Parallel? Not Really, But

A great American writer said this:

“I have tried hard, and yet I cannot for the life of me comprehend how we got into that mess. ... I thought we should act as their protector — not try to get them under our heel. We were to relieve them from ... tyranny to enable them to set up a government of their own, and we were to stand by and see that it got a fair trial. It was not to be a government according to our ideas, but a government that represented the feeling of the majority of the [people], a government according to [their] ideas. That would have been a worthy mission for the United States. But now — why, we have got into a mess, a quagmire from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extrication immensely greater. I'm sure I wish I could see what we were getting out of it, and all it means to us as a nation.”

4,324 American soldiers died, many of them killed by irregulars and insurgents, in a conflict that was a credit to no one. Iraq? No. Nor much of a parallel, really. Guesses as to where and when?

Tripping Over the Light Fantastic

An Assembly committee approved a bill Monday that would make California the first state in the nation to ban the sale of incandescent lightbulbs.

Another bass-ackwards move by the those people who get elected to the Legislature because they can never get real jobs. Yes, incandescent bulbs use more energy than those compact fluorescent thingumbobs. If everyone in the state -- nay, the country, the world! -- switched over, a noticeable dent would be made in greenhouse emissions. But so what? Energy costs money. Let people who would spend more to use incandescent bulbs go ahead and do so. Let people who don't mind looking like a fat pasty ghost who's prone to depression under fluorescent lighting make the more economical choice. It's no use mandating a specific technology. They should just do as they did with automobiles and decree that x-percent of light sources sold need to meet y and z efficiency requirements and let the market and its numerous clever technologists worry about details. Gad! What's with these frickin' Al Gore wannabe lawyers who think they're frickin' engineers?

Folsom Friday Night

The locals have generated a nice little party town. I mean both the nice and the little parts. Folsom was a tiny prison town forever, and though now it spreads its stucco neighborhoods in all directions like an overturned barrel of nuclear waste, the old downtown core is still kind of cool. Just the one crossroads, surrounded with bars and restaurants, maybe half a dozen all told, all in buildings that predate the post-Reagan building boom (some the Civil War) hence have a modicum of character. We had Mexican food out on the second-story veranda under an overhanging tree and sucked down margaritas while talking and watching people and listening to the Harleys roar by, then had more in the bar where the "entertainment" was a couple of fat people jerking arhythmically while they played a mostly 70s party tape and played with the disco lights (maybe they were dancing), then moved down and across the street to Scarlets, a new bar wide open to the street that gets entirely packed with people from twenty one to seventy (or who look seventy, anyway, there has always been a meth-using prison family subculture here), where we hung out and bothered people half our age and laughed discreetly at people who deserved it and had our usual uncreative drinks made with vodka (her) or gin (me). It was fun! Always is. Some gal was getting painted with her home country flag and being a dork I tried to ask her if a Zimbabwean accent is any different from a South African accent but to no avail, for people rarely get it when I'm babbling off the wall shit like that, especially with a drink in my hand. It's very possible I actually said Rhodesian anyway. Here are pics taken with my brand new pocket camera for those who are into that sort of thing.

Movie Mudness

My kid observed that when I have the remote control, I always switch past all sorts of channels complaining that there's nothing going on, and then stop to watch some black and white movie where there's nothing going on.

Fursday Five

(Explanation)

1. What is the single most ridiculously unnecessary purchase you've ever made?

It’s possible that I once bought cigarettes. But that was hardly ridiculous if in my case entirely unnecessary, so we’ll go with that stupid-looking brown leather jacket I bought in the late 70s that I’ve still never worn. Sorry, never hired Van Halen for a birthday party. (Ooh, jeez, now that I think, the most ridiculously unnecessary purchase I've ever made would really have to be a certain firearm, thus combining ridiculous and unnecessary with .223 caliber.)

2. What is your favorite season and why?

Spring! Winter’s cold is gone except for a welcome morning chill, the days are getting longer, the air is getting warmer, the world is turning bright green, fruit trees are blossoming, summer’s on its way, birds are singing, “birds” are wearing less ...

