this crazy dream

I'm test-driving a new/used car that I know right away is not right for me. It's a huge four-door Lincoln, one of the older models with big square fenders front and back, way too big and fancy despite being a nice ride, so I reconsider and take it back.

The second test-drive is a smaller car with zero comfort or sex appeal, but at first seems to fit the profile of a cheaper, more practical vehicle. The body is the opposite of the Lincoln, with a rounded hood, rounded trunk, rounded everything. It's like a Rambler American, kind of a homely economy car, and it drives like a small boat, with limited visibility and loosie-goosie steering and really bad, bouncy suspension, so I park it on a side street and get out.

I picked that street arbitrarily, and it happened to be a cul-de-sac, so I thought it would be easy to get back to the car without getting lost. I mean how could you get lost on a cul-de-sac, even in a strange neighborhood, so I only walked a block or two, turned around, but when I returned to where I had been, or so I thought, the car wasn't there, so I must have been on a different cul-de-sac with slightly different houses, very confusing, and no ugly car, which I didn't want anyway.

Scene changes from the quiet residential street to large, multi-story urban apartment building, don't ask me why, this is a dream, remember? I'm looking around a large, vacant apartment on the third or fourth floor, open spaces with lots of light, and several other people are walking around with me, I don't know who they are. Everything looks very nice, very clean and well taken care of, but I'm not sure if I can afford this much space, and anyway who are all these other people checking out the same apartment?

Down a flight or two is a smaller apartment, maybe just a studio, not as much light, not as much space, but aesthetically appealing with good, solid woodwork and exposed brick, and something about the shape of the rooms makes me think it's probably more my speed. There is an exit onto a quiet side street near some shops with awnings, kind of friendly.

If any of my devoted readers would like to point out the obvious Freudian or Jungian symbols that are staring me in the face, feel free. Square fenders vs. rounded, large upstairs apartment vs. small groundfloor studio. What am I missing here?

Just Plain Odd

There was nothing exceptional about it. An hour of meditation went fast, but maybe that's because I got there ten minutes late. The guy sitting next to me, whom I met once when I was doing a landscaping gig in Clintonville, couldn't or wouldn't sit still and wore slippers in the shrine room, and there's something furtive about him.

At the tea break, I sat between a guy who told me about his career as a nurse and subsequent health problems due to a fall from a dump truck in his youth, which he recalled in great detail, and a lama from a small town in Colorado, somewhere in the mountains southwest of Boulder. I enjoyed their company, and the mint tea was good too.

I had time to kill before my appointment to give blood, so I went to Half Price Books on Lane Avenue to use up my gift card. As soon as I stepped in the door I saw my old friend Joe from Grandview, and we had a lot of catching up to do. Our sons were friends in elementary school, and Joe and I coached their soccer team -actually Joe coached and I wore the sweatshirt - and now he works at the same store as my daughter. Central Swingstate is a big small town.

When Joe went to lunch, I went to look at dictionaries and realized I had left my glasses in Franklinton. Funny, that's the second time I've done that. I had a spare pair in the car, so I looked at books, and I actually found one to buy, a Descriptionary, or Thematic Dictionary, published by Facts on File. I think it will be useful, or at least fun to peruse, and I love how everything is categorized, like a condensed Dewey Decimal System populated by words but organized by the kinds of things they represent. The TOC is like:

Animals and Insects; Architecture; Art; Clothing; Electronics; Environment; Finance; Food and Drink; Furniture; Human Body and Mind; Language; Law; Magic and the Occult; Medicine; Military; Music; Occupations; Performing Arts and Broadcasting; Physics, Chemistry, and Astronomy; Religions; Sports; Tools; Transportation; Weapons.

How did the Linnaeus-wannabe author, Marc McCutcheon, come up with these categories, of all the possible groupings in the English-language universe? Each section has a number of subcategories, so under Furniture there are Beds; Bureaus, Cabinets, and Chests; Chairs and Sofas; Decorative and Construction Elements; Styles; Tables and Desks. Under Weapons thee are Clubs and Hammers, Daggers, Guns and Bullets, Pole Arms, Swords. Okay. This selection of themes is, shall we say, a little idiosyncratic, and it's clear this is the work not just of a geek, but a certain kind of geek. Maybe there's word for it in the Descriptionary.

