Breath In, Breath Out; It is not as Simple as we Would Want it to Be.

“One of the disadvantages of school and learning, he thought dreamily, was that the mind seemed to have the tendency to see and represent all things as though they were flat and had only two dimensions. This, somehow, seemed to render all matters of intellect shallow and worthless...”
― Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund

 

Intellectual pursuit need not be dry and sleep inducing.  Just because rigor and logic are applied to the matters of the world, to the matters of life, does not mean that we cannot just simply experience things that bring joy and delight.  We are capable of duality.  When we see sunlight falling through the trees in a park onto a grassy clearing, we can joyfully experience it as a green space of solitude and warmth.  We can purely see a place to set out a blanket on the ground and to open a picnic basket.

 

We don’t have to see a question of why the trees were located there and whether their roots give off chemicals to prevents other trees from growing between them.  We don’t have to speculate of the genus and species of the grass and why it flourishes in this copse of trees.  We don’t have to think about the carbon/oxygen transition ratio that the trees engage in and whether they in a day take care of our carbon footprint.  Some days are days for analysis and some days are just for sitting down with cold fried chicken on an old blanket. Some days are just for drinking a glass of wine.

 

In my life I have known people who analyze everything including how you say hello to them.  You remember the old stand up bit don’t you where in call and response fashion the comedian says, “Good morning, eh?”.  He then adopts another voice and says, “What do you mean by that?” Sometimes such people just seem lost in an internal chess game that will not end until they die.

 

On the other hand, I have known people who smoked pot, drank beer and slept around until their bodies gave out.  These were good people, nice people but people for whom the phrase, “The road goes on forever, and the party never ends,” was a mantra. These lives were lived in just a shallow and meaningless manner as that of those who over intellectualize.

 

Life requires balance sometimes one must do the hard-cold math.  Other times one must accept and simply be without opinion or judgment. Book learning is fine and gives us the tools to live in organized society, a group of people fighting for higher achievement and freedom from the vagaries of nature’s randomness. But simply being in place in the world is required too.  The issue will always remain how to balance both.  Extremes either way can create a shallow and hollow place of being.

Protest with a New Spirit

Early morning yesterday my wife quietly asked if I was going to the march against gun violence. She was planning for travel and wanted to know if I was going to work because she would have to work me in to her route to the protest. 

I usually work about 3-4 hours every Saturday.  I depend on my Saturday time as a catch-up zone for work that got shunted to the side in the day to day struggle to keep up. To protest or to work, the decision did not come all at once. While contemplating what to do I thought about the kids who were behind the demonstration and their motivations.  Sitting with my coffee in hand I remembered what it meant to me to walk out of school on moratorium day as part of a nationwide protest the Vietnam war. Being part of civil action for a just cause back in the late 1960s motivated me to stay active in political issues the rest of my life.  I decided to go.

Personally, I know a thing or two about gun violence.  While I have never been shot I have had a gun pulled on me during a robbery.  I also tried to intervene when my father grabbed his shotgun to confront some of my friends over a long simmering dispute when I was in my teens.  In the former case the situation was based on just pure evil being amplified by access to a deadly weapon.  In the latter case a man I view as good just lost it and the gun amped up his power level versus 15 or 20 young turks.  I am happy my father didn’t shoot anyone.  I am happy I did not get shot.  But twice in my life the power of a gun has impacted me.  As a result, I don’t keep guns in my home.

When we got to the demonstration the crowd was solid in size but not overwhelming.  The voices that spoke were for the most part on the mark with what I believe.  Nobody was calling for an outright ban on ownership of guns. Shotguns and limited ammunition capacity rifles for sportspeople don’t bother me.  Hunting deer and other game is not an issue for me.  Keeping predators off a farm, again no big deal.  However unfettered access assault weapons and hand guns is a whole different kettle of fish. I clapped, I chanted, and I listened.  Gun waiting periods, background checks on each gun sale and limitation of access to weapons whose primary purpose is wounding or killing other people make sense to me.

