Pulling up roots

When you're a kid, and your parents talk about things that happened twenty, or thirty, or more years ago, it seems like an impossibly long time. Now that it's been an impossibly long time since I was a kid, I find myself saying these sorts of things all the time.*

Large Southern University has been at the center of my life off and on for an improbably long time, given that a younger me once moved 8 times in one year. I found my professional calling there, met my closest friends, learned more than I can even begin to describe. It is as much my home as the house I grew up in.

Later this month I will leave my office for the last time, and start a new adventure in a new place -- one with seasons, terrain, and a single digit student-to-teacher ratio. Biscuit and I will be leaving for the Show Me State, after almost 30 years in Bayou Country. I will be working on a campus that one can see all at one time, after spending most of my life on one that takes 45 minutes to walk across. My new job is 90% teaching, where my current is almost 100% research. I guess what I am saying is, it's going to be different.

I am excited about my new job, and the move. It is closer to family (when did that become a desirable thing?), day trip distance to some of my favorite places, and I love to teach. Did I mention I will be teaching game development? I like games. The town seems nice, and our new house has a garage. And a basement.

As much as I like it when things change, one doesn't live anywhere this long without filling up a life -- at least if you're doing it right. We will miss our friends, and the food, drive-through daiquiri shops, neighborhood parades, Mardi Gras, and much more. Mostly I will miss familiarity. It's good to know where everything is, and the parts of town to avoid when driving there. I've been getting my hair cut by the same person for twenty years (there I go again). This move will mean a new dentist, vet, dry cleaner, and HVAC service company. Restaurants, paint stores, and neighbors all need to be rediscovered and integrated.

Years ago, I was amazed -- and frankly a little concerned -- when my 75 year old father decided to start a new firm. Now I think I get it. Opportunities come when and where they will. We can choose to do what's next, or we can stay planted, clinging to the familiar. For me, it's time for a change. In the words of the immortal Roy McAvoy (Tin Cup), you ride her until she bucks or you don't ride at all.

Wish us luck, and if you're ever in flyover country, stop in for a glass of tea and a shot of white lightning. But definitely call first. I may be out trying to find a front license plate holder.

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* Don't even start the "I have underwear older than that" contest. I am simultaneously proud and horrified at how well prepared I am for this game. I really need to clean out my drawers (heh).

Ninety-five percent half naked

I have worn a St. Christopher medal most every day since I was fourteen. This is not something most people know about me. That's well into five figures of days, placing the chain around my neck when I dress in the morning, laying it down carefully before I climb into bed at night. I have long since grown accustomed to the feel of it, and in most cases I could not tell you without checking whether I was wearing it or not.

The current medal is actually my third, each a gift from a (different) woman who meant a great deal to me. The first barely outlasted the relationship that started it all, lost after only a couple of years. The second survived much longer, through my days on the road and other youthful misadventures. Unfortunately, the ex never really liked the fact that it was a gift from someone else, and it disappeared during the turmoil of our divorce.

The second medal was similar to this one. I always liked the Be my guide
inscription over than the more common Protect us. It seems less needy, somehow.

She needn't have been concerned. While the medals were important symbolic gifts, they were never strong reminders of the givers. They were my secret indulgence in superstition,  egotism,  ... different things at different times. But this little piece of jewelry (I really think of them as one object) has always felt like mine -- perhaps more than anything else I own -- and I associate it with my personal journey much more strongly than its own origins. I have worn the current version for over twenty years now.

It never mattered to me that St. Christopher was removed from the official roster of saints when I was a child. Actually, since I am not Catholic, it was a bit of a bonus. What was important was that we shared a name, and that he was the patron saint of travelers. As a fledging disciple of an eclectic mix of Eastern philosophies, I initially found the symbolism quite compelling. I no longer read the Tao regularly or consult the I Ching, but I still see life more as journey than destination, so the feeling of kinship with St. Kitt remains strong.

Yesterday morning I reached for the silver chain in its pewter tray, exactly as I have done thousands of times before, and came up empty. The medal and its chain have vanished, and a light search of probable locations has come up empty. I can't definitively remember the last time I noticed having it. You may as well ask when I last remember having my left pinky. All I know for sure is that I don't have it now, and I am beginning to feel its absence.

There may be feline involvement. I felt confident that the cats would not be interested in it, but I began to rethink my position when I saw one carrying a pill organizer down the hall this morning. If so, then it may turn up again, though both cats love to watch things disappear, and there are some suitable crevices and drain holes in our house.

While often proud of his possessions, Boy Cat was trying to sneak away with this undetected. Don't worry.
He doesn't have a drug problem. We use these to portion out fish food for vacation pet minders. The cats love fish food.

More likely the clasp gave way and it slipped from my neck in some random location on campus or in the yard. It has happened before, and while up until now I have always felt it fall, I assumed the day would come when I would not be so lucky. If this is the case, and I have seen the last of this iteration, I hope it has fallen where someone will find it. Like the two before this one, I like to think of St. Christopher helping someone else navigate life's strong currents.

Out of Time

I guess it's natural for each of us to be comfortable in our own time. The world we grew up in is our baseline, and every year brings changes that make everything feel a tiny bit less natural. I think this is the main reason old people are cranky all the time. That, and the sore everything. Middle age has brought  not only an acceptance of mortality, but an appreciation of it as well.

There are usually a handful of changes that we treasure, though frankly I'm having a hard time coming up with any at the moment. It seems every advance during my life has been a double-edged sword, trading diversion, minor convenience, or economic efficiency for a more complicated life and erosion of our environment. I make my living from technology, and I'm not sure how we watched television before there was Google, but there are days I would gladly trade the whole thing for forty acres and a mule.

On the other hand, many of us long for some aspects of life that may have passed away before we were born*. Jimmy Buffett apparently wanted to be a pirate, and not the Somali kind. Mine is a world with space for solitude. The thought of walking for weeks without meeting another person carries great appeal for me at times.

