10, and while we believe in the land-grant college ag-and-tech concept in the abstract, we're not in that business - except when it's Ohio State and Michigan State. You gotta draw the line somewhere.

What do KS, OK, MO, and TX bring to the table? Huge TV audiences, of course, historic football traditions, excellence in many other sports (Kansas basketball), academic respectability, and a warm-water port for international commerce. It might be argued that inviting Oklahoma to join the Big 10 is like inviting Turkey to join the European Union. The suits in Ann Arbor and Evanston (Paris and Bonn) will gag on their white wine at first, then they'll get over it when they see the national rankings, the TV revenue, and the bowl revenue. I picture the folks in Austin, Norman, Lawrence, and Columbia, like the folks in Lincoln, will walk a little taller.

Divisional alignment of the 16 teams in the Big 10 - I'm keeping the name because you don't mess with the brand - should be along geographical lines, simply because people relate to neighborly rivalries. You wouldn't want to separate UM and MSU, for gosh sakes, or IU and PU. The obvious divisions are:

EAST
Penn State
Ohio State
Michigan
Michigan State
Indiana
Purdue
Northwestern
Illinois

WEST
Wisconsin
Minnesota
Iowa
Missouri
Nebraska
Kansas
Oklahoma
Texas

If this alignment creates a competitive imbalance, so be it. Power will shift before you know it, and before long the Michigans and Penn States will return with a vengeance to challenge the Sooners and Longhorns. And what a conference playoff that would be!

On learning and labor

2011-09-04T21:21:00.005-04:00

How best to make use of a weekend to recover from a workweek and restore body and soul to working condition? Is that what Labor Day is for? Put another way, what can I learn from the challenges of the past week(s) that will make me whole again and give me tools and perspective to function more effectively? Labor Day as restoration, celebration, and education.

The mind and body need to switch gears at the end of the day and move into another activity with another set of conditions and another purpose. Examples: going from spreadsheets and schedules to trees and flowers; from logical analysis and rational planning to romantic musing and playful pipedreams; from the keyboard and the screen to the bicycle and the ball; from the procedures manual to the novel.

Being able to switch gears at all is a survival skill that for some people seems to develop naturally and intuitively, while others have to work at it, and some would rather not be bothered. Some acquire an adaptive facility early and continue to refine it with age. Others struggle with it or have no idea. Is it an exaggeration to say that addiction and other self-destructive behaviors are symptoms of the inability to make the shift from left-brain activity to right-brain activity and back? Is it an oversimplification to suggest that bad decisions are usually the result of relying excessively on one side of the brain and neglecting the other?

Work hard, play hard, take a break. How many alcoholics, overeaters, stoners, spouse abusers, schoolyard bullies, deadbeat dads, and compulsive liars just want to go home and relax but haven't learned how?

D.H. Lawrence said the poverty of coal miners in northern England consisted partly of a lack of beauty in the slum housing and ravaged landscape of mining towns. What had earlier been a region of peasant farms and villages was turned into an industrial war zone at great profit to others. Most of those people were poor to begin with, but the material and spiritual poverty they endured was a different kind of suffering. So-called alienated labor works only for the dollar (pound, franc, mark, whatever) without regard for the work except as a means. It's a mean existence, and it can make people mean because what they do has no meaning.

It is well known how the change from farming and herding to mining and manufacturing affected the British culture and economy. Workers were moved off productive land and into mines and factories, populations were displaced from the countryside to cities, and technology powered a faster, bigger productive system. Wealth was generated. It is just as clear that "social problems" like crime, violence, and public health issues arise in part from the same concentration on extracting resources from the ground, burning fossil fuels, and building bigger weapons of mass destruction.

Lots of nineteenth-century rich people got richer and did some stupid things; many more nineteenth-century poor people got poorer and dumber and did some stupid things. You don't have to be a Luddite to see that some kind of counter-measures are needed to mitigate the negative effects of technology, and I'm not talking about TV, fast food, and cheap beer. Not many people want to live off the grid. Many are convinced that it's the workers' own fault if they don't have the knowledge, skills, and good taste to make rational consumer decisions and act like people with class.

Before I completely veer off-topic (too late), let me say that I don't see any solutions in the current political standoff between Democrats and Republicans, union and management, or lefties and righties, while realizing that adversarial gamesmanship will continue to play out people's personal dramas. What I'm looking for is a way to adjust my own habits in the micro-practice of making ends meet every month, while adjusting my view of the macro-practices of the company I work for, the state I live in, and the global economy that is either falling apart at the seams or morphing into something new and strange and dangerous. Hello oligarchy!

I have no doubt that the strains pulling on the social fabric are the shared responsibility of the workers and managers and stockholders and brokers and buyers, all of whose irresponsible excesses are doing more harm than good. The reforms and adjustments to come are bound to be difficult, with a lot of options to determine the means and the consequences - intended and unintended - of the choices to be made. I think the micro-adjustments I choose to make and the macro-adjustments made by S&P, Goldman Sachs, the Eurozone, Saudi Arabia and other major players will make a difference in how things shake down in the 15 months before it all falls down on 12/12/12.

If enough of us learn from our labor how to shift from linear/logical/positivist/objectivist thinking to fuzzy/holistic/aesthetic/pluralistic thinking, it might affect the outcome of the choices we make. And we have to remember to shift back when it's time to go to work the next day.

Sven's Guide to Effective Parenting

2011-09-04T21:03:00.003-04:00

1. Clearly distinguish between personal relationships and professional relationships.

2. Sparingly and cautiously disclose information, experience, and advice to offspring about the former, trusting that they will pay close attention to your example and the wisdom harshly earned and do the opposite.

3. Freely and candidly disclose information, experience, and advice to offspring about the latter, trusting that they will have absolutely no interest in your boring, petty, anachronistic issues and do the opposite.

Untitled and Uninspired Up North

2011-08-18T21:54:00.012-04:00

The first day was a morning of packing up and getting ready to go, which is always stressful in a grumpy sort of way. With a minimum of frustration we were on the road at 1:15. I remember because both the clock and the odometer read 115, and a responsible traveler has to know these things.

The plan was to get to Detroit around five-ish, and we rolled up through the Downriver suburbs listening to a fitting soundtrack, "The Best of Cream." Then in our excitement we missed an exit to I-75 north and played cultural anthropologist on downtown streets, watching Tiger fans walk to Comerica Park on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. I was never an Eastside guy, so winding up through the city was not a trip down memory lane as much as a reminder that the city is alive and well despite widespread belief to the contrary.

The Spartan Inn motel in downtown Rochester was not as Spartan as I expected but just Spartan enough to be cheap, clean, and very adequate. Gven and I had ample time to get dressed and go to our nephew Todd's wedding reception at the Fieldstone Winery in downtown Rochester. My sister Anna Banana Golly Gosh and brother in law Fred Gosh were in fine form, enjoying the celebration and very at home among both sides of the family - the Gollys and the Goshes - which mixed politely before settling in at separate tables.

I love how revealing of character these events are, especially when the person you're talking to is guarded, standoffish, distant, or defensive while ranting about everything and everybody else, telling you all you need to know about the subject without putting their cards on the table. Maggie and Ted Gosh-Carpenter, on the other hand, looked me in the eye and made real statements about their real lives, and I appreciate that.

Out of towners gathered at the Gosh-Golly home for a delightful after-party and an unnecessary additional glass of wine, and the cool evening lent itself to more intimate conversation, first in the family room and then the the deck: Android vs. Mac, tablet vs. phone, McGraw vs. Pearson, and the future of online educational content vs. print.

We reconvened for breakfast on the deck, a fabulous array of coffee cakes, scones, souffles, and fresh fruit served by Anna Banana and her sister in law Judy of Ludington and Florida. A relaxed morning gave me an opportunity to get to know Fred's Uncle Ralph and Judy's husband Heinz as they traded sailing stories. My brother Petro Golly wore black jeans and a black T-shirt in preparation for his flight to Dusseldorf for a metals trade show later in the day. It must be a German thing.

Gven and I got back in our new black Escape and headed north to begin part two of our Michigan weekend. Tent, check. Cooler, check. Bikes, check. Cots, check. Firewood, check. I guess we're ready for the north woods. We established our base camp under the same huge pine tree as last year and cooked brots for supper.

The weather was a little sketchy when I got up the next morning to make coffee and oatmeal. Still hoping it would warm up, we visited Lot 1000 - our piece of property - and went to the stables. The young woman running the place saddled us up with a couple of easy-going horses, and we went for an hour-long ride out from the barn through some pine and poplar woods, down a long incline to a bottom full of spruce trees along the Manistee River headwaters. Amanda had been studying vet tech at a college in Cadillac but dropped out to go to massage therapy school, and now she wants to be an equine massage therapist. She also knows something about horticulture, and we all had a nice conversation while riding slowly up the trail back to the barn.

I was hoping for a bike ride in the afternoon, but the weather didn't hold, so instead of gliding down the road to Pencil Lake I got depressed and sat in the tent out of the rain. Gven suggested a movie and a pizza, but I didn't see the point of driving seven hours to the pristine Northern forest for a bad movie about a "Bad Teacher" at the strip mall multiplex, but there weren't many options, so we ended up at a Mexican restaurant in Gaylord, which was okay in a summer camp/tourist kind of way.

It rained some more that night. We got up early and went into Mancelona for a big breakfast at our favorite log cabin donut shop, Bo Jack's. The waitress's disposition had improved a lot since last summer. The 70 percent chance of rain showed no sign of stopping, so we just kept going southwest on US 131 and cruised right on through Traverse City on M 72 until we got to Lake Michigan. It was still cool but had stopped raining when we walked along the windy beach and stopped at the Maritime Museum. My photos don't begin to do justice to the lovely old boats restored and displayed as a little slice of Great Lakes history.

We meandered up the pinky nail of the mitten as the weather cleared up, and in the precious little resort town of Glen Arbor we passed a kayak rental shop, so we stopped on a whim to ask questions. Ten minutes later we were in a van being dropped off on the Crystal River, learning by doing. Our two-seater handled much like a canoe, but we still managed to hit a couple of low-hanging trees as we gradually figured out how not to paddle against each other, how to anticipate the rocks and turns and eddies. There were three very short portages and almost nobody else on the little river, yet we made it challenging enough all by ourselves.

Finding the right place for a burger after that spontaneous adventure was another formidable challenge, but we rose to the occasion, and the whitefish burger at the place on the corner was excellent.

I had my sights set on Frankfort to the south, where I had read about a coop retirement community, so we drove way down M22, which took a long time, and got to the pretty little town after all the shops had closed. We settled for a weak cup of coffee and an over-embellished piece of pie at the Betsie Inn and walked down to the beach, which was beautiful.

The next morning, our last, the weather cleared up and warmed up, as it always does, so I was able to get in my ritual dip in Pencil Lake and revel in the clean, quiet lakeness of it. Then we came home to agendas, schedules, font issues, and a status conference call. Maybe next time we'll take a whole week.

If on a winter's night a traveler

2011-07-24T23:40:00.014-04:00

Have you ever finished a book and immediately started reading it again at the beginning? I don't recall ever having done that before, but that's what I did with this novel by Italo Calvino, who is without a doubt a genius. Of course it took me a couple of months to read it once, and I'm lucky no one else had it reserved at the library, so I was able to renew it repeatedly and keep reading, slowly, one chapter at a time, over and over.

So here you are now, ready to attack the first lines of the first page. You prepare to recognize the unmistakable tone of the author. No. You don't recognize it at all. But now that you think about it, who ever said this author had an unmistakable tone? On the contrary, he is known as an author who changes greatly from one book to the next. And in these very changes you recognize him as himself. (p. 9)

Different readers read the same book differently, and yes, the same reader will read different books differently. Most of us probably seek out the conventions that we have grown fond of in other books, qualities that go by names such as character, plot, tone, and setting. You know the drill. It's how successful authors develop a following, by sticking to the style or structure or formula of their last popular work and departing just enough to keep the familiar reader interested. Or not so much seek and find as wander in the woods, swim in the current, or pick one's way through the puzzle of the narrative, enjoy the layered texture of the metanarrative, or trip out on the nonlinear language of some other text not yet defined as a genre.

But Ludmilla is always at least one step ahead of you. "I like to know that books exist that I will still be able to read..." she says, sure that existent objects, concrete albeit unknown, must correspond to the strength of her desire. How can you keep up with her, this woman who is always reading another book besides the one before her eyes, a book that does not yet exist, but which, since she wants it, cannot fail to exist?

The professor is there at his desk; in the cone of light from a desk lamp his hands surface, suspended, or barely resting on the closed volume, as if in a sad caress.

"Reading," he says, "is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid, material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something else that belong to the immaterial, invisible world, because it can only be thought, imagined, or because it was once and is no longer, past, lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead...." (p. 72)

Other times it's just pure admiration for a writer who has articulated a series of thoughts that I've wanted to express but never found the words. An author who has written something I wish I had written. Or better yet, a work that clearly and with a sense of humor sums up something I've been mulling over vaguely for years, then extends the line of thinking and expands it far beyond the range I had stumbled through, but now I can see that it's been there all along, and the possibilities it presents are exciting if a little mind-boggling.

"First of all, ask about If on a winter's night a traveler, make them give us a complete copy, and also a complete copy of Outside the town of Malbork. I mean copies of the novels we began to read, thinking they had that title; and then, if their real titles and authors are different, the publishers must tell us and explain the mystery behind these pages that move from one volume to another."
...
"The novel I would most like to read at this moment," Ludmilla explains, "should have as its driving force only the desire to narrate, to pile stories upon stories, without trying to impose a philosophy of life on you, simply allowing you to observe its own growth, like a tree, an entangling, as if of branches and leaves..."
... (pp. 92-93)

The business end is another thing altogether. It's a little like making laws or making sausage, once you've been around the actual process it's never the same being a consumer of the product. Clearly that has an upside as well as a downside. I know a little something about what ingredients went into that sausage and what gives it its distinctive flavor and texture and sausagey goodness, and I have certainly become more discriminating, selective, and appreciative of the many Varieties of Sausage Experience.

And so Marana proposes to the Sultan a stratagem prompted by the literary tradition of the Orient: he will break off this translation at the moment of greatest suspense and will start translating another novel, inserting it into the first through some rudimentary expedient; for example, a character in the first novel opens a book and start reading. The second novel will also break off to yield to a third, which will not proceed very far before opening into a fourth, and so on.... (p. 125)

Somewhere in the reading, a time-warped kind of self-reflexive light goes on in the mind of the reader that reveals or at least depicts what has been going on in real life for some time without the reader's knowledge, or alternatively what has not been going on, and only now does the reader grasp some aspect of his own everyday existence that has been staring him in the face, such as the seemingly universal overlapping and interpenetrating relationships between and among ourselves and our consciousness of some account we are telling ourselves, usually in relatively innocent self-delusion for perfectly valid reasons with unpremeditated and unintended consequences.

As far as you are able to gather from hints scattered through these letters, Apocryphal Power, riven by internecine battles and eluding the control of its founder, Ermes Marana, has broken into two groups: a sect of enlightened followers of the Archangel of Light and a sect of nihilist followers of the Archon of Shadow. The former are convinced that among the false books flooding the world they can track down the few that bear a truth perhaps extrahuman or extraterrestrial. The latter believe that only counterfeiting, mystification, intentional falsehood can represent absolute value in a book, a truth not contaminated by the dominant pseudo truths. (p. 129)

Cutting and pasting words and phrases from one existing source into a second related site is perhaps the most common practice known to literate culture. There are a lot of assets out there to be copied and repurposed. Some of them are tightly guarded and some are fair game, and of course the rules about the boundaries are one of the most contentious issues known to litigious society. Everybody samples content, but some are more careful or judicious or sneaky about it than others. And everybody quotes somebody, usually misquoting and often unattributed or wrongly attributed, rarely in context and usually distorting, with or without malice. But imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so it's okay, just send the check by the end of the month with the agreed upon fee for permission to use said material, because no matter what it is, somebody owns it.

The arboreal young man, having hidden the manuscript in his jacket, slipped out of the elevator, slammed the gate in my face, and is now pressing the button to make me disappear downward, after hurling a final threat at me: 'The score with you isn't settle, Agent of Mystification! We still have to liberate our Sister chained to the machine of the counterfeiters!' I laugh as I slowly sink. 'There is no machine, kiddo. It's the Father of Stories who dictates our books!'
He brings the elevator back up. 'Did you say the Father of Stories?' He has turned pale. For years the followers of the sect have been searching for the old blind man, across all the continents, where his legend is handed down in countless local variants. (pp. 130-131)

The book as mystical source of truth, as romantic repository of timeless wonder, as magic theater of the mind. The book as mirror of nature and the soul, as the key to unlocking unlimited knowledge and power, as the secret passage out of your mundane predicament and toward liberation. The book as a copy of a simulation of a description of a retelling of a rumor of a legend of a translation of a hallucination of a recollection of a twice-told tale of a rationalization of a dream of a testimony of a prediction of a fantasy of a justification of an apocryphal of an alibi. The book as an example of what can be done with a stub of a pencil (Ring Lardner). The book as the flesh made word, the somatic experience of the body electric transformed by one dimensional scratching on two-dimensional surfaces of three-dimensional efforts in four-dimensional flow of a time-space-weight continuum in the historical dialectic of analog waves in digital particles, note by rhythmic note.

And so Marana proposes to the Sultan a stratagem prompted by the literary tradition of the Orient: he will break off this translation at the moment of greatest suspense and will start translating another novel, inserting it into the first through some rudimentary expedient; for example, a character in the first novel opens a book and starts reading. The second novel will also break off to yield to a third, which will not proceed very far before opening into a fourth, and so on.... (p. 125)

If we are all readers, I guess we are all texts. We read and are read in context. The story, if there is one, has texture, and because it is layered, woven, closely or loosely knitted, the tale is spun into many threads of textile material that is high in fiber. It seems as if Calvino has thought of everything and decided to render it bit by bit in fragmentary, easily digestible pieces of stories larded with the seeds of other stories.

When you think about it, this total writer could be a very humble person, what in America they call a ghost writer, a professional of recognized usefulness even if not of great prestige: the anonymous editor who gives book form to what other people have to tell but are unable or lack the time to write: he is the writing hand that gives words to existences too busy existing. Perhaps that was my true vocation and I missed it. I could have multiplied my I's, assumed other people's selves, enacted the selves most different from me and from one another. (pp. 180-181)

Yet there is a distinct sense in which making a book reveals in the close proximity to the planning, marketing, design, production, packaging, and distribution of the tangible object a widget-like randomness, a wonderfully absurd kind of mundane materiality whereby ink stains on pressed wood pulp are so darn magical.

The Reader is beset by mysterious coincidences. He told me that, for some time, and for the most disparate reasons, he has had to interrupt his reading of novels after a few pages.
"Perhaps they bore you," I said, with my usual tendency toward pessimism.
"On the contrary, I am forced to stop reading just when they become most gripping. I can't wait to resume, but when I think I am reopening the book I began, I find a completely different book before me...."
"Which instead is terribly boring," I suggest.
"No, even more gripping. But I can't manage to finish this one, either. And so on."
"Your case gives me new hope," I said to him. "With me, more and more often I happen to pick up a novel that has just appeared and I find myself reading the same book I have read a hundred times." (p. 197)

So why haven't I written anything lately? Or have I, and it just didn't end up here in this sad space? Am I just taking a break, or have I moved on to bigger and better or smaller and more humble things?

"Me? I don't read books!" Irnerio says.
"What do you read, then?"
"Nothing. I've become so accustomed to not reading that I don't even read what appears before my eyes. It's not easy: they teach us to read as children, and for the rest of our lives we remain the slaves of all the written stuff they fling in front of us. I may have had to make some effort myself, at first, to learn not to read, but now it comes quite naturally to me. The secret is not refusing to look at the written words. On the contrary, you must look at them, intensely, until they disappear."
Irnerio's eyes have broad, pale, flickering pupils; they seem eyes that miss nothing, like those of a native of the forest, devoted to hunting and gathering." (p. 49)

Maybe the fun begins when the text speaks to the reader in an unprecedented way, like when you meet someone unlike anyone else you've ever met, and you just want to keep that conversation going and see where it leads.

(To begin. You're the one who said it, Ludmilla. But how to establish the exact moment in which a story begins? Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book. Or else the real story is the one that begins ten or a hundred pages further on, and everything that precedes it is only a prologue. The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living that has a meaning separate from the rest - for example, the meeting of two people, which will become decisive for both - must bear in mind that each of the two brings with himself a texture of events, environments, other people, and that from the meeting, in turn, other stories will be derived which will break off from their common story.) (p. 153)

Or, as my friend at work said, it means there is no story. He's the one who told me about this crazy book in the first place, the catalyst in my journey toward and through the mind of Calvino and Ludmilla and the Other Reader, in which there clearly is a story, actually many stories, a proliferation of stories in fact, none existing outside the Reader, which is probably his point - no independent, self-existent, noncontingent story.

Fair Use

2011-05-28T22:37:00.006-04:00

I say all I want to do is live in a cabin in the woods and read, but it's not true. Whenever I get started on something good, I get sidetracked quickly. Is it neurological? An influx of too much stimulation, an excess of messages received by the brain, an interruption in the flow of thoughts and the processing of linear information in a nonlinear world? So in response I slow it down in a procession of bits that can be tracked in an orderly way, making a list, checking it twice.

Where is the line between fair use and piracy, which is just an inflammatory word for copyright infringement, which is just a legalistic way of saying 'Don't touch my stuff'. Everybody references somebody else all the time. Or did Apple trademark the word internet so nobody else can use it? So it seems that it's just a matter of degree. How many words of text is too much to repurpose, plow back into the site, and cannibalize the parts for free without asking (and paying)? Somebody already owns that idea. Here's another idea somebody owns:

The Common Sense of the Fair-Use Doctrine 1
(c) 2011 The Chronicle of Higher Education
1255 23rd Street NW
Washington, DC 20037

Michael Morgenstern for The Chronicle

By Patricia Aufderheide

While checking final edits on their new book, two media-studies scholars are informed by their publisher that they must secure permission to use a magazine cover as an illustration of one of their assertions. Instead of dropping the graphic or making cold calls to the magazine, the scholars explain their fair-use rights under copyright—and the publisher's general counsel agrees.

A researcher asks a librarian if the librarian can provide her with a clip from a major motion picture, relevant to the researcher's presentation at the annual meeting of her academic association. When the librarian demurs, the researcher explains her fair-use right to show the work.

MIT's OpenCourseWare designers, who develop free online curriculum materials, are preparing a course on sound engineering. The professor has included in the lecture several audio examples—all of them copyrighted. Instead of stripping out the examples and turning the material into a skeleton course, the designers include the material under fair use, allowing consumers worldwide to benefit.

Those users and many others in academe were able to employ their rights because they learned them from their peers who had created codes of best practices in fair use. They are re-establishing the normalcy of a longstanding free-speech right.

The right of scholars to use unlicensed material for research and publication purposes is clear under the U.S. doctrine of fair use. Fair use—a broad, flexible part of copyright policy determined on a case-by-case basis—permits users to repurpose, or transform, an appropriate amount of original material. If it's so easy, why are so many smart people so scared of fair use? In the work that the legal scholar Peter Jaszi and I have done since 2004, and have synthesized in our new book, Reclaiming Fair Use, we have seen members of many professional and creative communities express that same anxiety. And we believe we understand why: They lack a common-sense understanding of their rights.

Twenty-five years ago, fair use was widespread and uncontroversial. Journalists, scholars, and documentarians employed it regularly. Publishers and other distributors routinely issued works rich with fair-use claims. But increasingly over the last two decades, that has changed, as large media and software companies have fought for greater copyright protections and ramped up their public-relations campaigns and legal actions. Meanwhile, their critics, including academics and artists, have often made alarmist claims about the dangers of overreach by copyright owners, causing further confusion. Many scholars, as well as members of various professional, creative, and research communities, simply misunderstand their rights, whether they seek to use or protect a work.

Now that codes of best practices are returning fair use to normalcy, it is time for scholars to reclaim fair use. Some dos and don'ts:

* Do exercise your fair-use rights to teach and research using copyrighted materials, just as your peers are doing. Insist on your rights with publishers and librarians. Learn about codes of best practices assembled by communications scholars, film-studies scholars, and poets to find out what other academics regard as normal. If your field has not yet developed a code, considering crafting one.
* Do teach best copyright practices. You are both a model to your students and a crucial source of current information. Students often come to us weighed down with a lifetime of misinformation, mixing up file-sharing (sometimes a clearly illegal use) and fair use (entirely legal when properly reasoned). They will enter a world where gatekeepers are often misinformed as well. Educate them about their right to help combat fear-mongering by copyright holders. Students and scholars who understand the basic logic of fair use have nothing to fear.
* Don't mix up fair use and educational exemptions. Teachers and scholars have significant rights within copyright law, but they are limited to mostly traditional educational settings. As both students' and professors' work moves outside the classroom, whether in a video posted on YouTube or a slide presentation on SlideShare, they'll need to employ their fair-use rights to participate in 21st-century education.
* Don't expect to get a pass on fair use because your use is noncommercial, but don't be afraid of fair use in commercial settings, either. Noncommerciality is a consideration in fair use, but a minor one. The key issues are transformativeness and appropriate amount matched to the transformative purpose. Litigation is almost universally on commercial uses, and judges tilt heavily in favor of transformative, appropriate fair use.
* Don't confuse fair use with the open-source movement or Creative Commons. The open-access movement works to expand the amount of material available on either a copyright-free or a copyright-light basis, such as a Creative Commons license. The impulse to share scholarly research more freely is an admirable impulse for any creator who wants to do so. Fair use, however, focuses on a different issue—specifically, when new creators and researchers want to use work that its creators do not want to give away. It permits unauthorized use of material that is normally closely guarded. It keeps copyright holders from becoming private censors of future culture by denying access to building blocks of new work.

Scholars in all disciplines need access to copyrighted work to enrich their research, their courses, and their public presentations. They must be able to effectively and economically publish and present their findings. Anxiety about whether their use of copyrighted material will get them, their institutions, or their presses in trouble is an obstacle to the creative and scholarly process. Worse, when scholars and others do not employ fair use, they shrink its effectiveness as a right. Fair use is like a muscle; the more it is exercised, the stronger it becomes. Robust scholarship requires robust fair use.

Patricia Aufderheide is a professor of communication and director of the Center for Social Media at American University and co-author, with Peter Jaszi, of Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright (University of Chicago Press, 2011).

See how simple it is? As long as everybody agrees on commonsense things like how much is an "appropriate amount" of somebody else's material. How hard that it be?

While I'm in recovery mode from a week of high productivity, I could probably afford a day off to pretend I'm on vacation, but that would only push back another week the many things I have so far succeeded in leaving undone. A co-worker said she was looking forward to a weekend of doing nothing. I asked what that's like, and she mentioned watching movies, not the kind of recovery I had in mind, but she probably means not getting anything done in particular. So I'm safe. Nothing much is likely to happen here, productivity-wise.

When in doubt, rearrange the furniture, move plants and lamps, wiggle it a little at the risk of being misinterpreted. The back yard is a quilt, and the quilt is a back yard. Somewhere to play, and something to work on while playing, to make it a better place to play. Moving materials around, pulling up some and piling them elsewhere, lining up fibers, stacking stalks, or spreading stuff out that's been steeping and saturated somewhere else unaccustomed, juxtaposed with other materials native or transplanted. Thus the play becomes the work becomes the play. I'd like to draw the line, but it keeps moving.

When is the best time to dismantle the compost pile and distribute it over the vegetable beds, the better for tomatoes, onions, potatoes, and asparagus to be nourished? Today! Today is also a good day to transplant peonies and forsythia and mulch around them with sawdust from the stump grinder's work. While working in the garden, I'm planning my next book, "Groundwork for a Metaphysic of Mowing," to be followed by my magnum opus, "The Critique of Pure Pruning." Instead of writing that opus, or any opus, I think I'll emulate Kant by taking a walk at precisely 5:00. Or later if I feel like it.

Character-driven

2011-04-09T22:00:00.005-04:00

Speaking in incomplete sentences. The weather is definitely changing. Joints ache in anticipation of rain, but practice is the best medicine.

Who goes to Caribou on Saturday? The new barista is doing the best he can, but he doesn't know a cranberry scone from a black raspberry. And what's up with all the loud, animated conversations. Is it me? Or course it is, why else would everyone around me be unattractive and obnoxious and stupid? The West Side is its own little freakshow, but so is uptown Clintonville, and Westerville, home base of the strongman Colonel Qaddasich, don't even get me started.

People should wear uniforms with colorful insignias - stripes, stars, bars, oakleaf clusters, crossed fasces, swords, pentacles, rods, cups - indicating their tribe, rank, level of education, political orientation, astrological sign, religious affiliation, dosha. It would be so much more efficient than the random, rootless, free-market fashion statements of name-brand apparel and the inevitable unsuccessful attempts at upward mobility by wearing the knock-off uniform of the tribe/rank/credit rating sought but not achieved.

The checklist, written or unwritten, on paper or digital file, acknowledged or tacit, functions as a personal measure of accomplishment and simultaneously as an autotelic artwork, checking off items as an end in itself, tracking is its own reward. Birds seeking seeds, bark breaking down from a hard life as cells protecting living plant tissue to become in the next life a footpath across a garden, eventually becoming soil itself, and back up the food chain to reconstitute as plant cells again of some other species.

Plot-driven. There was a reason for the confusion between cranberry and black raspberry, involving white chocolate chips, three bicyclists talking with a mail carrier, and a woman waiting outside the bank, looking up the street, and pulling a book from her black bag. A fire truck goes by, then another. The loud talk subsides, as if the whole point of the conversation was to finish it.

A couple comes in, young woman leading young man with confidence, orders drinks and sits down, her jeans more flamboyantly worn than his, his smile more reserved, almost dour, but behind his youthful haircut a calm awareness that he is going where she is going. Even after he cracks a slight smile, he talks behind his hand like a pitcher to the catcher to guard against stolen signs. Somatotype, attitude, and body language as cultural artifacts, signs seeking a common denominator in the indefinitely recurring language game of ratings and rankings in a narrative of ordinary discourse by natural selection.

Guy walks into a bar. Name of the bar is Phenomenal Cafe, and his immediate reaction is to like the place. He stands inside the door just a moment to check it out, and when a chorus of other people's heads turn he self-consciously continues walking, thinking about what he will order: "Coffee, dark-roast, large, slice of herb bread, toasted, butter." He pays and sits down at a table farthest from the counter where the distracted barista is getting his order. The main thing is to keep moving.

There are two kinds of people in the world. The disheveled employee brings a steaming ceramic cup and a small plate. Those who report on the state of their lives, sometimes in the first-person and sometimes in the second but usually in the third-person, and by the second sentence you know enough to not believe a word of it, because the content of the story is effectively masking how they really think and feel. This line of discourse is their way of deflecting attention, misdirecting intention, putting up a facade of believability.

Then there are those who would rather die than report on the state of their lives, which would be too hard, too soul-crushingly revealing, too self-absorbed in its implicit attention-seeking and too depressing to admit openly what and who they really are. By the extreme neutrality, general niceness, and businesslike discretion posing as polite decorum, you can tell there is no one home and nothing to talk about, so why even knock on the door.

