February 2008 Archives

Flipped through the local weakly weekly paper yesterday and was disappointed not to find any outrageous typos. Every new issue is like a treasure hunt, and if you search you can find "T-shirts" spelled without the "R" or "public" without the "L." (Those are not hypothetical examples, by the way.) Huge mistakes in headlines, all sorts of fun stuff. It's like those "What's Wrong?" pictures from Highlights for Children magazine: You scan it quickly, looking for bizarre stuff. And on the rare (believe me) occasions when there's nothing egregious, you feel a little let down.

Pobody's nerfect, of course. You could ask the thousand most expert, successful surgeons in the world if they've ever made a mistake, and they would all tell you about the time they left the hemostat in the patient or whatever. What I'm talking about here is a doctor who's so completely out of it that two or three times a week, he shows up at the hospital in the morning without having remembered to put on his pants. Now, if he remembered to wear pants all week, wouldn't it be a little bit of a letdown, so to speak, for the other people in the hospital who rely on him for amusement? Well, that's how I felt, flipping sadly through the paper. Sigh! But there's always next week, and unless you live in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, USA, you'll read it here first.

Last summer I mentioned that I was interested in getting a memory-foam mattress from Bedinabox, and I got all sorts of traffic here because of it. The idea is intriguing—they manufacture a product similar to the Tempur-Pedic, then mash it up into a package a quarter of the normal size and send it to you through the mail, and the whole thing is about a quarter of the price too. The only sticky point is that they don't have showrooms, and if you don't like it you can send it back but it's your cost for shipping and what you're sending back is now a full-size mattress.

This gave me pause, so I searched myself for comments from actual people who had one, and found damn few. One guy had been near the factory on business, tried one, and was buying it on the strength of that trial. Fair enough. Anyway, I took the plunge, and for six months I've been perfectly happy. It's not as firm as the Tempur-Pedic, and if you want to look at their website they explain why that's a good thing. Long story short, I'm happy with the mattress. I don't sleep well because of a bad case of existential angst, but you can hardly blame the mattress for that. Hope this helps.

P.S. My lawyer just whispered to me that I should say that mattress choice is very personal. Even Consumer Reports pretty much throws their hands up and admits that. So no guarantees. My lawyer is now saying you should assess your own tolerance for risk, and if you can't risk having to ship the mattress back at your own cost your should consider other, tryable mattresses. Press AGREE to accept these terms.

Yesterday I had a package in the mail and whaddaya know, it was the first book I've written. I hasten to add that it wasn't a book book, it was a biography of a local politician written for pay. It was a bigger project than most that I'd undertaken in my life, it was longer, more comprehensive than most, and so forth. And there was a certain responsibility in sitting in someone's living room, listening to her story, and then going away and writing something that would make her feel her life had meaning. I had a lot to work with—she was avid about constituent service, if you needed a form from the state capital or whatever she'd take care of it—and she had quite a few solid accomplishments. But no matter how useful a life a person has led, when you write about that life there's always the question, have I done him or her justice? In this I was fortunate: There was a tribute to her in the local paper when she retired, and a letter writer had said that he saw her in her office, working late, many times but never thanked her for her service but wanted her to know her appreciated it. I used that for the ending, and I think it worked reasonably well. 

This wasn't a book book because it was self-published. (Such things used to be called "vanity presses.") She paid money to have it done, and I got money to do it. You can't buy it on Amazon. So when a friend said "You're a published author," I said, "Well, I'm a printed author." But then today I did something I've been putting off—I took all the printed-out chapters of a young adult novel I've been working on and read them straight through. Partly I did this to see how they flowed, to find transition gaps, missing or misplaced parts, that sort of thing. But also it was to get a sense of the whole and see if it was a big pile of twaddle or not. And it seems I may have something to work with here. A second draft is very much called for, but I think the patient may live. It might, in other words, someday be a book book. At any rate, it seems to justify going forward with the next steps, of which there are many. But it's going. Whaddaya know?

Last night was devoted to Rest & Recuperation, and accordingly I watched DVDs on the laptop with the cat. First I finished Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Then I watched The Maltese Falcon. And today I slapped my head and said, you know what? Ferris is certainly an expression of the folkloric Trickster archetype, and Sam Spade is too, to a slightly lesser extent. Both understand what has to happen and they make it happen through guile. They upset the established order, but the results are ultimately beneficial.

Also funny. The Maltese Falcon in particular is wonderful, one of those films that are a) near-perfect as films and b) better than the book. It's a rare thing, and when it's done it's usually done by John Huston. I love the part where Elisha Cook Jr. as the psychopathic young gunsel Wilmer believes that he has gotten the best of Bogie's Sam Spade by threatening to shoot him with one of the two .45s he carries. As Wilmer conducts Spade to his boss's hotel room, Spade hangs back a little, yanks Wilmer's coat down over his arms, and reaches into the struggling young man's pockets and extracts the pistols. They enter the apartment, and Spade gives the pistols to the hapless Wilmer's boss, Sydney Greenstreet. "Here," he says. "A crippled newsie took 'em off him, but I made him give 'em back."

