FULL CLEAR LIGHT

Finding Family at a Funeral

2006-12-03T12:28:00.000-08:00

(Photo: Gravesite near Edinburgh, Scotland)

It occurs to me that you could probably make a very good guess at somebody’s age by comparing the number of weddings to the number of funerals they’ve attended, in the past year.

There are still several weeks of 2006 to go, and so far I’ve been to one of the former and five of the latter, which is probably a record for me.

But one of the few grudging benefits of getting older, I’ve found, is that you don’t dread funerals nearly as much as when you’re younger and are consistently surprised by them. For most of my life, I assumed that the task of the attendees at a funeral is to say, or do, something that will make the family’s loss seem somehow less profound, and I always came up short (no pun intended) in that regard.

I mentioned this dilemma, in passing, to a friend a couple of years back, who observed that this is a very egotistical way to think. The point of showing up at a funeral or a memorial service, she said, is to remind the bereaved that they’re not alone in their sorrow. Job over. You go home.

It was in this frame of mind that I found myself driving up Highway 269 to Oakman on a recent Wednesday morning, under rain clouds that looked as if they might burst loose at any moment. A lifelong friend’s husband of 20 years had died of a heart attack on Monday, much too young, and there was to be a graveside service only.

The turnoff to the cemetery was a narrow road that coiled up a steep hill, with the colors of autumn displayed in the hollows on both sides. I had misjudged my driving time a little bit, and as I parked and walked up to the edge of the crowd of maybe 70 or 80 people, the ceremony was already starting.

There was no lengthy sermon, just a few opening remarks and a reading of the survivors, and then an invitation for any friends or neighbors of Bob, to step forward and say a few words if they wished.

A handful of mostly older men did, and as the comments drew to a close, I realized something. Each man had probably spoken for less than three minutes, in voices whose volume was respectful but exactly loud enough to be heard among the gathered crowd and no farther. Moreover, each of the comments was not some disjointed, rambling remembrance but a real story, a story with a point to it, that made us either laugh or cry.

It was at that point that I thought: These are my people.

We Scots-Irish have the reputation of being a cantankerous lot. And Lord knows, most of us have enough genetic personality flaws to write a psychology textbook about. But when it comes to telling stories, we don’t have to take a back seat to anybody alive.

It occurred to me that I was not thankful enough for that heritage, that gift. And that I’m not thankful enough, often enough, for the great good fortune and privilege to be able to do it for a living.

The rain kept holding off. I didn’t know that the best part of the service was yet to come.

After the comments were finished, a man who looked a little bit like my father, if he had lived to that age, stepped out from the crowd. The man said that he apologized for not being as good with words as the other speakers had been, but that if it was all right with everybody, he wanted to sing just one verse of a song instead.

He cleared his throat and began:

“Farewell, vain world, I’m going home...”

The song has long been my favorite Sacred Harp hymn. It says everything important about death in a few dozen graceful words. I’d heard it sung many times by congregations, but never by just one person before, and it was like hearing the song for the first time.

The musical notes that comprise Sacred Harp compositions are as solid as the wide slabs of cut stone that are used for making steps up and down a dirt hillside, and the notes of this gentleman’s singing let me walk, in my mind, to a place I had been only once before in my life: the place my family came from.

It’s been some 20 years now since I walked down a street in Glasgow, Scotland, weary and homesick from a too-long business trip to nearby England. It was lunchtime, and the scent from a tiny storefront cafe drew me in.

Sitting at a table there, it dawned on me that I was 4,000 miles from Alabama and yet the smells were exactly the same as my grandmother’s kitchen. Not only that, but the waitress spoke to me in the voice of my great-aunt, and the conversations at the surrounding tables were the same tone and pitch as if my grandparents had been multiplied and spaced around the room.

I’m sure some of the customers wondered, when I was gone, why a strange young guy would sit there eating the best shepherd’s pie in the world and crying as if his best friend had died. But there I was.

And there I was, Wednesday morning, driving home from Oakman, changed once more. I was all the way to the fishing camps on the Warrior River before the rain showers finally came, and my one regret was that I had not sought out the man who sang the one short verse, and shook his hand and asked if I could make a good digital recording sometime of him singing the song all the way through, so that I could give a copy to my granddaughter. And she could give one to hers, and so on.

In case any of us ever need to be reminded of where we come from.

November Sunset

2006-11-18T19:47:00.000-08:00

I don't know what the meteorological factors are, but the first couple of days after a storm front passes through and a cold front moves in are generally a time for spectacular sunsets here in the South...such as yesterday's, seen here from our back window.

The Zen of the Chattering Mind

2006-11-17T18:34:00.000-08:00

You know that one part of your brain that just never shuts up? The little voice that keeps going and going and going, every minute you’re awake?

Eastern philosophies refer to this chaotic part of our mind as “The Chattering Monkey,” and as one teacher puts it, we achieve wisdom by “sustaining awareness for as long as possible without interference from the monkey mind.”

(There might as well be a footnote to this teaching that says, “Good luck, Dale.” I feel like I’ve got a whole cage of hyper-active monkeys up there in my skull, not just one.)

I can’t help it. I was born with a one-track body and a hundred-track mind, and if I ever complete more than one percent of all the things I intend to do on an average day, but get distracted from, I feel like I’ve lucked out.

Okay, here’s an example... not long ago, we were heading up to Memphis for a book festival and listening to the Alabama game on the car radio. For some reason, my brain can focus better during a good football game than almost any other time, which is one more reason I look forward to autumn.

Anyhow, Kenny Stabler (one of the best commentators in the business, for my money) says about the Ole Miss quarterback, “That boy’s so quick, you couldn’t hem him up in a phone booth.” And after the Diet Coke spewed out of my nose and I finally quit laughing, my mind drifted off to phone booths and how rarely you see them, nowadays.

See, apparently so many people have cell phones that there’s not much money to be made in the phone booth business any more, especially what with vandalism and all.

Then my mind jumped back to August. when I had to report on a story in the Mississippi Delta. Once I got where I was going, the town was so small my cell phone had no reception at all and so I couldn’t use it to call any of the people I was supposed to meet and interview there. I had to find service-station phone booths instead, and the operators who connected the calls told me they were “independent service providers.”

Well, I was so busy I didn’t give any thought to what their rates might be, and when I got my next month’s phone bill I had a $90 charge for Mississippi phone calls from some company I’d never heard of. Which, getting back to football for a second, gave me yet one more good reason to hope Alabama stomped Ole Miss good.

But then one of the radio commercials during the football game had a saxophone solo in it, and that got me to thinking about Beale Street up in Memphis, where we were headed, and that beautiful song “Walking in Memphis” from a guy named Marc Cohn. It won him a Grammy, I think, back in 1991 if I remember correctly. What a great line, “I’m walking in Memphis, with my feet ten feet off of Beale…”

But, see, “Beale” sounded like “bill” and I remembered my August phone bill again and I got worried I’d have to use pay phones on this trip. But I checked my cell phone, and the signal stayed good and strong all the way up Highway 78 through Tupelo and beyond. So I’m thinking, one less thing to worry about, right?

Except that my new cell phone has Internet service too, and when I’m checking the sports scores on ESPN to see how Alabama and Ole Miss came out (we were out of radio range of Kenny and Eli by that time) I got distracted by an Internet headline about medical researchers in St. Louis who were teaching people with spinal cord injuries to play video games with no hands, just by using their brains.