Random Dreaming

2011-03-16T21:39:00.007-04:00

I had just parked my car on the street, and I was walking away when I heard a loud cracking sound. I turned around to check, and someone had thrown a brick or some heavy object at the windshield, leaving a hole in the glass with broken shards radiating out from it. I saw a young man running away, so I ran across the street after him. He looked back and sped up, zig-zagging through a crowd of people. I managed to keep him in sight, and people in the crowded street saw that he was fleeing and I was chasing him. People in the busy street were slowing him down but also getting in my way, but I was confident I could catch him. Finally I saw an opening and tackled the guy, but the man I tackled had sudden grown old and shriveled.

I dreamed that the sheets and blankets on the bed were made of digital documents like a quilt made from stitched-together paper and disks and electronic files .

So I'm coming in the back door to a porch of some house I don't recognize, and a young woman I do recognize is coming out the door to the porch holding her knee in pain; she explains how she was knocked down and banged up her leg, which I put my hand on with healing qi.

I dreamed there was a large, winged insect hovering around my chest and neck with its long tendril-like tail hanging down like the tail of a kite. It seemed harmless, benign, almost friendly. It landed in front of me and crawled out of its skin, leaving behind an exoskeleton that looked like a crab's shell. Having shed its skin the red, soft-bodied creature slithered off like a slow-moving lizard.

Melo Drama for the Knicks

2011-02-23T22:52:00.004-05:00

By now everyone has heard that Carmelo Anthony has been traded to the New York Knickerbockers, making the Knicks instant contenders in the talent-rich Eastern Conference of the NBA. The Knicks acquired Amare Stoudemire from Phoenix before the season started, taking a big step toward respectability, but they missed out in the LeBron sweepstakes. Anthony played college ball at Syracuse and made no secret of his desire to go to either the Knicks or the New Jersey Nets, but it took a long time to consummate the trade. The Denver Nuggets got four players plus two draft choices and cash for one prolific scorer and an old point guard named Chauncey.

By the way, FYI to anyone in Ohio, this is about basketball. Remember basketball? It's the sport with a round ball, five-on-five, indoors, played between the Michigan game in November and the Scarlet and Gray game in April. Maybe you've heard of it, very popular in exotic places like North Carolina, Kansas, Kentucky, and Indiana. No? Oh well.

For Carmelo to join Amare in the Big Apple is very good news for Knicks fans. A prolific scorer to go with a top-notch power forward could make them one of the elite teams in the league. What everyone seems to ignore is the difference that Chauncey Billups will make. Here's the real key to this trade vaulting New York into the thick of the championship race: they now have a seasoned point guard.

Make no mistake. Chauncey may have lost a step or two since he directed the Detroit Pistons to the NBA title with his buddies Wallace, Wallace, and Hamilton. But he is still one smart, tough, unselfish passer who can distribute the ball and hit the three when it's needed. He isn't pretty and he isn't the star, but he wins games by making his teammates better. Melo will score 25 a game and make it look easy; Amare will get his 20 plus ten rebounds; Chauncey will score 10 with 15 assists and bother the hell out of the opposing guards as the Knicks win another one in the Garden.

The Eastern Conference appeared to be a season-long build-up to a showdown between the Boston Celtics and the Miami Heat, but now who knows? The Knicks might have a shot. With LeBron pretty much carrying Dwayne Wade, Chris Bosh, and the rest of the Heat on his shoulders, they are clearly a force to be reckoned with. The Celtics are aging but playing great basketball. How do the Knicks match up against Boston and Miami?

None of them has a dominant center. Nobody does. Name one great center. Dirk Nowitski's best inside move is a 20-foot jump shot. Kevin Love is getting there but needs players around him, like his mentor Wes Unseld a generation ago. The best teams have a decent journeyman center who can rebound, defend the paint, and set picks for the guys with the ball.

At power forward, the Celtics have Kevin Garnett, who is a little better than Bosh and Stoudemire, but it's close. At small forward, there's LeBron and then there's everybody else. At shooting guard it gets interesting, with Wade against Anthony against Ray Allen. All of them are amazingly fluid scorers. Slight advantage to Miami when Wade is healthy.

Trouble is, Miami doesn't have a top-notch point guard - unless LeBron plays the point and passes to Dwayne, Chris, Zydrunas, and himself. Boston has Rajon Rondo, who is no longer the weak link but rather the youthful spark on a balanced team full of veterans. But now New York has Billups, who is the opposite, a cagey old point guard, the catalyst for two scoring machines who have not played together, and he will take Rondo to school. Advantage New York.

I haven't mentioned the Chicago Bulls because even with Derrick Rose they are a year away. I haven't mentioned the Los Angeles Lakers because even with Kobe Bryant they are just Kobe Bryant end four other guys. I haven't mentioned the San Antonio Spurs because even with Tim Duncan they are too old.

Why do I care? The NBA isn't as much fun as college basketball, and the NCAA tournament is right around the corner. But these men are artists who do what they do better than anyone else in the world. And what else you gonna do in February in Ohio?

Regularly scheduled randomness

2011-01-29T18:22:00.006-05:00

I'm the first to admit that I'm a little superstitious. As in "When you believe in things that you don't understand..." (S. Wonder) Okay, very superstitious. So who 'believes in' things that they do understand? Do you understand gravity? Do I understand inertia? Things that are undeniably real remain wonderfully mysterious.

Hence the desire to build a fire at the end of the day and not just turn up the thermostat, to cook rice and stir-fry some tofu with carrots, onions, fresh ginger, broccoli, and home-grown peppers instead of ordering a pizza. It's time to bring to a close another week, turn in a timesheet, call it a day, enjoy a Danish vodka, and prepare to bid adieu to the Year of the Tiger.

It's just another week, and it's just a calendar, an arbitrary number in a mathematical system invented by an astronomer working for an emperor (lunar) or a Pope (solar) that makes sense within the community of the faithful, for whom it defines something important, but at the end of the day, it's just another day on the blue-green planet.

The key is to "Be heavy and still have a sense of humor," as my friend Terry in the UP used to say, quoting Frank Zappa. With that wisdom in mind, I consult the oracle, which I used to consult almost daily 35 years ago when another friend named Shea introduced me to "the old man in the yellow coat," in an effort to keep things in perspective. Coin toss, marks on paper.

Before Completion (64) when the transition from disorder to order is not yet completed, presents a parallel to spring. "But if the little fox, after nearly completing the crossing, gets its tail in the water, there is nothing that would further." Leading the world out of confusion back to order, one must move warily like an old fox moving over ice....Deliberation and caution are the prerequisites of success.

This divination is pure T'ai Chi, and every new beginner gets it drummed into their head when we are learning to walk like the old fox, placing each foot weightlessly in front, pausing to test the ice before committing to take a step in that particular place, lest the ice give way underfoot and we lunge forward to an icy end.

Six in the fifth place means perseverance, as victory has been won, and success has justified the deed. The new time has arrived and with it good fortune. As the sun shines forth in redoubled beauty after rain, or as a forest grows more freshly green from charred ruins after a fire, so the new era appears all the more glorious by contrast with the misery of the old.

So I slept soundly, woke up holding hands, and had a biscuit with my coffee before Saturday morning class. I could have gone to Lowe's to look for a storm door, or I could have walked the dog or renewed Zelda's car tags at the BMV. But it's nice to know that the victory has been won.

Instead of the errands on my to-do list, I played it by ear in the randomness of an open-ended Saturday, and driving east from High Street I spotted a crew of tree workers bringing down a gigantic ash, so I asked them if they wanted to get rid of some of the wood. The head honcho was more than willing to cut a few of the oddly shaped limbs into lengths I could carry, so I filled up the Ranger with free firewood.

Happy accidents happen sometimes, but you can't plan them or they don't count. I had just enough time to go to the thrift store and found an almost new pair of jeans that fit - nine dollars - and go to the regularly scheduled randomness of the Clinton-Como drum circle.

Nick was there, of course, smiling as usual, and Mark was there, brooding as usual, and a couple of other familiar faces. Pretty soon more people began to trickle in, a young woman I didn't know, three young guys I had met before, an older woman, and everyone found a place to sit in the circle. A couple of kids wandered in from the gym still wearing their basketball shirts, one left after five minutes and the other stayed for an hour. You never know.

Out of office

2011-01-27T22:46:00.004-05:00

Being gone for the better part of a week has consequences. I took a few days off last week because my mother was in the hospital with pneumonia. I talked to my manager, made arrangements with a dependable co-worker to cover my project, and drove south on Saturday.

My sister Anna Banana Golly-Gosh had been visiting my parents for a week, and the day I arrived she went back to Michigan. My brother Rock Golly was there for the weekend, so it was my turn to grab the baton in the sibling relay and accompany Dad through the next few trying days.

Long story short, everything went fairly well. Drs. Sawabini and Mehta saw daily progress in Mom's condition from Sunday through Wednesday: "Her numbers are better." She was unenthusiastic about eating the bland hospital food, but eating unassisted was a big step forward. The physical therapists coaxed her into taking a few steps with a walker, and she felt better after being up out of bed.

Monday and Tuesday, Dad and I visited two "skilled nursing" facilities in Cumberland County and one just across the Putnam County line. Of the two in town, we chose the one that looked more professional and organized. By Wednesday morning, the pneumonia threat had cleared, and we moved her across town to a semi-private room in the rehab center. We spent the afternoon getting acquainted with nurses and therapists, generally being the squeaky wheel and getting their attention.

Thursday I came home to a snowstorm in central Swingstate just in time for my qigong class. They say falling snow has very positive, cleansing qi, and I believe it. Friday in the office was surprisingly trouble-free because Courtney had taken care of business while I was gone. There was exactly one page still to be approved before all files were released. Update the schedule, answer a few emails, touch base with the production team, and call it a day.

On the home front, there was work to do. I hadn't seen Gven Golly in almost a week, so I unpacked the salient details of my visit with the folks and did three loads of laundry. It was cathartic. I cleaned the rooms that I inhabit the most, shoveled snow, built a fire, watched basketball - Ohio State vs. Illinois, Tennessee vs. UConn, Minnesota vs. Michigan, Purdue vs. Michigan State.

When I called Dad, he reported that with a little butter and salt, Mom is eating more and is lucid if not altogether happy and cooperative. She had a successful physical therapy session on Friday that pushed her limits and left her a bit tired. Dad got her a TV and some large-print Readers Digest books. Someone from their Methodist church had visited, and there is a group in the rehab that gets together to sing hymns.

Zelda came over for dinner on Sunday, always a welcome respite from the hum-drum of the week. We had a nice evening with turkey burgers and mashed potatoes while the Packers beat the Bears in the snow of Soldier Field. However, the oven igniter had stopped working, so there was no way to bake bread, and I would have to make do with pita and tortillas for the week's lunches. A whole week's worth of New York Times sits unread on the kitchen table, so I will have to read two sections a day to catch up with the newspaper of record.

Hanging with my boys

2011-01-26T12:21:00.005-05:00

My desk is like a home away from home. When I'm there, I sometimes listen to music. Not all the time, not even every day, so it's not like I make it a practice. But it is a great way to break up the day, screen out distractions, and spend quality time in the presence of familiar voices.

I like these guys. They're not my friends exactly, depending on what that means. Some of them know each other, of course, and none of them have ever heard of me, I can safely assume. Let's just say I enjoy hanging with Adrian, Bob (of course), Charlie, Chick and Bela, Christopher, Dave, Eddie and Joe, Irving, Jerry and David, John, John, Leon, Matt, Miles, Mstislav, Ralph, Red, Ute, and Yo-Yo.

It's a small, select group. I might have the most limited iTunes library in the office. I would attribute that to quality over quantity. Just ask my boys.

Wrandom

2011-01-08T14:28:00.003-05:00

I jotted down the first few words I heard on each channel while flipping from channel 3 all the way up to channel 99, just to see what fragments would fall together. This sample of tube talk from a Friday night is the language of TV.

Beginning

A kind of strange egg creates tomorrow. Car wash, okay, I’ll speak to the catering manager.

Men, HD 3-D mobile TV. My sister said to me the other day, when I find the dress, as they’re thumbing their noses in the face of truth, justice, and the American way. Thus Butterworth entered the funeral business.

Down across southeast Ohio, mother, tomatoes, Maria, the house looked so gorgeous for the holidays. One carat, I love it, Michael, you’re so fabulous. McIlhenny stores 60 thousand barrels; 14 thousand gallons of vinegar are mixed with 3 thousand pounds of mash. (Sousa’s Washington Post March) I thought we were best friends.

Middle

Poetry in motion, injustices we are forced to suffer, and now the conditions for selected locations puts you in a coma. More legitimate as an edited version, or are they both equally despicable?

Strong muscles and healthy bones, in seafood is enjoying it together too consistently not to make it, love coming back unless he changes his mind now. A versatile guard who can do a lot of different things. It’s Chuck’s last call after the game right here.

Congratulations, guys, we’re thrilled to have you. You may speak too, half-breed vermin, but first catch up on everything that’s gone down. It may be cold outside, but it’s still hot in Cleveland. Congratulations, and don’t worry. That’s not a bad omen at all.

Under the gig, pumps pulsate a stream of water. It’s eating you up inside, and you know I never molested that boy. I may be mud, but I have standards. Invisible electric fencing, it’s the latest thing. I think it sexifies the dish a little bit putting the chocolate on top. Maximum strength musinex DM breaks up the musus and quiets coughs. At Burger King you get a second one for free.

Hey, are you famous or something? Or something. Stir up a smile with Hershey’s syrup. Set a good example to lead you in the right direction. What about me? Finally there’s a choice in high-performance detergents. Why don’t you put some pajamas on? That’s not a good situation. Where are you going? Call the number below or log on to get a bow flex dot com.

I love you, Tron guy. Now Ritchie, you don’t have auto insurance coverage right now. He’s square with the house again, so keep off him. Roger’s sick. The film is in about two hours. Wanna go? What’s the name of it? Cross Creek. Never heard of it. Why was he so upset and uncomfortable? I think it had something to do with being socially awkward.

End

The butcher’s paper blowing in the wind, the floating bridges, trying to get something going just for that one game. Any time you get a set of horns the first time and rattle them, that’s a good set of horns. We got a special place here, you know? They’re drunk and disorderly, and police already know they’re a threat to public safety.

PGA shot tracker puts you in control. President Clinton’s secretary of commerce, something in this field could be releasing the chemical into the air when there’s too many of us together. I don’t know anything about anything anymore. By the way, what are you planning to do with your talent, sing, dance? If I do say so myself, now where is that baby unicorn?

We could control Tommy, and by trailing Tommy we could control Celati. It’s like the story of the lion sleeping with the lamb. It happened naturally. Instead of fighting it, I worked with it, you know? Sabor a verdad, I’m gonna call ya in a few hours, okay? A few hours, why? What’s for dessert? Your favorite: crème brule!

Museum as church, church as museum

2011-01-02T18:31:00.017-05:00

Our arrival in New York was delayed by the closure of the Pennsylvania Turnpike and a missed entrance ramp to the New Jersey Turnpike, but in the end our timing was perfect. We were traveling two days after the storm that dropped a foot or two of snow on most of the Northeast, and the evidence increased the farther east we got along I-70. By the time we crossed the Verrazano Bridge from Staten Island into Brooklyn, snow was piled up everywhere on major streets, and many side streets were impassable.

When we finally turned onto Dean Street, a couple of men had just shoveled an SUV out of a parking space two door down from our rental just in time for us to pull in. One of them was our landlord for the week, Niya [NAH-yuh] Bascom, who was kind enough to be out there to guide us in after a long drive. We didn't move our Toyota Echo for the next three days. By Friday some of the snow had melted and the plows had come through, so it was easy in and easy out, the kind of thing you can't plan.

Niya's house is a nice six-unit brownstone on a quiet, tree-lined street a couple of blocks from where Crown Heights meets Bedford-Stuyvesant. Our two-room studio on the first floor had plenty of space and all the amenities we needed. He was a great host. In fact, we had only positive encounters in our Jamaican neighborhood. The civility of Brooklynites was impressive. Maybe it was the leveling effect of everyone having to deal with two feet of snow. Or maybe it's just Brooklyn.

What were we doing in New York, you might ask. Our son Jessi had spent the week of Christmas in Ohio, so Gven and I decided to drive back with him and stay a couple of days to see his new place and a bit of the city. When we got settled on Dean Street, we walked a few blocks up to Fulton and Nostrand, then up the four flights to Jessi's apartment. Yup, that's a lot of stairs for us old folks, but it probably keeps the rent low.

So part of our mission was accomplished. We met two of his three housemates, inspected their very neat, updated space, and verified that yes, you can indeed see the Empire State Building from the kitchen window. We went out to get a bite to eat, and the man at the juice bar on the corner knew Jessi and asked him how his Christmas had been in Ohio. Jessi grinned and asked how things are in Burkina Faso. He introduced us. We got a papaya juice and a chili dog and called it a day.

We slept like we had just driven for 14 hours and walked to breakfast at a bar called Bush Baby on Fulton St. Then, because the Franklin Ave. shuttle wasn't running, we walked about a mile to the Brooklyn Museum. The sun was shining, most sidewalks had a narrow path shoveled through the snow, and it was fine.

Each of us likes to move through a museum at our own pace, and it was easy to spend half a day there, take a break for coffee, and not get lost. I had never seen Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, and it more than lived up to it's inspiring reputation. Gwen told me I should see the exhibition by Fred Tomaselli on the fifth floor, and she was right, it was stunning. He layers materials - leaves, feathers, pills, cut-out images of body parts - in acrylic with a collage-like effect that has to be seen.

Just as it was getting dark, we walked across a tiny corner of Prospect Park and down Flatbush to Cubana Cafe for dinner. Excellent mojitos, excellent service; bring cash because they don't take VISA. Then we walked around some more, but the really cool bars were too crowded, so we walked some more and found a great little bookstore. Why is there more of everything in New York? Because it's New York! And bring your walking shoes.

We had a definite goal the next day for breakfast. On our last New York trip, Gven and I stayed in the East Village and met Jessi at B & H Dairy, his favorite diner on Second Avenue, which is said to serve the best borscht in the universe. It was Saturday morning and the place was packed, but we found a small table in the back and drank coffee while observing the Polish matriarch at the end of the counter keeping an eye on the place while peeling potatoes. When Jessi arrived, there was nowhere to sit, so I suggested that we find another place to eat. Later I regretted this decision, so this was our second chance at the B & H.

It was totally worth it. I didn't see the old lady, but the young man waiting tables refilled our coffee cups and yelled our order to the cook: "Pierogis, cheddar-apple omelette, French toast, Mummy, Daddy."

It was a sunny day in Manhattan, and our mood was ebullient on the way to our next destination in SoHo. Gven wanted to look at knitting supplies at Soho Purl on Broome Street, a place she had admired online, and Jessi took me a block north to The Evolution Store on Spring Street, where among the fossils, stones, and bones I found a book about the natural forms of flowers, stems, shells, and skin that made my eyes bug out the way Fred Tomaselli's art had the day before.

We were beginning to figure out a few of the worst-kept secrets of the New York subway system and quickly found ourselves on the Upper West Side at a table in the back corner of a Hungarian cafe across the street from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Am I in heaven? No, but it's probably a little like Budapest. I can still taste the almond pastry.

The cathedral itself is somewhat overwhelming, which might be the point of Gothic architecture in general and this amazing specimen in particular, built on a rocky outcropping in the most exclusive quarter of the wealthiest city in the richest country in the world. If the vaulted ceilings, tiled floors, stained glass windows, larger-than-life statues of saints, ring of chapels encircling the altar, and string orchestra rehearsing in the nave don't take your breath away, you might want to check for a pulse. Not quite a conversion experience, but close.

Did I mention that it was our anniversary? Yes, our last day in New York - and part of the rationale for the trip - was the 32nd anniversary of the wedding of Sven and Gven Golly all those years ago in Atlanta. We celebrated year 30 in Chicago and now year 32 in New York, maybe our 35th should be . . . in Budapest, or Prague, or Oslo! Let's think about that for a few years.

Our tour guide Jessi and co-conspirator Alex had picked out the perfect restaurant in Greenwich Village. Like kids out on a date in the big city, Gven and I navigated the A train to Washington Square and walked a couple of blocks to Bleecker Street and Trattoria Pesce Pasta. The lobster ravioli was righteous, the tortellini was terrific, and the wine was wonderful.

The Donut Diner in Park Slope was our final breakfast destination and another favorite place of Jessi's where they know him and welcomed us. The Greek omelette was average, but the complimentary glazed donuts were melt-in-your-mouth yummy. Long story longer, we emerged from our free parking place unscathed, crossed back over the Verrazano Bridge and out the Jersey Turnpike, and with the help of a rivetting book on CD by Nick Hornby made it home a few minutes before midnight to toast the New Year.

Chores as ritual, rituals as chore

2011-01-01T18:59:00.006-05:00

Writing the date in numerals separated by slashes, not dashes: 1/1/11

Drinking strong coffee and herb bread, reading the Sunday Style section. Remembering that whatever happens on New Year's Day, unlike Vegas, doesn't stay on New Year's Day but penetrates, permeates, replicates, indicates, and echoes throughout the year, so take note of your actions.

Changing to the 2011 refill in my old weekly planner; recommitting to pen and paper, knowing I'm not ready to organize my life on a hand-held computer, thus admitting that I am old school, a throwback, an anachronism.

Chronicling the salient facts, not for reference later, just for the sake of intentionally writing them down. Making a list of verbs attached to objects both direct and indirect; entertaining a fantasy of expanding it into a blog entry, a short story, a novella, an epic; settling for a journal entry.

Taking out the trash; recycling paper, glass, metal, and plastic; sweeping the floor of the kitchen and den; shovelling ashes from the stove; doing laundry; watering indoor plants. Cleaning up borders between beds in the garden; sweeping the patio, raking away debris, moving rocks upsteam or downstream, redistributing leaves and bark as needed.

Ignoring TV and football until a midafternoon dream turns nightmarish in Big Ten matchups with Southeastern and Big 12 teams. Michigan ouch, Michigan State ouch. Penn State not so bad, Northwestern not so bad, Wisconsin not so good.

Eating a peasant supper of sour kraut and pork.

Playing the three-penny opera of changes: After encountering comes gathering in union, bringing people together, assembling with a common purpose at the ancestral temple with somewhere to go, repairing weapons to guard against the unexpected. After marrying comes abundance with no additional room for growth, as the sun at midday begins declining with the time to be treasured and enjoyed.

Happy Holidays, Family & Friends

2010-12-27T18:54:00.003-05:00

As we look back in appreciation of the abundance around us, we are looking ahead toward new growth and more sustainable perspectives. Join us in taking a break from the struggle and acknowledging the people who matter the most. It’s like a balancing act between glasses half-full and half-empty.

The changing seasons have been abrupt in central Swingstate. I’m looking out at a snowy garden teeming with birds. Our dog Ruby bounds around the yard keeping the squirrels at bay. She is a two-year-old golden retriever-Irish setter mix, and we adopted her just after Gven’s birthday in May. Ruby has her own room (cage) in the corner of the living room, and she has made herself thoroughly at home.

The major event of the summer was a gathering of the Golly clan to celebrate the patriarch Chas’s ninetieth birthday. Anabanana, Jeaniebeanie, Jojo, Sven, Rocko, their spouses, children and grandchildren joined Helena, Chas, and dozens of their Fairfield Glade neighbors for golf, boating, and a big party in his honor. For good measure, we celebrated Helena’s eighty-ninth birthday and their sixty-seventh wedding anniversary too. It was an awesome weekend for older kids to appreciate their parents and younger kids to catch up with each other. The stairstep age distribution of Sven's four siblings, eight nieces and nephews, two adult children is a tribal wonder to behold.

It has been an eventful year for Scott’s parents. After years of macular degeneration, Helena’s right eye had become painful as well as nonfunctional, and they decided the best treatment option was a prosthetic eye. The process of making and fitting an acrylic eyeball was fascinating and a little scary, but the surgeon and the ocularist who built and painted the eye are an impressively skilled pair. The support team, especially our sister-in-law Cindylou Who-Golly, helped manage the logistics, and the new eye looks perfect.

Jessi’s custom builder and handyman business in Brooklyn is keeping him busy when he isn’t working for the electrician at an event space in SoHo. During visits to Ohio, he spearheaded our long-planned bathroom renovation by doing new plumbing, wiring, framing, and tiling with help from Gven, Zelda, and Sven. In October, Jessi and three housemates moved to a new apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant that allegedly has an awesome view of Manhattan.

Gven and Sven will be in New York for a few days after Christmas, so they will see whether you can really see the Empire State Building from the kitchen. They weathered a rainy July weekend in Michigan exploring corners of Antrim County we hadn’t seen in a long time. Our meandering led to Camp Maplehurst, where Sven worked briefly in 1973 with his traveling buddy Scott Hastings. By pure coincidence, campers from the last 50 years were having a reunion that day, and they welcomed us as though we were one of them.

Zelda gets smarter and more beautiful every day – just my opinion – as she approaches her four-year anniversary at Half Price Books. It’s an additional bonus that she lives close enough to drop by for an occasional Sunday dinner. Zelda took a vacation in April to visit her friends Anton and John in Chicago. She balances the demands of work with passions for baking, knitting, hiking, and spending time with her cat Nora.

Sven made the challenging transition to production coordinator/grumpy old man at McGraw-Hill – and he likes it! Adapting to change is the name of the game, so he looks forward to learning a lot more about digital publishing as the industry morphs into a whole new definition of textbook. Thanks to the expanding taiji classes at the rec centers and the good folks in the drum circle, Sven has ample opportunities to get grounded, find a rhythm, and sometimes even shoot baskets.

Gven teaches yoga at police and fire academies, the county courthouse, a major insurance company, a recreation center, and her home base at the Yoga Factory. She joined her sisters and cousins in September for a fun reunion weekend in Helen, Georgia. Sad news came in November when her Dad and the Surratt family suffered the sudden loss of Gven’s stepmother Mavis to a heart attack.

Jessi and Zelda are home for the holidays. The tree is up, and there is a fire in the hearth. We’ll have lutefisk, mashed potatoes, and peas. Some things don’t change so much. Have a fertile, cautious Year of the Rabbit.

Peace on Earth & Peace of Mind,
Sven and Gven

Recipe for a successful Xmas

2010-12-25T15:50:00.004-05:00

1. Shop for tools at Sears Hardware, books at Acorn or Half Price Books, shoes at Macy's, food at Weiland's and the Clintonville Community Market. If they don't have it, you probably don't need it.

2. Appetizers: egg nog (alternative: Brooklyn brown ale), herring in mustard sauce, aged gouda, sharp cheddar, wheat crackers.

3. Dinner: lutefisk baked with garlic and butter; mashed potatoes with garlic and cream cheese; pork-beef meatballs with garlic, bread crumbs, pine nuts, parmesan, romano, and parsley; peas; tossed salad with poppy seed dressing; braided bread; sauvignon blanc.

4. Dessert: apple crisp and tea while watching a movie and dozing off in a comfortable chair.

5. Go outside and do qigong in a light snowfall.

6. Stay up late. Sleep late.

7. Breakfast: coffee with Bailey's, walnut-date bread, smoked salmon, cream cheese, blueberries, yoghurt, apple crisp.

8. Open presents slowly. Try on the new wool socks, new boots, new jacket. Read the first chapter of the new book. Listen to music that everyone likes, or at least music that nobody hates.

9. Go off to separate rooms for awhile and take a break from each other. Bring in more firewood. Take the dog for a good long walk.

10. Dinner: flank steak marinated in Jamaican jerk rub, baked sweet potatoes, green beans with garlic and slivered almonds, pinot noir.

11. Attempt to watch a movie but doze off in a comfortable chair. Go outside and revive by hanging from a trapeze and doing qigong briefly because it's getting cold. Must be that nor'easter that's about to slam into the whole Eastern Seaboard.

12. Don't stay up so late. Don't sleep so late.

13. Get up, read the paper, meditate, eat a spartan breakfast of bread and apple crisp; clean the kitchen and den; dispose of all the wrapping paper, boxes, and miscellaneous packaging materials.

14. Supper: leftover sweet potatoes with salmon, leftover mashed potatoes with meatballs and peas. Marshmallow fudge for dessert.

15. Go out to an actual movie in an actual theater; engage in complex four-sided negotiation whether to see Black Swan, The Fighter, or The King's Speech, and end up seeing True Grit instead. Not bad.

FRD

2010-12-04T20:26:00.004-05:00

It's File Release Day. Leave the tracking, forecasting, and documentation until Monday. It's all about jack, according to Bill. We talk about books, families, co-workers, a former student who can scat like Ella, and the small connected world.

Because I am celebrating the cramp leaving my left calf, the tension exiting the row of cubes I share with four other production workers, and the completion of a project, I am buying another Red's Rye Ale before we go our separate ways.

If your past is in print, your future might be in digital files sent out from a server to a wider world. Our parents, raised on radio, could not have imagined the network we navigate, and we have no inkling of the wonders our kids will know.

So I speed home and eat turkey noodle soup, sit in my favorite chair, and scratch the dog's eager ear. My wife re-starts a movie called "The Time Traveler's Wife," bittersweet but not cloying, and I sleep the undisturbed sleep of a glass half full.

Incrementalism

2010-11-12T19:21:00.004-05:00

Attitudes change over time. Beware of the lightning conversion experience, the sudden flash of enlightenment, and the born-again felon/politician/celebrity who is ready to move on and put this all behind him/her.

Bodies grow, develop, strengthen, and mature gradually. Bodies also age, slow down, weaken, and deteriorate gradually. That growth spurt in adolescence or health crisis after retirement might have been building for some time.

Trees have growth rings, some thicker or thinner than others, reflecting the rate at which new xylem and phloem cells add themselves to the vascular structure of the trunk or branch.

People develop new habits and skills little by little. They don't rid themselves of old behavior by swearing it off, going cold turkey, or putting themselves in the hands of a higher power, although any of those courageous acts might be a step in the right direction, followed by practice, practice, practice.

Healing happens cell by cell.

If I learn anything from reciting this set of facts, I will learn it in the same manner, slowly.

Mulligans league founder retires

2010-11-07T12:24:00.010-05:00

A nice article appeared on page 9A of the Crossville Chronicle, Friday, September 24, and the clipping eventually found its way into my hands. I would provide a link to it here, but the Chronicle doesn't make back issues accessible on the web, so I'm taking the liberty of posting excerpts.

Charles "Charlie" Duncanson, leader of the Fairfield Glade Mulligans Golf League, has retired after 19 years of dedicated service. As the founder and as the league's organizer, Duncanson has approached his duties (with) a zest for success, just as he's done in (other) aspects of his life.

If you happen to know my Dad, you are aware that references to dedicated service, being a natural and gifted organizer, and zest for success are understatements, and that understatement is his style. But I digress.

There are now 32 members and countless subs who will definitely miss having this gentleman at the helm, but they were happy to learn that he'll still be golfing with them occasionally.

Duncanson revealed his secret to keeping all of those accurate schedules and records for which he was known. Every meticulous bit of information was handwritten by Duncanson, who has never relied on a computer for assistance.

I can testify that Dad would spend some time every day at his desk in a nook off the kitchen, updating the scores, standings, averages, dues, and upcoming pairings of every team in the Monday morning golf league. Again, meticulous and accurate do not begin to describe the discipline and care with which he accounted for every stroke, every tee time, and every dollar of every golfer in every foursome on every Monday. He could also shoot his age for 18 holes.

In his youth, recognition as a multi-sport athlete earned him letters in baseball, football, basketball and track during his collegiate career at Winona State University.

