911 My First Day on the Job

He looks good in relative terms now, but I never did like George W. Bush. The whole John Kerry, Bush pere et fil, all in Skull and Bones. Arrogant pricks therefore. Made men. For no reason that I'm aware of, I watched Netflix' Turning Point about the Cold War. Then I watched Katrina: Come Hell and High Water. I learned about the 911 documentary from my son-in-law.

I find myself imaging what if we ever had a President who actually knew and understood our history. Of course I realize that such a thing is not in the job description. But for sure, Jesus Christ could never become president. Imagine someone wondering out loud why these people hate us as much as they do. What had we done to them? Imagine trying to understand motive, and trying to find a way to bind the world together instead of blowing it apart.

There was, according to the first Front Line documentary I watched, an actual opening for Russia to join NATO back when the Soviet Union dissolved. But we couldn't let go of our enemy. And then we couldn't understand why Bin Laden conflated us with the Russia which had destroyed Afghanistan. They knew our motive was oil. But it wasn't possible to be straight with the oil-addicted American people about that. They bunches up the imperialists in the same way we bunched up the terrorists. 

Imagine how much more peaceful the world would now be if there weren't cocky and angry Rumsfeld and Cheney cackling into feckless Dubya's ear. He did know his role to channel the anger and confusion of the American people. To call them terrorists would be to dehumanize our attackers against a background of good and innocent Americans. That's precisely the medicine which power requires.

No wonder now all we get from politics is hatred. All we get are angry and disgusting people on all sides. There is no-one left to call out the good. We the people ape our feckless leaders. Imagine that!

And now as I write, in a virtual sense since it takes me so long, Charlie Kirk is assassinated. I wish life were so simple that we could just kill off the bad guys as our leadership is programmed to do. All that ever does is to compound the victory of the so-called terrorists against us. The mayhem we exacted against ourselves post-911 is utterly astounding. Except there is no us anymore. We've clearly turned against ourselves, with almost no agreement about what our as-yet aspirational polity really means. 

I was nervous on my first job as a contractor for the Catholic Church. But shortly after my entry to the rectory which housed computers in distress, the women - churchladies - who ran the place called me in to watch the attack on the World Trade Center towers as it was happening on their little black and white TV. I'm pretty sure I completed my work, checking in with family along the way. The hour-long ride home was filled with a desperate search along the airwaves for why there was a plume of smoke over Buffalo. 

Finally, the local NPR station announced that it was an accident confirmed to be unrelated to terrorism. That heroic announcer slept at the station for at least two weeks after 911, so bound were we all to NPR. Yes, the very same network the Administration now seeks to silence. 

Since when did Conservatism become conflated with authoritarianism? Since when did it become OK to silence your political adversaries by way of the government? How can that possibly be American? Is drill baby drill (guns and machines) all we know anymore?

I'm asking.

And Finally, THE REVENGE OF THE REAL

In this new Heart of Darkness, it's the Irony, the Irony! That good churchgoers from the countryside should consider Trump a decent and honest man. I ride out from our fair city which promises to elect a Socialist Democrat (female black!) as mayor, into the countryside where the Trumpers still prevail. Maybe the signage has been muted a tad, but the signs remain. I mean signs in the other sense.

These are people who live closer to nature, often in quite spectacular - by my sights as an apartment dweller - houses, often new. Of course I am mystified by the desire to have all the modern conveniences in the middle of nowhere. Even surrounded as I am by the rogue gunshot-like sounds of random privateered fireworks near where I live, I feel that much more at home in the polyglot miscegenated variegated city. One can walk here among people. 

The RVs also proliferate away from the city, and somehow these are extensions of the political demand that we not be forced to abandon the promised rapture. It is also a technological rapture, where AK's and snow and water mobility without sails and Internets galore and connected screens are never absent. Comfort in the wilderness, where those who would agree with Bratton all must prefer tents, or simply not indulge  In the countryside, nearly everyone owns an RV, and many if not most are far nicer than my apartment. (I still get 24 mpg towing my tiny home)

I said before that I don't know Agamben, but I do, it would seem, find his vocabulary familiar. From Bratton? No, I think I predate him. And so the serpent eats its tail and Agamben, the radical, is identical to those calling a state of exception against all rational governance. 

Of course I still wear a mask, even vaccinated and immune from having contracted the contagion, now moving among an ever smaller minority. I am not an idiot. Though I still find Agamben and his ilk interestingly provocative; affording some truth that others would eschew. You know, like that film about GW (Bush) bringing down the Trade Towers, Small Change, was as if it were true in a way. Some people can't distinguish signal from noise. Some crave a clarity that never has been and never will be.

The thing that no-one wants to say is that this contagion is a direct result of our very success at overtaking the planet. There are too many of us, overcome now by our own effluent, living too closely together and travelling too often. By most measures, it was inevitable. 

Our governments put our collective heads into the sand, affording more interminable warfare and almost no medical preparedness. Ever confident that only the homo zoe would ever be destroyed, in warfare or in contagion. Zoe's revenge, as objective embodied man becomes ever more dangerous in the red zones. Armed, flag waving, unmasked and dangerous. 

The irony. The irony. It was never the sacred man, homo sacer. Bios. It was the intelligent man; the one Bratton celebrates, who believes that our science is only ameliorative in the end. That we will always resolve the worst of our lives into the better, no matter how bad it gets. Because understanding is progressive, I suppose.

One wonders how many straw dogs Bratton has fired up here. We hardly require a sensing layer to know already that we have the tech to distribute pretty good living to all on the planet. We just simply won't do it. Same reason we misuse "data extraction" for the private profit of a minuscule handful of people with one-name impact on the planet.

From Wikipedia:

In one translation Chapter 5 of the Tao Te Ching begins with the lines "Heaven and Earth are impartial/ treating creatures like straw dogs".

Su Zhe's commentary on this verse explains: "Heaven and Earth are not partial. They do not kill living things out of cruelty or give them birth out of kindness. We do the same when we make straw dogs to use in sacrifices. We dress them up and put them on the altar, but not because we love them. And when the ceremony is over, we throw them into the street, but not because we hate them."

This is Bratton's whole book, really, isn't it? We have China as a reasonable facsimile of eradicating poverty. Over here we delegate government to invisible technocrats because we can't be bothered. Those we elect pretty much deflect us from government, no matter which side of the fake divide within neoliberalism they sit on. Capitalist and anti-China to their bones, eh Liz?

I still fail to see how more information will change the game if we won't change it until it's just patently too late. Or in other words, what if there really is something wrong with science as we practice it, or medicine as we practice it, or care as we administer it? Because we even delegate truth, which is what the crazies patently refuse to do. Can't there be a better coming together than this?

I am simply not so enamored of scientific rationalism as Bratton seems to be. I am with him up until he abdicates, in favor of what I'm not sure. We already have all the information that we could possibly need. The corruption was already within us before the virus hit. This was no epidemiological event. This was a metaphysical failure. 

Irony, indeed.

I am now reading Bratton's conclusion, and I have no hope nor certainly any expectation that I will understand what sort of a world it is that he wishes to live in. We seem to agree on most points, and yet I have no feel for how he thinks life may evolve such that I shall want to live it. He does sketch a negative trend, and how it will feel quite normal. I need a more positive vision at my conclusion.

Over the course of my life, once might say that there has been drastic change. And yet trains, planes and automobiles have hardly changed at all. I started along with the Interstate system. Death on the highways was but a street away. My uncle flew a boxcar and would storm our beach house when he could. I did travel overnight by train, and across the continent by plane.

I simply want not to want to do those things anymore. In this last brief phase of transformation, it seems that the cost-content of an automobile has shifted rapidly toward electronics. It is apparently so cheap to build the car I want that the automakers, almost out of desperation, need us to want all the automated processes. Built on the promise of better safety. Somewhat realized. But  so much easier if we simply didn't drive so very much in such extravagant comfort.

