Late December

Remembering back before they put up the interstate, we had traffic round here, and visitors, and assorted good times.

No, I'm just procrastinating. I'm really good at that.

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.

Wordless Wednesday #3

Wordless Wednesday on Friday

Wordless Wednesday on Thursday

Wordless Wednesday #2

Wordless Wednesday on Tuesday

Wordless Wednesday on Monday

By Design

The most brilliantly complex systems come about by accident and evolution. Weather. Biology. Religion.

Our society has transformed Christmas into a festival of excess. Excess materialism, excess food intake, excess expressions of cheer. That's not all bad. Some of it is very good. There are also intense moments of introspection and spirituality and love of family, friends, people. All good.

Also a time of stress and melancholy, anger and suicide, sadness, family strife, and eleventh hour reconciliation. Name your nectar or name your poison, you will get more than you expect over Christmas.

As we've transformed Christmas, so we've transformed New Years. More excess -- but now it's a past-stress blowout. Fun, parties, fireworks (if you live in my neighborhood); or home alone if time and chance put you in that space -- and always the resolutions.

I don't make them usually, but I might this year. I feel it's a brilliant design to place new beginnings and new resolutions a week after the premier festival. So much about Christmas tangles our children and our childhoods and our marriages and our loves and losses, our families and those indescribable relationships, dreams not met and targets just missed, tangles all these and more -- faith lost, edging to restoration, almost there until the candles are blown out -- Christmas tangles all the loose ends into a beautifully lit ball and tosses it into our laps ... And then what do we do with it?

Roll it out onto the floor for a week and start a new year resolved not to do THAT again, or THIS, or SOME OTHER THING, and who knows, maybe this time one of those resolutions will stick.

I don't have any really bad habits beyond staring at a computer too much, but I can think of a thing or two I must resolve to change. So maybe this year, the brilliance of placing a few new bets a few days after reaping a lifetime's harvest of old ones will pay off. Time will tell.

The Tools

I keep forgetting to post these. Put an ad on Craigslist, two nibbles, no resolution as yet, and Annie wants to see the pics again, so here we are.

Of course I forget the d's and here it is midnight, I need to hit the rack. Suffice it to say the table saw and planer / jointer are fifty to sixty years old and run like old tractors (i.e. they'll never quit -- tho' the ripper doesn't rip quite straight anymore). The scroll saw and sander are newer and work fine and I want to toss the old originals in too. Wife's family stuff so she might prefer to get some $$$ for it but we also just want to clear stuff out.

I wrote down the makers / model numbers somewhere but I can't be arsed finding that now. I know the saw is a Power King 280 and a web search found an entire community of old woodworking tool geeks who collect, restore and use these old things. Who knew?

Friday Fourteen

Sunday after Thanksgiving. South bound. Two hundred miles to the next city. Gas light on. No idea where's the next gas station. Good times.


Monday afternoon, headed home, gas light on again, drove all along Highway 1, nary a fuel stop, I swear Newport Beach must have passed a law against gas stations. Finally solved it by going inland. Going back, Catalina Island out on the Pacific calm and bright, I can see the attraction.


Still find these things around unexpected corners.


I got out for a walk on the beach.



Every time I see this thing it fascinates me. It hulks over Huntington Beach. Still don't know what it is exactly.


The Pier at Huntington Beach as seen while making a right turn onto the PCH from Main St.


The highway goes under LAX. Top was down, camera propped on top of the windshield, yeah, I'm dangerous like that.


Walked about Venice Beach right around sundown.






And went for the freeway, and six hours home again.

Wordless Wednesday #1

attribution

Roads Taken And Not

My son is doing a paper for an English class and typical of students aiming towards Engineering, finding he doesn't have (or thinks he doesn't have) the right sort of mind to analyze a poem.

"There's really nothing there," he says. "Just the poem, and a bunch of people giving their opinions on it. Nothing definite."