I was looking at who's visited here, and I had one visit from a place described simply as "European country," and I thought, That's it! Let's have a generic European country! It would have cathedrals and good food and art and cafés and inhabitants who are friendly, no really, they are if you know how to approach them and so forth, but it would be cheaper, because it would be generic, like generic beer or cigarettes. Can you imagine the tourism bucks that would flood in? Everything European and desirable, but slightly less good and much cheaper? It would work for a whole huge demographic that happens to include me. I know, I know, there are some details to work out but that's not my concern—I'm more of a big-picture person.

I've seen plenty of slushy parking lots, but this is the first time I ever found one to have a gently whimsical side:

Hi, all. Sorry for not posting as regularly as I would wish, but we had a followup vet visit last night and with one thing and another it lasted into the later hours. But we saw the eclipse, and it was something, the moon glowing amber, just hanging in the cold sky. Tonight Panther and I are just going to chill out and watch Ferris Bueller's Day Off. It's a charming little film, and Panther and I could use a laugh. Panther's had a hard six weeks, and if any of the jokes go over his head it's OK because I'll have my arm around him, just two interspecies buds watching a flick. Everyone deserves a day off, or a night off, as the case may be, every once in a while.

Freaky—I can hear the Texas debate through the wall. My neighbor is a poli sci professor, so I guess this is homework for him. Me, I'm skipping it, since I can't get it anyway. I'm watching a library DVD on my laptop tonight.

OK, we're going to watch the show, and we'll check back in real soon. Have a good night.

I've said before that when I look at the search terms that brought people to my little curio shop here, I sometimes feel a pang of guilt for their wasted effort, for the sense of deception and loss they must feel. Like the person who googled the phrase "Jetsons porn," for instance—I have none to offer, alas. Just not my forté, I'm afraid.

It's the same way with one I saw a couple of days ago. Years ago I was talking with a friend, and we were discussing various troubles people were having. I mentioned the part in Hamlet where the bad-guy king, Claudius, is having some problems of his own and tells the queen, "O Gertrude, Gertrude, when sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions."

The friend I was talking to is a little like me—always ready for a joke, an upbeat person generally, but with a wistful, sigh-heaving side to her nature. She agreed that this is how things sometimes are. "We should call it 'Gertude's Law,'" she said. And at some point I mentioned it in the blog.

That's why I felt the aforementioned pang when I saw the search phrase "Gertrude S. Law." So close! So near, and yet so far! I hate to disappoint people, but we have no information about Ms. Law and don't plan to soon. But look around, feel free. Maybe there's something else you'll like?

I heard tonight about one of those workplace kerfuffles where Defendant ate Plaintiff's sandwich. Defendant claims mitigating factors: she was sick, and believed that the relatively similar sandwich belonging to Plaintiff was, in fact, her own. She further claims that she mostly saw it as food, which was necessary to keep alive. She was suffering, in other words. I think we should keep this in mind.

I had a similar situation in the workplace a few years back involving an entire turkey. I'm kind of a sucker for those yearly Thanksgiving events where the supermarket gives you a free frozen turkey if you spend a certain amount in the course of a month or so. In the last few years the amount has been pretty high—say three hundred bucks—for which you get a 15-dollar turkey. But this promotion has some sort of evil grasp on my mind. I become like a gambling addict, like a prospector driven mad by the thought of a rich strike. At a certain point, watching the amount of money I have in eligible purchases inching up, I get obsessed with the thought of that free turkey. I buy things I might not actually need any time soon, things I'll want sometime, expensive things, like four boxes of wild rice, say. I don't know why this is. I don't even like turkey that much.

But eventually the happy day comes, the receipt says I can have my turkey, and it sits for months in the freezer and finally I make a nice meal out of it. Wild rice goes well with turkey, by the way. This one year, I got the receipt with my turkey certificate on it while buying food for lunch at the supermarket near work. I immediately redeemed it, took my frozen turkey to work, and put it in the refrigerator to take home.

Later in the day, I went to get my turkey and put it in the car. I stared in disbelief at the empty air in the refrigerator where my turkey had been. Outrage! I marched myself upstairs and announced to some friends that the doors should be locked and nobody allowed to leave until my stolen turkey was recovered. One friend started to chuckle, because she thought she knew what happened. She had organized a food drive for the local working poor, and one part of it was to bring in frozen turkeys that would be delivered to the deserving needy folks. That very day, as it happened, was the one designated for people to bring in their frozen turkeys. The procedure was for them to put the turkeys in the refrigerator, and a guy would put them in a van and take them to the agency that would distribute them. This had been done. The guy had probably passed me in the hall about 90 seconds after I put my turkey in the fridge.