...Duncanson served two years in the U.S. Navy, and then two and a half years in the U.S. Air Force. He taught aviation maintenance and repair in both branches of the service, after which he launched a successful 35-year career in the insurance business....

An appreciation luncheon honoring Duncanson was held Sept. 7 at the Phil-ing Station. Mulligan members summed up their feelings with a heartfelt statement, "To know Charlie is to love the man."

My heroes: Allen and Violet Large

2010-11-05T10:50:00.005-04:00

When they won ten million dollars in the lottery, they gave away $9,800,000 of it, according to the Halifax Chronicle-Herald. Are these Canucks plain loony? Or do they know something the rest of us don't?

He is 75 years old and she is 78. He worked as a welder in Ontario for 30 years before retiring to Nova Scotia. She worked for cosmetics and chocolate companies. They have an old house that they like.

She was being treated for cancer on July 14 when they hit the lotto. She underwent her final chemotherapy treatments a week ago. It took them about a week to figure out what to do with all that money.

The Larges donated their winnings to the local fire department, churches, the Red Cross, Salvation Army, and the hospitals in Truru and Halifax where Violet received treatment. Some of it went to family members. They said they felt fortunate to be able to help. "It made us feel good," said Violet. "And there’s so much good being done with that money."

Steal This Education [but Buy This Article]

2010-11-03T21:29:00.008-04:00

[Headline teaser in the Chronicle of Higher Education]

Abbie Hoffman said a revolutionary's first duty was to get away with it. Now you can.

[Byline]

By Dalton Conley

[Snarky lead paragraph]

It turns out that the yippie activist Abbie Hoffman was born a few decades too early. In his 1971 counterculture classic, Steal This Book, he devoted considerable space to discussing how to live for free. He provided survival tips, such as how to take advantage of furniture pick-up day in your neighborhood, how to Dumpster dive, and how to enroll for food stamps or for clinics to get a venereal disease cured gratis. But Hoffman went beyond that: He counseled the reader on how to get

[Rude awakening to unsuspecting reader]

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[Hint: It's yet another self-serving article about the wonders of online courses. Wouldn't Abbie be proud? I doubt it.]

Still Life with Coffee

2010-10-24T22:31:00.009-04:00

Woke up this morning,
Put on my slippers,
Walked in the kitchen and died.
And oh what a feeling
As my soul went through the ceiling,
And on up to heaven I did ride.

John Prine has the amazing gift of telling a story in a simple, straightforward song. Verse, verse, chorus. Nothing too intricate; some of the tunes sound a lot alike. They're put together like country songs, two guitars and bass, plenty of twang. They're from Nashville, and he looks comfortable in the black suit and black shirt. But in my book it's poetry.

I went to see Prine last night at the Palace Theater, kitty-corner from the stately Ohio Statehouse, and ended up having a sort of spiritual reunion with some old friends who used to appreciate the same stuff. It's not easy to distinguish the work of art itself from what I was going through at the time. How could anyone separate the song, the album, or the artist from their concurrent personal adventures in life as we know it? So my response to about three albums worth of John Prine songs is heavily tied to people I knew at the time who were sharing that appreciation on some level in their own idiosyncratic way.

I'm guessing Prine connects with a lot of people that way. The bass player asked me what songs they didn't play that I wished they would, but there was really nothing missing. What I most wanted to hear was "Hello in There," and I did. I hoped he would do "Sam Stone" because it is so devastating. I had no complaints. I was just there to enjoy the moment.

When my friend whisked us backstage to watch the encore from the wings and then through a labyrinth upstairs to the little room in the old movie house, we thought we might get to meet Prine himself. Turns out he left immediately to go back to the hotel and didn't go back to the dressing room to hang out, but I did get to express to the band, the promoter, my daughter, and my friend who got us tickets that Prine reaches some deep, soft, emotional place, and that was about as much earnestness as anyone could take.

We had an apartment in the city.
Me and Loretta liked living there.
It's been years since the kids have grown,
Lives of their own, left us alone

He didn't do a lot of talking between songs, but he did introduce that particular story with another story about when he was helping a friend with his newspaper route. They would deliver the Sun-Times to a nursing home, taking a paper to each subscriber in their rooms, and some of the old people would talk to him and pretend he was a grandson or a nephew. So he's always had a connection with old people, he said, "and now I am one."

Old soul maybe. He looked fit as a fiddle onstage, and he moves well with the guitar. His voice is as strong as ever, though he has never had operatic pipes. It's a little rough, like an uncut diamond, and his range covers just enough notes to tell the tale. He's a little thick around the middle, but he always was chunky. He never was a prettyboy, and the ordinary workingclass face has only gotten more beat-up looking with time.

But the songs are even more gut-wrenching now than they were in the early seventies when I first became an admirer. And I was ecstatic to witness Prine's two-hour set in yet another provincial capital on yet another stage in yet another old theater and see him holding his own in the battle against the brutal fact that sweet songs never last too long on broken radios.

Sam Stone came home to his wife and family
After serving in the conflict overseas.
And the time that he served had shattered all his nerves
And left a little shrapnel in his knee.
But the morphine eased his pain, and the grass grew round his brain
And gave him all the confidence he lacked,
With a purple heart and a monkey on his back.

Prine writes about death a lot, and about love, of course, loneliness, despair, betrayal, peaches - all the major themes. There's plenty of religious imagery - God, angels, Jesus, pearly gates - some of it tongue-in-cheek and some definitely not. I guess like many of us who were raised to be patriotic, god-fearing middle-Amerikans, he continues to cast a jaundiced eye on the damage done by his own cultural baggage. Yet wonder of wonders, he maintains a hard-working and indispensable sense of humor.

Blow up your TV, throw away your paper,
Go to the country, build you a home.
Plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches,
Try and find Jesus on your own.

So in a way he wrote part of the soundtrack of a certain version of my life during a crucial formative stage before I was set in my ways, and it was fun to share a little of that magic with Zelda at a crucial formative stage before she gets too set in her ways. These opportunities don't come up every day, and rumor has it there's a time limit.

Butterfly Effect

2010-10-15T22:21:00.001-04:00

When a butterfly flits its wings in the Amazon basin, they say, it affects the melting of the polar ice cap. How does it do that? Through a vast chain of multiple causes and effects too complex for anyone to fathom. How do they know this? Inductively.

An individual person who is a member of multiple, sometimes overlapping groups at work, at home, in a family, among friends, in schools, churches, and informal circles transmits and receives hundreds of signs, signals, and messages every day. Spoken, written, postural, gestural, performative, functional, aesthetic. It would be neat to discern exactly what led who to do what.

Why did you do that? People can be very creative when called upon to justify something.

I dreamed about owls. Not one owl, but three owls landing one by one in quick succession on three difference branches. Three big owls flying in from left to right, then landing right to left. Then I forgot about it, but it came back so I wrote it down. I can't tell you what it "means" except that my sleeping mind had owls in it.

I dreamed I was driving in a rainstorm and all of a sudden the windshield wipers blades shredded right before my eyes, splitting into long useless strips hanging by a thread while I stopped the car to try to fix them. In a rainstorm. In a dream. You tell me.

Chuang-tse famously dreamed he was a butterfly and awoke wondering whether he was really a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang-tse. An epistemological conundrum. Who can say for sure. For myself, I am reasonably certain that I am not an owl in this lifetime.

Sitting and forgetting is another big theme in Chuang-tse. He suggests sitting and forgetting as an antidote to strife and trouble, as a way of letting internal measures address the distress brought about by external matters. At least that's how I remember reading it. Sitting and forgetting is the same as meditation, if meditation aims toward tranquility by letting go of thoughts that arise and trouble the mind. Forgetting is just a negative, characteristically Taoist way of calming the mind.

Forgetting is a favorite issue of mine because of my own predisposition (or habit or talent or fatal flaw) for losing track of one thing while focusing on another. I multitask well - one thing at a time. The hard part is switching from one thing to another at the right time, like keeping track of the conversation without missing your exit on the interstate. Period. New paragraph.

Some people are exceptionally gifted at sitting; others have a penchant for forgetting. Rare is the bird who intuitively knows how to do both, and rarer still is the sage who can do both at once.

I'm pretty good at getting so absorbed in what I'm doing over the weekend, without a thought of the work I left on my desk on Friday, that by Monday morning I have no idea where I left off. I'm in the 99th percentile at letting my right brain take over temporarily, so my left brain retains nothing - or vice versa.

There was more I could have said about this momentous topic, but I forgot what it was, thank goodness.

Why I love the rec center, Part two

2010-10-10T22:20:00.004-04:00

A warm, clear October afternoon. The qigong class is practicing outside under a big maple tree. Kids are playing on the playground nearby, and a hum of activity pervades the space. Pretty soon the rec center staff are setting up tables next to bales of straw for their Fall Festival.

Our little circle of six is joined by a mother and daughter for a few minutes. They mimic our movements and move on to other forms of play. We're a mixed bag of younger and older, male and female, hipster and nerd, in other words a really cool cross-section of everyday people. We finish our form, talk about next week, and Miss Connie from the rec center comes over to offer us cider and donuts, now that we're all one with nature.

It's too nice a day to just get in the car and go home, so I take a walk past the playground full of kids climbing and watchful parents sitting on benches or standing around talking while keeping one eye on their babies, out to the ballfield, where teams of young adults wearing matching T-shirts play a spirited game of kickball. Some of the twenty-somethings run fast and kick with power; some of them are just starting to get the hang of the eye-foot coordination thing, but they are out there playing anyway, among friends in a safe social environment, doing something physical without having to be athletic.

Pinch me. This is what I want to do when I grow up. This little corner of the park is a little bit of heaven on a Thursday in October.

The next day is a workday, another opportunity to get something done, try to communicate effectively, solve some problems, and get paid for it.

Saturday morning has recently become another classtime in my week. I drive across town to another rec center and do my best to convey to adult students how to practice what I practice, and to my enormous satisfaction they seem to get it. This group is smaller - three instead of six - and a slightly different really cool cross-section of everyday people.

On my way out, I pass an empty gym. There is a leather basketball on the floor calling my name, so I spend half an hour practicing another ancient movement form. Right hand, left hand, legs and back interacting with the ball, the floor, the backboard, and the hoop. Muscle memory kicks in big time, and I discover to my mild surprise that I can still do this meditation form I've been doing for going-on-sixty years.

I'm not alone in the gym. A couple of neighborhood kids are shooting at the other end. The rhythm of their movements with and without the ball show that they know what they're doing, and a lot of their shots go in. At another basket a young man and his son toss the ball back and forth. The dad looks like he's more familiar with the soccer field than the basketball court, but he's getting it too. Dribble, pass, shoot. The drum-like sound of the ball on the hardwood.

What would it be like to live alone?

2010-09-11T23:13:00.008-04:00

I really don't know. It's been a long time. And a four-day weekend by myself is not about to show me in any real way what living alone would be like, although it does prompt the question, and it's a question worth asking. Not that I'm planning on living alone any time soon, like in the next 30 years, but eventually almost everybody lives alone.

I've done it a couple of times. I grew up in a moderately big family - five kids, two parents. Even then I spent a good bit of time alone, but I never ALONE - existentially alone - because I was always surrounded by my family. Then I had roommates for two years in one dorm, Apple Hall in Kent, and one year in two apartments in Ann Arbor. Those were good times and good places, and I enjoyed the company, mostly.

Then I came back from a trip to Europe and got a room by myself in a rooming house for a year. Nice quiet street, come and go as I please; friends would come over. It was okay. It was better than okay, it was great, but it didn't last very long. I moved out and moved on, living in other people's places for a couple of years - a spare room here, a spare room there, Lower Peninsula, Upper Peninsula - in a house, a cabin, a tent, and finally moved south and found a roommate who eventually became a wife.

Of course that changed everything. For the next 33 years I managed to find time by myself, and over the years I have gotten better at making space for myself within the shared space of apartments and houses. Even with kids, it has always been possible to find time alone and create a space for being alone. But that ongoing balancing act is not the same as living alone, which makes the occasional four-day weekend a useful and revealing experiment while Gven Golly takes part in a sisters-and-cousins reunion in scenic Helen, Georgia.

One makes one's own coffee in the morning; walks the dog in the morning and evening, feeds the dog, and makes sure the dog has water in her bowl. This is not part of my routine normally, so it's a new and different part of my day that would take a serious decision to commit the kind of time a dog requires, that is, if it was just me and the dog. For now, since it is just me and the dog, it's still a major responsibility, as the dog needs and expects my full attention, at least a couple of times every day. Now if she would just learn to heel instead of yanking the leash - and my shoulder - this way and that.

One makes bean soup and arranges lumber in the shed. One watches tennis and football on TV. One reads a story in McSweeney's and articles in the New York Times. One goes for a longish bike ride out Dustin Road to 3Bs&K Road. Have you ever been out that way? West of the interstate, east of Alum Creek Lake, a quiet rural part of Delaware County, quite lovely if you have the time.

I've had an surprisingly active social life this weekend, aside from all that time with the dog. Saturday night I went to a gallery opening - Gven's friend Evangelia's gallery with Gven's work in the show - where I ran into a few people I knew - friends of Gven. Sunday I went to the temple and meditated, stayed for the teaching, went out for coffee, and drummed with the regular Clinton-Como drum circle in the park, where I ran into several people I knew - independently of Gven. She has her circle, I have my circle, and our circles overlap like a classic...Gvenn diagram. Sorry.

One finds things exactly where one put them, cleans up one's messes, and eats what one cooks. There is an increased sense of control, inhabiting a house by oneself. Everything is right where I put it. Nothing gets done if I don't do it myself. There will be no chicken dinner on Sunday. Nobody's going to clean up those dishes but me. Who am I gonna blame when something goes wrong? Why are we are out of coffee? Who left all this stuff lying around? Oh, yeah, that would be me.

I don't know how long it would take for all this glorious solitude to get old, but it would get old. There is no one there in the evening to unload all the day's baggage of disappointments, misdeeds, unmet deadlines, and crises du jour. And there is no one occupying the couch and the TV the entire evening with inane hospital shows and sitcoms, so I can catch every update on every ballgame on SportsCenter if I feel like it. Or not. It's mixed.

On realignment

2010-09-07T23:11:00.008-04:00

If the Big Ten is going to expand, and they are, let's do it right. If that sounds like I have skin in the game, maybe I do and maybe I don't. When you've grown up breathing the air and hearing the language of midwestern college sports, it feels like it all matters deeply, because it does. Herewith some gut responses.

1. Keep the name. The 'Big Ten' brand transcends the actual number of universities in the conference, so don't get hung up on 11, 12, 14, or whatever the business arrangement becomes. It's the Big Ten, and it shall remain the Big Ten.

2. Screw Notre Dame. It would be like marrying the biggest prima donna in the senior class. Better off without her.

3. Organize the expanded conference into divisions based on geography AND history AND economics AND mob psychology. What is this, social studies? Yes, as a matter of fact, it is.

Now make a graphic organizer comparing the market size, football bowl appearances, basketball tournament record, academic research funding, and level of alumni fanaticism in each of the following:

East: Penn State, Ohio State, Michigan, Michigan State, Indiana, Purdue.

West: Northwestern, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska.

4. While you're at it, add Missouri and Kansas. Not right away, because the Big Ten doesn't make impulsive decisions like those other, lesser, mercenary enterprises to the East, West, and South that lack our sense of history, decorum, stodginess. Hrmph. Give the current configuration 20 or 30 years to make sure its a prudent move, then see if Missouri and Kansas are worthy. By that time, the Big Pac WAC Tex Mex 18 will have morphed into any number of Frankenleagues.

Come to think of it, that recent interloper Michigan State, which joined just the other day in the 1950s, is really still on probation, and the jury is definitely still out on this new outfit from State College.

5. Not Pittsburgh, not Syracuse, not West Virginia. Not Connecticut, not Rutgers! Let's not get carried away. Okay, maybe Pittsburgh and/or Syracuse, at least they're not coastal, but wait until some time in midcentury. Or Kentucky! Why is Kentucky in the SEC anyway? But no.

Of birds and bees

2010-09-06T21:58:00.003-04:00

It's a Saturday morning, already warm but not yet hot, as I enjoy my coffee at a steel and tile table on the terra cotta patio. About a dozen bees move from flower to flower on a sprawling old multi-stemmed salvia. When they latch onto a flower and feed, the weight of a bee shakes the whole stem, and when the bee moves on to another flower, the stem rebounds like a spring. The mass of a bee's body hanging on the salvia stem must be like boys climbing trees in an orchard to pick apples, going out on a limb to grab the good stuff.

It's my idea of a good time just to sit out here and watch the yard come alive.

Last weekend I was sitting right here enjoying a quiet morning, and I heard a big bird swoop in past my left shoulder and land under a rose bush right beside me. All I could see was its black and white tail feathers for the minute that it rested under the roses. Then it took off and in two seconds was in the middle branches of a maple tree in the corner of the yard. I could just barely see the tail twitching under the branch that obscured its body. When I walked closer to get a better look, the hawk flew away, and for a second I could see its white belly shooting across the parking lot to another maple. Not a red tailed hawk, maybe a sparrow hawk, and whatever you are, you can see me a lot better than I can see you, so thanks for stopping by.

When Jessi was here in July working on the house, he made a number of trips to the hardware store to get tools and materials. A drill bit here, a section of PVC pipe there. On one of those trips down the bike trail from Summit to State Street, he was riding past the South High School baseball field, and he saw a hawk caught in the netting of the batting cage on the far end of the field. The big bird must have randomly flown in one end of this long, narrow net and gotten tangled up trying to find its way out of the 65-foot tunnel of rope.

Jessi being Jessi, he got off the bike and into the cage, trying to shake the net to free the bird. It took some doing, but finally the hawk got unsnagged from the net and flew out the open end.

That was the week that was

2010-08-29T21:56:00.007-04:00

It started out on a Sunday, as many weeks do. I was spending the weekend doing things I like to do - cleaning up the branches of a fallen tree, transplanting some raspberry bushes, getting a few chores done in preparation for a bike ride. But when I went to the garage, the bike was gone, stolen from under my suburban nose in broad daylight while I was oblivious in the garden a few feet away.

I was bummed out. Worse things can happen, it's true, but I had grown attached to the dark green Trek in the year and a half I had ridden it, and I was really looking forward to riding it that day. With it disappeared a nice little rechargeable headlight and taillight and a toolkit containing Allen wrenches, tire irons, and a spare tube. It happens every day to somebody; that's life in the small city. I suspect that the perpetrators have no idea what they're doing.

No doubt my downcast attitude colored the other events of the week, which had already looked challenging. I had rescheduled some vacation days to focus on getting a new project launched, and I had some other, nonwork-related schedule issues to work out. And who doesn't have decisions to make in the course of a week?

"Return," said The Book of Changes, "brings exit and entry, somewhere to go with firm strength, going out and coming in without trouble." A few days later it said, "Advance and illuminate virtue by reflecting it under stress, going to three meetings a day." That sounds about right.

What's remarkable now, in retrospect, is how quickly things got checked off my list of problems, as if compartmentalizing the sources of stress and irritation made it easier to address them individually, take a breath and move on to the next one, as if each was separate from the other, which they never are. But I can only do one thing at a time, so I had to take each item of unfinished business out of context and treat it as a single entity. No calls yet from the Nobel committee on my amazing discovery.

So I hastily put together the launch that I couldn't put off any longer, and lo and behold all the key people came to the meeting, which of course raised a bunch of additional issues for all the key people to start working on, and since I'm the production coordinator, each key person's problem is, at least indirectly, my problem.

I'm still without a bike, and wouldn't you know, now the truck is running rough, misfiring in low gear like it suddenly needs a tuneup, when two days ago it was running fine. Normally I would drop the truck at the shop in the morning, ride my bike to work, and pick up the truck after work, but no. So I called the trusted mechanic, and he suggested I try a can of Sea Foam motor treatment, which I picked up for nine dollars and poured in the gas tank in the hope that this stuff will clean up the fuel injectors until I can get a real tuneup.

Sometimes it's the little loose ends left hanging that are most annoying. Not that each question isn't important in its own way, but the plethora of unresolved issues was clouding my thinking. Just make a decision, okay? Yes, I will schedule a new Saturday morning class this fall on the Westside, and yes, I will continue to practice on Thursdays in the park even if no one shows up, and no, I will not make the switch to Wednesday nights when the old men's group changes to its new schedule.

I called my son and learned a lot about his new gig maintaining an event space in SoHo for Red Bull. Everybody in his house is moving out and finding new places to live, so he will likely have a new address come October. He commiserated on the loss of the bike.

I called my parents and heard about some of the adjustments they are making, such as cooking more for themselves instead of getting meals delivered. They're picking lots of tomatoes, and we compared notes on how our gardens are doing. They were delighted to hear that their grandson Max is getting married.

I met my friend John for a beer after work, and among other things we discovered that we had met 23 years ago when we were both in school. Neither of us remembered the other when we reconnected on a church committee a couple of years ago, or when he gave me a can of Fix-a-Flat when I had tire trouble, or when he and his daughter took my taiji class, but we had been in another taiji class together in 1987, and I had the class roster to prove it.

Finally, at the end of the week, I couldn't stand it any more, so I found a pretty good bike on Craig's List and paid the man cash on the barrelhead for a black Schwinn. It's not as jazzy as the dark green Trek; it has wider tires and narrower handlebars, but I'll get used to it, and at least I can ride again.

It's a luxury

2010-08-03T11:35:00.003-04:00

You go somewhere other than your usual digs to do something other than your usual gig, and things happen, not exactly as you imagined, which might be the whole point. You make the necessary course corrections in order to have a good time without exhausting your resources. You come back.

Time passes. Memory persists during re-entry, reconstructing events, places, moments of unusual brightness and clarity. The urge to chronicle the experience comes and goes, competing with the need to get things done in the here and now. Travelling seems to spark that memoirist impulse; maybe that's why people take their cameras and bring home the obligatory photo gallery of their trip. I have my hands full getting from Point OH to point MI, so I can't balance the going and doing with the recording and capturing. And even if I could, do I really want to spend my precious vacation time taking pictures and writing in my journal?

So when I got back from our very short northern lower peninsula sojourn, I scrounged a surface to write on while the memory was still fresh. It's a luxury to have a day at home to clean up the kitchen, do laundry, water and weed the garden, read the paper - the usual weekend things - before going back to work on Tuesday. So I put a pen to paper and scrawled a couple of pages without much self-editing; the good news and the bad news is that this happens on vacation because it doesn't during the routine everyday rhythm of home and work.

It was a luxury to be able to pack the car and take off Friday morning, arrive that evening in a campground where we are known, and for twelve dollars a night sleep in a tent, cook over a fire, meditate under a humungous pine tree, and breathe the air of the north woods.

It was a luxury to get up in a dry tent Saturday morning and drive to Mancelona for breakfast, read the local paper while drinking coffee and waiting for our sausage gravy and biscuits. The young couple from Ann Arbor at the next table at Bo Jack's Bakery Cafe was envious as they busily minded the manners of their two little girls, four-year-old Ava and two-year-old Lydia. Especially when we told them that our grown-up daughter was dog-sitting for us back in Ohio.

The early morning rain had not let up, and we found just the map we were looking for at the gas station, so we took off west on M-88 to see what we would see. What we discovered was the cute little town of Bellaire and a string of small lakes on our way around the northern tip of Torch Lake, a big beautiful body of water just inland from Grand Traverse Bay. On a lark, we turned down Cairn Road to try to find Camp Maplehurst, where I worked and played for a short time in 1974, before moving on to the U.P. and other adventures.

To my surprise, we found it largely unchanged, the lodge sitting up on a knoll about a mile in from the highway, with cabins lining the path down to a little lake. On a whim we stopped and asked if we could look around. As luck would have it, we had walked in on a reunion of campers and counselors from the 55 years of the camp's existence. That explained all the Cadillacs and Volvos in the parking lot. The proprietors, Lawrence and Brenda, son and daughter-in-law of Tom, who ran the place back in the day, graciously invited us to make ourselves at home.

So Gven Golly and I looked around the big old house and took a self-guided tour of the grounds, down to the lake, past the dock, around the ballfield and the basketball court, through a cherry orchard and back to the lodge. Old campers were singing camp songs and eating lunch together. I had never met Lawrence and Brenda, but they had known the people I worked with, most of whom have since died or become hermits, and it was cool to make that connection.

That little side trip gave us plenty to think and talk about the rest of the afternoon while driving around the hills east of Traverse Bay, past dairy farms, orchards, fields of sunflowers, and houses with fieldstone porches. Even with a good map we managed to get a little bit lost between Elk Rapids and Kewadin before getting our bearings again, rounding the southern tip of Torch Lake, and making our way back to Bellaire for a cup of good Ethiopian coffee and some serious fantasizing. Just enough exposure to the local culture to whet the appetite.

When we got back to our campsite it was still drizzling, not a heavy rain but not weather for a bike ride and a swim. We made do with a charcoal fire and cooked our pasta, which we enjoyed with some cheese, an avocado, cherry tomatoes, and an Oberon ale. The charcoal fire gradually dried the wood we found, and the fire kept going until bedtime.

Next morning the sun came out, so we made breakfast and rode our bikes to Pencil Lake for a swim. The road was smooth, with pine and poplar and ferns on both sides, and we passed the occasional house along the way. The water was clean and clear. A man and his two grandchildren got there just as we were leaving; other than that we had it to ourselves.

This was Sunday, our return-home day, so we decided to go to Traverse City and see what was happening. By midday the awesome weather and a film festival had drawn throngs of people to the beach and the streets. We did the streets first, which were packed with film geeks and tourists. Gven found just the right restaurant for lunch, Poppycock, and the food was almost as good as the people-watching. She faced out and I faced in; it's a toss-up who saw the better show.

A walk on the beach confirmed my suspicion that a fairly wide socio-economic cross-section of midwestern humanity flocks to this bay at this time of year. And who can blame them? Of course there are the high-end tourists, who have a summer house on the water, and the low-end tourists, who pitch a tent in the state park, and everyone in between. And my slow realization is the high-end tourists don't have a monopoly on education and good taste in art, food, drink, clothes, or water sports.

We took back roads almost halfway home and got to see a different view of that part of Michigan. Because we indulged our senses all morning and most of the afternoon, it was a late night before we got home. We were spent but it was worth it.

The Four Ordinary Truths

2010-06-27T23:51:00.004-04:00

1. All life is subject to the blues.
2. The nature of the blues is feeling really good some of the time and really bad some of the time.
3. The reason for these crazy, unpredictable changes is that things don't always happen the way we want them to happen, and that can be disappointing.
4. There is a way through this mess. Inhale. Exhale. Repeat.

I didn't say I knew the way through this mess, I just said there is a way, and in the meantime, breathing is recommended. You got a better idea?

Coming soon: The Eightfold Path to Relative Contentment in the Midst of Absolute Ambivalence.

On writing badly

2010-05-17T15:17:00.001-04:00

It's refreshing to read something well written once in a while, even if it's this article about bad writing.

Good writing makes you keep reading. It's like good cooking. It draws you into the act of reading (eating), makes you not just enjoy reading but want to read and imparts an increased appreciation of the content and substance - but also the craft of making it. So satisfying, how did they do that?

Bad writing makes you wonder why they even bother to put random words on paper, as if they gave a damn how a thought comes across to the poor disrespected reader. An overly generous response to bad writing is: well, it's better than not writing at all.

Sorry, I'm not that generous. Bad writing does more damage than not writing. Like bad music, it inflicts pain on the senses, but it also conveys false, confused, or distorted information in the guise of facts and explanations, one step forward, two steps back.

Worst of all, bad writing numbs the senses to language the way bad architecture can make people hate their house. Bad writing in the jargon-laden, formulaic mode of most business and academic dreck, conveys the impression that this is all there is, information is dull by definition, and you can only get used to it. Just kill me now.

The trouble is, most of us have to do a lot of bad writing before we have the chops to do any good writing. It's a practice like any other. How are you going to play good basketball, chess, or piano unless you put in a lot of time playing bad basketball, chess, or piano? I wish it were otherwise.

Maybe I'm overlooking the difference between bad writing and novice writing. The neophyte or the uncoached player can easily be forgiven a multitude of sins. The craft takes practice, and the first few thousand attempts are going to fall short of excellence. It's a neophyte critic who is too harsh on the early attempts.

It's the careless, inattentive player who won't make the effort that is intolerable. If the first draft doesn't measure up, well too bad. You can't understand what I'm trying to say? That's your problem. With extremely rare exceptions, every first draft is badly written. It follows that everyone who refuses to rewrite (and rewrite and rewrite) writes badly.

The opposite problem can be just as infuriating. In contrast to the George W. Bushes of the world, who don't care enough to construct a coherent sentence, we have the terminally self-absorbed writer who finds every line flowing out of his or her mellifluous pen or word processor incredibly poignant and precious.

I plead guilty. Why else would anyone write, then write some more, and come back repeatedly to keep on writing without getting paid for it, unless they just love the sound of their own amazing writerly voice? Give me a freaking break and get over yourself. I'll try.

Golly Plumbing

2010-05-14T15:17:00.005-04:00

"This Old House" it's not. We don't use only the best tools, wear designer flannel shirts, and speak in Boston accents. And we don't make everything look easy like on TV. But we git 'er done, eventually.

First, you grab a bunch of screwdrivers, wrenches, a hammer, and start taking things apart. Take the handles off the hot and cold water valve to the tub. Unbolt the tank from the toilet, drain all the water, and unbolt the bowl from the floor. Oh, don't forget to shut off the incoming water pipes before you start taking things apart. That would be a mess.

And it's a mess regardless. Get used to it. But this outfit cleans up frequently (I almost said continuously, not true) if only to breathe a minimum of dust and dirt, keep track of the tools lying everywhere, and see a semblance of the room this will eventually be. The back bathroom of Om Shanty has been in some stage of slow transformation so long that no set of before-and-after photos (which I haven't taken, sorry) would do it justice.

Once we got started in the demolition phase of the project, it was only slightly more complicated to detach the drain pipe from the tub, accessible from either the other side of the wall through a removable panel in the adjacent kitchen wall or from underneath in the dim and dank cellar. It was a big nut, so the pipe wrench came in handy, and once it was off, the whole tub lifted right out of there. Tub gone, toilet gone, sink long gone, it's easier to see how much (or how little) room there is in this room.

Then it's time to reconfigure the space. In this old house, that involves taking down lots of old plaster, some drywall, and a few studs I had put up when I recessed the fridge into a former doorway into the bathroom. This experiment a couple of years ago sort of worked for a while, and now Gven and I are rethinking the fridge placement, moving it a few inches to make better use of space in the transformed bathroom.

Tearing into the plaster and lath on two ancient walls was big fun. For this, Jessi Golly and I donned our handkerchief masks, gloves, wielded hammers, and did a convincing imitation of Samurai cowboy plumbing train robbers. It took awhile, but we got it down to the original 1884 brick wall and 1925 framing. Let the wiring begin.

Jessi did all the real work; I consulted, fetched tools, cleaned up, asked questions, and offered uninformed suggestions of improbable alternative solutions to the inevitable problems that come up. He's the one with the skills, the mind-set, the analytical ability, the physical strength and agility to crawl around in the attic, drill holes through old 2x4s that are actually two inches by four inches and pull old wires from an old switch box across the room to a new switch box mounted next to the door where it should have been in the first place.