And that got me to wondering if I’d live long enough to have a cell phone I could operate with my brain, and whether I could tame my monkeys enough to do it, and finally I just settled for living long enough to see Alabama find another wide receiver with the talent and heart of Tyrone Prothro, and thinking about him got me sad.

By that time we were in Memphis, but my brain was so tired from all its monkey-chattering on the drive up that we didn’t go to the book festival that night but found a motel instead, so we could hit the festival fresh the next morning.

If you’ve never tried to get a hundred chattering monkeys to sleep in a strange motel bed, you’ve missed a treat.

But that’s a story for another day. And another monkey.

Nourishment and Sorrow: A Scots-Irish Heritage

2006-09-28T21:56:00.000-07:00

I don’t know why food, and the cooking of food, is so closely tied to death and sorrow in the Scots-Irish heritage that I come from. I just know that it is.

This fact was made clear to me again on the recent Sunday when we got the phone call, early in the morning, that my grandmother had died in the night. Her passing didn’t surprise us. She would have been 99 on her next birthday, and her health had been steadily going downhill for the past couple of years.

After we gathered with our family and set into motion the plans for the funeral, the day was still fairly young. I wasn’t hungry, but for some reason I felt a strong need to come home and start cooking.

I tried a new potato salad recipe I’d been meaning to use for a while, one with green onions and tarragon and a vinaigrette dressing with a touch of brown mustard. There was broccoli and baby carrots in the bottom of the refrigerator, and with some grated fresh ginger they made a decent stir-fry. I found half a head each of green and red cabbage that was still fairly fresh, and whipped up a bowl of coleslaw.

We weren’t having friends over, so there was nothing for us to do with all the food but eat part of it for lunch and put the leftovers in the fridge for another day.

It occurred to me that if this had been a weekend only a few years ago, the potato salad would have been a good recipe to try out on my grandmother on the day each week I went to eat lunch with her, at her apartment in the retirement complex just across town. Until she was well into her nineties she insisted on doing all the cooking for those lunches herself. But when her strength and balance started to decline, she agreed to let me cook for her instead. We joked that it was finally time for me to start paying her back, for teaching me how, when I was just a kid.

One of the many aggravations of growing old, she said, was that her taste buds were fading, and many of her once-favorite foods had all started tasting the same. I took this on as a challenge, and stayed on the lookout for new recipes that were a good bit more tangy or spicy than she would have enjoyed, when she was in her prime. I branched out into Mexican cookbooks, then Thai and Indian and Chinese, then Cuban and Ethiopian.

Most weekends, my experiments worked. She approached each new dish like a puzzle to be figured out. Before she tasted it, she had me tell her the ingredients and how they were fixed. Then, when she chewed a bite, she would stare into the distance with the look of concentration people get when they’re listening to music, or dreaming up a floor plan for a new house.

Finally she would render her judgment, which was nearly always the word “Good.” Followed shortly by, “What if you...” and suggestions for minor variations in seasoning or toppings or texture. Impaired taste buds notwithstanding, she still knew food the way an increasingly deaf Beethoven knew when a piece of music worked and when it didn’t.

In retrospect, looking back on those long weekend afternoons in the late 1990s before the whole world went haywire, I realize that it’s a good thing we can’t predict the future. If either of us had known then, while she sat at her new computer learning the fine points of scanning photos and sending them to her relatives by e-mail, and finding news headlines and weather forecasts on the Internet, that Alzheimer’s would soon make me a familiar stranger to her, some days, we couldn’t have enjoyed those hours as much as we did.

By late afternoon of the Sunday she died, I had depleted our kitchen of things to cook and had to make a run to the grocery store to restock. I didn’t feel nervousness or compulsion about this fact, just a level of calmness and rightness that at times almost verged on pleasure. Almost.

As I went into the supermarket, the skies looked as dangerously dark as if a tornado was coming, but there were no winds. When I came out of the store pushing a grocery cart, a rainstorm slammed down. The biggest, loudest drops I ever remember seeing, and in the middle of the downpour the sun popped out, as blinding as in a dream.

A young man riding a bicycle, who had sought shelter under the concrete eave of the store, said to me, “The sun makes the drops look like diamonds, doesn’t it?” I agreed with him that it did.

On the way home, with dusk very near, the rain clouds blew away to reveal a spectacular double-ended rainbow, a perfect mirror of itself, over the drab gray shopping center.

And that was the end of our first day without her.

'A Circle with No Escape': Some Wisdom on War

2006-08-22T08:53:00.000-07:00

In times of war, most nations seem to go at least a little insane, as though the violence triggers primal attitudes inside us that we prefer to think, in ordinary times, we've grown beyond. That dysfunctional aspect is especially magnified where the United States' current occupation of Iraq is concerned, because of the war's dishonest and confused origins and rationale.

Here are the perspectives of two thinkers on the subject of war and human nature, from ninety years ago, as recounted in the book In Search of the Miraculous by P.D. Ouspensky, a student of the philosopher G.I. Gurdjieff (pictured above):

"For a man of Western culture," I said [to Gurdjieff], "it is of course difficult to believe and to accept the idea that an ignorant fakir, a naive monk, or a yogi who has retired from life may be on the way to evolution while an educated European, armed with 'exact knowledge' and all the latest methods of investigation, has no chance whatever and is moving in a circle from which there is no escape."

"Yes, that is because people believe in progress and culture," said G. "There is no progress whatever. Everything is just the same as it was thousands, and tens of thousands, of years ago. The outward form changes. The essence does not change. Man remains just the same. 'Civilized' and 'cultured' people live with exactly the same interests as the most ignorant savages. Modern civilization is based on violence and slavery and fine words. But all these fine words about 'progress' and 'civilization' are merely words."

This of course produced a particularly deep impression on us, because it was said in 1916, when the latest manifestation of "civilization," in the form of a war such as the world had not yet seen, was continuing to grow and develop, drawing more and more millions of people into its orbit.

I remembered that a few days before this talk I had seen two enormous lorries on the Liteiny loaded to the height of the first floor of the houses with new unpainted wooden crutches. For some reason I was particularly struck by these lorries. In these mountains of crutches for legs which were not yet torn off there was a particularly cynical mockery of all the things with which people deceive themselves.

Involuntarily I imagined that similar lorries were sure to be going about in Berlin, Paris, London, Vienna, Rome, and Constantinople. And, as a result, all these cities, almost all of which I knew so well and liked just because they were so different and because they supplemented and gave contrast to one another, had now become hostile both to me and to each other and separated by new walls of hatred and crime...

Avocados and the Art of Life

2006-07-01T18:54:00.000-07:00

Whoever said, “The older you get, the more you appreciate the small things in life” sure hit the nail on the head.

If anybody had told me, 30 years ago, that someday I would have a bounce in my step from anticipation when I approached the shelf of fresh avocados in the supermarket, I would have insisted that before that day arrived someone should obtain a power of attorney over me and force me to get a life.

But here I am, and loving it. How ‘bout that avocado crop this year? Aren’t they a work of art?

In my youth, I was not crazy about guacamole. I could take or leave the guacamole dip sold in the potato chip section. I later learned that avocado, guacamole’s heart and soul, was pretty far down the ingredient list in the commercially prepared version. Apparently the manufacturer waved an avocado over the mix for appearance sake, but the real payload was guar gum, green food dye, and a lot of chemicals whose names I can’t pronounce. The result was a vaguely greenish mush that tasted vaguely of mayonnaise.