I sagged a little, chuckling. A kindly providence had allowed me to act generously, if only after the fact. I've been in publishing all my life, and figure that I'm pretty much part of the working poor myself. But if someone can't quite afford a fifteen-dollar turkey, well, hell, they're welcome to mine. Sometimes you're generous voluntarily, and sometimes it's involuntary, but either way, a kindly providence is at work and life being hard enough, you should just be glad that it worked at all and that you were part of it. It's like Scrooge on Christmas Day—he had a chance to do good, in spite of himself, and he was glad about it. That's how I felt about that turkey. My own Thanksgiving turkey from last year is still in the freezer, and I really need to defrost the damn thing and eat it sometime soon.

Just an update for anyone who's interested, the cat's back home and doing great. He's got more checkups and visits and annoyances yet to endure, and we all have to keep our fingers crossed. But he's eating and drinking like a horse, and the natural consequences of eating and drinking are manifest as well, so it seems like they've maybe, finally, got him in good working order. Financially this has been what is technically called a "blow," but look, he makes me feel happy. People spend money on all kinds of foolishness that doesn't quite meet that level of return on investment. And if you must know, I think it's easier to make more money to pay off the vet bills than it is to say goodbye forever to something you love. As a deal, it's a no-brainer. And I happen to specialize in that kind of deal.

I felt bad about not having been to the Kimmel Center, where the Philadelphia Orchestra lives, in all the years it's been open. But anyway, now I've been, and one of the interesting things about it was the gift shop. It's full of gimcracks and gewgaws for the cognitive elite—a phrase they're welcome to use for marketing purposes, free and clear—and some of them made me laugh. They had these little dolls of the famously accomplished, like Shakespeare and Abraham Lincoln and so forth. There's a whole subculture of parents who relentlessly indoctrinate their kids with the sense that you should always be striving intellectually, and while I'm not exactly opposed to intellectual effort, at least on other people's parts, I think it could be inculcated in a slightly less driven, obsessive way. If parents sit around reading, or listening to quality music, because they really enjoy such things, that's really going to accomplish more for their kids than a truckload of Abraham Lincoln dolls. A doll should evoke some sort of protective instinct in a young child, and it should evoke it by being cute, which is unfortunately not one of Abraham Lincoln's many qualities. (Shakespeare was cuter, but he does have that Van Dyke and moustache thing going on.)

Which brings us to the Frida Kahlo doll. There was a Frida Kahlo vogue that started in the '70s, and crescendoed in the States when a biopic came out in 2002. In the photographs, you see a striking, intense-looking person. In the self-portraits, though, holey moley, you see the inner person, and it's pretty scary. There's a scene in War and Peace (speaking of enrichment) in which Prince Andrey is walking around at the battle of Borodino and an explosive shell lands at his feet. "The smoking shell spun like a top," says the relevant passage. That's what I see when I look at Frida Kahlo. Just being in the same room with her would be pretty dangerous, I'm guessing. She had a tumultuous relationship with her husband Diego Rivera, and for some reason I'm not surprised at all. (Diego didn't mind her relationships with women, but he didn't like it when she slept with other men. One of the men was Leon Trotsky. Personally I don't see what quality Leon Trotsky had that Frida might have found so compelling. You don't think of the founders of Bolshevism as devils with the ladies but I certainly wasn't there and can't say for sure.)

Anyway, lots of people see her as a hero, admire her, identify with her, and that's perfectly fine. I'm just saying that a doll based on these self-portraits has a certain kind of emotional intensity that's capable of making your kid have screaming nightmares for months. If that fits into your ideas about enrichment then maybe you should change your ideas.

Another thing that made me laugh was a sign about the opera glasses, which they sell for $49.99. "All sales of opera glasses are final," the sign said. For a part of a second I wondered why. Bathing suits, OK, sales of them are final for reasons that occur to us fairly quickly. Then it came to me—a fabulously rich and fabulously cheap concertgoer who made a habit of coming in a few minutes early, buying the opera glasses, and returning them for a refund after the concert. "I changed my mind," the concertgoer sniffs. "They really don't meet my needs."

After about three times, they change the policy. And the clerk is able to inform the concertgoer that if you take the opera glasses, that's it. You have to live with them. I can see the dropped jaw now—no more free opera glasses. It would be worth it to be that clerk, it would be worth it to be a person of modest means your whole life (hey, it's my fate anyway) just to be able to say that.