Wall Street buzzes: Golly Plumbing merges with Jessi Electric, construction futures soar!

Are you happy?

2010-05-13T23:45:00.007-04:00

It must be the zeitgeist. Have you heard? It's all about being happy.

Popular magazines, academic research, and religious messages are full of descriptions and prescriptions about happiness. Just this morning, Slate referred its unwitting readers to a TIME magazine article informing us that "The Internet is a key to happiness." No kidding. Now I know. What I really want is to be happy AND that going online will make me happy, according to unbiased research by that well-known authority on my happiness, the Chartered Institute of IT.

Yoga Journal, for example, has always had lots of pretty pictures of pretty people (You want to be just like them, and if you do yoga, you'll be pretty too!) performing amazing postures while wearing big smiles and chic yoga attire. But lately the articles too, rather than providing information about, like, you know, yoga, are about that most amorphous of subjects, 'happiness'.

My Buddhist friends seem to be unanimous in the assumption that everyone - Buddhist or not - ultimately wants the same thing - to be happy. Not wise, enlightened, virtuous, or powerful, just happy. Apparently all other human goals, aspirations, and drives are subsumed in that one nebulous, undefinable word. People's behaviors, beliefs, and justifications for doing what they do vary widely, but it's a given that we all really want the same thing.

And there's the rub: if somebody says they want something else - let's say health, wealth, freedom, sex, drugs, rock and roll - that aberrant desire can be attributed to the notion that it's only a means toward what they really want, you know (the H word).

What's the purpose of living? To survive, mate, procreate, and raise children? No, it's to be happy. What's the goal of all successful people? To advance to greater responsibility in a productive career? No, you idiot, it's to be happy. What is it that everyone has in common? A genetic predisposition to communicate, use tools, build things, and maintain relationships? Hell no, those are just placeholders, substitutes, or sublimated outlets for the one true desire, let me guess, to be happy!

What's the ultimate measure of your educational growth, parental influence, work ethic, perseverance, social standing, and lovingkindness? Altogether now: Are you happy?

But I protest too much. I'm no different from anyone else. Of course I want to be happy. But I want a lot of other things too, and they're not reducible to any single unit of currency that conveniently fits under the sugary category of 'happiness'. Have we all seen too many B movies in which boy meets girl, a bunch of unpleasant conflict occurs, and after 100 minutes of mild predictable plot devices, they live happily ever after? Does anyone really want their life to reflect that formula?

If so, you stopped reading this rant six paragraphs ago. If you're jaded, faded, and overrated enough to have read this far, join me in beseeching the Universe. Please, let there be more to life than smiley-faced signs of everyone being nice to everyone all the time, lest they be found guilty of that most heinous of crimes, being unhappy for even a minute.

Some obscure sources say that it's possible to be a responsible, somewhat intelligent person and not be absolutely giddy with joy every waking moment. I have a number of valued acquaintances who actually frown quite often. From their behavior, body language, and conversation, I discern that they have things on their minds that concern them, perhaps worry them, make them wonder about things going on around them that might not be just hunky dory. What's wrong with these people?

In fact, at last count six out of six co-workers with whom I share a row of cubicles, could be described as borderline suspects of harboring less-than-happy thoughts. Every one of them is smart, funny, interesting, complex, witty, even erudite and highly skilled in their work, yet they seem to suffer that awful malady of occasional - and recurring - unhappiness. People say there's a cure, so maybe they should get a prescription.

Or maybe it's just me. They're all happy as clams, and I'm just not picking up on it. They recognized me early-on as the resident Knight of the Woeful Countenance, and they humor me by feigning deep existential concern for the dark undercurrent of horror in everyday life. Or not.

I have a confession to make. I'm not happy. I'm ecstatic.

Is there a god?

2010-04-28T23:18:00.009-04:00

Of course there is. In fact, there are lots of them.

Look around you. Jews have a god, although it's difficult and/or contentious and/or forbidden to pronounce the name of said creator/lawgiver/covenanter. Muslims, being their fellow patriarchal Abrahamic monotheists, of course have a god known as Allah. One of the few things most Christians can agree on, I think, is that there is indeed a god, and in a truly remarkable moment of unanimity, if not creativity, they even agreed at some point to call their god 'God'.

In short, ample empirical evidence exists to support the proposition that god(s) do(es) exist(s).

If that isn't convincing enough, we can look to the ancient Greeks, who were blessed with a number of colorful, if flawed, gods. The Romans had a pantheon full of gods and goddesses endowed with a wonderful array of humanlike qualities. Those human qualities of gods could make them either appealing or repellant, depending on one's attitude toward humans.

My ancestors the Norse had their own amazing and quirky assemblage of deities, and they were generous enough to share some of them with other Germanic folk in a loose kind of early pagan EU. Hindu tradition has a rich array of gods from Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva down through a plethora of lesser divine beings, embodying for our benefit a mind-boggling range of aspects of our own complex, amazing, and troubled existence.

I'm undoubtedly leaving out many gods and goddesses that exist in a number of cultures of which I am unaware, and I hope members of those cultures will forgive us our omissions (as we forgive those who omit against us). The fact that I don't know about your gods in no way implies that I deny their existence.

Silly question, Is there a god. Clearly there are gods and goddesses all over the place. If it's metaphysical questions you are interested in, you might as well ask, Is there a tree? Is there a mountain? Is there a language? Is there a story? Is there an insect? How many do you want? How much time have you got?

It's not like I lie awake at night wondering about these things, although I do admit the question has come up in dinner-table conversation. (You had to be there.) I bring it up now because I ran across a book recently with the intriguing title 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction. I was intrigued as much by the subtitle as the title, but I'm sorry to say it has been a bit of a disappointment both as fiction and as theology.

But I went ahead and read it, and every time I was ready to give up and return it to the library, I'd start to care about the characters, some of whom are well-drawn, a few of whom seem like interchangeable foils for the protagonist, and some of whom are caricatures of the kind of people you love to hate.

It's a valiant literary attempt to do something really extraordinary in a single book, and some of the intellectual questions the author hamfistedly wedges into the narrative are interesting, although, as you might expect, those discursive asides tend to slow down the action just a bit.

It's a great idea to collect a whole bunch of cogent arguments, either for or against a controversial proposition, and use them as the bones of a novel. Here is a sampling from the Appendix, not for your edification but as an indication of the weighty tone that Rebecca Newburger Goldstein brings to her tale:

1. The Cosmological Argument
2. The Ontological Argument
3. The Argument from Design
4. The Argument from the Big Bang
5. The Argument from the Fine-Tuning of Physical Constants
6. The Argument from the Beauty of Physical Laws
7. The Argument from Cosmic Coincidences
8. The Argument from Personal Coincidences
9. The Argument from Answered Prayers
10. The Argument from a Wonderful Life
11. The Argument from Miracles
12. The Argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness
13. The Argument from the Improbable Self
14. The Argument from Survival After Death
15. The Argument from the Inconceivability of Personal Annihilation
16. The Argument from Moral Truth
17. The Argument from Altruism
18. The Argument from Free Will
19. The Argument from Personal Purpose
20. The Argument from the Intolerability of Insignificance
21. The Argument from the Consensus of Humanity
22. The Argument from the Consensus of Mystics
23. The Argument from Holy Books
24. The Argument from Perfect Justice
25. The Argument from Suffering
26. The Argument from the Survival of the Jews
27. The Argument from the Upward Curve of History
28. The Argument from Prodigious Genius
29. The Argument from the Human Knowledge of Infinity
30. The Argument from Mathematical Reality
31. The Argument from Decision Theory (Pascal’s Wager)
32. The Argument from Pragmatism (William James’s Leap of Faith)
33. The Argument from the Unreasonableness of Reason
34. The Argument from Sublimity
35. The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe (Spinoza’s God)
36. The Argument from the Abundance of Arguments

You get the idea. She's a Serious Writer.

Postrelativism

2010-04-27T17:07:00.008-04:00

"'Relativism' only makes sense in a realist epistemology." - Patty Lather

An article in the New York Times describes the strange position of Western filmmakers in North Korea who, in exchange for the privilege of filming in North Korea, must adhere to authoritarian Pyongyang standards of form and content. In order to reveal an informed view of the state control of the arts and society that is their subject, they have to play by the rules and thus show the absurdity of the rules. Go along and get along.

Very few Western artists have found their way through the obstructionist maze of official oppression to make a documentary film about the extremities of life north of the 38th parallel. The intention to subvert the system could only succeed ironically, by adhering to its restrictions and pleasing the approving authorities. Not biting the hand that feeds you, just obeying it with a straight face.

In the good old freedom-loving USA, paragon of democracy, diversity, and dissent, we don't have to resort to such duplicity.

In the Art World as the eminent critic Arthur Danto defines it - you know, galleries, museums, collectors, agents, buyers, sellers, critics - there is a (desperate) need for standards of high art and low, 'fine' and 'folk', this school and that, uptown-downtown, etc., and those distinctions of course serve many purposes. For one thing, the market appears to require them in order to set the value of the products it buys and sells.

If you buy into that worldview, as Danto, et al, clearly do and want the rest of us to do, then you become eligible to belong to the club - or not. [Note: eligibility does not guarantee membership, but buying in is a prerequisite to eligibility; let's get that straight.] It's a realistic view of art and artists, producers and consumers, supply and demand, goods and services, you know the drill. Qua realism, it is what it is; the world just works that way, so if you don't like it, get over it.

Besides, I read it in the New York Times, so it's true. Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, TIME, Newsweek, CBS, CNN, whatever. Don't you watch The News? These people make the news. They're professionals in a serious and competitive business. Whether they take themselves and the content they produce as seriously as their target audience does is another question. I'm guessing that the news biz is rife with ironists.

What several friends have tried to teach me on several occasions over the years - I'm a slow learner - is that this realist paradigm is not necessary or even helpful in understanding the world or getting by in it. On the contrary, it is liberating to take a peek outside it as often as possible, to think and act other than what expert opinion makers agree upon, and above all to not waste your life stoking the star-making machinery behind a popular soooong. Yet there are consequences to opting out of the dominant paradigm, and as a young poet once said, to live outside the law you must be honest.

My old friend Nancy tried to convey something like this to me back in Ann Arbor when as a callow lad I was desperately trying to be unique and special and extraordinary - at something, anything. She was as patient as humanly possible, but I was a slow learner in my own poetic and alienated way.

Another friend, Dazey, a couple of years later, was much more direct in setting me straight about art and life. Yes, there is a difference between theater and everyday life, and no, there is no difference between famous people and ordinary people. There are talented, cool, regular people all over the place doing amazing and groundbreaking work, so what if you haven't seen them on TV.

Professor Lather's statement several years later, uttered impromptu in response to my simple-minded assertion on behalf of 'relativism' during her qualitative research class, resonated in a similar way with respect to science, valid data, and education. What counts as 'true' is not the property of the institutions who fund the research. What counts as beautiful is not the property of the record label, the movie studio, or the publishing conglomerate. What counts as good is not the property of the church, the university, or Major League Baseball.

If you've heard all this a hundred times before, I beg your pardon. Like I said, I'm a slow learner, and it helps me to belabor the obvious every once in a while just to remind myself where I am.

Relativism was simply my favorite term du jour for the much more fluid and mutable view that nobody gets to determine for everybody else what the facts are, what is valuable, and whose work is most interesting and consequential. Realists want to stop the world and nail down once and for all what is the case and claim that it's just objectively so (because they said so).

Given that kind of categorical claim, you know someone will make the contrary claim, and since they don't want to be in the 'realist' camp, they have to call themselves something else. So along came the 'relativist' stance, an attempt to undermine realism by taking nothing as given. Okay, fine. That worked for about five minutes and generated a lot of theses by people who repeatedly told each other, "No, no, you don't understand."

But the more radical truth that Lather did understand is that you can't be a relativist without a realist to disagree with. That's like buying into the realist's argument in the first place, so never mind, might as well skip that step. Forget about relativism, because it's barking up the wrong damn tree. Kind of like trying to be all radical and alienated according to the rules of the New York Times and Arthur Danto, because they call the shots about who's hot and who's not, right?

Easter is

2010-04-06T18:10:00.006-04:00

Redbuds blooming; daylilies and hosta poking out of the ground, peonies sending up thin tendrils, ajuga and lamium waking up, peach and pear trees budding out.

Transplanting chunks of overgrown thickets to areas of bare ground to fill in spaces; moving a few flagstones to make a better path between two rooms in the garden; pulling a few weeds to free up space for flowers and rocks to be visible; leveling off a couple of square-foot spots in the back corner to mark the last stop of Dali and Isabelle.

Grilling salmon, eating with potatoes, asparagus, and white wine outside with Zelda and Gven.

Great Dilemmas of Our Time

2010-03-07T19:14:00.005-05:00

1. To read the entire front section of the Sunday paper or get to church on time? (did/did not)

2. To get coffee or tea during the break after open meditation and before the teaching? (coffee, then tea)

3. Where to park in Grandview? (on the street after going around the block twice)

4. To sit facing in toward the room or out toward the street while enjoying coffee and a scone by oneself at Stauf's? (inward by a window, best seat in the house)

5. To take matters into my own hands and use the plunger to unclog the toilet in a busy cafe after someone put paper towels in it, thus risking an overflow upon flushing? (I did/it didn't)

6. To begin our home bathroom renovation this spring instead of waiting until after we put new flooring in the dining room? (do it now)

7. To deceive/manipulate one friend in order to help another friend pull off a major coup? (no)

8. Does "Sunshine Superman" prove whether Donovan stands the test of time as a pop songwriter/performer? (it does/he does)

9. Does "Peaceful Easy Feeling" prove whether the Eagles stand the test of time as pop songwriters/performers? (it does/they don't)

10. Is it better to ask forgiveness than permission? (no, it's just easier)

11. Is it "tough love" or selfishness to withhold material support from one's adult offspring? (hmmm)

12. Is Stauf's hipster heaven for hipsters of all ages? (yes, but that's not a dilemma)

Jane Burns

2010-02-23T17:50:00.006-05:00

I lost a good friend this week. I hadn't seen her in over a year, but prior to that we had spent many hours together, spread over several years, mostly in a second-floor classroom at Westgate Recreation Center. The thing about Jane was: she was present every minute.

Officially she was a student in a taiji class, and officially I was the teacher, but with Jane all bets are off. We were a group of people who met every week to practice and learn together. No one was in charge, no one was entitled to any privileges that others did not have; no one was excluded, degraded, or marginalized. We learned about movement, we learned about health, and I think we learned a little about respect.

Jane stood out as the senior student who never had a senior moment. She was a warrior who gave no quarter and expected none. She was one of a kind, and I will miss her.

When she was a beginner in the art of taiji in the mid-1990s around age 80, Jane was modest to a fault. Her way of dealing with this novel situation was to immediately befriend a shy young woman in the class, making both of them more comfortable doing something new and somewhat difficult. Jane always showed up on Tuesday nights, and it was clear that she practiced diligently on her own between classes. She uttered words of encouragement for her new friend Sue, and when Sue dropped out after a year or so, Jane adopted another reserved young woman, and they became fast friends.

Jane also befriended me. She went out of her way to do me favors, such as buying bulk whole wheat flour at a bargain price and delivering it to me after class. She knew I was a baker and simply found a way to help. Having retired some time ago after a career in the military, she volunteered for many years as a bookkeeper at WOSU radio. She lived with her two Siamese cats in a condo on the far west side.

Once we had known each other for a while, Jane asked me if I would help her trim the trees and shrubs in her yard. We set up a time on a Saturday morning, and I showed up at her gate with my lopping shears. She showed me around the little garden, pointing out her neatly designed assemblage of growing things, and I worked for an hour or so according to her directions. She gave me a glass of iced tea and a sandwich, and I met her cats - or the one who liked stranger, the one who wasn't hiding under the furniture.

So I would come over once a year and cut back the oakleaf hydrangea or the pieris japonica or the star magnolia. We would talk about this and that, and then I would see her next week at the rec center. On one of my visits, Jane enthusiastically showed me where her pacemaker was, just under the skin on her upper chest. "Here, feel it," she said, taking my hand without any self-consciousness and placing my fingers on the round disk just below her left collarbone. She was so happy to have the little electrical device attached to her heart and explained how effective it was in regulating her heart rate.

Jane had mentioned her cardiologist a few times and wasn't shy about discussing her health issues. Following a mastectomy, another doctor had recommended some exercises for upper-body strength and range of motion. Maybe that's what got her starting in taiji. She took up qigong, too, and made that part of her everyday practice. She liked living and being active, so she did what she could to keep going. She also mentioned her late husband Tom a few times. I think he was a career naval officer too.

When city budget cuts forced schedule changes, I stopped teaching at Westgate, so we didn't see each other every Tuesday, but still talked once in a while. I didn't get a return letter after sending her a Holiday card this year, and in February I received a note from her neighbor Mendy, informing me that Jane had passed away in November. She fell and injured her hip, leg, and arm a year ago and went from the hospital to a rehabilitation center, then to a nursing home, and apparently she never quite recovered. According to Mendy, "She simply wasn't happy being in the environment she was in," and truth be told, I can't imagine Jane sitting all day while other people took care of her.

When Lauren Bacall made a brief appearance on camera at this year's Oscars, my first reaction was: that's really great that Lauren Bacall even bothers to go to this event. My second reaction was: she looks just like Jane Burns. And they would be about the same age.

Lost & found

2010-02-15T19:41:00.000-05:00

What are weekends for, if not to clean the kitchen, make French-press coffee instead of Mr. Coffee, sweep the back room, scoop the ashes from the stove, bury them under the snow, and turn a few heliotropic plants to face in instead of out? But this is no ordinary weekend.

It snowed again, but it only took a few minutes with my trusty shovel to clear off the back walk once I had secured the broken handle with a long nail and some electrical tape. That and other chores left enough time to start a batch of bread, and by the time the dough was ready to knead and rise again, it was time for the drum circle at the rec center.

They say things can either go very well or very badly in the Year of the Iron Tiger. What elemental forces are at work in the natural world and in human society? I did a reading for the incoming lunar new year, and the Book of Changes, in a new translation by Alfred Huang, was as cryptic as ever. Whether 'splitting apart' like firewood, or 'peeling off' like a banana, or 'falling away' like the husk of a seed, the imagery still gives me something very abstruse to work with. Something solid is eroding, but seeds will sprout and push against tough resistance. Something is happening here and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?

I got to the drum circle late, as usual, and once I settled in, time passed all too quickly. Rhythm is not the same as time management. Ten or twelve drummers fed off each other's energy in 20-minute jams that just kept going, and a few steady hands knew when to bring it down to a close.

On the way home I stopped at the flower shop at Schrock and State and bought flowers for the three women in my life - my mother, my wife, and my daughter - and went home to knead the bread and build a fire. It isn't easy choosing just the right gift for someone important, someone with certain likes and dislikes, someone who sees everything as a symbol of something. It keeps it interesting. Then it's reassuring to do something you know how to do, something immediate and tangible.

While picking up an armload of firewood, I found my lost glasses under a big piece of split maple and put them in my pocket, possibly the same pocket they fell out of when I bent over while stacking wood back in October. Somehow I knew they would be there, it just took a while to use up that much wood. While the fire warmed up the den, I sat at my desk and bent the twisted right rim back into a shape that would hold the lens that popped out, cleaned the lenses, adjusted the nose pieces to sit on the bridge of my formidable nose, and put them on. They still fit better than the backup pair I've been using these past four months.

Now what? Plans A and B just didn't seem right, so we went to Cafe Istanbul for lamb with rice and okra, Turkish wine, and coffee. Yes, I think that's what weekends are for.

Just venting

2010-02-08T09:28:00.007-05:00

The clothes dryer wasn't working because the heating coil quit Thursday night. I could tell, thanks to my keen powers of observation, when the cold, wet clothes I put in were still wet after tumbling around in a cold dryer for an hour and a half.

I consulted with my trusted sidekick Dr. Watson, who confirmed my suspicion that, yep, it's the heating coil alright. She did the real work of calling the repair shop, then calling the supply store to find out whether we could just buy a new coil and replace it ourselves, and finally getting it done by a professional from Apex for a reasonable amount of money.

The cause of the problem was unclear, but it might have had something to do with a clog in a low spot of the long and circuitous path that the hose took from the dryer to the vent outside the house. Venting warm, moist air in or underneath the house isn't recommended, and we don't need any moisture issues with our 120-year-old foundation.

So we chose to change the outgoing path of dryer air from the twisting, turning diagonal vent, made mostly of flexible tubing, that I cleverly devised when we moved in six years ago to a straight shot to the nearest exterior wall, as any rational person would have done in the first place. It took a while to determine which path to take from the back corner of an interior room to one of two outside walls, and my able assistant was very helpful in reducing the three possible options to the one obvious choice: straight back. Hamlet should have had her to help him cut through his endless deliberations.

While Dr. Ophelia Watson bought a couple of sheet metal vent pipes at the local Home Despot, doing our part to help Arthur Blank buy players for the Falcons and contribute campaign funds for Republicans in Georgia, I set to work making holes to vent through. Soliloquy (aside): Everyone has a special calling in life, and this is mine. Given enough practice, almost anyone can increase their skill at making holes in wood or a variety of other materials, and then going about the important work of venting hot air from their own chosen interior space to the relative safety of some nearby nontoxic exterior space. What can I say? It's what I do.

A little work with the jig saw succeeded in cutting a nearly round hole in the floorboards in the back corner of the laundry room, providing access to the shallow crawl space below. Meanwhile, there was enough of a break in the snowstorm for me to hunker down next to the back step outside and shine a light in the foot-square opening to the crawl space, piecing together exactly 13 feet of metal tubing (with an elbow), and feeding it in through the crawl space to the hole in the floor, in the snow, in the dark. You could cut the dramatic tension - and the duct tape - with a small utility knife.

To make a short story long - again, this is what I do; if you want snappy AP style, go read somebody else's boring blog - the vent hose from the dryer hooked right up with the upward-turned elbow just below the hole in the floor, and we dried a load of clothes that night, edified by the whole learning-by-doing experience.

Shoveling snow is much more therapeutic than fixing broken household devices, besides its obvious utilitarian value. So when the whole venting thing got frustrating, I would just take a break and shovel snow for a while and then felt better.

The next day Zelda came over for dinner, and the three of us watched the Superbowl together just like a regular Amerikan family. Actually two-thirds of us focused primarily on the badly crafted, unbelievably expensive and ill-conceived advertising that used the game as a carnival sideshow cum visual facade to sell snake oil to us rubes in the provinces. The other one-third of us watched very big, very fast men clad in armor bedecked in gang colors knocking each other down and preening for the crowd of like a hundred million consumers of goods and services.

Somewhere in that unlikely domestic scene, triggered by an ad for something - I don't know what - that referenced a YouTube clip about a little kid coming home still half-anaesthetized from the dentist, the three of us found ourselves in conversation about, how shall I say, our own youthful experiences under some form of medication. You can't plan that kind of parent-child disclosure, and it was good to get it out.

I am not Holden

2010-01-30T20:34:00.000-05:00

So the moon is almost full, and I have a relatively minor birthday coming up in the rear-view mirror, and I'm feeling a nostalgic wave of emotion with the reappearance of a lost-lost friend through the fiendish magic of Facebook, and in the midst of the usual everyday ups and downs comes news of the death of a long-disappeared but still resonant literary hero. So I join just about everyone I know in celebrating the work and mourning the passing of J.D. Salinger.

I cannot think of a more poignant coming-of-age story than Catcher in the Rye, yet there is nothing I can say about it that hasn't already been said - and said badly - in a thousand freshman English papers. For starters, I'm betting Salinger would hate that word poignant, which I added in the second draft, and I'm using it anyway.

A literary critic on NPR praised Salinger for writing "with all his stars out," whatever that means. Actually I think I know what it means, but I can't tell you, and if you don't get it, well, never mind. It's a metaphor, damn it, a linguistic bridge from an obvious, so-called literal, statement to a truth beyond the literal, and either it speaks to you or it doesn't. It's something Salinger accomplished with remarkable, even breathtaking honesty. That's why Holden, that slightly snotty, sophisticated preppy antihero, hit home so well with so many less self-aware midwestern kids like me and every single one of my friends.

When I arrived in the rec center parking lot, I wanted to keep listening but I had to turn off the car radio because it was time for class to begin. One by one the students filtered in, and the circle in the middle of the room gradually expanded from three to four to eight, and the shakuhachi music in the background only made it more conducive to surrender to the lapping of the internal wave machine and to dedicate this evening's practice to an old man who valued privacy yet had contact with millions of fortunate readers.

There isn't much people can do for each other on a cold Thursday night in January in Ohio, but we can stand in a circle and try to keep each other from walking off a cliff. I had some time after class, so I went to the library just to see if there were any Salinger titles still on the shelves, and to my surprise found two copies of Franny and Zooey, so I checked one out, got a cup of coffee, read a few pages, and immediately fell back in love with the voice that so many young readers cut their reading teeth on. I wish I could write dialog like that.

What can you do? You go to your next meeting, where a few of the people in the circle are on the same page and some are not. You can listen respectfully and go home with the candle wax drying on your sleeve and answer the phone when it vibrates in your pocket. It's my parents on the phone, wishing me a happy birthday and disclosing, because I asked, the latest wrinkle in their ongoing struggle with the inevitable challenges of aging. Which I can relate to, but in comparison I have no idea, so there isn't much you can do but listen and bear witness.

Zelda came over for dinner the next night like a breath of fresh air on a cold night. She has read some, if not all, of Salinger's fiction, and she knows the characters well enough to correct my pronunciation of their names. So there is that. She and her brother are not Phoebe and Holden, but they have made their acquaintance and possibly gotten together for cocktails on occasion.

Haves 5, Have-nots 4

2010-01-23T17:39:00.010-05:00

On the face of it, this week's Supreme Court decision allowing unlimited campaign spending is another major step toward institutionalized oligarchy. Or maybe it's just an open acknowledgment of what has long been the case in the United Estates of Amerika.

The myth that "our" democracy - of the people, by the people, and for the people - counts the votes and opinions of the rich and the poor equally has long been challenged by the practices of both major parties, by electoral irregularities, by lobbyists and fundraisers, and by selective news reporting. Nobody really believed that poor people, women, or people of color received equal treatment under the law or had equal access to the levers of power.

According to five old men in robes, the law of the land now confirms the widely held suspicion that person-like business entities with greater resources not just do but should have greater rights than others to shape policy and influence the composition of the public sector everywhere from dog catcher to Congress.

No one should be too upset by this officially validated state of affairs. You don't have to be a nineteenth-century Spencerian social Darwinist, a twentieth-century Ayn Rand egoist, or a gun-toting wilderness survivalist to know that the strong get to do things that the weak don't get to do. Although the degree and brazenness of their natural advantage has varied over the 250-odd years of Amerikan history, this disparity of power is built into the formal and informal structures and functions - the gesellschaft and gemeinschaft if you will - of this country.

By birthright or by the privilege of their position, rich white men founded the nation and directed its development into the military-industrial superpower in which we live. So it's no accident that rich white men have reaped the greatest benefits of a political economy set up to serve their interests. Despite the noble Jeffersonian rhetoric, the Framers did the self-serving Hamiltonian thing and made the new nation safe for bankers and merchants at the expense of common yeoman farmers.

Yet this is still the land of opportunity. The long list of exceptions in this historical materialist account has made it more interesting and open to fanciful interpretation by idealists of many stripes. De jure changes like the Fourteenth and Nineteenth Amendments, Brown v. Board of Education, and the Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts of the 1960s leveled the playing field on paper by granting equal rights to groups that had been disenfranchised by law.

Some were entitled to own property, to vote, and to have a lawyer's representation in court, and some are not. It hasn't been long since blacks and women were granted the status of human beings and gained the privileges of citizenship. And these legal reforms have had substantial de facto consequences, reflected in a more diverse ethnic and gender composition of local, state, and national government and culminating in the dramatic ascendance of Barack to the presidency. You've come a long way, maybe.

This inspiring triumphalist reading of Amerikan history is only one of many layers of text on a time line that also includes a series of wars fought largely by poor provincials on behalf of captains of industry; an Industrial Revolution that profited enterprising robber barons on the backs of immigrants and other exploited workers; income disparities that dwarf the aristocratic social hierarchies of Europe from which egalitarian Amerikans self-righteously distance themselves; health and social services that systemically exclude more of the population than any other so-called civilized nation. These things too make Amerika special. No, I'm not bitter. I'm just the last common yeoman farmer to wake up and smell the coffee.

Whining about the hypocrisy of judicial conservatives engaging in the heresy of judicial activism does little to address either the intention or the consequences of the Court's ruling on campaign spending. In theory, it equates dollars with free speech and corporations with persons, but the practical intent could be something akin to the Founders' compromises in 1789: to create a stable social order in which to do business, while hedging against the fickle desires and unreliable opinions of the ordinary rabble by placing real authority in the hands of those who know better and have the most to lose, should anything upset the applecart, and the most to gain by controlling the size, shape, location, contents, availability, and access to the applecart.

The consequences of the ruling are a little harder to discern, especially after the financial collapse of 2008 and the sense of denial with which the bailout and recovery have been managed by and for the parties who perpetrated the collapse in the first place. Rather than tamper with the very business practices that nearly brought down the system, while making them very wealthy, the oligarchs in New York and their minions in Washington bought themselves an escape hatch from accountability for large-scale mistakes, while increasing the accountability of the consumers, borrowers, and taxpayers who work for them. And yes, we all work for them.

Don't like it? Then move to Russia, where an authoritarian government in league with a small group of wealthy industrialists makes the rules that every Ivan and Nina has to abide by at their peril. Sound familiar? Or move to China, where a centralized ruling elite decides military, economic, and social policy while flouting the masses' civil liberties and access to information in the name of national security.

Clearly the differences in the material conditions of life in the three countries are significant, and the methods by which deals and made and authority is maintained are perhaps less blatant in the U.S. than in Russia and China. It's all done under the guise of due process and equal protection, and that gives patriotic Amerikans the right, by jingo, to call other countries corrupt. Our government is for sale, and it's all Constitutional and squeaky clean. Five old men in robes just said so.

A View with a Room

2010-01-12T00:16:00.006-05:00

The upstairs studio becomes a bedroom; the downstairs bedroom becomes a living room; the downstairs living room becomes a studio. Everything has to be moved out of one room into another, so for a while, the only place to sit down was here at my desk while everything else was turned upside down. Most of the furniture that had to be shuffled around is at last in place, at least for now. We can sit down for a meal, and we can even watch TV in relative comfort.

The cable guy showed up late Saturday afternoon and connected the northeast corner with the internet and the southeast corner with the TV. He didn't balk at going into the crawl space during a snowstorm to drill a hole through the subfloor, and I got to use the new outdoor outlet. So the new living room is on the grid, and we've restored our connection with the outside world.

The changes in Om Shanty are making an amazing difference in our use of space. The sight lines are much improved, and suddenly looking from the dining room into the living room suggests connected spaces that you might want to inhabit. I can sit in the rocking chair watching TV and turn my head to see the fire in the den adjoining - which is still the best room in the house.

Going negative

2010-01-11T13:54:00.001-05:00

It's winter. Get used to it.

On this planet, temperatures go up and down. Especially here in the middle latitudes, including central Swingstate where I live, the seasons come and go with remarkable variation, bringing wide fluctuations of warm and cold weather. So pardon my interruption of your January rant about how horrible it is to endure the harsh subfreezing gale outside, but hey, it's winter.

