The One That Got Away

So this morning on the way in to Buffalo, I stopped at this ridiculously popular five and dime - even still so called. I wanted some birthday baubles for my daughter who will become an adult (!!) tomorrow.  There was the owner, namesake of the store, gamely cashing people out. He must be several generations on. The floors are still oiled wood, which creaks and slopes and smells right.

This is also the town where another five and dime family got its start, long since moved on to more imperial wealth I think. One son was a classmate of mine in college - I met him once and was too put off by the class divide to act other than an idiot. It would have been different if he weren't from my hometown, having his name all over it.

Of course this store reminded me today of that visit on my motorcycle to WalMart's home town, and a similar old man there who charmed me with his old-timer's wit. These days most shoppers visit old time stores with ironical intent, or to entertain the kids. And the store well knows its niche, stocking old-style shelves with toys we baby boomers might have played with as kids when to grandmother's house we went, plus all the goofy stuff you might buy on a whim when you see it. That's why I was there.

I had already found a Sponge-Bob lunchbox, when I went to check out a birthday card. A quick repartee ensued about taking my lunch to work, the economy, who knows where we're going, then sudden agreement that of course we all know where we're going (down the drain). But then all talking has to stop, because you're not quite sure that you'll agree about the causes. The elderly clerk offered "greed". 

I could readily agree with that and countered about the size of the void some people have to fill, and how it might be approximately the size of the growing bailout (well, I think that might be tautology, right there).

And we chatted about how stores should go back to what they used to be - grocery stores selling groceries, and drug stores selling drugs, and clothing stores on the corner with what you really need (she'd gone to four stores before finding a simple raincoat - it's thaw time hereabouts). 

Talk inevitably turned to Walmart, but both of us instantly knew a hot topic when we hit one. This small town is unique for having successfully turned them away. But she talked up the place, and was proud that she goes there all the time. It's the only place she finds things. And of course, it's cheap. (I might have looked like one of those metro types who used her old town as a suburb, but she stayed friendly enough)

The irony of it all was right on the counter between us, so we smiled broadly at each other, and laughed to turn some heads. I was so happy, the postman greeted me as we passed each other on the sidewalk! (They must train them around these still cobbled streets to recall some better days - "Hello Sir!" he said. Sir??) Well, I took it, as they say, in good stride.

I'd had in mind all the drive here (it's a good two hours) a theme I wanted to tackle now. It seems that over most of my adult life, often while driving, I have these brilliant thoughts for a novel, say, or an angle to something I've been trying to figure out how to say. I take copious mental notes, often having considered buying some recording device, so that I can take thoughts down without crashing. 

Some times I can hold the idea for a few days. Never do I have the time or energy to write. And then it disappears. So you, gentle reader, will never have the opportunity to read the one that got away, though, I'm serious now, it was really awesome! I'm talking freaking brilliant!

(well, I tried once and got quickly shot down by a schoomarmish friend, who noticed things lacking in my writing which you too will likely find)

Today, though, I had in mind this equation - and it must have conditioned my chat - between the mysterious black hole in the financial economy and the gap I've written about between the cost of, say, a Nike shoe and its actual labor content. I don't know enough to be a Marxist, so I'm not claiming that the labor content is all that should count, but I still do think it's fair to claim that the gap consists of want. It's what get called, perversely, "good will" on the books of larger companies when they get valued so much more than their capital equipment and inventory. 

I guess it's what General Motors lacks right now, and can even go negative to where the company magically is valued less than even the firesale value of its equipment and inventory. (Don't you just wish some Silicon Valley whiz would buy it all up and start making smart cars and trains? We retooled fast enough during the real war. Why not during one of these metaphorical wars we keep having???)

Brand value. Logo meaning. I think it's what this old time store clerk meant by greed. It's what gets collected to make some people grotesquely rich. The beauty factor in a movie star? The steroidal prowess of an athlete. But also the shared meaning of "refresh" when you're drinking Pepsi (or is it Coke?). 

She meant of course the shysters, still politically incorrectly so called. The ones on Wall Street and in the banks who simply cannot get enough. Whose hearts are cold and broadcloth fine. But why not all the rest? I guess there's valid wealth and then there's greed. But how come no-one makes the WalMart connection?

She pointed out how well WalMart's doing in this crashing stock market, as have I. I started the line about "yeah, like a cancer which is about to die from killing off its host . . . " but she wasn't following, thank goodness. 

I'm pretty sure we can all agree that it's "goodwill" which up and vanished. And then beyond, even durable goods no longer have any certain value. Not even counting the stuff from China which never did have any.

I'm not sure what the route can be back to some better ecology. Where jobs pay livings and goods are made, cleanly, nearby. I do remember the local hardware store of my youth, still somehow hanging on, where I could bicycle to get everything I ever needed for my projects. Those clerks had families, and wives who stayed at home, and knew us all by name.

Well, OK, I do know the route, but I don't quite know for sure how to get enough people moving in that direction. This right here might be the best that I can do.

Now on the way in to the store, while parking, I was listening to Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, who seem almost always to get me to crack a smile and laugh, which is tough to do when I'm all alone. They were talking with some charming girl named "Leah", who'd escaped back to Seattle from college down East. This girl was youthfully full of all the proper stereotypes about uptight Easterners, where everything has to be done just so, as it has been for hundreds of years.

I guess she meant the traditions at Mt. Holyoke, the college she'd escaped. But to call anything in these United States full set might seem just a bit silly to someone from almost anywhere else in the world. Still the Left Coast is laid back and open, and willing to experiment. Click and Clack were the perfect shills for her ravings, happy to make fun of themselves right along with the fruitcakes out West.

I think she missed the Puritan connection, and Congregational propriety. It's not old age makes us this way, so much as early upbringing.