I admit that I wish I could still buy a stick shift without a backup screen and without all those sensors. I confess also that I did enjoy getting on the Shanghai subway or walking the dark streets without any fear at all of violence. It was a kind of surveillance that provided that ease. Also some lack of obsession with privacy. But they sure did like their selfie sticks, which I had only ever seen there. Software to post themselves as racially ideal, and identical to everyone else, it also seemed.

The biggest change to flight is also in the screens and the shuttered windows even though the North Pole or the Rockies might be on view below. Still, the planes do crash when the pilot doesn't know how to mistrust the obviously malfunctioning sensors when there's ice on the wings. And the wife of a good friend, a MacArthur genius for exposing genocide, dies with all the rest.

We were shuttered during the pandemic, and then there was a chip shortage. We thought it wise to poke China. I was happy enough to stroll or ride my bike or even ski during the shuttering. Not really missing the anxiety of wanting to travel coast to coast or over to China. 

I miss my little sailboat rowboat shuttered away in Canada. It is more than all I need to get me on the water. I practically had to beg my close friends to let go of Zoom and come to my apartment for dinner the other night. It was a lovely time had by all.

Last night - Independence Day - the private fireworks built in a kind of crescendo as though somehow orchestrated. They came from all over, and I was astounded that so many had bought so many. I now know why I felt comforted and not afraid when I heard the sparse popping leading up to this, when it came from so few that it did sound like gunfire. And you know the shootings have been going up. An almost nightly affair and not far from where I live. 

Bratton mistakes Trump for wanting to be the sovereign - that embodied state. No, Trump is simply the avatar for the manly white world outside the city, and the sovereignty those men wish to preserve over their domains. Their wives, their kids, their motorized thrills. There are, as yet no screens in the side-by-side four wheel drives, or on the Harleys. "You're fired" is a nice thing to be able to say, as you coal the bicyclist from your outsized diesel pickup.

The cars and planes will mostly go because they must. The trains may stay, and some trolleys. We will want fewer goods less often, and they will be delivered by a packet switching system of autonomous vehicles which also move stored electricity about. They may have racks for boats and kayaks and bicycles and they may travel to the countryside for recharging and even wait for you to recharge yourself. And you will not wish to hover in a bloated drone because there is so little thrill to doing nothing.

And our tracks will be cheaply built by China, and designed to enter quietly into and through the wilds, and we will naturally dwindle in numbers since kids will no longer be to us what Trump is to them. A maxi me. Because there will be no fantasy about love's product, and so schools will be rebuilt of love and not of what Illich wanted to deschool, and he was right about that. And the children will be part of the economy again because they will be excited about it., and they will grow by it.

And no-one will ever again want their selfie self to endure forevermore. As though we could extend to infinity in any dimension. As though we could fill the cosmos, which was never empty in the first place.

And all that we require to accomplish all of this is to take back the shock and awe of the military industrial complex and never again delegate its control to the likes of Donald Rumsfeld. We will stop exploding anything or building buildings toward the sky. We will stop designing our own destruction, and our doctors will be our friends and they will touch us.

We will recognize the accidents of life and death and evolution as the expressions of cosmic love that they are, and we will nevermore work to replicate death and destruction in the name of such love because it was never about tooth and blood and claw within any species, really, except for ours. 

It was never about survival of the fittest. It was always about putting a face on love and we should live it. We are plenty smart enough already.

The coming together will be when we realize that we all want the very same thing. I have never actually met a Trumper that I didn't like, though I've seen some from a distance. I sure do know the thrills of motorized joy, though I don't wish to expend my soul to afford them anymore. I even know a father's outrage. Even racist though I most certainly am, it seems obvious to me that the beauty is tending toward far darker skin than mine. 

I will work for our new Socialist Democratic mayor. Things will improve. The economy will flatten. Life will prevail. What's not to celebrate? I want my guitar back too. From Canada where all our musicians seem to originate. Oh Beautiful!

The Big City, The Big MLA Conference

Your feckless correspondent finds himself, of all places, in the grand city of L.A. where he is company (no bona-fides) witnessing the annual gathering of literary types from across our land. I have nothing in particular to do and so I have enjoyed walking (!!!!) throughout the city. What a city!!

Having just written about Buffalo, again, and being among those who "talk proud" of that city, it does have to be said that the worlds' great cities each have something about them which leaves a city like Buffalo, well, in their dust.

I've been to a few, and have gotten to know each quite well in my time - that would be the old days to most people since I'm not a jet setter. I bar-tended in London, and worked as an au-pair in New York. I studied Chinese in Beijing, and have paid more than a tourist quick stop to Toronto, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Madrid, Paris, Hong Kong, Shangai, and now L.A.

Each of these cities has a distinctive personality - something that makes it unmistakably itself and not even remotely confusable with any of the others. But each is also of such size that it can be said to embody a near infinity of diversity and choice; things to see, things to do, places to be surprised by.

There is nothing in the world which could have prepared me for L.A. I've seen images, and read stories and of course we all have a televised sense of what L.A. must be like. After walking as much as I have, it all starts to feel something like familiar but it's definitely not like anyplace else I've ever been.

I don't think it's just the architecture, or the distinctive way public and private get merged, though in each case - and I'm sure the weather is a factor - there are spectacularly unique things about the way it's done here. I gawked at the "post-modern" cathedral, and especially its catacombs: financial footing and foundation for the building's maintenance. It's the only time I've ever seen anything "modern" worthy to be put alongside medieval cathedrals, although I'd have to be on the side of those who must have protested the extravagance of the project. Well, especially given where the Church's money has all been going.

From Sacred Destinations website

I ducked into a nice bookstore in Chinatown, and asked the very well-educated proprietor if he might suggest some modern novelists for me to practice my Chinese with. Ten years ago, he said, there was still a lively trade in literary works - novels, poetry, that distinct Chinese essay form san-wen. But he complains that no-one reads anymore, and that I must read more than his Chinese customers. The old ones too, I ask? Well, if they're still alive he shrugs.

I don't know if it's just that the Chinese have moved up and out of Chinatown and he doesn't get the literate customers anymore, or if that general sense of things descending ever downward has infected him from American intellectuals. Or if what he reports is literally true. No-one reads anymore. Well, he hadn't heard about the MLA coming to town either, and that's been prominent on the news. Even for L.A., it's a big deal, with upwards of 9,000 participants. I guess the action's in Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show. Alas. Still, I have to say there's nothing like a world-class city, and I wasn't prepared to find one in L.A. All we hear is sprawl.

Honoring Sarah Palin

Maybe I have her mixed up with Oprah Winfrey. I'm not in the right demographic to pay attention to either of them, but I did come across the fact of Winfrey starting up a new distribution channel, the Oprah Winfrey Network (her OWN the world network!), to start on cable and satellite TV.

With a somewhat snarky tone, Time Magazine makes note of who it is that watches Oprah and why. I guess they're still smarting that most readers have migrated over to the video-magazine format. As far as this under-informed reader knew, Oprah had only recently announced her retirement from her vastly successful television show.

Of course, that seemed unlikely, but was I the only one who'd already guessed that she would only do that as a way forward to bigger and better and more powerful ventures. Even as a reader now, you have to be a specialist, so I really have no idea what the entertainment insiders already knew that I didn't.

I appreciate Time Magazine's continued conscious and conscientious literacy, by the way. I'm sure it's not so highbrow as the New Yorker, or the Atlantic Monthly or Harpers; magazines which I'm far too unspecialized to take the time to read. Maybe I just simply don't want to be that much of an insider. Anyhow, it feels as though catching on to the special narrative style of each of those could only cut into both my book reading time and my book reading budget. Time gives me a good survey of what's going on, and doesn't seem to presume a thing about my identity.