Or you could move in with Ken Lay down in the Cayman Islands, where it's nice and warm with all that oily money. Here in the relatively temperate Lower 48, it's not as tropical as Hawaii and not as arctic as Alaska, and there will be warmer months and colder months. Like yin times and yang times in the cycle of the year, they're not going away very soon.

Excuse me if I repeat myself, but in case you didn't get the memo, change happens. Sometimes change is wet and cold. Learn to live with it. The wet and cold stuff of January is good for the apple trees and other flora that grace this part of the country. Put on your mittens, fergoshsakes.

As much as you might object, it might get hotter than 72 F. in the summer, then you can complain that it's too hot. And as much as you hate the cold, the temperature might drop below 32 in the winter. Horrors! In our command-and-control culture, you can push all the buttons you want, and it doesn't change the fact of the ups and downs.

I say life is a garden, so dig it.

It's the same with human interaction. I respectfully disagree with the unwritten rule that when someone asks "How are you?" the appropriate response is the upbeat "Great!" or even "Fine, thank you." If they take the trouble to ask, I think you owe them an honest answer, even if it's "I feel like hell but I think I'll live."

I realize these are mixed messages. On the one hand, everyone should enjoy winter - as I do - and get all gung-ho about wearing wool, shoveling snow, and turning corners in a controlled slide. On the other hand, everyone should act as grumpy as they feel - like I do - and stop feigning a constant but perfunctory state of happiness.

In other words, enjoy the down side. We're not in any old recession, we're in a Great Recession. I'm not just in a bad mood, I'm mired in an acute state of existential malaise. But at least be present for the event.

Excuse me while I leave my cubicle to take a walk in an outdoor oval to breathe unrecirculated air.

Ink-Stained Wretch

2010-01-06T10:59:00.005-05:00

Why do all my shirts have dark blue or black blotter-like stains on the cuffs below the elbow? Why do two of my favorite pairs of pants have small but impossible-to-ignore and hard-to-remove Rorschach tests on the seat? Should I start wearing plastic sleeve coverings like the bookkeeper or telegraph clerk in the old movies? Its an occupational hazard.

I've been scribbling since I can remember. Some of my early work was drawing on scrap paper my dad would bring home from the office; the writing of actual words and sentences probably came later, but the medium is the message, and the visual line, not the play, is the thing. Paper, pencil, pen, eye, hand, analog marks on a two-dimensional surface.

Early on, uniforms of sports teams and military units - real or imaginary - were a favorite subject. The typography of team names, logos, and players' numbers was fun too. Serif or sans serif, block or rounded, printed or cursive. Later came lists and maps of realigned baseball or football leagues with divisions reflecting geographical balance, maps of dreamed-up cities with street grids and government buildings, floor plans of unlikely houses. I spent a lot of time in my room and went through a lot of paper in the 1950s before anyone thought about saving trees.

The technology of the game changed in junior high school when I developed a personal relationship with the typewriter. I still wrote longhand of course; make new friends but keep the old, one is silver and the other gold. Mr. Fiocchi had a roomful of manual Royals in typing class, and I had access to a little blue Olivetti portable at home. Neural pathways connecting with the keyboard, smudges on the fingers from changing the ribbon, followed by crisp impressions on the paper. The round eraser with a little brush attached.

In high school we had a couple of IBM Selectrics in the journalism room, with the detachable golf-ball you could change to get a different typeface (we didn't call it a 'font') and a half-backspace key to justify lines. That was when I started to compose at the keyboard instead of doing a draft with a pen and then transcribing. But then, as now, it's all about revising, deleting, inserting, and transposing in a quest for the perfect lead, active verbs, and an editable inverted pyramid.

It's not always easy finding gainful employment when words on a page are your bricks and mortar, so I have found it expedient at times to do something else for a living. Then I would come home with dirt or dough under my fingernails instead of ink on my fingers. At times I had a hard time staying with a job in publishing, like the summer internship that convinced me I really didn't want to work at a newspaper, but that's another story.

Then there was the time I wanted to set type in the composing room instead of writing articles as a beat reporter, only to quit the night shift for a nine-to-five gig at the phone company doing business letters on an early A.B. Dick word-processing machine, circa 1978. Once you typed it in, the plastic magnetic cards stored the data electronically and printed out on command, very cutting edge.

When I decided to go back to college and get a degree in education, NOT journalism, the employment agency put me behind an IBM Selectric where I knocked out engineering syllabi, vitae, tests, and grant applications. When I changed schools and applied for financial aid, the administrators took one look at my record and put me to work on the faculty-staff newspaper. I thought I was in heaven, with my own office in the old stone theology building next to Asia House and facing Tappan Square, but as usual I didn't take full advantage of the opportunity. Was it the right place at the wrong time or the wrong place at the right time? I don't know, but I chose to go elsewhere and do other things.

Doing other things, of course, led me back behind a typewriter. I couldn't get away. After brief forays teaching kids, planting trees, selling trees, and landscaping trees - my karma after all that paper - I entered the digital age at a keyboard attached to a Mac, then a PC, then a Mac again.

It's only right to ponder, every once in a while, the possibility of another line of work, especially now that print is on its way out as the dominant publishing form. Yet half the people I know are connected in some way to printed pages and their digital offspring. In the meantime, anybody know a good stain remover? Out damn spot!

Champagne and Caveat

2010-01-04T12:19:00.004-05:00

Happy New Year? Take a rain check.

Is it a new decade yet? I can never remember whether a decade officially begins or ends on the zero-numbered year? If it starts with a 1, then I guess we're a year away, but I have my own reasons to redraw the line. It's been exactly ten years since I began working at the Hill. As anniversaries go, it might not be much, but it's a record of professional longevity for me.

I interviewed with Michael and Marty for a staff job that went to someone else, but they called me back and offered me a project editor position. I told them I would think about it. After another interview with a small company that offered less money with less job security in worse working conditions, I consulted with my career counselor, Zelda Golly, who strongly recommended that I take the job at the Hill.

I called Marty to accept the offer, and she asked what salary I was looking for, so I pull an hourly figure out of the air that was slightly higher than what I made freelancing. She said they would pay me a little more than that, I said okay, and that was that. I reported for work the first Monday of 2000. Ruth showed me to my very own cubicle with my very own computer, phone, Web 10, and Herman Miller chair. Janet handed me my very own copy of the Chicago Manual of Style and I thought, hey, this might work. But would it last?

Flash forward ten years to the waning days of 2009, and my new supervisor in my new department in a newly constituted division of the Reorganized Corporation of the Latter-Day Hill calls a meeting to celebrate my ten-year anniversary. She even brought pie - apple, cherry, and blueberry! Since the date in question happened to fall during the week following Christmas, there were all of four people in the office to eat the delicious pies and help me celebrate. It was fun anyway.

With very little prompting, I described my brilliant career in publishing, starting with the high school newspaper, a summer at the Detroit News, through three undergraduate and one graduate institution, off-the-beaten-path sojourns in the UP, north Georgia, the composing room of a newspaper on the North Shore of Chicago, stints as a busdriver, landscaper, butcher, baker, and candlestick maker. Jaymee, Kim, Aaron, Sandra, and Valerie made me feel special, and that's what's important.

My dark secret was that my date of hire was in the last days of the last century, just before the dreaded apocalypse Y2K, but my first actual day at work was in the first days of 2000, after the would-be threat had passed. It was also in the early days of the opening of the new building at Polaris, so my new co-workers were just getting used to the space after moving up north from Eastwind Drive.

My tenth year ended with me and my new co-workers getting used to a new space at the Easton office, with new and transitioning people arriving every day. I'm going to pretend that today's impromptu lunch at Anemame was an unofficial celebration of that unofficial anniversary. The sushi, the atmosphere, and the company were excellent. Alas, no sake, since we were going back to work.

Almost in passing, the other anniversary last week, my thirty-first as a married man, was also just a half-bubble off center. Since Gven Golly and I had gone to Chicago last year to celebrate our thirtieth in style, we thought we would keep it simple this year, just go out to dinner, and maybe do something wild like paint the new baseboards. However, family events intervened, and we found ourselves driving south the morning of December 30 to attend a funeral.

We stopped off in central Tennessee to have dinner and stay overnight with my parents at their retirement place in Vol Halla. By happy accident, my brother and his wife and daughter were also there for dinner, so we got to spend some bonus time with Pete, Cindy, and Liz, swapping stories of home renovations, college applications, and musician offspring. In-depth discussions of plumbing, wiring, framing, and drywall are just as effective as anything else in bringing people together.

Early Thursday morning, Gven and I were on the dark, winding, rainy, foggy road across the ridge and down the mountain toward Atlanta, where we arrived in ample time for my niece's funeral. Such occasions are often a happy-sad opportunity to reconnect with distant family members, and this was no exception. I hadn't seen some members of the Bradley clan for many years, and now their kids, like my kids, are grown up, some with kids of their own, and I'm one of the old folks. Under the circumstances, I can enjoy that distinction. Cry, laugh, talk about old times, catch up on what's new, laugh, cry.

Since Sandra was a veteran of the first Gulf War, burial with military honors was at the National Cemetery outside Canton, Georgia, in an otherwise beautiful spot on top of a pine-covered and increasingly gravestone-covered mountain. After initially missing the turn-off from highway 20, we got there in time to witness the playing of "Taps" and the folding and presentation of the flag to my brother-in-law. Burt understandably looked a little the worse for wear, having buried two of his daughters in the last few months. Family members went back to my sister Jo Jo's house to eat, relax a bit, and begin the next phase of grieving, healing, adjusting. Clearly it is easier to do that among others who are doing the same.

Eventually Gven and I went to our motel, which was way out in Norcross but was very cheap and very adequate. Gven was tired, so she went to sleep early. I was wound up, so I stayed up. The superstition says the way you start the new year shows what kind of year it will be. Apparently 2010 will consist of multiple "The Thin Man" movies watched back to back over a local pale ale and a tangerine; doing a taiji form and sitting for half an hour with the last movie on mute; sleeping soundly with active dreams that I don't remember; eating the complimentary bagel and coffee while watching CNN in the lobby with visitors from India and Tennessee; and meeting Jo Jo for breakfast.

The days have totally run together, but I'm pretty sure it was New Year's Day in most time zones. We drove straight down Peachtree Road past our former neighborhood near the Brookhaven MARTA station, so we happened to pass a few familiar places, like Nuts & Berries, the natural food store we used to frequent when the kids were little. The IHOP in the heart of Buckhead was packed at noon, but we were seated within minutes. The country omelet was excellent, the service was even better, and the additional time with loved ones priceless.

When it was time to go, we head up Roswell Road for the nickel tour of Sandy Springs on our way out of town. Atlanta turns into Marietta, Calhoun, Chattanooga, Knoxville, Lake City, and London, Kentucky, where we stop at Frisch's Big Boy for a Brawny Lad (Sven) and an open-face roast beef sandwich (Gven). We phoned Zelda from Frisch's to check in with her, and she follows up with text messages updating us with the score of the Rose Bowl. Go Bucks. Lexington, Cincinnati, Grove City, and home in record time. I'm pretty sure there's a pretty good bottle of L. Mawby Consort sparkling wine in the fridge just waiting for a special occasion.

Binary Politics

2009-12-15T20:22:00.007-05:00

There are four kinds of people in American politics today, and they can't be easily pigeonholed as either 'conservative' or 'liberal' or 'radical' or 'nut-case'. That by itself could automatically make the following distinctions far too complex for most people who claim an interest in matters of public policy, for whom heroes and villains, good guys and bad guys, Us and Them make it so much easier to assign credit and blame.

I haven't figured out what to call the four types yet, but surely some pundit is on the case. Sadly, because it frames a multitude of issues as a trade-off between foreign and domestic spending, this argument reinforces the notion that Barack Obama is a latter-day Lyndon Johnson figure. With LBJ the prevailing issues were 'Guns and Butter' - large federal expenditures on the war in Vietnam and/or the Great Society social programs. With BHO it could come down to 'Insurgents and Insurance' - whether to spend megabucks to bring a semblance of humane order to Afghanistan and/or to the health care industry.

To be more specific, the four types of people are really segments of the small percentage of folks who have actually given some thought to what they want to pay for with their taxes, not just what they want someone else to do something about. So we might be talking about five percent of registered voters. Which would make an interesting statistical sample in itself: How many poll respondents consider the cost/benefit of a program or policy when asked to support or oppose it, rather than scoring political points for the Good Guys (us) against the Bad Guys (them)?

Expanding the war in Afghanistan is one expensive policy that Americans can either support or oppose. It's binary; you're either fer it or agin' it, and it's gonna cost ya either way. National health insurance - whether you call it a "public option" or "nonprofit coops" or "Medicare buy-in" or some other euphemism - is another. It's big, it's expensive, you either support it or oppose it. Many boatloads of money will likely be spent on one or both of these large-scale projects, and the money has to come from somewhere. The rumor is that you and I will foot the bill.

Citizens, if you want the government to provide more services, you have to pay more taxes. The binary nature of yea or nay questions means the four groups in question would: a) spend the money needed to win the war in Central Asia but NOT to provide national health insurance; b) spend the money needed to provide national health insurance but NOT to win the war in Central Asia; c) spend the money BOTH to win the war AND provide insurance; d) do neither, save the money, and see what other consequences ensue.

There are some obvious problems. Options (a) and (c) beg the question of whether two years or ten years and many lost lives CAN win a war in Central Asia. Options (b) and (c) offer no guarantee that Congress can "fix" health insurance. Are you kidding? While this admittedly leaves out many complexities of policy making and its limitations, it also has the advantage of cutting through much of the nonsense spouted by those who want to have it both ways, waging endless wars, saving investment bankers from themselves, underwriting entire industries, deregulating other, all while cutting taxes.

End of rant. I have a friend who is fond of saying there are two kinds of people - those who believe there are two kinds of people and those who don't. That pretty much discredits everything I've said above. Or not.

Silvio e Sylvia

2009-12-14T10:08:00.006-05:00

Sometimes the news is all the literature, theater, and plain old down-and-dirty comedy that one could ever want. When the news events in question occur in Italy, and in this case in Milan, the feeling of high drama is only intensified, as if the seat of government were transplanted onto the stage of La Scala and the curtain was raised on another scene in the grand opera of politics.

When the larger-than-life figure at the center of all the attention is the megalomaniacal head of state Silvio Berlusconi, owner of a media empire as well as the unchallenged plutocrat at the controls of Italy's government, and the reporter's voice on the radio belongs to NPR's inimitable Sylvia Poggioli, well, what can I say, it's journalistic heaven.

Take this terse summary (from an overcautious Slate):

At a rally in Milan yesterday, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was met by demonstrators who shouted insults while he gave a speech. Later, when he was signing autographs, a 42-year-old with a history of mental illness hit Berlusconi on the face with a model of the Duomo cathedral. The attack left Berlusconi bloodied with two broken teeth, a fractured nose, and cuts on his nose and cheeks. Berlusconi spent the night in the hospital with a severe headache, but doctors say he's doing well.

Spare us the timid account, Slate. Burlusconi runs the most influential news outlets in his country and arguably determines what information makes it onto front pages and TV screens from Torino to Palermo. One part Rupert Murdoch and one part Benito Mussolini, I'm guessing his people make sure the national news in Rome isn't too critical of the ruling party. And I mean party. Old Silvio has earned a reputation for romancing young women that American pro golfers might envy, except he unapologetically gets away with it.

Part of the NPR story that Slate omitted was the alleged Mafia connections that helped Signor Ministerio Primo get his start in real estate, from which entrepreneurial foundations he went on to dominate the tone and substance of the right wing in Italian politics. In the tradition of Mussolini, an arrogant kind of masculinity and swagger are expected in a leader. Il Duce liked women, weapons, and fast cars too, and he wasn't a fan of dissent.

His spiritual descendant Berlusconi has recently been accused of having ties to the Mafia, which he dismisses as a figment of the American movie-going imagination. What I loved in the news account was his denial of any connections with organized crime accompanied by a promise that if he got his hands on his accusers, he would personally strangle them. Then his nose is broken by a half-crazy man in a crowd throwing a stone model of a cathedral. You can't make this stuff up.

My people are from another European peninsular nation, also bold seafaring stock who ventured far from their ports, as did the Renaissance Italians, but this kind of thing doesn't happen in Oslo. On the other hand, I haven't heard a Norsk news correspondent with a smoking hot voice like Poggioli, who can write a factual straight-news piece for the radio and deliver it on the air like poetry, like a torch singer, like the muse of the news.

In the details

2009-12-13T21:11:00.004-05:00

The time was Friday night, and she left her knitting at work and had to go back to the studio, it should only take ten minutes, do you want anything, okay a bottle of tonic, during which time the fire in the stove gradually grew, probably due to the green sticks I'm reduced to using for kindling, finally combusting a handful of wood chips, which consumed a miniature log cabin of thin split logs, which engulfed three or four full-sized pear branches that fill the house with a fruity aroma.

It all adds up, and then it all reduces down to almost nothing, you can see in a clean well-lighted room that it's not absolutely nada, as he nudges the air intake closed a half-inch to slow down the conflagration, a small adjustment that over the course of the next four hours affects the whole house.

The guacamole has been tightly sealed so it's still good after a few days in a ceramic bowl in the fridge, and smeared on half a slice of bagel, eaten between bites of brown rice and adzuki beans, heavy on the salsa which is heavy on the onions, and you've got a sweet, sour, salty, savory sense of the moment. The Chardonnay, the fine conundrum, make tonight a wonderful day.

It's about time

2009-12-06T20:44:00.008-05:00

I took my time getting up, taking a shower, eating scrambled eggs and toast, and reading the paper on Saturday morning. By the time I had drunk a second cup of coffee and swept the floor, it was time for my appointment to go give blood. Oh, I also sewed on a couple of buttons in the meantime. A stitch in time, you know.

The Red Cross trailer was parked in front of Lowe's on Silver Drive just like it usually is. The little booth in back felt even more claustrophobic than usual, but the attendant was very professional and polished in the procedure. She had perfect skin. I don't think she smiled or frowned once during the entire 45 minutes. My blood pressure was 120/80. The otherwise too-loud radio played "Baba O'Reilly" too softly while they hooked me up and I squeezed and released the little rubber ball every five seconds.

I ate the entire bag of Cheez-Its while sitting in the parking lot before going to my next errand, saving the trail mix for later. Must maintain energy. The rec. center was not as close as I'd imagined when I made the appointment, thinking that Lowe's would be on the way, when in fact it was a few miles out of the way at the opposite end of Clintonville, an easy mistake to make if coming from Methodistville. The drive up High Street was not unpleasant if you like that kind of thing.

In the rec. center parking lot the midafternoon sun was slanting across the field as it does in winter, and it drew me to the three pine trees beside the softball diamond. I've always liked those three pine trees. Even facing into the wind it was a good time to do a little qigong, having just given blood, and when is it not a good time for some internal healing practice? I just hope the recipient of my pint appreciates the high-quality rum remaining in my system from a bit of Friday night celebrating.

A few drummers were already banging away when I entered the room, and a collective shout went up welcoming me back, because I hadn't been there in a few months, kind of like Norm walking into Cheers. It was great to see some familiar faces and another great source of healing to join in the rhythm-building, shape-shifting, bass and treble-making crescendo and diminuendo of the drum circle. After one particularly awesome jam, Mark remarked, "Was that specifically fun?" You had to be there.

I got home just before dark, so I put the new lights on my bike and went for a very short, very cold ride. I think my mistake was removing my gloves to fiddle around with the straps that attach the lights to the handlebars, thus starting out with cold hands, so my fleece gloves had no chance. After quickly turning back, I ran warm water over my frozen fingers, started a fire, and poured a glass of red wine to watch the Crimson Tide dominate the Gators.

The next day, right on schedule, I began to descend into my annual preholiday funk. Call it stress, call it seasonal affective disorder, call it uncertainty and change at work, or feel free to make up an interesting new name for it, whatever you call it, I am not making the transition into winter smoothly. Consequently, 'tis the season to humbug. At least that I know how to do. Some time around noon on December 24, I fully intend to become a nice person again, at least long enough to enjoy some lutefisk and lefse.

Like everyone else in this krazy krismas kulture, I have many preparations to make, and compared to most my preparations are minimal. Some of them involve ripping out a doorway, cutting through lath and plaster, and pulling nails, which can be satisfying in a cathartic sort of way. Then the hard part comes - putting the slightly enlarged doorway back together with a semblance of stability. Like any task worth doing right, it will take more time than it seems at first.

The good news is the weather was slightly warmer on Sunday, and while bread dough was rising I took the time to get out on le Trek Vert for a nice long ride down Alum Creek Trail. It was a successful test of helmet, tires, gloves, and matching le windbreaker vert, all of which handled the weather just fine. Best of all, I was not as exhausted and unfit as I feared, having neglected any aerobic training for far too long. At least one positive sign heading into the season of darkness, I won't need a pacemaker quite yet.

How many Gollys does it take to screw in a light bulb?

2009-12-03T12:00:00.001-05:00

Seven.

One to arrive by Greyhound from New York Freaking City and regale us with tales from the cranberry bog in Buzzard's Bay; go to Lowe's and pick out the right kind of junction boxes, plugs, wire caps, and outdoor cable to reconnect the power between the house and the garage, suspend the far end from a pine branch with a ceramic insulator and a bicycle tube, and connect the near end to a new outdoor receptacle mounted on a corner post of the pergola; cut holes in the plaster wall and ceiling upstairs to remove, repair, and re-install the stairway light fixture, snake new wires between the rafters to connect the hanging lamp with two new three-way switches, and run wires down through the wall to the new switches at the top and bottom of stairs; go out with his sister and her friends to their favorite watering hole du jour; bring the grandparents up to date on his latest adventures in trade school and prospects for gainful employment.

One to hand him tools, flip circuit breakers while he tests all the outlets and fixtures in the house, and label what outlet is on which circuit; climb the white pine to hang the cable, fetch a stepladder, caulk the boxes; tear out an upstairs closet wall to get to the switch box; start a cozy fire in the den; pour the libations appropriate to the season (rum, coffee, pale ale, white wine); bring the patriarch up to date on his latest adventures in the reorganized church of latter-day educational publishing and prospects for continued gainful employment.

One to consult on the proper placement of screws, staples, and wire; compliment the hostess, inquire about the garlands of cayenne peppers hanging over all seven windows in the den, drying for future use in bean soup as well as adorning the holiday festivities, and settle into a comfortable chair to work on the crossword puzzle, and finish his biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes; carve the turkey, say grace, compliment the cook; tell stories about life on the farm in Minnesota, his five brothers and sisters, his parents and grandparents, and being stationed out west during World War II; take everyone out for breakfast the morning of their return home.

One to bring a blueberry pie and consult on the roasting of the turkey, stuffing, etc.; inquire about the yoga studio, the bookstore, the cranberry farm, and the textbook business; knit a few rows, read a few pages of her biography of Mark Twain, express her condolences on the loss of our cat and dog, inquire whether we going to get another pet any time soon; compliment her grandchildren on their most recent accomplishments, insist on helping clean up after every meal, and utter not a single complaint about her own faltering hearing, eyesight, or mobility.

One to drive from Atlanta, GA, to Cumberland County, TN, to central Swingstate (and back again) and accompany her parents to the home of her brother and sister-in-law (and in spirit); generously augment the supply of seasonal libations with top-shelf stuff; find time for one-to-one conversation with each person in attendance, bring her brother up to date on administrative downsizing at her university, a death and a birth in her own immediate family; enliven dinner-table conversation with an account of her recent work-related trip to Spain; wash dishes after every meal, and be all-around good company.

One to pop in after a long, exhausting day at work to have a piece of pie with her extended family, after working all morning making not one but two outrageously delicious apple-cranberry pies before work; reprise her acclaimed role in the last ten Thanksgiving feasts by making awesome garlic mashed potatoes; spend quality time with her aunt, grandmother, grandfather, doting mother, adoring father, and spirit her brother away to hang with people their own age when it gets late and the old folks are tired.

One to clean the house and cook for her own family plus her husband's parents and sister: turkey, sausage stuffing, gravy, sweet potatoes au gratin, brussels sprouts with caramelized onions, fresh organic cranberries shipped directly from Mann's family farm in Massachusetts, rolls, spinach salad, white wine, and arguably the best pumpkin pie on the planet - with your choice or real or nondairy whipped topping - working around unplanned interruptions due to thrown circuit breakers for the benefit of Jessi Electric and his intrepid team of electricians.

We're not high-culture, just high-calorie, high-voltage, and high-maintenance.

Dear friends/colleagues/countrymen

2009-12-01T10:28:00.006-05:00

unentitled autumnal screed

2009-11-18T10:47:00.009-05:00

Watch out for the Mad Men.

They say Milarepa, the Tibetan poet, was a wild and crazy guy in his day (eleventh and twelfth centuries). They say he killed some people, then went through a deep remorse for his actions and worked even harder than others to get outside his self-inflicted predicament to find peace of mind. They say he had an ear for music and he made up songs to help him remember the things he was taught. He was one of the Mad Men of his day.

So, short of poisoning 30 people at a party and redeeming yourself by meditating for the rest of your life, what is 'madness' anyway?

This week I had the pleasure of becoming better acquainted with the songs of Bertholt Brecht, who was perhaps a little bit mad himself, but in the modern sense sometimes romanticized as the archetypal politically Angry Young Man. Germany between the wars was not a pretty sight, I'm told, and people with their eyes open, like Brecht, had a bone to pick with the emerging political economy, so they wrote songs with titles like "There's Nothing Quite Like Money," "German Miserere," and "Ballad of Why Human Effort Is Always Futile." Happy stuff.

Maybe madness is nothing but excess. Excessive anger or giddiness, talkativeness or silence, eating and drinking or abstinence, work or rest, acceptance or criticism, lethargy or activity, deliberation or decisiveness, mobility or stillness, discipline or laziness, patience or impulsiveness, questioning or answering, complication or simplicity, attraction or repulsion, contact or separation. Excessive use of commas. Excessive cheese consumption. Excessive list making.

Like an imbalance of the humors, it's being a little off-center to the point where other people think you have a problem.

Madness itself is a rather old-fashioned term. The psychological profession has come a long way, and the vocabulary for labeling the continuum from 'sanity' (mental cleanliness) to 'insanity' has grown with it. Thanks for Dr. Freud and others, we have an abundant and varied menu of conditions such as neurosis, psychosis, paranoia, schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder, and many more to choose from. May you live in interesting times.

What do you call the sudden awareness of your own condition, when it hits you that you have no escape hatch, no way out of a predicament of your own making, and all of your best-laid plans for turning things around have no chance of realization? When you see once and for all that your adversaries are correct, and you are, after all, completely inadequate for the task you are attempting. There must be a word for finally facing the fact that one is guilty of all the shortcomings others have found in you. In short, you are doomed.

I call it optimism. In spite of being unfit for everything now on the horizon, the closing of one path could be the perfect opportunity to re-invent oneself in a different environment, under a new regime, with a brand-new title, an altered persona, and a different attitude. At least outwardly. A chance to make connections with a new set of people, to hear what is on their minds, and to reconnect with other people whose situations have also changed.

Sometimes people do re-invent themselves, like Don Draper did when he came back from Korea wearing another (dead) man's dog tags and made a decisive break with his unenviable past. Others just lower their standards when they find out that they've been trying to land a fish rated 10 when they only have the bait and tackle to catch a 7 fish. Maybe 'lower their standards' is too harsh; maybe 'refocus' is more accurate.

If I always wanted to be editor of the New York Times AND teach journalism at Columbia, while raising goats on the roof of my coop in Central Park West, maybe it's appropriate to use my current midlife crisis (my third) to adjust my game plan and aim a little, uh, differently. When I grow up, I wanna be a production coordinator and teach a class at the rec center, and grow cayenne peppers in the backyard in Methodistville!

Dicycling

2009-11-15T00:01:00.003-05:00

I'm thinking of getting some accessories for my bike. A light for visibility, a helmet for safety, and maybe some fuzzy dice for that statement to the world that establishes a unique identity, a distinctive persona, a brand if you will. Then all the world will see what a ramblin' gamblin' man I am.

Yeah, no. I do need a light on occasion, and I'm pushing my luck if I go much longer without wearing a helmet, even though most of my riding is done on bike trails and less-traveled roads. But there are always factors that one doesn't control - along with a few that one does control - that bring an element of risk and unpredictability to the otherwise safe, serene, and self-reliant activity of cycling. Riding is a game of chance.

It's a roll of the dice, for example, whether the wind out in the country turns out like it seemed when I started out in town. I always check wind speed and direction before I decide whether to go north, south, east, or west. In spite of MacKenzie's First Law (go out with a headwind, come back with a tailwind), there have been times when I rode for an hour, turned around, and inexplicably found myself coming home riding, like the venerable Motor City rocker Bob Seger, against the wind.

At other times my level of conditioning betrayed me, and the ride back from halfway across Licking County was a long, slow grind. In those cases, I have no excuse. You have to train if you want to go farther. Where there are hills involved, the oxygen debt of biting off more than my cardiovascular system can chew makes mountains out of central Swingstate molehills, and the muscles won't do what the mind tells them to do. Then I struggle up even the mildest hills in first gear and use the next downhill to recover. That's pushing your luck.

In moderation, of course, pushing one's limits can have beneficial effects. If I did that three or four times a week, I would get stronger and chug up those same hills in sixth gear. But I don't train consistently, so when I hit the wall it can get dicey coming back. And that's the slippery slope a casual cyclist rides on, letting days go by between rides, losing the aerobic edge, and making every extended ride a gamble.

Gatsby in Ohio

2009-11-12T13:44:00.003-05:00

There is a beautiful spot in the middle of a cluster of office buildings across the road called Easton Oval. My building is on Easton Commons. I was looking for a place to take a walk and decompress and discovered a little park in the center of the elliptical street that connects the buildings bearing the logos of Huntington Bank, State Auto, Elmer's Glue, and other regionally based companies that have bought or rented space in the complex within a complex just inside the interstate perimeter highway around our fair city.

The captains of industry who made the decision to locate at Easton Oval were wise to move their money-making operations to such a verdant place. It's a humane way to arrange multi-story office building full of workers sitting in cubicles looking at monitors, because they can go outside on their lunch hour and take a walk along the gravel paths meandering through the oak, beech, and hickory trees. This time of year leaves cover the ground, and you can barely make out the path, and lots of sunlight filters through the branches. I'm looking forward to seeing how it changes in the next few months.

As nice as the weather is this week, I'm surprised there aren't more people out enjoying it. In the half hour I was there, I saw half a dozen pairs of walkers and one maintenance guy checking the sprinkler system. One end of the oval is designed more geometrically, like a downtown park, with benches arranged around a circular walkway. The rest is just a patch of woods that has been there for a while, preserved by smart architects. The breeze would be chilly if you stopped moving and sat in the shade, but the sun is out and it's perfect weather for walking.

I'm just glad to have a place to go in the middle of the workday and breathe. All those mature hardwoods are more than willing to absorb the carbon dioxide coming in from cars on I-270 and connecting streets. I'm happy to join them for twenty minutes hanging out between earth and sky. The egg-like name and shape of this oasis in the midst of commercial sprawl just adds to my appreciation. I'll have to re-read Scott Fitzgerald to get a better sense of what it was about East Egg and West Egg that drove Jay Gatsby crazy. Then I'll try not to do that.