There is a park in Northwest Arkansas that has been my favorite place in the world since I was a child. Part of what I liked about it then was that it was quite inaccessible and not very well known, so there were few visitors. The trails were long, mostly deserted, and so quiet you could hear gentle breezes blowing down the valley. It was a place where you instinctively spoke quietly.

There is an interstate within a few miles of it now, and it is covered with tourists during the summer, but last time I was there during winter it was still pretty deserted. I spend a few days there as often as I can, which usually ends up being only about once a decade. I walk, and climb, and sit, and walk some more. I don't exactly feel like I'm alone in the world, but I usually do get a chance to remember what it's like to be a human being.

Maybe this fall will be time for another visit. I've been looking for an excuse to buy a new pair of hiking boots, and I could certainly use the quiet. Did I mention there is no cell coverage, no television, and only one phone in the entire park?

---

*How else do you explain Renaissance fairs? And NASCAR?

Can you see the real me?

Image from here

We've started watching this British TV series on DVD called Being Human.  It's about a vampire and a werewolf that live with a ghost. Sounds like the opening line of a joke, right? So far, we really like it. Perhaps even more than most stories of supernatural beings, the focus here is very much on the monster within.

I've had enough long drunken nights with enough different types of people to know that we all have a monster inside of us. Or at least people that will drink with me seem to have one. No matter how much we show to those around us, we hide a creature that we believe to be so vile that we cannot afford for even those closest to us to catch a glimpse of it. Or maybe the point is that we especially can't afford for those closest to us to see it.

I wonder about those perpetually perky types that hide their monsters beneath mountains of bunnies and flowers, or (somewhat ironically) the Bible and the Holy Spirit. Are they truly unaware of this primitive presence within themselves? Or are they ones working hardest to conceal it, lest someone catch wind of how the sight of a full moon makes them want to tear off their clothes and run howling into the forest, eviscerating those same bunnies that decorate their kitchens?

Or maybe it's not monsters for all of us. Perhaps, in what Arianna Huffington calls our "lee-zard brains," some of us are prey rather than predators, secretly longing for the fangs in our throats, and the sweet release from perpetual fear that only comes as we bleed out onto the snow. I suspect we all have a little of both. This is a theme that may get explored in this series, though it's too early to tell.

How did we get this way? Do chimpanzees hide their true motivations from their community?* Did secrets somehow evolve alongside language? I guess the ability to tell goes hand in hand with the option not to tell. But do we really need to believe that others lack the same primitive motivations as ourselves?

I suppose the answer to the last question is "yes." It is probably much easier to build civilization when we can believe that our wife has never had the urge to cuckold us with our boss, or that our children have never considered killing us in our sleep. And isn't that the whole point of civilization, after all? To allow us all to believe we live in a world of order and fairness and safety? Instead of the one we really inhabit, where a looming shadow could be the last thing we see, and the only thing keeping that moment in the future is our wits, and a great deal of luck.

---

*This is not to imply that I believe we are related in any way to chimpanzees.**

**But I do.

The End of Time

I think we are living through a significant moment in human history. Something fundamental is changing. The development of human language is perhaps the greatest factor in the creation of civilization, because it allowed people to know about things that they did not experience personally. Writing created a way to store portable information outside of human brains, and the printing press provided an economical way to distribute that information across the world, without being changed in the telling. In essence, printed material provided the blueprints for our global civilization.

But writing is still a fairly labor intensive process, and only a tiny fraction of human experience has been captured in this way. The further back we go, the less we find, and all of it has been written through the filter of its authors' minds. History, as the saying goes, is written by the winners. Fiction helps us understand the people and society of its time, but only the public face. Published authors know (or hope) that their work will be read by a broad audience.

This was the world into which my grandfather was born. The great thing about this world was that the past and future were almost equally abstract and impenetrable. Legend and prophesy can hold great power, but they have less substance than the sounds of a house awakening, the familiar smell of a mate, or the tearing grief of losing a loved one forever. I'm sure it was still common for lives to get stuck at some intersection of regret and lost opportunity, but people eventually forget, or at least remember more conveniently. There is ample evidence that we continually remanufacture our memories to be more consistent with our current world view. This is not some memory defect that comes with aging. It's a design* feature, meant to help us keep our minds in some semblance of order.

This all started to change a little over a century ago, with the invention of audio recording, and then moving pictures**. All of a sudden, not only the words could be captured, but the sounds, and then the pictures. Less was left to the imagination, and we could all share the voice of Franklin Roosevelt describing a day that will live in infamy. No nuclear devices have been exploded above ground during most of your lifetimes, but we all know the horrible beauty of the mushroom cloud.

Like the printing press did for writing, television distributed movies and sound to everyone. As a child, I watched live as little Jack Kennedy saluted the caisson carrying his fallen father. A half dozen years later, a third of the world's population watched Neal Armstrong step on the moon, and billions more have watched it in the intervening forty years. Significantly, the words we heard are the ones in the history books, even though they were not the exact words Armstrong uttered. In those same years, our nation saw for the first time the realities of war in living color, as every night images of Viet Nam were beamed to us via satellite, replete with jungle, and flame, and blood.

Once recorded -- and while preserved -- an event cannot be forgotten, or alternatively remembered. These images become the dots we must connect. John Kennedy still dies in the same way every time, and the bodies at My Lai cannot be denied. There are fewer degrees of freedom, and the past is sticky. Time has less power to wash away our triumphs and sins.

Film and tape were relatively expensive and troublesome for most of my life, and still only a tiny fraction of history was recorded. Home movies of Christmas and Easter made up the bulk of personal posterity. News crews captured a few significant events, and a few hundred hours a day of film and video were recorded for posterity. Most of that has been lost as the media degrade, the playback technologies become obsolete, or people simply decide it is not worth saving. Interestingly, much of the music survived, and it has the power to transport us in time as well as any contraption imagined by H.G. Wells. But that's another post.