I've been thinking of moving to Seattle after my daughter's graduation. Everyone I know in Buffalo, it seems, works for his father, and has a pretty beer-oriented sense of what's new and possible. A newage silicon valley type scheme back here gets hit pretty quickly with a lot of cold water.  There's rapid fire recitation of why it can't work - it's finding myself doing it that makes me want to get away.

Though I do guess that Seattle, like everywhere else, is just chock full of refugees from here. That all that's laid back and open is just so much failure to launch at home, and a refusal to grow up. (Sour grapes have never tasted so sweet)

But still and all Buffalo has this perfect setting. There's water and plenty of power from the Falls. We're the continent's natural transportation hub, and once had the world's largest railroad switchyard, just after the Canal opened the West. Until the fateful Interstates got built, and the St. Lawrence Seaway bypassed our fine port.  Now there are only a few left of those unique cement grain elevators, which once crowded the harbor. Dad and I canoed through them down the Buffalo River a while back. Like a table set in the house of a dead person, they look as though they were in use only yesterday, though it was so much longer ago than that.

Buffalo too is the one that got away, and, like perhaps every Buffalonian, I've puzzled about what to do with the regret. That the University got built in a flatland swamp, instead of becoming the vitalizer of downtown. That the highway got built right into town, dividing color and class and neighborhood, seemingly forever. That political gridlock seems to guarantee only mediocre eyesores get funded. That backward looking bluebloods lock up all innovation.

But hey, I think I've found it! I'm writing now, at age oh-my-God, and it doesn't seem too late to start. When sprawl retracts, as it surely must, our infrastructure is all ready. There's power, and for trains, still, a natural transit hub. There's wind and water, and all four seasons, and an arts community that will not die.

OK, I still may move to Seattle. I need some people to encourage me too. But I may not. This town has got some promise!

Skillful or not, this writing provides some outlet now for whatever'd been pent up. I think that defined some dullness. Some depression. Some schoolmarmish scolding not to try that. I doubt I'll be able to bring the West back East, but I'd say don't count us out quite yet. After all, we're more grown up than you (though way more politically ingrown). 

Aw, throw the bums out. Let's roll out a barrell and change the system. I don't think there will be a better chance.

Bob is Dead, Long Live Bob!

I'm scheduled to take a road trip to visit my daughter in college, and she wants me to leave the 22 year old VW with her so she can road trip back after graduation. Not having any way to refuse this reasonable but very father-tweaking request (very technically, it might be called her car, though in name only, not Title!), I was therefore somewhat bemused today as I was hurrying out the door to find that Bob is dead.

Bob's my daughter's name for the car, some annoying way she developed of signaling her unwillingness to answer my fatherly questions. I think it had something to do with Bob Dylan, and other things that Daddy's think their daughters ought to know about. I guess it became the (non)answer to everything, and finally the obvious name for the car.

So this morning, for whatever reason, I looked a little further into the question of why the seat latch wouldn't release so that I could place my laptop case behind it. The seat was loose I noticed, and then a peek underneath while wiggling revealed that the entire floor was falling out. 

So when I made my daily random hour-ish long commute out along the East North East-ish spoke of my backroads mandala, I had to notice a new sense to the motion of my seat; kind of rocking toward breakthrough, as the car bounds along. And it does bound, its springs are squat and the road now frost heave potted.

It makes for a kind of excitement! And sadness too, as I've been wondering when this one hoss shay might return to dust, sure hoping for one heap, and all at once (dream on)!

Well, I'll continue to drive it, and happily, as I wonder the same about my crisis-point body. Only last night switching to salad and bread, out of some anxiousness to get my thoughts down first before the feeding. I am at that certain age where floorpan rots and pipes clog and all the rest.

Though I did think that I'd better check the obits for old Bobby Dylan, who's rockin' still for so far as I know. I heard him live not long ago, among whirling dervish Dead Heads, who baffled me then as much as blogging does now.

I went rollicking past a sign this morning, late for a meeting stuck behind school buses, about "Stoney Lonesome" Vineyards and Winery.  That's another name my daughter came up with, making fun of where I live. We found an old car impossibly deep in the woods, ingrown with trees which seemed they must have been there when the car was driven in and abandoned. This was no model T, but of a vintage for that old man we saw pedalling slowly along the hills when I first moved here. He might even have been that old friend of Dad, whom I never did meet before he passed away, though he lived within a walk. 

We called him Stoney Lonesome, and considered the old red car to have been his. After the name of a road near here, which was in turn after a name for the pokey (Pokey Moonshine being another road).

Gaol, jail, goal, death, resurrection and release. These are themes I drive among, along and through, whistling that it feels like spring! (I got lucky the other day on my blog)

Ha! I'm back . . .

I'll bet you didn't think I would be! (well, I had plenty of doubts myself) There were so many veiled and naked references to death and suicide and lives unfinished and thoughts too. I almost stayed home, except that the danger of losing my mind there just about equalled the danger of the highway (although it sure did seem that the drivers were aggressive, and boxing me in all over the place). Then there was that strange way I have learned to pray. Abusing Names rather than to recite them in awe. 

Well, as I've said before, I think that BIG ONE, that Banger in the sky, has to get me at least better than I get myself. And, I mean well. And to abuse a Name is so much more mild than to abuse some one in some Name.

I know I've got it all backwards here, but I am turning a corner of sorts. I stayed up late last night, which effectively avoided that wine with which I both kill off the utter exhaustion of the killer day and lubricate mass quantities of food I prepare to my precise gustatory lustings. It is a rush and race against my limits, of hunger pangs and dull frustration and plain exhaustion, among feeding the cats (which have been condemned to hell outdoors, but seem actually to thrive there) and fish, and then the dishes and I'm out.

But last night, when I started this, I had to labor mightily to prevent this post from becoming book length - be forwarned, I haven't yet succeeded - which leaves me very very little time this morning. I also did realize, this morning, that I've run out of underwear and socks again, and I have a great supply which only seeming yesterday I did wash!