Math and physics are definite. This is what makes them easier to do. But college also teaches us to write about things we will never understand. And so he is writing about Frost's "The Road Not Taken." It's a lovely poem, simple of imagery and rhythm and rhyme, and as a well for pondering, bottomless. I'm reading it so I can better proofread his paper later. I enjoy reading it. Rhyme and rhythm assist the mind in framing concepts. Freeform poetry also has its place, but honestly, a lot of freeform poetry is little more than offhand prose written by a lazy poet.

My simple take? Choices are choices. We always have roads not taken. Once done, our sigh may be of regret or relief, but the choice itself cannot be wrong. It's the choice we make and that makes it right. What we do on the road now chosen, how we seize it and make the most of it, is what makes all the difference.

Tree Hunting

The tree farm we go to is a little family biz up a side road an hour's drive up towards the mountains. Been operating forty years. They built a quaint little Christmas village.


I could be snarky but it's nice, really, not overly commercial. They sell trees (cheap!) and ornaments and hot chocolate. Boughs are free.


I used to always say, let's take this one! Then I figured out they weren't little kids anymore who'd laugh at anything.


I always bring a saw and someone always asks, why'd we bring a saw? And we never use it.


If you cut well above ground the tree will eventually grow another main trunk for someone else. We found one nearly perfect (pics later, prolly). To cut no more than we needed I climbed up onto the cut trunk of another, three or four feet above ground, and commenced with the sawing. It fell, and I was King! I was Man, I Cut Down Tree!


It's fourteen feet tall, more or less. Thirty two bucks, something like that.


I started to get in the Christmas mood and took this picture. I'll get over it.


They had the usual life-size creche thing and the baby in the middle was rolling his eyes and going "Dad! It's 4 B.C.! It smells like a fucking barn in here! Couldn't We have waited, like, a couple thousand years? I mean, building codes. Building codes! That's all I ask. And some decent Thee-damn music!"

Three Sentences

I don't know if it's because I'm getting older and my brain is fossilizing or if it's because there is just too much unresolved nonsense rattling around in it or if it's because I've finally reached that age where the things I always really wanted to do -- e.g. travel, write, take single-malt tours of Scotland -- increasingly seem more Important and Significant than the day to day of this career begun nearly thirty years ago that's fine as jobs go but was really only meant to pay some bills, but the end result is a signal inability (if not unwillingness) to focus on the work that needs doing and instead obsess on how cool it would be if they added cable and tower tours to the Golden Gate Bridge.

Another result may be the demise of this particular blog but not yet, not until I try comment verification to fight off the rising incidence of unsolicited ad-related comment spam, a strategem that unfortunately makes a weird sort of economic sense on an internet increasingly crawled by spider-like robots weaving their sticky ad-like webs to trap errant ad-clicks and thus generate income, penny by penny, for the nameless robotmasters who lurk in windowless spam-dens when they're not lurching through harsh Floridian rays to the strip clubs that form their only connection to living, breathing human beings, never caring that this connection consists of a velvet hand reaching under their overstuffed Hawaii shirts and lifting wads of cash as the price of a smile and an aromatic whiff of fake feminine hair and other fake feminine accoutrements; these overfed grease-faced greed-heads who have perverted the web's possibilities of communication into a mine of pointless penny-snatching click counts.

Apologies for the inconvenience but the readership has declined tremendously anyway (another sign of an impending need for decision as the decline is attributable, beyond Facebook, to a signal lack of compelling material and/or consistency) and so I will consider comment verification an experiment, see if it kills the Anonymouses and their useless links which annoy me even if no readers have noticed, see what other effects there are, and enter this winter season resolved to make changes of several different types in the life that pulses quite outside the bounds of this peripheral vanity and which indeed account for the distraction and ill focus alluded to at top.

What Am I Doing Today

I know you want to know. Forthwith: Randomity.

The weather is fantastic: Clear and bright and somewhere around 70F. Yesterday it rained. The outdoor life is good.

I'm listening to a Pandora mix whose last several songs were by Kevin Yost, Animals on Wheels, Infected Mushroom, Karsh Kale, cEvin Key, Shpongle, Lali Puna, Sasha, Enigma ... You ask? Electronica with an Indian flavor. I'm diggin' it.