The situation is different now. The Digital Age has brought us the technology to record virtually everything we do, and the internet gives us means to distribute it. I still have virtually every e-mail message I have received over the past fifteen years. If you live in an average city, you can expect to be on camera up to a hundred times in an average day. You could record your entire life, including constant video coverage, and store it all for a few hundred dollars per year. And the price is dropping fast.

We are reaching a point where nothing is forgotten. History is online and searchable. And an increasing number of us are recording it. I expect my Facebook page to outlive me -- I just don't know for how long. This post could survive for a thousand years, stuck deep in the Church of Google archives, and read only by machines. Every word you write online, every picture you post, is being catalogued, and indexed, and correlated somewhere.

All of this gave me the serious creeps for several years, and I even toyed with the idea of going "off the grid" at one point. Then I got over myself, and realized that this is the way civilization is going. And I'm not Amish. But I do wonder what it means for the human experience. What will happen to us as our present becomes more difficult to separate from our past?

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* Don't take my use of the word "design" too seriously.

** Damn you, Thomas Edison! Also, I realize that still photography was around for a long time before this, but I really don't think it was a major contributor to the process I'm trying to describe, at least not until cameras and film became commonplace.

Letting go of the rope

A dear friend of my family is dying. Inexorably, painfully, hopelessly dying. Some days are better. Some are hard to bear. But the eventual outcome is not in doubt.

Along the way, he will have spent a double-digit number of weeks in the hospital, an unknown number of days in a rehab facility, uncounted hours being shuffled between the two, and no time in his own bed. He is finished eating, walking or going to the bathroom unassisted. He has so far engaged eight or ten specialists, and not a single general practitioner.* It will -- has already -- cost a fortune.

This is a man who was a proverbial captain of industry only a few years ago. An actual son of a share-cropper, he worked tirelessly to improve his lot and provide for his family for most of the previous century. He created a thriving business, became a pillar of his church, and a force in political discourse. A generation ago, he's a man who would have died unexpectedly in his sleep, or pitched over into his dessert after a big steak dinner and a couple of martinis. Today, he is a frail, frightened shell of his former self, his body struggling to maintain the minimum requirements for continued existence.

It is the way of life, and American medicine, that many of us will live our final days undergoing every procedure, and receiving every medication, for which our insurance will reimburse the medical corporations whose representatives are working so hard to bring our vital signs back into the range where they may consider the course of treatment complete. There is no talk of cure, or even of going home. Address the current issue, get the patient stable, discharge them from your service, and hope for the best, seems to be the only strategy.

I think the end of life is like water-skiiing. When you feel your balance slipping, you can try to right yourself, or let go of the rope and glide to a stop, more or less under control. The trick is in knowing when to let go. Release your grip too soon, and you may miss a chance to correct and ski on. Hang on too long, and you end up dragged face first through the water, sometimes with your swimsuit floating in the water behind you. It's not exactly drowning -- assuming you let go eventually -- but no one would call it fun.

I've reached the age where I think about these things. Not because I want to, or because I think they are interesting, or significant, or cool.  I think about them because they are happening to people close to me. And because I can feel it in my future, the way we once saw graduation, or marriage, or a new car, just over the horizon. It's all the same journey, but the scenery gets darker towards the end.

Ultimately, hanging on or letting go is a personal decision. Maybe the most personal we ever make. I'm not surprised my friend chose to hang on. It is his nature to struggle, and I always assumed that he would not be one to go gentle into that good night.

For myself, I hope I can be less Dylan Thomas and a little more William Cullen Bryant. Of all the ways we can measure the quality of a life, length is not high on my list. Every story has an ending, and I hate stories that go on too long.

---

* Because we don't have those anymore.

Late Bloomer

There has been a wisteria next to our driveway since we moved into this house, growing around a big gum tree. In the ten years we have lived here, it has never once bloomed. Not even a little. For several years, we tried everything that anyone suggested to get the thing to flower. We fed it, we starved it, we disturbed the roots, we cut it back. Nothing.

Eventually we gave up. We decided it was never going to bloom. I intended to dig it up, but have not ever quite gotten around to it. It continued to grow, and every year it continued not to flower.

Then this Spring, just before Easter, for no apparent reason, I noticed a single bloom hanging over the driveway. When I told The Wife, her response was, "Shut up!" She stopped whatever it was she was doing to come see. You would have thought I had found a pot of gold, or the face of Jesus in an oil stain, seeing how excited we were. It was kind of stupid.

Today I turn -- well, older. A little more than twenty years ago, on my thirty-somethingth birthday, I was served divorce papers. It was also my ninth wedding anniversary. At that point in my life, I had accumulated about a hundred credit hours toward no particular major at a series of ever less distinguished colleges and universities. I lived in a strange town, far from friends or family. I had a crappy one bedroom apartment that I couldn't afford, and a new job that I kind of hated. I was ending my third career in twelve years.

In short, I had less than no money, no prospects, and a seven year old Subaru station wagon with a slow leak in the right rear tire. I had failed at nearly everything I tried. My life was over, and I had a lot of sad, lonely years ahead of me. I was destined to end up selling cheap suits at Men's Wearhouse.* I had made a few new friends, and they were about all that was keeping me afloat.

Today, I have been married for more than ten years to a woman who is not crazy, and in fact makes me laugh almost every day. She will undoubtedly buy me a great birthday present and then worry that it is not good enough. I have two college degrees in a field I love. We live in a big, comfortable old house, and most mornings I drive three miles down the prettiest road in town to one of the most beautiful college campuses in the country, where I have ideas for a living. I still find plenty to complain about, but most of it is meaningless. My life is unbelievably sweet.