3. Who would you want to play you in the movie adaptation of your life?

Harrison Ford. Woody Harrelson. Judge Reinhold. Gregory Peck. Twenty five years ago someone thought I looked like Sting. But these are all leading men. The actor for me would really have to be a sidekick, a co-star, a character actor whose name no one can quite remember.

4. What's your fondest memory of your bestest childhood friend?

There are many. One would be our long walks through Tilden Park where it rambles along the crest of the Berkeley Hills, far from urban noise, telling tall tales in various British accents of our derring-do in foreign wars.

5. What is the most disgusting thing you've ever eaten?

Some indescribable uncooked creature of the sea, served last summer in a Japanese restaurant in China. The texture, the flavor, even the temperature of the thing made my body scream for rejection of every kind. But I bravely kept it aboard. Because I actually ate it, this beats the so-called “stinky tofu” they have in Taipei that smells of stomach acid. Because I ate it on purpose, it also beats the baby-poop I found under my fingernails one day when I was a young father after eating lunch.

Here is where I put the rules if you want me to carry it forward but I deleted all that part because I've only thought of one question so far and my life is hella ramping up now and for the next couple months and I really need to be bloggering less, a lot less, wish me luck. But I'm not gonna delete this thing, sheesh, nobody does that!

The Shooter

Below, I tried to examine how the international nature of the shooter helped me see the incident not as an American tragedy but as a global one. This was because I presumed he was a fairly recent immigrant and not subject to a lifetime of American culture, and thus represented a pathology more universal.

I may have been wrong. He had been here since he was eight, and in many particulars fit what we've come to see as the typical profile of such a person. As I say, I don't scour the news. This adjustment comes by way of a blog entry.

If I start thinking about the victims, as I tried not to do below, I will get all sad, and it won't do them any good, nor me, so I'm going to go out into the sunshine awhile. After all it's within an hour of lunchtime. Be safe, everyone, and alert, and smile at someone who looks lonely.

The Shooting

The shootings at Virginia Tech didn’t effect me, I think, because I was waiting to have some information to hang my feelings onto. I don’t seek out the news much. Almost never on TV, and if I’m looking at news on the net I’m likely half a minute away from finding something better to do. I gathered it was the “worst shooting in modern American history,” and that’s bad, but these things are bound occasionally to be the worst so far. Thirty-three people, that’s awful. Could have been twice as many if it was a bus driver went off his nut rather than a kid with a handgun.

Something clicked when I heard on NPR while driving in to work that the shooter was a student from South Korea. Not someone who’d spent a lifetime steeped in America’s alleged gun-crazy culture (a culture which, by the way, I’ve had almost zero contact with despite having at home several firearms). Not someone who was bullied throughout high school and finally reached the end of his rope and picked up a trenchcoat and a list and a shotgun. Not someone who was desperate to maintain his place amongst local gangsters. Just a kid from another country, smart and hard-working enough to get into a prestigious American university, a kid who, sometime in the past year or so, completely lost his way.

It may be the Columbine incident offers the nearest similarity. I can imagine the young man far from home, feeling isolated hence resentful, possibly subject to occasional barbs from the local rednecks. Maybe a girl dumped him in a particularly cruel way. Maybe he lost himself in endless rounds of Doom or something similar and at some point in his private journey, nursing his need to lash out, simply lost all fellow feeling. That he was from another country shows this is not a peculiarly American trait. That he was in western Virginia might have made the guns easier to get than in, say, New York City, but not a lot easier. Even Seoul has gun crime.

I am very sorry that so many families were torn apart and will remain so. But I’m not giving their pain special attention because horrific crimes that slaughter innocents happen every day, and I’m numb. There is nothing about being at Virginia Tech that makes a person’s death more significant than in some marketplace or bus stop in Baghdad. The entire world is awash in a terrible sense, spreading throughout the human tribe, that at some weird personal level it is acceptable to kill total strangers, people who have done nothing to deserve it. Whether this happens to students in the U.S. or to Shia worshippers in Iraq or to Buddhist teachers in southern Thailand makes no difference to me. It happens, for different reasons, for reasons that make an evil sort of sense to the perpetrators, but it happens, every damn day. I’m aware of it one way or another, every damn day, and I’m very sorry for the students' families and for the people of Blacksburg, Virginia, but their pain, our pain, my pain, once it soaks into their lives, will simply be more of the same. They say America is a violent place but the truth is, the entire world is a violent place, and all this incident shows us is that America is not immune.

