In the eye of the beholder

There is so much talent out there. It's a wonder. We have such easy access to such greatness, it's remarkable. I think that somehow, this has happened to us without our fully being able to appreciate it or adapt to it as a society... From a modern perspective, this evolution of social knowledge began in earnest with books, then with radio and as cars and airplanes broke down the barriers of distance, and then a huge step forward with TV, and then a giant leap forward with the Web. And the phenomenon is only accelerating, what with Google and Youtube and iPods and so on.

Here on my flight to work, with no effort on my part at all, I enjoy:
-- the greatest musicians that have ever lived; enormous, profound talents -- Sally Goodin by Flatt & Scruggs (get up and dance, bastard!), Bottle of Wine by the Kingston Trio (used to love that song as a kid), Whole Lotta Love by Led Zeppelin (right to the core of hell and back), Break on Through by the Doors (that's why the 60s were the Zen era), an aria from Rossini's Aragonese, sung magnificantly by Cecilia Bartoli (how can humans create such beauty?), Neil Young's Too Far Gone (have you never felt it?), Matters of the Heart by Tracy Chapman (oh Tracy, I love you so! who could be as vulnerable and perceptive and honest as you are!) and so on.

-- George Carlin's observations on the various kinds of stupid people -- "fuckin stupid", "full a shit", and "fuckin nuts"... Oh yeah. It's like a godsend to have someone tell the truth.

-- Payton Manning's glorious outstandingness surgically dissecting the Denver defense, managing his offense. He's so head and shoulders above everyone else, it's inspiring. He's taken his great physical talent, and his disciplined preparation, and his obvious competitiveness, and added an element of creativity and intelligence -- reinventing the very definition of quarterback, so that opponents live in fear that he has tricks up his sleeve that they have not even imagined, or that they cannot keep up with -- and they are right. He does what every great leader does: he is unbound by traditional definitions; he excels at the core competencies of his role, while adding his own significant stamp, pushing the boundaries, inventing the future. A model of achievement.

It sometimes seems to me that everyone is talented, although there are other times I despair that everyone is an idiot -- definitely a tale of two cities. The people near me on this very flght are composing videos or running companies or architecting breakthrough new buildings on their laptops. As we speak, my good friends are inventing the future of social networking and social entrepreneurship, are brilliant lights from political activism to medieval literature, and more. One looks out the window of a New York hotel -- and the streets and windows are aflower with genius and dynamism, with all the bubbling fervor of self-actualization in the Brave New World. I am myself, perhaps, quite brilliant in my way :-)

Who could be ungrateful for such gifts? If only I could absorb and learn their lessons as well as they deserve, and as well as I should, if I could retain the open, adaptive mindset of youth.

But even the young cannot appreciate their gifts; indeed, I observe that most young people are remarkably parochial in what they can appreciate, in the stingy poverty of their awareness and openness. They do not yet know what they don't know, they are not even really aware that such a category exists, so their world-view is tightly circumscribed by what is fashionable or grossly attractive. Even the most brilliant among them cannot have the depth of experience to perceive the subtleties of importance and talent, and their attempts at insight ring hollow; indeed laughable, albeit noble.

The truth is, the richness of our social knowledge has far far far outpaced our human capacity. The child of man is waiting to be born, who will be ready and able to process all the manifold knowledge and beauty and power that their forebears have brought into being, and who will move forward the world into an unimaginable new frontier.

Thoughts on the flight home

One of my favorite songs ever is Hollaback Girl, by Gwen Stefani. I love Gwen: she's a great writer, extremely creative and personal, but slick and catchy and professional too -- true talent, brilliant range -- and all that as a musician. Hollaback Girl tells a story beautifully, perfectly capturing the feel of the moment and the character in high school. The language, the pace, the style, the silliness (what an inspired use of "Bananas"!), all are perfect.

But my favorite part is a sentence that I mis-heard, and was oh so disappointed to learn was really something else. The real line is the perfectly reasonable "It's not just gonna happen like that" -- where "happen" is pronounced "hap-bin". Well, I heard it as "It's not just gonna have been like that..", which put me into a kind of grammatical ecstacy.

In my version, the sentence writhes through tenses in a way that -- to me -- perfectly expresses the complex thought processes we all perform all the time, immediately and without effort, but which are so hard to convey. The singer does not think it would be OK for the situation to work out in such a way that she had allowed it to be like that. Looking forward, she anticipates that inaction would result in a future where the past had established an untenable precedent, which, here in the current moment while she has a chance to act, she realizes she must prevent. It is not the specific action she must prevent, it is the future in which that action has been allowed to have just taken place, without resistance.

I love how perfectly her pithy phrase captures this, with no hard work, just right to the point, and in language you might truly expect to hear in the mind of a high school cheerleader. It sounds so natural, although when you allow your mind to course over the phrase, it wraps and curls around itself in a lovely, serpentine, moving kind of way that is hours of entertainment for a freak like me. How sad that this was not what she said at all!

And another thing:

If and when I die, and there is a funeral or a celebration or cermony of some sort, someone should please play Sam Cooke's Twistin the Night Away. Nobody else's version, please, but that one. Of course you can play lots and lots and lots of other music too -- Talkin About a Revolution, and Cherry Cherry and Moonshadow and It Aint Me, Babe, and The Battle of New Orleans and Rockin in the Free World and It's In His Kiss and Meet Me at Mary's Place and so many many more. You need to bury me with a whole shitload of my favorite music, playing out loud so the worms can hear it and the grass trembles with it. Beethoven and Mozart too, and all that stuff.

But please play Twistin the Night Away, and everybody dance, or everyone who wants to anyway, and think of me dancing in the upstairs bedroom of the Mission Viejo house, with Ama downstairs washing the dishes and my wife around the house somewhere doing other chores or helping Ama, and a happy young me up there every night holding my one-and-a-half or two-year-old girl on my shoulder, in my arms, singing to the music, swinging her in my arms, tossing her out this way, back this way, up and back, twirling and laughing, night after night. Dancing to the music with my baby. It makes me want to cry every time I hear it. There is no better feeling. There has never been and there will never be anything that meant as much to me as that. Or holding her gently to sleep on my shoulder as we played Moonshadow, humming softly, easing her down onto the bed. Or chasing her down the slide and sitting and telling stories and walking and playing with her in the park at her pre-school. Or walking her home from school. I want to go with that in my heart.