They do, however, seem to presume a thing about the identity of the Big O's fans. OK, maybe there's a bigger O now, but I'm talking about Oprah. These are people who want to bask in the glow of her celebrity, and who are not so small minded as the Big Mama Grizzly's fans. Oprah makes ordinary people feel large minded, and capable not just to make sense of the world, but to be competent at its pinnacle once they get their chance, just as Oprah is.

Yes, as Time's tone implies, this celebrity craze goes too far and the people who spend too much time on it should learn to get on with their own lives. Still, you get the sense that Oprah does more good than harm overall. At least she's not in any known danger of wanting to run the country.

One thing that caught my attention in the Time announcement was their take on a new show to be featured on OWN, called Enough Already! with Peter Walsh. Ostensibly about decluttering your house, this show is really, Time assures us, about how to live in your own present, by clearing out 'two kinds of clutter:' "memory clutter," which recalls the past, and "I might need it" clutter, which anxiously anticipates the future.'

Well, you know this just resonates with me since I've been pretty intensely involved with cleaning out clutter in my own life. It isn't that fun, and it hasn't been easy. Cleaning out clutter is definitely not something I ever wanted or needed to do. What I needed to do was to move, however much more pleasant it would have been to stay put.

I don't really think the Oprah ethos would have anyone moving so smartly in the direction of Spartan as I've had to move. She probably has in mind that fabled empty executive desk, topped with an Apple, and with the rich wood grain showing all the time except when papers might need signing.

She's talking about celebrity decluttering, to a demographic made up of those who wish they could have celebrity makeovers, celebrity style consultants, and celebrity designers to guide their self-creation.

I've always prided myself on a fairly contained and only modestly growing collection of belongings. But when I recently vacated the one and only house I've ever owned, I did discover that stuff, just like work, expands to fill the space/time available for it. Smart executives work from a Spartan desk if they need to get stuff done. I am not a smart executive of my own life, I guess. (To be honest, when I did have an executive desk, it was always cluuttered.)

The biggest thing was my long campaigned wooden sailboat, and it's surrounding accouterments. That might have been all mixed up with my identity. The boat would be still sitting beside the house after it was occupied by the new owner, but for some hapless fellow not all that much younger than me allowed as how I might give it away to him.

There were all sorts of clothes which had documented my inevitable middle-aged sprawl, and useful stuff I pretty much gave to the new owner for pennies on the dollar. Tools, even, and a lot of furniture. After relocating back to the same apartment I lived in before the house, I still had too much stuff. Now I'm trying to get rid of as much of that as possible to complete my move to California.

I'm still not quite here yet, not having found a job and therefore unable to get health insurance, and so my apartment in Buffalo remains intact, if forlorn. And it leaves me still not having had to confront the main issues; the Christmas Tree ornaments collected across the years, the file cabinets, certain pieces of furniture I've had with me my entire life, even against all sorts of odds, and boxes worth of just plain stuff. It's not the "sentimental value." I think this stuff actually embodies my mind; all the little decisions one makes each and every day about what to save and what to discard.

I came out here with a carload at first, which was more than enough to keep me going and not missing anything at all. Having things available is not the same as having them with you, and it's easy enough to be away from "home" even for extended periods of time. But for me, home has probably always been a sprawling and extended collection of stuff, not all of which is in "my place."

Over the recent holidays I packed up 5 boxes of cherry picked books and notebooks - things which I thought  contained aspects of my self and mind which It would be difficult if not impossible to reassemble without them - and had them shipped out to my newer digs in California. It looks like I'm straddling two "homes" now.

Sure, it will remain as unlikely as it ever has been that I will ever re-open my old Chinese literature notebooks. Had I completed my entry into that field, these notebooks would already be buried beneath piles of subsequent production; of value to me only by virtue of their ability to contrast with my later and more sophisticated production.

As it is, I find that looking through them actually does recall circuits of my brain which I might easily have thought dead. But they come back to life in ways which would be impossible if I were to try to start over. Looking at my own actual handwriting brings back the actual moments of study and discovery.

Among the notebooks I left behind this time are collections from all my various careers. There are conference notes jotted when I was a private school headmaster or a technology administrator. There are classroom notes from the study of Comparative Education. These also recall parts of me, but parts I feel content to allow to fall away. Or maybe it's just that whatever I once did know in any of these fields would be so utterly obsolete and superseded that starting over would be the only way to get back into those games.

With Chinese literature, it's more a game of mastery at the basic level in ways that never will change. Whatever my career might be now in this last slide of my life, I do want it to be informed by my once and now re-enlivened study of Chinese traditions. Maybe that's because it's the only way out I've ever found from the conundrum of "progress." Where continuous improvement is meant always to lead to something new and better, but where also, therefore, the medicine we practice now and bet our lives on will surely be shown to be idiotic some day ever sooner rather than later.

It's nice to think that there's always something more to learn and a better self to become. But it's also nice to know that maybe it isn't necessary always to leave the familiar one behind. Medicine would be nicer if it were more like Chinese literature, with certain principles always enduring, though no two pieces could ever be the same.

I am glad for my study of education and my facility with technology, but these have failed to define me, or I have failed to invest myself in these fields. Is it that I never did fully see myself in these careers. Or were tthey what happened to me, and while I climbed on top of them, it was also seemingly random or unlucky happenstance which knocked me from my game. Well, same with Chinese literature.

Among the notebooks I was perusing while making my selection for shipping (equal to my weight and travelling steerage, these books still cost more to ship coast to coast than I do - weird!) was one which I just knew would satisfy a partial memory I've carried for maybe 20 years now. I had been attending an Independent School Management Institute about integrating and coordinating curricula, and had been struck by a section on "expert learning" and in particular had a memory of being alerted to a study of chess masters.

Over the years I've conducted Internet searches and asked knowledgeable people questions, but I was never able to find anything about this study, and I couldn't remember the excellent  teacher's reason for having brought it up. But I had apparently forgotten about the notebook. Perusing it recently after coming across it during my cherry picking expedition I just knew it would have my secret.

On maybe the fifth pass through, it finally did. Yes! It was about how chess masters can "read" a board, and will be able to tell in an instant if the pieces have been randomly (or inexpertly) placed. There is a meaning to the board, a telling of the expertise of the players and of the place in the game where the expert finds the board. This can't be taught directly. The only thing you can teach is the rules of the game. And then the student has to want to play.

I think that must also be the way that a person views the debris of his own life. To an interior decorator, maybe my stuff is all random. To someone with better taste, much of it will be clutter. But to the person who lives there, each item contains its own history, and when you let it go you might as well let your mind go the way my Dad's has. It will not remain a part of you. Being forever new and always in the present is not always a thing to be desired.

On the plane out here to California I finished reading this excellent book on Buffalo called City on the Edge. In its essence, I think the book opposes everything about the living-in-the-present-decorator-ethic. My home town Buffalo is presented as both victim and victimizer of itself across the years. It would repeatedly take giant sweeps across its scruffy architecture in an attempt to get out ahead of what the expensive seers from out of town assured it would be directions for the future.

In general, the book urges, Buffalo was the victim of Urban Renewal; the very same thing on a massive scale which makeover artists would have you do to your home. You can inhabit someone else's view of life, and adapt it for yourself. But in the process, you might destroy everything that makes you you.

The book's author, Mark Goldman, documents the many extravagant successes of Buffalo: in the arts, in music, in architecture, even in politics. But all of these have been subsumed beneath the collective finish by the turn of this still-new century, where Buffalo is the butt of jokes about impoverishment and lack of style in every dimension.

There is not a soul who lives in Buffalo who can't document his litany of regrets for the city. The Big U. should have been built downtown on the waterfront. The suburbs shouldn't have been allowed to cannibalize the culturals of the city. Regionalism should have overwhelmed home rule and competing jurisdictions sprawling toward the lowest common denominator. No mass transit would have been better than a partial realization of its vision in the form of a single underground line.

This sense of regret can get transported inward, until as a denizen of Buffalo you start to believe what outsiders already know; that in such a downtrodden and dingy place, it's unlikely that an interesting soul remains. Could have been great, but now the City of No Illusions, accepting itself as a might-have-been, leaves the Oprah life for elsewhere. To have remained behind at all, we must be losers all.

