Another Day, Another Verbose Exploration of Nothing

Blogs used to be short and spontaneous. Still can be. I need to work on not being so damn serious.

This one's about done. Will expand on that later.

Spent the evening in my neighbor's garage assembling his new ping pong table and drinking beer from the kegerator. Lockdown, home of the Folsom Prison Brews. Pretty good stuff: Dark and heady with a rich nutty taste and just the slightest ale-like kickback. I actually like it better than the standard for local ales, Sierra Nevada, which comes out of Chico and I believe is distributed nationally.

Speakin' o' Chico, my mother was born there, because her parents eloped to there, because her father's family lived there, because her father's father had worked for Mrs. Bidwell and I guess they stuck around awhile after her death. It's through this connection that I'm only six degrees from Abraham Lincoln.

Says at Wikipedia that she knew John Muir. Well, I don't need that, I'm only two degrees from him thanks to my paternal grandfather, so nyah.

It's funny: This blog is now starved of interesting content in part because some of the good stuff gets said at Facebook, or in comments there, or in comments at other blogs, or even (surprisingly enough) in actual conversations with actual people. It's the latter that I wish to do more. Now, offline interaction is totally fair game for online content. Really needn't be mentioned in this context of already-said-can't-say-again. But words are still words, and somewhere along the line I developed an aversion to copying, so if I say something clever to someone, I really don't feel right repeating it here; and this is doubly true if I said it online somewhere. This is one reason why blogs (or mine anyway) are dying. Further, as blogs are to books, so Facebook and Twitter are to blogs. Ultimately, though we are all enabled for a form of self-publishing, in the end very few of us will contribute anything worth a damn. There will just be more words; and thanks to the impermanent nature of digital publication, those words won't last very long either.

The more things change, the more they stay the same, wot.

What blogs do I admire? These two, for starters. Why? Because he simply tells his truth. I stop myself from doing that. Most people do. Most blogs are purposely entertaining, or expand on a narrowly defined aspect of someone's life, or in some way or other obscure the real person underneath. Dr Zen is not obscuring. I am, because I must. I look to a day when I no longer need to. What that will require is yet to be discovered. May never happen. I've a sense that if I wrote truly and honestly about myself, I would create something ugly, and I don't want to create something ugly. So I remain vague like this, poised on the edge of changes that may never come. It's frustrating.

It's also why I keep blogging.

Zen, BTW, does not read this, because (he says) I am "an unrepentant racist". It would be enlightening to discover how this is so, but my breath I am not holding.

Xmas Past

Just past midnight already, so this will be short.

I dread Christmas, then get cranky about it as the internal pressure mounts ... Then it's here and by the end of the day I'm happy with it, content with it, so deep inside it I have a hard time imagining the world outside it.

That'll pass. But right now I'm all alone in a house quiet but for Anonymous 4 singing On Yoolis Night (and of course the buzzing in my ears), my chair an island in a sea of wrapping paper and piled boxes and indescribably multivarious objects. The tree glows, I'm getting cold (we didn't have a fire), I'm fading out ... So, what was Christmas?

Christmas was weeks of fretting over what to get for whom and when to go shopping. Shopping requires a mood, and long work days and evening meetings and the never-ending identity crisis were not conducive. But it always comes together in the final few days. Partly because I get ruthless and suddenly can't give a shit about my job. Partly because close deadlines wonderfully focus my attention. Partly because the spirit finally penetrates and I loosen up and find myself surprisingly able.

Until that time, I'm angry. Maybe that's not the right word, but it seems close enough. I'm made cranky and even more self-loathing than usual by the annual avalanche of realization that I buy things to show my love because I feel inadequate at showing it in other ways. I really don't think I'm inadequate like that, but there are pieces missing, instincts that are weak, parts of our various relationships in which I cannot show leadership and am more or less missing in action, and filling Christmas with the sort of cheer that attends wrapping paper and getting new things that reflect some thought and familiarity is at least something concrete that I can do. So the season progresses with me being cranky over that.

And then it starts to come together, and I find a thing here and a thing there that I know he or she will like and my heart suddenly fills with a weird joy that almost makes me cry and I think I must be emotionally unbalanced or something. But it passes and come Christmas Eve, all is well, and I am just happy.

Christmas was hours spent talking to Dell Computer and FedEx to prevent my wife's purple new laptop showing up at the door while she was home only to have it get delivered at the house anyway, and she even signed for it, and I felt like a total schmuck, and today she was pleased and surprised and had no idea and thought she was signing for our kid's new printer or something. So she said. I'm not so sure, because of an unguarded late-night comment a week ago, but such things can be forgotten, and no matter.

Christmas (Eve) was dinner at Mikuni and a stroll in sub-freezing temps down an over-decorated street and Lessons & Carols at Folsom's 150-year-old Episcopal church, where the comforting rituals of my childhood were somewhat informally replayed and my boys got a refresher glimpse of the church thing and my mother got to sit and sing with me and my family and I was happy to slow down and ponder the meaning of this mixed festival and holy day from within the thumping rhythm of old Anglican hymns, Venite adoremus Dominum.

Christmas was sleeping in and wondering at the phenomenon of everyone else sleeping in too, having presents at eleven or so, a late post-noon breakfast of eggs and ham, too much random food throughout the day, a new board game played, a new DVD watched, lots of drive-by huggings, homemade lasagna, self-absorbed playing with something new, shopping adventures recounted, and finally, while I'm trying to be quiet and focus, my mother carefully and not very quietly folding the colored tissue paper for next year.

Yes, we keep bags and tissue (for stuffing) and bows. Ribbons and wrapping paper are for the fireplace, but the rest of it lasts for years and years.

I've been at this for an hour? I'm a slow typist. Time to retire. I hope your Christmas was, like mine, better than expected. And if you don't do Christmas, that's fine, I hope it was a good day, I'm just not going to be unnecessarily polite about it.

South Southeast by Southwest, Part I

I have to vent over my quest to get a wireless internet connection in Anthem, Arizona. I thought Starbucks offered this service, so long as you buy something. I wanted a mocha anyway, so I found one at the corner of two of Anthem’s many identical boulevards (which are not laid out in a simple grid, by the way, but meander like coyote trails, no doubt to make the brand spanking new suburb seem a little less like a brand spanking new suburb). Stood in line awhile and then asked if they had a functioning wireless. Only if I had a Starbucks card, quoth the barista. I don’t buy memberships so, no, I had no card, and I left feeling very annoyed that the silly woman could at least have tried to sell me one, or clarify that I’d get access for free if I bought something, or otherwise been encouraging. But no! All she could do was suggest the library. Libraries generally don’t serve food and drink. So I went back to my cousin’s house to search again.

Right, my cousin has internet, but not wireless, and for reasons too obscure for me to grasp, when I connected the RJ45 on the back of her cable modem to the RJ45 on the side of my laptop, a network was detected but never connected, and I was simply never able to do what I needed to do. Which was mate my work machine to the net and get a VPN going and do some triage on a couple days’ worth of work email. Really wanted to spend a lot of time doing that.

“Wireless network anthem az” netted me a possibility in the form of a café at the local Safeway. All right, I could do work at a grocery store, why not. I meandered along the coyote trails at a crawling forty miles an hour really enjoying the fact that Maricopa County had decided to impose a thirty five mile an hour speed limit on roads that could easily support eighty, and eventually, after many long hours passing decoratively transplanted saguaro cacti, found the Safeway and the Starbucks within. I asked if the wireless worked, the guy said probably, so I tried and sure enough caught a signal. Fool optimist that I am, I bought a venti mocha and a piece of pumpkin cake and sat down to enjoy my breakfast while wrestling with warning pages and out of date certificates and all manner of general network dysfunction. Money well spent! The workers had no idea. But by now I had eaten something and decided the library was worth a try.