The shocker was that my own true prayer got answered, in its way. My niece, who has developed stunning strength in so many ways, has developed power in words as well. And I guess, on the basis of her strong written telling, the prosecutor was able to lay out the case which might put her father in jail for 40 years. So, he's going to jail on lucky Friday 13, pleading guilty rather than to go to trial against his stronger child. And sparing my niece the stand.  There's grace in that, not his.

This I was not prepared for. Far better than corrupted indulgences from that other Church, this is what Coyote wants who speaks the truth because he can't help it. No mediated authority to calculate the dole of proper pleasure allowed here on earth. Proper suffering in the next. I felt much joy in the news, which had nothing to do with revenge; since I'd forgiven him long since. He's suffered boundaryless his entire life. Dylexic. Pimped out at age 5. Scorned as stupid, which he's not. I'll work now to accept my sister back, and hope there can be some awakening for her.

She felt such tenderness toward his suffering. Such Marian obligation to take on his hurt which manifested only as bombast and all manner of abuse and over certianty, like Limbaugh, say, or Bush, Cheney Rumsfeld and the rest, though they are saints in comparison, and only harm, well, just all of us. 

What terrible lack of feminine competency did his presence fill?  Does theirs? That is a mystery too deep for me. But I do know that it must be the reciprocal of not instantly believing her daughter at her very simple word, and banishing him therefore from her heart forever on that spot. This I cannot believe.

You know, as I drive all hyper vigilant - mostly because I'd left my house such a mess and this bloggy thought unfinished, and like dirty underwear on the way to the hospital, these aren't the clues you want anyone to focus on if you don't come back - I have to confess that it's the young women who seem always to be the aggressive ones. They seem to have no sense of stopping distance, and what might happen when something surprises the one in front of them.

I wonder if this is just a matter of practice, and not having transgressed enough in boyish youthful sprees to understand where the adrenalin should kick in. Or maybe there's less adrenalin in the first place, or maybe it has to do with why women tend more to bake and measure and men to guess and taste.  The gay among us know how to clean their house and underwear, and maybe measure perfect martinis. Are women just focused through the car, not on it? God, as Man, must feel different to a woman. So, I will and always must suspend judgement.

I'm trying not to generalize in too obnoxious a way, but it isn't always obvious to me who's the hunter and who the hunted; who the aggressor and who full of reticent propriety, comparing man to woman. Or which gender tends more romantic, which lofts higher to fall harder, which plays more all in. I just don't know. But I do know in all my many million miles of driving, the men might flip you off, but they know exactly what they're doing, while I sense these women drivers just have no real sense of where the bounds are. Not all women drivers. I'm not that old. Just these ones who endanger my life.

While making a stereotype, I'm trying to say that stereotypes don't hold. For sure, I don't want to go way back to where hysteria as mental illness was thought to be a feminine weakness. I know these women can drive. I just don't sense they get the machinery, quite, and its limitations. And they seem always to be good looking, the ones who are so aggressive.

OK, so that must be it. A sense of power, granted by our social ecosystem, of catching what you want. And withering the rest? I'll stick on that for a moment.

My sister must have some nun-like need to abnegate herself. Some shrouded subservience, and her daughter therefore is something of her very self that she fears to nurture. I wish I could simply ask her. I doubt I can ever understand what lives inside any nun, though I can imagine it as remedy to insanity of the sort which lurks in me. A sublimation of all missing boundaries toward one sweet bliss which must be all in all. I don't have such a hard time with that. I'd be a monk, if only I could believe. My daughter's roommate, mirabile dictu, plans to become a nun against all protestations from her friends. I'll ask her.

So, here we are in this economic meltdown, where the positive result I hope for gets contradicted by big elephants in the room. I hope for the end of corporations too big to fail, which get trapped in the logic of marketing Hummers when clearly it's way too late for that to be other than insane. Because they have no other way to fat profits in the near term.

Most run by men, and who knows whether Carly and Hillary were fired for being women. Or not? Why did so many people assume Meg Whitman when Sarah Palin is what was meant? There's wrenching struggle going on right there, and so I'll have to pray for a woman on top for just a while longer. I think the role is no longer defined, even as man's role plays itself out.

I hope for some end to competition which drives toward the bottom instead of at some victory top. I'm sick to death of dreary sameness, just as when as a youth I took my first motorcycle trip out of town, and off the highways discovered Miracle Miles that all looked just the same city after city, town after town. Ticky tacky on steroids. (I somehow have always managed to preserve shocked innocence where more normal folk have long become inured or enamored) I think I might have been among the first in my neighborhood to taste MacDonalds, and I liked it as much as the rest. But somehow I learned to avoid it first as well. I've back slid.

I look for smaller corporate interests, where workers can relate to the company mission more directly. I look for something other than the Wall Street fed logo kitchens which first destroy all local flavor, and then themselves go out of business, as Wall street money chases after some newer fad. I'm sick of markets cornered, and customers addicted, who, like so many zoned out junkies, keep eating poison fast food even after it costs as much or more than the well prepared stuff down at the local diner.

Or is it that we still begrudge the tip? I tell my boss I'm done, I quit, I've struggled for a year now - it's just about that anniversary - to master good boundaries because my health demands it.  He knows the tale - I lost my very mind, and by God I'm wired right now and I'll lose it in your face if you don't get a clue, terrorist of soul that I've become.

I think there's plenty of room left in that Gap (somewhere I read that it means the gap in crotch for hippy women, signal there for men, from jeans) between labor inputs and price (these logo kitchens have and need no skill in the kitchen, and still they go out of business???!!! With lines out the door and around the block!!??  What's the return on investment that they demand, and who's black hole are we filling? Newspapers used to demand profits of fifty percent . . .). 