My Twitter Background

Listen, the web is nothing if not a great big toy box, okay? And I’m a big boy that plays with great big toys. So I signed up for Twitter. Okay? Got a problem with that?

Great big toys. That doesn’t sound right. Implies I drive a backhoe all day. I don’t. I’ve rented one a few times. Great fun, but. No. I don’t have any great big toys. Darn. Not even a used Harley. Not yet. Got a few other things to do before I can by me a toy that costs SIXTEEN THOUSAND FRICKIN DOLLARS. So meanwhile I have to keep myself happy with similarly masculine pursuits such as a social networking tool named after birdsong.

The birdie babies are doing fine, by the way. One egg hasn’t hatched yet. One chick seems to be missing. Do birds eat their young? I would think it would be too small for a hawk to bother with, and the cat can’t get up there. Maybe it wasn’t reading at grade level and the mama decided to cut her losses. Frickin’ yuppie birds and their expectations.

Anyway, my Twitter background. Off the cuff, looked for something, found a picture I took last July, somewhere along the Pacific Crest Trail. Went backpacking for a week, spent the entire time above nine thousand feet, took as usual a boatload of pictures, a handful of which came out. It was a fantastic experience, not just for us dads, but for the boys aged fourteen to seventeen who humped fifty miles in seven days over ridges and around mountains and learned, most of them, that they can do a lot more than they thought they could. You can’t overestimate the value of such a discovery.


For those of us who spend our lives growing soft at our computer desks, a week of hauling seventy pound packs up and down mountains on light-weight, low-fat, high-protein backpacking food isn’t so unhealthy either. Highly recommended. Especially in John Muir's Range of Light.

All a-Twitter

Twitter is all the rage today and may even last into the afternoon. Sign aboard now! Don't be late and miss valuable with-it points!

More twittering outside our bedroom. A finch made a home in a pot hanging just outside the door. (I know it's out of focus, shaddap.)


She laid four nice little eggs.


They are starting to hatch.


When we step outside, mama flies away. When we make little peep peep sounds, baby says FEEEEED MEEE!

My Pome Today

I wanna write like Paula
Because she's one brill honey
I wanna write like Roy
Because he's seriously funny

I wanna write like Jenny
Because she's freakin' hilarious
I wanna write like Asia
Because she's melancholy vocabularious

I also wanna write like Jen
Because she gets it done
And write like Peggy and Kos (Jeff)
Who have way too much fun

Or write like Dawn whose sarcasm
(Though not her bod!) is hefty
Or write like archer even though
His genius is all lefty

But I can only write like me
And me is way too serious
I look at what I wrote and think
I must have been delirious

But better to write like I have writ
Than try too hard to not
Cuz what I've writ is writ by me
And me is all I've got

So if this page comes off as sad
Or too nutjob political
Remember that deep down inside
I'm really happy wittical

And all those arguments you see
In endless comment streams
Are foam und drang upon my sea
Of art, and love, and dreams

Degrees

I learned this past weekend:

1) My maternal grandmother met Ishi. She grew up in San Francisco, and her mother took her out to the UC museum now and then. One day she met a “dark” man in a guard uniform and talked with him a little while. Looking at dates, my grandmother would have been eleven when Ishi died after his four years at the museum.

2) My paternal grandfather met John Muir. Though he grew up in Livermore he also spent time with family in Martinez, where Muir owned a ranch. They met one day at a baptism.

It's said that we're each within six degrees of separation of everyone else, even Kevin Bacon! I believe it. Being two degrees from Muir means I'm only three degrees from Teddy Roosevelt. Down another path, I can get to Abe Lincoln in five steps: my mother, her grandfather, Annie Bidwell (whom he worked for at the mansion in Chico), hence to her husband John Bidwell, and then President Lincoln, whom he surely met at the Republican Convention of 1864 (if not, Bidwell and Lincoln were both acquainted with Sherman, Grant etc., making it six).