Once I tasted homemade guacamole, though, my life changed. I wanted this food of the gods three meals a day, and for a couple of snacks besides.

Imagine my dismay when I tried to make a batch of this delight in my own kitchen, only to discover that the first step was peeling the avocados.

The skin of an avocado, if you’ve never peeled one, has a texture somewhere between tree bark and rhinoceros hide. Combine this factor with the soft, buttery consistency of the inner fruit-flesh that the tough skin protects, and you can whittle on one avocado with a paring knife while continents shift around you and the seasons change.

ONE avocado. For a party-sized bowl of guacamole, you’d need to peel at least six to eight of them. Forget it. Life’s too short.

Fast-forward this story as decades pass and my taste buds remain bereft of homemade guacamole except for brief interludes in out-of-the-way Mexican restaurants.

Then, a miracle. This spring, our TV’s channel-flipper happened to settle on a cooking show, and the chef was demonstrating how to prepare...avocados!

Turns out, there’s more than one way to skin a cat. Er, fruit.

Don’t waste time peeling, the chef said. Just cut the little booger in half lengthwise on both sides, down to the big hard seed in the middle, and with the slightest hand pressure the avocado separates into two halves, one of which contains the seed.

Pluck out the seed and discard it, and then it’s surprisingly easy to scrape out the avocado innards with a tablespoon. Throw the tough, empty hull-halves away, and you’re done. With a little practice, you can scoop out a dozen avocados in far less time than it takes to peel just one.

Life is good.

As I pursue my guacamole habit these days, I discover endless refinements of technique that keep the process fun.

For instance, if you buy avocados of only picture-perfect consistency (not too ripe, not too hard) you can actually remove the seed without touching it with your fingers. Stab the seed precisely in its center with the tip of a well-sharpened knife, and when you pull on the handle the seed pops loose as if by magic.

To take these culinary acrobatics one step further, you can tap the knife blade sharply on the edge of your kitchen trash container and the seed hops off the blade as gingerly as if you’d trained it. The process develops the rhythm of a symphony, or a ballet, or...

Not that I’m obsessive-compulsive, or anything.

Once you have a waiting tub of gorgeous avocado flesh, the remaining ingredients are a matter of debate. Some guacamolers (guacamolars?) use minced onion, diced tomatoes, jalapeno slices, fresh cilantro, and even the heretical addition of sour cream.

By long experimentation, I maintain that the ultimate classic guacamole contains avocados dressed only in a hint of garlic (actually, garlic juice, if you want to be picky), a squeeze of fresh lime juice, and a light sprinkling of salt.

Anything else is gilding the avocado.

And anybody who insists that if you have to break some eggs to make an omelet, you have to peel some avocados to make guacamole, is just behind the times.

But don’t take my word for it.

I’ll see you at the avocado counter. And if I’m there with my eyes shut, communing with the spirit of each fruit as I test its firmness for exactly the proper bounce with my thumb and index finger, just humor me until I’m done and I’ll be out of your way.

You’re only young once, but perfect avocados are for a lifetime.

Forgive Me, Papa; I Broke Your Wardrobe Rule

2006-06-02T17:16:00.000-07:00

In years to come, I’ll remember this week as the time I broke the Hemingway Rule.

I was driving past the mall and remembered something I needed to pick up. There was only one problem. I’d been working on the house all day, and I looked sweaty and bedraggled. And I had the attire to match: sandals, running shorts, and an old T-shirt, all of which were daubed with grime and the house paint of projects past.

Should I run in and take care of business, or should I put it off until a day when I’m freshly bathed and better dressed?

In case you’ve never heard of the Hemingway Rule, it’s one I came across many years ago when I was reading a biography of the great writer.

One day, or so the story goes, Ernest Hemingway had hired a man from the neighborhood to help him put a new roof on his house in Key West. The day was blistering hot, and by mid-afternoon the two men pretty much looked a mess. That’s when they realized they needed another bucket of roofing tar.

Hemingway handed his helper some cash, and asked him to run into town and buy the tar. The man hesitated.

“Well, I can do that,” he replied, “but I’ll have to go home first and clean up.”

“Nonsense!” Hemingway told him. “I go into town dressed like this all the time.”

“Yessir,” the man said, “but a-body has to have a whole lot of money to go around looking as nasty as you do.”

So, back to my predicament: I was looking nasty, but with not much money, and the mall was a mere turn signal away. I hemmed and hawed a moment, but then I went for it. I broke the Hemingway Rule, in a most blatant and brazen fashion.

And…nothing happened.

The sky didn’t fall. There was no film of my transgression on the 10 o’clock news.

In fact, everybody including the sales clerk treated me with the utmost courtesy. I didn’t even catch any customers grimacing at the fact that I looked like I’d come there straight from working on the railroad. Or at least, from painting one.

I was actually back in the car and driving home, feeling a little smug, when the truth dawned on me: I’d gotten away with it because I have white hair.

It’s such an important corollary that I’ve mentally added it to the Hemingway Rule, i.e.: “To get away with going around looking nasty, a-body has to have a whole lot of money. Or, white hair.”

The silver lining (so to speak) of our impatient and road-raged society is that we still tend to cut a lot of slack for somebody with white hair. Unless that person is, say, frothing at the mouth, sleeping in our carport, or openly carrying a loaded firearm (none of which I’ve done…well, not lately), we tend to look over them.

And that’s all to the good. Because by the time a person has white hair (although mine started turning when I was 30), he or she has a lot more problems on their plate to worry about than being stylish at all times.

As just one example, there’s the problem of trying to write as well as Hemingway. The secret to that, of course, is the same as the answer to the famous joke about, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?”

Practice. Practice. Practice.

Which, come to think of it, is what turned my hair white in the first place.

Imagining Kindergarten

2006-04-21T19:45:00.000-07:00

My granddaughter is in kindergarten now, and most days she likes the place a lot, which is good news. I also like the fact that her teachers routinely send home reports about her activities and development, and have regular conferences with her parents about how Darrah’s doing, both socially and academically.

Obviously, kindergarten had not been invented back when I was five years old, so that’s a chapter of life I’ll never experience. When I was five, dirt was a brand-new commodity. But paper and ink were still in the developmental stage, so I doubt that many written reports would have been sent home with me about my deportment.

I suspect I would have gotten good marks in the “Plays well with others” category, though, because I’m a peaceful sort by nature and I pride myself on being able to get along with anybody whose social skills rank somewhere above the level of ax-murderer.

Where I would not have gotten good marks, I feel sure, is in “Follows instructions.” It’s not that I try to be cranky on purpose. It’s just that I’m such a square peg in a round hole that any generalized advice or common wisdom almost never works out well for me.

Take writing, for example.

Please.

(Note to readers under the age of 50: that’s a reference to an old Henny Youngman joke, which would take longer to explain than it’s worth, which is just another symptom of what I’m talking about, if you catch my drift.)

If I had taken seriously the advice I was given in most of my writing classes, I would have ended up in another career.

The most common advice that writing teachers give is “Write what you know.” Problem is, the kind of stuff that I know is not even interesting to me, and I sure wouldn’t expect anybody else to pay money to read it.

An example? Okay.

Do you know where the word “avocado” comes from? Well, the Aztec word for the green fruit was “ahucatl,” which Spanish explorers mistook for the Spanish word “abogado,” which means “lawyer,” and though the explorers had no idea what avocados had to do with legal matters they split the difference in pronunciation and the fruit would ever after be referred to as “avocado.”