The elusive flaming pear

2009-11-09T10:09:00.008-05:00

I brought a pear in for lunch today because we were out of bananas. It's yellow, rather than the usual light green, with a slight pinkish blush, so it stands in well for my daily banana. I also have a woodblock print of a pear by my desk that I like having around, along with family photos, a jovial little wooden troll from Minnesota, and other visual artifacts that help make a cube a habitable space.

Not everything has found its place in my new cubicle environment, and that, like the relocation to a new office itself, will take time. The pear theme, however, stands a good chance of continuing, even when I get back to the daily banana.

My wife Gven Golly is the pear person in our household. She can be counted on to buy pears in season at the grocery store, and they're always in season somewhere, aren't they? Pears from California, pears from Argentina, pears from New Zealand, maybe even the occasional pear from - gasp - Ohio. Does anyone grow pears commercially in central Swingstate? If so, do they look as pretty under the lights in the produce aisle as the cosmetically enhanced, genetically engineered variety that's shipped as containerized cargo from some far-off trading partner? Probably not.

Today's pear is d'Anjou, and the bar-coded sticker on it says "USA/E-U" (estados unidos), which tells me it might have come from some temperate place in latinoamerica. The sticker has an image of a mountain next to a giant ladybug next to the word 'Stemitt', all of which is code for some hemispheric operation that I can only wonder about and guess at. Okay, Ladybird Johnson's family owns a division of United Fruit that grows pears on a plantation in Uruguay, and their marketing people had fun with the play on the words 'stem' and 'summit'. No?

Week 2 in the new location has now come and gone with remarkably little turbulence. The usual comparisons with the old location are inevitable, usually saying more about the speaker than the place itself. And my own cubicle microcosm has not radically altered either, with only a few images tacked on the cube walls: a randomly found poster of Bookwus Mask by Beau Dick [1992. Red cedar, paint, feathers, horsehair. 43.2 x 38 x 51 cm (17 x 15 x 20"). Northern Heritage Art Co., Ltd., Tucson, Arizona], a calendar, a department phone list, photos of my family c. 1956, 1973, 1985, and 2007, and the pear print.

When Gven and I were courting, one of our early dates was a trip to the High Museum in midtown Atlanta, where there was an Asian art exhibit that quickly got our attention. The most memorable work was a painting titled The Elusive Flaming Pear that was both beautiful and hilarious. Something about it spoke to both of us - quest for enlightenment, mystical transformation, chance encounters with the unexpected, fresh fruit - and the phrase stuck.

The one on my desk, while just a bit overripe and not exactly flaming, is still delicious with a bit of baby Swiss cheese. Bon apetit!

RE cycling

2009-11-04T11:07:00.003-05:00

I took the plunge this morning and rode le Trek to work at the new office. It wasn't much of a leap of faith, since I had ridden the eight or nine miles down the Alum Creek trail many times on weekends, so I knew more or less what to expect. This was just the first time doing it in work mode, so now I know empirically that it can be done.

Although there was almost no wind, the morning air was, shall we say, brisk. Hat and gloves were necessary, not optional. Ten degrees colder would have made it a tough ride; ten degrees warmer and I would have had to change into the spare T-shirt I brought just in case.

The creek was very high, so the trail was flooded where it dips under Schrock Road coming out of Methodistville. Once I had dodged traffic to cross Schrock, it was clear sailing south, except for the oblivious grandmother in the minivan turning right onto Cooper Road, who breezed right through the red light without looking. Close calls with idiot drivers like that show me that I really should wear a helmet.

The other close encounter occurred a couple of miles down the trail where it winds through woods and parks. As I careened down the leaf-covered path, I startled a couple of deer having breakfast on the creek side of the trail. The buck was pretty big and sported a rack of antlers with maybe eight points. Other than birds and squirrels, the only other wildlife in evidence was a tall young woman running with her dog in Casto Park just north of highway 161.

What I love about this trail is its avoidance of roads and traffic. After winding a few blocks through residential streets, I'm by myself without cars and stoplights, save for crossing route 3 at Cooper Rd. and then Sunbury Rd. at Easton, then a few blocks coming up Easton Way to the office. The middle seven miles is glorious solitude, except for grandma and deer. Which begs the question, what will the weather be like on the way home? As George Carlin, the hippy-dippy weatherman would say, "The forecast for tonight - dark."

untitled seasonal stream of consciousness

2009-11-01T21:34:00.009-05:00

Let's connect some dots and see if anything hangs together. It's moving day at the office, Halloween in the suburbs, Samhain in the forest, All Saints Day in the Church, el Dia de los Muertos en Mexico, and the end of Daylight Saving Time in the U.S. of A.

So what?

It is time to turn a corner. Take a look back and move resolutely forward. Put the nonhardy plants like spider lilies in the cellar for the winter, because we will have a hard freeze before you know it. The patio looks naked without them, but I want them to live and bloom again next year.

It's also an ideal time to get up on the garage roof and sweep off the leaves and pine needles, scoop the wet gunky debris out of the gutters, and liberate it all to the flower beds below. All of which was a tangent to the original task of replacing a sheet of metal roofing that blew off the shed more than a year ago in Hurricane Ike. Now it is nailed down nice and tight.

It was clear and cool today, so the wet sticks I stacked yesterday had a chance to dry, but you know that clear sky will make it colder tonight, so the dry kindling will come in handy starting the first fire of the season in the stove tonight.

The moon is full and very bright.

Gven and I ended a satisfactory Saturday of mowing, weeding, and breaking of sticks for kindling with a hearty meal of brots and a salad, with pauses to give out candy to dressed-up Methodistville street urchins on All Hallows Eve, one of the few times we have both been home to enjoy that neighborhood ritual. Tonight she made eggplant parmesan, which was perfect with bread and red wine.

The Yankees are beating up on the Phillies in game 4 of the World Series. I did catch one electric moment when Pedro Feliz took Joba Chamberlain deep, but I think the Yanks have too many horses.

Instead of going to church or open meditation this morning, I ended up at Jersey Universalist Church in rural Licking County, a tiny congregation I visited infrequently several years ago. I love the setting, for one thing, just off the old highway 161 at the edge of the village of Jersey, Ohio, east of New Albany, nestled in a grove of pine trees surrounding an old cemetery in front of a cornfield. About 12 people showed up for a service consisting of readings and open-ended commentary from the Book of Daniel. The imagery of Nebuchadnezzar's dream was fascinating: head of gold, chest of silver, belly of bronze, legs of iron, and feet of clay mixed with iron. I might have to visit again to discern its mystical meaning(s).

Afterward I drove up Mink Road to Jug Street and east to Alexandria through some of the prettiest rolling countryside in central Swingstate, then west toward Methodistville on Central College Road, confirming my desire to bike that way some time. But when will the stars align, giving me three hours on a weekend with good weather?

Tomorrow I'll drive Hank the Ranger southeast instead of northwest and park myself in a different cube in a different building among a mostly different cast of charcters. Should be interesting to see how it plays out.

Apex Update

2009-10-23T16:39:00.000-04:00

My son and I communicate pretty well if only sporadically. I'm a spore and he's a radical. Our conversations don't always follow a conventional template, and that might be a good thing. We have a lot of history, some difficult but most of it very positive. The lines are open. This post attempts to make up some recent lost time.

Last month Jessi finished his construction skills course at Apex Academy, a trade school in New York City. The final phase, Electrical II, was his favorite part of the program, and the teacher, Mr. Neese, was the best of the lot. Mr. Neese also taught one of the plumbing courses, which Jessi also liked. He did well in the theory classes and in the shop. He has always been a good student and a good test taker, and he thrived on the combination of theory and practice with tools and materials.

They learned pipe bending and wired circuits and electrical panels using different kinds of cable, such as Romex (two- and three-wire cable in plastic sheathing) and armored (also called metal-clad, or BX because it was invented in the Bronx). They installed switches, outlets, and lights according to code.

In the week or two between the end of school and the start of cranberry season, his band, Hey Baby, was extremely busy. They began sharing a new practice space in Brooklyn with two other bands, and that required assembling amps, speakers, a PA, and drums. The space is more readily available than their previous space, and it looks like a good arrangement. They played shows at DIA Beacon in Beacon, NY, at Don Pedro's, and at Tommy's Tavern in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

The first week of October, Jessi and friends went up to Buzzard's Bay, Massachusetts, to start work on the cranberry harvest at Mann's Farm. Once again this year, the seasonal workers have a house to live in right on the farm, and the living situation seems to agree with him. They put in long days picking, cleaning, sorting, packaging, and shipping berries to customers. Some of it is in the bog, and some of it is in the shed. I gather that they work hard and play hard too.

Gven and I have big plans for the prodigal son when he comes home for Thanksgiving - bearing a box of berries, we hope. We have a couple of house-renovation projects - including wiring, flooring, and a bathroom - that are currently on-hold awaiting someone with his skills and creative problem-solving ability. This is not a test, but we are eager to see what he can do.

Retreat

2009-10-20T19:28:00.004-04:00

A few examples of an imperative sentence:

Go into the forest for a couple of days, even if it costs a little money, and sleep in a sleeping bag on an unfamiliar bunk in a dormitory full of relative strangers. Live by an altered, imposed, and accepted set of boundaries. Wake up at 5:00 to the sound of a bell, followed by chanting, drumming, and another bell. Be silent until breakfast at 7:30. Sit as much as you want. Take a break, then sit some more.

When you're not sitting, go outside in the crisp October air and walk down the trail to visit the bald eagle, the red-tailed hawk, kestrels, barn owls, barred owls, and turkey vultures that are sheltered at the Raptor Center. Do a taiji form on the brick fire circle just outside the kitchen with your morning coffee, then do another one after dark while the stars come out.

Go for a serious hike down into the glen, across the bridge, past Helen's Rock and Pompey's Pillar, and take a drink from the yellow spring that gives the town its name. Walk along the top of the ridge, down some steep steps, and closer to the creek. Mind your own business, just like the other hikers - young, old, and in between - mind theirs. Get a little bit lost, and find out by accident that the trail loops back to where you came from. Take off a layer or two and cool off.

Help with lunch, then help clean up. Collect enough kindling to get a fire started after dinner, and sit around talking with four or five other people while the fire burns down to coals.

When it's time to go, pack up your stuff, help clear the rooms of furniture, and mop the floor. Take a detour into town, and since it's such a nice day, take a bike ride up the paved trail, stopping to fix a flat tire on the way back, thankful that you brought a spare tube and a hand-pump. Recover from that little adventure with a sandwich and coffee at a little place on Xenia Ave.

Drive home and do a couple of chores because the back yard looks so welcoming.

Isabelle

2009-09-30T16:16:00.002-04:00

This one won't be easy.

That was the start of a blog entry dated almost three weeks ago, then sat unfinished and barely begun. The sweetest cat in the known universe died at the foot of our bed some time during the night. It was painful to watch, though we knew it was coming, and it is painful to recall now. So I will not dwell unnecessarily on her long, slow decline or the strange sight of her blank open eyes near the end as she labored to breathe.

Izzy and her brother Gus joined our family on my daughter Zelda's seventh birthday in 1991. We lived in Grandview, and our previous cat, Big Louie, had been hit by a car while crossing Northwest Boulevard. We buried Louie in the tiny back yard of our double and started looking for another cat. My running partner MacKenzie's tabby had kittens soon after, and he and his family were generous enough to let us have not one but two longhaired picks of the litter, the orange male and the black and orange tortoise-shell female.

Gus and Isabelle moved with us to south Alabama that summer and helped make our little house on Brook Lane a home. A year later they moved back to Columbus with us. Zoe bonded with Gus, sometimes wearing him draped across the back of her neck like a fur collar. My favorite thing was to lie on the floor after a run and cool down while Isabelle took a nap on my chest. Good times those.

The prime years were the ones we lived in a big brick house set back from High Street surrounded by an acre of pine, spruce, poplar, and maple trees with lots of wildlife. It was cat heaven and not too bad for humans. We acquired a dog during that time, and it took awhile for Gus and Izzy to accept Dali into the club, but eventually they came to terms.

Our move to Methodistville was relatively smooth for the animals, and each of them claimed their favorite places in the smaller house and yard. Now all three are buried in the back corner, just inside the fence on high ground under the cedar trees. Gus went first, and Isabelle was a wreck for maybe a year, crying day and night for her brother. Already losing weight and strength, she became much more needy and feeble but lasted another couple of years on sheer pride and stubbornness.

The question of another cat or dog has come up naturally. I think we will take our time with that and just let the house be empty of animals for awhile.

Turn the page

2009-09-22T00:22:00.010-04:00

New job, new cast of co-worker characters, new set of acronyms and idioms to go with the new subculture of production. New kinds of problems to try to solve, new chaotic situations out of which to bring order. I've been an editor for so long, it had become burned into my identity, and officially at least, I'm not an editor anymore. We shall see how readily I shed that skin.

It seems like a lot of changes are happening all at once, because they are. The star wheel is turning from summer to fall, and just today the pine trees were shedding their golden needles like crazy. It's a downer in a sense, gravity and the receding sun's rays doing their thing, but I love the look of fresh pine straw on the ground.

The cooler temperatures are not harsh just yet, so the cold is not a problem either. Wear long pants, put on a sweater. It gets dark pretty early, so there will be no more eight o'clock bike rides deep into Delaware County with plenty of time to loop back home while the cars can still see the green flash of light that is me on le Trek.

I'm starting a new job in a different department of the same company, although the "same" company is morphing into a whole new starship publishing enterprise, so the department I was in for almost ten years will not be the same old department much longer. Even if I wasn't the new/old kid on the second floor, it would not be business as usual. Good news or bad news, you tell me.

I chose to disappear from the fourth floor quickly rather than make it a long, drawn-out leave-taking. It's not like I'm leaving the company or the big small town that is Central Swingstate. I just need to be here now rather than dwell on where I am not.

The plus side of not making many close connections with people at work is that when it's time to move on and call it a day, there are fewer attachments to break. I know that sounds harsh, or a lame rationalization, or fair-weather friendly, but it's not intended that way. I'm not the jilted boyfriend who says, after the fact, that he never really like her anyway. I'm more like the survivor of a shipwreck who washed up on a desert island and lived a good, long time on the nearest beach, in no small part because of help from the other inhabitants of that island. Now another tempest has washed me out to sea, and I'm learning to live on the fruits and nuts that grow on the next island.

Since I did not choose to make this particular move at this particular time, I have less at stake in its being the absolutely best thing ever to happen. Even an intentional change of situation has only an even chance of success: either it will or it won't work out to my advantage, however that is measured. As it says in the middle school math book, just relax and do the best you can. When the next challenge, opportunity, or long strange trip comes about unexpectedly, it's not all that different: I don't know where this story is going, but I will do what I can to make it go somewhere good.

That's just the thing. Being ejected from my comfortable seat in Editorial Land after all these years might just be the best thing that ever happened to me. Yeah, like it "happened to me" and I had nothing to do with it. I probably sowed the seeds of this departure/exile/deportation/ostracism many times over. Paraphrasing that most revered and respected of elder statesmen, Trickie Dick Nixon, they won't have Sven Golly to kick around anymore.

If anything, I'm anticipating a whole new professional adventure, and in the Joseph Campbell sense, you don't pick your adventures, they pick you. So I'm game. Let's see what kinds of trials and tests, temptations and traps, hidden helpers and hoodwinking hindrances lie in wait.

Peregrination

2009-09-17T09:48:00.002-04:00

Let's say you're out for a nice bike ride on a gorgeous Sunday evening in Methodistville, and the wind is a mild sou'wester. MacKenzie's First Law says that you would start out going southwest, against the wind, to get the tailwind on your way back. It's an ideal late-summer time to unwind, in the immortal words of Chuck Berry, with no particular place to go.

If you go west on Walnut and hang a left at the cemetery, then head down Knox and cut through the service department past the skateboard park, you get to Alum Creek bike trail and go south, under Schrock Road and I-270, past a row of condos to a little unofficial eroded pedestrian trail up the bank to Cooper Road.

Here it gets tricky for a minute, as you ride uphill a short distance north, looking out for traffic on the curving two-lane road, before turning left on Corporate Exchange, a wide connector through an sort of office park campus that wends its way up to Cleveland Ave. and comes out, lo and behold, at the Home Depot. This was my objective: to find a route to that corner. Success!

There's no bike rack at O'Charley's, which is not a surprise, only a mild disappointment, since I was secretly hoping to bicycle there to meet my posse later this week. However, at the back of the parking lot I notice an inconspicuous, heretofore unnotice driveway, like a call to adventure leading around a bend and over a small rise to the Xenos campus, which looks busy, well-organized, and wholesomely friendly, like a cross between the Hallmark Channel and the Sci-Fi Channel. Just past the well-marked Cafe in the rear of the the back building I spot a gap in the fence, squeeze through a narrow gate at the back corner, an almost hidden portal onto an out-of-the-way dead-end street that leads to the mainstream normalcy of Sharon Woods Blvd.

I love to discover these obscure connections between the public geography that's printed on the map and the places that the locals know only because they happen to live there. Sharon Woods winds south from Schrock about a mile through a suburban residential neighborhood not unlike my own, past Underfunded Public High School, and comes out on state highway 161, one of the ubiquitous commercial strips from hell so common in central Swingstate.

Crossing 161, the neighborhood changes, as they say, and for an old white guy it doesn't feel so familiar anymore. Since I'm macho in my backward Buckeye cap and cruising along in high gear on le Trek, I have no fear, but through the roundabout of Tamarack Circle I know I'm not in Kansas anymore. I get as far south as Morse Road and things get really strange.

I haven't been to what's left of Northland lately, and apparently no one else has either, because it's deserted save for the surrealistic movie fascade of a building labeled State of Ohio Department of Taxation. This is either some extreme irony or people actually work here, but it's Sunday so I can't really tell, and the sun is going down, and I don't want to turn into a pumpkin, so I definitely need to head back from whence I came.

With no buildings blocking the view it's easy to find my way through the uninhabited expanse of pavement to Karl Road and head north past familiar landmarks like Woodward Park Rec Center, Epworth Methodist Church, the Northside YMCA, and the Karl Road branch of Columbus Public Library, all of which are, in my insular world, bastions of civilization.

Karl turns residential again north of highway 161 revisited, and it would be a stretch to say that I'm on my own with no connection home like a complete unknown, though I was enjoying the indirect route I was riding not quite like a rolling stone. After turning right on Schrock, I happened to notice a gate left open at the very back corner of Sharon Woods Metropark where it ends at I-270, so I doubled back and snuck through the gate into the park and found the unexpected treat of a perfect curving path through protected woods and picnic tables back toward Methodistville.

Directly across from the park entrance is St. Ann's Hospital, which reveals itself as a kind of campus, too, as I coast downhill through a succession of parking lots leading back to Cooper Road, which takes me back to Alum Creek trail and up the hill to Otterbein, which really is a campus, back to Walnut Street and Om Shanty, where there is a cold Great Lakes Eliot Ness Amber Lager waiting for me. Pointless but satisfying nonetheless.

Yo Ho Ho

2009-09-14T17:04:00.000-04:00

You can feel the change of seasons in the air. The maple tree outside the office window already shows a distinct splash of orange. We pull up the down comforter sometime during the night. Football season is underway across this great pigskin nation. That must mean it's time to switch from gin to rum.

Gin and tonic is a summer drink, and on a warm summer evening, there's nothing quite like it, wedge of lime, thank you. Spring is for tequila, por supuesto. In a margarita, or with grenadine and OJ in a tequila sunrise, or all by itself, what the je. Viva agave! In winter it's vodka. Russian, Polish, Swedish, whatever. And from around Labor Day to New Year's Day, here roughly defined as 'fall', rum is the liquor of choice in my house. It's versatile, as refreshing in OJ as in tonic or, as a Christmas treat, egg nog.

Let's be clear. I am not advocating that anyone overindulge. Have one drink to take the edge off. If it's a seasonal libation, it becomes a little more celebratory, a little more connected to the four directions, the solstice and the equinox, the turning of the big wheel, with the cultural observance of winter, spring, summer, and fall. When I figure out the eight trigrams, the five elements, and the five flavors, you'll be the first to know.

Nine, nine, oh nine

2009-09-09T15:11:00.002-04:00

My son Jessi was born 27 years ago today. Over the years, the numbers 9/9/82 have been kind of special for me, as well as an easy-to-remember PIN or lock combination.

The online Merriam Webster dictionary gave me this additional factoid this morning.

Did you know?

Since ancient times, various groups of people have considered nine to be a very special and sacred number. Legends and literature have long characterized groups of nine as having a special, in some cases magical, significance. Ancient Egyptians organized their gods into groups of nine; even today, their principal group of gods (headed by sun god Re-Atum) is called the "Great Ennead of Heliopolis." The "Ennead" English speakers use in that name traces to "ennea," the Greek word for "nine." "Ennead" is also used generally to refer to other groups of ancient gods. Furthermore, it is the name given to six sets of nine treatises by Greek philosopher Plotinus that were collected and organized by his 3rd-century disciple, Porphyry.

So there you go. Nine not just another number. Nine is out there. Dressed to the nines. The whole nine yards.

Everyone knows that 9 is super cool numerologically. If you add 9 to any digit (let's say 2 + 9 = 11), and then add the digits of the sum (1 + 1), you get the original digit (1 + 1 = 2). Oh wow!

Nine is very heavy in the Book of Changes (I Ching) too, indicating a strong yang element in any changing situation. Nine is all about creativity, mobility, and dragon-like power. Three in a row has to be auspicious.

So by the quirks of the base-10 numbering system and the Western calendar that has September (literally "seventh month") falling on the ninth month, September ninth in the ninth years of the current century kind of stands out. Three nines in a row, 9/9/09, makes 27.

Happy birthday, Jessi. You are a nine nine oh nine!

It's a Bean!

2009-09-03T17:51:00.008-04:00

If you've been following the continuing story of our search for a car, the search is finally over. Thank goodness. It's been almost six weeks since the deer leaped into the path of Gven's Honda somewhere in western Pennsylvania, totalling both the car and the deer. The car made it home safely; the deer didn't.

In the meantime, we've been getting by on one vehicle, plus the Lincoln Town Car on loan from Gven's friend Kate. As Commander Cody said, "My pappy said son, you're gonna drive me to drinkin' if you don't stop drivin' that hot rod Lincoln." Now Kate can have her Town Car back, because Gven has bought a Toyota Echo named Bean. It's a cute little, dark red, kidney-shaped car, hence the name.

We test-drove Accords, CRVs, and Civics; Volvo S40s and XCs; a Subaru, a Land Rover, and a Sportage. Some came close, but none filled the bill. It's a good way to meet interesting people from the Middle East, Africa, Mexico, Ukraine, and Grove City. Long story short, car culture is vast and varied. Our research was less exhaustive than exhausting, and it seems to have worked out fine.

The Bean doesn't have power windows, a sunroof, all-wheel drive, or turbo. It isn't an SUV, station wagon, hybrid, or amphibious armored urban assault vehicle. It does have four wheels, an engine, air, and a CD player. It runs. It handles well, and it's great on gas. I think it will do, even without bells and whistles.

We'll have to see how Gven bonds with her car. It's doing well bopping around town, and soon we will take it on a road trip to see the parents. It's just good to have the car issue resolved for now.

It's a pergola!

2009-08-27T11:01:00.006-04:00

After a prolonged gestation period, a new addition to our family has seen the light of day. This baby was first conceived about four years ago, and finally has been delivered unto us, a joyful addition indeed.

It's a big one, about 20 feet long, 12 feet wide, and 9 feet high. Roughly speaking, since all measurements are just a bit off. It has been an interesting project, you might say, from a vague idea to a vivid daydream, through some initial sketches and multiple design changes, pacing off the length at least a hundred times, right down to what I'm tentatively calling "completion."

If I was a carpenter, and you were a lady, would you marry me anyway, would have my pergola?

Burn or frostbite, take your pick

2009-08-25T17:09:00.006-04:00

"There's more than one way to skin a cat," said the dermatologist.

No kidding, he really said that. Dr. Quillin, as in quills, plucked feathers, porcupines, sharp pointed instruments, dipped in ink and scratching on paper. Maybe he does tattoos on his day off. At least his name isn't Hyde, as in Jekyl.

This was toward the end of the appointment, after he perfunctorily apologized for making me wait all day, then went about the business of checking my epidermal surface from head to toe. Turn to the left, turn to the right, stand up, sit down, fight fight fight.

The Enderson side of the Golly family has a proclivity toward spots, and my Mom periodically reminds me to have them checked out. My last dermatological checkup was four years ago, so I was due. So far, so good, nothing malignant, just a minor annoyance on the neck or back that can either be ignored or removed with the right tools. Enter Dr. Quills.

Rather than scheduling another appointment, Dr. Quills obligingly went ahead and applied the tools of his trade to a few "irregular growths." That's the generic term, irregular growths, which includes spots, moles, lesions, and skin tags.

He can burn them off with a shiny stainless steel electrical pointer thingy, or he can freeze them off, with a cotton swab dipped in liquid nitrogen, a safe way of getting frostbitten. Either way, extreme heat or extreme cold will kill those pesky irregular cells. Or he can cut them off with a thin blade and send them to the lab for biopsy, and the report comes back saying it's benign.

Dali / Dolly / Dalai

2009-08-08T12:24:00.002-04:00

She was our family dog. We spotted her at the shelter in a cage with several other puppies, and she was the cutest and calmest, so we chose her and took her home. It was February, right around Valentine's Day. It turned out that she was sick, not calm, and when she was healthy she had all the typical puppy energy and behavior issues. But she was still the cutest of the litter.

The shelter people (no, not Leon Russell and his friends, the other shelter people) said she was a Dalmatian-Lab mix. Someone throught she might have been part beagle. One self-appointed expert said no, definitely a German shorthaired pointer. Whatever.

Gven and the kids, who were 11 and 13 at the time, bonded with Dali right away. I somehow acquired the naming rights, but it took me a little longer to bond, being the alpha dog in our pack and slightly less enamored of the whole having-a-dog experience, but I came around eventually. I think when I started walking her regularly, getting used to the leash and plastic bag routine, and seeing Dali respond so well to that time together, I started to get with the program.

She was trained. I was trained. You are your own dog.

When I attempted a comeback as a runner several years ago, Dali became my running buddy. Every night we would hit the streets of Methodistville, and both of us got a workout, since her short-legged gait matched my shortened 50-something stride. She was happy as a clam as we got to know the neighborhood. My athletic comeback was short-lived, so our nightly run eventually became a nightly walk. She was okay with that.

Jessi and Zelda grew up, went off to college, came back, got their own places, came back some more, and Dali/Dolly/Dalai was always - ALWAYS - tickled to see them. Of course. She was their dog. They were her humans. They raised her from a pup, and she faithfully protected their home.

In her last years, Dali still eagerly went for walks with Gven, usually with Gven's friend Kate and her dog Sadie. Dali and Sadie enjoyed many play-dates and became close friends and confidantes. Sadie's pack dog-sat for Dali when we were out of town, and we dog-sat for Sadie when her pack was out of town. It's good to have neighbors you like and trust.

Dali developed a hip problem and slowed down quite a bit. She had always run slightly sideways, and at age 14 that odd gait became a pronounced limp. Going up stairs has been difficult for the last year or so, and toward the end she had trouble getting up on the couch. She recently lost the use of her larynx so she couldn't bark. Her energy waned, and she rarely went out in the yard by herself. Toward the end she didn't wag her tail very often and lost the gleam in her eye.

On Friday morning, Gven let her out and Dali lay down in her favorite spot under the redbud tree near the back door. When Gven returned a few minutes later, Dali wasn't breathing. I know she wasn't happy, and I'd like to think she went peacefully, knowing she was loved. We buried Dali that night in the back corner of the yard, next to her buddy Gus, the cat.

Unnatural habitat

2009-07-31T22:57:00.002-04:00

The backyard of Om Shanty on Summit Street in Methodistville was abuzz with biotic activity on an unquiet evening in late July. Not only was amplified music blaring from the Fourth Friday Uptown Commercefest, but birds, bees, squirrels, insects, flowers, vegetables, and other carbon-based lifeforms are out force. I blame it on the weather.

I can't begin to name the species of birds that make this quarter-acre their home and/or feeding ground. Some are flying solo, some with a partner nearby, some in competition with a rival for a partner, and some in a collective wave of mass movement from one tree to another. A squirrel was attacked by a nest of yellowjackets, the unintended consequences of foraging for its own nesting material, and you should have seen him jump sideways when he got stung by those aggressive little beasts. None of your beeswax!

I wouldn't call it a feeding frenzy exactly, but it is the dinner hour after all, the end of a workweek, and the din was frenetic. I did my part, inadvertently helping the houseflies reproduce by watering indoor plants from the rainbarrel, so lots of tiny wiggling larvae were given a sheltered place to incubate and hatch. Now the tolerable outdoor insect population has colonized the back room of the house, where they have become intolerable. I spent hours on Saturday swatting and disposing of the gross little piles of fly carcasses, depositing them in the compost where they could at last fulfill their destiny and do some good.

The flies were especially thick around the night-blooming cereus on the corner table in the den, where the long, curving stem drapes over a lampshade, keeping the leathery leaves from hanging down to the floor. Just this week little tassels began to appear on the tips of three or four leaves as the cereus began to bloom. I was careful not to swat flies too close and ruin everything.

While I stayed home alone for the weekend, Gven and her sister Nyet went to a small family reunion near the Antietam battlefield in Maryland. There had been some years of estrangement in their youth between the sisters and their father, and it has taken the better part of a lifetime to make up for lost time. Some things are still unresolved, unsaid, and unacknowledged. He made some life choices as a relatively young father, and it seems as though others have suffered the consequences. The small, casual weekend gathering with their half-siblings seems to have gone well. With no aunts and uncles and cousins by the dozens to make it into a Big Event, they achieved a comfort level where they could speak and be heard more openly.

Sunday was a long, emotionally exhausting day for Gven. I am grateful that Nyet was there to keep her big sister company, bear witness, and provide support. They got a late start coming home, so it was dark by the time they got to western Pennsylvania and collided with a deer that leaped across two lanes of I-70 in front of the white Honda, bounced off the hood and right-front fender, and fell into the ditch. Gven slowed down and pulled over to the shoulder while other cars steered around the flying deer. A witness stopped and called the police, who did not issue a report because it was an Act of Nature.

No humans were injured, but Gven was pretty upset. The car was drivable, so Nyet drove the rest of the way home to central Swingstate. I was in touch by phone but largely uninvolved. I came home from work the next day and pulled weeds in the side bed along Plum Street that get neglected until it begins to look like nobody lives there. Gven and Nyet spent more quality time together processing their weekend with their half-family, discussing the deer incident and how close they had come to a much worse ending.

What to do about the car would ultimately rest with the insurance claims department, and it was taking State Farm and their friends at Collision One several days to come up with an estimate of the damage, repair costs, and the fate of the Honda. Nyet caught her flight home to Atlanta on Wednesday. Gven returned to her regular work schedule while we traded off the use of one vehicle. Good bicycling weather made that easier.

I took a vacation day on Friday, so I was out in the yard holding a shovel when Gven gave me the news that the Honda was totalled. Okay, if that's what the number crunchers say, then that's what it is. It had been a good, reliable car for a little over five years, and Gven was somewhat attached to it, even more so after it warded off a big deer from crashing through the windshield, punctured a radiator and battery, and still made it home in one piece.