So many people have moved away from Buffalo. And in the moving, they must have faced the same thing that I do now - it simply isn't worth the money to take it all with you. Plus, you'd be bringing along your Buffalo style, or lack thereof. You'd be dragging along self doubts.

So here's the point. (There's always a point!) Ever since we all realized that there's something wrong with Kansas, thoughtful people have been trying to figure out what's up with politics that people believe and act on utterly unthoughtful certainties. Sarah Palinesque idiocies. Why???

The only cogent analysis I've come across is the one given by a well-known left coaster, George Lakoff, who divides the world of political predilection into those who value most the strict father vs. those who value a nurturing mother. And that simple distinction can explain - maybe it's the only thing that can explain - the bizarre lineup of political positions. Save the unborn but nuke Iran and death penalty to anyone who ought to be guilty but demonstrably might not be. Libertarian, but join the mob shouting down any liberal sentiments.

I don't know if anyone's remarked on this or not (that reading trouble I have) but surely it can't have escaped notice that the entire American experiment can be viewed as a giant filter to capture all the strict father types. We are people who have deserted our motherlands. We have quested for frontiers. We quake on the brink in California, well, except that there is one place further. Alaska!

Sarah Palin's Alaska (I am vaguely aware that there is a show by that name, and I even caught a part of it once, but it was so far fetched that I couldn't believe that anyone would or could take it as real). That's where the Mama Grizzlies are stricter than strict fathers. Or to paraphrase Jack Nicholson in some movie or other, a strict mother is just like a strict father, but take away the honor.

Subversive Shorts Bee Lineup, AKA "A"

With a start, I realized that I should have been up in Toronto where all the real subversion was happening last night. Too late. I've been preoccupied with family matters, and numb to the world stage. Our own Seattle right around the corner, where acting up can make a difference. But then I watched a burning police car via over-the-Internets video and it looked so Canadian. Almost as if they have no interest in fanning flames of provocation. According to Michael Moore, they don't even lock their doors. And the cops with batons were equipped with bicycles, of all the crazy stuff. They were probably dialed in to the subversives' Twitter accounts. No-one looked very guilty. Not even the police. We're such hosers down below.

Subversion gets no satisfaction these days, and there are still unaccountably scant audiences down at the Theatre. Which only means that there's more room for YOU. These shorts are good!

I can't quite agree that this "A" or "Artaud" lineup is better than the one I saw last week. These short one-act plays were certainly engaging, but sometimes veered in the direction of a Saturday Night Live skit, which was what I fell asleep to last night, literally. Well, it was a re-run, so it wasn't technically "live", but it was live once! (Eat meat, it's what's for dinner, though you should eat stuff which was alive and not in industrial feedlot simulating life, as I learned the other time from the "B" lineup) It could just be the venue which keeps the crowds at bay - I'm pretty sure that if you threw these shorts up on a television screen, or a YouTube say, audiences would howl. Buffalo-born has made the world stage before!

Real theatre (sic) is face to face in a way, although I think if the actors were to make eye contact of the sort real people do they could never quite do the incredible job they did here last night. These actors were *in* to their roles. What a pleasure!

To run them down - not like police do, but like reviewers do - there were middle schoolers acting like adults negotiating gender politics as on the world stage of trade negotiations to our North (I might have my scale and venue mixed up). There was a traffic control disembodied voice posing as a very masculine God. There was celebration of the quiet choices of the abused women of the world, stood in for by an offstage silent smiling nun of ones imagination. The sister act-ed by a gay woman celebrant of absent judgement toward dronish subservients in a patriarchal structure of abuse which hardly becomes the Universal Church of Men. There really were bees composing Genesis, with some gender role reversals. Well, all you have to do is to imagine queens and drones and this was funny honey. Sweet. A Boorish banker opening an American do-gooder NGO-sponsored eco-tourism mecca down in South Africa with ironic twists. I mean, talk about ironic! You don't even know.

I don't know if life imitates art, or if the other way around, and how come it all coheres if only in this one mind, but each play plays on the others and on reality, so-called, and there's microcosmic shift which might be enough. It always has been. Did you think the world could change its mind all at once?

I'm not kidding, this was good stuff. The first short was acted out by students at the Performing Arts High School Magnet (another Buffalo invention), which is surely harboring some talent. Some good teaching. Some almost unbelievable presence on stage. The monologue by the gay sister of the sweetly innocent nun was performed so convincingly that I felt as though she stood for everyman, liberated, constrained, uncertain, freed, holding back from judgement herself, though she had every right to toss firebombs. On the model of silent women the world over who need honoring, but not, you know, worshipping.

And really, you should see actors channeling bees looking down on us humans-without-awareness. Divided as we are from the continuum of life. Genesis. Exodus. Who knows how the world will change? One awakening at a time? Person to person? The bees really are telling us something about our mono-culture, I mean the real bees, the ones we depend on for our pollination and our lives, and, um, I think we can't live without them, no matter the buzz down in South Africa which drowns out the thoughts of superstars. We didn't project our dreams on that screen this time, did we?

Right before the show I installed a new battery to the supposedly irreparable iPod my daughter's cat accidentally showered. People camped out all night to get the latest of these false presentations of seamlessness, interfaces without any way in. Willing to overlook flaws at the cost of a fatted service contract, as though they never crash. I will not refrain from opening smooth exteriors, you know, certainly not because I've been mesmerized by Word or words or acting.

The place where I bought the iPod battery represents a mission to protect landfills from poison superannuated electronic gear by demonstrating how easy it is to repair. Yeah, I know I'm being greenwashed, but, well, still I'd rather watch live theatre than participate in staged protest, and the "genius bar" just tells you they don't fix these things. I'm no sucker for guys in robes representing some mysterium.

Who knows how the world will change? The only thing that we do know is that it will, because the math doesn't work out the way we're going. Why not start here? Why not now? As my friend and I were walking out there was a full red moon just above the treetops, over the low buildings of this supposedly dying city. Now I just found out that I'd missed it's eclipse. The moon's, I mean, not the city's - for that I've been fully present. These menstrual pulls cannot be gainsaid by my manly artifice. My head was turned, as was God's, on stage, by flesh. Hey, I'm human. I'm implicated. She was hot!

Finally, Buffalo Trued

Buffalo Lockjaw by Greg Ames


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Everybody in Buffalo wants to find a way to be ourselves in the world in a way to be noticed as something not quite dismiss-able, the way that Buffalo is. To do that, you have to find a theme - a big theme, that will sustain an entire novel, or a life, without once seeming clunky or contrived or making the whole text one extended metaphor in any way that you've heard it all already.

Yeah, who would want to go there? What is it we all avoid? Could that be where the humanity is? Could it? Can we look hard at the City of No Illusions and retain any illusions for ourselves?

People give up, you know, fall back, from dreams and accept life in its fullest mediocrity, take pride in that to the point of delusional boosterism, so? But why would you want to go there if given the chance to go somewhere else? Lots of creative types get born here, but they call it their beloved home. They don't stay. Visiting celebrities, filming, say, love it here. Why would they stay? Maybe aging football stars find a place where they can remain a celebrity for the rest of their lives.

From the inside, Buffalo seems a place of might-have-beens, if-onlies. Petty politics, advantaging local bigshots, trump vision every time and so we build our perpetual wanna-be flagship university out of town, wipe out our waterfront with highways and dead industrial tracts, and conspire to route traffic around our natural transportation hub. Hell, we even sell our hydro-power down the river, downstate.

So, it's in the person of a once-vital Mom, a noted expert in the care of elderly demented patients, who herself becomes a living shell of who she once was, that Buffalo can come alive, in words at least, as something larger than its life.

