May 2009 Archives

I don't know if it's random, but I made a few anti-ant moves and for the last few days it's been like the Great Plains and bison, circa 1904 or so. Where once there were vast herds, now only a few solitary stragglers wander the empty expanses. And while I suppose they serve some purpose—anteaters would be in trouble without them, I suppose—I'd be pretty comfortable with local extirpation at the very least. Everything in nature has a role to play, yeah, yeah, I get it. But I just think the roles could be played just as well somewhere besides my house, is all. 

I have a friend who's a shopping journalist, so maybe I'll ask her what to decide about this:

For all the ex- and soon-to-be ex-journalists like me, a website cheerfully titled Newspaper Death Watch. They do claim that in addition to the death watching they're chronicling the reinvention of journalism. 

I know I'm not posting enough. I'm not doing anything enough. But here's an image, just for fun, from the opening day of the local farmer's market a couple of weeks ago, OK? Very fun and all. The statue belongs to beauty salon or whatever those things are called these days. It's Marilyn getting her skirt blown up in The Seven Year Itch. An odd thing for a small town sidewalk but that's why I like it.

After a short spell of unseasonably warm and extremely humid weather, a sort of mirror-image Indian summer, if you will, it turned cool and breezy last night, and that was how it was when I woke up. It reminded me of fishing-trip mornings, redolent of adventure. The cat sat on a table by the window, looking out with his nose in the breeze, and I realized that for him it was different: with his sense of smell, a breezy, humid morning was probably something like reading an interesting magazine article.

Rain fell off and on, which is nice when you have a garden, which I do. But I got thinking about how my gardens have typically been on the property where I lived, but this year it's in a community garden plot in the park across town. Ordinarily I'll hover over the garden in its early weeks, checking how things are going every day. But now I can't, and it gave me an odd feeling: It was like my garden had gone away to college, and I couldn't hover over it any more. I guess I hope I've taught my garden to make good decisions, is all I can say. Better than my own at that age, at any rate.

Call me Mr. Touchy-Feely but North Korea reminds me of one of those people who get all obsessed with weapons because—wait for it—they're hurting inside. I mean, they act just like the crazy gun-nut neighbor with the tall fence and ramshackle yard with rusting washing machines and the "Keep Out" signs and all. And I declare I don't see why. Why can' they just, you know, lighten up? Stalinist dictatorships, cults of personality, bloated armies, it just all seems so 20th century, somehow. This seems less like an irresolvable conflict than it does a case of a country that's let truculent isolation become an ingrained bad habit. Yo, Comrade Kim! Lighten up, dude! Life's too short for all this tension.

I was vaguely troubled yesterday by a sense that I was wasting the day. I woke slowly, puttered around, cleaned dishes, read online, played the piano. I have lists of things to do, but I didn't do any of them, to be honest. Short-range, long-range, medium-range projects all went unadvanced.

Some people say they strive to "live life to the fullest," and more power to them, I say. Good old Horace said "Seize the day." (He actually said carpe diem, because he spoke Latin.) And I more or less agree—no telling what may happen tomorrow, so give it your all today, and so forth.

But it was nice, taking it easy. I grilled dinner and sat on my back porch, a glass of wine at hand. Neighbors up the alley had friends over, and as the evening went on they lit a small bonfire. Just across the alley, a guy did woodworking in a garage. Opposite me, some teens hung out, sitting on bicycles, talking. Far overhead, chimney swifts wheeled about, making their chipping call. I watched a jet's contrail stretch across the sky; for a moment the fuselage gleamed in the sun, just a tiny bright dot, and then faded. I looked at the clouds and ate grilled mushrooms.

And I felt content, and calm. Maybe I hadn't seized the day in my jaws and ripped great chunks of bleeding time out of it, but at its end I felt happy and full. Maybe you don't have to seize every day. Maybe occasionally you can leave the day in peace, the way you let a cat be, if you know how to be with cats. It was as though the day jumped up on the couch with me, catlike, and let me smooth its fur while it sat calmly at my side. Like I said, I didn't seize the day, but it was a fine one all the same, in the end.

