This is not a pipe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Instant karma's gonna get you

I felt the telltale irritation in my throat the other day and knew I was in for a fight. It was either the cold or me, so I went on the offensive. The sniffles from my right sinuses were only a minor annoyance, and I knew they would get worse if I didn't do something quick. I believed with every fiber that I could still nip that sucker in the bud if I did the right thing.

So I did my usual chores inside, then spent most of the afternoon out in the yard, cleaning up after the storm that took down the neighbor's tree. The heavy work of cutting up the tree and stacking the limbs had been done, but the denuded trunk and a huge pile of branches was left to dispose of somehow. To minimize the amount we have to load in the truck and take to Kurtz Brothers for them to make into commercial mulch, I took the lesser traveled path.

If I tear the little needly branches off the big boughs, I can spread them around the flower beds as mulch and eliminate the middle man. When nature gives you a dead spruce tree, make sprucenade!

So far, that part of the plan is working perfectly. It took awhile, but there are now little twigs full of green needles covering all the perennial beds, and by the time the hostas come up in July our homegrown mulch should be a lovely reddish brown, nutrient-rich, weed-retarding layer of decaying organic matter. And I had the satisfaction of being outside in the sunshine inhaling fresh air while going through the labor-intensive process of saving a buck on commercial mulch. This appeals to me on so many levels.

The ulterior motive, aside from pure nordic frugality, was to use an afternoon of grunt manual labor to stoke the internal furnace to the point where no virus could survive. I was so sure of myself that I even started drafting a blog entry that night titled "Sven 2, Cold 0." This was the second time I've whupped the toxic attackers this year, and I was so very pleased with myself.

Of course you know what happened next. I woke up the next day with a full-blown, sneezing, runny-nosed, self-inflicted, hubris-induced, all-too-human cold. I won't gross you out by describing the all-day sniffling and nose-blowing in my cubicle, but my office mates can tell you how many gesundheits there were on Monday. I was not a happy camper, and I wasn't much fun to be around, either. Don't even ask if my work was top notch.

I would really like to know what I did to bring this demon virus on myself in the first place, but one doesn't usually get the chance to isolate particular causes of specific effects in this lifetime. Maybe it was the two days in a row last week that I did the taiji form on the left side only, not on both the right and the left sides, as I usually do (which begs the question of when a "positive" addiction is out of control). Maybe it was dashing from the car to the church a couple of times on Sunday without a jacket, but I doubt it. Maybe it was the extra jigger of Polish vodka in my Sunday night screwdriver that pushed my immune system over the edge.

Let's just make this whole thing a freaking moral parable, shall we? Maybe it's all because I haven't called my mother in a while. Yeah that's it. Insufficient filial piety is behind the common cold.

My point is that there are viruses around all the time; sometimes a person is more vulnerable to them, and sometimes a person's defenses repel the little attackers. Runners know that if you do your workout when a cold is coming on, chances are good you will sweat it out and not get sick. But sometimes the wrong workout at the wrong time drives the nasty little buggers deeper into the cells, and a mild cold becomes a debilitating force of nature. Then you've done the wrong thing.

Obviously I'm feeling a lot better now, otherwise I wouldn't be writing this tale of woe, I'd be huddled under three quilts watching Anthony Bourdain educate America on the finer points of the pastrami sandwich like I was last night. (Note to self: Eat lunch at Katz's Deli next time you're in New York.) I'm not completely over it, but I'm not suffering mightily and going through one handerchief after another like yesterday.

My initial hypothesis was wrong, so I caught a cold instead of warding it off. I'm wearing wool and lots of layers underneath, drinking tea, all that stuff. Now I'd do just about anything for a good night's sleep.

shovel-ready

Why would anyone believe anything they hear, see, or read in the media about the highly touted economic stimulus plan - aka "stimulus package" (which strikes me as a little too sexy)?

a) Because they want to believe in something - anything - even if it's patently bullshit. In that case, any project it includes is automatically shovel-ready.

b) Because if they even pretend to believe it, maybe other people will really believe it, and that belief will translate into increased confidence in the financial system, which will then spark a widespread change in behavior that actually changes the economic conditions in some sector(s) of the economy.

c) Because my belief in lie X, rather than lie Y, encourages other people to buy product or service X, whose continued existence hinges on the perception that X is good and viable (and Y is not), which puts money in my pocket. It's a zero-sum game out there, folks, and money that goes in the pocket of the maker/seller/distributor of product Y doesn't go in my pocket, so screw them.

You're always selling. I have it from a reliable source that this is one of the natural laws of business. No matter what you're talking about, the discourse you and I are engaged in is a pitch for a version of reality in which something is at stake, and if you're not making the sale, you're losing the sale, sucker.

Okay, call me paranoid, call me skeptical, call me oh ye of little faith, whatever, but are the talking heads on channel 10 or CBS or Fox disinterested parties? Are the reporters for the Columbus Dispatch or the New York Freaking Times not stakeholders in this thing? Clueless and misguided stakeholders but stakeholders nonetheless. They are just doing what they know how to do, given their position in the food chain.

How about the high-minded radio voices of progressive wisdom on the self-congratulatory "All Things Considered" on NPR? Responsible journalists every one, but give me a break, why not just call their little show "Absolute Truth From the Mountaintop Interview with God." Robert Siegal, whom I like and who does an excellent job of reading the news that's written for him, wants to keep his job and his nice house in Chevy Chase or wherever he lives, and his employers want to keep their business afloat, and all of them have an interest in other people - millions of other people - believing a certain version of material reality that keeps them in white wine and broiled salmon.

Let's not kid ourselves. The minuscule minority of power brokers who control the flow of information about how to solve the current crisis have everything to gain by not changing the very institutions and conditions and procedures that created the crisis - or at least they believe they do, so their packaging of the information reflects, rather than rectifies, the kind of thinking that perpetuates the problem.

Do not rock the boat, do not change the system, and do not upset the applecart of immediate, short-term, known commodity, i.e. this paycheck, this supply chain, this management organization. Any structural change in the way of doing business could potentially damage the bottom line this week, month, or quarter, and even if that is a bump in the road toward long-term health, we here at channel 10 don't want that, so we're going to report the news that's good for channel 10.

If you and I sit in front of the TV screen and take it all in, uncritically absorbing the carefully crafted messages bottle-fed by the various talking heads - from the chubby, blow-dried local Cabot Rea to the studious and analytical national David Brooks - then we won't know any better. Otherwise have your shovel ready.

What Congress knows how to do is throw money at it. Problems on Wall Street? Look disgruntled on camera, deplore things for the microphone, have your staff investigate the problem, and then throw money at it. Don't change the rules of engagement in financial transactions, energy generation, vehicle manufacturing, or home financing, that might actually, um, you know, change something. I think they call that a lack of political will.

Don't stop building things that don't sell or don't work; don't stop mining fossil fuels that are poison to humans and other life forms; don't stop lending money in ways that guarantee very expensive failure by one or both parties. Just make more money available to keep doing what auto companies, oil and coal companies, and money lenders have been doing so badly for so long.

In the meantime, the same players are getting more money for doing what they have always done, the way they have always done it, which is the only way they know how. Why? Because it's easier - and politically more expedient - to get money out there quickly to fund those projects that don't require any new plans, new designs, new ideas, new start-ups, or doing anything that hasn't already been done before. That is, if your original, creative, groundbreaking, problem-solving project isn't shovel-ready to play the same old losing game, you need not apply.