On a related note: the Aztecs were also fond of making dipping sauces out of their fruits and vegetables, and the Aztec word for sauce was “molli.” Hence, avocado sauce was “ahucatl-molli,” which sounded close enough to “guacamole” for government work, and so another word was born.

You can imagine how well this stuff works as cocktail-party conversation, which is not at all. Folks who start off listening with feigned interest gradually drift away with the excuse that they’ve got to put money in the parking meters outside, and it’s a good while after they’ve been gone that I realize I didn’t recall seeing any parking meters outside.

Anyway.

The second most frequent advice I received from writing teachers was, “Before you begin writing, take a few minutes to organize your thoughts.”

This is like telling me to take a few minutes to levitate, or split an atom, or build a sports car out of a box of toothpicks and a tube of epoxy.

It ain’t gonna happen.

If I could organize my thoughts, I would be rich. Or a danger to society. Or both.

But that’s a subject for another day.

For now, I’ll just keep missing my granddaughter and trying to imagine what it’s like to spend a day in kindergarten.

Wait. Good news! I just looked at my watch. And where Darrah is, it’s nap time.

That’s the one kind of instruction I’m good at.

The Glorious Noise of Springtime

2006-03-18T18:15:00.000-08:00

Can’t win for losing. First there was the construction noise. Now, there’s the construction noise.

For almost two months, the apartment building just uphill from our house got renovated from the ground up. Which meant a whole construction crew showing up and unlimbering their equipment at the crack of dawn each day—jackhammer, front-end loader, air compressor, the whole nine yards.

The only advantage I’ve found during a quarter century in this self-employment biz is the ability to choose your work hours. Which is both handy and necessary, because sometimes the puzzle of how to best construct a story that has defied your every solution for eight straight daylight hours will suddenly answer itself when you’re drifting off to sleep, at which point you can rouse yourself and get down to business until well past midnight or until the keyboard spigot runs dry, whichever comes first, and then catch up on your sleep the next morning.

Ear plugs are a miracle, in this regard. But the apartment construction crew, not wanting to be the only humans in the neighborhood active at 6:15 a.m., carefully chose hydraulic gear whose racket would easily pierce any self-respecting ear plug. As I can testify. And probably rouse a few folks from the cemetery, for good measure.

But all things, the good and the irritating, must come to an end, and thus the familiar crew finished up their work last week and moved on to other pastures.

Ah, peace, I thought. Now I can lie uselessly abed until 8 a.m. if the spirit moves me, after a long night.

That’s when the other construction crew moved in. The very next day. Flocks of birds that would scare Alfred Hitchcock. Hyper-active squirrels, the size of house cats. Loud buzzing insects of all varieties.

And that’s just the above-ground contingent; no telling what the earthworms, chipmunks, and gophers are constructing, just beneath the surface.

On the bright side, my heavy-duty ear plugs block out nearly all the bird sounds. Except for a giant woodpecker somewhere on the street, who must have taken lessons from the jackhammer operator because he (she?) can get up a head of steam at 6:14 a.m., like clockwork, and bring me wide awake, plugs and all.

Once the ear plugs come out, the whole bird chorus of springtime swells from all four directions, and the squirrels on steroids are doing something in the loft that sounds like a cross between bowling and square-dancing.

The way I see it, I’ve got three options. I can start working from 8 to 5 like a normal person. That’s out, because of the nature of the beast inside my keyboard. Or I can try sleeping in the basement under several layers of foam insulation, hugging an expensive white-noise generator from one of those mall stores next to my chest.

Or, I can do what every other sentient creature for miles around seems to be doing, these unspeakably gorgeous mornings that are springtime in every attribute except name. I can get my rear up at first daylight, and get with the program.

Springtimes may come and go, but I hear all these animals discussing with one another the fact that this springtime is to be like no other, an opportunity never to be matched again in this life.

I’d be a fool to miss it, they say. And, like them, I can sleep next winter.

Sounds like a plan to me.

Stalked by Rainbows

2006-03-02T21:04:00.000-08:00

I sense a trend, here. On the second day of February, I posted a photo of a rainbow that surprised me in a hallway. On the second day of March, I wake to a rainbow on the bedroom ceiling...in a room where there is no glass crystal in a window to be casting that spectrum of colors. I take a picture, then go to solve the mystery. The answer? A simple CD has been upended onto the floor, during the night (most likely by a prowling cat) so that the disc's laser-grooved side reflects a rainbow upward. Me, stalked by rainbows? I'll take it. I've had worse problems.

RFK: Looking Back to a Brighter Day

2006-02-16T07:58:00.000-08:00

In 1966 I was a junior in high school. The prospect of being drafted and sent to Vietnam loomed large in my future, and the world was an exceedingly dark and frightening place.

If anybody had told me there would come a day in my lifetime when I would look back on the Sixties as a brighter era, I wouldn't have believed them.

Forty years ago this spring, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gave a speech at South Africa's Capetown University. I offer it here as a reminder of a brighter time. Why brighter? Because despite all of America's mistakes and failings and transgressions during those years, we remained a country with principles, and a country with leaders who had the intelligence and intellect and courage to articulate those ideals to the people of the world. How far we've fallen.

I hope you'll read this excerpt of RFK's remarks, and think about what America...with an outbreak of truth and courage, and a lot of luck...might someday be again.

"...There is discrimination in this world and slavery and slaughter and starvation. Governments repress their people; and millions are trapped in poverty while the nation grows rich; and wealth is lavished on armaments everywhere.

"These are differing evils, but they are common works of man. They reflect the imperfection of human justice, the inadequacy of human compassion, our lack of sensibility toward the sufferings of our fellows.

"But we can perhaps remember--even if only for a time--that those who live with us are our brothers; that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek--as we do--nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.

"Surely this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men. And surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again.

"Some believe there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world's ills. Yet many of the world's great movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man. A young monk began the Protestant reformation, a young general extended an empire from Macedonia to the borders of the earth, and a young woman reclaimed the territory of France. It was a young Italian explorer who discovered the New World, and the thirty-two-year-old Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed that all men are created equal.

"These men and women moved the world, and so can we all. Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

"Few are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change. And I believe that in this generation those with the courage to enter the moral conflict will find themselves with companions in every corner of the globe.

"For the fortunate among us, there is the temptation to follow the easy and familiar paths of personal ambition and financial success so grandly spread before those who enjoy the privilege of education. But that is not the road history has marked out for us. Like it or not, we live in times of danger and uncertainty. But they are also more open to the creative energy of men than any other time in history. All of us will ultimately be judged and as the years pass we will surely judge ourselves, on the effort we have contributed to building a new world society and the extent to which our ideals and goals have shaped that effort.

"The future does not belong to those who are content with today, apathetic toward common problems and their fellow man alike, timid and fearful in the face of new ideas and bold projects. Rather it will belong to those who can blend vision, reason and courage in a personal commitment to the ideals and great enterprises of American Society.

"Our future may lie beyond our vision, but it is not completely beyond our control. It is the shaping impulse of America that neither fate nor nature nor the irresistible tides of history, but the work of our own hands, matched to reason and principle, that will determine our destiny. There is pride in that, even arrogance, but there is also experience and truth. In any event, it is the only way we can live."