Do these connections count over the internet? I think not. I think the acquaintence should be face to face, if even for just a minute. What think you? What interesting people can you get to, if you just happen to know the links?

Five Years

I’ll never forget. Five years ago tonight. I stayed late at the office. I had less than six weeks left to finish my master’s project, complete the write-up, and get it all signed off. I was not exactly ahead of schedule. I chose to spend the evening in a lab downstairs, rather than the lab on the third floor where I usually worked. It had better equipment for what I had to do that night.

I worked for two hours until I was at a good stopping point. I knew my wife didn’t have the number for that lab, so I decided to check for voicemail.

Several messages, starting from ninety minutes ago. Where are you? Her father was dead.

* * *

She was able to reach a friend, who took her up to the hospital. It was in a foothills town, nearly an hour’s drive. I rushed up there. He lay in state. His widow vacillated between putting her grief and her bizarre humor on display. Within earshot of a sheriff’s deputy she rambled vaguely about how scared he was, if she did the right thing. The sheriff suggested I just let that go.

His daughter was crushed. Over the next weeks and months I learned that hugs don’t heal a broken heart.

* * *

I posted something a few days later. As it happened I had a men’s church group retreat to go to right after he died (except they called it an “advance” because “men don’t retreat”). The timing for me was good. I was able to grieve, by and for myself, just for losing my father-in-law, whom I loved very much. For my wife — there was to be no timing or anything else to help her through the worst loss she had ever known.

* * *

He was a fisheries biologist for the State of California. He was a walking encyclopedia of fish and birds. Whenever I see a red-tailed hawk wheel over my oak trees he stands next to me for an instant, watching it too.

He was an outstanding grandfather. He was almost the only person in my wife’s family who could actually love. He grew up in South San Francisco but was born in Dodge City, Kansas. He claimed descent from the great Scots poet Robert Burns. He was an only child, his father a carpenter and musician who came west to work in wartime shipyards, his grandfather a country doctor.

He was a jazz trombonist. To listen to Stan Kenton or any similar orchestra is to listen to his heart beat. He was a dry wit. Thanks to him, whenever anyone says I’m funny I remind them that looks aren’t everything.

* * *

No two families are alike, not even happy ones. But to speak of my wife’s family (or mine, for that matter) is to speak of the other kind in its way. My wife’s father’s death closed some big chapters but opened new ones unexpectedly, and the book continues to be written. Is the grieving over? No. Does he rest in peace? I believe so, but of course I wouldn’t know.

He was nine days shy of sixty-four, and after only five years we miss him every day.

Easter Post, Belated

I consider myself a spiritual being. This is because I sense an ongoing conversation between myself and whatever it is whose essence permeates existence. Or maybe I’m just neurotic.

But I was raised to be open-minded about the nature of God. My father is generally atheistic, and my mother generally pantheistic (so far as I can characterize the beliefs of others, if I may do so) and raised me in an Episcopal church. God can be described in many ways, and since I sense my parents are supportive of any description so long as it’s come to honestly, my tendency is to project that acceptance across the rest of the human population and assume that very few people really care about my take on the matter. Of course I’m wrong about that when we speak of the entire globe, but I have no plans to be a diplomat in the Middle East (or a businessman in the Midwest) so it’s just as well.

But I hate sitting on the fence and saying, could be this, could be that, so my rational mind, through which I observe and process the experience of living, disavows the existence of God. I agree with the countless individuals who have opened their eyes and minds and come to realize there is literally no evidence for His existence. He may exist, but if so He has made the world such that believing in Him requires faith in Him. If you lack faith, He simply isn’t there. Absolutely everything that is used by believers to support their belief can be otherwise explained.