I had a vague idea it was down this way and indeed I found it, nestled within the grounds of the local high school. I didn’t feel like waiting in line at the information desk so I took one of the plush little reading chairs in back and found a network and enjoyed the familiar experience of warning pages and invalid certificates. I went back hopefully to the help desk line and at my turn was told that indeed their wireless worked fine, I just needed to have a library card. All out of quibble, I bought a thirty-day one for five bucks, was given some codes and instructions, and, nestled back in my corner, was finally able to plug in to the employer matrix.

As usual, about a dozen things had blown up since I left the office late Wednesday afternoon, and by the time I had addressed a few of them well over an hour had passed and my enthusiasm for doing work while on vacation was getting thin. So now it is noon, I am back at my cousin’s house, and everyone is either out getting their toenails done or lying around fast asleep. I guess that’s standard for mid-day in Arizona. Well, I’m on vacation, and the idea presumably is to relax. But my nerves are humming like harp strings. Only one thing to do: Get a beer, find a cool place, damage my eardrums with the very loud music stored on my netbook (I don’t own an MP3 player), and read the Raymond Chandler short stories I brought along. That’ll do me, for a little while.

Short Post in Celebration of Life

I'm pretty much hating on life these days -- all of it is entirely my own fault, and knowing that does wonders for my mood -- so I'm following the advice Roy gave awhile ago to just blog a little every day. Makes me feel better, somehow. Even just a little bit. Not that this will improve my writing. But surely it can't make it worse.

I want to know what the expected outcome is of being married a long time. Through both the internet and actual real conversations with actual real people, I've seen that there is a lot of ambivalence out there. People, both sexes, not really excited about who they're devoted to, but it's too god damn much trouble to make a change. Now, the dumb ones, who think they're clever, go and explore and have affairs and get caught and wind up in the shit, and if they're well-known and powerful they make the news and we all get a laugh. But the rest of us don't act up like that, we just sort of live the habits and accommodations and look up once in awhile to notice, wow, another year has gone by, fancy that.

I'm struggling because on the one hand, I'm sick of living a half-ass life, and though I married someone who never lives her life half-ass -- in fact, she pretty much kicks ass, every day -- I can't just flip a switch and start wanting to be full-ass specifically with her. No: Ambivalence; and a long history; and way too much shit boiling up from the state of our lives when we got together as well as from all the years before, dating right back to when I was a one year old. Seriously. All those long arcs of personal history are converging to this point, focused like sunlight through a lens, and that intense light beam is slowly but surely lighting the fuse.

Sort of a crisis that strikes at mid life. That's why they call it a, erm, you know. But what I'm wanting to know is, what do all the other poor saps (and sapettes) do? Right, some go off. Maybe I will too, at least something happens. Some (men particularly) push it deep inside where it twists around and they wind up being seriously outlived by their wives. Some manage to look (at least outwardly) quite happy. Typically those are men of faith. That fact bugs the shit out of me.

I understand faith. I understand it as a form of mental organization that human beings evolved as a means to survive. More accurately put (because too often, evolution is described backwards, as if changes are adaptations when in fact they are accidents that happened to turn out as advantages), the mutation that allows for faith and god and all that provided a psychological advantage that, in the unforgiving primal forest, led to more successful reproduction. So we all have it. I just don't choose to use it. Faith is like fire with all its risks and benefits, but now that we have central heating, why set part of your house on fire just to keep warm?

Yet there they are: Men of faith who have defined and narrowed (or maybe broadened, wtf do I know) their lives and found their bliss is in what they've spent the past couple three decades building. Well. BULLY FOR THEM.

I have to get back to work but my whole hating on life point is that this conundrum and a number of related side issues that I'm not going into here have me so distracted that my job performance sucks which only makes things worse and I'm supposed to feel better now that I've written it out and done so publicly. Yeah.

In Which I Ramble On While Hiding Away In A Random Unused Cubicle

Yes, there are tales of Burning Man in the oven, but they are slow going. Mostly because I am slow going. Like most men I don't handle being sick very well. For ex, last night, after a long and (I thought) fairly pointless telephone conference with a customer in Tokyo, I came home so wiped all I could do was nuke some old pizza and crash. The good news: I may have slept ten or eleven hours. The bad: Though I needed the sleep, today I'm not any better. So my brain remains a fairly useless organ, and that's not always bad news if some other organ rises to fill the gap, but alas these days it is my brain and no other that is needed most.

Some of that writing got done on the trip this past weekend, bouncing down I-5 in the back seat of our crew-cab pickup. It was an environment. I've read that more often than not, in order to be productive a writer must create a space to exercise his craft. For me this is certainly true; and it's typical that I've responded to this requirement by doing nothing about it. I have nowhere at home to write. No one's fault but mine, I hasten to add, and now that our number of at-home children has been cut in half I have even fewer excuses. I look forward to fixing that, once I get this done ... and that ... and the other thing ...

Lately I've been daydreaming to distraction about the open road. It seems I want nothing so much as to just hit the highway, with a reasonably dependable car, my little netbook for travel-blogging, and sufficient funds. What funds would be sufficient? I don't know. I hate to spend money on lodging if all I'm going to do is sleep but it seems unavoidable. I would camp a lot to save money. Crash on dark unpatrolled side roads (the Mz and I used to camp in random locations when we were young, it was fun AND free). I don't eat a lot. Maybe I wouldn't need so much. Really, I don't know. Probably the adventure would devolve to hitchhiking and taking buses. Possibly you would never hear from me again. I am quite looking forward to it. Maybe next year I will find a way to make it happen.

Of course, that's false. I would get lonely, and then I would get tired of it all, and then I would go home again. I predict three, four weeks.

I would visit friends, however, friends made via the internet, old friends from school, as well as my cousin, and my brother. Actually, no, I wouldn't get lonely. Not right away.

The meat of such daydreaming remains unwritten. Given the nature of daydreams, that's appropriate.

This open-road daydreaming is a direct response to driving nine hundred ninety nine miles this past weekend, down to the dark side of the state and back. A lot of folks hate I-5 because it goes on for hundreds of miles with little to look at. But all that does for me is make me want more. Not necessarily more of nothing to look at. But there is so much world out there, and so many people in it. Every single person has a story, and every little place too. Everywhere you turn, everywhere you look was the defining space at some moment for some life somewhere; a place of birth or death, of unexpected sex or romance or drama or pain, of hours and hours of brutal life-changing labor. I see worn old scars along the hillside and wonder about the men who spent years making those scars in the course of their lives, lives spent scratching a living the best way the knew how, herding and fencing cattle, building flumes and canals, planting orchards only to find a decade later that the climate just wasn't right for it. The remnants of hay barns, of houses, of dormitories for migrant farm workers long since converted to one-night shelters for itinerant homeless families; and rest stops.