I also found three jazz CDs I coveted: a live John Coltrane concert from 1965, Herbie Hancock covers of Joni Mitchell songs, and a Benny Goodman quartet from 1935. I'm not going to analyze my selections; they weren't exactly what I was looking for, but they looked interesting, and it remains to be seen (heard) whether they will "take" - one out of three if I'm lucky.

The total was only slightly more than the gift card, one more reason to return to HPB - you get twice as much stuff - and the whole store is so not Barnes and Noble. I asked the clerk if she could give my daughter a card, like leave it in a cubby in the break room or something, but a second later, there was Zelda walking toward us, so I gave her the card myself. It's just a silly valentine. We stood and talked, and I saw her new haircut, and it looks good.

So far, nothing has gone as planned, but when does anything really? I went to Lowe's on Silver Drive and gave blood at the Red Cross Bloodmobile, and I actually had a conversation with the phlebotomist from Mansfield. He asked what I do, and I told him, and he has concerns about the public schools, not just the academic side but the social environment, which we agreed makes a big difference, so he's working weekends to be able to send his kids to private schools. The time went fast. He took my blood, I took my Lorna Doones and bottled water, and I was on my way.

Luckily I remembered that I'd forgotten my glasses, and people were still there in the meditation hall putting things away, and someone had found and set them aside. In fact, since I seem to have a history of doing this, one of them recognized the case from the last time I left them there, so now I'm the old forgetful guy who keeps losing his old glasses case that's held together with duct tape, dontchaknow.

Satisfied, I went home to drink coffee, which I needed by this time, nothing against the mint tea and bottled water, and read the Sunday paper, which is part of the sabbath after all. Leftover ratatouille was perfect for lunch, you know it's always better the second day, and that was an opportunity to listen to my new CDs. So far it's Benny Goodman by a mile.

root and branch

Another day, another tree down in the back yard. Wednesday night's sudden storm produced not only the pyrotechnics of a February thunderstorm, wind advisory, and tornado watch, but the added drama of the Norway spruce next door crashing across our yard, taking half of our apple tree with it.

Gven Golly had just left for her yoga class in New Albany when the wind started to whip up, but otherwise everything was normal in Methodistville. The first salvo of the storm hit during her class, while I was still at my desk watching the lightning flash to the southeast, and she saw the aftermath when she got home. I was driving to my class at Whetstone when she called my cell to say, uh, don't be shocked when you come home and there's a big tree down. Ho-hum.

It was a mighty wind indeed, to uproot the whole darn tree and topple it straight north, across the fence and half of the yard. Amazing how shallow-rooted those big tall spruces are. It clipped a couple of major limbs of the apple tree on our side of the fence, and we'll have to see if the apple tree survives the shock.

No other damages that I can see, and this will give me something to do this weekend, trimming limbs off the fallen spruce and freeing up the apple tree. Time to sharpen the chainsaw, Ole. Then we'll see about repairing the fence, which was no gem in the first place, made entirely from scrap lumber like most of my recycling projects. And come spring there will be considerably more light coming into the yard, to the benefit of whatever we decide to plant.

If only spruce made good firewood, but I think it's too soft. Maybe I can cut the trunk into new fence posts!

Later that week...

Upon closer examination, the top-heavy spruce not only became suddenly horizontal, but it took the whole apple tree with it. It wasn't a direct hit, but the apple tree trunk was leaning about 45 degrees due north, about half-uprooted with two major limbs broken. The weather on Saturday gave me time to do triage.

So I cut off all the needle-bearing branches and cut the trunk into 10-foot sections that would make good totem poles if someone has any totemic faces they want to carve into them, you're welcome to them. The smallest branches might make good mulch. The apple tree will make nice, aromatic firewood next year. Even the sawdust smells sweet.

R.I.P. TARP

From our friends the Wall Street Journal via our friends at Slate's "Today's Papers":

The WSJ reports that the administration is retiring TP's favorite acronym of the day, TARP, since it will be renaming the Troubled Asset Relief Program as the Financial Stability Plan.