Especially, for me, the evidence within heart and mind. Scholars today hypothesize how belief in God may be an artifact of evolution. I haven’t yet read any of their stuff, but I accept the premise because it’s simple and makes sense. Evolution is not about achieving some ideal of perfection and thus, for humans, of perfect knowledge and understanding. That’s not the point at all. Evolution is merely the process by which random miniscule heritable variations accumulate and define the characteristics of species. If those accumulations and traits lead to a statistically significant survival advantage, the traits are passed on. If not, they don’t. Absolutely nothing is at play in evolution except that some species survive, and some do not. It is truly arbitrary, constrained only by ever-changing environmental conditions, and only looks to us like design because the pieces fit together so well. Of course they do. Otherwise, some other critter whose pieces fit together a little better would out-compete. And so they do, and so it goes.

My spiritual sense, my need for religion, is a gift of evolution as well. For whatever reason, we became dependent on our packs and tribes to survive. Nurturing by the parental generation gave us an advantage of some kind, such that it became necessary. Community and fellow-feeling gave us an advantage and thus became necessary. As humans developed the ability to think abstractly – a clear advantage – they also drew parallels between their experiences as children and their experiences with Nature. In time, regarding Nature as something with a Presence, as something not so terrifyingly random, as something that can be negotiated with, accrued an advantage. Further down the road, we de-Natured the gods and made them, or Him, an absolute, a pure mind and heart. This allowed a direct relationship between a man and the cosmos without animist intermediaries, giving us strength even when everything, Nature and Man, seemed to be against us. When a man is convinced through his partnership with God as imagined within his mind that he cannot lose, even when every rational mind would say he must, there’s a good chance he will not. Faith accrues an unquestionable advantage to human survival in a difficult world.

But does that mean it’s based on something real? Of course not. Evolution is not about truth. Evolution is about survival. Whatever happens to work.

So I found myself at Easter Service. The church was a beautiful redwood structure built in about 1860. Sunlight filtered through stained glass and illumined the flowers. Musicians populated the northern transept and filled the air with song. There were singing and readings, families and children, the baptism of an infant whose bawling made every mother smile (except his own), and from a very personable rector, simple messages of love and of hope. It was thoroughly enjoyable.

But, hope for what? I always wonder. I have no need for resurrection or for salvation. I don’t even know what they are, other than parts of a bizarre system set up by a capricious God for sorting people after they die. That He would create this immense universe simply as a means to compel spirits in human form to jump through some very specific spiritual hoops strikes me as ridiculous. But I keep that to myself and listen and sing and enjoy the sights and the fellowship, because it can be just about that if I wish: A sense of place and belonging while celebrating life on a beautiful day in Spring. Hope? Hope is for people who want to tease themselves that their existence, before or after death, will get better. It might – it probably will in some way before the end – but not in connection with an instrument of torture consecrated with flowers pinned onto it by children.

Still, for all that, there is something there that I need. I know that because I feel it, deep down inside, at some point in the service. The faith binds people together – an evolutionary advantage by any measure – and together they are joyful. Together they are joyful and being apart from them, I am not. Indeed, there’s nothing like a gathering to make me feel alone. Deep in my heart there is sadness, and the light and the music want to draw it out, let it burst out in tears as they speak of saviors and sacrifice; that sense of loneliness that comes as a result of having, so far as I can, thought it through. I cannot raise my hands in praise; I cannot dance to it (not that Episcopalians ever do, but there is a spirit in the air); I cannot surrender myself to the instant tribe formed within the walls. I cannot surrender, and that makes me alone, and that makes me want to weep. I sit in the pew, suppressing the feeling, willing my tears to remain unshed.

I know it’s just evolution calling me. I am, after all, human, and as needful of faith and religion as anyone. I’ve just thought it through and away; or as a Christian would say, I’m too proud. Maybe so; but pride in our integrity keeps us from doing all kinds of terrible things. Joining a system that in other incarnations inspired imperial conquest, enabled slavery, and encouraged unimaginable slaughter could be among them, if we let it. Modern, non-apocalyptic, nurturing Christianity is far removed from any of that, but that doesn’t mean that surrender to it is ultimately a good thing. No harm, you might say; but that leads us to Pascal’s Wager, and only a fool or a hypocrite takes that seriously (a fool, if one does not believe in freedom of will, and a hypocrite if one does).