The Colors of Grace

2006-02-02T19:59:00.000-08:00

Some days, your hallway is suddenly graced with a splash of rainbow...from a tiny crystal ornament hanging in a window two rooms away, and which you'd forgotten about until the late afternoon sun makes this precise alignment and you happen to be watching. If you're lucky, you have time to grab the camera. Because half a minute later, the rainbow is gone.

Tell Your Coffee: Bitter, Begone!

2006-01-29T13:42:00.000-08:00

Ordinarily, when I start getting excited about household hints it's a pretty reliable sign that my medications need adjusting.

Not so, this time. Trust me. This is important stuff. This is about…

Coffee.

There are some days (okay, most days) when the lure of a really great cup of coffee is the only thing that can entice me to get out of bed in the morning and get dressed rather than just pulling the covers over my head and having them bronzed in place.

I won't get on my soapbox (actually, coffeebox) about the wisdom of paying just a little bit more for a flavorful brand of coffee rather than the generic sawdust substitute that's a buck a pound cheaper. And I won't browbeat you about the extra freshness you can get by grinding your own beans in small quantities or by using a small cone-filter drip device to make one cup at a time rather than a whole scorched pot that deteriorates throughout the morning.

What I'll do, instead, is to ask you this simple question: when have you cleaned out your holes?

No matter what kind of coffee maker you have, there's some kind of little hole or holes that the mixture drips through as it brews. The manufacturer's instructions usually say to anoint these babies every month or two with some elite brand of coffee-pot cleaner that comes in a tiny jewel-like squeeze bottle, has to be special-ordered from the Swiss Alps, and costs more than the coffee maker itself.

Bah. Waste of money. Plain old baking soda does the job just as well. As for monthly cleanings, that's ridiculous. Coffee oils and acid build up around those holes in days, not weeks, and even tiny deposits can give a bitter taste to every cup you make.

Daily cleanings may be a bit of overkill, but if you scrub out the works at least once a week (twice, if you're finicky) you'll be amazed at how much better your morning coffee tastes.

Here's what I do. Take a small handful of plain old baking soda and cram it down into the holes of your filter container. Drip a little bit of water from the faucet onto the dry soda until it makes a paste. Let sit for several minutes, and then force the soda paste through the holes with either a tiny wire brush or, in a pinch, a coffee stirrer with a dab of paper towel twisted on the end to simulate a Q-tip.

Rinse and dry the filter container, and you're good to brew. (The night before is an ideal time to prep your coffee maker; you can pay attention and do it methodically because you won't be antsy to get that first great jolt of caffeine into your system.)

Even if you're not a coffee aficionado, and have gotten into the habit of drinking it for the buzz rather than for the flavor, you'll still be amazed at what a difference an oil-free, acid-free filter device can make.

Try it. Your morning will be brighter. You may even get more work done.

Nope, there's no need to thank me. That's what I'm here for.

Stop the bitterness. Wake up and smell the coffee.

Rise of the Underwear Police

2006-01-24T09:04:00.000-08:00

So, what makes me suspect that religious fundamentalism is on the rise in Uzbekistan? Check out this report from Ananova...

Fur-lined Knickers Banned

Fur-lined underwear has been banned in Uzbekistan after authorities deemed it too sexy.

Sales of the furry slips have rocketed in temperatures that have hit the region of below minus 20C.

But the government has now banned the lingerie saying they want to protect citizens from "unbridled fantasies" caused by wearing the soft fabric.

Textile company Collapse, which has been making fur undies for both men and women, have protested the decision from the capital Tashkent, reported online newspaper Ferghana.

***

Unbridled fantasies. As opposed to "bridled" fantasies, which I presume are OK?

Eagles' CD Box Set a Treasure Trove

2006-01-21T21:10:00.000-08:00

Hear me, o ye young, and attend unto my hard-won wisdom. Of all the indignities and depredations to which we fall prey in middle age, few are more humbling than the experience of listening, at a remove of some 20 to 30 years, to the popular music that formed the soundtrack, as it were, of your young and vigorous life—songs by artists you worshipped for their lyrical profundity and their genius with a melody line or rhythm track—only to discover that in truth this once-hallowed music, not to put too fine a point on it…sucks.

Thus, it was with no small trepidation that I opened the plastic seal on the boxed CD set “Eagles,” containing seven of the group’s best albums that so beautifully bridged the fences between rock, pop, folk, and country beginning in the 1970s.

Would the music measure up? Were such songwriting gems as “Take It Easy,” “Tequila Sunrise,” “Lying Eyes,” “Desperado,” “The Best of My Love,” “Hotel California,” and dozens of others, actually as timeless as they seem in memory, or was I hearing them through the soft complimentary filter of life in 1970s America, when I was young and energetic and living large and no goal seemed impossible?

I’m both proud and relieved to report that upon repeated listening, these guys who produced a decade’s worth of great pop music are even better than I remembered.

The sheer musicianship, for one thing, is staggering in its consistency. I realize it’s hard to go wrong with side players the caliber of Joe Walsh, but even so, there are no throwaway cuts here. Even the less-distinguished songs (and every group has some) are meticulously polished in the studio and yet escape being overproduced as so much of the era’s music was.

Classic guitar solos don’t get any better than these. If you can listen to these songs at full volume on your car stereo and not at times momentarily steer with your knees so as to play air guitar, you don’t have an ounce of rock-and-roll in your bones.

But what makes the greatest of these efforts by songwriters Glenn Frey and Don Henley endure—to be sung around campfires and on festival stages, in my humble prediction, long after the Eagles and myself have all turned to dust—is the lyrics that go straight to the head and heart at once.

I sometimes tell people that my favorite contemporary philosopher is Don Henley, and I’m only half joking. There’s a blinding amount of wisdom hiding in the words of these radio-friendly melodies:

—“Beautiful faces and loud empty places / look at the way that we live / wasting our time on cheap talk and wine / left us so little to give…” (“Best of My Love”)

—“Don’t let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy…” (“Take It Easy”)

—“You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave…” (“Hotel California”)

—“When it comes down to dealing friends / it never ends…” (“Tequila Sunrise”)

—“Don’t you draw the Queen of Diamonds, boy / she’ll break you if she’s able / the Queen of Hearts is always your best bet…” (“Desperado”)

And perhaps the most hard-won lesson of all, that I could never have fully understood in my 20s:

—“Every form of refuge has its price…” (“Lying Eyes”)

Tell it, brother.

It’s not often, in any art form, that you find truth and beauty in equal proportion, but this treasure trove of music manages to pull it off.

Ironically, most of these songs were written in an atmosphere of excess and drugs and hard living, and yet they manage to be deeply moral without being moralistic. Much of what passes for “religious” music these days could learn from Frey’s and Henley’s clear-eyed assessment of their own failings and of their respect for our shared humanity.

But I digress.

If life were fair, the aging members of the Eagles will win a whole new audience of young listeners who realize that this is very different stuff than they’re finding on today’s radio airwaves. Different in a good way.

If not, then at least my fellow geezers and I get the satisfaction of knowing that we weren’t just dreaming the first time around. These guys play like demons and sing like angels. And music doesn’t get much better than that.

Buddhism and Enlightened Belief

2006-01-20T07:57:00.000-08:00

One quick afterthought (okay, two) on the previous post's commentary by John Steinberg, in which he says that one of the most basic questions for any religion is "What do you do when belief and data collide?"

To my knowledge, only one of the world's major religions has taken an unequivocal position on that thorny issue: Buddhism. As the Dalai Lama himself has repeatedly said, "If the words of the Buddha and the discoveries of modern science conflict, the former have to go."