I think there's room for local flavor, Jesus Christ almighty. But we mistrust our neighbor, as that Nazi hearted Jew, who might be asking for too much take; whose cashbox makes us narratively jealous. I think there's room for a race to the top (you should try chicken wings in Buffalo, where you have to make them good or not at all. Or bread in France, where the price is set, and so the competition is all about the quality) I think our neighbors cheat us less every time than do those great abstractions, some living in mansions we watch on TV, some in the sky, some in our heart of trust.

The biggest elephant in the room now is Walmart, that predatory pox upon the land, whose capital is all available for cash flow losses, for so long as there is local business to put out of it. Like any parasite, it requires good fat to feed on. And yet their stock keeps going up, while every other one continues down toward a bottom not yet plumbed.

Is there any hope to be found in this inexorable logic?  When all that's left is margin squeezed out trash for sale along acres and acres of self-service shelves way out even beyond sprawl to avoid the taxes, and whose parking lots look like Black Friday every day? The desperate served by the desperate in the desolate wasteland acres of asphalt. To discover sameness at the lowest cost. Value approximately nil, though calculate in the wasted businesses and lives down below in China, and the outsourced cost of welfare and oil for transport of shoppers and goods and you have to wonder why we are so happy still to carry all these externalities upon our backs. As though cost could be whittled so low without cost. 

It's loss of trust in neighbors who might smell (Zizek again there) which drives this crazy logic. It's pasting ourselves to this view from our wombs, and never stepping out of doors, evermore to talk. Ah, but the womb has quickened, and the view become, mildly, interactive.  Surely someone has to put a stop to this. Charge for news! And net-neuter the bloggers. Before it gets too late.

I see this moment of Walmart's overbloated triumph rather as the death knell of a cancer with no more healthy cells to devour, just like the medieval structure of the Church will not outlive its indulgences. There is no buying time from hell by obedience, when what is wanted is true spirit in the face of what's staring you down here and now. There is no keeping free when your own subjected victim can rise up and accuse you in stronger language than you ever could bluster from your pulpit (oh yes, he was a preacher). There is no sin more serious than to abandon your daughter for or to any man god. This is not moral rocket science. But there is and must be forgiveness everywhere. No sin without redemption. It's the coin is wrong is all.

And no matter how outsized your Hummer, there is death in aggressive driving. Neither can your beauty convince me of your truth.

OK, so I've got to close off this Walmart connection. It's actually true that once, toward the lower half of a long and wayward trek across our continent by motorcycle, I landed in what looked to be the quaint small village of, was it, Bentonville Arkansas? I swear to you, I had no idea of where I was, or what was Walmart, which had not quite made it to my part of the rust belt by then. I parked along the village green, as I recall, and was attracted to "Sam Walton's
Five and Dime" or something like it, which looked all cute and homespun. Inside was a very gracious and homey handsome old gentleman, perfectly eager to chat even with someone dressed all black in  leather.

I remember being disoriented and confused by what seemed a small museum and collection of memorabilia and signed handshake photos from presidents. I got a sense of Amway, and something amiss. Something Texas oilman predatory. But the old gentleman - I think he must have been dressed in cowboy plaid - in any case, he had the feel of a checkered tablecloth  - was very knowledgeable and kind.

I rode dazed out of town toward the Western sunset, and was dumbfounded that this little village was dwarfed by warehouses and trucks which seemed to fill a horizon beyond earth's curve. So that's the thing we're being sold. Some "honest value" with a down home face. And out the back a warehouse all computer sorted for maximum efficiency. Where whittling wood might fit in like a shy one at some orgy, but you're meant to feel that it could.

OK, look, I can't write nearly so well in the evening. The day has already worn me out by now. This race for value, is all I'm saying, is a serpent eating its tail. There is no winning there, but that someone else gobbled whole. There is no fair transaction that leaves the labor of its terms out in the cold. There is only a black hole in the end, where value once was thought to be.  This should be drop dead obvious by now, but clearly isn't yet.

We thought we could make our houses grow, but that their value got inflated by the overheated air on which they bloated on and up in scale. We thought we could keep up with the treadmill, if only we could make price keep balance on a scale with stuff once made by hands. 

I don't know what I'm trying to say about women, except that its not always the men who are guilty. Yes, by very definition we are. Except in China where abominable snowmen get raped by woman (you can tell I'm too pooped to google the references anymore, but that headline is out there), that's something you can't do. But we're all getting screwed by your trade in common bargains, ladies. Your mistrust of the men who would take advantage, when it isn't swooning self abandon or worse, has reached the same extreme as men's rapacity. 

It's all about the boundaries.

A very funny comic I caught on the way to the news made some nasty comment about Islamic terrorists, who would never be that way if their women weren't so subjugated. "Oh no you're not" they'd hear on the way out to take on the world. There's truth there to what balance is missing. 

And I want to say that whether covered head to toe in black, or stark naked all over the internet, the message is the same and drop dead obvious. That men are helpless in that power. That boundaries broken need fixing with extreme care. That absolute cover, like any absolute truth in word or attempted deed, can only distort the actions of a man to fanatical absurdity in reaching out to make some sublimated conquest. That what's very most cheap about us - our naked form - should not be traded so cheaply that it's nothing personal at all. Nor covered up as if we didn't know.

I'm tired.

The Bounds of (in)Sanity and Degrees of Freedom

I have to leave early for work tomorrow, so I'll try for a few digs tonight. The mind raves on, without any real notion of what I'm working on for now. Driving back from getting some groceries for tonight, I was pondering my state of sanity. After checking the quirky backwoods video store - which I used to swear has absolutely every film ever pressed - for Buckaroo Bonzai, which it seems I will have to join Netflix for - I was stuck on boundaries and reading and other hangovers from this morning. Probably a good thing I didn't end up lost in some goofy film no one else, apparently, wants to watch.