Play, Drujienna, Play!

Weekend mornings are always good for thinking… I wake up every day around 5:30 or 6am no matter what, but on Sunday, my wife won’t wake up for about 4 more hours, and we’re lucky if we see the baby before noon.

So I have gallons of time to lie in a semi-dream state, and then rub the crust out of my eyes and wander over to the kitchen to make some coffee; then slowly stretch and decide to go out for a jog, and enjoy a couple of slow miles in the early sunshine, getting my thoughts together; then hang out watching Meet The Press for a few minutes, waiting to cool down from the embarrassing sweat that breaks out after just a couple of miles; then a nice shower and cuddle with the dog; then make my weekend breakfast of bacon and eggs and toast and another cup of coffee… and they’re STILL asleep! Holy cow, it’s like a time warp; like I’ve discovered the secret of infinite life or something.

So you may have noticed, if you could read the horribly unreadable previous sentence, that I do catch a segment or two of political BS-talk on the tube as part of this ritual. This morning I caught exactly two stories. One – the highly publicized incident where the woman was ignored while she died a slow and painful death right on the floor of the Emergency Room at King-Drew hospital. Two – the Iraqi Foreign Minister talking about how the American timetable for results in Iraq was much too speedy and unrealistic.

Well, I think both stories can benefit from a little straight-talk politically incorrect analysis. Here goes.

The woman who died at King Drew had been in there earlier in the week, and the nurse in charge of triage thought she was a big, fat complainer. So when she came back, that nurse told her to sit down, shut up, and wait her turn, meaning “you can just sit there forever, you annoying fat Mexican woman; you’ll get no service here.”

King Drew is essentially a black hospital, and only exists because white city council members are unable to hold this complete basket-case accountable for its failures, either because they are simply afraid, or more likely, because their minds have been so deformed by years of politically correct appeasement that they believe they are doing the right thing. Lord have mercy, when good people lie to themselves, double-thinking their way through, averting their minds from the truth.

Talk about the bigotry of low expectations! It's incredible how both black and white self-aggrandizing politicians create and perpetuate this sense that blacks or other "minorities" should be treated by a different standard. It's the most destructive thing I have ever seen. I can understand why such a theory might have held 40 years ago, when civil rights changes were alive, and one could fairly argue that special treatment was worth a try to make up for prior wrongs. But the flaw in this approach is all-too-obvious now -- unless you don't want to see the truth. It degrades the person given the special coddling. It undermines achievement. It destroys potential. It creates artificial divisions and competition, where none should exist.

Back to the scene of the crime. Everyone around knew that the official word from this triage nurse was that this patient was “just a complainer”, so they ignored her. Some not-too-subtle intra-ethnic racism was at work – “if you’re not black; if we don’t know you or like you, you’ll be treated like garbage. We do anything we like here… we’re Dr. King’s legacy; we’re an entitlement from the sacred Watts Riots days, and no one can touch us.” Not to mention incompetence, along with an all-too-common and banal bureaucratic mindset: “I’m just doing my job here… don’t make things difficult”, and the related “Just follow the rules; who the hell knows why, or even if those are the rules – just stop bothering me.”

So why did this happen? Because the staff there are perfectly secure in their entrenched, civil-service, artificially-entitled universe. They’re safe, because the political CLASS treats them as if they're exempt from accountability; so in practice, they are.

What should be done? They should be held accountable. They should all be fired, plain and simple. All of them; the whole staff, top to bottom. Then privatize the thing – I don’t want to pay any taxes to support that kind of care. You do know YOU are paying for it PERSONALLY, right? – the funds don’t just fall from the sky, you know. As citizens, you should expect this hospital to provide BETTER care than average, and to be highly efficient and competent in executing its public mandate – providing great VALUE.

Instead, it’s a sink-hole, spending MY money right out of MY wallet, but I get no say… The amazing thing is that 10s of millions have already been expended to try to rescue this mess, and millions more are on the way – for sensitivity training, no doubt, and management consulting, and extra staff, and so on. And why all this money? – because they’re performing BADLY. Yes… they are REWARDED for performing badly. They get extra attention and money, and get into a negotiating position where they are entitled to ask for additional, special resources, precisely because they perform BADLY.

Could there be a clearer indication that the political process is off the rails?

Well, let’s look at the Iraqi story. This asshole Foreign Minister is saying that they need lots more time… that it took the Americans 13 years after winning their Revolution before they had a Constitution.

OK, asshole. That’s fine – take all the time you need. BUT NOT WITH MY MONEY OR WITH THE LIFE OF MY SON! Who the hell decided that we need to be there, spending hundreds of billions of dollars (a truly staggering sum) and losing thousands of precious lives, to give corrupt Iraqis time to play their power games, some corruptly on the side of horrendously corrupt insider Western powers; others just as viciously on the side of other players in the Great Game?

Holy shit, that makes me mad.

I supported the war originally, unlike almost anyone else who reads this. I still think that it could have been the correct policy – that’s how far to that side I am – if properly executed and followed up. But what we should have done, after the military victory, after Saddam’s army was defeated, was to say the following:

“Congratulations! We’ve removed the dictator – who was oppressing you, and whom we considered a threat. You now have your republic and your freedom, if you can keep it (to plagiarize Ben Franklin). We’re going to leave now [waves hand in the air, indicating an exit, stage right]. Some of our army will be stationed nearby [Jordan, Israel, Kuwait, Turkey, etc.], most will be back home. You are free to do whatever the hell you want to govern yourselves – including a Civil War if you like. BUT – if you become a threat to us, ever, or if we believe that elements have taken over that are a humanitarian outrage, we will come back in and overthrow whoever is in power again. So be careful.”

We could still say that. We SHOULD. We should not be there ONE MORE DAY.