Deep in my distraction I read about rest stops. The state puts these up along the freeways. We've all used them. They're bloody necessary when one is driving for hours and hours. They are also homeless shelters of a sort. Some of the larger ones, it is alleged, are home for entire families living in, say, a camper van that they move every few days while they live off the largesse of other travelers. At our last stop a lady asked for gas money. I said I had no cash. Frankly, if you are in your fifties, you need to have run your life a wee bit better than to depend on guilt-ridden strangers who never learned not to feed the animals, as it were. Sorry, but cold truth: I don't believe in encouraging and enabling destructive behaviors. We are all better than that. And yet it pains me, especially when there are children involved. The world is a huge and very cold place if you are not so fortunate as the rest of us, the rest of us who had a role model or a parent or some means of support while growing into adulthood. Honestly, I've always felt a kinship with the homeless, a kinship yet to be explored and explained. This kinship does not make me more charitable: The homeless are fellow human beings to me, and not merely opportunities for giving. The fact that I get to eat when I want does not translate into a moral need or directive to "give". I see them much more deeply than that, and (this is weird, perhaps) have always felt but a couple of steps away from being one of them myself. Does this explain my less merciful attitude, the fact that I don't see a fence between them and myself? Perhaps subconsciously I see giving to panhandlers as akin to giving myself a break thoroughly undeserved, and every bit as harmful. I don't know, like I said, this is largely unexplored.

I have thought of spending my next extended vacation partially immersed in that world. Talking to people, serving in kitchens, living as though I don't have a credit card and a bank account and can escape whenever I want. Slumming, you call it, and to many it is thoroughly despicable, an opportunity to see how much "better" we are than others, to get insight into how those others somehow "deserve" their unhappy state. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe you're right. In honesty I can't say what my motives really would be.

There is research, of course. One of my reasons for wanting to experience everything is so I can write about it with authority. Imagination is fine, but we've all read novels where the novel situation just doesn't ring true, and others where it does. The difference isn't just in the author's skill. You can tell if he's ever been there, and if he has not. And thanks to life's opportunities, I've been here and there and I have worked those experiences into (NaNoWriMo mainly) attempts at story-telling. But there's more, always so much more.

And if I have to choose between experiencing life and writing about it, I will choose the experience. Let some other poor sod who sits all day do the writing, if that's what it takes.

All right, enough hiding, I'll go back to work now.

Jeez, Peeps

Don't panic. I said nothing I wouldn't have said a month or a year ago if I was sick and tired of being sick and tired and didn't care what anyone thought. Mostly tired of watching what I say here. So here's the word: This is a blog, which means it isn't true, except when it is, which means that it isn't. I will be passive-aggressive enough to delete it, though, if anyone I'm related to mentions it to my face.

I'm weird like that.

So we're on the cusp of a major milestone, the younger kid being set to enter dorm life this weekend, and us the loving parents driving him down tomorrow to make it happen. For years and years this has been the milestone before which no decision can be made, no matter what. But no: Hey, we did our job. Parenting's first stage is well and truly done. We can do what we want! Especially if that means get divorced! Yay!

But what if we don't? Will you be disappointed?

The other day, or some day other than that, I don't know, I got analytical about why we stuck it out this long. One, we love each other. Duh. A pretty good pairing. But I've done some stupid shit, and some of it she knows about. She's pulled her pranks too, though I'll be the first to admit none of them were deal-breakers, just fucking annoying consequences of having her personality. So no one's perfect, yet even so I sometimes wondered why I was unable to get within miles of considering a split. I decided it was about passion: I'm impassioned about parents sticking together. Somehow the experience of parents divorcing when I was four coupled with a childhood in which both of them found that ignoring or being ignorant of their responsibilities was a lot easier than actually raising their children (right, this is one of those annoying spoiled yuppie moments where the self-hating "adult" blames it all on his now elderly parents who actually did the best they knew how to do), all that, once understood by having my own parenting experience, led me to a point such that it was simply impossible to do to mine what was done to me, and we stuck it out, and here we are:

Too old to move on, too young to settle.

Thus the dice remain in the air where they've flown for years now. The difference really is that our youngest is an adult now and about to spend the rest of his life living elsewhere. The psychobabblish effect this has on our attitude (well, mine) is immense. I really don't know what's next, I don't always care, but sometimes I do, and most of all it needs writing about. This is very likely the wrong place for it but, once again, with feeling: I don't give a shit.

And so your visit isn't a total loss, here is a recent photograph that nicely summarizes the subject matter.

Dazed, Confused, So On

I am deeply dazed and confused. It seems my job is nearly incomprehensible to me, even though it has become easier and simpler in recent months. It seems my wife is almost complete in her conviction that our marriage has run its course. It seems I am unable to develop any sort of cogent counter-position. It seems I lost ten pounds at the Burn and subsequent illness and am only getting soft and weak as I gain them back. It seems I've had the same headache since I was in a semi-dehydrated state in Nevada two weeks ago. It seems any ability I may once have had to focus on anything that needs doing has left the station for good. It seems my kids know I am on the verge of an explosion yet behave towards me as if everything is completely normal. It seems long-understood concepts of normal living are now grown foreign, and having a job and a place to live or not having a job and a place to live look to me the same. I don't want to alarm anyone, but this isn't the sort of thing you put on Facebook (which I slowly but steadily grow less interested in) or keep to yourself or hide away in a journal if in fact you are trying to quit journaling, so, yeah.

Here's an unrelated or only partially related note that has been on my mind and might as well get noted down here: If you know me personally, I would appreciate it if you never mention that you read this here blog. As a sporadic public diary, it does not exist to provide fuel for polite conversation. It exists in a world of its own, and any and all feedback must occur within that world, i.e. within comments. Whenever someone I know says, "I read your blog ..." I feel an immediate desire to find it and set fire to it and crush the ashes until there is no more evidence that it ever existed. Of course, it being on a Blogger server, that's impossible, and deleting it strikes me as a misguided over-reaction, so typically I forget about it until the next annoying mention. And the next, and so on, so nix on that, here's a note instead. Don't mention it.

You wonder why it's over. I wonder why it wouldn't be, even though I love my wife and want her happy. Loving someone and wanting them happy is a far cry from sincerely desiring their company in every circumstance, and since I don't know what long-term marriages are built on, I don't know what else there is to focus on. Not real charmed at the idea of being an old couple that comfortably ages forward because they've made a good life and can now cruise with it awhile. Lack of passion is lack of life. I've never known an old couple that was happy, barring Art and ML of recent mention, and frankly I wondered about them too, countless times over the past few decades of observation. Besides, I've dropped broad hints in the company of numerous females that things are not what they seem and though I never meant to start anything (nor did I) I'm pretty tired of such half-ass vicarious attempts at adding interest to life. As I've said to Herself, it makes more sense to me than anything to take this midpoint in life, rake it all into a pile, and set it on fire. People who've had this done to them, people who've done it, and people who's lives took a sharp turn simply because they were unable to prevent it all look to me about as happy as the long married couples -- which isn't to say much. Indeed, after we've hit fifty or so and our offspring are in theory able to support themselves, evolution provides no more useful capability or purpose, and frankly I don't think it matters any more what we do. The dice are in hand.

Worthless

See, exactly seven days from now I expect to have set up camp and be under-dressed and bicycling in the desert heat on the lookout either for free drinks or an active dance bar or both, my senses filled to reeling with other like-minded weirdos similarly under-dressed or set out in odd post-apocalyptic Mad Max attire or strange creative costumes or slowly driving in a daze as they seek out a campsite, the sun slowly dropping towards the dark razor's edge of a nameless Nevada mountain range in a perfectly deep blue sky. I find this just distracting enough I can't get a fucking thing done at my job.