Something about each of our lives, no matter how accomplished, no matter how smug or self-satisfied must remain in the world's capitals of mediocrity. You will find yourself less than you could be and at the same time find the lock-jawed striving in the face of white-out blizzards determination to find in yourself and in your life something still better. Something to make light of. Something to brood about, and mostly long long lists of friends who care for you as you are.

This is not the fictional Buffalo. This is the real thing, real places named and authenticated. Real characters. I live here. I know them. I am them. If you want to be judged by your proximity to beauty, to power, to accomplishment, then this is not your place. But you are not those things, and if you are, you won't be for long.

If you realize, as did de Kooning in an essay which was for me, the central figure in this novel, "Content is a Glimpse;" if you realize that perfect beauty is always only glimpsed, perfect accomplishment, no matter that the glimpse may last an entire performance. I haven't read that essay, but it's title gives a glimpse, right? into its content.

In the end, that's all we are to each other, unless we make more of it than that. Unless we commit to stark beginnings and endings. Unless we understand that regret perpetuates the dissected stare, the bloodied guts-revealed loss of what might have been which is the city of Buffalo. Where only a glimpse is required for a father and son to bond, to conspire, to complete life.

Our natural disasters merit guffaws. No hurricanes, no oil to spew, just perpetual and powerful Falls. No Superbowl wins, ever, before they will inevitably move to another town more celebrated. More besieged by worse disasters. Ours are merely relentless. And of our very own making, if you'd like to have some excuse to pass us by.

But this novel makes of Buffalo what it truly is. A life. Worth living in and by and through. Stark. But not Carol-Oates stark. These are lives moving up, the way you feel when facing the Falls.

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Buffalo Bloodline

Although I'm not settled enough to be a subscriber, sometimes I think the Buffalo News is written exclusively for me. The other day, I saw a notice for the Boom Day ball drop. I rode my bicycle along the breakwater which goes under the Peace Bridge where I was pretty much the only one to watch the event. I'd expected at least a small crowd. What people had come were all dignitaries on the Fireboat, but I still felt the hosing was all for me!

WHAT A HOSER, EH?

Then yesterday, I decided to see how hard it would be to bike down to the Small Boat Harbor, since the News had indicated that one of its new draws is a bike path. Along the way, I found that I could ride up to the top of a parking ramp alongside Pilot field, and watch the ball game as though I'd bought a ticket. Whoops! Coca-Cola field. I find on Wikipedia that I've blown right by Dunn Tire Park. Well, anyhow, it's the home of the Triple-A Bisons. Whoops, I guess that's "International League." I'm so out of touch. Or do even names just go to the highest bidder now?

From my perch on the parking ramp, the stadium looked pretty empty. I had a blast zooming back down the levels, although it sure did look as though the beams were going to clip my head off. You can't ride your bicycle over the Skyway Bridge anymore, so if I wanted to get to the Small Boat Harbor, I was going to have to do the drawbridge thing. It made me a little nervous, since I'd bicycled down there the other day to the General Mills plant, where they make Cheerios, and the young guard told me "you can't be here" even though it looked like a public road. They must have worried I would be secretly counting rats or something.

I'm a little skittish about these things, like the other day when I pulled aside to let the siren by and then the cop figured I must be guilty of something so she followed me off to the side. You know, you try to do the right thing . . . like I eat Cheerios all the time for my high cholesterol. Why don't they want me hanging around?

So I ended up biking down this long and really lonely, and very wide thoroughfare, feeling like I'm in a Hitchcock movie, knowing all the while that this used to be bustling with factories and businesses of all sorts. The one newish and clean  looking plant had a realtor's sign on it, which can't be a good, um, sign. I checked on my handy smartphone, and sure enough the place had been closed down upon buyout. I guess this is more evidence of the efficiency of our capital markets.

Eventually, I did get down to the Small Boat Harbor. It's a Sunday, and the weather is fine (although thunder storms had been called for), but there isn't exactly a crowd there.

But there are people in Dug's Dive, and there is a bike path. It's still early. I'd learned from the News that the Harbor had been opened two weeks early because of our fine spring, and I guess the boats were still on their way in:

You know, it's actually a bit tricky to follow the designated bike paths around Buffalo. Some places have signs, and sometimes you can see the faded outline of the bike path on the roadway - washed down from the famously harsh winter - but then sometimes it just seems to end, and you find yourself on a road where no-one else seems to have ever thought of biking.

The same thing happened in reverse when I biked past the Small Boat Harbor. This time there was a brand new asphalt bike path, which still has yet to be completed and doesn't have it's painted striping yet. I followed it along, past the smoking fishermen - I think that might be a reason to escape to such places; you can smoke in public. Well, it would be public if anyone else were around.

I ended up at the old headquarters for the long since closed Bethlehem Steel Plant, which looked far worse up close than it does from the highway, although its grass was mown.  It is a beautiful structure, and I was struck again how much the old business edifices, striving for a kind of legitimacy, look the same as schools from the era, striving for the same.

I sat there for a while, chatting on my cellphone, feeling very much as though I was still in the Hitchcock film, in some nowhere crossroads, with some catastrophe impending. The building is right next to some offices for the water authority, which did seem to be populated on a Sunday. Since these are Homeland Security protected sites now, I wasn't sure about getting pulled over again. I remember once or twice in Taiwan, innocently taking a picture only to have some guard appear seemingly out of nowhere, becuase I'd managed to take a shot of some infrastruture installation. I think they were paranoid about having targets identified by mainlanders.

Well, that ship has sailed, but still it seemed as though I should keep moving. Heading back along the trail, I couldn't help wondering about the legislative process which created this path, apparently just for me. There was landscaping and new planting, and the bases for what promised to be some nice lighting, although such signs as there were all seemed to indicate "closed after dusk." Government decision-making can be so confusing sometimes.

ROAD TO SOMEWHERE?

See, there's Buffalo rising in the distance. I did notice, on my way out from the Boat Harbor, that there is another paved bike path which would take me down past the Tifft Nature preserve. I almost can't imagine that anyone else would ride this one, but there it was, just for me.

I decided to keep going, heading into South Buffalo. By now, I'd gotten familiar with the expectation that the bike path would end, but I was pretty sure that I could make my way back home along South Park Ave., and that it wouldn't be much longer than the way I'd come. Perhaps less desolate?

But there is a really long stretch of Fuhrman Boulevard where I did actually pass another biker, though he was walking his bike along with fishing gear and looked to be heading to where I was coming from. Another view from another bridge of another way in to Buffalo:

TRACKS WHICH USED TO GO SOMEWHERE?

Anyhow, along I went, catching the flag on the huge South Park high school through someone's back yard. This one doesn't look quite so stately as the Bethlehem Steel offices - it must have come along at some more modern period of efficient production. I used to supervise student teachers in this facility, and let me tell you, there is a kind of martial efficiency going on in there.

Well, further along was an older, more stately school, where the kids had a bit more freedom

Still, you can see the direction of things. Now, a lot of the schools I rode by are special "charter schools" where the thing to do seems to be to find a theme and move backward along the liberating assumption that all kids would benefit from general education, and maybe try to fit them sooner into whatever it is they're most fit for. The funny thing is that this just seems to leave the ordinary public schools whose purpose still is general education full of those kids who aren't fit for much. Anyhow, I'm sure glad I never had to decide about my fate that early. Otherwise, I'd be stuck in it right now, you know, having a clue about what I'd like to do for the rest of my life. 

Well, I have lots more pictures, and thousands upon thousands more words. I really wanted to paste up here the pictures from a recent canoe trip when I saw the other side of all these things from the perspective of the Buffalo River but paddling a canoe in the city is even stranger than riding a bicycle, and you'd probably get really really bored. Or maybe it's just me?

Anyhow, it's really really hard to see any sort of renaissance amid all this vacant space where things used to get made. I even saw the offices of the massive hydroponic tomato greenhouse complex which was being put up during one canoe trip, and magically disappeared before the next one. I should have been reading the Buffalo News every day, and then I would have known what the heck was going on, you know? The headquarters still looked pretty spiffy. Maybe they sold all that glass to Dubai or Abu Dabi or something. Like they need greenhouses in the desert. Oh.