Why don’t we? It’s a crisis of leadership and morality. There is not ONE politician or leader in this country with the balls to speak the truth, or the courage to hold others accountable, and hold ourselves accountable, to commit our strength to our convictions. We have, as a nation and a culture, grown stupid and weak. We are afraid to think clearly, or to put ourselves on the line, or to act in accordance with our beliefs. And as a result, intensely corrupt elements like the Bushes and their cabal are able to lead us by the nose. As a result, our media is useless; filling time with American Idol and Entertainment Tonight and mealy-mouthed shoutfest commentary, completely unable to report honestly or to analyze intelligently (and with no interest in doing so either).

The same underlying forces apply in the case of the other major news story of the day: the Immigration Bill. There are many interesting policy points there, and it’s a great object lesson in special interest politics and the distortions and dishonesty it breeds. But even more important, perhaps, is the simple truth that this bill is being considered without ANY discussion of what should be the policy… it’s all about the horse-race of which power center can get what it wants, and how it plays… Who are we, as a people, when we don’t even know OR WANT TO THINK ABOUT what should be our policy? What does that tell us about what our real policy is?

Have a good Father’s Day, everyone. Happy Father’s day to my own father, and to me :-)

At the end of the day

Blood pours down the window as the thunder rages.
This moment is the culmination of the ages.
Monsters wheel and scream unheard, the air is full of flame.
Babies squirm, hearing the call, remembering the grave.

You and I spent the afternoon walking hand in hand,
The air was cool and bright as our feet slipped through the sand.
Now the ground erupts beneath us and we plummet into darkness as we rise -
The past and future whirling past each other, the colors draining from our eyes.

I have cowered by the chimney, seeing the blood beneath my skin.
But the lovely false promises of music and love redeem our sin.

***

I don't think the above is any good. "This moment is the culmination of the ages" -- ugh! The whole thing sounds to me like a parody of a pretentious high school student after dropping acid for the first time. The lines are flaccid, the wording blurry.

But this was the best I could do to express this particular sentiment.. what can I say?

The title is deliberately deceptive, as are some of the lines. My sense is that it would be easy to read this as a description of Armageddon, of the rapture, and I am using that to make a point. I believe this is the way the world is all the time, and that this is in fact the meaning of most apocalyptic writing -- a mystical perception rather than a literal prediction.

The distinct characteristic of existence is that all moments are equally real and equally "present"; they can never lose their reality. Our choices are permanent. Our parents had real childhoods. The ancients walk among us. The floating of a strange flower petal a trillion years from now on a faraway world is as real as this table here. But at the same time, for us, there is only one "present": the unique moment of the here and now. We are capable of experiencing both of these aspects of existence.

The human condition

The spider I killed in my shower
Struggled and screamed as she fell.
She slid down the wall
Curling into a ball
Down the drain as she damned me to hell.

The spider who lives in my shower

The spider who lives in my shower
Wakes every morning at dawn.
She walks up and down walls
With no trouble at all,
And spins spidery dreams all day long.

The spider who lives in my shower
Likes to go out to the bar.
We laugh and we joke,
We drink and we smoke.
And when we’re at home, there we are.

The spider who lives in my shower
Could out-talk the moon on a bet.
She dances all night;
Gives the girls quite a fright.
Then a shower, some bugs, and she’s set.

The spider who lives in my shower
Has spectacles perched on her nose
At least – I suppose –
One never quite knows –
I’ve never been up quite that close.

The spider who lives in my shower
Has a habit of eating in bed.
“Take a few tasty mites –
Rolled up nice with some spice;
They squirt when you chew ‘em,” she said.

The spider who lives in my shower
Paints her toenails with polish and flair.
She likes to be read
To when going to bed
And to wiggle her legs in the air.

I don't like Americans

I’ve said earlier that I love America, and I do. I love American music, American writing, American style. I like everywhere that I’ve been in America. It’s an amazing, gorgeous, bountiful land – there is no more beautiful, richly textured, exciting, or diverse country anywhere on Earth – from the Rockies to the Rogue River, from the big shoulders of Chicago and New York to the warm, welcoming neighborliness and quiet grace of it’s thousands of small towns. America has a history of greatness, with a spirit that combines the intrepid explorer, the tireless inventor, and the ruthless capitalist; the optimistic, ambitious and brilliant new-world-building visions of Hamilton and Jefferson, and the profound integrity and gritty, manly strength of Washington and Lincoln. A can-do, no-BS, I’ll-believe-it-when-I-see-it, don’t-give-me-none-of-your-crap foundation that I love. We have fostered the greatest intellectuals, scientists, thinkers, and innovators of modern times. We have a legal system whose architecture I deeply admire and appreciate, whose protections of personal liberty and freedom are among our greatest assets, and whose culture of fairness is the foundation of a good life.

But, that said, I can’t stand America. It is filled with incredibly rude and stupid people, and getting worse by the day. It is completely incompetent. It deserves (and is rapidly marching into) the ash-heap of history.

What was my first clue, you ask? Well, I’ve always felt this way, so it’s been a gradual elevation of this feeling over my counter-balancing affection for my homeland. But perhaps one clear milestone was the Katrina experience. That, for me, was an unwelcome and unpleasant awakening: a disillusionment that has dominated my attitude over time. It showed me that even in the face of crisis, Americans are completely unable to get anything done, or even to formulate an idea of what should be done. We ran around with heads up our collective asses for a few weeks, while old people and children wandered the streets, thirsty and homeless and uncared-for. Then the politicos elbowed onto the scene, with their crocodile tears and canned outrage, barfing up paper and proclamations and media bullshit by the ton for awhile, eventually resulting in a plan to dump hundreds of billions of nonexistent dollars into the open hands of insider-connected reconstruction vendors, who would squander and mis-manage and skim it in partnership with their vast ecosystem of corrupt and brain-dead politicians and other hangers-on – unions, illegal immigrants, overseers, consultants, and all the other players in the shell game to nowhere that is modern America.

How can one have any faith in a country that would handle itself that way? A great city, dead, under our noses. A gigantic sink-hole of precious money and attention and resources, with zero result. It’s the same story we see every day, a banal story of potholes and wasted association fees and incompetent school administration and so on, but writ large and visible – a beacon of our downfall, impossible to ignore.