OK, so about three months ago when it was still cold I made a dish that called for just a sprinkling of brown sugar, and I put the almost-whole box of brown sugar away in a remote corner of my pantry without thinking. Didn't seal it up, or anything.

It's been warm now, and the ants in the kitchen were just outrageous. Until I found that damn brown sugar box. This was a brown-sugar bonanza for the little demons, and I could see plenty on top and figured they had a whole mining operation going on in there. Free and clear! Come one, come all, it's gold-rush time! I suppose they thought the good times would last forever, because they were pretty oblivious as I took the box to the trash and dumped it in. They were oblivious as I approached with a spray container full of insecticide. By the time the juice hit them, it was too late. Mass oblivion now, the kind that lasts. Heh.

It's been very quiet in the kitchen today. No ants. I guess ants aren't blessed or cursed with forethought. What the geniuses on Wall Street thought the future would bring, I really don't know. We don't move in the same circles. But I suppose it's quiet in the Bear Stearns offices these days—as quiet, I imagine, as my kitchen counters are today. 

In the category of things that seemed like a good idea at the time, the BBC had news this morning about a couple who ran a gas station in New Zealand until the bank accidentally deposited ten million New Zealand dollars in their account. They managed to withdraw the better part of the money before the mistake was discovered, and now they've disappeared.

Call me a worrier, or call me wise, but I don't envy them. It's not like the bank made a mistake in chess and you get to take its queen; it's not a game at all, and you don't get to laugh and keep the money when this happens. There was some vagueness in the BBC radio report exactly how illegal it is to try. One of the officials interviewed said it was either theft or fraud.

The couple's fleeing the country suggests they understood that. And going from being a service-station operator to being a wanted criminal is kind of a big jump with a steep learning curve. You've got the cops to deal with. And you've got the bank, and the insurance companies that underwrite the bank. They're out millions, and have every reason to hire a stadiumful of private investigators and bounty hunters and any other help they need.

So the couple has to live modestly, and worry a lot. I don't see how they're better off. If they could pay the bills working at the service station, they were probably better off before. The David Copperfield character Mr. Micawber gave rise to what's called the "Micawber Principle":

“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result: happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result: misery."

Personally I live modestly and worry a lot myself. But I don't have millions of dollars I can't really spend. I think that would be kind of frustrating. And I don't have armies of cops and other predators chasing me across the globe. I have enough problems without that, thank you very much. All I want is to be ten dollars ahead of the bills, and have a mind at peace.

I'm going to go downstairs and make coffee now, and stand on the porch and drink it. Then I'm going to water my tomato plants. And then I'll start my work day. Nice and calm and peacefully, is how I'll do all that. I don't have as much money as the New Zealand couple but I can live in my house and walk in my town. I wonder if they wish they still could, too?

Sorry, running out of time for blogging again and don't have much to say. I was fooling around with Twitter and dropped it. And when you don't even have time for microblogging, well, obviously your macroblog is going to suffer accordingly. But I'm sure today or tomorrow I'll see something—a dog will sit down and scratch its ear, or whatever—and I'll have some thoughts and insights on the subject. : ) Talk to you soon, world.

He was the kind of guy you immediately typecast: businessy-looking dude, sports utility vehicle. But I only had a moment, because the light changed and he was coming toward me in the opposite lane, and before I could think anything about him at all he blew a big chewing-gum bubble and was gone. I really don't know why I would think bad thoughts about dressing for business and driving an SUV. Or why I should like him so much better because of the bubble gum. But I did.

I don't think the United States is a perfect society. We could think about the future more, consume less, and pay more attention to the arts. We got involved in at least one ill-considered war I can think of and that slavery thing seems, in retrospect, like something of a mistake.

But.

I love the Hubble Space Telescope.