Saturday I emerged from my cave like a hungry bear and spent a night on the town. Philadelphia is about 30 miles east of here, and it's a fine city with lots of good stuff, including reasonably priced Italian food and the Philadelphia Orchestra, which was what was on the agenda. Long-suffering readers of your poor servant's blog will perhaps remember a phase in which I developed a man-crush on Radu Lupu, a Romanian pianist who's simultaneously obscure and famous. He's won a clutch of international piano competition prizes, including the Van Cliburn, and won a Grammy here and there too. He's known for playing musically, a strange term that I can only explain by saying that with some players you may say, "Wow! What spectacular piano playing!" and with others you won't say anything at all, because the music is so beautiful that you're rendered speechless, and feel a vague urge to cry for happiness. Lupu is the second kind. He's been called "holy man" and "poet" fairly often. But many pretty knowledgeable music lovers have never heard of him, because he doesn't tour or record all that much.

I saw him at the old Academy of Music 10 or 12 years ago, doing a Beethoven piano concerto. He was scheduled to come around again this past week, doing Beethoven again, so tickets were procured well in advance. He's grayer now, but still plays the same way—he plays the music with tenderness and delicacy and depth. The second movement was, I have to admit, poetic, and everyone woke up from their trances with the third, which is a happy piece of music in which the melody tumbles over itself like a bunch of puppies running up a hall. I came away with a renewed reverence for the guy. It's somehow a tribute to the human race, that people learn to play that way. But if there was any temptation to see him as somehow more than human, some divine being come down from among the angels, there was a moment near the climactic ending where he became a human again. The piano was silent for a number of measures, and Lupu just sat quietly, waiting to play. And then at one point as the music sounded triumphantly through the gleaming concert hall, the poet and holy man slowly raised an arm and scratched his left ear. I loved him for that. And it reminded me that although people who play at his level deserve a wagonload of credit for their work and insight, if there's poetry and holiness going on, it's in the music. Anyway, here's a sample of his playing from years ago:

Just saw a piece in the Times about budget wrangles in Washington over PBS, and I had to agree—the radio side is a useful service with lots of quality stuff, and the TV side is moribund. Way back, PBS was the one source for both high culture and edgy new stuff. Today, it's pathetic—if I wanted to watch the local PBS station tonight I could see Lawrence Welk, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, and Red River. I haven't seen any television at all in a while, but I imagine these yawners would be liberally larded with 30-second "enhanced identifications" for Archer Daniels Midland and, presumably, products such as Geritol and Serutan.

I was going to say that PBS did a very cool thing back in 1969 by showing the Peter Hall version of A Midsummer Night's Dream.We all goggled in amazement when Oberon said "Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania!" and pretty soon (about 1:25 into the clip) we could all see at least a couple of things Titania had reason to be proud about. I was going to say that this was PBS in a nutshell, high culture and edgy (for then) at the same time, but you know what? It was shown on CBS, not PBS. Huh.

OMG, I just read that the S.S. Minnow from Gilligan's Island was a sarcastic reference to Newton Minow, the farseeing Federal Communications Commission chairman who said in 1961 that television was a vast wasteland. I ask you to contemplate this: The Gilligan's Island people dissing the man who said television was a vaste wasteland. It utterly confounds logic—it's a koan.

Well, enough surfing around, eh? Let's you and me go see what's going on IRL.

I went to the salad bar at the supermarket yesterday and a woman was standing at it in a kind of catatonic trance. I went up—everything seemed OK, nice fresh bins of salad stuff just glowing there—and she turned and told me there were no tongs. She'd told them and they said they would bring tongs. I looked around—no tongs approaching in the distance—and settled down to wait.

A minute went by. Another. Employees ambled about in a dreamlike slow motion. One woman fiddled with the hot food bar, but at least addressed us. The person who was supposed to do the salad bar tongs called in sick. The backup called in sick. (OK, I thought, there's nobody in the building for whom tong-bringing is in their job description.) But they had delegated someone to bring the tongs. Ah! Perfect.

More waiting. Finally, away at the horizon, I saw a big rack roll through a door. It slowly approached. A young woman was pushing it in that same sort of trance that I assume all the employees are trained in before they're allowed out on the floor. She came closer and closer and finally she was there. On a middle rack was a big bucket with lots and lots of nice clean tongs.

She slowly, deliberately put out the tongs and slowly, deliberately ignored the waiting woman and me. I've notice a marked deapologization trend in our culture, which makes me feel old. If I saw two people standing there, having waited four or five minutes for tongs, I'd have made a chipper little apology, but I guess that's me. She just kept putting out tongs, and the only recognition of our existence was that she didn't actually bump into us in the course of tong outputting. "Thank you," I said. Nothing.

I thought about this, and decided that to this young woman, customers were objects. They were objects with desires, of course, but a subway turnstile is an object with a desire too. You put in your ticket, and it takes the ticket, and it might even be equipped to say "Thank you," but you wouldn't say "You're welcome" back, would you? There'd be no point. So I just started to get my salad. But I was faintly concerned. I think most of us know that there's an election going on here in the United States, with lots of talk about competing in the new global marketplace. I was just wondering how ready we really are to compete in the global marketplace if we're having this much trouble just putting out tongs.