I guess speaking of fools and hypocrites means I am too proud. Well, so be it. If I’m too proud to bow my head to something that is only as real as each human mind and heart makes it, then that’s fine. Evolution does not require that I be happy. It requires nothing of me. Only my requirements count, and they are that I am honest about the wonder of existence as it is and don’t go pretending to believe in things just because they make me feel better. There are other, truer communities to join. It’s another peculiarity of my life that so far I haven’t been able to find them; but hope springs eternal.

I feel uncertain, though, of the effect of my agnosticism on my children. I never tell them what to believe or what is true or what isn’t. I always say, some believe this, some that. Naturally, they pick up on my attempt at a humanist approach, my interest in history, on human mistakes, and they make up their own minds. I’ve been very influential. But when I look at the different influences of my parents on my faith, I understand and accept my father’s, but am more grateful for my mother’s. Sometimes I wonder if it would have been better to raise them churched and keep everything to myself until they were adults.

But of course it wouldn’t. It would only teach them I’m a hypocrite. On the other hand, it would then have been even more wonderfully inappropriate to rent “The Wicker Man” on Good Friday, as we did. What an excellent film is that!

Thursday Thirteen: International Teleconferencing

1. Do you say good morning when it's morning at their end, or at yours?

2. Whoever's first to say good morning/afternoon/evening wins and sets the default time zone.

3. It's hard to drive the meeting and take notes at the same time.

4. I'm real glad I'm not a project manager and have to drive the meeting an/or take the notes of record.

5. I can listen with one ear, and with the rest of my body occasionally check the agenda and speak up now and then and generally do whatever I want.

6. Wireless Bluetooth headsets are nifty cause I can walk all the way over to the men's room and back and not lose the signal.

7. Wireless Bluetooth headsets suck when the batteries are weak.

8. When the people on the other end don't speak English very well, I think maybe this would go better in Instant Messenger.

9. When the people on the other end don't speak English very well, I hope someone is taking good notes.

10. I try to but my mind wanders.

11. You can't be shy about asking if such and such has been covered already.

12. When the people on the other end don't speak English very well, you can be excused for not being sure if such and such has been covered already.

13. It's vitally important that the project manager is someone you can go to afterwards and say, what the hell did we just talk about anyway?

No Pain At All

I hate running. I start out fine, jog along a bit. But then after about a minute my body is going, Whoa, what’s this? Why are we running? Then my lungs kick in and breathe hard and ask me what the hell I’m running from. There a tiger or something? We don’t see no tiger! Come on, slow down! I have to smack ‘em and say Shut up! It’s for your own good! I keep going, pound pound pound on the pavement, and they grumble and kick into gear, but they’re not happy, not happy at all.

Neither am I. People are driving by in their nice comfortable cars and here I am, running, breathing hard, feeling that prickly sting that precedes a sweat breaking out, squinting in the sunlight. It sucks. I wanted to sit at my desk and eat Oreos and get more work done or maybe look at blogs or the news or maybe even write something, as if. But no, here I go, running from nothing.

But I catch a second sort of wind and though I know it’s only because I’m going downhill, it’s a long gradual downhill and I’ll take the sense of relief however false. Down we go, gliding a little bit. Sidewalk, gutter, bare earth, a footpath between the pebbles. Tempted to speed up but I’ve already learned that if you go downhill too fast, you are burning energy you are really going to miss when you are going back up. So take it easy, bend the knees, use the old leg muscles to keep hip bones from pounding into each other, it’s what they’re there for.

Nice day, a little cloudy, humid. Run alongside my good friends the piles of rocks. An obscure history is encoded in their piles and ridges, a very, very obscure history. But there is history, some sort of tale, in everything touched by Man. Everything mattered, if even for a day, an hour, it mattered to someone once.

Minor pains, in that toe, in the other knee, a little twinge at the lower edge of my back. All right, don’t run that way. Use muscles to run some other way. It’s all good. Keep on going. Pain is not good, by definition, but if you have it and you can manage it, it becomes just another part of the experience. There can even be pleasure in pain, because it reminds you that you’re—

At the base of the steep weedy slope, next to the roadway, a white cross, set in the hard ground. A white wooden cross with a team picture pinned to it, class pictures, graduation pictures. Plastic flowers, necklaces, jewelry. Pens, inscriptions, “I miss U”, little hearts. Hat pins, a shirt. Candy wrappers. A small stuffed animal.