Well, there it is. My city. It used to be a thriving place, just like I used to be a young man. You have to squint really hard to see a bright future. For the city, I mean. Obviously, I won't be getting any younger. You know, we're all doomed by our astrological accidents, like who we chose for parents, what the great roulette wheel in the sky had in store for us, whether we're on this side or that of some border or other.

These are all the accidents of birth. Sometimes they become the accidents of death and dying. Sometimes it's how you look at things. To tell you the truth, when I ride (or paddle) through Buffalo, I see lots of possibility. It's like a blank slate. We could try other things besides letting global capitalism put labor against the wall of too cheap to meter. We could take the oil out of most production processes and bring the work back home. We could make it really costly to commute out to the lawn-belt, and by mixing it up a little better, make it really safe to live in cities. Modern industrial production doesn't even need to be hazardous or exclusive of kids who might want to learn.

These are choices, which bloodlines are not. Or maybe we really don't care about what got us here anymore. Well, at least the cars did stop to let a few geese across the road. If you squint, you can see the chicks. Peeking out behind the old grain elevators are windmills. It's easier to see possibility in Spring, don't you think?

Springtime in Buffalo

It's been beautifully sunny and chilly for a few days. Just in time for warmer days now, I've finally figured out how to purge the air out and get heat back into my old VW. My timing isn't always perfect. But I'm getting ready to leave town, and with 300,000 miles on her, I want to be sure that air in the cooling system isn't a sign of something worse.

The dealer thought the heater core must be clogged, but I found out that the dealers all think that. All on my own - with help from Samaritans on the Internet - I discovered that if I purged the air I would get heat. I struggled for just a minute with mistrust for the VW shop. You know, where you nurse the assumption that they were just trying to sell me the expensive procedure to put in a new heater core.

In the end, I opted for open questions. After all, they're the ones who helped me get the car this far. And "advisors" on the Internet are as often people taking advantage (although I couldn't tell how in this case). Anyhow, I did find out that this is one among several notorious weak points in the VW design when I chatted with the guy who runs the shop today. They're going to do the power purge for me tomorrow morning, no charge! I'm happy.

All the other manufacturers are benefiting from Toyota's woes now. They built their cars to perfect Consumer Reports specs, but it turns out that there are other things which can go wrong when you over-engineer. Do we just enjoy the fall of the too big? Not too long ago, I ran into a friend who owns my identical VW, and he considers his a lemon. He would never get another one!

I guess I overlook the weak points and find myself pleased with the overall package. I like VW's emphasis on sound basic materials engineering. Lots of little stuff might go wrong, and even cause a catastrophe with the big stuff, but if you keep it from going that far, the car is built to last forever. That just wasn't true of a Toyota I once owned.

But, to each her own. I know my car has a Nazi pedigree, but I don't root for anyone's downfall, no matter what their difference from me.

Everyone seems to know who they hate these days. I was lucky enough to watch the Sabres beat the Bruins at the Arena in their second-to-last game of the season. It was a thrill which spilled out onto the street beyond the last-minute rule-challenging glove-flying exclamation point fight on the ice. The thrill was marred only slightly by "let's go Buffalo" horn tooting drivers who yelled "where's a Bruins fan to run over?" out their windows. Hey, it's all in sport.

Before that, I'd tried to make a clever point when New Orleans won the Super Bowl, about how only sudden disasters get sympathy from the crowd. Although New Orleans, and the nation, had prepared for Katrina by neglect over many many years, the actual event defined our generosity as a nation. Just as it contributed to bringing down a presidency. Just as Haiti's earthquake brought out the best in us, even though we couldn't be bothered for so many years while the ramshackle disaster waiting to happen got put together.

I used the analogy of the frog in the slowly heating kettle. He likes the hot-tub, and by the time he realizes it's getting way too hot, his energy is sapped and he's cooked. Despite the wooden carvings I walk by each day on Elmwood, left over from our great October tree-smashing snow storm, Buffalo's emergencies are all slow motion. Nothing to bring out the best in the crowd of people making fun of us.

But still, the other day, riding my bicycle back from watching the big orange ball drop off the Peace Bridge (along with maybe half a dozen others) at the start of Boom Day festivities, I rode past that home-makeover house on Massachusetts Ave. There's a sign out front which looks like a for sale sign. I was slightly outraged until I realized it was just the builder exercising bragging rights. There was something to cheer for, wasn't it, even from the rest of the country. Extreme home makeover, Buffalo edition.

Boom Day, chicken wings, wide right, we make lemonade from the lemons handed us. But we have water and power and infrastructure and beautiful surroundings and are the very setting for the whole "if you build it they will come" idea. Nice thoughts while leaving town in search of a job.

Another Day in the Life of a Techie

Each day there is a new letter in my mailbox from the health insurance company. It is part of our cultural birthright to detest bills in the mail, but bills are predictable and very clearly dependent on our own actions. They are our responsibility to pay, no matter how much we might dream about their getting lost. These insurance company notices are different.

And, as a technophile, each day I marvel at the cool new stuff out there to capture my lust to buy things. As a cheapskate, I've found that I can earn compound interest regarding technology purchases by following my most basic rule of economic survival: don't ever buy anything (or repair anything on your car) until you absolutely must, or until not spending the money will cost more than spending it. This avoids the regret of sunken costs, such as might be incurred by purchasing a satellite radio before you discover Pandora on your smartphone. Or getting a really good deal before the better one comes out. Especially, it avoids closets full of now obsolete gadgets which seemed really useful in their day.

Think ever cheaper memory and storage costs, and ever changing standards for how to present stuff. You don't really need it. You just want it. And looking is as good as it will ever get. Trust me.

But it's always fun to look and imagine the things you could do if money were no object. It's almost unbelievable now how many wires I have coming out from my tiny new laptop, just to take advantage of all the legacy stuff I hate to throw away. An old CRT, a keyboard I once liked, the scanner my daughter got for free with her MacBook, but didn't have room for in her dorm room, the KVM switch will allows me to share files for backup purposes by seamlessly navigating to an ancient computer which still works and therefore won't grace a landfill yet. I could keep going on, but you probably get the idea.

The trouble is that as a techie, I actually do spend more time trying to understand the gizmo in its context than I do deploying it for its supposed purpose. I have no use for the stuff beyond writing here, but I am fascinated by it! Take my new smartphone, for instance. There is a whole slew of stuff it simply doesn't do so well as the broken one it replaced. Some of this can be traced to new ways for the various companies involved in the transaction to make money where maybe they used to be looking for market advantage by giving away some bundled cool processes for free.

Some of this is because the new stuff was pushed out the door too fast, just to keep up with something Apple will always be able to do better. And some of it is because no company seems to employ thoughtful users like me, who are always more interested to examine all the ins and outs and logic trees. I spend more time optimizing my usage than using my devices. And, to tell the truth, I could not possibly care less about most of the stuff they seem to gear these devices toward; games and amusements and social engagement tools.

I'm a reader and a thinker and a seeker after good information, who would, however, really appreciate new and clever ways to do it better. Just like any fool embedded in our cultural certainties, I remain both surprised and disappointed when new isn't better. It's almost always better in whatever category forced the newness. The screen size, for instance, or its resolution. But it's almost always not better under the covers, ho ho.

The assumption always is that the very best person for a particular job is the one who's been hired to do it, right? Our economy rewards skill and competence. Well, or maybe it just rewards boldness and self-promotion, since I sure would never let something with my name on it go out the door with as many flaws as much new technology contains. I would never sacrifice my reputation for a few more bucks on the near side. Any good company should know this.

But I suspect that the economy generally works rather more like the economics of the health insurance industry than not. Some people would like to think that its perverse economics of screw the customer is some sort of anomaly. But it's not. Bold self promotion to take advantage of people's gullibility generally makes a lot of money.