I hear people talk occasionally about how unsatisfied they are with their lives at 26 or 30, and I find this both humorous and sad. Humorous, because I know how young that is, and how much it can change. Sad, because I know that some of them will give up. A few will even be overwhelmed with despair, and cut the journey short.

Life can change in an instant. Whether lovestruck, lightning-struck, car-struck or hit with a realization, we all have moments on which our whole existence pivots, and takes a new direction. If things are good, savor every blessed moment. If you're waiting for things to improve, well, waiting serves a purpose, too.

In the end, we never know when the first bloom will appear. All we can do is wait, and grow, and try to believe that it will happen.

---

* I guarantee it.

On being alone

A few days ago, my brother sent me the transcript of a speech delivered to the cadets at West Point by William Deresiewicz, an old and somewhat crusty book critic who likes to flip the occasional metaphorical bird at the literary establishment. It's an interesting, if somewhat rambling discourse, with the gist being that true leadership requires (among other things) introspection, focused concentration, sustained reading, and friendship of the meaningful conversations kind.  All of these activities he says are related to solitude, which is not so much being alone as being able to be present within oneself.* He reserves a few of his tastiest jabs for those who seem to confuse leadership with ambition.

As I get older I run across more people who are semi-permanently on their own. A few are widows, more are divorced, and some just never really managed to pair up for whatever reason. Some have kids at home. A few have parents living with them, or requiring daily care. But one thing they practically all share is a sort of apartness, a combined self-reliance, independence, and seeming ability to live a little more in the moment than those of us who are more permanently entangled.

Perhaps one of the reasons that I have almost always enjoyed being alone is that those are some of my favorite personal traits. I mean, I love people, and no one is more ready to pile a bunch of people into his house or dance stupid in a bar than this guy. But I also like it when the people go away for a while. My favorite days at work are the ones I spend alone in my lab, and the only people I talk to are the baristas at the coffee bar in the bookstore.

I especially like solitude in nature. I can spend hours sitting by a creek or on top of a bluff, studying the infinite variety of trees, leaves, and rocks, listening to the wind and watching the little animals do their little animal things. If you put me somewhere I can hike, I will keep going out until I am too sore to walk. And maybe a short walk after that.

One exception to this love affair with myself occurred immediately after my first marriage split up. I kept finding myself in my crappy little apartment full of hand me down furniture, increasingly desperate to talk to someone on the phone, or to go somewhere that other people would be. They didn't have this fancy Internet thing back then, so there was no YouTube or Facebook to keep me company. Besides, the ex took the computer, so I couldn't even go on Prodigy^® and do whatever you were supposed to do on Prodigy^®.

I can still remember the moment -- it was a Sunday evening about three weeks after I moved into the apartment -- when I reached for the phone and thought, "Wait. If you are sitting alone and you can't stand the company, then something is terribly wrong." I put the phone down and started working on my self. I only made it a couple of hours that night, but it got better over time.

Someone said once that love is the uncomfortable realization that there is someone in the world besides oneself who is really real. I think it's also the process of surrendering the apartness. Some people think you're not really in love until two people have more or less completely fused to share one life. Many of the more experienced** people I know are a little more circumspect, and generally try to find a balance between "me" and "us".

In the end, that's something that each of us has to decide for ourselves. Which of course, requires solitude.

---

*I may have added that last part.

** I mean old, not slutty. Not that the two are mutually exclusive.

Just say ... wait, what was the question?

When I was in eighth grade, pretty much all of my knowledge of drug culture came from watching Dragnet on television. I was standing outside of the school one afternoon, lurking around a girl I thought was pretty (and maybe a little fast), when one of the ninth grade biker boys rode up on his Yamaha 250. After a few minutes of chatting, he pulled out a homemade cigarette (professionally rolled with the Laredo cigarette machine) and started sharing it with the girl. About thirty minutes later, and halfway home, I realized what had been going on.*  I was appalled, and certain that those people would be drowning babies in bathtubs shortly before going insane. Obviously, they were all going to hell.

Less than a year later I was at a Bread** concert with LC, my girlfriend at the time. In those days it was common for someone at a concert to light a doobie, take what they wanted and pass it down the row. When it got to LC, she took it, did what you do, and then passed it to me. I took it without hesitation, passed it a few seconds later, and then tried with all my might not to cough up a lung.

While my attitudes had softened some over the preceding year, I think it's safe to say that my beliefs about this particular herb changed a lot in a few seconds, and primarily because of my feelings about a very small redhead. It's hard to even imagine how many "Just say no" commercials it would have taken for me to make another choice in that moment. Peer pressure is an unstoppable force at that age, especially when amplified by hormones.

That moment marked the beginning of a very different direction for my life. I'm not saying that LC or Bread are responsible -- it was almost certainly the path I would end up on anyway, given my personality and the emerging culture of the day. But every journey has a beginning, and that was the first step of that particular aspect of my life. Over the next ten years or so I would gravitate to different people and activities, make different decisions, and face different challenges than what my eighth grade self expected.

I don't regret that choice, or any most of the ones that followed. but I know my life would likely have been simpler if I had gone another way. I would have been more likely to get a degree from the first college I attended. I probably would have missed some adventures. I definitely would have gotten more sleep, and would have been way less cool.

I think the only thing that can help kids (and adults, really) make informed decisions is giving them real information and real tools. The pressures on them are intense and immediate, and expecting them to think, or remember their values when they are awash in the smell of Love's fresh lemon and the taste of strawberry lip gloss*** is just asking for disappointment. They literally can't help themselves, so someone else has to help them.

As an outside observer, I can't even imagine how overwhelming these choices are when it's your own children. In many cases, a parent's own investment makes them incapable of adopting the strategy that is most likely to succeed. It's got to be even harder when you wish for your children to make different decisions than you did.