I'd tried out my diatribe about how school de-educates the lower half of the population, and where I trivialized the teaching of reading - an observation I stand by firm. But of course, it takes a lifetime really to learn to read, and I'm still very much the beginner myself.  On the radio was an interview with a guy who wrote a piece for the New Yorker, I think, about David Foster Wallace. Unfinished work, unfinished life, cut short by suicide.

This mind so much greater than my own, though I'll bet less lonely. I aspire to such a state of "read" (state of being, past tense), and can only dream of writing so gracefully strong. The process of learning to read is very much like all internalized boundary making. It starts out simple and effortless, because all the boundaries are clear at first. Then you have to build out catalogs which true those words again and over again. Each word reaches back across time and makes new sense alongside new others. Each brilliant new mind orders them again, and makes new sense again, anew, aloft, away and anon.

And now we have this dizzy blogosphere, where millions or is it billions of us monkeys keyboard away. There has to be a kind of longing for the days at the start, when the puzzle was so simple, and each word could resonate across all time and space. "The Way which can be followed is not the constant Way (the word which can be uttered is not the eternal Word), The name which can be catalogued is not the Proper Name . . . "

Transgressions are how we learn. Illegal crossings where sense is lost, and sometimes - often - we must return to the very source of sense. Thank God there is much forgiveness, though even the mild oversteppings have filled my soul with guilt. It's what makes my writing so stilted and uptight. (It's what keeps me tight in my cocoon for just a while longer) 

We have, again thank The Word, formality among us so that border crossings can be better marked, and dictionaries for the passage. Yet most of the time, I bite a word and it feels solid until I play it back in my mind or someone gently reminds me, at the end of a speech, that obfustication is not in the dictionary. (Hell, it should be, that's a funny word right there).

Well fuck you Jesus, sang coyote and skulked away. I think the time has come when words can make more sense than we can handle. I try on wigs and disguises and different postures, but in the end my coy pose to be anonymous is as ridiculous as that redundant signature at the corner of a painting. If it could be someone else's it likely is, though forgery's an art as well. (The Hoax was a great and underappreciated film). I guess forgery lacks only soul, just as words, too, have lost their zing and awe.

I know, I break the Law, but hell it must be done. These words have no sting to them. And if they're crossing bounds of sanity, so what? Where's the harm? I test my limits inwardly, more often than you do I'll just bet. I try for that moment when my narrative hoists me beyond all sense and reason, and I start living in it. When mind levitates and sense gets lost. 

It lands you in the hospital, hearing Mercy Flight helicopters and imagining them to be Marine One, prototyped apparently just down the road, because your warning shout was heeded seriously all the way to the top. And they're coming to debrief you, and give assurances that they already know who's out to get Obama.

In hospitals lurk serious bugs, which eat into your flesh. Our ecology there is all wrong, as every effort to cleanse back the germs, incomplete as it necessarily must be, gives advantage to the more stalwart mission obsessed genes. (Their mission, please note, has nothing of purpose to it - it's our environment gave it to them. Our artificial ecosystem made them so.) The more firepower that we bring to bear, the deeper into our bodies those germs can creep, until we resemble returning vets, whose lives will attest forevermore the power of good up armor.

So, I aim to keep away from hospitals, and stay this side of sense. It isn't always easy, since it is my mission to plumb the limits of these words. To take them back as far as I can be led, or at least to renew them in their original sense for myself that there is some actual mission to my purpose.

Unlike most of my former students, I have no Latin. No Greek. No very fluid Chinese (hah, gotcha on that one). I am no prodigy with words for sure, and I do know my reach far far exceeds my grasp. It simply is not a talent that I have, any more than I can go beyond ace(I'll give myself that one) troubleshooting with computer networks, since the fundamental designs are so very far beyond me. I guess, like a hunter in the woods, or hunted, I have good sense for the signs that count, and can internalize my path. But mostly, I know full well that it's luck which kept me alive, and not my own kung fu polish. There's God in that right there, since I sure do know the limits of my discipline.

Sad to say, I'll have to leave this thought incomplete, since it's time to dodge more bullets on the highways.

Last year's man

 oooh, very very oooh. Mmmm. Not sure.

I just now for the first time reached out to the blogosphere and touched someone. Scary business, this. Very scary. I was very me, as in saying something so opaque that it could be rejected without implication. But then I wanted to know. I needed to know. I was suddenly really afraid that I'd crossed some line I didn't understand. That I'd get blocked and yuched. (The topic of the blog I came across, really quite excellent, was to relate sex to blogging. Very insightful and funny. And I learned this trick about titles for my links)

So this blogger got me, which is so way cool. As in I'm the shy one at some orgy. EEEEEeeee. cringe. Bolting for the door here. I still can't work up the courage to "friend" that person I still can't quite remember from highschool. It was so damn long ago . . . 

Back to work!

The Fish Lives on (and I expect a new salary offer any minute)

I know you were wondering about the fish. It's great to be wrong for a little while longer. It's a minor thing, but it's such a downer when you have to use that little net they urge you to buy along with your "starter kit." And flushing down the toilet somehow just ain't right.

Meanwhile, no action at work, since I guess the various implications if not shock waves have to be plotted out. So, I'm in my familiar limbo. Public face and private knowlege.

Last time, I was heading a closing school but still had to carry on with public enthusiasm and fundraising and hiring and even recruiting. Because part of the board wouldn't give up while the other part with the deep pockets were working out the school's orderly dissolution. I was on the responsible side, but it cost me my appendix and several times nearly my life for a huge variety of reasons. For sure, the scars run much deeper than the one on my abdomen. I just ain't been right since then.

The appendix part is actually pretty funny, in a grim sort of way. I was living across the border from Buffalo in my parents' Canadian summer house, having just left home myself again. Leaving home was about the second time in my adult life that I full out cried. The first time was when my daughter whom I was now abandoning was born two months prematurely.  There is always laughter and pain at border crossings, I'm sure. Especially when they're forced.