I love what it says about human beings and I'm pleased with what it says about the United States. I'm very happy that the repairs are going well.

See (and I use that word advisedly), when I think about the Hubble I think about the first primitive human who looked at the night sky and wondered what those lights were. I think about the desert nomads who wondered who made all the magnificence they saw around and above themselves. I think of the Vikings, sailing so far from their native coasts that they discovered new worlds. I think of mountain climbers, explorers who went to the poles, who went to the ocean floor and finally took to the air in balloons and gliders and airplanes, flying over the trees and lakes like the birds we'd envied for so long. And I think about Galileo Galilei, peering through a telescope he made himself and seeing, for the first time in history, that Jupiter had moons.

We do horrible things, we humans. But the best of us burn to know more and see farther. Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe is expanding. And the telescope named for him helps us see farther and farther outward, and learn more and more about it. They're installing a new instrument on it called a cosmic origins spectrograph. I'm sort of a math dunce and I have only vague, general idea what a spectrograph is good for. But that name—it tells me that this machine was built by serious people who are hunting big game.

There's a very cool site about the telescope. And for God's sake, if you don't look at anything else, look at the images. We're humans, and even the most complacent of us have something inside that makes us wonder what's over the next hill. And we have a capacity for wonderment and awe. Look at the images—you'll thank me. And maybe you'll say, like me, that the United States is jolly well not perfect but that Hubble deal is pretty cool.

By the way, one of the guys floating in space and fixing it as I write this is an astronomer named John M. Grunsfeld. He's 50. I suppose they could have gotten somebody younger and cheaper, but I assume they thought he was the right person for the job. See? Some of us boomers are still actually good for something. His hobbies include mountaineering. That didn't surprise me.

I like to portray myself as a genial fellow in my literary pup tent here, because I am, in fact, genial most of the time. But not when I hear these two words in this order: "torture debate." There is no debate among anyone who knows a damn thing about interrogation. So when I am forced to acknowledge that some people—well, humanoids, at any rate—think the United States ought to be in the torture business, I seethe with contempt. I won't try to argue with you; if you think the United States should torture people, you're ipso facto a doctrinaire ignoramus who's immune to rational argument. So I'll just ask you one question:

Have you ever been accused of something that you didn't do?

Well?

Ahhh—hear that? The sound of chirping crickets. How very pleasant.

Went to the famous Willowdale Steeplechase yesterday. I wasn't that interested, rich people kind of bore me, but it was something to do and I thought I could get a few photos. I walked around like I was in a zoo, looking at the local aristocracy, and at one point I wondered what these old-money wealthy guys who evidently never take off their navy blazers do when the cloth wears out—is the blazer removed surgically? But man, did one photo come together. I couldn't ever be a real sports photographer because doing things correctly at the right time is just not a strength of mine. But check it out, these guys are pounding toward the finish:

It was unusually quiet at the breakfast joint this morning. The waitress figured it was because people were making breakfast in bed for the mothers in their lives—it's Mother's Day in the United States—but that a lot of people would be taking mom out for breakfast later. "About nine o' clock," she said, and snapped her fingers. "This is the calm before the storm."

"That's the only kind of calm," I sighed, "that I've ever known." An exaggeration, of course, but only a slight one.

Today I had one of those moments where you wildly overdramatize a prosaic situation in order to keep yourself amused. The classic expression of this tendency was set down by James Thurber in his short story, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. So anyway, I had some fairly unglamorous work to do (little stories for the local newspaper, not the fancy-dancy magazine work I prefer), and I was mentally bewailing my lot, and I thought of Captain John Smith.

Mr. Smith was born in 1580 in England, went all over Europe and the Near East fighting in armies against just about anybody who wanted to fight back, it seems, but in 1602 he was wounded fighting against the Tatars, was captured, and then sold as a slave. I thought of him today because he must have thought, at some point while he was a slave, that he was doing relatively unglamorous work. But he got out of being a slave somehow—he claimed his Turkish master sent him as a gift to his Greek mistress, who fell in love with Smith, but Smith was not the most reliable source of information about himself, to be frank, and many of his stories should be doubted in the absence of corroboration—and went on to do all sorts of interesting things, including founding the first permanent English settlement in the United States.