The under-dressed part really isn't necessary to being a part of things, it's just my personal style. We all have our uniquities. I just made that word up. I expect to make up a lot of words out there in the creative maelstrom. Words and modes of living. BMan is a deeply spiritual experience for some people, the reason being once you drop your structures and your expectations and your inhibitions and your programming amongst an uncountable number of other people happily trying to do the same things in their own way, great windows open up by which you can look into your soul that simply wouldn't open before, and the trip can be life-changing. Yes, drugs can open those windows too, and some people use drugs out there, but not many, and they really ain't necessary. Not to mention there is a significant law enforcement presence: Federal officers of the BLM, the Pershing County Sheriff's office, the Washoe County Sheriff's office, and the Nevada Department of Investigations, to name a few. I also recall seeing some Tribal Police cars last year. All of these have overlapping concerns but needless to say, torching a spliff in public is a dumb idea.

My camera broke on the first day last year and it was a freeing experience. Leaves me with a conundrum: Leave the camera at home, or take it anyway for when I just have to have keepsake photographs? There is no shortage of pictures on the web, at Flickr and elsewhere. But they are rarely of the specific things or people that mattered to me. So, yeah, camera will go, the little one that fits in a pocket. Maybe it will break too.

Maybe you can't know the building level of excitement. It's impossible to grasp if you haven't been there or if the images and stories you find on the web don't interest you. I felt I got it just from web research, and once I got to know people I found I was more or less right. Maybe it attracts my long suppressed but deeply ingrained Berkeley hippie soul. For others it's about finding appreciative audiences and participants in their love of inventing vehicles and other mechanical contrivances. There is a lot of yin-yang flowers-and-fire sort of duality generating energy in this community, men who work with their hands to make machines and art and flame, and women who also make art and dance with the flame and share their beauty, and there are a thousand other archetypes besides, but this ancient coupling as between Vulcan and Venus seems most common and generates a huge amount of creative beauty and energy, just as you might expect.

Well, it's no wonder when you drive up to the gate, they hand you your packet and say, "Welcome home!"

3rd of July

Everyone knows about the 4th but yesterday I got the day off and I was so excited about that, I took the day off. Not every week you get two Saturdays in a row. I spent it doing an hour-long job on the Jeep. Yes, the whole day. It's a simple matter to replace a power steering pump, especially if you just did it a week ago. A very simple matter indeed. First, borrow a turkey baster from the kitchen to suck out the power steering fluid. Then loosen a bunch of bolts. They are either 1/2 or 9/16, depending on which socket you don't have on your wrench. They are also impossible to reach with a socket wrench, or indeed any kind of wrench unless you are lying on your back in the gravel getting foxtails in your shirt and snaking your arm through oil-soaked steering linkage, or leaning over the top of the engine far enough to ensure your reading glasses, your best ones, the ones you could find, keep slipping off into a grease-covered maze of wires and hoses. Then, if you squint and grunt and contort your fingers in unnatural directions, one of your various wrenches might fit.

After loosening the last bolt one excruciating eighth of a turn at a time and then the last-last bolt which was previously invisible and is the one that allows you to loosen the serpentine belt and force it painfully off the pulley, it is time to consider turning off the hood lamp lest you lack battery power later when you need it. There is no switch, of course. It turns on automechanically when the hood is open. Nor can the connector be disconnected without destroying the plastic housing that has become brittle through twenty years of inland California temperature swings. But there is a ground wire attached with a hex-headed sheet metal screw, and pulling that off will work, and since Jeep is an American brand it is sensible to try your 1/2 and then 9/16 sockets on it. Neither fits, and when you come back out of the garage with your metric set and squint to read a 12 and find that is too large, and you find an 11 is too large, and you rummage around and find a 9 and discover that's too small, you then have to go back to the garage because your set is missing the 10mm socket. There's one in another socket set, and eventually you find it, pull the ground wire, turn off the lamp, and see about removing the pump from the engine compartment.

There's no difficulty with this part, it comes right out once you detach the two hoses and ensure the ground absorbs a pint or so of toxic fluid and twist and turn the damn thing three different ways to extract it from amongst numerous other engine components. My difficulty was philosophical: We had just put in a new one because the old one leaked and was twenty years old. The new one didn't leak but it didn't work either. Not at idle -- worked fine going down the road but the power assist gave out if the RPMs went under about 1500, and this was most disconcerting when taking a corner with the clutch in. It basically felt like the steering had locked up the instant you really needed it, when turning a corner with some litigious-appearing old dame in your path at the stop sign, watching with baleful eye as you screech to a halt half an inch from her newly-waxed left-rear quarter-panel. My son figured out how to rev the engine while turning and thus reduce risk of collision but to my old brain it was backwards to hit the gas while slowing down to make a turn, and after talking to the auto parts store and the pump manufacturer and a handful of home mechanics at work I decided the smartest surrender was to assume the new pump was bad and take it back. I hated doing this because the odds of getting a bad pump seemed somewhat less than that I had done something wrong, and the odds remained somewhat better that I would do the same thing wrong when putting in yet another new pump. I also had a theory that the first new pump had the wrong fluid control valve in it. I'd much rather replace the valve than the whole damn thing, because it was easy to get to. But auto parts return doesn't work that way.

Pulley replacement is fun too, because it involves an obscure tool that costs half as much as the pump itself and is good for nothing else, an old torque wrench, a combo wrench stuck in a length of pipe (for leverage), two legs braced in opposite directions, room on the ground to spread out in, and an assistant who is either very brave or has never done this before.

Love days off. Don't you?

Last night we went to a 3rd of July celebration: Cul-de-sac of midrange private homes, second and third generation owners and renters, fireworks in the street (the legal kind), beer and pool table in the back yard. I enjoy hanging out with my fellow suburbanites with their tatts and piercings, biker-chic slash blue collar style of dress, alternately polite and horrible children, undersized RVs, oversized motorcycles, redneck facial hair styles (e.g. shaven head and full beard), and hard but generous nature. Family men all, and I've noticed that family men who've been to prison are more polite than those who haven't.

The County is out in force this year to clamp down on illegal fireworks and our hosts were warned directly. No wonder, a house burned down behind their cul-de-sac on the 4th last year. It was abandoned, more than likely an insurance job, and clever enough to get done on the 4th of July, but this left the authorities no choice but to be suspicious and vigilant. They could not, however, hang out around the corner all night, and about ten or so an explosion above the rooftops grabbed our attention as a volley of twenty or so airborne Mexican-made fireworks lit up the night and set off the dogs and car alarms. It was a fitting end to a fine low-key evening. Tonight we're off to a shopping mall, where the rock radio station is hosting a display. We're thinking to fill our Nalgenes with beer and wander the crowd, watching faces, looking for familiar ones, and enjoying these magical times when our children are independent and still close to home.

Book

Facebook is definitely the new blogiverse.

Blogging started out as a means of sharing interesting links and commenting on them. As more people became net-users the concept morphed into general self-publishing. People could "blog" and it would mean whatever they wanted it to mean: An online diary, a means of sharing pictures, a place to shout back at politicians and pretend they were listening. For some of us, a place to practice writing and get immediate and qualified feedback.

Now Facebook does most of that, and it's much easier. What it doesn't do is create a literary space. You can write there, but the slam-bam nature of it is discouraging. I wouldn't bother.