The vet called yesterday in the morning and she was, as the British say, over the moon with giddy joy about how incredibly well Panther was doing. "He's eating," she exclaimed for a start. "And that's remarkable?" was my snappy comeback, at which she must have slapped her head. Usually, she explained, they don't eat for several days after this operation. And he was peeing copiously, when normally the kidneys usually shut down for a couple of days. The students watching him called her at one in the morning, worried he was peeing too much, and she was delighted to tell them that there's no such thing, and she says she nearly called me to give me the good news. I'm sorry to talk so much about peeing, but it's been a theme of the whole saga since January 6.

She went on and on. The latest blood work shows his creatinine level is dropping precipitously, which is also a very good thing. "Panther's a rock star!" she said. He's up and around, trying to get out, for which I can hardly blame him and I want him out too, but he's got to stay for a little while. These people saved his life—she used those words, actually——and I'm inclined to let them do what they want.

She said at one point that I can't know how happy she felt about this, and then she stopped and allowed as how maybe I could. To be honest, I was taken a little off guard. You steel yourself for bad news. You don't steel yourself for miracles. 

Last night I stopped in to see him. The vet student who's on night duty there said he was on pain medication, and he looked pretty zonked out, his pupils totally dilated. I told him if I were a cop and had pulled him over he'd be in trouble. He tried to get up, but I remonstrated as if he were an elderly gent, rising politely, and I just rubbed his chin. He ducked his head against my hand, like he does. After a minute or so I could feel him purring. They'd given him a little toy clown to play with, he had lots of soft blankets, he had food and water, and his stomach and neck were wrapped in blue cloth and there were tubes everywhere. I just petted him and talked to him, and he purred audibly now. People around working, cages and machines, like before but more of it because this was the intensive care unit. The student sat there too. She'd been due to rotate somewhere else, but she asked if she could keep working with him. "There's something affecting about him, isn't there?" I asked her. He's like Jimmy Stewart or Tom Hanks, the soul of gentle good nature. All he wants is friendship and peace. Friendship he has, no cat more, and the peace we're working on.

I told him I loved him and that I'd be thinking about him, and I got up and left. Then I went to a bar where a bunch of fishing friends were meeting. One of the gang moved to Montana, and he was back for a couple of days. We got caught up and made short- and long-range plans for fishing trips. They made the usual bloodthirsty jokes about what should be done with sick cats. If you think I minded you're wrong. There's a good heart (and a fine mind, btw) in every one of them. So I guess the theme of the evening was visiting friends. There are worse ways to spend your time, I must say.

I woke this morning to the sound of rain on the porch roof. And the William Carlos Williams poem came to mind:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

Without the "so much depends upon" part it's a perfectly good haiku; with it, it's much more. OK, so what depends then? I don't know, and Williams didn't say. But the older I get, the more I think that it's a poem about existence. Not simple existence, because there's nothing simple about it, not mere existence either. Existence per se, I guess.

Monday I took the cat in for what I, in my innocence, supposed was a followup sort of checkup visit. The cat would be pronounced in splendid fettle and we'd go home and find something to do for the balance of the afternoon. But the film showed that the last kidney stone hadn't moved, so they had to do something about it. The doctor was showing and explaining and talking about the different options and all I really could think of was how much I wanted to yell and kick things. Then the blood work came back and the number of options shrank to one—the big operation.

They did that yesterday, and it went well. Now they have to address his kidney failure. The doctor is famous; she may be the best in the country, and she may be the best in the world. But my little guy's paws are walking right on the cliff edge that defines the line between Here and Gone.

I'm able to step back and see this is just one little quotidian drama in a big world full of them. It's odd: I feel compelled to explain to the doctors just what I find so affecting about the little creature, as if it would make a difference, as if they would go into a special cabinet and bring out the extra-effective medicine if they understood. I know this is crazy, that it verges on magical thinking, that the whole veterinary hospital stands there, that people come and go, that the light bill is paid and deliveries made, all of that happens because they understand that people love their pets. And yet the compulsion is still there, the way a little old man will tell a cardiac surgeon a story about the day he and his wife met.

But I don't need other people to care, really. It's just one story out of many. Cats get sick, and they get better or they don't. But it was interesting to me to read that the poem was written about a scene Williams saw through the window of a home in Passaic, New Jersey. Williams, a physician, was there attending to a very sick young girl, so sick he was afraid she would die. He looked out the window, saw a wheelbarrow and chickens, and somehow the scene resolved itself into a poem that is widely anthologized today. I wondered, when I read about that, did she live? And if she did, did she ever find out about the poem?

I just thought it was odd that the poem came to my mind this morning, after I read about what was happening—a doctor, sitting in a room with a sick girl and her concerned family, looking out the window as he wondered what he could  do, thinking about white chickens and red wheelbarrows and the falling rain.