A small stuffed animal.

I keep running, pound pound pound. There’s no pain in it. There’s no pleasure in it. Just running and being alive. Being alive because no matter how much pain there can be in being alive, I owe feeling it and experiencing it to anyone who’s in a place where there’s no pain at all.

Another Observation

This sort of creeps me out.

But I'm not criticizing their beliefs! Or theirs. And especially not theirs. Heaven forbid.

An Observation

A political guest on The Daily Show knows he's doing a good job if after making his point, the studio is silent.

Nice

Yesterday I ran outside for the first time ever, it seemed, out the door from the locker room, stretched against a lamp post, and jogged off across the parking lot. It was a little past eleven and the sun was hot, the air warm with Spring, like a nice drink just chill enough to remember when it had ice cubes. The air in April is a tall glass of water. In summertime it will be hot tea, scalding and dangerous.

I ran down the road watching my step, staying off my heels, not letting my knees bang with the impact but letting them be springs. When on the treadmill I fear running in the real world because I will step on a pebble and turn just enough to miss a curb, crack my ankle, sprawl before an onrushing bus. Death awaits me out there sometimes, I don’t know why I let it. I run through it and keep going.

The road was a four lane thing they poured ten or fifteen years ago down a wasteland of mine tailings. The mine tailings are now almost all gone, dug and scraped and subsumed under development, under office buildings and houses, a veneer of imported soil, a sprinkling of fashionable landscape trees and bushes and rolled out lawns. A hundred years ago men worked hard here, turning the wide ancient riverbed for gold dust that nature had deposited in so many ounces per ton. Now we get soft in air conditioned offices and eat snacks, and just a few weird ones run along the sidewalk.

To my left, mounds of old rock, smoothed and rounded by running waters unimaginable numbers of years ago, lifted and piled high by the gold dredgers. Then a century of lichen and topsoil and stunted digger pines taking root. Then bulldozers tore into them where the road needed to be. Nothing is left but a thin ridge between the road and the freeway, and I wonder who last walked atop that particular ridge, had lunch next to that sun-blackened boulder before the road and the freeway were even thought of, way back when the big steam dredgers floated in their migrating ponds, how long ago was that, what was he thinking? If he had magic glasses and could see a hundred years ahead, what would he make of this half-naked man running nowhere and back – and if I had those glasses, what would I see on this old road a century hence?

To my right, the road itself, four lanes of sparse traffic beyond which low-rise office buildings and cheerful chain restaurants straight out of Office Space squat between new lawns and blinding parking lots. I barely glance at them. At the bottom of the hill, I do a little spring-heeled turnaround dance in the shadow of the new railroad crossing arm and commence trudging back uphill. I’m halfway through and think, damn, I might make it after all, this outdoor running gig isn’t so bad. It’s nearing noon and traffic increases and I am shirtless and sweating and starting the seasonal tanning process and aware that drivers glance over maybe to idly wonder what the tattoo is supposed to be, and I decide it would be the ultimate shame to be seen walking; so I create a rhythm with my swinging arms, an upper-body waltz that goes LEFT-right-left RIGHT-left-right LEFT-right-left and it keeps me going, focused on every step and every gained inch of elevation.

A worker from another building floats into view, coming downhill, slim and lithe. A small polite smile as she passes by, gliding over the concrete like a chocolate elf over snow. The old rock piles, now on my right, aren’t so interesting anymore.

Back at the gym I feel large like a blown up balloon, damp, using all my lungs. The place is crowded and noisy and smells of sweat and I see several people I know. It’s nothing like early in the morning, it’s a party by comparison. I go through some exercise routines, this, that, whatever feels right. The point is to feel great and you know what? I do. Back at my desk I google up a map and find I ran three and a half miles. Well, that sounds about right. Maybe it’s time for a new routine, at least until it gets too hot out.