In my state the person who put together the gathering of over a thousand people at the state capitol on a cold March Saturday morning was 14 years old.  While I stood there loads of teens walked by me.  Lots of young college students were there.  I would guess the crowd was a least 50% young.  Those of us who protested Vietnam, we are fading from the scene now.  Damn it is good to know that there is a younger generation who has the spark to act burning within it.

Facts Not TaTas

If only we could collectively winnow out the noise in our stream of daily data. If only we could clear out the nonsense and clutter from the material, we see and hear each day. Why should the thoughts and musings of the has-beens, never-really made its, and famous because they’re famous, have a prime position in our stream of information, the so-called “news”?

 

Just because an actor once played a doctor in a movie doesn’t provide the performer valid credentials to discuss the treatment of cardiac failure. Just because a lovely woman once bared her breasts in a glossy magazine to the eyes of millions of adoring men and women, doesn’t give her the knowledge to speak with a heightened public persona about the workings of the brain.

 

The demand for content, and I use that word loosely, is so intense for companies providing news/infotainment. As a result, these purveyors of data will print anything said by a person whose face has been seen before by a large swath of the television watching populace. I don’t need to know how star A copulated with star B. What I do need to know is how close are we to war. I also need to know is how unhealthy are the choices being forced upon me by a monolithic food distribution system. We need to know many things, but factual scientific and political things, to live as responsible citizens of the world.

 

I need knowledge from informed experts. I do not need ramblings from a bosom enhanced pubis shaved talking Barbie doll.

A Different Facebook

Today is day two away from Facebook.  Took a while but my fascination with solitaire has passed.  Now I am back to writing.  I am keeping up with the news, but I don’t need Facebook for that. 

As opposed to searching out who among my Facebook friends is angry or which one of them had the best fish taco, I have been downloading books on the history of the Iberian Peninsula onto my Amazon Fire.  The reason is twofold.  First, I am looking to move to Portugal, a country on the peninsula. My hope, God willing is to go within two years.  Kind of makes sense to understand the fissures and bonds that have hold over the peoples there. Second, I am watching a television series called in English translation, The Ministry of Time. Each episode presents me with some episode of history of Spain that I either have the vaguest knowledge about or I have never even heard of.  Searching out the references is becoming kind of a game for me. 

What I am missing from Facebook is the opportunity to offer support to the people I know there that are hurting.  One friend is battling a serious illness.  Another fired has passed just recently and I am sure the comments and condolences are flowing.  I feel guilty about not being involved on this level.  But Facebook has become something else. 

Facebook has always been about the money from day one.  I get that.  But it is the way that it has grown more and more into an intrusive marketing and data mining service and less and less of a community forum that has driven me away.  Cambridge Analytics is only one example, one big ugly glaring wound of an example, of Facebook’s problems but there are others.

I would join a Facebook-like entity that required a monthly fee of $10 a month if all they did was connect me with my friends and not data mine me and not market me things tied to every reference I have made in a post.  There would also have to be a term of service that indicated the stream of interactions would be monitored for abusive and manipulative posts.  If you had 80 million users paying $10 a month that would be 800 million dollars a month.  I think you could pay for infrastructure and capable monitoring under such a model.

Monthly I pay $6 to listen to music without ads.  I think most of us would pay $5 or $10 a monthly for Facebook without ads and without data mining.  For at least the next six days it is on to Lisbon and Madrid.

Man-Child

This is hard to put into words, but it is a belief I have come to have after years of interactions with younger adults.  We meet regularly in what is in essence a half hour long confrontation.

 

When I talk to younger men, because I mostly deal with men, there is a timidity, a lack of self confidence and a lack of focus that is very different from what I saw among my contemporaries growing up in the 1960s. Adrift, with a lack of focus and an attitude of what does it matter, they bounce from one parent’s home to a friend’s couch to the other parent’s home/

 

Repeatedly I see cases where these young men who should be on a college track but are just lost.  They have taken seven years to get a degree that I rushed through and obtained in 3 ½.  They are tentative about everything.  There is no raging desire to be separate from their parents, to be different and better than the generation that came before.  I can’t think of a single guy I grew up with who didn’t have a relatively concrete plan on what would happened when they finished high school.