What a terrible idea. How are we going to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps if we can't come up with a better acronym than FSP? It sounds like a medical condition newly coined by a drug company in order to sell a newly invented medication in search of a disease, but that's a different rant for another day. Let's focus on the immediate, more pressing national problem of patching together a replacement for the ripped TARP.

If you upgrade your TARP, do you move up to a TENT (Traumatic Excesses Necessitating Taxes)? A larger upgrade would take us to HUT (Horrendous Uber-Taxation), YURT (Yesterday's Ugliness Rebounds Today), or even SHACK (Safe Haven After Capitalist Killings).

Then comes news that Timothy Geithner, our savior from Henry Paulson, is just a younger Henry Paulson clone. The new sheriff in town, hand-picked by the most forward-thinking president in two generations to change the way business is done in Washington, doesn't want to tie the hands of the geniuses in the banking industry with too much oversight or transparency:

In the end, "the plan largely repeats the Bush administration's approach of deferring to many of the same companies and executives who had peddled risky loans and investments at the heart of the crisis," declares the NYT.

It seems that so-called liberals and conservatives in the lofty reaches of policy making have much in common; either they are so beholden to the very people and institutions they are asked to regulate that they dare not actually regulate, or they have no idea what to do other than what they have always been told to do, which is what got us here. Don't tie the hands of the banks by requiring them to disclose what they are doing. Don't limit their compensation or they won't be able to attract other geniuses just like themselves.

things/objects/stuff

The first question Eric during Sunday morning's talk was (I am paraphrasing): "Can happiness be found in external objects?" The obvious answer is no, and it's just a rhetorical question to spur a certain amount of thinking about what really brings happiness.

He had some definite ideas: the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha can provide what external objects cannot. In other words, happiness can be found in the teacher, the teaching, and the community of practitioners. Paraphrasing further, if you look for refuge in your stuff, you are asking for trouble, but if you look for refuge in enlightenment, in the truth, and in others who are working on finding enlightenment and the truth, you might have something.

I had a couple of immediate reactions, which I kept to myself at the time but wanted to try to work out somehow. Why not here?

My first reaction is: why is it all about happiness? Are we to assume that the big questions all come down to how to be happy? Who decided that's the only thing of value, or that all other things of value can be boiled down to being happy? Did I miss the vote where everybody agreed that happiness is the end-all?

Yeah, yeah, Mr. Jefferson, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Whatever happened to life, liberty, and property (John Locke's favorites); sex, drugs, and rock and roll (who said it first?); or sun, surf, and smoke (my old friend Paul from Long Island)? Why not satisfaction (John Dewey, Mike Jagger, Keith Richards) or the greatest good for the greatest number (John Stuart Mill)? How about the Good, the True, or the Beautiful (Plato)?

But nooooooo, got to be happy, happy, happy.

Aside from that quibble, I have another bone to pick with Eric's truism. I want to suggest that refuge can be found in a hot shower, a cup of coffee, shoes that fit, a car that runs, my favorite hat, fresh bread, the Sunday paper, a warm breeze after an unusually cold January, a familiar face in a crowded room, a song with that je ne se qua, the book you've been looking for, a strong and relaxed body, a certain photo of a certain someone, the full moon rising beyond the big pine tree, or just the right word for what you've been trying to say. External things are alright!

True, those external objects provide only momentary refuge, and just as quickly the comfort and joy are gone. Point taken. And I guess that was Eric's intention: to point out that the refuge to be found in things is fleeting, so it isn't the kind of refuge worth looking for. I could quibble about that too, but never mind. I'm not sure I want to make this a materialist argument. But I'm also not sure I'm ready to give up my attachment to the shower, the coffee, shoes, my hat, bread, and all those tangible pleasures that do it for me.

On the drive downtown that same morning, NPR did a feature on a musician who quoted Rumi in the title of his new CD, "Last night the moon came dropping its clothes in the street." The music itself didn't do much for me, but the interview on the radio was kind of interesting. Later in the day, I split some wood, stacked some wood, took a break, built a fire, lay down on the floor in front of the stove, and watched the full moon rise over Ohio. I wouldn't call it happiness, but I wouldn't trade it either.