There is a lot one gives up when one chooses not to be a parent. But to quote the guy in Office Space, in this particular case, I wouldn't say I've been missing it.

---

* I was always a bright boy, but not super-quick on the uptake. Not much has changed.

** Still a guilty pleasure, though I never replaced the 8-track. I dare you to listen to "Baby, I'm a Want You" and not sing it all day long.

*** Those are still popular with kids, right?

One is the loneliest number

Occasionally, at the end of a long day, especially when I have been trying to be all analytical and sciency like I was yesterday, my right brain will rebel against the repression, paint itself blue and attempt to take over my mind. At these times, my thoughts tend to puddle into a loose collection of images, semi-random associations and fragments of stories, some real and some imagined. Sometimes there is music.

When I left my lab last evening the sky was on the move. Low and heavy overcast slid eastward as a solid block, accompanied by occasional thunder. Random gusts and a few sprinkles warned those of us walking to or from our cars to quicken our pace or risk being deluged.

I walked past a three car gridlock, caused by one person attempting to turn around and two more pulling up right behind them. I overtook a young woman with multi-colored hair and a Yankee's jacket on her way to the bus stop. I felt the set of my Land's End raincoat, and the New England life it promised, as clearly as if it had spoken to me.

I was suddenly overwhelmed with the vastness of possibility. The ocean of lives I could have lived -- that we all could live -- filled my mind and rolled away like the clouds. A different decision on one day as a child, or a different flip of a coin could have sent any of us in radically different directions.  A Maine writer. A show business douchebag in L.A. A crocodile hunter down under. All were probably within my reach at some point.

It seems unfair how puny our lives are, when our imaginations can hold so much. How can it be that we only get to live one life, and that we don't even get to choose which one in advance? I'm not sure whether it's more frustrating that so much of our life is out of our control, or that it takes most of us so long to realize it, and to begin to enjoy what we've been given.

This caused me no end of anguish in earlier years, and on occasion I medicated heavily against the pain. Eventually I really came to understand and accept what my father meant when he used to say, "There's a long way between what we've got and what's fair." I chose years ago to focus what a treasure this single life is, and what a sweet one I drew.

I have got to spend more time out of the lab.

New Digits

It's 2010. Finally. Frankly, it's about time we got some different digits on the calendar. You kids today probably think that having double digits in the year is your birthright or something, what with the double nines and then twenty-oh's coming right in a row and all. Back in my day we had to wait eleven years to get double digits, and it only lasted a year.

That's probably what has gone wrong the last two decades, what with the unsafe food, global warming, economic collapse and decline of the NHL. It's all this promiscuous double-digiting, I'm sure of it. So maybe now we can get back to some good, solid American calendar years without all of this digit duplication. Perhaps there is hope yet.

Oh crap. Next year is 2011. Hopefully, we can hold out until 2012. And it won't be the end of the world.

Passing Away

There has been a fair amount of upheaval in my adult life, but my childhood was bedrock stable. I lived in the same house, went to the same church and lived next door to the same neighbors from the time I was born. And my parents kept one circle of friends the whole time.

The closest people in that social circle were E.B. and his family. He was my father's best friend. His wife was -- and is still -- a member of my mother's tight, inner circle of ladies who speak most every day, travel and shop together, and support each other in endeavors large and small. They had kids around my age. We went to the same church. Our families took several vacations together, and we spent countless weekends camping together, or at their cabin on the lake, or hanging by the pool. I was well past grown before I realized that it is not typical for two families of unrelated people to be this close.

E.B. was more like an uncle than a family friend. He and my father had an ever-escalating competition over who would pick up the check at dinner. He taught me how to pitch a tent, build a campfire, and how to tell a good ghost story.* With almost infinite patience, he taught me to waterski, refusing to surrender to my almost total lack of balance and grace. He pulled me around Lake Hamilton countless times, two skis or one, boogie board or barefoot, always bringing me in at just the right angle and speed to glide in to knee-deep water and step to the shore. He grilled a million hamburgers, and as many hot dogs for countless kids.

In recent years, his wife had not been well, and he spent increasing amounts of time and attention caring for her. He started a business with his son, and I think it took more of his time than he probably anticipated. He was working harder than an eighty-something year old man should, but he never complained. In fact, E.B. was the anti-complainer. It seemed the more lemons life tried to give him, the more cheerful he was determined to be. At a certain age we start to recognize this artifice in this approach, but it was as natural to him as breathing, and it worked for him. As Kurt Vonnegut said, we become who we pretend to be, and E.B. was quite simply the nicest and most beneficent man I have ever known. He was notoriously generous with his money, his time and his love.

Yesterday E.B. suffered a major stroke, and he is right now lying in the hospital on life support, waiting for the last of his children to arrive and say goodbye. Not surprisingly, he never let anyone know if he was feeling unwell, and this all happened without warning.

There is no way to describe how I feel right now. Hell, I don't even know how I feel right now. All I know is that the world is a poorer place tonight. My wife said, "I only met him a couple of times, and I love him." I am trying not to think of how hard this is, and is going to be, for his widow, and his children, and my mother and all of the other people who maybe never really knew how much he enriched their lives.

So long, old friend. I miss you already.

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* His signature story was, "I want my tail." I heard him tell about a dozen versions of the stupid thing, probably fifty times or more, and he still managed to scare the piss out of me every single time.

The tyranny of things

I have a friend who still has the golf clubs and several pairs of golf shoes that he cleaned out of his late father's country club locker over ten years ago. He holds onto them, despite the fact that the shoes don't fit and my friend doesn't golf. He is not exactly a hoarder, but he has attached feelings to objects and the events they represent in his life to the point that there are definite paths to walk in his apartment. When we were discussing it one time he referred to it as the "tyranny of things."