I'd come home from a pep meeting with the alumni portion of the board. As I recall, there was some threat to the meeting, that I'd better not scuttle their efforts, and even more still carry on as chief cheerleader in charge. I know I did truly want, with all my heart, for the school to succeed, and had even developed a pretty elaborate business plan to make it possible. 

I worked very hard to fund that plan, but treachery must have been the name of the spot I occupied. I know that I acted earnestly and in good faith with all aspects of proper governance and reporting. But I was living on some variation of adrenalin, and holding in all feeling. And the lead funder of the plan pulled out the bottom card. I'd failed the confidence game, at least in part I feel, because I was familiar with the foundation director. Knowing me, I wouldn't quite trust me either.

That night I developed a pain in my gut, which grew in crescendo volume until I thought my body had become a siren in its pain and could get no higher but somehow still did. In retrospect, it was idiotic to draw a bath, but I needed some exit from the pain. Finally, very late at night or maybe early the next morning, sopping wet in final panic from the tub, I made my way crablike out to my little bouncy pickup truck. 

I had to endure what seemed a full half hour's grilling at the border crossing, since by all appearances I was putting on an act and must be up to something no good. The dramatics were intense for sure, and I still don't begrudge the fellow at Customs his disbelief. I would often run in to another had-been headmaster colleague who'd taken a Customs job for relief at that border crossing, and could easily see myself there too. I was grateful when he finally suspended his disbelief, and let me through, to speed in desperation through the slushy streets so thankfully barren.

And  after being parked in the hallway of that hospital for what seemed interminable hours, amid ambiguous signs of what was going on in my guts due likely to confessions of liquor, they opened me up, and I hear my appendix burst like a rotten tomato in the doctor's hand post harvest. (he was more skilled than the one who delivered my daughter, and who left her Mom chopped up).

It was Christmas Eve, and the papers were full of the anchorage boathouse where I'd kept my non-yacht, being sent up in flames by the mentally disturbed son of the abused chief boatwright. That man was smart! But not much educated. I'd befriended him as best I could across that clubby class divide, just simply because my boat was crude, ugly, and not very properly preppy looking. I had no proper sense of color with the paint either. 

He always regarded me with the same fundamental suspicion he did all the prigs at the club's myriad helms. Many of them with portraits along the admiralty wall, back eons almost to the days when this manly yacht club got its start as camping destination for canoe-craze outings across the lake before the Peace Bridge ever got built.

The ceremonial and maybe original canoe went up in the flames, as I recall. The boatyard chief had just been fired himself, and there must have been some sense of outraged justice to the torching. I remember watching this craggy and mostly toothless man build my own boat's cradle, most by eye, from huge timbers now rotten and gone, but then perfectly matched and tuned to the task at hand. He thrilled to do it. I marvelled at the result.

His pricing reflected the budget he kept for his operation, and so far as I could tell never his own profit above what meager salary they paid. But I'm sure he ran afoul the admiralty, who'd somehow transmogrified from whisky bonfires on the beach to prigs who'd lost their sense of humor.  I shouldn't say, since I never knew any, and soon withdrew from the club in a kind of shame.

Though, and here's a strange true fact, my Dad and I did grace the cover of the Buffalo News Magazine one time for paddling down the river in our canoe. So, I guess there is return. (We were nowhere near the Falls, though they are always in your mind when paddling down that river). I head for the Falls again now, for sure.

This story is so hackneyed old, I can't even remember if I've ever written it or only told it umpteen times. And then there was that evening in the dim Demerol darkened light of my hospital room when I signed my final separation, and completed another border crossing to divide my life.

So now, still obsessing, I look forward only to these two three hours with you each morning. Or working out my book. It's what gets me out of bed, interrupted by my coffee induced morning regularity annoyingly, but there are worse ways to be stirred out of bed.  Shortly, I will have to start the increasingly grindy work day, and I'll  miss you until my return later on.

Meanwhile, the thought I'd meant to work out was this:  that I remain convinced of two twinned facts: (how many colons does it take to evacuate a thought?) The first: that offshoring of manufacturing is NOT primarily a race to the bottom for wages. Of course, there are many features of these decisions, including cheap shipping, cheap real-estate, inviting tax arrangements, lax environmental regulation, all along with cheap wages. Each of these alone is enough to constrain the hand of any decider, whose responsibility is to the bottom line, and to his stockholders.

Skirting the irony of the stock market crashing for just a moment longer, the fact I truly know is that the system which is global capitalism also wants docile labor, which gets defined by proximate fear of starvation.  That's always been a bottom line of the capitalist system, and it's bosses and beneficiaries have always been able to rationalize it away. Even while the university types struggle to connect the dots which allow the system to be blamed for creating the very misery its jobs, ostensibly, set out to resolve.

Parenthetically, I think connecting those dots convincingly might be as likely as cold fusion or winning an argument with my work colleague. He cheats in ways I cannot detect, nor master, and finally wins by wearing me out from the effort only to pay attention. I apologize that I do the same to you, dear and gentle reader.

The second fact I know full well is that our education system - the system now - is designed primarily to sort and categorize - as efficiently and perhaps as permanently as possible - its charges into those same alphas and betas which IQ testing was originally, and very militarily, deployed for.

The IQ test is the point of contention, always, both in the school I ran for "gifted" children, and in the community of educators more generally, since clearly "all children are gifted" (though not in the same ways, he whispered).  But it's more the gentle machinery of control and feedback which it seems impossible to grow beyond.  By suppressing the score, you don't make the score go away, and every child automatically and all the time knows it anyhow. It's what children do.

Now I've studied this stuff a little bit, but I don't want to claim any academic anything here, since I'm out to make an actual difference, which never felt very easy from inside those academy walls. That disconnect is quite matured, most clearly in the field of education, where what gets read and studied in the field has (or used to) almost no carryover to what gets read and studied in the ivory tower. The audiences and inspirational speakers just don't cross each other.