This goes to show that if you're doing unglamorous work on Tuesday you might nevertheless do something of consequence on Thursday. Captain John Smith managed to get out of being a slave somehow—he showed some gumption and didn't take it lying down. He didn't brood about it and wonder what deep inner flaw created this state of affairs. He just dealt with the situation.

Anyway, Captain John Smith liked to embellish things to make life more interesting. So do I. But right now I'm hungry and I have to go buy bread. I'm out of bread. I'm going to walk to the store and get some. It's a matter of survival! I need food! Across the burning sands of the desert I'll walk, hungry, starving, nothing forcing my stumbling feet forward but my blind will...

The redoubtable (that means both good and bad, but it usually means good) Paul Boutin has a great article on how to get more from Twitter (which is something that's both good and bad, but I suppose might be somewhat good sometimes). 

I think you'd have to say that famous British astrologer Jonathan Cainer is an expert, don't you? The phrase "expert astrologer" sounds funny to me somehow, like "expert dowser," in that it suggests you've achieved mastery through training and experience in doing something that most sensible people don't believe can actually be done. But he's immensely popular, and when he had his predictions in the newspapers he was, for a time, the United Kingdom's highest-paid journalist. So let's say he's an expert.

I don't believe in astrology myself, but I believe (there's evidence for this one) in positive thinking, and Cainer is nothing if not positive. He constantly hammers away at the idea that what seems like a problem is really a blessing in disguise and you'll soon see why. As I say, I don't believe the stars can tell you whom to marry or whether to buy gold, but most of the time I can use a pep talk as much as anyone else and the man is, after all, an expert.

But I was brought up short by a prediction he made for me and my fellow Librans the other day. He was talking about the way the swine flu epidemic that was going to end all human life on the planet a few days before had seemed to abate just a bit, or at least the media uproar had, since the actual epidemic-wannabe itself never really seemed to work up a good head of steam. So Cainer made a few remarks about how often experts are wrong, and told us Librans to "be wary of expert opinions today."

I read that and scratched my head. I did at least implicitly consider Mr. Cainer himself to be an expert, as we've discussed, and I thought, OK, if you're an expert, I should be wary of your opinion too, so that means I shouldn't be wary of expert opinions, which means I should take seriously your opinion that your opinion shouldn't be taken seriously—does not compute—does not compute—she's my sister and my daughter—ack!

I mentioned this to friends I was having dinner with and one of them, a philosophy major in college, laughed and immediately pegged it as an instance of the famous "liar paradox," which people have been having fun with since the fourth century B.C.

Luckily, Cainer is himself again today. He said that when we don't know what we do, we resort to doing the sensible, adult thing. Am I now pursuing a course that seems comforting, yet makes little sense? "Today's discovery gives rise to several new possibilities," Mr. Cainer assures me.

I don't know what those possibilities are yet, but the day is young—I'm eating breakfast and writing this, actually—so I guess we'll see. I'm certainly open to new possibilities. Having been well trained by Mr. Cainer over the years, I just now imagined it was possible that all my problems are actually good things waiting to happen. It's as if I were surrounded by growling bears, and I faced the prospect in the next second or so of being devoured with nothing left but half a shoe and a belt buckle. Then suddenly the bears pull off their scary masks and reveal themselves in their true nature—they're all my dear friends and close relations, come to douse me with champagne and hoist me on their shoulders like a conquering hero so they can carry me, as I grin with relief and happiness, out of the dark forest and all the way home.

I really shouldn't be writing here, I should be writing in a different application because I'm in the middle of a piece I'm doing for that stuff, what's it called, money, but I wanted to stop, to slow down, to take a break, just for a moment.