Surprised? You're not alone. The country of China and its Western allies have made an enormous public relations effort over the past 50 years to portray Buddhism as a "backward" and "superstitious" belief system because many of its precepts and rituals are unfamiliar to a Judeo-Christian mindset. This smear campaign arose after the Chinese government failed to destroy the practice of Tibetan Buddhism through genocide, violence, and punitive restrictions such as imprisonment for possessing even the smallest religious image or symbol. (The United States, meanwhile, despite its facile "spreading freedom" mantra, looked the other way as Buddhist monks were tortured and killed and their centuries-old libraries and monasteries burned to the ground.) To learn more about the ongoing nonviolent struggle for Tibetan autonomy, you can start here.

How ironic, that a "backward" belief system is light years ahead of others in reconciling spirituality with our actual life on this earth. The Dalai Lama has also memorably observed, "Religion is a luxury. Compassion is not." But that's a story for another day.

Speaking of irony, I was talking recently with the editor of a "Christian" publication and I mentioned to him my deep respect for the principles and practices of Buddhism. As we parted, he wished me luck in "converting" all my Buddhist friends to (his particular version of) Christianity.

Yeah, right.

Failing the 'Reality Check'

2006-01-18T17:03:00.000-08:00

Do you ever come across an article that instantly clears up your confusion over some topic in the news? The ol' cartoon light bulb goes on in your brain, and in this piercing new illumination the situation makes sense.

That's how I felt about this recent piece from John Steinberg of Raw Story, in which he explains our nation's current failure to face even the most basic precepts of reason about our dark political circumstances. (It's a fairly long article, so I'll just excerpt a few of the high points. I highly recommend the whole shebang, which you'll find here.)

One of the basic questions about how we make our way through the world is, “What do you do when belief and data collide?” A core tenet of post-Enlightenment Western society is that a rational person will drop a hypothesis that is contradicted by good empirical evidence. It is the scientific method enshrined by Descartes and Bacon, and, for good or ill, it has given us every scrap of technology and science. But we see evidence in every corner that this is not how people live their lives.

Bizarre hybrids like “Creation Science” notwithstanding, fundamentalist religion rejects reason. Reason embraces the possibility of error; absolutist religion must deny it. By definition, Fundamentalists maintain belief by rejecting the data.

Look at the declining role of science and reason in our society and wonder how we could be anywhere but this sorry juncture. A 2001 Gallup poll found that 45 percent of Americans believe evolution is flat-out wrong; the Washington Times reports that more than 60 percent of Americans believe that the Biblical Genesis and Noah’s Ark stories are literally true. True believers are pulling their children out of public school by the thousands to avoid contaminating them with unwanted questions. All of those children are being bred to believe what they are told, and that the world view of their parents and teachers is correct — simply because they say so.

The brilliant cynic Karl Rove saw that the religious right had manufactured millions of Americans programmed to follow without asking questions or demanding accountability. In short, America’s heartland had produced a substantial population that believes rather than thinks. Rove understood that all he had to do was provide a leader callous enough to speak their code and claim the shepherd’s mantle. The subtle part of Karl Rove’s subtle genius is that he has positioned Bush not merely as President, but as Messiah — the touchstone of a belief system. That he accomplished this feat while flying under the radar of the mainstream press is one of the great feats of modern politics.

If you think of the Bush White House as a Church, many things begin to make sense. Religious leaders don’t take hostile questions at press conferences, or debate policy with non-believers. Followers do not debate their infallibility. Non-believers are hectored, then ignored, and finally scorned. And most significantly, fundamentalists create belief systems that banish critical thinking. As the Catholic Church learned hundreds of years ago, reason cannot be tethered to dogma, and inevitably contradicts it. Fundamentalist leaders know this, and tie reason to the devil instead.

Accept that reason is no longer essential to decision-making, and a host of policies snap into focus. The decision to invade Iraq is now the most obvious assault on reality-based decision-making, but there are many others. Global warming is denied in the face of virtual consensus among scientists; billions of dollars have been transferred to defense contractors building missile defense systems that most experts agree will be useless; energy policy assumes infinite resources; environmental policy suspends belief in cause and effect. The old separation between church and state has become a separation between church and reality, and government increasingly stands opposite reality.

As the actions and polices of this Administration show, faith-based government obviates the need for Constitutional protections. Any American sixth grader should know that “checks and balances” form the basis of our system of government. What we usually talk about are the ways each of the three branches of our government limits the excesses of the others. But at root, they all depend on a more fundamental kind of checking and balancing: the reality check. And when reality ceases to be the touchstone for policy, the very concept of checks and balances loses meaning.

The result has been a tragic symbiosis. Its value to Bush et al. is obvious: as Mel Brooks once said, it is good to be the King. God’s powers are by definition absolute, yet God, despite His omnipotence, takes a pass on accountability. The worse things become, the more tenaciously true believers cling to their views of Him. A tragedy like 9/11 might make others question their faith, but not the Bush disciples. A dangerous world increases the need for comfort, and if filling that need requires a belief in the objectively false (like Saddam-9/11 links, or Iraqi WMDs), so be it. Pointing out that Bush did nothing to prevent 9/11, or has made us less safe with his new crusade, is unavailing. The faithful vest in the object of their faith attributes based not on reality, but the size of the hole they expect him to fill. A sickening spiral ensues: the further Bush drifts from the moorings of reality, the stronger the support from his disciples becomes.

2006: The Year in Advance

2006-01-14T10:00:00.000-08:00

The good folks at Birmingham Weekly graciously asked me to look into my crystal ball and predict what the new year might hold for us all, so I offer those ramblings herewith as my two cents' worth on the subject. And fairly priced, at that...

***

Few things will dampen a good New Year’s buzz faster than to start invoking the ghosts of Victorian Era poets, but one Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) coined the ultimate go-to line for prognosticators when he wrote “The past is prologue.” And he’s never been more on the money than this month in which American political history turns the corner from 2005 to 2006.

True, every year has a habit of churning up unexpected events that no sensible person could have predicted in his/her wildest dreams. But the issues already on the plate of sloppy leftovers that the Bush administration must deal with in the next 12 months can’t help but shake up the nation’s political picture in major, and quite possibly historic, ways.

Hey, we can dream, can’t we? Some best-case scenarios:

—The domestic spying scandal has not even begun dribbling out specific unsavory information that will offend a growing percentage of Americans. Ideally, some of those Americans will be in sufficient places of power to make a difference. A completely separate issue: Our friendly telecommunications giants apparently said “No problem!” to the government’s request that they open up easy spy portals to all our most private information. This, without even the courtesy of informing us of same via the small-print disclaimers on the back of our monthly bills. Can you say “Lawsuits”?

—The Congressional bribery (aka Abramoff) scandal will give the spy mess a good run for its money, both in the increasing number of “persons of interest” and the lengths to which resulting court trials (televised, with any luck) will drag on to Election Day 2006 and beyond.