The Big Game is happening sometime today. I won't bother. Not a regular football fan, and I didn't go to Cal, and I don't really care that much beyond GO BEARS!

I'm reading The Great Game by Peter Hopkirk. It is a fantastic book. A history of the struggle between the Russian and British Empires for domination of Central Asia and, ultimately, India. Hopkirk writes with such flair I find it a series of adventure stories I cannot put down. It's extremely topical, of course, Afghanistan being as central to the aims of the great powers now as it was then.

I'm often convinced that people who wish for an end to war are idealists who've never understood history, nor just what hangs in the balance in every conflict. Other times, I hope for the day health and security are spread more or less equally and war will not have to result from everyone protecting their own. This has to happen organically. Give it another millenium.

I'd as soon us out of Afghanistan anyway. Instead we should assist Pakistan in serving its own people, whether it really wants to or not. Undercut the appeal of the Taliban and fellow travelers, reduce the risk of those nukes going rogue, and leave the Afghans to their own devices. Fighting terrorism is just a pretext. Even with that, we don't need more troops. If we were to work effectively with the tribal leaders (which some Americans have done quite well) and make service in the Afghan army more attractive, the place would settle down well enough. Eventually.

I'm easily captivated. At any given time there are sure to be several mild infatuations in my universe. A girl smiled at me yesterday at work, a real smile, teeth and all, completely unbidden except that we've both been around for a few years and nodded in passing. She's young and tall and dark and luminous and my romantic side wonders if she's a Pashtun, distantly related to Roxana of Bactria.

Modern Balkh is one of those ancient hidden cities I'd love to visit, but it's in northern Afghanistan and that might have an impact on my life insurance rate.

I'm hesitating over placing my first Craigslist ad. My wife's father's father worked at the shipyards at Hunter's Point during the war, and was a woodworker all his life (as well as a musician), and we still have his old power tools taking up space in our garage. I need to sell them -- table saw, planer, sander, scroll saw. They are bolted to tables he built, as are the large electric motors that run the belts. We're talking old school tools here: Exposed belts and wheels turning fast. One false move and you lose a finger, or an errant small child a hand. Surely someone will want to drive out here and give me fifty bucks for the lot.

If not, what to do? We have too much stuff. Somehow the objects left by previous generations keep washing up here. None of it is particularly valuable nor especially worthless. But having it around has helped me to see how material possessions weigh down the spirit.

Catullus 85

In another forum, Hope reminds us of the timelessness of experience.

Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

I hate and I love. Why does this happen, perhaps you ask?
I know not, but I know that it happens and I am tortured.

Catullus lived and loved and wrote in the first century before Christ.

The modern scholarly resource Wikipedia notes that Anakreon laid down a similar riff four centuries earlier.

I love and yet I do not love,
I am crazy and I am not crazy.

This is exactly what I've been saying. I've been saying I'm crazy, that I love, that I don't love, that all this trouble stems from actually being sane.

It ain't workin'.

I wrote a lot more and deleted it. It suffices to say I must be crazy. The poets say so.

Blinking in a Brighter Light

I called an old friend, just to see how he’s doing. He’s sitting in the house he grew up in, watching his father die.

I left a comment at a blog because I didn’t like the music. The comment was deleted because, said the owner, his mother reads it and he won’t allow that kind of language. I don’t remember what I said. I try to keep the obscenities down. Apparently I don’t try hard enough.

Maybe I’d been drinking. I doubt it. I don’t drink, particularly. When I do I’m a docile drunk, silly and meaningless. Then I get tired and that makes me cranky and then I might not be the winner of many popularity contests. But I wouldn’t swear about music I don’t like.

It’s hilarious what we can learn about ourselves if we open our eyes. I might do that someday.

My friend and I hadn’t spoken for a couple months. He sounded like he had been crying. His father was a big man when I knew him three decades ago, not at all the Berkeley type, with his guns and custom trucks and admiration for certain politically incorrect historical figures. He was deeply in love with the woman who lay dying then of an acute arthritis, in the dining room they converted to a bedroom when she could no longer be taken upstairs. Now he lies dying in that room too, and his son is watching over him, feeling helpless no doubt. We didn’t talk long.