 

These men-children are all shaking shoulders and I don’t knows.  Where is the ambition?  Where is the desire to succeed?  Where is the longing for a championship, a scholarship, a place on the Dean’s list?

 

Did we do this to them?  Did screens do this to them.  Did a culture of participation medals do this to them?  I just don’t get it.

Grace is Not so Easily Found

I am walking; the weather is warmer. There are little hints winter is not a permanent condition. Hardly little buds are pushing up through the soil. A wind chime is ringing. OK, this moment, is a state of grace. I think I’ll humbly accept it.

Facebook Former Users Anonymous

Yesterday I went the entire day without the use of social media, and by that, I mean Facebook.  My disquiet with several of the platforms has extended over the decade or so I have used them.  Not scrolling through my newsfeed, I felt like a junkie suffering withdrawal from heroin.  I kept picking up my iPhone and hitting the Facebook button only to realize I had deactivated my account.  I could have slipped on with just the use of my password, but I didn’t.

 

The news yesterday sustained my resolve.  The fact that every “What Character Would You Be in Love Actually” quiz I had taken allowed data miners full access to my friend’s lists and my daily postings showing my left leaning, licentious and human secularist ways just told me to say no.  I played a little more solitaire than usual and I read a bit. 

 

Avoiding Facebook is problematic.  It has become the de facto common marketplace for personal news.  It is where I met one of my favorite distant cousin and it was the place where I learned of his death.  It is where I hear what places from my youth have closed and been torn down.  It is where I learn who is divorcing and whose children are succeeding in life.

 

The egregious use of the data by the entities who bought information from these social platforms should be a warning.  The manipulation of facts and the wily insertion of propaganda as truth should make us shudder. I will go a week and see if the withdrawal symptoms abate.  Maybe I will start a 12-step program, Facebook Former Users Anonymous, and help others to quit.

The Road Onward to the Sea

Last night I dreamed.  Last night I dreamed of you.

 

In my late-night reverie, I was travelling, driving across a long semi-arid plain. The radio was playing but I was not really listening.  Instead I was simply enjoying the isolation of the ride, the hum of the road and the glimmers on the surfaces you see at great distance on such stretches.  While it was the darkest night as I dreamed this, the scene was late afternoon maybe an hour before sunset. A glance down revealed I had about 70 miles of fuel left.  I had no GPS, just a map and I was heading for the west coast.  I sensed that I wanted to deep my feet in the water of the rocky Washington shoreline.

 

Time passed, and I was almost out of gas. About a mile out I saw an old-style cinder block service station with a sign that said, “Jet Gas and Food.” Not wanting to be out in the dark searching for another gas bar with another hour to drive before I hit the Pacific, I pulled in.  By this time the light was faded. Above the sky was amazingly clear.  I filled up my tank topping it off. Then I walked inside to grab some chips and a pop.  Among the assortment of 10-W-30 quarts, Frito Lay Grab-it bags and hanging wiper blades I heard your voice. Clearly and distinctly it was coming through the open door back separating the office from the service bays.  I smelled gas, oil and grease. I heard pneumatic tools and metal ringing on the concrete floor like a hub cab had dropped. I grabbed a bag of salty snacks threw a buck fifty on the counter and poked my head in.

 

You were there in jeans, a blue oxford shirt and a red silk scarf.  Your hands were on your hips and you were standing by a mechanic looking up at an old Alpha Romero Spyder.  Your Ray Bans were on top of your head. He was jotting things down on a service order.  You looked stern and the grease monkey looked disheveled and noncommittal.  God, the man was wearing gray coveralls and had a greasy name patch above a top left pocket.  I could see his Marlboro soft pack. Looking up and out I could see through the service bay door that it was growing darker. You shook your head a couple of times as you talked to the mechanic and in what appeared to be frustration you scanned the room.  Then, you saw me and smiled.