A huge difference is it's not very anonymous. It can be if you want, but that denies the point of it. Through Facebook you can make yourself, your true self, accessible. If you don't want to do that, then don't use Facebook. Don't be accessible, etc. Your choice.

I chose to try it and the results are interesting. My Facebook presence has taken on three distinct personalities, reflecting the three distinct groups of people that I'm hooked up to.

First is the internet writerly crowd, the entertaining and argumentative crew that got to know itself on usenet five and more years ago (no, that link won't work if you're not already set up for it -- I know, cause I'm not, and I tried it, and it doesn't work, but the URL is correct anyway). I've denied it before but the truth is they are friends, the unique sorts of friends that were virtually impossible to have before the 21st Century. Their antics keep me going back to F/B as often as I do, just to see in a moment of corporate-cubicle ennui what's going on.

Second is family and family friends, none of whom are particularly computerwise and have therefore only flowered as link-sharers and photo-posters with the advent of Facebook. It's a great way to stay in touch more than you ever thought you'd want to be.

Third appears to be old high school people. I could mention work, because I've a few co-workers in there. But I really don't want to interact with co-workers in the silly and informal Facebook milieu. Fellow employees, okay. But not actual colleagues, and I won't bother to explain why. High school people are starting to pop up, however, and it's kind of amazing. Someone will find me whom I last had a good conversation with in 1976, and their list of friends will include names I had forgotten since Ford was in office, and their friends will include others, and damn. There's a party goin' on.

I don't have weird atavistic reactions to high school like some folks do. I got nothing against anyone back there. I didn't make many friends and lost contact with everyone pretty quickly, but no bridges were burnt and in fact, by now, even a burnt bridge can grow back again. So I find it pleasant, almost comforting, to think of reconnecting with these various people. I'm doing so slowly. I'm not the sort to go, "I remember you, let's be 'friends'!". I like to keep my Facebook friends as real people with whom I have a real connection and not just because we were both at Caz one year. But it's a happening, a 'hey, this is nice' sort of thing. The distance is controlled. We can do this.

That's all. The post summary is: Seeing faces from over three decades back is a good thing by and large -- maybe we'll meet up at the multi-year picnic this summer; and lowered blog traffic and lowered blog activity reinforce one another, and so this thing's day are numbered. They're numbered anyway, for other reasons, but except for occasional bursts of exceptional energy, I expect this page of mine to fade into the weeds of the internet, like a warehouse at the edge of a former boomtown. I'm okay with that, because I've a sneaking suspicion the sort of writing I wanted to develop in a blog has actual markets, if I only look for them and write up to them. See you there.

Vale Chambers

It always surprises me when someone who helped define my world turns out to be more or less my age. As yet of unknown causes, Marilyn Chambers recently died at 56. Ms. Chamber's evidently naive belief that hardcore sex films were part of a natural evolution and would enhance her career as an actress parallels other influences that led me to have a similar outlook. Of course, this outlook coupled with the shyness and social fear that, looking back, I simply can't believe I had, led to enormous frustration. But somehow I've always held a sense that society's progress could in part be measured by sexual openness, quite apart from whether or not I could actually participate.

Of course I still feel that way -- "of course" not because it's obviously the right attitude, but because it is something I grew up with and therefore forms a part of my worldview and is unlikely to change. When the internet came along I thought some of the Reagan-era regression would get corrected, and to some extent it was, but unfortunately a lot of ugliness blew in on the same breeze and society as a whole reactively maintains its conservatism. And now religionism and social conservatism are resurgent, and what healthy openness we have is likely to fade away yet again.

This likelihood is not countermanded by the trend towards gay marriage. My prediction would be that gay marriage will become the norm while the public face of homosexuality becomes more and more conservative. The crazy acting-out antics of the past will fade in memory, and gay couples will be accepted as just as unspectacularly normal as the rest of us. This is fitting, of course. I'm only saying that this trend, and others that also appear to be the dreams come true of us old 1970s Boomers (legal pot anyone?), are easily balanced in the global zeitgeist such that what we used to wish was a license to have more fun will just be another uninteresting life option. Details may change, but the big picture probably will not. Too bad: I like to think that so long as we are open about our feelings, careful with others', and proceed with honesty and integrity, there's no limit on what behavior is acceptable; or at least, exploration of this should prevail in the art world without penalty. But there are penalties, society yet being what it is, and Chambers (and Mapplethorpe and a host of others) can be counted among the unfortunates who have had to learn it.

Or Is It Freedom

Sometimes this deadly shyness hits me like a bomb. I know a fair amount of people now, but few of them well, and if it weren’t for the random associations of the workplace and of my kids’ rapidly disappearing family-related activities, I have the strong potential to know no one at all. I hate the shyness. I despise it. It is part of a broader sort of brokenness that stands between me and the rest of humanity, an Olduvai Gorge that has me more often than not watching the floor as I walk, watching potential acquaintances remain strangers, watching potential friends remain acquaintances, and watching friends evolve back into being strangers.

I fake it pretty well, though the fake-out is not sustainable. My 50th birthday party was a success, and certainly everyone got the impression I had a lot of friends. It was no doubt a surprise to all of them. I know it was to me. But I gather most folks have an instinct to remain in touch somehow, to manage all those relationships such that they remain alive and breathing, and it is that sort of social management that entirely escapes me. Not the mechanics of it – it’s child’s play to write down a list of things one should do. It’s the instinct that is missing, or that is too weak to overcome the fear.

What the fear is of, I can’t say, but if you are a shy person, you already know as well as me.

So anyway, the bomb hits when I realize that my instincts to focus on my own work and not make continual little investments in human relationships not only augurs a life that will never be a less lonely one, but is the number one reason why my career has never really taken off. Yes, I’ve raised a family, have a good house, got to travel the world a little on the company dollar, might even be able to put the boys through college. All of that is good stuff for which I am thankful. But that’s about the limit of it. In this competitive industry, staying on track and going fast enough to avoid being run over by the train still isn’t enough. Taking the long view, if further contractions and other workplace turmoil costs me my position, the ultimate cause clearly will not be from being less valuable through misbehavior, insufficient smarts, or lack of productivity. It’s a given that one should get mustered out for any of those. If I am vulnerable it is because, just as in the social context, I am not plugged in to the crowd. I don’t swim with the school. When in amongst the herd I either edge to the outskirts or keep my head down in the grasses. People don't always know what I really do, therefore, and that alone is recognized as a weakness. This lack of managing impressions allows for poor impressions where a whole lot of solid and valuable work may not be so visible.

The above is the sort of thing I write and then delete because it looks like a bunch of whining. This time I’ll post it instead because I’m brave like that, brave being another word for nothing left to lose.

Obama At Risk

Just my quick unqualified thought. I never supported the bailouts or the big economic stimulus package but I'm nobody and don't know much. (I gotcher stimulus package right here, baby!) I just have a bad feeling about government taking the reins to save people from themselves. Plus the rhetoric has been dishonest. They keep blaming Bush, who actually tried to regulate the FMs some more and was stymied by Congress, and Greenspan, who was Clinton's darling if I recall, and of course the set-up so people could buy houses they couldn't afford, which was absolutely not a Republican deal, never has been. In other words, I deeply distrust the public discussion on this, and am not convinced that the current power has any better a combination of competence and good intention than the last.