An Open Letter to the Iraqi People

Dear Iraqi People,

Please accept our apologies for invading and still occupying your country. Probably we’ll stop soon. We hope so. We don’t really like occupying people. I mean, some people think we do that a lot. But as far as historical cycles go, we get tired of it pretty fast. Occupation of places where we’re really not wanted isn’t our bag.

We’re particularly sorry about all the Iraqi casualties. Iraq Body Count says 60,000. The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health says 600,000. No one really knows. And though any glance at the news shows most people by far are being killed by someone other than U.S. troops, no one seems able to track the difference, and besides, to the dead and their families, it doesn’t much matter. We uncorked the bottle. That Iraq was a seething hotbed of murderous factionalism only kept in check by the brutal dictator we took out didn’t really cross our naïve American minds.

You’ll be glad to know that we’ve already started the process of pulling out. We don’t want to take responsibility for the carnage any more. We’ll let someone else do that. And to be sure, it will be stopped when Iraq has a strong government again. That’ll come in time. Meanwhile we’ve determined that our soldiers there are exacerbating the problem. All the Iraqis want us out and they are killing each other every day in order to make that clear. So we are well into the second stage of disengagement. The first stage was successful once public discourse became thoroughly dominated by the message that we were all hoodwinked by Bush and his evil imperialist colleagues. Now that everyone understands that, we are on to the second stage, which is to divide our government, blame each other for all the mistakes, and claim that to “support the troops” really means to bring them home. The third stage, actual physical withdrawal, will occur soon enough. Please be patient.

Needless to say, a strong government, the key to halting the slaughter, will not have been established yet. We’re sorry about that, too. That requires trust, and there just hasn’t been time to build that trust, especially after some of the mistakes we’ve made. Trust above all requires results in the security department and that in turn requires time. I mean, we are making progress now, having made changes to both our foreign and military policies. Our bull-headed VP is losing influence, we are talking more to your neighbors, and our military people continue to learn better ways to work with the Iraqi people and help them develop trained and experienced security forces. Given time, you will have a strong government, more security, less cause to turn to militias and gangsters for protection, and consequently a greater propensity to work together. But, um, sorry. We’re not giving you the time for that. American election cycles won’t allow it, and as you know, your next 600,000 dead are nowhere near as important to us as our domestic power struggles. But please look at the bright side: None of those next 600,000 will have been killed by Americans!

Lest you fear we’ll return, hey, no worries. We’re going to be far too busy pointing fingers at one another to invade you or anyone else for years to come. Besides, we’ll elect a new President soon. We’ll elect someone who would never, ever invade anyone. Of course, whoever we elect, there’s a chance he or she will be among those who once voted to invade you. But that’s okay because he or she has since changed their mind. Were flexible like that. Our best politicians change their minds all the time. It’s a strength.

As for having peace and stability again, well, it will come. All you need is a strong central government. With us out of the way and given a cycle or two of enormously bloody coups, you’ll end up with a dictator everyone is too exhausted not to agree upon. Then, so long as you’re not part of some relatively underpowered ethnic group (yet to be determined), everything will be fine.

So once again, sorry about the war. Nothing personal. And you know, if our withdrawal gives the appearance of an American defeat, thus lending the strength of perceived victory to other powers in the region, that’s okay. We don’t mind, we earned it. We have to face the fact, as you have already learned, that Americans just aren’t very good at global power politics. It’s too much like chess. We’re good at American football: Out-hit and out-run the other team, use feints and secret plans to get the ball into the opposite goal, and then use a clock or a rainstorm or something to tell us that it’s over, a surrendered sword so everyone can agree on who won. But your people play a different game, more chess-like. A longer view, moves of mind-numbing complexity, sacrificing one’s own pieces to achieve results, and it’s never over until one side actually concedes. We’re just no good at that. Fortunately for you, chess was introduced to the West through one of your own neighbors! The Iranians are really, really good at playing chess. Perhaps they will be helpful to you in the coming years. We certainly hope so.

Well, best of luck and, once again, we’re awfully sorry. We sure hope it works out for you in the end.