It is no exaggeration to say that there is not a single competent public official in America. There is not a single government program that works – not one. In every case, it would be better to have done nothing official at all, and to let people fend for themselves. (I may have to make a single exception – which proves the rule – for the Forest Service and National Parks – not because Katrina works there :-) but because it’s a relic from an older time, when government operated as the instrument of the social compact, and is relatively unchanged from that period, left alone in relatively competent and caring pursuit of it’s obscure and harmless mandate.) But people get the government they deserve. Americans as a breed have become stupid and nasty, pure and simple. They don’t know any better. Their politicians are themselves.

Yesterday, I had to fly cross-country, which always reminds me forcefully of what America has become. The entire experience was one long drowning in a sea of insane stupidity. The ticket counter agent slouching and smirking, wandering off to spend a few minutes talking about nothing, gabbing with her buddies, while a line of travelers helplessly re-checked their watches and shifted from one leg to the other, waiting for their turn to go through the mind-boggling and random rat-maze that getting to a plane has become. I actually had plenty of time, but the inconsideration of the counter people for those who might well miss their flights, who still had the hideously inefficient luggage drop-off and the endless, pointless security checkpoints to get through was enough to make me scream. It takes them minutes to do what should take seconds – if anyone with a brain had bothered to think when they set up their systems, or if anyone in management were actually concerned with results, or if the stupid counter people actually had enough wherewithal to be able to add two numbers, or understand what anyone said to them, or to care.

And they’re rude and uncultured and unpleasant and ugly while they do it. Sorry, but they are. People naturally are beautiful – in their natural, unspoiled state, they are like dogs, all good all the time – but people in airports are disgusting. Obese, reeking of hamburgers and unwashed hands, with strangely streaked hair, and ill-fitting, obscene clothes, unable to spell or add, unable to understand or express a simple sentence. The banal, unself-conscious ugliness of most Americans is overwhelmingly obvious, and a sad change from the dignity, capability, and self-respect of our predecessors.

Then, the security “process” – the mad monstrosity, whose sole aim is to employ the very stupidest among us, to slow the pace of social unrest and provide an income stream for the dramatically increasing population of uneducated, unambitious, and unimaginitive among us, who truly have nothing better to do than stumble into their Old Navy clothes, eat a McBreakfast, drop the kids off at DayCare4U, and go off to their job, where they will be paid to mumble, look at pieces of paper, take breaks, and be arbitrary. Later, no doubt, they will be found blobbing on the dirty couch at home, screeching at American Idol, text messaging their votes, calling their friends on their cell phones, or popping down to the mall to gawk at bigger screen TVs and scarf down more food at the Food Court. Lord help us! – why has it been so easy for us to slip into Brave New World?

Every single time I go through this process, I am insulted and amazed. It seems hard to believe that none of this was in place just 5 short years ago – that we have somehow been acculturated to accept this, to not find it shocking, to not rebel against the monstrosity that would impose it. I don’t accept it at all. I tell people all along the way – with a smile and a look that says “you deserve better; you don’t have to do this” – how stupid it is, and how insulting I find it, and how much I recommend that they not allow themselves to be tools of it’s bizarre and dehumanizing force. And although I’ve been through it hundreds of times now, it never fails to shock me – like the woman yesterday who would launch into her memorized 2-minute spiel about what to do with more than 3-ounce bottles of liquid whenever she spied what looked like a bag or other possible container of liquid goods. She spoke in the “I’m only a cog in the machine” voice of a prison guard, loudly reciting the canned Miranda Rights speech with no understanding or intent, not looking at anyone, without any connection to reality at all. She would squint at the boarding passes of old ladies and 5-year old children, grabbing their IDs, mouthing out their names letter by letter as she matched the ID to the boarding pass. Oh my Lord! We live in a world where we pay people to do this baloney all day long, as if they were bits in a software program, and we wonder at the world that results!

And then the rudeness and smelliness and overwhelmingly dehumanized spirit of the airport restaurants and lounges, of the flight attendants who want nothing more than to do nothing, to get to the end of the damn flight and go watch some TV, of the security guards whose only function in an emergency would be to get in the way of anyone who actually knew what to do. The people at the Starbucks who hate coffee and hate people; who are forced to make idiotic, over-priced concoctions for people who merely want to occupy their time with unwanted indulgences, who live in a kind of over-stimulated mindlessness, bouncing from one routinized activity to the next, with no appreciation, no awareness, and no humanity, and not wanting any.

America is filled with people with butts too big to fit into their chairs, ignoring their children who scream and throw potato chips at passersby, talking loudly into their sleek, gadgety cell phones about the sexual episodes of their cousins and their favorite TV stars. People who push in line, who whirl around with elbows flying, coffee spilling, without looking, who squeeze past those waiting patiently, with no consciousness of shame; indeed, rightly perceiving themselves as paragons of their world. Men with ugly shoes mismatched to their sloppy clothes, bellies sloshing over their belts, iPod earbuds jammed into their ears, programming their ant-brains, sunglasses perched stupidly on their necks, stumbling from one sit-down to the next. Women with glossy blond wigs, garish lipstick and waxy foundation smeared across their unhealthy skin, fake smiles and cold eyes ruining their faces, which emerge turtle-like from the rolls of fat hanging off their flabby necks.

Did I mention that they lost my luggage too? Criminy...

Has anyone seen the “Willoughby” Twilight Zone episide?

Walking a mile in his sandals

It's really annoying that pseudo-psychic experiences are such BS... that we really have no clue what they are. Very likely some combination of regular intuition, and aspects of the way the brain and the mind work that we don't fully understand (but are not "psychic"), and suggestion from our pop culture.

It's annoying because there certainly ARE wonderful and amazing things going on, but we can't differentiate them from the ordinary or the downright false. What kind of wonderful and amazing is that?

I know it's not just me, because the whole social conversation about psychic-type stuff is like this... Everyone has the borderline experiences, and no one knows what the heck they are, and any time you examine any claims that sound more amazing, they evaporate under the scrutiny. If anyone knows anything supernatural, they're not explaining it very well.