So. These bold moves have Mr. Obama's imprimatur, these vast trades of money for control, these tax-funded infusions to try and jump-start an ailing economy in the mold of FDR's programs to end the Great Depression. Everyone's a Keynesian all of a sudden. But the markets so far have responded poorly. They keep sinking. And it isn't that markets are all Republicans who would rather lose money than see Obama get a win. Markets are self-interested and thus can be trusted as an indicator set of the wisdom of the crowd. If the market, which is forward-looking, doesn't like something, maybe that something ain't so great.

So we have a situation where mere weeks into his presidency, Obama has hitched his wagon to an unproven and expensive program about which the non-political self-interested crowds outside the Beltway are gathering doubts. It's not hard to predict what may happen next. Mrs. Clinton and her husband were dogged for years by the failure of her bold program to reform healthcare. Mr. Schwarzenegger was rendered relatively ineffective once his early and bold proposals to correct California's more intractable problems failed at the ballot (thanks in my opinion to the pernicious influence of self-protecting power centers called "unions" but that's fairly moot now). Obama is at risk of losing his momentum, initiative, popularity, whatever it is that enables a politician getting things done, and winding up kind of a meh president and risking a GOP comeback in '12.

That's all. Half a long unedited essay is better than none, if I'm just bleating to the net before cranking up on yet another day here in corporate America where we are living the dream.

(Bonus round: "Young Chuck in Montana bought a horse ...")

Settle Down

Saw Gran Torino today. Great movie. I learned a lot from the main character. I learned that maybe it’s okay if I just settle down and become the mean old man I was meant to be. But I won’t go around telling gook gangsters to get off my lawn. And not only because I don’t have a classic old M-1 Garand to threaten them with (I wish I did, those are lovely rifles). I’m really not like that. And anyway, no one ever comes into our cul-de-sac. No one who likes to threaten folks. If they do, well, sayonara, y’all.

The Eastwood character confesses one of his sins as being that he never got very close to his sons. Didn’t really know how. Today I told my son I feel the same way. He seemed surprised. Maybe we’re closer than I think. But I will always know (as every father knows) I could have done better. I have a particular memory. Back when he was twelve or so we went fishing. I never fished and didn’t know what to do, really, and pretty soon was upset with myself for not having the basic knowledge. I was also upset with myself for not really knowing how to just be there and relate to him. As my mood deteriorated I related it to the emptiness I found when reaching in for genetic knowledge. By genetic I mean learned at a parent’s knee. I have no solid memories of father-son time of my own, and thus had little to pass on. I had to make it up as I went and it didn’t always turn out so well, especially this time. My son just wanted to go fishing with his dad. I reached deep into my gut for fishing-with-dad memories and my hands came out empty. I wound up very sad, and this put me in an angry mood, I was probably short with him, all the usual bad moments all parents have. We didn’t catch anything either.

I was talking to my dad on the phone recently. I love and respect him but within me the relationship is complicated. We talked about my son, the one whose college career hasn’t quite taken off yet. He’s trying, but he’s too much like me to really find his direction. Hopefully that will change. Anyway, I don’t recall exactly but I did make the distinction between him and me by saying that he has parents. By this I meant he has people trying to understand him and give him direction. I realized my indiscretion quickly and kept talking to move the conversation away from there. A trick of fear and denial that is probably genetic. I hope he wasn’t upset. Dad, I mean. Maybe he’ll read this. But there’s no message. I know it’s been years since any of the pain could be managed in any way other than by acknowledging that, well, time has passed. Too bad. Or as my mom once said: Sorry.

Time is a river and it carries a lot of sand and dirt. I think all of us must have a pretty good layer of sediment in our riverbeds by now. You know, as the river keeps flowing it smoothes the sediment out, wears down the boulders, sometimes digs a deeper channel so the surface can flow more smoothly. That’s an awfully cheesy analogy, isn’t it? I don’t even know what I mean. Something about settling down, as sediment settles. My brain is getting old and sometimes it just wants to settle. You know, shout out to the stars above, Look, you bastards, I’ve done enough! I will never be content so just leave me the fuck alone! But I’m not sure they would understand. Being gods, they are really just a reflection of myself so, no, they will not understand.

Pursuit of Happyness

Thought I saw that movie already. Remembered bits and pieces and the overall story. Watched it tonight. Most of it was new. Did I see a preview? No, I remembered too much for a preview. Finally figured I must have seen it on an airplane, rummy from lack of sleep, hurtling through the night a few miles above the Pacific. Looked up from my book or laptop or catnap now and then, put on the headphones awhile, went back.

It’s an exhausting story. And the period of homelessness makes me want to fund shelters (except of course my systemic instincts kick in, damn them). I appreciated seeing Rev. Williams in his uncredited role as himself. I felt like a slacker and a slob watching the Will Smith character stay so focused in spite of adversity.

Focus is not my friend. Sometimes I feel I can barely accomplish anything anymore. Now would not be a good time to age out of my career but it wouldn’t surprise me if it happened within the next few years anyway. The younger guys care more, and are interested more in technology, and aren’t distracted by second-half yearnings to go find themselves. They have small children and thus strong protective instincts that override any individualist angst. Mine just need college funding and a place to park.

There was an instant when the director ran a convertible full of laughing yuppies past a long line of homeless men lining up outside the shelter at Glide Memorial. I feel like the paper-thin people in the convertible – except I’m not laughing. Not even smiling. I have my huge house and my convertible and occasionally the unbelievable privilege of experiencing the magic that hurtles one through the night a few miles above the Pacific just to go talk to men wearing suits. But other than the laughing part, I’m just as paper-thin as the people in that half-second scene. Just as thin and just as likely in a callow moment to ignore if not dismiss the people lining up for a warm place to sleep.

Systemic instincts. Compassion vies with practicality. Surely the discipline Nature imposed on Man in his days in the forest shouldn’t be discarded entirely. Why not? Not sure. Everyone deserves a hand without regard to why, at least sometimes. But I’ve an inarticulate instinct that insists there is no compassion in giving a man a fish every single day the rest of his life. Teach him to fish and if he won’t learn, leave him free to choose his own lessons.

I don’t know. I only know that charity without end leads to the Roman mob clamoring for their bread and circuses and pulling down and trampling the praetor who denies them this newly inalienable right. That is not the direction of a society with a future.

The main character muses that Thomas Jefferson was an artist, for proclaiming not happiness as a right, but the pursuit of happiness. A vital distinction. But apart from discussing the nature of rights, it’s also a reminder that happiness itself is fleeting, and sometimes we are only really happy when pursuing it.

Ranting because I Looked At the News

Two towns I'm fond of are on the verge of insolvency.

More California Towns Face Bankruptcy

The County can't help. The State can't help. They're all learning the same hard lesson, and on a much larger scale. Let me say it boldly:

IT'S REALLY FUCKING STUPID TO BUILD A BIG-ASS GOVERNMENT ON TAXATION OF BUSINESS INCOME

Simple answer why: Business cycles, income, and tax revenue go down as readily as they go up. Big-ass government assembled by nanny-state do-gooders who think free-for-all government programs are the solution to Mankind's problems cannot be shrunk once it is grown without throwing all the worthless good-for-nothing^{(meant with the greatest affection)} citizens and others who have come to depend on it out into the freezing cold street. Where, the so-called liberal defenders of free-for-all government programs warn, they will turn to crime.

This highlights the difference between Liberals and Conservatives. Liberals think the poor are criminals in waiting if we don't pay them off with bogus programs to set them on their feet that no one ever follows up on anyway. Conservatives think the poor are middle-class people in waiting who simply need all those goddamn regulations that make employment, housing and food so hard to get swept out of the way. (All right, Conservatives also think of the poor as human resources that could be more affordable, i.e. slave labor that would be turning the cranks as soon as all minimum wage laws were set aside but hey, what do you want? Criminals in waiting, or workers that can compete with China?)