Just like Proust

As I removed a slice of whole wheat cranberry-walnut bread from its zip-lock plastic bag and laid it on a paper napkin next to my mouse pad, I felt the stirring of a vague memory somewhere. When I broke off a corner of a slice of bread and put it in my mouth, the long-dormant memory sprang to life like the opening scene of a movie, or a long-lost friend who suddenly shows up at your door. And in the slightly dried-out, faintly sweet, chewy texture of the cranberry-walnut bread came swimming back an entire wave of long-buried multi-sensory experience, hidden but not lost in the weeks past, of looking up the biographies of famous people in a couple of reliable sources and writing the shortest possible blurb with all the journalistic craft at my disposal.

It's pretty cool how the mind works, oh ya.

Remembering Updike

I first met the literary John Updike, as if there was another one, in freshman English, introduced by Dr. Jack Null, nemesis-mentor and professor of mythic erotica in modern American fiction. My friend Jack Janosik, from across the hall in Apple Hall, our dorm, was in my English class, so there is at least one witness to the madness. We read Updike, Walker Percy, and the Brothers Grimm, seen through the lens of Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, darkly. What did we know, a bunch of kids sitting around a seminar table trying to get the right answer and meet girls, to the existential angst of Dr. Null. Kind of like Rabbit and many of Updike's protagonists.

Come to think of it, Rabbit Run was a perfect choice for our coming of age transition to college life, which we called freshman English. What archetypal images do we encounter in Harry Angstrom's desperately self-centered and lazy life? Write a precis. (What's a precis?) What Freudian symbols, puns and wordplay shed light on his characters: Harry's wife Janice Springer, their son and Harry's tormentor Nelson, his old coach Tothero, the old harsh-god minister, the young group-therapy minister, Rabbit's shadowy parents and sister? Play ball. Write a research paper. Jump through hoops, win approval. Make it with girls.

The record will show that fall quarter went okay but winter quarter was a disaster, live and learn; if you sleep through enough morning classes, you won't do very well, and a pathetic attempt to critically analyze The Stranger didn't help much. However, I did make some kind of connection with Updike through the sheer adolescent obtuseness of Rabbit Run, and years later devoured Rabbit Redux and the other sequels, Rabbit is Rich and the final sadly triumphant conclusion Rabbit at Rest, whose final scene stays with me to this day.

All the literary types catalog Updike as the chronicler of middle-class blah blah blah. And it's true, his novels are not so very highbrow, and they do reveal a certain earthy, mundane, unpretentious side of bourgeois American existence in the middle to late twentieth century. And the point of view is consistently male, consistently white, consistently nonrevolutionary, consistently of the flesh and of this world. Sorry, no Nobel for you, Jack. Sucks to be born in eastern Pennsylvania.

Updike made fun of all those suburban couples in Couples whose erotic attractions and repulsions and misunderstandings were more comedic than tragic, and at the same time he took them seriously. It made a young reader wonder about whether and how to be a couple. Other books, such as Bech: A Book, seemed more ironic and distanced, like he was writing with tongue firmly in cheek, and maybe that reflected both the aging novelist and the era.

Minor books like The Centaur, Memories of the Ford Administration, and The Poorhouse Fair didn't lodge in my mind as clearly, for whatever reason, and struck me more as experiments in writing in a certain genre. I bet Dr. Null would be able to shed some light on that, in between drags on his cigarette held precariously between long, thin fingers at the table in Satterfield Hall.

Imperialists and Immigrants

There I was, minding my own business, reading the travel section on a Saturday morning, when it struck me, in an article about rebuilding London's East End for the 2012 Olympics, how the fiercest nativist movements seem to spring up and thrive in countries that have the longest record of invading, extracting, enslaving, encroaching, appropriating, and exploiting other countries that have something they want - labor, tea, gold, spices, labor - which the rich (and getting richer) nations simply viewed as animal, vegetable, or mineral resources to be taken and used.

But look out, when some of the human resources settle down, perhaps put down roots, build a community, and inhabit significant portions of the privileged "first-world" nations, many first-world natives view their fellow immigrant neighbors as some sort of uninvited problem that doesn't really belong there. Since they were there first, they know better, drawing the commonsense conclusion that the Others should just go away.

But first give us your labor, tea, gold, spices, (got any oil?), then go away.