 

I woke up. Don’t know what it meant.  But it was nice to see your smile.

Another in a Long Series of Sundays

‘Tis Sunday morning. A light of gold is falling bright cutting through the brisk but not biting air on its way to warm the earth.  The day now begins to take shape.  As I clean the kitchen of the remnants of my wife’s cooking of cabbage and corned beef from yesterday’s celebration of Saint Patrick, the late great Stan Rogers is singing in full voice that he will go to sea no more.  The Jeannie C is a beautiful song.

My youngest, the one who sings but is so tentative in marketing himself that he cannot figure out how to form a band so as to showcase his vocals, is off early to church.  He goes early each week to see if there is an ad hoc choir he can sing in.  Whether there is a choir depends on who shows up. A friend has suggested a docu-film about an Irish singer and that is probably on the agenda for he and I today.  Strange, one part of my family throws in with the Scots but my son with as English a surname as they get, is fired up with songs of the uprising and against the oppression of the crown.

My wife is off to Weight Watchers.  Me, I could not do it.  The last week at work was tough, I mean really tough, and there were several times I thought about why I keep working.  Bottom line it is for the money, duh.  But my stressed and twitchy mitts clawed at chocolate and scooped large portions at meal time to calm the stress and angst.  Yeah, I tried the walking this thing out and I tried using my mat to meditate it away.  It is hard to meditate well when candy wrappers crinkle in your pockets and you sit down to assume the contemplative position.  These did not work for the week really sucked and I found myself in the feed bag just far too often.  Because of the stress binge, and noting that last week was a travel binge, I just could not face the silent grey and black digital judgment of the scale today.  I will start anew this morning, I swear it.  My skinny jeans are just too tight.

My other son, the computer weirdo, is up in bed still.  Good news is that it turns out he likes cooked cabbage with a wee bit of bacon in it.  This fact was discovered yesterday.  Bad news is that the cabbage must process through his system.  All open flames are banned from the house today.  I don’t want the world to see headlines in the style of “Suburban Home Destroyed due to Gas Leak of Unknown Origin.” Still, let us celebrate another vegetable added to the palate of a twenty something carnivore.

My goals today are simple. Wash the bed linens and some stray laundry.  Walk 10,000 steps.  Read some more of a young adult ghost novel.  Watch a movie about a man who sings Irish folks songs.  Continue on my task of trying to figure out what I need to keep and what I need to lose as I count off the days to the end of my career.

The sun is beautiful today.  The music is warm.  For all the stress and all the struggle, it is a great day to be alive.

Every Day - a prose poem

Every day.

Every day on a cold but virtually snowless day,

Cold engines struggle to turn over and that old term from the adverts “cold cranking power” crosses our mind for only the second time in a decade.

Every day.

Bone chilling winds push past power lines and into the broken seams and missing buttons of this coat I hoped would last just one more season.

Every day.

The temperature rises and falls cording to the vagaries of high and low-pressure systems.

 

On a March morning in the north country a solitary person walking in the world can either choose to ignore the grinding of gears percolating above the whistling of the wind;

Or that sole figure on grey concrete walking can take it all in and have their senses filled with nature and with humankind’s artificial strategies like cars and central heating striking a blow against weather and manual labor.

 

Every day.

The remnants of color from summer can be seen on brightly colored deck chairs stacked in side yards leaning against the garage.

Every day.

A smattering of shades from bell shaped blossoms are popping up from out the hard-cold frozen earth to tell you that spring is promised.

Every day.

The machinations of humankind are innumerable. Our resistance of the universe is a fool’s errand.

Every day.

A solitary being must find a reason to be to exist,

Must find a reason to touch the world,

Must find a reason to give or take.

 

Every day.

In bright sunlight on white pavement a solitary figure’s feet carry him forward.

Every day.