Rio Vista I haven't been to much. It's generally on the way to somewhere else, and often as not across the river from the route I'm taking anyway. But Isleton is very cool. Small, but cool. Some abandoned buildings on the main drag that date back to the 1800s, a few bars and general stores that thrive during the Crawdad Festival, streets that are most picturesque when lined with large American motorcycles, a few lawns and fine old london plane and sycamore trees and of course the not-so-mighty Rio Sacramento drifting by across the levee (and occasionally over it).

I don't know what they have in expenses such that a downturn in business has to drive them to bankruptcy, but I bet it's a bunch of social niceness crap imposed by laws written by the usual cabal of nanny-state do-gooders up in the state capitol building. Some of whom might actually be Republicans, who knows.

But anyway, it's clear the time is coming for self-sufficiency. Depending on gov'ment (or anyone) to feed, clothe, house, educate, or protect you is a ba-a-ad idea. It's great when we can afford to take care of everyone. But this economic downturn is either going to

A) Provide the painful lesson that the gifts of government can easily be taken away;
or,

B) Provide the painful lesson that government that can't shrink into its income is destined to become less than worthless.

Are those the same thing? I'm forgetting the new taxes our RINO governor has in mind. What kind of IDIOT would ever think it's possible to tax your way to prosperity? Seriously. 'Splain that one to me. 'Splain to me how taking MORE money from the people who create wealth and dividing it up in programs to protect the people who don't from the consequences of not producing wealth will result in MORE prosperity. That makes sense to a point -- don't get me wrong -- if the money goes effectively to schools, kindy to university, because schools are underfunded (or administered so badly as to be effectively underfunded, whichever). But bah. That's about it. Welfare? Cut it. Prisons? End the drug war, establish drug rehab and interventionist self-esteem programs at a fraction of the cost, problem solved.

Oh, and another thing. Why the FUCK do we have people streaming illegally over the border to work out in the fields, while at the same time we have countless young people in the cities hanging about doing nothing but mutually masturbate in their little gang wars? Maybe if we killed off the welfare state, allowed licensed pharmacies to sell cannabis and coca derivatives at competitive prices, and started sending farm-work recruitment buses into 'hoods full of now-hungry people, we could solve THREE problems for the price of NONE. Just a thought.

Next: Suffrage for property owners only. (Just kidding.)

Out of the Cold

There is a bittersweet moment when shopping for my loved ones. Especially at Christmas.

I am a Christmas grouch. Life never runs smoothly and there’s never enough time and to have this demanding season thrown in the middle of it annoys me. I’d rather just keep to routine. But beneath the commercialism and consumerism and short-lived attempts at recalling some ancient Middle Eastern mythology there is some real cheer and eventually it finds me and I start to enter into the spirit.

I’m not sure what the spirit is. As described in the Dickens story, it is the happy fun pagan element of Yuletide, which Scrooge, the atheistic grandchild of dour Puritans who regarded Christmas as un-Christian, could not in his coldness abide. The Spirit of Christmas was the new unfolding merging of ancient traditions of social order reversal –- a-wassailing we will go -– treat us or else –- with the post-Puritan Victorian sense of sentimental Christian charity. Not a bad thing altogether, but I don’t know how much of that applies to Christmas today.

Gawd, I think way too damn much.

Anyway, so I go to the stores and I start casting about for material ways to show my love. This is a sickness but so many of us have it there’s no point seeking a cure. Not really knowing how to show my love in earthy daily ways that forge strong bonds, I reflexively, and probably as a typical male and/or consumer-culture citizen, put store in the giving of gifts or more precisely, the focused providing of wealth. I give not just things, but things the person given to will really enjoy having.

And in that moment of acquiring some desirable object or other, of imagining the moment when it becomes a part of and enriches the life of someone I love, my heart fills, and I’m standing there in an aisle at Best Buy surrounded by clamshell-encased technology with a water balloon in my chest about to explode and pink edges forming in my eyes.

But it passes. Suppression of emotion must be a survival trait: It happens so readily and without a thought.

It’s followed by a sort of peace -– mission accomplished but to a much greater degree, a general thankfulness that I am in a position to celebrate the season more or less as everyone else does, especially if I don’t struggle with it. My heart goes out to those who cannot – the poor, and the unloved, and to those who are losing their jobs. Sure, you could say that’s the spirit, or part of it. But that isn’t seasonal, really. I can afford a day off and an extra meal and a shiny gizmo or two. That isn’t seasonal either. I’m thankful all the time. Maybe a little bit more now, because I can duck out of the cold. But I still think of children who never really get presents. It all makes for a complex emotional cocktail. What do you do with it?

Drive Em Out

So on the way home last night I was listening to NPR as I usually do and some gasbag was saying that if we let the Big Three automakers go under, that will also hurt the entire supply chain, which is huge, and that in turn will drag down the foreign makers who build cars here.

And this utter idiocy was left unchallenged by the journalist. Where the fuck do they get journalists these days?

One of the things that has steamed me up the most since I became a grownup and got a job in a real industry is that the major forces driving this world -- the making of policy and the analysis and reporting of same -- is left to lawyers and journalists and the occasional retired college professor. People in other words with no real understanding of how A leads to B leads to C. And so we are getting fuckeder and fuckeder every passing year.

Don't get me wrong. If GM and Chrysler go into bankruptcy, that will be very bad. The ripples will tsunami across the landscape and tear vast holes in the banks and houses and factories and everything else in the way. But the pain will be relatively short-lived -- a few years maybe -- as what's left of industry downsizes and retools and reconfigures and starts hiring again (here's an example of the sort of brilliance GM's failure will make room for). In contrast how the fuck long will the country be burdened with the unintended consequences of an unimaginably huge bailout? We'll essentially be rewarding an old-line 20th Century industry for fucking around in their old-line 20th Century way. They'll forget the scare and go back and do things the same way. Well, except for the oversight provided by, ahem, Congress. If you think that will help, omigod, go rent a brain, will you? Try it out, see if you like it.

I also recall hearing of a contention by the Ford guy, who doesn't really NEED the money, that if the other two go down, then he will need some money too. Well, a) no fucking duh, as CEO he owes it to his stockholders and employees to see to it that a gift given to their competitors comes to them as well, and yet otherwise b) that's bullshit, because it will not only mean he suddenly has a less competitive market to play in but a shitload of experienced and desperate auto workers and cut-rate factories available to go play in it with. Sounds like good times to me.

Did I mention auto workers? Oh, those poor fuckers. It took me two degrees and ten years of experience to make a salary comparable to your average union quarter panel installer and U-joint adjuster. Maybe twenty, I don't know. Fuck em. A major reason we're in this mess -- not the short term mess created by those creative wizards on Wall St but the longer term mess of steadily decreasing American industrial output and the massive strategic and economic Damocletian sword it represents -- is that the rest of the world is finally starting to catch the gravy train we leapt aboard after WWII, and our workers just aren't worth as much more than the rest of the world's as they used to be.

Oo, what a sentence. What meant: As the competing ladders of economic growth lurch upwards, lower costs elsewhere make our workers' entitlements unaffordable. That goes double for the non-workers' entitlements, but I'm not getting into the welfare state today. Seems a bad time of year for that particular rant.