While we pondered our options regarding a new car, I was busy transplanting lamb's ear from a crowded border in back to a bare strip in front, pulled a few weeds, and mowed the little trapezoid of grass. When I bumped a railroad tie between the lawn and the bed with the mower, I disturbed the nest of yellowjackets, and they were on me within seconds. I backed away swatting, but they kept coming, persistent little buggers.

Is it because of the dog days of summer? Later that afternoon I was weeding a bed of daylilies near the house and disturbed another nest of yellowjackets. This time one of them got me good, a direct hit in the meaty part of the base of the thumb, and within minutes my hand was swelling halfway up the wrist in a perfect rectangle of puffy flesh. I wrapped it in a cold pack, took some ibuprofen, and sat down in the rocker for a nap. Weeds or no weeds, it was clearly time to retreat on that front.

campin'

2009-07-21T12:10:00.007-04:00

Gven Golly and I have been camping before, so it was a minor challenge to set up the tent after dark in a light rain. We're not "serious" outdoor people, and we haven't done any hard-core wilderness survival training, but in most settings we kind of know what to do. Many factors contributed to our getting a late start on our journey from Methodistville, Ohio, to Mancelona, Michigan. We chose to stop for supper at the little restaurant at the Waters exit off I-75 just as it was getting dark. The hot pork sandwich with mashed potatoes and gravy was worth the short delay.

We had breakfast at the nearby golf course restaurant/pro shop/bar by special arrangement, since we had slept late and missed the 11:00 cutoff time. They were happy to waive the restriction when we made it clear we were hoping for a real breakfast, and the ham and cheese omelet hit the spot. The lunchtime clientele was a study in Michigan contrasts: Republican retirees at their laptops complaining about how Obama wants to tax their capital gains and give it to the illegal immigrants; middle-aged biker chicks in leather leggings and plunging necklines blaring music on their iPhones; wholesome young families from Ludington on vacation up north in their school sweatshirts; and us, a couple of immigrants from Ohio figuring out what to do instead of bicycling and canoing when it's 55 and rainy.

The drizzle continued most of the day, so we checked on the property that Grandma and Grandpa Golly gave us, just to see what it looks like in July, and collected a little semi-dry firewood while we were there. We drove over to Lake Lapiz, one of our favorite spots, but it was too cold and damp to swim or canoe, so we bought a few supplies at the little store in Alba and looked for tie-downs at the hardware store in Mancelona to try to upgrade our roped-down canoe-carrying setup, but without success. If ropes is what we've got, then ropes will have to do. They turned out to be perfectly adequate, even though tying and untying repeatedly was a bit of a task - grumble grumble #&@%$!*.

Perhaps the best decision of the day was to go ahead and put the canoe in the water, rain or no rain. As soon as we started to float out the cove past the lily pads onto the lake, I knew it was the right thing to do, even as we paddled against a brisk wind across the lake - why? - to get to the other side, of course. It was instructive to see up close what people have tastefully done - and not done - with their lakefront property to keep it clean and unspoiled. The slow, steady paddling warmed us up and lifted our spirits; there's nothing like floating in a little boat to change your perspective on things.

Thus revived, it was time for dinner, so we got a fire going with a little help from self-starting charcoal - which is cheating, you know, but what the hell, it's raining - and in no time had pasta with pesto, sweet red peppers, cherry tomatoes, Jarlsberg cheese, and red wine. The cooking fire morphed into a long-lasting campfire, which gave us something to poke while listing all the places we have camped over the years.

There was Hillsville, Virginia, 1976; Strawberry Mountain Farm, Georgia, 1977, in the tent that Gven sewed herself. There was Zion, Illinois, 1978; Door County, Wisconsin, and Marquette, Michigan, 1980; Cade's Cove, Tennessee, 1981; Uwharrie National Forest, North Carolina, 1982; Walker County, Georgia, 1983; and Newberry, South Carolina, 1984. Then not so much when the kids were little; Cade's Cove again with the preteens Jessi and Zelda, 1995; John Bryan State Park, Ohio, with Jessi, 1997; then Antrim County, Michigan, 2007, 2008, 2009, and counting.

You'd think we'd have it down by now. You'd think. But no, we're still improvising and experimenting in a long-term quest to find the most difficult way to do the simplest things with the least possible preparation and minimal equipment. Sleeping on cots this year, instead of on the ground, is a major concession to modernity.

The weather broke on Sunday, so after breakfast (campfire oatmeal, fruit, coffee) we decided to go to Traverse City and up the Leelanau Peninsula. I hadn't been there in many years, and Gven was oohing and aahing half the way there, and it's true, it is a picturesque drive up M-22 along the rim of Grand Traverse Bay. There were a few sailboats out on the water, but a lot of people were just lounging on their boats sitting in the harbor and enjoying the sunshine. It's been a cool year so far. We stopped for a picnic lunch in Northport and headed back by way of Sutton's Bay. Since we were in the neighborhood, we decided to find the winery that a couple of high school friends recently bought, but as luck would have it, closing time on Sunday is 5:00 and we got there at 5:02.

I knocked on the door anyway, and who should open it but my friend Heron Sherrick, who remarkably recognized me right away and invited us in to join a wine tasting party already in progress. We met the other workers and sampled a few of the sparkling wines that are their specialty. Heron called her husband Lou Stang, also a Groves Falcon, class of '69, and Lou showed us around the place while we caught up on the last 40 years while sipping their product. It was all an unexpected pleasure, and their hospitality at the end of a long workday was almost an embarrassment of riches.

Heron and Lou recommended Apache Trout Grill, so that was our next stop for dinner. We had a view of the water from our cocktail table by the bar, which beats an hour and a half wait, and the walleye with garlic mashed potatoes was excellent. It was also fun eavesdropping on the conversations of golfers and tourists from Green Bay sharing Packers lore and other lies. We had some time to kill and were in no hurry to get back to camp, so we walked up Front Street and found a decent bookstore with a cafe and, briefly, a piano player.

In spite of our new cots, sleeping was still a challenge, more due to the well-ventilated tent than anything else. It was chilly at night, so we had to wear layers and burrow down into our mummy bags, and this is July! We also had to get an early start Monday morning for the trip home, so we decamped at first light and hit the road - but not before a ritual dip in Lake Lapiz, which was completely refreshing and made the rest of the seven-hour drive bearable. We got home just in time for me to make it to my 6:00 class in the park. Although I looked a little the worse for wear, I felt renewed and invigorated after a couple of days away.

Stuff

2009-07-09T18:15:00.008-04:00

In my ongoing quest to amass more material possessions, I have made great strides of late, acquiring a used bike from a guy in Pickerington, a truck cap from a guy in Jersey, a new pair of shoes at a little store near the mall, new glasses from my new optometrist, and a new belt tensioner from Joe's Service in Methodistville. WOO HOO! This is exciting stuff.

Each of these purchases deserves its own unique story, and each narrative of happy economic exchange unfolded in a peculiar, unpredictable way that's beyond my storytelling ability. For a nonshopper like myself, it's a freaking revelation to observe the minute details of seeking and finding just the right item, and I can only begin to sense the adrenaline that must course through the veins of a serious consumer stalking the wild commodity in the great Amerikan marketplace.

There was one day last week when a Vonnegut-esque chronosynclastic infundibulum occurred right on State Street in uptown Methodistville. I had dropped off Hank, my truck, at Joe's Service to have the mechanic fix the annoying whine from the serpentine belt, which had been getting worse for months and I couldn't tolerate anymore, and he diagnosed the problem as a worn-out tensioner just below the nonfunctioning air conditioner. I had put my lovely new dark-green Trek in the back of the truck and rode it the rest of the way to work, already feeling a bit of the materialist magic.

When Joe called me at work and said the truck was ready, I rode le Trek back to the shop, paid the bill, and drove the quiet truck up the street in air-conditioned comfort wearing my brand new German-made, cork-insoled, not-yet-broken-in, Zirkon-encrusted size 45s, feeling like a pretty cool customer let me tell you. To top it all off, due to exquisite timing I had an appointment to pick up my new glasses from my new eye doctor at the corner of Maxtown and State. My new "progressive" lenses were waiting for me, and I picked up a new fake leather case to put them in, just for good measure, dark-green to match the handsome new/used bike.

I'm here today to bear witness to the power of the greatest recreational drug of all, consuming goods in the marketplace. Can I get an amen?

Character development

2009-07-06T10:11:00.005-04:00

One of the things I like about getting out once in a while - out of the house, out of the cubicle, out of the everyday rut - is the opportunity to run into characters like Ali. I talked to a guy named Ali - he pronounced it like Ollie - the other day while drinking green tea downtown. He quoted Milan Kundera as saying that the three most important things in life are eating, reproducing, and eliminating. You have to eat to live, so obviously it's worth paying attention to. Most people, for widely different reasons, would agree that maintaining the human species is a high priority; some are more actively engaged in that endeavor than others, while many are deeply involved in either increasing or decreasing the probability that they personally cause the birth rate to rise. What is easily ignored, forgotten, or denied is the excretory imperative, but it causes havoc when it ceases to function, shall we say, smoothly.

I don't recall what prompted this exchange or the ensuing conversation about politics and publishing and what not to believe, but it was an unexpected pleasure. Ali had seen me around, and I had seen him around, but we had never met or had occasion to talk. Now I know a little bit about his literary tastes, his politics, his sense of humor, and even his journalistic standards. He's about my age but has probably been many more places, and he strikes me as nobody's fool. My personal narrative has been increased and enriched by one additional flesh-and-blood character. Besides that, it gives me something to write about.

This in turn provides me with a means to practice what I think of as the Natalie Goldberg-David Martin School of Creative Writing, which can succinctly be summarized as follows: Write something every day. That's it. You don't have to show it to anyone, publish it, polish it, edit, hone, dress it up, or endlessly redraft your precious piece of art. You don't even have to read it yourself (lucky you) or ask your friends to read it (lucky them). It doesn't have to meet your own or anyone else's high critical standards, stylistic preconceptions, or baseless expectations of what constitutes "important" content. Consequently you don't need to have anything to say. You just have to know how to operate a pen, pencil, or keyboard.

What happens in the process - and I'm assuming that something happens - is that writing something - writing anything - changes the writer, regardless of what else happens to the ink stains on the page or pixels on the screen. Let's not even think about changing anyone else's mind, reaching out to our fellow Amerikans, or, pardon the expression, making a difference in the world. Writing as a practice, as opposed to writing strictly to produce a certain outcome, works on the mind of the writer. That's all it is, and that's enough, and that's what makes it a practice rather than a project. It's probably better if you don't know ahead of time what will come of it. Mostly likely nothing much.

fanfare for the common sweat beetle

2009-07-04T00:38:00.002-04:00

In the great Amerikan tradition of making work out of play, this Independence Day weekend is an appropriate time to analyze the shit out of another great Amerikan tradition, the proper use of leisure time. And what better, mind-numbingly reductionistic way to weight one's everyday life choices than to make a balance sheet of what's right and what's wrong in my world?

RIGHT

1. The geraniums look glorious in their hanging baskets and window boxes.
2. The weather today is fabulous.
3. My knees don't hurt.

WRONG

1. This Gevalia mail-order coffee is the worst dreck I've ever tasted.
2. Messes in laundry room and kitchen refuse to clean themselves up.

RIGHT

4. My pocket knife got the old beach umbrella on the patio table unstuck, so it will both open and close.
5. Cardinals, chickadees, robins, bluejays, swallows, and crows coexist in this humble but verdant quarter acre. What's wrong with them, don't they have any ideology?

WRONG

3. The weeds I have tolerated, overlooked, or ignored are taking over the flowerbeds.
4. My Michigan vacation pipedream isn't going to happen this year or this lifetime.

RIGHT

6. Isabel the old cat takes a nap on the patio next to an old-fashioned steel lawn chair with spring-like tubular arms and legs.
7. Behold the daylilies of the back bed by the garage, trumpeting their existence in joyous yellow and orange.
8. Tendrils of bean plants have located the poles and know what to do.
9. I can choose which columnist to talk to at the cocktail party that is the Sunday New York Times.

WRONG

5. This peace will be broken tomorrow by well-intentioned crowds, parades, bad music, traffic, explosions, jingoistic rituals and self-congratulatory rhetoric.
6. I screwed up some early measurements of a project I'm working on, so nothing is truly square.
7. In the corners of my consciousness are shadows of problems that I will never solve.

RIGHT

10. I have the good sense to buy new lumber instead of making do with some scraps I had lying around, then I find some cheap little brackets at Home Depot that will secure a 2x6 firmly to a 2x8 at a right angle and save my bacon.
11. A simple flour tortilla, warmed on cast iron, with hummous and cherry tomatoes, with a cool Great Lakes Edmund Fitzgerald handcrafted porter tastes mighty good at the end of the day.

It's official: Right beats Wrong 11-7. I guess it was a good day.

Poser!

2009-06-19T10:02:00.009-04:00

I'm increasingly convinced that posturing works. In the words of a wise and experienced teacher, "Fake it till you make it." What I think she means by that is, roughly, practicing the outward form of the kind of life you admire, even in a superficial and flawed way, can bring about some significant changes.

If you don't achieve anything else, the act of posing as [insert desired character attributes here] aligns the body, outward appearance, and attitude in a certain way that gives the impression that you actually know what you're doing. Assume the posture. Do it again. Repeat until all the weight-bearing structures and all their supporting levers and pulleys adapt.

On one level, posturing is a practical way to replace one set of habits with another, hipper and more enlightened, set of habits, kind of like buying new clothes can make the same old dork feel like a new man for about an hour. Sometimes the shoe fits, and you can wear the new persona immediately. (This has happened maybe once that I can remember.) Other times the fu shits, you wash it off and try again.

Usually it takes a long time (gongfu) to take on the attributes of the form, the guru, or the role model, so there is a gap between the objective, fumbling 'me' and the ideal, integrated 'it'. My hips don't want to rotate wide enough, my head doesn't want to rest vertically on top of my spine, my mind won't focus with crystaline clarity. There's a reaction (oops) and a resumption (there), followed by a relapse (damn) and a reset (okay), and so on indefinitely. This chain of events can resemble a rote drill more than a peaceful meditation, and there might not be much difference, at least for a beginning poser.

I suppose I've been posturing on and off for forty-plus years, and my skill in posturing has improved markedly. As a little kid I was just Sven. My friends knew me and other people didn't. Then at some point, probably adolescence, I decided to be somebody, so it became necessary to act the part of an athlete, a cool guy, a writer, a responsible young man, a deep thinker, or whatever attracted girls. If you're paying attention, there are role models from whom to pick up moves, and if you're not paying attention, well, never mind.

A big part of it in my circumscribed world was body language. Standing, sitting, or walking a certain way, physically placing the muscles, bones, and joints in a certain relationship with gravity, conditions malleable soft tissues, brain, and nervous system with the know-how and disposition to act like the jocks, the hipsters, the guys chicks dig. We were all in training, and for those who persevere, the body takes on the shape of the aspiration. Practice, practice, practice, and hope it takes.

But you knew that. Did you also know that posturing is related to all these wonderful words in that fabulous lexical landscape we call the English language?

A. positive
B. impose
C. posit
D. expose
E. oppose
F. component
G. dispose
H. position
I. postpone

Now, use all of them in a sentence, you poser.

Have fun, be good, take a nap

2009-06-01T10:18:00.005-04:00

When we were kids, Mom would feed us breakfast and send us off to school in the morning with the admonition, "Have fun, be good, learn lots." Concise, to the point, and very Helen. I went to see Mom and Dad for a weekend recently, and now her mantra is "Have fun, be good, take a nap."

I'm beginning to learn how to take a break at the appropriate moment, step back from an issue, and just chill. There was one such moment, I think it was Day 3, when something random and unintentional got to me. Maybe I was tired, or I missed my own space, whatever. I stopped what I was doing, took my laptop out on the deck and listened to Simon and Garfunkel. It was restful and a source of stimulation at the same time, allowing me to step back from my reaction to Mom's reaction to Dad's reaction to some other dysfunctional faux pas in the peasant family dynamics. I'm not going to over-analyze it, just acknowledge it.

The whole visit went well, and I'm grateful that I can hang out with my aging parents at their house in their comfort zone and their daily rhythms, enjoy their company, and get a couple of chores done. Dad had a project or two underway, as usual, and he welcomed my participation as much as I welcomed having something tangible to do. That kind of reciprocity has not always been the case, so we seem to be making progress in that area.

The deck he built with the help of a friend has deteriorated over the course of 18 years of sun, wind, rain, and hickory trees, so Dad was replacing the spindles of the railing enclosing the north and west sides of the deck. My first job was to paint the new 1x1-inch 4-foot hardwood spindles--after first artfully arranging then on a dropcloth on the floor of the garage. This was nice solitary work that I could do in a deep squat taiji style like some Chinese-Norwegian Jackson Pollack.

My second job was to drill and screw the spindles onto the railing and deck. It's not rocket science, but as with any project, there are plenty of ways to get it wrong while measuring, spacing, and attaching stuff to other stuff, whether you're 12 feet up a ladder or bending over from above. This phase of the work required some communication, as well as trading off drill and screwdrivers, so Dad and I carried on a focused dialog as we worked through the process step by step.

Because Dad is 88 (and I'm not), I handled the ladder climbing, securing the bottom of the spindles to the deck frame while he attached the tops to the railing. Because he has degrees in industrial arts and a lifetime of experience in building and fixing things, he had a pretty clear idea of how to go about the task safely and effectively. Because I'm not 12 (or 18, or 24, or 30) anymore and have been to school and work awhile myself, I was able to offer a few suggestions on how we could organize and execute the work, though I usually deferred to his judgment. Because he recognized my contributions and valued my efforts, he listened to my ideas with an open mind and heart and mostly let me do my part my way.

By the end of the day, we had one side of the deck done and were ready for a vodka and Squirt. Mom had cooked a fine dinner of country ribs and scalloped potatoes, and I think I ate enough for three people. The deck railing was only one job in a to-do list compiled by a local construction expert, and I spent a little time reading through the other repairs that would bring their house up to marketable condition. Not that anyone is in a big hurry to sell the house and move to a condo up the road. Let's not get ahead of ourselves.

The roof figures prominently in about half of the list, and a quick look from the back deck provided a clue to the problem. I had some downtime the next day, so I climbed up on the roof with a broom intending to spend half an hour sweeping off debris from the trees that tower over The Little House on the Fairway. You guessed it, half an hour turned into half a day, and a quick sweep turned into a sparring match with a ton of damp hickory droppings, gravity, the pitch of the roof, and the hot Tennessee sun. Luckily I kept my maize and blue Michigan baseball cap on, so I maintained a cool head and didn't succomb to heat exhaustion, vertigo, or delerium. My legs got a workout, and the accumulation of debris in low spots showed me how a minor design flaw led to the need for some of the repairs on the list. I'm looking forward to the next project.

Oxygen debt

2009-05-19T10:28:00.000-04:00

Leonard Cercone was old school. Win all your intervals, go all-out on every down, beat the other guy, even if he's your best friend. Especially if he's your best friend. Leonard Cercone was the track coach at Wylie E. Groves High School, also assistant football coach and world history teacher, in that order.

I went out for track my sophomore year, and after failing miserably in the hurdles, I tried the quarter mile because Coach had been a quarter-miler and his default setting was to run the quarter. But I didn't have the speed, so I tried the half mile. I passed people on the second lap, and Coach Cercone said, "Dunc, you're a half miler because you get stronger as you go along."

I remembered that phrase, stronger as you go along. It would help me in a lot of things that didn't come easily. I wasn't much of a half miler either, at least not on a team like ours that was loaded with talent, not to mention that I had no idea what training was all about. So I ended up a high jumper my senior year and did alright once I switched to the Fosbury flop.

Yet I still didn't know what a workout was, and it was years later, after high jumping was all over and I needed something else to do, that the concept of aerobic conditioning entered my world. Like many aspects of physical nature, it is a harsh and beautiful thing. You can strengthen your existing muscle fibers by overloading them with progressively increasing resistance. You can cause your heart and lungs to get stronger by demanding that they do more than they are prepared to do. Push the instrument and the instrument responds.

The opposite is also the case. If you decrease the resistance, muscle fibers get weaker, and if you stop using them, they atrophy. Go a week or two without asking the cardiovascular system to rise to the occasion, and the system loses the capacity to do it. Like trying to run a marathon when you've trained for 10K, at some point there's an oxygen debt, and it ain't gonna happen. If there's insufficient oxygen delivered, there's no ATP and no go.

Back in March when the weather got nice, I was riding the old Schvinn and feeling pretty confident about putting some miles on it. In my endorphin-fueled excitement, I actually thought I could bike three times a week, with one long ride on the weekend, and keep increasing the distance week by week. If I add just half an hour a week to my long ride, I'll be up to a hundred miles by summer.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Not that I seriously believed I would do that. I just saw that it was possible and briefly entertained the notion that, in the abstract, it could be done. So what happened? It rained. It got cool and windy. It wasn't 65 degrees and clear every day during April. It rained again. Note the whiny tone. I thought about riding, but I had other things to do.

Consequently, when perfect weather returned the second week of May, I saddled up old Schvinn and moseyed on up the trail, and guess what. No gas in the tank, no wind in the sails, no ATP in the muscles to climb the long, gradual, half-assed central Ohio hill on County Line Road. Use it or lose it, and in a couple of weeks I lost it.

The first day was bad, and the second day was horrible. Where I come from - and Coach Cercone would certainly endorse this - being fit has moral weight. If you let the body go all slack, this demonstrates your failure as a person and reveals an undeniable character flaw. He would give you that glare.

The third day was better, much better, as if my sins had been redeemed and I was a good person again. The fourth day I was unstoppable. Cars ate my dust, and I climbed hills in high gear. Westerville to the Park of Roses? No problemo! Legs, heart, and lungs hitting on all cylinders. Mind and body humming on all chakras. Oxygen delivered on demand, and the endorphin bar is open.

Let's see how long this lasts.

Generaniums

2009-05-10T01:04:00.006-04:00

Just another weekend of epochal proportions. Clean the house, weed the garden, play a drum, bake bread, plant geraniums, celebrate the non-Hallmark Mother's Day holiday and the daughter's twenty-fifth birthday. Another week, another quarter-century of life as we know it. This season within a season could be named Offspring.

Every time I get the urge to be somewhere else, I am reminded how many attachments I have in central Swingstate. After topping off the compost pile with weeds in the morning, I went to the biweekly drum circle at the rec center, and I knew about half of the people there. I guess I'm not the new guy anymore. Two of three of the regulars I've seen at other events in other places, so there is more of a community-like context, which adds texture, and we'll see where, if anywhere, that goes.

Because I was in the neighborhood (and out of flour), I went to the coop, where I saw two more familiar faces. The nursery was on my way home, so I stopped to buy geraniums, and wouldn't you know it, I ran into a former co-worker who is an avid gardener. We chatted awhile - our gardens, other co-workers, my kids, her kids - and she returned to her reverie in the perennials while I picked out two flats of annuals.

After pulling more weeds - there are always more weeds - Gven and I went to Zelda's house for a birthday party. Her housemate David also had a birthday this week, so they cleaned the house and had a lot of people over. We arrived early and left early, had one drink, nibbled on Cheez-its, mixed with a few of their friends, and met a couple new ones. One, coincidentally, I had seen last weekend at a rest stop on I-80 in the middle of Pennsylvania. She was coming back from a film festival in New York, and I was on my way to New York to visit Zelda's brother Jessi. What are the odds? I figure it's the red hair.

Church on Sunday was focused on the theme of imperfection and the value of failure, in stark contrast to the safe, suburban liberalism that I see around me, which should be no surprise, since I undoubtedly project that same risk-averse attitude among that same congregation, whom I chose to hang out with, so pardon the digression. [Note to self: pick up Bruno Bettelheim's A Good Enough Parent.]

Since it was Mother's Day, after all, it was imperative that I go home and get busy potting geraniums in window boxes, the ritual that began some time in the 1980s and has become a sacred seasonal rite. The process is getting a little easier too. This time I used a square-bladed shovel to mix old potting soil in a wheel barrow, then filled several pots with soil and little plants from 4-packs, watered them in, and there you go. Just like Dad used to do back in Michigan.

I had to get it done quickly and efficiently because Gven and I had plans to go out to dinner with Zelda at the Tip-Top downtown, her choice of restaurant. The two of them decided to celebrate her birthday and Mother's Day together, and I had no objection. It felt entirely appropriate, as they have entered a new phase in the mother-daughter relationship, which, for lack of another term I will call friendship. It is quite a sight to behold.

Whether Report

2009-05-04T13:18:00.008-04:00

Should I stay or should I go? The eternal dilemma nailed by the Clash was alive for me last week, on the horns of deciding whether to go to New York to see Jessi. Or not. I had an itinerary and the vacation days, but I also had a ton of things to do at home. You know how it is. You have to just go. Or not.

Gven couldn't find substitute teachers on short notice, so I would go by myself. Or not. The first weekend of May is garden planting season and comes but once a year, yet the forecast called for rain in central Swingstate, so I wouldn't get much done in the yard, and I might as well get out of town. It's good to know all those courses in the Department of Rationalization at The Swingstate University went to good use.

I get all the news I need on the weather report.
I can gather all the news I need on the weather report.
Hey, I've got nothing to do today but smile...
The only living boy in New York. (Paul Simon, 1970)

By the time I had baked a loaf of bread to take along, consulted Mapquest, made a list, checked it twice, read the paper, checked Facebook, done a taiji form and sat for 20 minutes, it was getting late. Gven says I have too many disciplines, and she is right, of course. So many must-do practices add up to one bad habit of keeping late hours.

So I slept a little later than usual, packed a bag, brewed a thermos of coffee, stopped at the bank, and headed up the road. A few miles up the interstate, I realized I had forgotten my sleeping bag and water bottle. Call me easily distracted. I was leaving an hour later than planned; the fan belt whined, I needed air, I needed water, and it rained in northeast Ohio and northwest Pennsylvania. Then it cleared and the countryside was beautiful. Central Pennsylvania looks a lot like central Michigan, except older; maybe it's all the pine and poplar trees.

A random barrage of music came through the air to Ranger Hank Ford from a succession of NPR stations. From WOSU to WKSU to WPSU to WVIA to WBGO, I heard the same news all day along with a Beethoven violin concerto, Pink Floyd's "Money," the Chiffons' "One Fine Day," and Booker T's nearly perfect "Time Is Tight" (from 1969) during an interview with Teri Gross. I didn't mind having to switch stations and take what they gave me.

Crossing New Jersey, it started raining again as it was getting dark, and I had trouble reading my directions on the bumpy surface of I-280, but roadsigns made it self-evident how to get to the Holland Tunnel. Coming out the other end in Manhattan, everything suddenly seemed more peaceful and orderly. Canal Street swept me along southward toward the Manhattan Bridge, and by this time I had to pee like a racehorse, but there was nowhere to stop with five lanes of one-way traffic jockeying for position on a Friday night in Chinatown.

After crossing the bridge into Brooklyn, stopped at a red light on Flatbush Avenue, a parking space miraculously appeared at the curb to my right. At the next corner I walked into a watering hole called Junior's Bar, and in my black jeans, boots, and T-shirt brazenly strode past tables with white tablecloths, up the stairs to the restroom, and found relief. I even tipped the attendant who handed me a paper towel.

It was a short drive down Flatbush, out Eastern Parkway, and around the block to Jessi's house. It's not as good as a bicycle, but driving through neighborhoods is a good way to get the lay of the land. Jessi and his housemates were grilling chicken, pork chops, and vegetables in their little back yard, and I got a nice reception and a Guinness. Besides Johnny, Chuck, Corey, Gabi, and Caroline, there were the cats, Lewis and Opie. Inside, the house was littered with musical instruments, bicycles and bicycle parts, books, and vinyl records. I found it remarkably livable.

It started raining again, so we ate a delicious meal inside. Jessi and I took the subway to Grand Army Plaza and walked up and down 5th and 6th Avenues in Park Slope, half looking for a place to stop but primarily walking and talking while getting a good look at a nice lively neighborhood. Jessi let me have his room, so I crashed early and slept like a rock.

It was cool but clear Saturday morning in beautiful Brooklyn. We went for a walk along a different route and saw another side of Park Slope, ending up at the Donut Diner for breakfast. It was early afternoon by the time we got to the MoMA and met up with Alex, who was working at the information desk in the lobby. She kindly got us complimentary tickets and took a break to go upstairs to "Compass in Hand" with geographical themes: spaces, directions, grids.

Jessi and I went up a couple of flights to "Tangled Alphabets," the exhibit I ostensibly came for, and it exceeded my expectations. Leon Ferrari and Mira Schendel have produced a lot of work with text, diagrams, equations, hieroglyphics, mobiles, floorplans, codes, scribbles. The web site doesn't do it justice, and I can't describe it either, so if you're interested in the graphic/spatial/visual qualities of language and symbols, you will have to go see it yourself. I was somewhat enthralled.

And somewhat exhausted, so at closing time a little walk in the park was just what the doctor ordered. Jessi and Alex indulged my need to take half an hour to do a taiji form in a perfect little grove of pine trees in Central Park, and I felt much better. I young man played a flute nearby. You can't plan these things; they just happen sometimes.

We found a bar in the East Village that looked inviting and watched a replay of the Kentucky derby. Jessi had a mint julep in honor of the occasion; I opted for a margarita, and Alex had red wine. Veselka was half a block away, so we enjoyed a hearty Ukranian dinner: beef stroganoff for her, cabbage rolls for him, bigos (hunter's stew) for me.

A quiet evening at home in Crown Heights included part of a Martin Scorcese documentary on Bob Dylan; I think they were indulging me again, but that's okay, it was worth seeing. I slept like a rock again. It was raining Sunday morning, but Jessi had a really big umbrella, so we walked to a bagel shop on Troy Ave. for breakfast. I am such a tourist; every street, every restaurant, every subway, every bookstore is another little pocket of New York culture in my midwestern mind, and it's all kind of welcoming. I had a good time. Thank you.

Even in the rain, the trip back up Flatbush, across the bridge, and Canal Street was smooth. Traffic? What traffic? Crossing Pennsylvania from the Delaware Water Gap into the Chesapeake watershed and across the broad Susquahanna River, I'm getting a different perspective on this big, wide, peculiar state.

The rain stops by the time I re-enter Ohio, and I meet my freshman roommate for our annual vigil at Northeast Swingstate University. Even after the fieldhand omelette at Mike's Place on Water Street, my expenses for the weekend are under $200. Hey, I could do this every few weeks. Or not.

with a broad brush

2009-04-26T22:13:00.007-04:00

The abrupt change of seasons couldn't have come at a better time. Lately I've been living for the weekend, and this was a convincing argument in favor of that generally misguided attitude. It began with breakfast on the patio, of course, an indulgence that is worth many undone chores.

Shortly after Gven came home from her morning classes, I went to a drum circle at the rec center and reconnected with that creative, loosely cohesive group. Pretty soon they will begin congregating outside in the park, and that will likely change the dynamics considerably, which might be a good thing.

The backyard potluck for a men's group member visiting from Santa Fe was comfortable like an old pair of shoes. The presence of spouses and significant others makes it a very different gathering from our serious weeknight meetings. One of the guys had just come back from ten days in Russia; another is about to move to Arizona. I think we will stay in touch.

Next morning: coffee and fruit on the patio with the Times. Must get a jump on the weeds. Maybe I can place the trunk of a spruce tree along the edge of the vegetable beds as a border. Eventually I'll move stacks of sticks to the woodshed for next year's kindling.