Each time I find a new envelope from my health insurance company, I feel something more like terror than the common  dread of yet another bill. Reliably, each new envelope contains a new denial of coverage. In addition to the "contracted" amount which they have found some technical reason to deny, there is the amount I will have to pay without their bargaining power to lower it. This is terrorism, plain and simple. And still somehow I am made to feel as though this might be my responsibility for not having mastered their arcane rules as well as they have. Like I'm supposed to know ahead of time what will be paid, despite what my doctor tells me I need.

The IRS might come back at me for having done my taxes wrong, and I will be liable for the charges plus a fine. The cellphone company might ding me for usage when I cross borders which are in the sky and not clearly marked on the land. I might not have closely read some fine print I clicked off on, and be found responsible for theft of intellectual property when I do some technical manipulations to lend a friend an electronic copy of a song or a book or a film or whatever. Even though Amazon helpfully offers to lend me a hand reselling old hard-copies of stuff I buy new cheaper on my Kindle, but can never resell. Yes, new is indeed better. Newly descended responsibility and fault.

As you can see, I'm having a hard time understanding how to write, or what I'm doing up here anymore. I used to think I had something important to say, but, of course, it's more the quality of how you say it that counts, and just like when I sing Cohen's Hallelujah over and over again with my guitar, it's never going to sound very good, even if I were able to memorize it. I just don't have it in me.

But, you know, everyone needs a gimmick, right? I heard about this guy who wrote a book called the Year of  Living Biblically, or something like that. I hear he's not a great writer, but he has some kind of genuine faith now, plus a readership. And then there's Julia and Julia, and people have always done stuff like rowing boats across the Atlantic. It never works, like going into the wild, there's just nothing there to be found that can't be found inside yourself if only you know how to look.

So, I'm performing these almost daily calculations in my head about the cost to transport stuff out West where the job prospects are better. I'm pretty employable. I have quite well refined Microsoftie skills. I "get" technology and can make it work really well. Plus I'm incredibly good with security, if anybody's willing to listen (which they're usually not). I have a background as a Chinese teacher, and understand just a bit more about Chinese tradition that most Chinese do, simply because I know that culture in a comparative sense, and that's the only way really to know anything. Knowledge is dialogic, no matter what claptrap anybody tries to sell you about there being only "one truth" (I actually heard that the other day), or even only one reality.

It's all metaphorical, and there's no kind of root understanding except for the body, and these days my body isn't all that reliable either. Among my calculations is the danger to attempt existence without health insurance. It's going to run out in a few months anyhow, likely before we get sensible new regulation, since a year is almost up since I quit my last job. (quitting isn't accounted for among the "socialist" help packages on offer) I have a couple of critical medical specialist appointments in the summer just before it runs out; one for the heart, one for the lungs. But it's hard to imagine that these will actually mean anything significant for my health. The cost of them would be terrorizing without the insurance, but it's not so fun either to live in terror of your own body's possible betrayal in the first place.

Then there's the car. Already with 300,000 miles on it, it would seem a bit silly to pay to have a trailer hitch installed just to tow a trailer across the country because it's that much cheaper than to rent a truck (and pull the car on a trailer for its preservation). I don't even need a car here in Buffalo, where everything I need is within a walk. And the insurance (that insurance again!) costs a bundle. Using the car to cross the country with a trailer would surely be the end of it.

Just yesterday, I finally "disposed of" my old wooden sailboat. Both it and I have grown too old together. Her engine is beyond saving, and the cost now to own such a plaything - like the cost to pay for your own healthcare - has grown grotesque. Even were I to live aboard as I once did, the cost for the dock would exceed the cost to rent and heat a nice apartment. Not to mention hauling and painting and repairing. A boat requires a bit more critical care than a house.

Of course, I'd long since betrayed the old girl. Leaving her high and dry for seven long years while I indulged my hermetic desire to do nothing other than read, watch movies and fulfill my obligations as a good Dad. Last night late, my older daughter crowed to me that she had gotten her new laptop, and that it was totally outside of my recommendations or, apparently, even my awareness of the existence of this particular gem.

Anyone who knows me is familiar with how painful it is to ask me for a recommendation on a technology purchase. "It's all a question of money and desire, and these things I can't help you with." But I can offer pretty good orientation among the terms if you have that first part sorted out. Only Dads can know how happy it makes me to see my daughter do that much better than I could have done with or for her. (No, I'm not telling what she got - it's not relevant here!)

You know, I loved sailing when I did it every chance I could get. Down in the hold of that old boat, I achieved a kind of epiphany which has stayed with me ever since. But I lack the skill - utterly - to sing it out in any way that you will be able to stand.

So, this morning, still quite frozen from my drive last night from Canandagua, where I was invited to join as family for dinner among good friends there after having dropped off the last of the boat parts from my apartment's basement storage, I watched a movie I'd picked up according to my usual random methods. (It's easy to know what to avoid, but sometimes it's hard to know what to watch in a positive sense). Nói it's called. A bleak and frigid-to-watch film about isolation, made in Iceland, from the perspective of disaffected youth. A perspective I've never left, if you want to know the obvious truth.

My car's heater core is clogged just like the arteries (veins?) in my lungs. The cost to repair it far exceeds the value of the car. I am led to believe that I could not do it myself, although there isn't much I haven't done with cars. But having spent a few weeks recently in Seattle squirming under really old cars in the cold (I still have an occult splinter in my thumb to "show" for it, peeled from the soft metal of the car's underbelly, while muscling loose her bearings), and my body protests at the thought of any more car wrestling.

So, here's my gimmick. I have a date to transport my younger daughter back from the Big Apple at the beginning of May. She has earned an academic scholarship to a much more suitable college than the one which placed her on Manhattan, where she thought she wanted to be. As you can see, I'm bursting with pride about both of my daughters, and feel fairly confident of having discharged my responsibilities as well as can be expected (you know, given human shortcomings, the dangers out there, and all that).

Sure, they're sad to see the boat go, but as with me when Mom gave away my beagle while I was at summer camp, they also know that they never properly loved the boat. Mom thinks this harmed me somehow, and she feels guilty, but it didn't and she needn't, although it seems to be in her genes to feel guilty, so I'm glad to oblige the need. I don't want my daughters to feel guilty that they never really wanted to sail all that much. Just happy for me that I don't have that absurd lust any more. That the boat has a good new home with a fine woodworker (although it was just a bit disconcerting to find a newly cut-apart old and clearly rotten sailboat just off to the side of the spot my boat now occupies).

I'm hoping they're happy that Dad is free!

Anyhow, the car should still be worth a few bucks. And the apartment would be perfectly comfortable for anyone - say a newly divorced guy - who needs a fully equipped and non-fussy place to live on short notice. Apart from my books, there's nothing here I have a very hard time disposing of, except for the financial calculations. And these have moved into the realm of the same strangeness which makes people still love cars when "public transport" costs a small fraction of the cost to drive. My math is not nearly sophisticated enough to undertand how keeping my old stuff might make financial sense.

So, I think I'll just simply take off on foot. I have a miniature laptop and a permanent connection over the cellular grid for phone and  for voice and for internet and for texting. Shoes are pretty cheap, and I have a brand new pair. (I wonder how many miles a pair of shoes gets? Stay tuned and I'll find out!). I learned on my recent trip out West that I can live pretty indefinitely with what fits into the overhead bin on an airplane, and I never even touched half of what I'd packed, including an extra pair of shoes! Plus the weather is getting nice.

A hat, a small backpack, enough money to keep in contact and to buy a bed most nights. For my body, it's at least as good a cure as all the expensive testing they propose for it. Even buying prepared food and staying in motels with hot water and battery-charging electricity should cost a lot less than to transport all my stuff. (I never did understand the sense of driving a Winnebago when the cost to own it so far exceeds the cost to stay at the finest hotels).