The Wife and I bought our current home from the three sons of the late owners, who built the house and lived in it for over thirty years. The first time we looked through the house, the daughters-in-law were going through the treasures and trash left behind from full, rich lives lived well, and we heard continual exclamations of amusement and surprise from the attic and bedrooms.

"Wow! There are flashcubes up here! Some of them only have one or two flashes left!" (At no time did anyone discover a camera that could use them.) "How many brooches can one woman wear?" ... "I can't believe they kept all of this."

I have been somewhat fortunate in this regard. I moved a lot when I was younger, and tried to limit my possessions to a volume that would fit in my car. A divorce taught me that we don't miss most of the crap we lose, and five years in a graduate student apartment trained me not to bring anything into the house without looking for something to send out. I adopted a policy of maintaining a fixed space for sentimental objects, and when that space gets too crowded something has to go. On the other hand, I have a lot of hobbies, and I love books, and it turns out that furniture and artwork and clothes and coats and shoes have a tendency to accumulate.

My geographic location and position in the family shield me from a good deal of the "tyranny of heirlooms," though I have received a few of my father's possessions that are really of no use to anyone, but I know meant a lot to him. What am I supposed to do with an architect's seal, or World War II era Army discharge papers? Two separate friends have recently had the experience of going through deceased relatives' houses, and both lamented the things they had to leave behind, knowing that many of their loved one's most treasured possessions would end up with strangers, or in a dumpster somewhere. I don't know if you've ever been to a professionally executed estate sale, but it's not something you want to experience if the estate belonged to someone close.

In my own experience, the times when I had the fewest possessions have been in many ways the happiest. I'm not saying that being poor is better than having money, but that people are better company than things, and that there are many activities more fun and satisfying than shopping and organizing our stuff.

I'm afraid that, in the end, we become the possessions of our stuff. It holds us in one place, both physically and emotionally. A thousand tiny threads bind us to all that we gather around us, and we become like the hermit crab, carrying our lives on our backs. Emotionally, the tyranny of things is associated with everything from severe anxiety to weight gain.

So can someone tell me why we feel the need to glorify materialistic behavior in everything from what we teach our kids to the way we run our society? We judge ourselves and those around us by our possessions, and there is nothing our children desire that they should not have. Consumption-driven economic growth is king, and if you're not buying then you're not doing your part as a citizen. We are supposed to desire and then acquire. Maybe it's good that products are becoming more disposable. I guess if we get used to throwing things away we can work on the front end later.


Image from here

Tibetan monks create complex mandalas from colored sand, often spending days or weeks creating intricate patterns with colored powder to heal and purify the world. The paintings are typically destroyed soon after they are completed, symbolic of the transience of life, and the empty nature of all phenomena. I try to remember this whenever I find myself thinking that I can't get rid of something, or when I set out to clean a closet.

So that's it. I think I'm through with stuff, and I don't need anything. Just this ashtray. And this paddle game, the ashtray and the paddle game and that's all I need. And this remote control. The ashtray, the paddle game, and the remote control, and that's all I need. And these matches. The ashtray, and these matches, and the remote control and the paddle ball. And this lamp. The ashtray, this paddle game and the remote control and the lamp and that's all I need...



Image from here

Gimme the beat boys

I saw a spot on TV this morning about a sixteen year old girl who had stopped growing -- and apparently aging -- at about six months. Her doctor was talking about the hope of someday "turning off aging" and giving everyone an indeterminate lifespan.

I have two problems with this. First of all, we have enough people already, without everyone living forever. Perhaps more personally important, the girl apparently stopped developing when she stopped aging. She still had the mental capacity of a nine month old.

I was reminded the other day by an old friend that a group of us used to sing "Ain't No Sunshine" and "Drift Away" while getting ready for football practice in junior high. A few years later, I was singing "We Will Rock You" with a different bunch of young men in the back of a 44 ft. trailer while we loaded lighting equipment. There was joy that only the young can feel. At the same time, other friends were killing themselves, by accident and on purpose. That amazing range of emotions is driven by youthful hormones and exuberance, but also untempered by the perspective that experience brings.

Wisdom and joy both come at a price. I would love to have my 20 year old body back, but I don't think I would like the insecurity and loneliness that went with. Everything I have learned (and I read a lot) indicates that life is a process, and we interfere with that process at our peril. If we could stop aging, what age would you pick? Twenty? Forty? Something else? I might have to go with seven. I could read when I was seven, and I was no longer forced to take naps, but I didn't have a lot of responsibilities yet.

In the end, I think I will stay on the journey until it ends. Every year has brought surprises and new insights, and I think there is still more for me to learn.

Must see TV

A friend posted this on Facebook the other day. All my instincts tell me to let you watch the clip and then shut up, but I've never really been one to follow good advice. See, the thing that makes this video so amazing is that it is 100% serious. Bill Shatner was part of a few shows I worked in 1978-79, and this is not an act. This is exactly how he was then, on and off camera. You could not find anyone who was more of an ass in the western hemisphere. You know that noise that Kif makes on Futurama whenever Zapp Brannigan asks to have his toes cleaned or whatever? We worked with Leonard Nimoy a few times that same year, and he made that noise almost every time Shatner's name came up.

Which is actually what makes present day, Boston Public Travelocity Shatner so wonderful. It's a testament to the power of continued existence and "character building" experiences to help us become better people in spite of our best efforts to do otherwise. Because I can't imagine what would transform the guy in the video into a jolly fat man with a sense of humor about the guy in the video except thirty years of perspective and a fair amount of getting your ass kicked by life. Let's face it. No one reinvents themselves until they find themselves in pieces on the floor and can't figure out how to put the old way back together.

I've got a friend from high school who could have been voted Most Likely to Have a Successful Yet Unremarkable Life, who had a seemingly successful and unremarkable life until about two years ago, when the whole thing turned to liquid shit. Since then it's been divorce, job loss, kids in trouble -- totally made for TV movie material. Maybe I will send him the link.