It's about time to change out the compost with shovel and rake, the first stage of soil prep in the veggie beds. There are bare spots where something should be growing, and there are crowded spots that need to be thinned. In other words, I will move things around. I have big plans, but here I sit.

This is the hands-on, labor-intensive, time-consuming part of spring when the forces of earth and sky won't wait. Groundcovers are jumping out of the ground from all that rain and all this sunshine, and so are their competitors the wild things humans call weeds.

I'm the new sheriff in town. It's my job to eliminate some of the competition and make it easier for the more privileged sentient beings to flourish. Maple seedlings, dandelions, and wild strawberry are deported to the compost; ajuga, vinca, and lamium have their green cards.

So I did a little of this and a little of that and kicked the big projects down the road. Painting the garage will take three weekends and counting. Gven put a coat of primer on the side today. The mysterious door-shaped piece of sheet metal was removed, revealing nothing but perfectly good wood siding underneath.

Nobody said this was going to be the most efficient farm on the prairie, but it has to resonate with a rhyme or reason for this or any project to make any improvizational sense. Today was like a dab or two on the coarse fibrous canvas, hardly enough to make a dent.

My Face Goes to a Class Reunion

2009-04-23T15:05:00.000-04:00

I took the bait. Now my life is an open Facebook.

It was relatively easy at first to put my mug shot out there in the vast global social network, with limited exposure to intersecting circles of family and friends. I could be as guarded or as candid as I wanted to be, and my standard profile information likely wouldn't shock anyone. Or would it? And if it did, what difference would it make?

As my Friends list grew longer, I was contacted by more cousins and in-laws, more co-workers and churchfolk, and the game began to change a bit. I see more posts I don't understand from more people I don't know very well. But that's life in the big networking digital city, and maybe that's the purpose - to extend beyond the circle of the known. I can choose to pay attention to them or not, to respond in kind or not, and if anyone wants to write inside jokes or inane stuff, that's their business.

I think I've kept my own inappropriate comments to a minimum, at least I haven't received any restraining orders yet. Nor have I made contact with any mysterious strangers, long-lost friends, or agents whose only desire is to publish my collected works.

On the contrary, my creative output has dwindled from the usual ten blog entries a month - or about 10,000 words - to a cryptic one-liner every couple of days. As the noted author and Twitter critic Shaquille O'Neal has said, "What can you say in 140 characters?" Yes, well, first you have to have something to say. That's always been the would-be writer's hang-up: all dressed up and nowhere to go.

But that's not really point anyway. Facebook is not about writing, yet it has the potential to thwart writing, especially if one hangs out there when one would/could/should be expressing the Great Ideas of Midwestern Civilization here at Istandcorrected. Ahem. Where was I?

So in the throes of Facebook, I started to get email from the Wylie E. Groves High School Class Reunion Committee, aka The Big People. Since I was on the mailing list, the messages included exhortations to participate in the reunion process as well as photos of fellow members of the class of '69. My multiple reactions of fascination, repulsion, and ambivalence have surprised me a bit, though they are probably typical.

A few faces I've seen on the reunion web site are just as familiar 40 years later as they were back in the best of times, or was it the worst of times, whatever that tale of two suburbs was. Other people I wouldn't have recognized without the caption. I suppose it's typical for those of us with a certain amount of "seasoning" to alternate between "You haven't changed a bit" and "Whoa, you look completely different."

A few photos have been quite touching. To see someone I knew at 18 standing beside their 25-year-old kids, or to see their parents as they are now, is quite remarkable.

Inevitably, someone created a Facebook Group for our graduating class and invited the other 600 souls to join it and do the Facebook thing. So I took the plunge; it felt like a plunge to disclose my profile of trivialities to the peers I most wanted to impress 40 years ago. Still in need of validation, still not really an adult, it's strange to revisit that adolescent intersection this far down the line.

So far I've been in real, authentic, personal Facebook contact with only one high school friend. She happened to be the copyeditor of the school paper when I was sports editor, so maybe that's the link. We were not close friends back then, and we've gone in widely different directions since, but it has been very interesting to get a Facebook-sized glimpse inside her world. I don't know if she will make the trip to Detroit from Los Angeles in July, and I doubt whether I will either. I think I prefer it at a distance.

Happy Accidents

2009-04-19T01:13:00.002-04:00

The warmest day of the year so far called for breakfast on the patio with sunglasses and the Style section of last Sunday's paper. The neighbors were tearing down an old shed, but I was too absorbed in the sun hitting my face to notice. I cleaned up the kitchen, did a little yard work, and lunch was also on the patio, with another section of the paper. Bread dough rises in a bowl on the tile table in the sun. Life is good.

I started scraping old paint off the back side of the garage, not a bad job if you don't mind a little elbow grease in alternating arms - wax on, wax off - and it's kind of satisfying to smooth out a rough, peeling 80-year-old coat of dark brown paint, getting the point of the scraper down into the grooves between the boards right down to the naked wood. I took a turn scraping, then Gven took a turn while I took a break to knead the bread. Gven is the resident painter, so I will leave the fun part - priming and painting - to her.

Zelda came over for dinner, so I had to stop scraping to start a fire in the Weber, which has survived another winter out in the weather, though its days are numbered. We grilled turkey burgers, but first we grilled Zelda about her trip to New Orleans with her friends for another friend's wedding. She liked the Garden District and will live there someday when she's rich. The French Quarter, at least the touristy stretch of Bourbon Street, was not so great. The reception was in a nice hotel across from Jackson Square, with good food, open bar, a good band, and a view of the river.

The turkey burgers were a little, uh, well done on the outside but still juicy in the middle and delicious with potato salad. I made the fire extra hot to simulate the classic Cajun cuisine of Chez Sven's Norwegian Creole blackened turkey burgers, known only to an obscure bayou colony of beignet-eating crab catchers. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

We lit a candle and ate cherry pie a la mode. The embers made their way from the Weber into the brick fire pit and turned into a campfire. Gven and Zelda went inside, never running out of things to talk about, and I stationed myself in the Adirondack chair off to the side of the fire pit. A big bird perched on a low limb of the maple tree in the front yard, just visible over the roof from the back yard. It was bigger than any hawk I've seen, thick around the middle; it might have been an owl. It flew past me, swooping down across the back yard and up through the pine trees, wingspan must have been six feet or more, and then was gone in an instant.

The next day something rather odd and a little embarrassing happened at the morning meditation. While drinking tea, I talked to a tall woman I hadn't seen before about choosing - or finding - the right practice. She told an interesting story about meditating while bicycling in Arizona, but before we could continue the conversation, other people's conversations and a moment of awkwardness intervened. While I drank my green tea, I saw an article open on the table about how certain personality types fit certain practices, so if you know one you can infer the other. Interesting.

Halfway through the article, someone else recognized me from a drumming group that meets at the rec center, and I realized why they looked so familiar. I knew them from somewhere but hadn't figured out where. Having established where we knew each other from, we talked about this and that, and I said something about taiji. They asked if I also do qigong, and it turns out they used to do qigong in the same group I did many moons ago at a church I no longer attend. It took me a minute. They looked different from the people I remembered from the little qigong group, but I probably looked different too.

I hope I have a chance to renew both of those chance encounters. It seems a shame to waste an opportunity to make a connection with someone who is working on a similar endeavor, and second chances are never guaranteed. As Dorothy observed in Oz, people come and go so quickly here.

This is not a pipe

2009-04-08T23:19:00.019-04:00

Jessi fixed a leaky pipe in his house in Crown Heights. Now it works. The pipe, not the house.

These are photos of projects he made for his plumbing class. They are made of copper and black iron. The projects, not the photos.

The teacher designed this one.

Jessi designed this one and put it together over a couple days. It got a very good grade.

I like the way it looks like it's walking (or running).

The Good News

2009-04-05T16:07:00.006-04:00

My burgeoning new social life is preventing me from writing more than three lines a day under the annoying heading 'What's on your mind?' All my new friends are occupying every free moment informing me what famous author, punk rock star, or Grey's Anatomy character they are, and all this newfound human contact enriches my life with the joys of relationship and community, so my blogging pen has all but dried up.

What a terrible loss, I know. In the meantime, half the newspapers in the country have either closed or cut back to three days a week and laid off half their staff, and I didn't know about it because I stopped getting the Dispatch a year ago. As Pogo said, we have met the enemy, and he is us. On the other hand, the startling events of my own circumscribed life continue apace, that is, nothing much has happened, and maybe that's the good news. March was not terribly prolific. There will be no life-crisis to share today.

But it's April now, which promises more prolificity. Daffodils and tulips are up and out; tiny purple buds are appearing on the redbud trees; dandelions and noisy neighbors are making an appearance. Work is sporadic and the future is uncertain, but I'm ensconced in writing three-paragraph features about Swingstate at a third-grade level, and I find I'm pretty good at thinking like a third-grader. Love is in the air. Take a look at the birds and bees and flowers and teenagers. Then get back to work.

Married filing jointly

2009-03-29T16:44:00.005-04:00

The caldron holds nourishment for the benefit of civilized people, as the flame below prepares the food within for consumption; one grows beyond oneself in spirit by consolidating matters and maintaining a correct position.

Union endures when one has somewhere to go, finding self-renewal in movement; in and out, contracting and expanding, in the end standing firm. (I Ching)

It can be confusing to try to reconcile (a) the discriminating mind that compares, evaluates, and judges after half a lifetime of training to become a better critic, and (b) the practical benefits of seeing through arbitrary and hair-splitting distinctions to the commonality and the connection. But if things in the macro or the micro economy are as much of a mess as they appear to be, there might be hope after all. In that case, the material world in all its ugly, destructive wastefulness is not simply a reflection of a negative attitude. But that might be too optimistic.

Don't worry, be happy. It's the weekend. Get a grande Americano with a shot of espresso and a blueberry scone. Enjoy the freak show walking by in the strip mall paradise of value-added goods and services, secure in the knowledge that you are one of them, no better and no worse.

The good news is that there are many fun things to do in the meantime, things that may or may not make a difference in the scheme of things but would at least keep the lights on without doing great harm. Things like reading the paper, cleaning up the back yard, playing manic right-brain rhythms in a drum circle at the rec center on a Saturday afternoon, discussing a friend's next revision of a book he is writing, cooking lentil soup, meditating, doing laundry, watching basketball on TV. That's where the juice is.

Let the latent meanings turn and bend in the wind, free from authoritative comment. (Don DeLillo, Falling Man, p. 12)

Making derivative utterances about other people's pain, while not necessarily a bad thing, is working in the third-person, kind of like making money by moving other people's money and letting them take the risk. Rather than believing that human nature is good, or souls are reincarnated, or the pursuit of private interest promotes the public interest, rather than believing anything in particular, we could just suspend disbelief and treat it as a movie in which we act as if it's true and see how it turns out.

At least the paradigm shift, like deciding which movie to watch and which premise to provisionally get behind, offers the possibility of changing the way you handle your business, pay your bills, make deposits and withdrawals, process information, respond to inputs and outputs. What if we put 5 percent of every paycheck into savings for next year's shortfall, proactively rather than reactively making ends meet?

Suddenly the sun came out in the strip mall freak show, and I finished my grande Americano.

untitled random bike ride

2009-03-26T22:23:00.005-04:00

Only at a certain time of year is it a perfect day for a bike ride and an ideal night for a fire. It happens to be the first week of spring, and my sedentary winter body was needing something - anything - after work, and luckily I seem to have stumbled onto the right decision for once.

Maybe it's because I wore a purple shirt. The email went out to the whole department several days ago that Thursday was the day to wear purple for cerebral palsy research, and uncharacterisically I complied. Usually I ignore the charity fundraising gift-basket raffle for restless leg research, but this time for no particular reason I wore purple. A Facebook friend wrote in purple prose; MadLab Theater is doing The Color: Purple this weekend. What's up with the zeitgeist?

Otherwise it was an ordinary workday. I got some stuff done, got a little lost, got found, amazing grace, corrected some mistakes, consulted with the content editors, and of course took longer than the guidelines indicated. By late afternoon I was bleary-eyed from staring at the screen, so I did a little qigong outside, but it was too little too late to be very productive past five o'clock. I wrote a little vignette for third graders about cars and suburbs in central swingstate that I will have to rewrite tomorrow. Put a fork in me, I'm done.

But the sun had come out in the meantime, and I paused near the basketball hoop in the parking lot on my way out, started to get out and shoot a few, but instead continued on home not looking forward to anything in particular. It was a bit chilly despite the sunshine, and I didn't even change clothes, just hopped on the old black Schvinn, checked the wind direction (north), and adhering to MacKenzie's First Law, headed north.

East on Park, north on Otterbein, east on College, north on Juniper, east on County Line, north on Spring, and I'm beginning to feel human again, breathing rhythmically and starting to break a slight sweat under my purple corduroy shirt. Being off the residential streets seemed to make a difference, and out on the exurban roads of Delaware County. Maybe I justed needed to get out of Dodge. Not that it really matters where you ride, as long as you get on your horse and ride.

I did pause to check the time, trying to gauge how far to go before turning around, in order to get back before it's totally dark outside, as I'm not a good judge of the sun's distance from the horizon in relation to my return trip from Galena or wherever I happen to end up. I started out thinking that 45 minutes out and 45 minutes back, or roughly 18 miles, is all I would have time and energy for, but this was not to be a systematic, clockwork orange handlebars kind of ride.

When I got to where Tussic intersects Old 3C, where you can see Hoover Reservoir through the trees on probably the prettiest part of the ride, I went north and took a left on Plumb, but instead of cutting south on the bike trail along Route 3, I kept going west on Plumb and hung a right on Rome Corners. I don't think I'd ever been there before, at least not on an early spring day like this, certainly not on a bike. It's a quiet country road with slight hills and a great place to daydream. I've found my spot, but the sun is about to hit the horizon, so I turned around and headed back, 45 minutes out.

Uneventful return trip: south on Rome Corners with the wind at my back, hang a left on Lewis Center, right on the bike trail by Route 3, cut across the Home Depot parking lot to McCorkle and I'm home at the stroke of eight. I'm not exhausted but I've had a nice workout, and that makes the Great Lakes Edmund Fitzgerald Handcrafted Porter taste so much better. It's already chilly, so I start a fire in the stove, read the Sunday paper while eating a veggie burger, and then spend an inordinate amount of time recounting the details of my day for a vast readership, but hey, oh ye of little faith, I guess I had something to look forward to after all.

The stages of tax grief

2009-03-23T11:50:00.000-04:00

As we all know, only two things in life are certain. Each year when the time comes, we all begin with denial. "This can't be happening to me." It's okay, there's no need to add feelings of shame to your altogether natural denial of the inevitable. Taxes are part of the human condition, and it's important to move on to the next stage in the process, anger.

Yes, even anger is okay. "It isn't fair, and someone is to blame." Raging, toxic, judgmental, irrational, hateful, venomous anger is normal at a time of loss of approximately 30 percent of your annual income for the privilege of living in a militaristic imperialist capitalist welfare state in which pompous congressional lap dogs spend trillions to prop up the plutocrats who really run the world. Feel better?

Moving right along to the bargaining stage, "I'll do anything to get out of this." Such as, let your spouse handle it; hire an accountant; go underground, assume a different identity, and live off the grid; file separately; get an extension. The advantage of bargaining is that at least it acknowledges the need for action and considers the consequences. As in, oh shit, this is gonna cost me plenty.

Which brings me to Mr. Depression Stage: "There's nothing I can do about this or much of anything, so what's the point?" (Sorry, I have no appropriately witty response to this.)

Finally, much later in the game than would have been rational, one reaches a point of Acceptance: "I can do this." One opens the folder containing miscellaneous records, receipts, stubs, letters, year-end statements, and other documents. One begins to sort them into neat categories, jotting down subtotals and totals as needed. One categorizes items according to the requirements of the institutional procedures, and one fills in the blanks with plausible numbers that can be documented. One bites the bullet. One stays up late if necessary to git er done.

The tree, the fence, and gravity

2009-03-22T00:05:00.003-04:00

Chalk it up to inexperience, poor judgment, or a slight miscalculation in angle of force, or whatever. A tree that needed to be removed did come down, but not where I wanted it, preventing me from enjoying the ego-satisfaction of prevailing over large and powerful things in my quest for a peaceful garden and lots of free firewood.

The storm-damaged Norway maple in our back yard was leaning northwest - toward Plum Street - but I had convinced myself that I could make it fall east - inside the fence and toward the garage. And maybe I could have done it by topping the upper branches from the fully extended ladder, but I had a bad feeling going up high on the ladder with a chainsaw, even on a calm, non-windy day like today.

So I went with plan B - cutting a deep notch halfway through the trunk about eight feet up from the safety of a step-ladder. While my comfort level was increased and the notch was nearly perfect, there was no way this tree was going to fall where I wanted it. I was cutting below the major leaning parts of the biggest limbs, so my exquisite notch was to no avail.

Live and learn. When I'd cut back toward the notch all but two inches through, it became obvious which way that tree was going, and there was nothing I could do about it. All the weight was on the wrong side of the fulcrum in the middle of the trunk. This simple bit of mechanics should have been apparent from the start, but wishful thinking clouded my perception of life's most consistent fact: gravity.

After placing a second step-ladder festooned with red flags and DANGER signs in the middle of the street and alerting my neighbor Joe to the hazard, I went ahead and finished the unfortunate cut, and that baby came down fast as lightning, right through the fence, which it crushed like paper.

It could have been a lot worse. The foot-and-a-half thick trunk missed the back corner of the house, missed the little plum tree with a bird house occupied by a family of sparrows, and even missed - by about half an inch - the dawn redwood sapling (metasequoia glyptostroboides) that I planted a couple of years ago. But it made matchsticks out of that one section of fence.

Cleanup was simple. I would have had to cut the tree into pieces anyway, I just ended up hauling the pieces a little farther across the yard. Tomorrow I'll nail two new 2 x 4s to the posts and find some one-inch boards to replace the ones that got smashed to smithereens, and we're back in business, fence-wise. The tree will yield about a cord of wood, I reckon, which is nothing to sneeze at, but it's still the one that got away.

America's Gloomiest Cities

2009-03-16T17:05:00.003-04:00

Remember when 'quality of life' was the newest sociolinguistic flavor of the month, like maybe sometime in the 1970s, and you couldn't turn around without someone referring to their personal, local, regional, national, gastrointestinal, sexual, or ecological quality of life?

You don't? Well, in that case, maybe you'll remember 'lifestyle' - another neologism that has outlived its 15 minutes of fame by about half a century. Popular phrases come and go; most run their course, are retired and put out to pasture. Add your own least-favorite overused phrase, but beware, by mentioning it you'll be putting it back into circulation.

Luckily we have the likes of BusinessWeek and the inimitable James Lileks to come up with a replacement phrase to bring the cultural lexicon into the age of the not-so-great depression: America's Gloomiest Cities.

Here's a magazine issue that will fly off the racks: BusinessWeek has released a list of "America's Gloomiest Cities." Next month: "America's Best Organic Soup Lines." You'll want to know if we made the list, and I'm loathe to tell you. These "America's Most (Fill in the Blank) Cities" stories may have actual science behind them, but A) So what, and B) Who cares? (Lileks)

First of all, anyone who can write like this will never be out of work. Second, for reasons that many of my readers will immediately understand, I love BusinessWeek. I think it's the best magazine of its kind on the planet, and I wish its editorial and production staff everylasting success and well-being. Lileks goes on:

Well, we do, of course. Every citizen wants to know where their city stands on a list, even if it's the Top 936 Places to Raise a Ferret or some such ginned-up idea. It would be great if we were No. 1 on the "Top 75 Cities That Don't Care About America's Best City Lists," but even then the media would note the fact and spoil it for everyone else.

Secondly, for reasons that only Gven Golly might understand, I take these rating systems seriously. I've been redesigning the color scheme of my personal parachute ever since Richard Bolles airlifted his bestselling book into career planning and job placement centers across Amerika in that same decade (see above) that no one reading this can remember.

Long story short, Gven didn't share my enthusiasm for systematically cataloging my preferences for places to live and work according to the geographical, psychological, and socioeconomic criteria neatly charted along the X and Y axes of neatly constructed, rational Cartesian grids. How anyone can draw up a decent itinerary without some criteria is a mystery to me.

We've always had different methods of navigating the planet, making it even more miraculous that we've kept co-navigating all these years. While I'm busy drawing straight lines on all the charts and graphs and maps, she's on deck intuitively sniffing the breeze and pointing, "Let's go there." Given her penchant for sunshine and aversion to overcast, I don't think America's Gloomiest has a chance.

There is usually somewhere warmer than where we are, although there have been exceptions. She was agreeable when I suggested Chicago. She was less than enthusiastic when I lobbied for the Redneck Riviera of South Alabama, and Central Swingstate sounded pretty good by default after a year in that cultural backwater.

Lately we've been talking Asheville, Portland, Santa Fe, Traverse City, and Chicago again, although it's all in the idle speculation stage, with no solid information to base anything on. My friend Tom was in Sedona recently for a wedding - his wedding - and by all accounts it is an amazingly beautiful place. Coincidentally another friend was there about the same time en route to a large hole in the ground allegedly carved by a river, which was pretty amazing too if you're into that kind of thing.

I'm not sure the desert would be my first choice. I like trees too much. It's probably genetic. My people came from within a few miles of the North Sea, the Bay of Fundy, the Mississippi River. I might be a fish out of water around all that high, dry red rock, high-energy vortex or not. I'll take a pine forest and a babbling brook any day.

While I'm busy being flippant, there is real journalistic research behind these reports of gloom. Apparently Portland, Seattle, New Orleans, and Detroit have high rates of suicide and depression, not just rain and unemployment. So there is reason for gloom.

Just like there is a suicide belt, there is also a homicide belt (Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and Baltimore) and a stroke belt (Southeastern U.S., including South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi). (BusinessWeek)

Maybe this teaser article will kick start me into some research of my own, adding other parameters of importance, such as parks, the arts, public libraries, hills, and snowfall to determine the best place for an unemployed editor to live. This could become a project.

Everything is broken

2009-03-09T14:29:00.003-04:00

Or maybe it's just me. If I had been rested and energized first thing in the morning, it wouldn't have bothered me when a co-worker got in my face the minute I arrived at my desk, demanding an explanation of a report I'd sent in on Friday. When I re-explained the faulty report in more detail, it was still wrong, and I immediately got a phone call complaining about the time allotments in the report, which should have been used differently. Clearly I should have known that before the fact.

Broken lines, broken strings,
Broken threads, broken springs,
Broken idols, broken heads,
People sleeping in broken beds.
Ain't no use jiving
Ain't no use joking
Everything is broken. (Bob Dylan)

So I went downstairs and got coffee to ease the Monday morning pain, read a few emails, revised the report again, and went to a funeral in Hilliard. Surreal would be the best descriptor. Maybe all funerals are a bit surreal. While I should have been thinking of my friend's loss of his father, everything that was said reminded me of my own father, another old-school midwesterner who loves to fix things and tell stories, so the photos and the stories about a man I had never met affected me more than I expected.

Broken bottles, broken plates,
Broken switches, broken gates,
Broken dishes, broken parts,
Streets are filled with broken hearts.
Broken words never meant to be spoken,
Everything is broken.

I did manage to touch base briefly with my friend before he did his pallbearing duties and departed for the cemetery. However, I missed Rev. Susan on her way out of the funeral home, having admirably done her part in the sad business, because I was caught up in conversation with a mutual friend with whom I seem to have a few things in common. We stood for a long time in the sunshine on the front steps talking about fathers, brothers, growing up, and all that stuff. I'm glad we got a chance to talk.

Broken cutters, broken saws,
Broken buckles, broken laws,
Broken bodies, broken bones,
Broken voices on broken phones.
Take a deep breath, feel like you're chokin',
Everything is broken.

When I got back to the office, I had only one more altercation with my nemesis and got to do some actual work for a few hours. Then I went to my class at the Rec Center, where attendance has declined even more than it usually does, but the stalwart souls who have hung in there are doing remarkably well. It was the last meeting of the quarter, and one never knows who will be back next quarter and who won't, so there is that sense of uncertainty over what worked, what didn't, and what could have been done differently.

Every time you leave and go off someplace
Things fall to pieces in my face

On the way home, the heater in the truck stopped working; the whine in the serpentine belt is getting louder; do you suppose they are related? I ate some soup and read a section of the paper. Gven's car was in the school parking lot behind our house with a flat tire because she couldn't get the lug nuts off. It could have been worse; the tire could have gone flat on the interstate downtown. I went out with a flashlight and put the donut-like spare on, so she could go to the tire store tomorrow. That was painless.

Broken hands on broken ploughs,
Broken treaties, broken vows,
Broken pipes, broken tools,
People bending broken rules.
Hound dog howling, bull frog croaking,
Everything is broken. (Copyright ©1989 Special Rider Music)

After checking the modem, the router, and turning it off and on again, my computer would not connect to the Internet, so I was stymied and could not check my Facebook page and spend a few minutes in my other, virtual life. I was tired anyway, so I went to bed - and dreamt of another surreal existence, where everyone pays taxes (or not) voluntarily, based on their ability and willingness to pay for government services, which are then tracked in a kind of running account where people deposit their taxes and withdraw services. No word on how that's working.

TransparentMan

2009-03-04T15:34:00.009-05:00

Look, up in the sky! Is it a bird? Is it a plane?

No, it's TransparentMan!

More candid than a tell-all memoir. More self-revelatory than an over-the-hill celebrity. More embarrassing details than the family of a vice presidential candidate. Bends commonsense rules of appropriateness with his bare hands. Leaps tall barriers of good taste in a single bound.

And who, disguised as Sven Golly, mild-mannered production editor for a great big publishing conglomerate, fights a never-ending struggle for truth, justice, and better coffee.

"Olson, what's this personal information all over some dunderhead's blog? Nobody wants to hear about his innermost philosophical musings while navel-gazing on an otherwise boring weekend. I've got a newspaper to run."

"I'll get right on it, chief."

"And don't call me chief!"

More to the point, blogging enables TransparentMan to put himself out there in Gotham City, central Swingstate, and the world wide web. But is he prepared to see what it looks like out there? And is the population of G.C., C.S. and the www interested in seeing what TransparentMan puts out there?

'Out there' is a two-way street where intrepid reporter-about-town Lois Lane can see more aspects of more people, and in turn more people can see more aspects of Lois Lane, than if she stayed home and read a book. Once she decides to be out there, every Lois must decide how out-there to be. Facebook, even more than Blogger, invites participants to be - discreetly and selectively or not - both voyeurs and exhibitionists.

Voyeur and exhibitionist at the same time? How is that possible? And isn't that just a little creepy? Surely I'm not treading new ground here (and don't call me Shirley). It's common knowledge that adults use business discourse at work and family discourse at home, playing one language game in school or church and another language game in the gym or the corner bar, with a certain amount of overlap. Public discourse belongs in some settings and private discourse in others. Don't be an idiot. Keep an eye on the boundaries if you want to play the game, okay?

It's also true that you gotta go out on the field if you wanna play the game. If online social networking is the game, then playing can be either more voyeuristic, observing others without being observed, or more exhibitionistic, being observed more than observing. Whatever floats your boat. But like any yin and yang combo, there is a little of the opposite in each.

"Jeepers, TransparentMan, are you telling me that every online networking voyeur is a closet exhibitionist?"

"That's right, Jimmy, and vice versa."

fragments

2009-03-01T17:22:00.011-05:00

I.

Saturday Gven Golly and I went to a party at a neighbor's house with people we haven't socialized with before and spent a pleasant evening, a little like tourists in another culture. They were nice folks, every one of them, and I appreciated being invited into the home of the guy I've gotten to know over the back fence, usually talking about trees.

So it was interesting to meet his brothers and their wives, some of their siblings and their spouses, a few co-workers, nieces and nephews. There was food and drink and friendly conversation about education, a recent move to Licking County, hunting and fishing, heating bills, crows, and the coyote that ate the chihuahua. Two of them had recently lost their mothers, lending a certain gravity to the gathering, but everyone maintained an even keel, mostly.

II.

Sunday I meditated as usual at 10:00, and my thoughts strayed to certain periods of my life that seem to show a pattern of integration and fragmentation. My thoughts always stray during meditation - some days more than others - and no, it's not a solid hour of pure white light streaming through my relaxed physical being emptied of all stress and distraction. In fact where my thoughts stray to can provide something to meditate on and can tell me something about what condition my condition is in. For today, let's call it fragmentary.

So I'm sitting on my cushion, minding my own business, letting my breathing regulate itself, remembering times of relative balance during the last 30 years or so, as Gven and I have lived in various places and carried on our usual activities - work, family, friends, this practice, that practice - in places like Oberlin (integating), Greensboro (fragmenting), Atlanta (some of both), Grandview (integrating), Fairhope (fragmenting), Clintonville (lots of both), and good old Methodistville (integrating, mostly), like one long run-on sentence on the verge of making sense.

Integration and fragmentation, after all, are just metaphors that shape the facts to a different mind-set. I could be saying "happy" or "unhappy" but then I would gag and pass out at the keyboard. It's not like my life itself was either magically coalescing into a perfectly seamless whole or literally falling apart at the seams. Maybe it was and I missed it.

Sometimes things fit together so that work and family, for example, co-exist or even support each other rather than being in all-out conflict, or other relationships, health issues, kids and schools, church and taiji, and all those things are more or less compatible. In short, are my several selves getting along with each other?

Let me hasten to add that it's a little arbitrary to call a one-year sojourn somewhere either integrating or fragmentary, much less a ten-year stretch in one place. Call me judgmental. It helps me sort things out if I frame the question in a binary, either/or way, then see how badly the shoe fits. It's always more complicated than that, of course, a little like calling something good news or bad news, as in the story about the farmer whose horse ran away.

Everyone said "bad news" but the farmer said he didn't know. When the horse came back with another horse, everyone said "good news" but the farmer said he didn't know. When his son broke his leg riding the new horse, everyone said "bad news" but the farmer said he didn't know. When the army came drafting soldiers and passed over the son with a broken leg, everyone said "good news" but the farm said he didn't know. And so goes the story. Who can really say? And in the long run, as Keynes famously said, we're all dead.

III.

The new moon last week (on Ash Wednesday) marked the beginning of the Tibetan lunar new year - so happy new year! Since I am neither Tibetan nor Buddhist, there isn't much I can say about it, except as a kind of tourist. Candles were lit at the Buddhist Center, delicious foods were eaten, sweet tea was drunk, prayers were said, and chants were chanted. White scarves were placed on a chair; wheat and barley grains were tossed in the air. I have a tiny scented red silk bag to take with me. Maybe I can take this experience, put it next to other fragments of other traditions I've run into, which I've either bounced off or stuck to, and make something out of it (or not).

A friend's father has been in the hospital for a week, and now he's in hospice care. Apparently he had a stroke several weeks ago, and his only symptoms were in the stomach, so that's where the tests were done, and nothing was found, so the bleeding has done much damage. His family is pulling together to do what they must do in the sad business where everyone wishes they could do more.

IV.

A brisk north wind whips the U.S. and Ohio flags in the schoolyard behind my house. It's March on our Western solar calendar, and it's coming in like a lion. The good news is the woodpile looks like it will last until spring, whenever that is. The bad news is the time I can spend at my desk or reading in the unheated back room of Om Shanty is severely limited, so I will need every stick of firewood in the mean time.