I was on the way back yesterday afternoon from an errand in the city and was sitting at a traffic light when for some reason I turned my head and looked left. A little road led away from the other side of the highway, with a sign by it that said "Castle Rock." So I went to the next turnaround, turned (naturally) around, and came back. The road was called "Rock Ridge Road", and it wound around a steepish hill covered with lower-middle-class houses, little ranchers and such, and at the top of the hill was a massive rock outcropping that was obviously the highest point in that part of the world. It looked a lot like a fort, a ruined medieval castle, you might say, and I just looked at it and said to myself, "Well I'll be damned."

What I was looking at was one of the hideouts of a famous highwayman named James Fitzpatrick. You could see that you might be able to survey the countryside and the road from it, especially if the the area around it had been cleared of trees, which was quite possible. It would also be difficult for pursuers to surprise anyone there. At any rate, it's quite an evocative spot. It happens I've been researching this fellow's life for a while now. He was an indentured servant, working in the fields and as a blacksmith. He joined up to march with the rebels in 1776 and fought in the disastrous Battle of Long Island. But after being whipped for some infraction, he decided he was a Tory after all, and after the British occupied Philadelphia he became a highwayman, harassing local Patriots. He never robbed Tories or the poor. (He was good to his mother, too.) And he was a bold devil of a guy—once he strolled into a tavern right uptown (it's a hair salon now) and ordered a drink, with militiamen all around. They only slowly realized who he was, and he pulled a pistol on them, backed out, and got away.

Eventually his luck ran out, and he was hanged. But they never found his reputed stores of treasure. I got talking to a postal carrier and a homeowner there, and they were telling me about how you could see holes in the boulders where people were going to put blasting powder. They tried that a few times, though, and found that they were making boulders roll down the hill in a dangerous way, and they gave up. This homeowner had a long beard, long hair, wallet on a chain, and huge gargoyles flanking his front door. He chuckled about the boulders and the failed attempts to find the treasure, and I did too. It's hardly a secret that when they're not directly harassing us, there's something about outlaws that people like. And it was fun to look up at those rocks with the car engine running, just stopped in the road, and imagine James ("Captain Fitz," as he styled himself) Fitzpatrick sitting there, rifle across his knees, brooding over his grievances with the rebels and planning his next robbery.

It all came together—light, angle, everything. The handsome boy as Young Cat of Destiny.

They're closing my supermarket. It wasn't a perfect supermarket, but then again, I'm not sure what a perfect supermarket is. Mine is being closed because they built a huge new one a few miles away. I'm not happy about this at all. It's a few miles out of my way, for one thing, but it's also the huge newness that bothers me. I know that the first time I'll go in, I'll stand there and look around, awed by its pristine immensity. Miles of polished metal and gleaming glass, aisles of racks stretching away toward the horizon like a hall of mirrors. I know it's meant to be a vision of limitless abundance, a kind of paradise where everything I want is on offer, but frankly, in places like this I look at myself and suddenly it's like a spotlight snaps on and everyone can see my frayed pants cuffs and other imperfections. And everything is just too beautifully arranged—an unusual complaint, I know, but honestly, you go to the produce section and everything is laid out with such severe symmetry that you daren't touch anything for fear a scary-mom archetype will swoop down on you and scold you within an inch of your life. (I'm imagining a nine-foot fire-breathing bat-winged Martha Stewart type of entity here.) They'd have fresh carrots there, unbagged, with their green stems still on, but much, much too clean. Those carrots are scrubbed until they seem to emit a faint orange glow. You could contemplate them all day and never realize that they were once in the ground, you know, where all the dirt is.

I remember first going into the old Acme something like 15 or 16 years ago, when I first moved here. It was standard fare, the produce only just OK but due to improve soon. What struck me was that they had an espresso machine that served you perfectly acceptable espresso in a paper cup for a quarter. A quarter! I had just gotten a new job after a long period of underemployment that had me fairly deep in debt, and I had no money for luxuries. But I could afford espresso if it was only a quarter. And I remember thinking that you could certainly live a good life on the cheap, if you were willing to work at it. Can't afford to go out to eat and have steak au poivre? Learn to make it at home! It's easy and costs less than you'd pay for a pizza. I lived that way for years and to a great extent still do.

Anyway, there's a supermarket conveniently on my way home that's charmingly called Zingo's, and it's also charmingly old-fashioned. The food is stored on racks that look scruffy and downmarket, the kind of racks you assemble at home to store things in your basement. The produce is jumbled up casually, the way a bunch of kids will throw themselves onto a couch. But it's good produce. The selection and range of things really is very good. I went to all the gleaming new supermarkets a long time ago, looking for wooden matches, and it was only at this old-fashioned place that I finally found them. I don't want to have to buy one of those five-dollar butane wand thingies every time I want to make fire. I just want to light a match, thank you very much, and I like supermarkets that make this possible.