The Eagle has Landed

When I started college for the third time at the age of 32 I was required to (re)take a number of introductory courses, despite the 100+ credit hours I had already accumulated in my previous academic wanderings. Which is how I found myself in freshman English Composition with 20 or so people who still thought drinking 'til you puked was sexy. We were introducing ourselves on the first day, and I had just finished a summary of myself which I'm sure was both deep and engaging, when the girl next to me turned and exclaimed, "Wow! You were alive when they landed on the moon!"*

Yes, I was alive when they landed on the moon. In fact, I was nearly six feet tall, my voice was changing, and I was beginning to feel ways about stuff. I watched Apollo 11 take off, I watched them land, and I watched a grainy and semi-transparent Neil Armstrong step off the ladder and speak the words that caused 750 million people to turn to those closest to them, tears in their eyes and ask, "What'd he say?" I can still remember staring up at the moon, trying to wrap my mind around the idea that there were people standing there.




I guess this is one of those events that will forever separate those who remember it from those who don't, like Pearl Harbor, JFK's assassination or the
premier of American Idolfall of the Berlin Wall. Like those other events, the moon landing forever changed how humans viewed themselves and their subsequent experience, and the world was in some way fundamentally different from the way it was the day before.

It is almost impossible to convey the audacity of the act. It had been less than a decade since people had sent the first object of any kind beyond our atmosphere. Most Americans had never flown on an airplane and no one was really sure what the moon's surface was like. There were knowledgeable people who believed the LEM would sink into a powder many feet thick and never been seen again. Less than a year before the landing, humans had never laid eyes on the far side of the moon, or seen the Earth from a distance. If they tried to do this again today, they would never even get the contracts awarded in the time it took to develop the entire Apollo program.

These three men took off on a dangerous adventure in a largely untested craft because -- well, wouldn't you? I know I would have. It was the first time people had ever set foot on any solid surface other than the Earth. It was crossing a boundary that had never been crossed in Earth's three billion year history, and that could never be uncrossed. It is estimated that one fifth of the world's population watched on about one-twentieth of that number of televisions , and it was all anybody talked about. And I don't mean all they could talk about like Michael Jackson. I mean as soon as someone walked in the door of their home or their job or a restaurant they would ask how it was going, or if there was anything new.

I watched every launch of every American spacecraft from Mercury 9 through the first handful of Shuttle launches. I grieved every cancellation of the later Apollo missions, and mourned the subsequent loss of exploratory manned spaceflight. Because let's face it -- what they have done with the Shuttle and the Space Station is certainly important, but it's not exploration.

I still follow the space program pretty closely, and I check on the Mars rovers every now and then. They are still wandering around up there, more than 5 years after their warranty expired, doing important science and taking cool pictures. And I'm sure I will be watching the return to the Moon and/or the first manned trip to Mars, on the off chance that I'm still around by then. But for me, none of it could ever match the feeling I got hearing Armstrong's voice crackle out of the speaker on our big console television, "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed."

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* I think I'm beginning to understand why my first paper in that class was about the best method for committing suicide. I got an A+.

Concert Season

There has been a veritable flurry of activity from the old roadie community lately. I have several e-mail chains that are at least 10 messages long, with a couple hundred recipients. So far I have resisted the urge to reply, "Unsubscribe!", which is usually my oh-so-subtle way of pointing out to people that "Reply all" is not the only option. Anyway, it started with some semi-coincidental commemorations, both happy and sad. Several couples are celebrating high numbered wedding anniversaries, and there have been a couple of weddings, finally legitimizing relationships lasting 30 years or so. I try not to consider the possibility that these are related to some of the sadder events, and I secretly hope that no one has been driven to the altar by thought of being cut out of an inheritance that they helped to build because they do not enjoy the legal status of a spouse.

On the other side, we have commemorations of old friends gone to that great gig in the sky. Old friends with names like Poodle, Dirty Mike, Goat, BJ, CD, Lunar and too many others have fallen to causes accidental and self-inflicted, and with each one there are stories. Lunar was queen of the electronics shop, and for years she was the only one anyone trusted to solder snakes. These were the 99-pin monster cables (not to be confused with Monster cables) that ran from the control boards out in the house to the lighting and sound systems backstage. The 99 wires were color coded with little stripes, and all had to be soldered to the right pin on a plug only about three inches across. Someone asked Lunar one time how she dealt with all of those itty bitty pins and wires, and she said, "I just smoke a joint or two and they get bigger*." I guess Steve Martin had something with that "getting small" thing, after all.

Several other old comrades are celebrating the anniversary of their first show, which is less of a coincidence than it might seem. Summer was outdoor show and big festival season, and everybody who was anybody was packing up all the equipment they could scrounge and heading out for Red Rocks or Pine Knob or the Meriweather Post Pavilion, where they would play for a few thousand of their closest friends. Wineskins and blankets were everywhere, and the SHOWCO shop was usually empty save some old curtains, a few bubble machines (don't ask) and the Who's giant spotlights. Of course, for every Genesis show at Wembley Stadium, there were too many like the Bee Gees at the Pontiac Silverdome, REO Speedwagon at the Rockford Jam. or KC and the Sunshine Band at a drive-in theater in Buffalo (all stories for another time). As August rolled towards September we would hit the state fair circuit in the upper midwest and Canada. All the gigs were at racetracks or rodeo arenas or just out in a random field, and the roadies had to drag all the equipment through the mud and string miles of extra cable and make it all work somehow each and every day. We didn't really care for State Fair season, though I'm still a sucker for a corn dog and some cotton candy.

Summer was the time to get hired if you wanted to be a roadie, and more than one was picked up at a show and learning the trade on the road a few days later. It wasn't always pleasant, it was never easy, but it was more than any other time of year the reason we were all there. And it definitely broke the monotony of 100 more or less identical hockey/basketball/multipurpose arenas in a row.