I happened to be reading this article, and I got this shiver down my spine, and hair standing on the back of my neck kind of thing... as if something was telling me "you walked those streets". Or as if I was actually walking them now, back in the past. Looking around at the dust-caked streets and the bright blue air and the mud, at the people walking past with their stringy hair, ragged robes, and strong bare arms; at the mothers, the donkeys, the children. Looking through my own eyes, inside the mind of another, who was myself.

But it's all such nonsense! I hate having what feels like a real experience, which is most likely a simple passing fancy, a combination of the beautiful day just outside, a bit too much mental fireworks firing randomly after I've just finished off some work-related writing, a bit of wishful thinking, a dash of suspicion that my crazy aunt just might be closer to the truth than I am, that all my hard-won insight is just self-deception after all, and that if I opened my eyes, the universe would be on.

I was telling someone in a letter recently that I often experience what is sometimes called "remote viewing" -- pictures (and smells, and once in awhile, sounds) that are completely unbidden and unexpected, out of the complete blue, at random moments, having nothing to do with anything I'm thinking about or doing, of people and places I've never seen or imagined before or after. But I think it's probably nothing.

***

In other news, in case anyone reading this has not listened to the album The Road To Here by Little Big Town, or to All The Roadrunning by Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris, you've got some things to do, man. God, what great music! What's the line: "O brave new world, that has such people in it"...

Slip me some honey, honey

A couple of you who pass this way may know that I belong to a few "expert" communities, where we blather on at each other in a rather amusing "bees exchanging honey" behavior that's harmless and useless...

In one of those hives, there's recently been a bit of dust-up about whether the forum should be "moderated" -- with posts reviewed and edited and maybe rejected by the moderator. As one might guess, I'm on the side of the "let it all hang out" faction, while some others prefer what they see as the more professional and orderly exchange that moderation ensures.

I made my point about this topic in the form of a mini Twilight Zone-style story... and since I'm lazy, and feel like posting something here, and I kind of liked it, I will let you all (ha!) enjoy it too:

***

Start with a typical scene -- black and white, of course -- with kids playing inside a big 50s-comfy suburban-neighborhood house, watched over by a matronly grandma -- looking suspiciously like our moderator. They'd be real kids, with that 50s kids look -- messy hair, freckled faces -- but unnaturally dressed in kid-sized adult work clothes. They'd be playing with their toys on the carpet of the big living room, rather lackadaisically and unenthusiastically...

One or two of them are arguing with grandma, repeating what is obviously a persistent refrain, an oft-repeated dialogue... "We really want to play outside, grandma. All the kids get to play outside... we'll be extra careful. We'll remember everything you told us... " We see her slowly relenting, slowly bowing to the pressure.

She smiles. "Alright kids, I'll let you try it just this once.. but remem... " But she's cut off in mid-sentence, as they all excitedly jump up, suddenly energized, shouting to each other, leaving all the old toys scattered, grabbing a couple of bats and gloves, balls, etc. and crowding through the door, screen slamming against the outer wall. She sighs, and gets a worried look, but then a wan smile... Maybe it's good for them, after all.

In the next scene (after the commercial, perhaps) we see old grandma, standing in the open doorway, a very worried look on her face, yelling out into the street: "I told you kids! Someone was bound to get hurt! The *outside* is full of dangers... Why did I ever let you all talk me into this at all! You come back inside right now, and I'll patch up your elbows and soothe your bruises, and we'll have some nice supervised play here safe indoors. All your toys are still here, kids! Come on back! Grandma will take care of you and make it all better"

The camera pans slowly around to face the street -- a quiet, wide street, with some oak trees and nicely trimmed lawns, and a couple of cars parked along the street -- where a bunch of grownups are lazily tossing a football, huddled in little groups here and there talking, maybe flipping a frisbee around, or playing with a dog. One of them is rubbing a scratch on his elbow. They all look around at each other, as if to say "what do we do now?" It's clear that the grandma still sees them as roughhousing little kids, while they have all grown up and become professionals with families of their own... but they haven't the heart to tell her. They slowly, dejectedly shuffle back toward the house...

Or do they?

Said the night wind to the little lamb

Occasionally, I wonder: whatever happened to Sherlynn? I won’t tell the whole story here (it wouldn’t reflect well on me, but that’s not why I won’t tell it). But Sherlynn was the only person I know of that ever really understood the way I talk.

A couple of blog entries ago, in describing my reaction to hearing Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car for the first time, I said that I was surprised to be so affected, because “it wasn’t about my life”. Sherlynn would have understood immediately that although I meant just that, I also meant at the same time that of course it was about my life. That was, after all, the whole point of the long preamble about my life as it arrived at that point, right? Even though I didn’t plan it that way – I simply found it necessary to provide the stage directions, as I tried my darndest to get to the scene. All along, I was actually trying to write the sentences about how I felt at that moment, but I found that describing my state of mind required establishing certain perspectives... thus demonstrating, res ipsa loquitur, in exactly what ways it was about my life.

Let me say it another way. The key to the way I talk is that the whole point of my saying that “it wasn’t about my life” was precisely to also express the opposite, in counterpoint. And at the same time, I had in mind the orthogonal meaning: that my life was the life of the people around me, not in the sense that their lives made up the world I lived in, but in the sense that I reflexively inhabit the minds of the people I observe and interact with.

We are all the same, and we are all unique. We all think this way, but some more than others. I pretty much always think and express myself in this kind of multiple, overlapping, self-referential, self-contradictory way, without intending or trying to. It is rare for me, when I've had my coffee anyway, to say something (or hear something) without being aware of the truth of its opposite, and of the perspectives that shape that view, and the alternate views implied by those perspectives. This is probably a useful way of thinking for a mathematician, or a writer, which are the callings I am most drawn to. It is less helpful for a Big-4 Partner wannabe, which explains a few things.