But enough of my paen to the imperfect. Frank Moore Colby said it better about a hundred years ago in a book called Imaginary Obligations:

Were it not for the presence of the unwashed and half-educated, the formless, queer and incomplete, the unreasonable and absurd, the infinite shapes of the delightful human tadpole, the horizon would not wear so wide a grin.

Well, Mitt's gone, having proven that he's not nearly as good at pretending to be crazy as Huckabee is at pretending to be sane. McCain is sane and doesn't pretend otherwise, so lots of people in "the base" screech "liberal" and "traitor" and other pleasantries. I don't know much about politics, to be honest, and I'm not likely to learn, because it mostly just makes me feel sad.

Just looked at my lottery ticket—nuthin'. Frankly, this is silly. Why buy lottery tickets if you're not going to win? No point at all. And the thing that bothers me is that I'd be such a good rich person. I'd buy a stone farmhouse around here—shoot, I was writing an article about a pretty nice one just the other day.

I have no comment on primary elections in the United States or politics anywhere else. Last night, while all that voting was going on, I mostly sat and watched The Man Who Would Be King, one of my all-time favorites, one of those books and films and whatever else that are perfect in every way, in which you really can't find any flaws. It's a Rudyard Kipling story about two ne'er-do-well British ex-soldiers in the late 19th century who go off into the wilds of Afghanistan (technically Kafiristan) and end up running the place because one, Danny Dravot, is mistaken for the returned spirit of Alexander the Great. The two rascals had intended to loot the place and go home rich, but the presumed god-king is seduced by his power into wishing to stay; he discovers he has something of a flair for delivering rational, reasonable justice. Of course he is living on a knife edge; the imposture can't last, but his idealism blinds him to the situation. His friend, Peachey Carnehan, begs him to leave, but realism will not be heard. In the inevitable end, the two friends end up out of ammunition, surrounded by a tightening circle of silently menacing tribespeople, intent on vengeance. The former king knows the jig is up.

"Peachey," he says, "I'm heartily ashamed for getting you killed instead of going home rich like you deserved to on account of me bein' so bleedin' high and bloody mighty. Can you forgive me?"

"That I can and that I do, Danny," Peachey says. "Free and full and without let or hindrance."

Danny relaxes, and looks around at the advancing crowd. "Everything's all right, then," he says. And you believe that these two really were adventurers who'd known they could die any time, and accepted that, and that they wouldn't trade their memories for longer life (this had come up earlier) and friendship mattered more than death. You believe it because Sean Connery plays Danny and Michael Caine plays Peachey. Good, good film. And maybe the subject of hubris and misplaced, bull-headed idealism is one that politicians should study up on. If any politicians are reading, I'd say this film is a good place to start, and it's lots of fun too.

The cat's been fine, which I no longer take for granted, believe me. The only problem lately is that in about a day and a half he figured out the routine: pills morning and evening. So in the mornings and evenings he keeps an eye on me, and if I show any sign of being about to swoop down on him and shove pills down his throat, he heads for one of his bomb shelters. He goes behind a bookshelf, for instance, and I direct a stream of irritated verbiage at him, asking him if he liked it better at the hospital and quoting Shakespeare on ingratitude, and then I leave the room. It's become like a game of wits, James Bond against some wily Russian counterpart, tit for tat. You'd think a human would be able to outwit a cat, but frankly I'm just staying even with him. And there's 18 days worth of antibiotic left. This could get interesting.

"You're not getting older, you're getting better" used to be a staple of Valentine's Day wishes, and a good, diplomatic thing it is to say too. But this sign stopped me. They didn't want to say "55 & Older," of course. If you're thinking about moving to an "active adult" place, you know the situation. But that "better"—man, I don't know. I think it's one of those euphemisms like "Rubensesque," things that strain your ability to not laugh out loud. Nobody really thinks it's better to get older. It's better to get wiser, it's better to get more experienced, it's better to have more money. It's not better to be older.

But you know what really makes me worried? If these people hired me, and we were all sitting around a table deciding what to say on that sign, I'd have strongly argued against saying "better" because I think it sounds ridiculous and would make the active adults laugh and then go to some other developer who doesn't insult their intelligence. But these developers undoubtedly have a high-powered marketing team who said do it this way and everyone around the table nodded their heads and agreed and ordered up the sign.

And maybe they're right to do that. If they are, then I'm wrong, wrong by temperament and conviction, because I'm pretty much convinced that people have enough sense to know when they're being ridiculously patronized. And that means that people with the money to build active adult communities and similar enterprises will never hire me and I'll just get better older and older and poorer and poorer. I've threatened before to give it all up and just go be that crusty, antisocial guy who fixes outboard motors at the lake-resort marina. No more communications! I give up! Or maybe I'll just discuss this topic with the marketing experts among my friends. In the meantime, all I can say is this: Brawndo's got what plants crave!