A few very advanced and sophisticated nations take the direct approach and build a fence to keep the alien life-forms out of the better neighborhoods north of the Rio Grande or west of the West Bank. Others use more subtle means such as literacy tests, poll taxes, gerrymandered districts, violent intimidation, an official national language, or an national religion to keep the Others in their place.

I guess some people are just entitled to have it both ways. Does the colonialist entitlement come from that old romantic notion of natural rights to life, liberty, and property? Maybe all those enlightened Europeans, flush with enthusiasm over all that Reason, all that power moving the big watch put in motion by the big watchmaker, amen.

And just as suddenly I lost interest, although the inherent unfairness still irks me.

"And it's organic!"

Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post provides a sane response to the tempest in a 'teapot' over Michael Phelps's recently publicized indiscretion. He may be a great Olympic hero, but he is not a god.

In short, the man is an athlete. Work hard, play hard, rest, repeat.

Phelps's public apology won't satisfy those people who insist their champions be superhuman ideals. But it's absurd to expect Phelps to maintain his brand of physical and mental discipline 24-7, while the rest of us privately anesthetize to our hearts' content. (Sally Jenkins, WP)

Let's say, just for fun, that there are four kinds of people in the world: (1) those who work out and indulge; (2) those who work out and abstain; (3) those who veg out and indulge; (4) those who veg out and abstain. Should we only admire and respect group (2) since they fit the profile that Nancy Reagan would approve?

I think I like Michael Phelps better now that I know he's got a weakness.

to-do list

1. Walk the walk

a. Clean house. Not the whole house, maybe just the two back rooms, kitchen and den, which I actually inhabit. That's good for now.
b. Shovel sidewalks, front and back. Salt lightly. Wait 24 hours. Repeat. Observe the infinitely fascinating behavior of water. Take photos of ice.
c. Watch the weather - not on TV or online - the real thing.
d. Meditate.
e. Buy honey and flour. Realize that a six-pound (quart) jug of honey is $20!
f. Bake bread with said honey. Taste the difference. It's worth it.
f. Watch the Steelers pound the Cardinals, along with every other brainwashed pop-cultural consumer in hegemonic middle-Amerika, trying to enjoy the big show without getting sucked into enthsiastically supporting (sounds like sporting) my own exploitation; oops too late.
g. This is scary: John Madden almost makes sense.

2. Talk the talk

a. Send thank-you notes.
b. Update FacadeBook page. Question other people's creative choices.
c. Write on someone's wall.
d. Use the following vocabulary words in a sentence: war crimes, Dick Cheney, torture, Guantanamo, perjury, Halliburton, due process, Exxon-Mobil, profiteering.
e. Remember that people suffering from some affliction often do things to harm themselves and others.
f. Pontificate on some subject that other people really ought to know more about. Failing that, listen to their troubles over tea and banana bread.

auspices and omens

inaugurate [from L. augury, divination from auspices and omens]

And what can we divine from the transition and the first week in office? Are we witnessing the dawn of a postracial, postpartisan era? Herewith a modest hypothesis, more a hunch than a data-driven prediction. I submit the heretical notion that Obama will be a conservative president.

What?! Am I insane, uninformed, or just jaded? Possibly, probably, and it depends on what you mean by 'conservative'.

I'm not talking about an ideologically narrow-minded conservatism wherein all taxes and social programs are evil, all minorities and foreigners are a threat to "our" cherished way of life, and the only civil liberties are property rights and guns.

Nor am I talking about an authoritarian neoconservatism whereby it isn't illegal if the president does it, anyone is an enemy combatant with no due process rights if the department of justice says so, and the U.S. can and should invade any country that can't prove that it isn't doing what some fabricated rumors say they might be doing.

Finally, I'm not talking about an oligarchic conservatism in which a elitist ruling class of naturally superior persons is entitled to control the wealth, manipulate the decision-making power, and change or ignore the laws that govern everybody else. Why? Because they can. Why do you ask?

What am I talking about? When I was a freshman poli sci major at Northeast Swingstate University (soon to be a transfer history-literature major at a major university up north, and then a college stop-out farther up north majoring in yoga and cross-country skiing), I had fleeting contact with a conservative political scientist who argued that FDR was a conservative president. Not in any of the senses sketched above, of course, but more broadly 'conservative' in the sense that FDR shook things up just enough in a genuine national crisis to prevent the country from flying apart at the seams. Roosevelt was not as revolutionary as the radicals thought necessary, and he wasn't as dogmatic as the reactionaries thought prudent.