Sherlynn understood (and shared) this with no explanation – in fact, like me, with a smiling disinclination to ever put it into words. I can’t remember exactly how we discovered this. She used to sit and read at the long tables in the big dining room at Ridge Project, and since everyone in the house wandered through there and hung out there a few times a day, we eventually were reading at the same table. We were both shy in a certain way – she was just plain shy :-) and I was reserved – unwilling to express my true feelings. There is always a little thrill in getting a shy person to open up, is there not? Somehow, in the course of some initial banter – related, I think, to Narcissus and Goldmund – we mutually realized that we both preferred to use words in the same reflective, oblique fashion, almost like probes into a system governed by Uncertainty Principles, like shields protecting our auras of over-sensitivity.

We began to play a game, without ever planning to. Someone else would come to our table – it became, for awhile, our table – and strike up a conversation. And as the three of us talked, Sherlynn and I were hearing and responding privately – but in the open – to the invisibly interweaved threads in each other’s responses, of which any other participant was unaware. There was no cleverness or double entendre going on; it was simply that we were tuned very sensitively, almost painfully so, to the multiple, subtle meanings of each others’ thoughts. Sometimes this would go on for hours. We would do this when we were alone too (how could we not?), but in that case it was a more dangerous, more tender enterprise. It was a very intimate kind of relationship; one that was not meant for a long season. One of the many things that go by the wayside as life goes on. I do not regret the passing of this very special connection, but I do wonder what might have become of the individuals involved.

Tracing the threads

This morning, I come to find out that Alex’s brain works exactly the same way mine does with respect to right and left. If someone says “go right”, we have to consciously think for a second: “which way is that? OK, I write with my right hand, and that’s this one [shakes hand in air], so this way is right…” But if we’re driving, and someone says “turn right”, we know which way that is instantly, because we know it’s “the shorter turn”. Vice versa with left, of course.

But she doesn’t do the same thing that I do with tying my shoes – making two rabbit-ear loops with the laces, and wrapping one under the other to tie the knot. Most people, including Alex, do whatever loopy thing they do to make it come out the same way… I have a kind of combination of mental block and superstition which makes me hold on to my primitive technique, as if I am holding out against some kind of betrayal, however trivial.

I am constantly checking this kind of thing – trying to see who my daughter is, and what subtly connects us, and in what ways she has become her own unique person. And observing myself and the threads of my personality and my style, and the underlying ways of being from which these personal elements emerge.

I often feel my brain working “as a Radetsky” – there are imperceptible little signs and patterns which are distinctly and recognizably Radetsky, and even more specifically, like the way my father thinks, although growing up I can really remember almost no interaction with him, and certainly no “influence”. I have even come to believe that there must be some genetic mechanism for these enormously specific traits to be transmitted, perhaps emerging from some underlying qualities in a kind of fractal surprise. I would expect, for example, to find that my odd way of conducting music with rhythmic waves of my hands and strumming of my fingers came down to me from some ancient Radetsky – it just seems to me to go along with those qualities of thought that I discern somehow flowing through my mental make-up.

For example, I have a quick temper, going from happy smiling to scowling and raising my voice in an instant, and then back just as quickly… Oddly, I do not perceive this shift as much of a mood change at all – it feels to me like I am simply letting my feelings through, without anger or bitterness. But I remember very distinctly finding this to be a selfish and emotionally disconnected and disconcerting quality in my own father, and I am aware that my daughter sees it the same way in me. My father and I also share a deep mathematical intuition, and a kind of false sensuality… a genuine love of the physical and carnal, undermined and made false by the dominance of our ascetic and mystical side.

Last time I spent much time with my father, several years ago, I was overwhelmed by a sense of how alike we thought, at our core, as if we were clones raised in different times and places, with a different “covering” that made many of the superficial and specific elements of our thinking different, but which could not undo our fundamental sameness. I felt as if I was tracing the same contours of thought with him, inside his mind, in ways that our words could never capture, but only reflect. I felt as if I looked into his old eyes, and saw my own mind looking back out at me, from the vantage of his age and experiences, looking at myself as my son.

At the same time, I feel the softer and sweeter strains of my mother’s family coursing through my soul as well. The quality I share with my mother is hard to name… it’s the quality that loves the Alice in Wonderland stories, responding to their vulnerability and hunger for innocence, their laughing curiosity and childlike impertinence. It’s the insistence on pointing out that “the emperor has no clothes”; the incredibly stubborn insistence on remaining true to oneself; the inability to be happy except when being honest with oneself. It's the "loneliness of the long distance runner". It’s the Orwellian view of politics, not as an exercise in mastery of deep theory, which is the Radetsky strain, but as an attempt at goodness while admitting one’s fundamental weakness. These twin influences even shape my face – one minute, the man in the mirror is my father's skinny, pale, fearful, too-smart brother; the next, he has the bright eyes, wavy hair, and boniness of my mother.

And underneath those qualities, like old black and white photos hidden in a drawer, I feel the bitter and disappointed Renaissance-man intelligence and the stubborn integrity of my grandfather, and the long-suffering, loving gentleness and musicality of my grandmother, simultaneously unimpressed and pleased by my intelligence. If I could choose anyone in the world to go back in time and spend time with, it would probably be my grandmother… I would go back to her childhood, and see her in her poverty and unhappiness, see her parents and brothers and sisters I never knew, see the laughter and hope in her young eyes, and dance and flirt with her. I would sit next to her at the soda counter where she met my grandfather, and try to charm her, competing for her attention with my hard-eyed grandfather, laughing at the twinkle in her eyes, holding her soft hands, before fading away to let her fate flow on.

Once, when I was at Berkeley, I had what people would call a mystical experience, although really it was just a very slightly heightened version of the way I think and feel all the time. I was at the crest of Ridge Road, next to the Graduate Student Union, with the Dominican School on my right, looking out across the bay toward the city and the coming sunset. And I had a sudden, deep sensation that I was in a gathering of like-minded souls from across all time and space. A place where time and space lost their usual meaning, where one could go simply by recognizing its existence. I knew as surely as I knew my own existence that others had recognized this state of being as well, and across time touched one another, and validated some eternal connection between us, and some deeper substrate of reality. I knew that I could be there anytime, that I belonged there, and that the reality of this place would comfort and sustain me forever.

This is, of course, simply the way I am. It is a kind of sensitivity to what is outside my own skin that defines how I see the universe, and my values. I do not choose it or believe it or advocate it any more than my dog chooses her perspectives; it’s just me.