I'm pretty sure that I hate to my very guts that young D.C. Asian superintendent, but I might be wrong. I do know that the more purely competitive education of the Asian masses, where they don't worry so much about student/teacher ratios, does us better by some measures. And this young superintendent might be kicking ass in just the right way, though I doubt it. I have yet to hear an educator, outside the academy, who doesn't want better of the same. It's the metaphor that's wrong, I think.

We still take the lead for incubation of entrepreneurial talent. Bill Clinton's famous top fifty percent. I'm pretty sure I incubated some my very self. Some might even have gone on to use the Chinese I started them on. I haven't kept up.

But to the extent that the economy becomes frantic that we need a better educated workforce, my little jaded brain cries out, "yeah yeah."  Let's get accountability for those outcomes. Let's measure our students performances better. Let's computerize the classroom. Let's better instrumentalize the entire process. Isn't it computers we want to make of minds?

NOT.

Computers will never think, hello! And brainy kids don't often make any creative genius cut. Schools used to be cheap because they had no administration. And kids controlled each other, maybe, so the teacher didn't have to.  Our schools now lag in their structure from the industrial age, now so fully outsourced (drive sometime along the dreary Monongahela in a thunder storm at night, having done it a first few short decades ago when the superstructures were all lit up!!)

This is what gets heatedly debated in the academy, where the facts are all full known. Even as they must prepare practitioners. (another funny factoid: I ran into my former student teaching supervision supervisor tuning in to The Corporation, the other day.  Along with the business manager of yet another private school, who'd long retired from his post, and left from the film before I could say hello. There must be something in the air).

There are no good metaphors for school. It should be messy, involve lots of travel, foreign languages, and preserve good boundaries between teacher and student. School, for liberation, should be a root metaphor itself, not likened to anything else, nor trued by any comparisons.

That's what's become impossible anymore. But two things are in our favor now. The first is that there is broad general recognition that investments in education might make the best long term stimulus.  Except for those robot Republicans who don't have any other recording to play when you pull their strings, most people think that the government should do more and better than just to feed the gaping black hole maw of the financial economy (that pairing of terms just cracks me up!)

I don't necessarily want the ivy-logoed technocrats to stop doing that, mind you, because I'm not nearly smart enough to understand what they do and why. I only know that whatever glimmering Demerol (no, I don't do drugs. It's just a metaphor) hope for retirement I might have been nursing has now fully evaporated away. (I hear that health and retirement benefits were incentives from a time when wages were controlled for the commonweal - what a concept.  That standardization should stimulate creativity. Regulation by any other name, a different colleague brilliantly points out)

But for sure, we don't want all those college age kids clogging up the employment markets, especially as devalued and uneducated and interchangeable hands.  Such creatures are commodity exports from most of the world already, despite our border fences.

Just as we don't want too many unemployed declaring bankruptcy when their appendixes burst, I think the ultimate fact of socialized medicine (let's call it "standardized" for fun) and free public higher education stares us in the face.  Let's get on with it.  It's not just real-estate values that have collapsed. It's the whole shooting match.

But meanwhile, we should clear a space again for that school I ran into the ground, because it was far too messy, and like me, too far ahead of its time (my Chinese evaporates too). It cost near nothing to operate, though income versus outgo never could be matched. I guess the same might be said of any institution which had so little administration. (ho ho ho, let's say of any institution which asked so much of the guy who also rang the bell, as they say in China about heads of small schools). On both scores.

Kids need to be put alongside other kids who stir them is all. Among teachers who inspire and respect them as fully human (beleive me, that last is not so common in schools). Reading writing and rithmatic need almost never be taught, since kids pick up these things on their own if they aren't disabled from it by schooling.  

You have to work really hard to prevent a child from learning to read, expect perhaps at a school for the dyslexic, but that's another story for another time (I can't afford to laugh that hard right now).  You have to present arithmetic in the most abstract disabling recipe style confusing fashion to prevent kids from learning what a bunch of manipulative tiles can help them figure out almost on their own. You have to almost invent computers to prevent children from doing things with pen and paper.

We're damn good at what we do, sadly.

I went to school alongside kids who were a lot more like that boatyard man than they were like me. They knew lots of stuff I'll never learn nor understand. Can't we liberate them as well from dreary sessions at the back of classrooms hot roddishly talking about their AK-47s, likely to impress the student teacher's supervisor, while the actual supervising teacher was about to be led off for sexual abuse, result of a clever sting run by some pissed off cagey girls?  True story, that one.

I don't see why kids can't mix and match and still compete at their own level. There are many different fields of competition.

But we'll get the world and the economy we want. I'm still very excited by the ways in which we can smart our various grids in an information economy. But I really really don't want to live in anything even slightly resembling the dreary housing which its architects do build. I am no inhabitant of any warren, nor does my thinking even vaguely resemble something computable.

And I got my education not just in kindergarten, but by running one.  That Yale dipoloma's just for show (for Mom).

Oh, damn, drink up please, it's time. 

Post Mortem - hastily composed

I'll bet you thought I'd put it off, didn't you? So did I. 

But I've run my course, and scary though it is, I've decided to jump out of this life boat into the water. Others don't swim so well, or don't have so much blubber to keep them warm and afloat. I hope it's the right thing to do. It's official. I'm moving on.

This morning, I must say that I'm finding Tom Friedman quite inspiring, to my surprise. I told a colleague that the thing I don't like about him is that he's so corporate in his thinking. He accepts all the givens of capitalism, that it somehow releases creativity rather than constrains it, and today I hit upon the thing which most annoys me.

You know, dear reader, my thoughts on corporations. Webs of disaccountability at the center of which there is no heart. But I'm extreme, and willing to accept some compromise along the way to an all natural Utopia (I hope you've also noticed my take on Utopian final solutions). I'm not looking for heaven here on earth (that's a reachy metaphor, as Robert Browning did know). Just something short of workers against the wall.