For the same reason that only Nixon could go to China, Obama cannot and will not do what is needed to get to the heart of the current crisis. Nixon was a symbol that stood for McCarthy-esque anticommunist Amerikan patriotism, so no one could be righteously indignant that he would shake hands with Mao and have dinner with Chou En-lai. Because Obama is a symbol who stands for change, he will walk on eggs to avoid an offending misstep or, heaven help us, actually changing something, lest he be called radical.

There will be no restructuring of the way government does business; more likely a cautious repopulating of the same old way business does government. The players will change, but the grand old game stays the same. Prima facia evidence is all over the cabinet. Take Timothy Geithner - please - and while you're at it, take his Goldman Sachs buddies transferring their conventional wisdom from Wall Street to Washington. Take Mr. Holdover Gates at Defense. Take Ms. Payback Clinton at State.

If Obama stays true to form, he will do in the White House what he did at Harvard Law. He will walk and talk the middle course between hostile combatants in order to reconcile opposing forces and win through nonconfrontation. Then he will appoint three right-wingers for every left-winger, to the dismay of those who put him in office.

Maybe that's the good news. Plenty of symbolic moves and talk of "bold strategic initiatives" while bending over backwards to reach across the aisle to Republican ideologues who don't seem very anxious to meet anyone halfway. Some would call that kind of centrist bipartisanship "pragmatic" and professor whatshisname back at NSU would probably agree. I just hope it works.

Waiting for the electrician...or someone like him

A sixties cultural reference, lost on people who weren't there (except the cognoscenti) and many who were and don't remember it, to a Firesign Theater album of the same name. Think Monty Python's Flying Circus, but for radio instead of TV and American instead of English: four very clever guys whose insane sense of humor coincided briefly with the zeitgeist.

But what I really have in mind is another bright young man, breathing in a different zeitgeist entirely, neither a Firesign nor a Python but with elements of both, who has at long last decided in his own time and manner to go "back" to school, though it's not in any way going back.

My son C.A.A. Jessi S. Golly (perhaps we gave both him and his sister excessive middle name baggage, the least of our commissions and omissions) some time ago dropped out of Ubermensch College halfway through his sophomore year to do other things than go to class, write papers, and study for exams. Imagine, a mere 20-year-old getting the outlandish notion that there are other things to do than go to class, write papers, and study for exams.

So he volunteered at the infoshop, planted a garden, built a bike, cooked and served at the cafe, wrote to prisoners, helped edit EarthFirst! Journal, squatted, built community gardens, tutored kids, fought city hall, rode in Critical Mass, counseled summer campers, got paid for playing Don't Kill the Messenger on the streets of Manhattan, wrote articles, sold graphic novels, harvested cranberries, and six years later - a nice round mythic number - enrolled in the construction skills program at Apex Academy, a trade school in New York.

Gven and I were delighted, in a maternal/paternal, vicariously psyched, tubular kind of way, when Jessi started talking about becoming an electrician. Both of his grandfathers, a few of his uncles, and some of his cousins have that engineering gene common in homo faber. Initially surprised at the choice of a technical school, but then again not, and equally excited by the decisive change of direction. I would have pictured him getting into teaching, horticulture, bookbinding, semiotics, or animation, but wiring is cool. He is interested in literature and the arts, but what he wants to do for a living is make things and fix things.

The 900-hour program at Apex breaks down to a series of courses in three trades - carpentry, plumbing, and electrical - and we shall see where that leads. What opportunities will there be for work, apprenticeship, or further training? Will technical school itself be as interesting and rewarding as the gainful employment it presumably leads to? Will he find a niche in the sociocultural milieu of blue-collar Big Apple in a way that he did not at Ubermensch? Will the recessionary economy help or hurt his ability to make a livelihood in the building trades?

These are just the kind of questions a theoretically inclined parental unit asks. Who wouldn't benefit from knowing a little carpentry, plumbing, and electrical knowledge? I would if I had the right kind of mind, but some things skip a generation. Much remains to be determined, and the adventure continues.