I went back to the blog and listened to the music again. This time I used headphones and let it flow over me and discovered the music I didn’t like before kicked some pretty good ass. It was electronica of some form or other (there are dozens), deep and rich and well orchestrated and full of surprises. Reminded me of the music that serves as a constant backdrop at the Burn, especially at night, when a hundred dance clubs sprout like lemonade stands and the strange lights, chai tea, lovely women, oddments of booze, unbelievable costumes, dust, aching feet, three days unwashed hair, and general awesomeness of people letting loose and sharing the fruits of their hard-worked creativity run through you like electric currents and life is simple and good.

Life is good and life is temporary. The more we know of it, the shorter it gets too. We all struggle, I think, to come to terms with that. I struggle now, just learning to see the need. No, I’ve never been complacent, nor in the least bit comfortable. But that doesn’t mean I’ve had my eyes open. What then does it mean? That I should sit still and weave stronger connections with people, for one thing. And other things, even more mysterious.

Written to music generated by entering "Shpongle" into Pandora.

On the Terminology of Racism and its Origins

Early in San Francisco's history (the early 1850s), the Chinese community was highly regarded as moral, hard-working, thrifty, and dependable, a source of stability with a relatively low crime rate. In an era when skin color was destiny, the Chinese were nearly considered white men, and superior to some white men (e.g. the Irish). They were thought to represent a new partnership that would civilize the west, merging Christian and non-Christian forever. It is not by accident that Chinatown occupies the same neighborhood where San Francisco was founded, around Portsmouth Square.

Times change.

Since most Chinese immigrants were sojourners, intending to go home once they made their pile, they had little incentive to integrate, learn English, or change their mode of dress and ponytail. Self-contained communities are often thus. Look how Europeans behaved in Shanghai. This engendered a sort of suspicion, which encouraged racism and led to resentment and hostility. Before long the Chinese were considered a threat to "real" Americans' wages, their efficiency an affront to white ambition, their misunderstood culture a threat to common decency. Populist politicians and newspapers grabbed the mob by these sensitive short hairs, and bad laws and bad times followed.

I'm interested in the earliest days, when a hopeful light shone on a young community. Temporary good times are always interesting. They contrast sharply with the popularly-held image, and then lead to the drama of the down-slide; which in San Francisco's case was long and dark. Chinese remained in a second-class status well into the 1900s.

"Chinee" is considered a racist term. I'm not sure it should be, not in terms of its origin. I have heard a Chinese person say "Chinee". This is because the Chinese languages often de-emphasize closing consonants. In those many words that end in "ng", for example, the "ng" is heard much less when spoken by an Asian than by an American. While in Shanghai I tried to learn some Chinese and one of my greatest difficulties was in hearing those subtle word-endings. I wanted it spelled out in my alphabet so I could know how to form my mouth properly: Is that syllable "muh", or "mung"? My ears couldn't tell me.

And so when an American in 1853 heard a Chinese man say "Chinese", he heard him say "Chinee", and no doubt thought it both humorous and a useful sort of shorthand to mimic what he heard when referring to men from China. Not strictly very polite by modern standards, but not evidence of a pernicious racism either. Using it today would be taken as such, of course.

Same goes for "Chinaman", I suppose. It doesn't offend me at all. You wouldn't expect it to, but "Dutchman" is more or less the same when referring to us Germanics, and I simply don't mind. Indeed, the only person I know who ever says "Chinaman" is 3rd-generation, straight from Guangdong through Angel Island. Of course, he's a Bay Area kid and not subject to strange racial insecurities.

What I don't entirely get is why "Oriental" is taken as offensive. "We're not Oriental, we're Asian." Well, yes, if you must be accurate. It's true that "Oriental" means "eastern" hence reduces a people to being of a geographic aberration. Taken that way, I can see the problem. But it's a minor one, if you take our current civilization as being an outgrowth of both ends of the Eurasian continent. We only got here by different means: You by orienting yourselves to the Golden Mountain, and us more or less by occident.