But it is a good time of year for redemption. I offer a case in point, the lovely and talented Carly Fiorina, who lost her job after flying H-P a little too close to the ground but today has some good things to say about the auto company bailout: CEOs seeking bailouts should be willing to resign.

Victory in Iraq Day 22 Nov

A number of people shook off the infection of pessimism and the sand the media has been pouring on them long enough to notice something:

We won the war in Iraq.

Don't expect the President to mention it. Especially don't expect the President-elect. He was hired on the theory that he was right to oppose the war and to oppose fighting it properly (i.e. masterfully opposing the "surge" while congratulating the troops who effected it). He's not going to change his tune now, especially since it isn't necessary. He gets the incalculable benefits of the U.S. having removed a dictator and placed something like the rule of law and democracy in one of the world's political and economic centers of gravity, while keeping his anti-war reputation, and at a pretty low cost as wars go. I don't begrudge him this. Just sayin'.

Just to check my sanity (which some would argue I checked years ago and never bothered to reclaim) I did a quick Google News search on "Iraq". I saw headlines about:

Iraq to vote on security pact
Iraq warns of consequences of early US pullout
In Baghdad, debating post-US outlook

This and the usual tension of civil (i.e. largely unarmed) debate. Conspicuously absent: Relentless terror attacks, Iranian troops interfering, a never-ending civil war, mass unrest. Indeed, war correspondents are returning to find the place relatively peaceful.

"There's nothing going on. I'm with the 10th Mountain Division, and about half of the guys I'm with haven't fired their weapons on this tour and they've been here eight months. And the place we're at, South Baghdad, used to be one of the worst places in Iraq. And now there's nothing going on. I've been walking my feet off and haven't seen anything." -- Michael Yon

There is one dire warning from many quarters if the US pulls out to soon: Pirates. Yep, that's the worst we have to worry about now: That the Gulf will follow the example of the Horn of Africa. And we know it won't. Except when using them against each other, I'm sure even the Iranians and the Saudis would cooperate against piracy.

I had a reader in times past who continuously called me an idiot for refusing to see that the Bush / Cheney plan was really to drop Iraq into perpetual war so that Western oil companies would always have leverage in the Gulf. I'm glad to say he was wrong all along, and that I suspected it all along. Not that I would necessarily put it past Royal Dutch Shell to be pulling strings with blood-soaked fingers. But sometimes you have to look at the world as the executives do and not the writers of paperback thrillers.

In recent months I've also been glad to see emerging validation of my instinct not to be political fashionable, but to follow my own vision. I've never backed off my support for the Iraq War. I've learned of the lies and the subterfuge and the crimes committed by the Bush Administration, and I have no interest in defending them and I certainly wouldn't push for a pass on prosecution or, in the end, for amnesty. Fuck that. Crime is crime, and as we saw recently with Prop 8, clever use and abuse of the law can do real evil.

But looking at the big picture -- turning away for a moment from Bush's crimes just as we turn away from Lincoln's, from Wilson's, from Roosevelt's -- Saddam's regime was an octopus of caustic influence and direct interference, and something like what we did had to be done. 9/11 provided political capital that Bush had to spend, and overspend, quickly, and overspend it he did. "Squandered the good will," he did, and the world is a better place for it.

Now the once long shot candidate whose campaign was built in part on a strongly opposing view will take the reigns. In the see-saw world of a functional democracy this is no surprise. What's emerging as kind of a surprise is the centrist, indeed hawkish, aspect of his first cut at a cabinet. But only kind of a surprise: I've said all along Obama is damn smart.

Casino Royale

I don’t have to tell you what sort of icon James Bond has become. International adventure, sex, bad humor, fast cars, gadgetry -- ever since Ursula Andress came dripping out of the surf in the first major film and the bad guy got the point. The movies were always entertaining, but got steadily more ridiculous from there.

I’ve always been fascinated with the real Bond, the original, as told in the novels and short stories written by Ian Fleming. After watching the most recent movie on DVD, Casino Royale, I was curious to see how closely it followed the book. I read it years ago. Times have changed, I’ve changed – it was time to read it again.

It is Fleming’s first novel, written in 1952 when he had no idea if the effort would pay off. Often I’m much more interested in an author’s early work, produced before his imagination is spoiled by success. My copy is a Signet paperback, fifty cents new, printed in 1964 after Fleming’s death but before his last novel, which “will be published in the spring of 1965.” I got it used about thirty years ago, at Holmes Books down in Oakland, a wonderful old store piled with old books moldering away in the grimy windows’ dim daylight.

The best thing about reading old Bond books, beyond the writing itself, is the necessity to disconnect this James Bond from the caricature that has developed since the 1960s. The real James Bond was a World War II vet, a naval commander with some experience in behind-the-lines espionage, not too far removed from Fleming himself. Going only from this book, I’d say he was born somewhat before 1920 – this because he bought his first car in 1933, a slightly-used supercharged Bentley (analogous perhaps to a modern Bond starting out with, say, a 1985 Rover Vitesse), and he must have been at the least a precocious teenager by then. Thus for the book he’s in his early to mid thirties and has had the unfortunate experience of having had to kill a couple of men late in the war – thus the double-oh distinction. He was not chosen for the assignment because of his mad secret agent skilz and ability to slaughter a dozen bad guys while seducing countesses and straightening his tie. He was chosen because he was known to be a good and serious gambler, especially at cards, and a gambler was what the assignment called for.

I love the simplicity and the absurdity of this story. Le Chiffre was a stateless man, one of many thousands wandering about Europe in those days, whose country of origin either no longer existed or was simply deemed irrelevant by those who took post-war chaos as an opportunity to reinvent themselves. His earliest known address was Dachau, June, 1945. His role was as paymaster to a communist organization in control of various French labor unions. He invested Soviet money into a chain of brothels and lost his ass when the French upgraded their blue laws. In a bid to recoup his employers’ losses and save his own neck, he sets up a high-stakes game of baccarat at Casino Royale on the French coast. It’s Bond’s job to beat him.

This Bond has no gadgets; there is no Q Branch presided over by a doddering über-engineer. He has only his small Beretta .25 under his arm. Vesper Lynd does not start out as some winking Bond Girl but is a bureaucratic fellow employee who grows on him naturally. In other words, they don't immediately like each other, but after a bit of personal sparring he admits to himself he wants to get her into bed -- as any self-respecting reader in the golden age of men’s adventure magazines would expect. In time he actually falls in love with her and decides to quit the service and marry her.

This plan falls through.

Meanwhile, Le Chiffre and his two henchmen, their rickety old Peugeot, the ill-kept rental house where Bond is tortured (just as in the recent movie), are all decidedly and unpretentiously low-tech. The only honest gadget in the entire book, apart from a botched bomb plot early on, is a cane gun such as you used to be able to buy in any novelty firearms shop. There isn’t even any cheating at cards -- Orson Wells and his x-ray specs are not to be found.

Like old movies, old books are time machines. I love my Bond trips into the 1950s. I’d love to see a period movie based strictly on one of the original novels. It would be so very back to basics. For all its half century of updating, the recent film follows the book reasonably well, and this is a major reason why it is one of the best of the James Bond movies.

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I was at work trying to organize my crap when I found this little essay, written several months ago. I had an intent to say more about the Bond character and illustrate it with some juicy quotes. But in retrospect that would be superfluous, so here and done. Now to go organize more of my crap.