—Karl Rove’s and Scooter Libby’s great CIA leak lapse appeared to be the only big investigatory show in town as recently as October. But it will now have to jockey for headlines in the media as prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s ongoing investigation continues to tighten the screws. The second grand jury is already seated for the new phase, and it’s a logical guess that it won’t take Fitz till springtime to bring them up to speed on what they’re looking at and get down to business. Meanwhile, in the background:

—Everybody talks about the weather, and Swinburne’s past-is-prologue pronouncement will be nowhere more true than in matters meteorological. The unprecedented tropical storms of autumn have already given way to historic extreme winter across parts of the globe, and January has barely started. It shouldn’t surprise us if the coming hurricane season in the U.S. is as bad or worse than the one we just faced. And chances are, the government’s profoundly failed response capabilities as highlighted by Katrina will not have improved appreciably in the interim—no matter how extensively former FEMA head Michael Brown (immortalized as “heck of a job” Brownie) fulfills his government consultant contract by listing the ways in which he goofed up.

—The monumental human tragedy that is Iraq, which went from bad to worse in 2005, will stay on that trajectory throughout the current year, presuming that the American military remains there in force. If significant withdrawals begin soon enough, the situation could level off at “worse” for weeks or months at a time. History scholar Juan Cole, the most consistently credible voice on Iraq that I’ve heard yet, this week made 10 detailed predictions for 2006. The short version: compared to Dr. Cole, I’m a giddy optimist.

—The monumental debt the U.S. has run up with China alone, as a result of ill-considered tax cuts, corporate welfare, and runaway war spending may not exactly be called in by the creditor, but the leash of usury will be publicly tugged in some fashion that is, at the very least, embarrassing.

—On a brighter note, there’s technology! The “good guys” of nonprofits and philanthropy will continue to make more computers and other communication devices affordable enough for disadvantaged populations around the world. Not a panacea, by any means, and not without growing pains, including the inevitable clashes over government censorship. But overall, a surprisingly potent force for liberty and for good.

—And on the high-tech home front, the remaining 73 people in the continental U.S. who do not currently maintain a personal blog will see the error of their ways and sign up. As a result, Americans will be so occupied with writing blogs that the reading of blogs will have to be outsourced to a series of Third World countries, whose economies will boom proportionately.

—Concurrent with the blog victory, the remaining 89 people in the continental U.S. who do not currently own an iPod music player (or reasonable cheap clone thereof) will see the error of their ways and buy one. As a result, the music programming of the ravenous MP3 players will have to be outsourced to a series of Third World countries, whose economies (and eclectic tastes in music) will boom proportionately.

In other words, a win-win.

A Sign of Hope in Winter

2006-01-11T07:35:00.000-08:00

After working for several days of bleak midwinter in the mountains of northeastern Tennessee, I can verify that spring is still a good ways off. Not a leaf-bud or a jonquil to be seen.

I did, however, spot one hopeful sign of better times ahead: a young man picking up his two daughters at an elementary school had a bumper sticker on his car that said MY KIDS CAN'T AFFORD FOR ME TO VOTE REPUBLICAN.

I've looked online for a supplier of those stickers, and can't find one. If you know of a place they're available for purchase, please drop me a note.

Thinking self-improvement...within reason

2006-01-08T06:26:00.000-08:00

There's nothing quite like the first untarnished week of a brand-new year, when we all have an extra spring in our step and a head full of ambitious ideas just waiting to be tried out.

Obviously, this state of affairs is both unnatural and medically risky, so it’s a good thing that human nature soon kicks in and returns us to normal before too much damage can be done.

But admit it…when this optimistic delusion finally wears off (probably around 10 p.m. tonight, when you realize that tomorrow is not another holiday from work), don’t you sometimes crave to feel that giddy sensation of power and control once more, if only fleetingly, as the brave new year grinds down daily into history?

Don’t you wonder if there’s even a single idea for self-improvement that’s realistic enough to survive until at least Valentine’s Day?

Don’t you wonder if there’s such a thing as an impervious dream, one that doesn’t crumple at the first sign of misfortune or duress?

Don’t you wonder if this will be the year when the field of String Theory in quantum physics is indeed proven to be the missing link between Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and the realization of a Unified Field Theory?

Okay, scratch that last one.

If you long for realistic self-improvement strategies, you’re not alone.

This year, I’m banking on the concept of “Think small.” (Last year, I banked on the concept of “Think again,” but that’s another story entirely.)

As a result, rather than starting 2006 with a bushel of resolutions so grandiose that they’ll only be discarded week by week like slightly rancid banana peels, I’m starting small and adding on gradually.

And when I say “small,” I mean small.

In January, for instance, I have pledged to spend at least five minutes a day performing some task that will not benefit me or anyone else immediately, but only in the long run.

Last night, as an example, when I unloaded all the Tupperware bowls from the dishwasher, I did not crudely jam them into the high kitchen cabinet above the oven where they would fall out on our heads at some future date, as is my habit.

Instead, I actually dragged a stepladder up from the basement, emptied the high cabinet of various debris and varmint carcasses and threw away the six grungy, orphaned pieces of storage-ware that lacked either bottoms or lids and were apparently placed there at some point during the Civil War.

Which, by chance, exactly made room for the good Tupperware to sit in carefully arranged ranks for future use, the big bowls in back and the smaller ones in front, a home economics teacher’s dream.

Not to brag.

What to do tonight, for an encore?

It’s too soon to say. Necessity is the mother of invention, though (or as an alternate version goes, “Necessity is a mother”) and if inspiration doesn’t strike before bedtime I’ll have to improvise.

A similarly manageable personal resolution to add to my plate for February is just a distant dream, at this point. Much less March, April, and…whatever they call those other months, nowadays. Why borrow trouble?

Or as Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount, “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” I’m fairly sure we’re told somewhere, probably in the Book of Thessalonians or the Book of Titus, that this applies equally to New Year’s resolutions. But I’ll have to look it up to be certain.

(The only verse whose source I know for sure is the one that Lewis Grizzard used to quote, from Leviticus: “Thou shalt not put sugar in thine cornbread.”)

In the meantime, I’m taking 2006 day by day.

And if this does turn out to be the big year when Einstein is finally able to say, “I told you so!” then that’ll just be icing on the cake.

In memory of Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

2006-01-07T07:13:00.000-08:00

Can poetry be prophecy? We should hope so...

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!

--Langston Hughes

(Thanks to Tristesse at firedoglake.com for the quote)

Spirituality versus Religion

2006-01-06T06:28:00.000-08:00

Much food for thought in this quote of the day from filmmaker Oliver Stone:

"Organized religion is for people who are afraid of hell. Spirituality is for people who have already been to hell."

The Death of Fiction?

2006-01-05T17:13:00.001-08:00

One morning back in 1991, I woke up and turned on NPR’s “Morning Edition” news broadcast and learned that the Soviet Union had just been dissolved.

Ordinarily, this would be really good news. The only problem was, at that point I had been getting up long before daylight every morning for almost five years, to work on the manuscript of a novel before I had to be at my office job. It was a long fantasy novel, about a group of Tibetan monks with psychic powers who had been entrusted with staving off the coming Apocalypse. And of course the Apocalypse, as we all knew back then, would come in the form of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union.

But on that day in 1991, after five years of hard work, I found out that the Apocalypse had been canceled. Talk about mixed emotions.

So the very next morning, I went back to the drawing board...rewriting the book from scratch. I can testify that spending cold winter mornings before daylight trying to imagine a different way for the world to end is not exactly a prescription for good mental health. It would be almost four more years before the new version of the novel was finished and on the bookshelf.

So imagine my dismay recently, while my new book of fiction is on the publisher’s printing press, when I open up the New York Times Book Review and see an article saying that fiction is dead. It was an interview with author V.S. Naipaul, and here’s what he said, exactly, about fiction:

“That business of making up narratives, making up stories, has done its work. It was very dominant in the 19th century, in France and England and in Russia. And then there was nothing more for that form to do. Forms have to change.”