Dreams at the corner of Broadway and 7th

I remember very clearly the first song that ever made me cry.

I must have been about 27 years old, living and working in Oakland, having just recently “finished” at UC Berkeley.

Actually, I never did graduate from Berkeley… I had started with a year’s college credit from high school AP classes, and an unalloyed, exuberant confidence in my own ability to be the absolute best at whatever intellectual pursuit I essayed. I took whatever classes I was interested in – more math than anything else, but a lot of other classes that went along with my journey of self-discovery: philosophy, religion, literature, and so on. They seemed so interesting on the syllabus, but I lost interest in many of them pretty quickly, or found myself struggling to fight the currents of the intellectual game that I wasn’t there to play, so I would pay only minimal attention or none at all. I ended up failing about 13 or 14 classes – mostly by simply failing to attend – a few of which I later made up, but mostly not.

I was also putting myself through school, so I’d take off time to work here and there, and save a little money – precious little, since I was much more interested in buying clothes and doing fun things than in smartly managing my self-guided path to success. So it took a lot of time off from school just to save for a quarter or two back on. And I took off other times just to play – to read Chinese poetry, or to play blackjack for a living.

So even after 7 or 8 years of sporadic study, I had barely enough credits to graduate with my BA in Math, and I still hadn’t met my minimum foreign language requirement, along with some other useless requirement which I’ve forgotten. But I needed money again, and I was able to talk my way into a job I was completely unqualified for, as an HR Systems Analyst (of all useless things) at World Savings, at their shiny silver 20-story headquarters building in downtown Oakland – so I “finished” going to school for the last time, and just decided that I would go on with my career from there.

I was living with my girlfriend, now my wife, in a little apartment just a couple of blocks from World Savings, on Alice Street. It was very much downtown Oakland – a few blocks from Oakland Chinatown (which is beautifully evoked in Dreams in Harrison Railroad Park, by Nellie Wong), a few blocks from the adult movie theaters and peep-show bookstores that used to line that part of Broadway, around a couple of corners from dingier and darker streets where drugs were sold day and night, where lonely prostitutes wandered between work and home, where poor kids laughed and ran in the garbage-strewn streets. Our building was a refuge of straight lines, clean floors, and potted plants, hoping to become a nicer place, where poor, educated young white and black and Indian and Asian couples pretended they were not poor. Nice little cafes and restaurants sprung up like weeds along the nearby streets, and the city planners of Oakland did their best to bring big businesses like Kaiser and Union Pacific into the few gleaming office towers, while the drug-dealing and emptiness and poverty and racial anger swarmed like a fast-encroaching jungle all around.

I can’t say I hated my job – I enjoyed some of the challenge, and I learned a lot, and I enjoyed some aspects of “work life”. I liked dressing up for work; I liked being smart and proving I could become good at a job I had no preparation for. But I was lonely. I did not find my co-workers to be potential friends, the way many of my classmates at Berkeley had been with no effort. We shared fewer values and goals, and I wasn’t psychologically prepared for the sad and meaningless struggle of entry level office culture; I was still a brilliant intellectual in my own mind; an important person, not a hamster in a cage. I had to force myself to play the game. I was intimidated by those who seemed to thrive in this milieu, and I doubted myself.

I would usually go off somewhere for lunch, just driving around, exploring aimlessly, eventually stopping somewhere for a bite. A little out of the way café here or there, where I could eat and think and read the paper in private, away from the maddening bustle and meaningless drudgery of the office, with all it’s little daily emergencies and it’s crazy culture of objectives that no one in their right mind could take personally seriously – and which everyone seemed to. Someplace I could flirt with a waitress, or doodle cartoons on my napkins – brilliant little compositions which I would laugh and throw away after an hour, as I sighed and smiled and got ready to go back to face the afternoon.

One day, I was driving on my slow way back, listening to the radio, and Fast Car, by Tracy Chapman came on. I think it had just been released. I had never heard it, or her, before.

You got a fast car
But is it fast enough so we can fly away
We gotta make a decision
We leave tonight or live and die this way

It was so completely unlike any other popular music I was used to hearing. It wasn’t jingly jouncy crap. It made my fingertips tingle, like a kind of electricity that was flowing right through my body. It was like listening in silence, in the dark, to the deepest sorrows of a close friend, baring their soul. Tears were streaming down my face, involuntarily. I had to pull over, on 6th or 7th, a block away from Broadway, and just sit and listen, in amazement.

I was really surprised to be affected this way. It wasn’t about me… it wasn’t about my life. But it was about the life of the people I lived with, that walked the streets of Oakland. I recognized them. I could FEEL that life coming out of my radio; I felt as if I were INSIDE that young black woman’s skin, as if I were riding in the car with her as she held out that hope, as she did what she could to dream, while living in her true world.

You got a fast car
And we go cruising to entertain ourselves
You still ain't got a job
And I work in a market as a checkout girl
I know things will get better
You'll find work and I'll get promoted
We'll move out of the shelter
Buy a big house and live in the suburbs

It was such an uncompromising song. One listened, knowing that things would not get better for her; drawn into her hopeless clinging to the prospect of a promotion, of his job, of the big house, but knowing that it was an empty dream; knowing that she would never escape in her fast car, that the bills and the crying baby and the tiredness would go on, that there would be shouting fights on the steps of the dirty, run-down apartment building, the man would leave, that nothing would change.

And it was completely unpretentious, completely unprotected. It was not *about* something else, it wasn’t pretty or pleasant or lovely. It was exposed. Yet it wasn’t raw, or exploitive, or bold. It was simply the true feelings of a young, poor, still hopeful black woman, who held on to some dream of a good life, a life. It was stripped of all pretension, as if she had written it, and then gone back over it and mercilessly struck out every false note, every word that was not straight from the heart. Over and over again, stripping the words bare, excising every hint of self-protection, so that at the end we were listening in to her deepest private feelings, with music seemingly welling up straight from the unconscious, that spoke the language of the soul.