I may even be willing to accept that some corporations can turn that corner, around to where workers share in wealth. And I do get very excited reading Friedman's recitation about how a "smart grid" could work - especially the part about how concentrated electrical generating capacity can be so much more efficient than distributed, but that distributed storage in the form of car batteries plugged smartly into the grid could make more sense than to centralize that reserve capacity.

I have a simple analogy in mind:  When I moved into the first house I owned (well, my name was on the title), as I was rehabbing it I discovered to my shock that the electric panel was dangerously miswired. As I learned, there are two distinct styles for breaker boxes; one whose phases alternate sides down the middle, I guess to make pairings of breakers side by side. And the other whose phases pair the breakers opposite one another. The clue is the heavy metal bus down the middle.  One is wavy, the other flat.

But the main point is that a neutral wire can be shared across phases, since its load will never exceed the differential between opposite phases, and oftentimes will be nil. In my house, some dizzy electrician (and I still have nightmares that it might have been me who fixed it backwards, but I did study and study and test) wired things all backwards, and effectively doubled the load on neutral wires. Since the neutral wires aren't even measured for overloads by circuit breakers, this was a fire hazard for certain.

If you follow that example, there is a built in thrill to smartening the electrical grid: First, an awful lot of the energy loss in the provision of electrical power is in transmission. Well, by definition, all of it. Heat given off is energy lost. But a distributed grid need not carry full power very much of the time - it need only carry the differential between near ends.  So if there is well thought out distribution of power sources, then the grid carries mostly a signal for balancing off the distribution. Cool! (literally).

Next, by charging transportation machinery at night, we can level supply across the hours between day and quiet night. Nighttime charging would use excess capacity required for daytime loads, and so no capital outlays would be required to build out infrastructure for this extra load. Cooler still.

You will have noticed a built in contradiction here.  If generation is centralized and storage distributed, then the differential still exists. So there is incentive to move people inward, to cluster in cities. But that was already obvious. And so the cars can be replaced by mass transit and everybody's happier still.

I think the principle can hold true, especially since there are some forms of generation which can very efficiently be decentralized, including windmills, solar panels and some more. Right now, gasoline or other liquid fuel powered engines for transportation or electrical generation are far far too inefficient, argues Friedman. Way too much heat gets given off for every motive watt. There is far less loss of energy along the process from fuel to electricity. 

Especially when efficiencies get enforced by government in what I would insist be called the commons. This grid.

So yesterday getting my hair cut, the barber right on cue starts railing about everything Obama, but in a kind of code, since he has some sense that I might be a Libral (said as epithet). I'm very very gentle in my responses, especially since he's holding the sharp things. Still I feel a snaggy cut now and then, and sense some butchering when I even gently disagree. About capital gains, say, where I urge that there be some level predictability in place of political see-sawing. Or regarding mortgage meltdown, where sometimes people do act responsibly and the rug gets pulled out from under. 

But in the end his position was resolved to a chant: "It all comes down to the individual" said over and over and over again. I have little enough hair that any butchering doesn't really show. I think what he meant - well, clearly what he meant was that individuals must work and save and make good choices and that they shouldn't be calling out for general "help" when their leaky boat starts sinking.

Fair enough as far as it goes (except for the letting people drown part). But how about the guy who bought the car which was most economical then and now can't afford to drive it? Or the near retiree who lost it all to fraud? Well, I'm not sure I have time right now to rehearse all the good examples, but for sure I agree with Friedman that there are some things government has to do if we are to release inventive creativity (I think that's a redundancy right there).

The thing I want to turn back from, however, is Friedman's claim that fear of sudden death, at the corporate level, is what spurs this creativity. As do all good capitalists, he likes to use the example of the lion and the gazelle. Both have the same imperative for every day: to outrun the other or die.  The question then is how best to resolve some corporate fear to worker enthusiasm. How often does the ecological equation get reversed to where corporate enthusiasm devolves to worker panic?

I protest. Insert exuberant joy in running as that thing which conscious humans do, perhaps in bodily rehearsal of adrenalin charged life and death matches, and you might be moving closer to some truth. Fear of death is what's gotten us here, in only the sense that we willingly ignored it. To cross the oceans or populate the West or still to fly in space. Please.

This death match must be at the heart of evolution; it's what weeds out the less than fit. But in relation to some crowd that cares; some population among which mating is possible.

If corporations ever do manage to capture enthusiasms more than fear of death, which by report is what good IT firms still do (another of Friedman's examples) then perhaps there's chance for heart? I'm not sure. I think it depends very much what they propose to make for us, and if the want gets manufactured too.

We move our dirt and misery offshore , and this is what must stop. We pop out goods which are not that - good - and make of things like health care - which are good - the same sort of market object which can create perverse incentives when priced to ignore ecologies. It's balance of need and want which is so out of whack right now. And definition of the commons.

So, my individual choice is to follow my enthusiasm, no longer in that dronish work which once I found so exciting. I'll hand that off, responsibly I hope, and then turn to more heady pursuits. 

I think there is no better time than when in the midst of disaster. That's the only time when the choices become clear. When the fear equation overcomes the grinding necessity to be prudent and responsible. I protest, with as much throat as I can muster anymore, every admonition that what I and you must do right now is sacrifice our souls to keep our jobs. As I thank Bush for giving us Obama, so thank you recession for getting me off my ass. The frontier is not in the direction we once thought.

Meanwhile, let's work to prevent any and all corporations from becoming ever again too large to die. Let's be sure their megalomaniacal enthusiasms never again do  translate into workers' misery. 

I do wonder if that's what's happening to the Church. This fear of death, so ironic now that Christ is here among us, not as a literal Man, but in awakened spirit which of necessity the Church as corporation must resist. It means its death. I for one, mourn not.

I'm scared to death. Ah ain't life grand now. Ain't it?