What that form should change to, Naipaul says, is nonfiction…if we want to be taken seriously, we should instead be writing only real facts, about the real world.

Now…understand that every few years, at least during my lifetime, somebody comes out and pronounces that the novel is dead. Or the short-story is dead. Or even, that reading is dead, what with video games or DVDs or whatever the high-tech buzz of the day is about. Naipaul, though, is a lot harder to ignore. Not only is he a Nobel Prize winner, he’s also written more than a dozen novels of his own, before he apparently kicked the habit.

And to be honest, I know where he’s coming from, on this. If the barbarians are marching toward your city, and you have the choice of buying either a newspaper or a good novel, any sane person will buy the newspaper. The news will tell you who, what, when, and where the barbarians are. What the news only pretends to do, though, is tell you why. Why do they want to kill us? What on earth are they thinking? What are they feeling? How are they like us, and how are they different?

For those answers, you have to look to a different type of story. As another Nobel Prize winner, William Faulkner, said in his Nobel acceptance speech: “There is only one kind of story worth telling, and that is the story of the human heart in conflict with itself.”

What Faulkner realized is that the barbarians are always marching toward your city—every city, everywhere—and they always will be. Only their names change. Ironic as it is, the larger truth of any breaking news is only accessible to us through an act of imagination. An act of art...by people who are willing to take that horrible journey into an imagined stranger’s heart.

If Naipaul is right, I ought to call my publisher and tell them to stop the presses. I ought to take 25 years worth of short fiction and rewrite it as a book of short facts…adding footnotes about the global economy and Middle East politics and the price of heating oil. But every fiction writer around the globe who will sit down tomorrow morning to a blank page and try to imagine a world is literally betting his or her life that Naipaul is mistaken.

One of those writers is a novelist from New York named Francine Prose, who wrote this in a letter to the Times about Naipaul’s comments:

“Few people, I assume, read ‘Romeo and Juliet’ for its insights into Veronese culture, or ‘Oedipus Rex’ for its grasp of Greek politics,” she writes. “Rather, in every era, in every place, men and women continue to be born, grow up, fall in love, marry or not, live in families or alone, bear children or not, grow old and die. And strangely, regardless of whether or not we approve, people stubbornly insist in finding these events as important as the clash between belief and unbelief in post-colonial societies.

“What fiction continues to offer,” Prose concludes, “is profound and detailed information about what it is like…any time, anywhere…to be a human being.”

I doubt that even William Faulkner could have said it better.

_________
(For an audio version of this post in MP3 format, click here)

The 'Quaint' Beauty of College Football

2006-01-02T12:32:00.000-08:00

When you look in the dictionary under "sports fan" you'll never find a photograph of me, despite my stint many moons ago impersonating a sports editor for a newspaper at a time when I needed a job and it was the only one they had open.

That said, there's a certain spot in my heart that nothing else can touch but college football. And if there's a more sublime use for a sunny, springlike half-day of January than watching Alabama squeak past Texas Tech in the last four seconds of the Cotton Bowl, it's a pastime I'll have to learn about in paradise.

Why, then, this lingering core of sorrow, deep in my gut? What's happened to the sense of total joy I could feel 20 years ago...or even 10...for at least a few hours of a perfect day after a hard-fought glowing victory? I suspect it all comes down to the word "sportsmanship."

Call me naive, but when I see a strapping young kid lay a bone-jarring tackle on an opposing team's lineman, then watch the tackler linger for a few seconds to be sure the downed man is okay, even reach out an arm to help him back to his feet, I'm not immune from shedding a few tears. I guess it's the idealistic notion that even a sport with violence at its very heart can be played within gentlemanly rules--played for the love of a fair contest, rather than just for spite of an opponent.

In that sense, college football hasn't changed. No matter how physically imposing you are as a player, if you try to cheat--or even if you just act like a doofus, by doing a cheap end-zone dance to symbolically rub the other side's nose in the dirt after you've scored on them--a whistle immediately blows and there's a penalty to be paid for your behavior. Identical and unchanging rules, enforced by the referees on David and Goliath alike. Character does count.

It's a wonderful fantasy, and (speaking of naive) we once could believe that such a system was not limited to a dozen or so Saturdays of the year on isolated swatches of green grass but actually represented what our country, above all other countries, stood for. No longer. If the people who now have control of the United States government can unilaterally decide that the Geneva Conventions of Armed Conflict are "quaint" and "outdated," then they surely must hold the elaborate code of sportsmanship in college football beneath contempt.

This in itself would be disturbing enough, but roughly half of American adults who vote in elections apparently consider this brave new no-rules world to be a big improvement over the old-fashioned laws of enlightened civilizaton. Remember the outcry on radio talk shows, a while back, when an Olympics committee decided it was bad sportsmanship for spectators at the events to wave the flag theatrically and chant "USA" in a taunting manner when our side is winning? Communists! Traitors! the talk-show blusterers said. What's the use of winning if you can't strut like a rooster and symbolically rub the losers' noses in the dirt until they're bloody? God bless America, and devil take the hindmost.

That's the core of sorrow that I feel, every waking minute of every day and in my dreams besides. If there's any silver lining, it's that while this spirit of darkness holds sway in the halls of our government, a template still exists for hope and civilized behavior in a violent and threatening world--even if that fantasy is now limited to a dozen or so Saturdays a year on isolated swatches of grass across a nation that once held such great promise.

A Year Ends, a Blog Begins

2005-12-31T12:30:00.000-08:00

The last day of an old year seems as good a time as any to start a new venture, especially since the December holidays have given me time to stick a toe into the brave new Weblog universe by reading a lot of blogs (you'll find my two current favorites in the "Links" box to the right) and becoming an enthusiastic, if wet-behind-ears, convert. So, here goes...

In keeping with my resolution to find out more about my family's Scots-Irish/Cherokee heritage in the coming year, I should point out that today is Hogmanay:

Hogmanay \hog-muh-NAY; HOG-muh-nay\, noun:
The name, in Scotland, for New Year's Eve, on which children go about singing and asking for gifts; also, a gift, cake, or treat given on New Year's Eve. [The origin of this word is unknown.]

And remember, you heard about it here first.

Some 20 years ago, I had the good fortune to travel through Scotland--and the bad fortune to only be able to spend half a day there, most of it walking the streets of downtown Glasgow. Lo-o-ong story. The short version is, encountering the place where I know now that my distant ancestors lived had an almost supernatural intensity for me, and I spent a good part of the brief afternoon in tears for reasons I only remotely understood. I've been meaning to write about the experience ever since, and seeing as I'm not getting any younger I hope this forum will give me the excuse to get off my rear and take that path in 2006.

Speaking of the new year, hold onto your hat as we zoom quickly from Scotland to Japan for some New Year's Eve haiku from poet Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828). The translation is by professor David G. Lanoue, and I'm grateful to Ruth Bavetta of California, a gifted poet in her own right (own write?) for the heads-up on Issa's work.

***
New Year's morning--
everything is in blossom!
I feel about average.

oh New Year's god
this year too
send help!

a new year begins--
nonsense
piled on nonsense

sunset's bell
finishes it off...
year's last day

today even the
hordes of hell celebrate
the new year

New Year's Day
a lucky, lucky
light blue sky

--Kobayashi Issa