Sure, flying would be the cheapest way, but I'm back to that employability thing again. I've recently discovered that nobody talks to anybody on airplanes anymore. I guess we're all afraid of one another, maybe checking each other out to see if someone's harboring a bomb or something. I figure, walking I would have a much better chance of learning stuff than by flying.

Sure, I did this once already on a motorcycle, after trying it on a bicycle (which was just nuts with all the truck traffic and hooting from cars. You make too good a target on two wheels). It wasn't the fault of the conveyance that I didn't make a whole lot of human contact from my motorcycle. It was my own damned hermetic predilection. It became more of a silent geography tour, indulging my almost incredible rapture with aloneness. It was like sailing alone in a squall. My very favorite pastime. So, I figure, walking, I'll have a better chance to be taken out of myself.

I think I have just enough money to make it West while still meeting all of my obligations. Plus, it would make a really good gimmick to get people to be interested in what I write about.

Someone will surely die along my way. It might be me, or I might have to take a few plane rides, but these can be fitted into the budget. It's not like I'll be heading out into the wild, though friends and family will likely call me crazy. I've been called that and worse before, and I've earned it! I might as well do what I'm good at.

Well, it's an idea. We'll see how close I come to pulling it off. Meanwhile, I have a script to prepare for reading at an Earth Spirit "conference" I plan to attend. I'll post it up here in case you're interested.

'Later

Eve Ensler's Necessary Targets at Subversive Theatre

Some days I do things which are plainly absurd. Today I bicycled down to the Niagara River to watch the kickoff event of "Boom Days." Boom Days are some sort of new Buffalo identity exercise, relating to the strange fact that each spring there comes a day when the "ice boom" is removed from the head end of the Niagara River.

The boom is placed to keep ice from clogging water intakes for power production from the drop down the same escarpment which provides the famous Falls. Enough water flows down this river to shrink our puny aspirations to the scale of that big red ball they dropped off the Peace Bridge.

There are mixed feelings about the overall beneficence of this boom, and so this is a kind of making lemonade when life hands you lemons thing. You can see the family resemblance to Buffalo wings. You can see the reachy punning. As if we were about to soar. As if these are boom times for Buffalo. As if our falling were only symbolic; yet another Blizzard Ball, in red, follow it down and drink and be merry.

I'd thought I would be joining some sort of crowd, but instead I found myself practically solo on the scene. A beautiful day, and I had the pedestrian-friendly breakwater which divides the river from the canal almost to myself.

I'd first scouted out the riverfront and determined that there wouldn't be any observers from the Olmstead Park, nor from the Frank Lloyd Wright boathouse at the Rowing Club. I'd pretty much decided that the whole thing was another mixup on my part until I saw the big red  Edward M. Cotter fireboat coming down the canal alongside the River. Then sure enough, there was the big red ball ready to be tipped over the edge. A lot of fuss just for me, don't you think?

That's about how absurd the situation was, presented by Eve Ensler's play, Necessary Targets staged at Subversive Theatre this month. American professionals credentialed and documented  in traumatic stress disorders get sent to Bosnia after the genocide, as if they could help. You don't realize until the moment the characters do how surprisingly absurd this premise is. As absurd as a ball drop event which nobody attends. You want to help. You want to participate, and you find yourself alone and unequipped.

A prominent and well published therapist is honored to be selected by the President. A younger counterpart is glad to find a way to escape her personal horrors, which we learn are ever present in the flashback of sleep when she stays home. The women they meet in Bosnia have lived through things so utterly unthinkable from the perspective of an upscale psychology practice Stateside - or even from that of  the shattered lives that practice helps - that it seems absurd to imagine that there could be any human contact across the divide. Suddenly absurd. These well-meaning travelers both find themselves over their heads. As if in a rapids heading for a falls.

Even the horrors of warfare can't compare to the horrors of atrocities committed by people just like us. Who can imagine neighbors gone wild with machetes and rape? In warfare, all the players are geared up for atrocity. The civilians learn quickly to expect it. But neighbors to neighbors right in front of our eyes, and even one's own children kill or get killed in the moments of mindlessness. Right upon entry, the lead practitioner, played with supreme confidence by Jane Cudmore, projects a contained version of the same sort of panic a wild animal must feel when corralled for the first time. It is not accouuntalbe that this troupe of actors has as little experience as the playbill says they do. There are other facts of life leaking into these performances.

I am not a well-educated theater-goer by any estimate, but I've seen a fair amount. I have never been taken so near my edge of comfort as I was by this production. I've been among the audience back in the gonzo days of street theater in SoHo before it was SoHo. The East Village before it was domesticated. But the raw emotions released on this stage made me realize why I could never do what these actors do. The strain to remain just this side of the edge of utter discomposure would be far more than I could take. I would need complete revitalizing sessions between each scene. I would need vacations.

Which can only stand in as metaphor for what was being portrayed. Women who were without place and without comfort and who could not come close to depending even on each other any longer, though each other was all they had. Because each of them was already beyond her edge of holding things together. Each of them was utterly beyond any limit for containing her once and former personality. Psychological talk of how good boundaries lead to good health dissolved like a face in tears once the "therapeutic" talking actually got started.

Yes, how utterly absurd to think that the world could possibly want or appreciate help from us, who are so preoccupied with some sort of politically correct decency of behavior and thought and process and education. Except that these Bosnian women were in need of someone to care for them as they had become; smelly ethnic symbols of pitiable lives. Still alive, still people, still trying to distinguish themselves from what their people had descended into for reasons unaccountable to us who strain in seeming raw anger against people who disagree with us politically. For whom "baby killer" is a reachy metaphor compared to what went on in actuality "over there."

"Baby killer" relates with the same abstract and purely metaphorical remove to the horror of rape as presented here. It has become an abstract problem of sexual continence, boy scout morality; something to be counselled away from by soothing priestly mannish voices. It's well known that Ensler doesn't shy away from the challenges to humanity of our sexuality. It is this which is ever front and center both for the deadened women, and by extreme remove at the core of the psychological practice which empowers the visitors from civilization to this ravaged wasteland. As if repression could contain this much feeling.

I would like - reallly I would - to find some way to participate in the life of this city of mine. I would love something which is less absurd than to patronize from some perspective of expertise or elite education. But the city seems sewn up from above. Expertise is already owned by an elite with closed ranks. Take a swan dive out into the rapids, or fly away to more welcoming places.

I suppose I can only bear witness. On the way back from the ball drop, I passed by that famous house rebuilt by the television inspired crew. Of course, there was a for sale sign. Who, when presented the chance, wouldn't want out from that particular neighborhood when handed the chance? No, wait, I think I'm too quick to jump the gun. This was just a sign from the builder who took the lead in the rebuilding, right? Someone used to building upscale mini-mansions for the better educated, lighter colored denizens of our suburbs. It was hard for me to imagine living there, among the blighted, blasted out remnants of our city before its descent.

As Eve Ensler stated in her presentation of this staged work, the real warfare is what comes afterward, among the women and not among the men. The part we saw on TV was the staged reality. The lived reality doesn't play well. The women are forgotten and, well, there are only a few psychologists brave or famous enough to stay beyond the established protocols of love.

We are our own necessary targets. This is how the visitors to Bosnia finally understood themselves. The tortured and tormented women needed someone to pummel and to hurt who would, however, remain beyond the beatings. Who would strain to understand that these acts of violence came from somewhere beside themselves. From the displacement which exist in each of us between our lust and our humanity.

Sometimes domestic tranquility spills over. Sometimes tears are inevitable. And sometimes they power change which is good. I had to leave as soon as the applause ended, since I could hardly trust myself to say the right thing or to behave properly in front of people who had exposed so much. But you should see this play. Follow the bouncing ball. It ends happily. It floats. The discovery of how stark our privileged lives really are is the only thing which can instigate real change. And no Sarah, YOU keep the change. Honest, I've got more than enough. I can spare it.