The area where I live is dotted with wineries these days, so for an excursion yesterday afternoon I went to a tasting at one. These things can be dangerous: You go, they pour you a glass, and if you don't reflexively spew it out and choke and retch like it was ammonia, you'll feel under some obligation to buy a bottle or two. But this place—it was just a few miles away, too—was different in that you pay ten bucks and they give you a souvenir glass, four reasonable noggins of different wines they make, and four different cheeses made locally so that the wine has something to wash down. When you pay for a tasting, there's no guilt involved. The tasting room is in an old farm building, stone walls and all that, and you can see the vines (well, the vine stocks, it's winter) out the window. They're used to dealing with people of all different levels of knowledge, and all different levels of pretension, of that I'm sure. I made a modest comment about a flavor I thought I detected, and the guy responded with a sort of noncommittal nod. I'm sure that if I'd said "Do I detect a note of singed raccoon fur?" I'd have gotten the same nod—he must practice it. The wines turned out to be perfectly tasty, a little pricey, but that's how it is with itsy wineries where small production is part of the value you're paying for. It's local, which is fun—I could walk there in a couple of hours, which I might do for a laugh some time—and it's rare, which is sort of okay too, and they concentrate on Italian grapes and styles, which are a little neglected in the wine world IMHO. All in all, a perfectly pleasant way to spend the afternoon. I bought a bottle of their cheapest. Fact is, I'm what's euphemistically called a "value shopper," and if I were any more of a value shopper I'd probably qualify for food stamps. In a properly ordered society you'd get government assistance to assure a good supply of solid table wine in the house for subsistence purposes, but we're just not there yet. So most days I'll have to drink good, solid, tasty wine produced on industrial scale in Australia or California or wherever, and have locally produced wine once in a great while, as a luxury. Wine that comes to me on a boat from halfway around the world is cheap, and wine made down the street is very nearly prohibitively expensive. Go figure!

Of the three DVDs  I grabbed at the library to entertain myself and the cat with tonight, I didn't notice at the time, it was a coincidence, but two of them were directed by John Huston. (Moby Dick and The Man Who Would Be King, to be specific.) If you want to watch a good film, get something by John Huston. You can't go wrong. Very, very cool guy, John Huston.     

I've always felt a little bit of awe regarding people like Carl Sagan, who are accomplished in the sciences, and I've always felt a little bit of awe regarding people like Jodie Foster, who are accomplished at everything. But I've been watching the film Contact a lot lately, and something struck me. In one scene, the Jodie Foster character, Ellie Arroway, is sitting under the night sky with some stupid guy who isn't me, and she's telling him, "There are 400 billion stars out there, just in our galaxy alone. If just one out of a million of those had planets, and just one in a million of those had life, and just one out of a million of those had intelligent life, there would be literally millions of civilizations out there." And her eyes just blaze with the thought of it, and you're carried away by her enthusiasm. But I have this nagging little thing in my head that sometimes stops and niggles at me, saying "Wait a minute," and this morning I ran the numbers. Not quite trusting my results, because I'm challenged not just with mathematics but, let's be frank, a little bit with arithmetic too, I started wondering if anyone else had gotten the same results, and alas, they had.

I'm a little let down. Carl Sagan was involved with this project, and he's famous for talking about billions and billions of things. And Jodie! What are they teaching at Yale, anyway? Yes, 400 billion is a lot of anything, but when you start dividing even large numbers by a million and then a million and then a million again, you can whittle them down pretty fast. No, to get that proportion to work out you'd need a much larger number, and you'd have to resort to kiddie math, like a hundred billion jillion kachillion. That's an estimate—this is not my expertise, believe me. Great flick, still, but go easy on the literally millions of civilizations in our galaxy alone idea if you find yourself at a party full of astronomers any time soon. They'll probably all thrust their wrists out at you and show you, on their digital calculator watches, how stupid you're being about the math involved.

I want to add that I like the film for the storytelling—you care about the characters. I'm fairly indifferent to the idea of space folks. It's hard to believe there aren't intelligent entities out there, if only because of the billion jillion kachillion and the growing belief that organic stuff isn't as rare or unlikely as we once thought. Also there are the many examples of UFO sightings by multiple people not all of whom have long histories of being nut cases. I don't understand why the saucer people are so coy, always flitting around and then hoisting their skirts and running away again, but still—where there's smoke, and all that.

I was on a plane once, crossing the Atlantic at night. I couldn't sleep, so I was looking out the window, and suddenly I saw another plane, flying parallel to us, miles to the north. It was like seeing a distant village, knowing that inside the plane there were people sitting, some sleeping, some reading with their lights on, some talking quietly to each other, flight attendants walking up and down the aisles, the cabin crew reading gauges or whatever the do up there. It was nice, looking away off through the emptiness at the blinking lights, and thinking that. Maybe that's what people feel when they wonder what's out there, or maybe it's just that gnawing human curiosity. I admire that, really. But for me, there's plenty to be curious about right here at home.