The conversation has moved on to t-shirts, some of which are now worth $1000 or more. So if I ever gave you a shirt, you should be ashamed of yourself because I know what you probably did for it. But you should also see if you can find it, because all of mine are long gone. There is actually talk of trying to find the old silk screens and making some new ones. If it happens, I expect you all to buy some.

_____________________________________

* Just say no, kids.

Lost in Time

I've talked a little about my days as a roadie, back in the day when shorts were small and socks were tall, but it's been a while since I've thought about what I gave up to take that job. I had wanted to work for SHOWCO ever since I knew there was such a place, and had already made one ill-fated move to Dallas to try to get hired on. In fact it was the fallout from that move (long story best left untold) that found me living in Fayetteville, Arkansas in the Fall of 1977, sharing a studio apartment with a part time accident photographer and working various food service jobs to make my half of the $125 per month rent. (That's not where most of my money went, believe me.)

About two months after moving to Fayetteville I met Anne. She had attended the college where I met my roommate, and they apparently renewed their acquaintance when both moved to Fayetteville. Anne was tall and blond and beautiful -- I mean really beautiful -- and for some reason she seemed to like me. The next six weeks or so comprise one of the most amazing periods of my life. Without going into detail, let me just say that we enjoyed each other a lot. A lot. A lot. She taught me to drink spiced tea with milk and honey. I don't know if I taught her anything. I don't remember a cross word passing between us. She got frightened once and I was the one she called. We went everywhere together. No wait -- we didn't. We went where we wanted when we wanted and we both seemed good with it. It was perfect.

And then the first week of November I made the call. Every time I called SHOWCO they always told me to check back in a few months. So I would call and they would tell me they didn't have anything and I would live another chunk of my life. Except the first week of November when I called, they had just lost someone and needed a replacement and the RCO All Stars are playing in Fayetteville tonight so why don't you go down and talk to this guy Buddy Prewitt and he will tell us whether we should hire you or not. And I did and he did and they did and I was gone two days later.

And just like that Anne was out of my life. Well, not just like that. We talked of her moving to Dallas after I got settled, and for a couple of months I really thought it might happen. But she got a job she wanted in advertising and our relationship did what long distance relationships tend to do, and within a year or so I had completely lost track of her.

Since then I have evolved really mixed feelings about those weeks. I don't think Anne ever knew how close I came to turning down that job. If it had not been my life's dream* I probably would have stayed where I was. She also has no way to know how long I pined for her, or how close I came to packing it in on multiple occasions that first few months, when I was lonely and homesick and the new job wasn't what I expected. I had some pictures of her that would almost (but apparently not quite) disqualify someone from being Miss California, and I kept them for far longer than was appropriate. My ex-wife finally threw them out during a move about a decade later. No one would ever have suspected how much time I spent looking at her face in those pictures, though the other parts were good, too.

On the other hand, it was six weeks. Almost all good relationships are good for six weeks. And I don't even know how much we really had in common. I'm sure we carried the seeds of our destruction, and if I look close enough I can almost see them. There was probably a sad or bitter or fiery end in our future, and we just never had to live through it. I think in some ways we were too much alike, which I only found out was bad many years later.

Or maybe that's all just rationalization. The entire weight of my life since then conspires to ensure that I am happy with my choice. Either way, the direction of my future balanced on a knife point one day many years ago, with two of the best things I can imagine on either side. I chose. What else can we do?

In the end I decided to treat those six weeks as sort of a capsule, like a great book or a favorite song**. Those weeks are almost completely disconnected from the main thread of my life, no longer food for regret or wistfulness or nostalgia. At the same time those weeks embody for me a feeling of love and relaxation and good fortune that is as personal and private as anything can be. It is without cause or effect or consequence, except to remind me that I have been blessed. Wherever Anne ended up, I hope she remembers the time half as fondly.


*I know. I was 20. Shut up.

** Or the time when I was fifteen and an eighteen year old girl I had never seen before stuck her hand down my pants on the Silverton railroad. It was a really good day.

The Flip Side of Aging

In some previous posts, I might have indicated that getting older is not much fun. I think the word "sucks" may have been used once or twice. Well, that's true in some respects, but there are compensations. At least partial compensations. For example:

1. I know all sorts of stuff. For example, I know what usually causes your air conditioner to stop working on the hottest day of the year, and what to do about it.
2. I don't care about what most people think. I will wear my house slippers to the mailbox, and once even to the grocery.
3. I (usually) know what I'm doing. Corollary to (1).
4. I have my own tools.
   

I realize that these are exactly the things that make older people either endearing or frustrating to young people, and often both. All I can say is, suck it young people. You will get your chance, and you will probably enjoy it as much as we are enjoying ourselves now. I know my parents' generation had a great time wandering around in their bermuda shorts and sandals with socks, eating cocktail wieners and telling us all how we didn't know how good we had it.

They were right. And I'm afraid we may all find out how good we had it very soon. It appears as though there may be challenging times ahead, and we are all going to need each other. Old people may not know how to get the pictures out of their phone, or what the Hell a "Twitter" is, but by and large they know how people and organizations really work, and how fundamentally unfair the world can be, and it is probably worth listening to what they have to say. Unless they are idiots. Aging usually just makes that worse.

And for those of us who think we've seen it all and know it all, we would probably do well to remember that the world is very different than it was only two decades ago, and that most of the knowledge taught in college today didn't exist when we were there. The "kids" who we think look too young to drive will do the heavy lifting that determines whether we end up living in our Crown Victorias, burning our 401K statements for heat.

Memory is stupid

Why is it that I can't remember what I logged on to my computer to do for the two minutes it takes to boot up and sign in, but I can still remember the last nine lines of Thanatopsis that Sam Blair made me learn in 11th grade?

Thanks a ton, Sam. Jerk.