I remember we were driving driving in your car
The speed so fast I felt like I was drunk
City lights lay out before us
And your arm felt nice wrapped 'round my shoulder
And I had a feeling that I belonged
And I had a feeling I could be someone, be someone, be someone

It makes my eyes water just hearing it again, in my mind. I sometimes tell my wife that in my next life, I’ll come back as a black woman, and maybe there’s some secret unknowable affinity there. Probably not.

I loved Tracy Chapman from that moment on. Really loved her; I would help her the way I would help my brothers or sisters if she needed it. That’s the power that art has to remake us. She hasn’t changed; her later music has remained uncompromising and brilliant and true. Some of her songs, like “All That You Have Is Your Soul”, or “Subcity”, or “The Promise” are among my favorite things in the world, and perfectly express (and shape) my own feelings, and make me sigh and smile and cry. But nothing, to me, has the power of “Fast Car” or “Talkin’ About a Revolution” – those first punches; those first words, that to me told a truth that I wanted to hear.

Looking around curiously as I descend into the pit

I must admit to having some difficulty with the blog form. Partly because I'm so damn busy that I don't have time to translate my thoughts from their lovely and insightful "shower form" to coherent paragraphs. But that wouldn't stop me if I didn't have a second problem -- that I am only interested in saying something worth saying. I've had plenty of people tell me my blog was boring, and that if I wanted readers, I needed to get with the blog form... breezy observations, interesting links, a little ironic commentary, a few pictures or videos. Well, I don't want readers. This blog is me talking aloud, reflecting, partly to myself, and partly to what many people would call God... to that which knows, to the fullness of what is, of which I am a part.

As I was driving to the cafe this morning, I chanced to ask myself, in the course of meandering thoughts, what I would be like if no one was watching -- INCLUDING MYSELF. What will I do when I am freed from accountability, when I am Lord of my private universe? Who am I really? I concluded that although I would do some things which would make me cringe, which would be EXTREMELY :-) embarrassing and revealing, that I was at my core what I appear to be -- a nice person, in love with life, with good will toward all. How nice... :-)

But anyway, I have this writing problem. As we speak, I am in the middle of writing a couple of longer pieces, political or social analysis, which are hard for me to write. It is hard to get started -- the issues are so complex, so wide-ranging, so mixed up, that it's very difficult to find the wedge that lets you say something meaningful, that one can get one's mind around, and from there extrapolate important principles and outline a philosophy... which is what I think I should be doing.

In the meantime, I do want to continue to say Hello, World... so I will succumb to the blog form, and just extract from my morning universe a couple of twigs that you -- my imagined alter ego -- may find amusing, as I have.

1) The New York Times has a nice puff piece this morning on mathematician Terrence Tao. Thank God for the small miracle of some publicity for someone other than a rich celebrity or a politician or a fashionable artist or "personality" (narcissistic and worthless frauds all). And I personally found this little vignette vastly charming:

At age 5, he was enrolled in a public school, and his parents, administrators and teachers set up an individualized program for him. He proceeded through each subject at his own pace, quickly accelerating through several grades in math and science while remaining closer to his age group in other subjects. In English classes, for instance, he became flustered when he had to write essays.

“I never really got the hang of that,” he said. “These very vague, undefined questions. I always liked situations where there were very clear rules of what to do.”

Assigned to write a story about what was going on at home, Terry went from room to room and made detailed lists of the contents.

Reminds me a bit of my nephew Edward, who is quite charming in his own right, although much more likely to be the next Keanu Reeves than the Mozart of mathematics. Or perhaps a bit like me, although not literally, only in some corner of my character.

2) I was flabbergasted and angered by this posting at this very useful blog. In particular, the following excerpt is a wonderful little insight into what's going on behind the scenes, in the meatgrinder of the massive government, where our future is being defined. It's not too late -- the future is surprisingly susceptible to leadership -- but I am beginning to wonder where the intelligent opposition is. No one needs idiot opposition; we need opposition that's smarter and better and more capable than the corrupt insiders.

AT&T told an appeals court in a written brief Monday that the case against it for allegedly helping the government spy on its customers should be thrown out, because it cannot defend itself -- even by showing a signed order from the government -- without endangering national security.

A government brief filed simultaneously backed AT&T's claims and said a lower court judge had exceeded his authority by not dismissing the suit outright.

Because plaintiffs' entire action rests upon alleged secret espionage activities, including an alleged secret espionage relationship between AT&T and the Government concerning the alleged activities, this suit must be dismissed now as a matter of law," the government argued in its brief.

Holy frikkin crap. So the claim is that the law says that if the government says it's actions are secret, they do not need to follow the law? AND that the government ITSELF gets to make the call whether this claim is valid? There's no irony here -- I think that IS the claim. I'm not OK with that.

Cute cute cute

Sometimes, you just have to look at the innocent way that our elephantine government goes about it's business, as if all was right with the world, and smile. They're trying, you say to yourself.. Thus my reaction to the slate of bids I see, one after another, in this mornings FedBizOpps email alert:

Federal Upcoming Bid		Administrative Professionals Day		Mar. 31, 2007
Federal Upcoming Bid		Base Club Membership Drive		Jul. 24, 2007
Federal Upcoming Bid		Base wide event- Hot Summer Nights		Jun. 08, 2007
Federal Upcoming Bid		Cinco de Mayo		Apr. 27, 2007
Federal Upcoming Bid		Easter Brunch		Mar. 30, 2007
Federal Upcoming Bid		Edwards AFB Tops in Blue Performace		Apr. 27, 2007
Federal Upcoming Bid		Holiday Tree Lighting		Dec. 03, 2007
Federal Upcoming Bid		Teen Center Haunted House		Oct. 12, 2007
Federal Upcoming Bid		Youth of the Month / Youth of the Year		Dec. 31, 2007

Then at other times, you look at the Walter Reed mess, or Katrina aid (still!), or a million other examples, and shake your head and sigh.. There's an old Sam Cooke song -- "A Change Is Going To Come" -- that seems appropriate. That song is kind of wistful, as if suspecting that the change may not come soon, while hoping that it will, but my feeling now is the opposite -- I think the coming changes will be quite a shock to system of still-complacent and VERY unprepared America.