For the past two days, I've gotten up early and come downstairs, made coffee, and sat in the gray light of dawn, listening to the gently falling rain and the sound of the birds calling through it. Feeling grateful for the moment.

I suppose you might call this a form of agnostic prayer. But at any rate, I'm glad not to have been too busy to recognize the moment for what it was. Not too busy with work, or fear, or sorrow. No, not that busy, thank heavens.

But I have to get back to work. Hope you're not so busy yourselves, gang.

I hadn't thought about good old Hans Holzer for decades until I saw his obit this morning. He was an investigator of the paranormal, but I never read his books because I think the real world is mysterious enough, thank you very much. I don't need to know what's going to happen after I die—I'm in no hurry to find out, if you really want to know.

My father inculcated in me the idea that anyone like Holzer was a charlatan. But I've discovered over the years that they tend rather to be enthusiasts, and if they're deluding anyone it's primarily themselves. They have lively imaginations unemcumbered by any strict sense of logic or rationality. You can't reason them out of their beliefs because that's not the game they're playing intellectually.

If I've learned anything myself from a casual study of critical thinking, it's that you shouldn't believe in things without evidence for them, and you should be aware of the limits of your knowledge. I always dismissed old Hans Holzer because whatever he suspected or believed, he didn't actually know anything about the afterlife. But just a few minutes ago I thought about it and realized that at this point, actually, he does.

KENNETT SQUARE: I'm reporting today from the epicenter of swine flu fear, the United States of America. Or maybe the fear is concentrated more highly somewhere else, I really don't know, or much care. I do remember thinking "hmm" when the flu was first identified as 1) lethal, sometimes, to young and healthy people and 2) bearing other similarities to the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-19.

But it really looks like it's not all that bad, not that much worse at this point than regular flu. So right now I'm going to say something negative about my own country. Not every last person, OK? But quite a few. What I'm going to say is that when Hunter S. Thompson said this was a nation of "frightened dullards," he may have had a point. He said that in 1967, when people all of a sudden thought the nation was being overrun by outlaw bikers. I know someone who works in a medical office dealing with the public, and she tells me about the panic over every new perceived threat. After Sept. 11, people said they'd never go to New York, never fly in a plane, never do this or that. You would have thought that the streets were full of rampaging terrorist allosaurs that would bite you in half if you emerged from the basement. Another time, there was some flu or other going around and the supply of vaccine was low, and one father demanded that his children be vaccinated, low supply be damned, and further announced in support of his demand that he was a police officer. I don't think he was seriously threatening to arrest or shoot or Taser anyone in the office there. He was just panicked.

He was panicked over a relatively unremarkable wave of seasonal flu, is the thing. We're not talking here about the Black Death, the epidemic of bubonic plague that started in 1347 and killed half of Europe, and in some places every three out of four people. We're talking about the flu, as in the phrase "cold and flu season." Something expected and usually unremarkable. Something that makes the vast majority of the people who catch it miserable for a week. Some of the more contrarian columnists pointed out that 36,000 Americans will die of the flu this year—the regular flu—and about that many die every year. It's a shame that those people died, but you know what? It's a shame, but we all have to die. But while we're alive, I think it makes sense not to worry disproportionately about terrorists, asteroids, or communicable respiratory diseases most of us won't get or will survive with mild symptoms if we do. It makes sense, in short, not to be a frightened dullard.

Anyway, I'd like to propose a cure for the epidemic of fear about swine flu. My proposed cure is to turn the power button on your TV to the "off" position. Go out and take a walk. Do you see dead bodies lying around? Tumbrels full of corpses? I was out yesterday and didn't see any such thing. We Americans are evidently not going to die in large numbers because of the H1N1 virus. We're going to die before we have to, most of us, but it'll be because of heart disease and cancer caused by bad food and lack of exercise. These will have been exacerbated by the ongoing stress of worrying about threats that will remain astrally remote for just about everyone. Just go outside, OK? If you don't see corpses, be glad. That's my advice.