Planet Rodin

Among those of us over at RL's planet.chronosilence who blog on a more casual basis and without a particular driving purpose -- to set an agenda or move a debate -- there is plenty of admiration for those who do: a survey of references to those presumed to be missioneers over any six month period could easily lead to multi-tiered searches through a grand hierarchy of 'is connected to' sub-searches, like a stomach wounded animal digging through his own innards. But then, there are those who feel more than a little as if we are local to the planet (and that will suffice, thank you very much) who recognize one or two among our across the fence friends who make the planet the friendly space that it is. One of these, and perhaps foremost among them, is Waximillian PottyPleasures -- if I might be forgiven the au so courant fun I thus have at his expense in his present predicament - whose entries appear most often over the course of passing months.

Señor Wax has finally learned the initial consequences of firing the recoilless rifle into the long future...well, he has learned the basic consequence and how it must lead to a prolonged flooding that begins like ceaseless rain and then overpowers those without a life preserver who must drown in the cascade of emotions that come in waves over the next many years. Waximillian Stud-ly is become a New Daddy, sire of the scion Feliks Thanxsamillian.

Where this leaves his word-warm acquaintances no one can yet tell. They must suspect, if those among them too have been such long distance runners, that the tide of Mole entries must ebb into what could be abrupt and large silences from that quarter, which entries had so often seemed not so much like a quarter as it does The Whole and driving inspiration for the greater proportion of ideas that have been bandied about among those in the community of stars and of planets. O so Fortunate and well-polished scion!

Thus it is we leave beesWax to his bold busyness trusting that his liquid hands might find some way to make Ink! of it in gallon and barrel quantities and always fully sized and well-polished, of course! In the meanwhile, Let us not moulder: it would only grow us older. Kick it over! Kick it again, Spark Plug!

September 03, 2010 12:34 AM

August 31, 2010 01:54 AM

Say hello to my son, Feliks Edgar Holland.

Feliks will probably say hello (or 'hello world') in a few months.

[Update: Less sleep-deprived spelling, now fiksed.]

August 30, 2010 10:07 PM

August 25, 2010 02:45 AM

Anyone have photo-sharing tips? I've put up some links to guests' Picasa albums on our wedding website, though we're trying to figure out the best way to host the various photos that doesn't require people signing up for a service or downloading Picasa. Flickr's user interface drives me crazy, and I'm also not a fan of Shutterfly - after signing up for it I couldn't actually download any files, though their photo-to-product services are lauded. Oooh, C just told me about smugmug...trying them now...

(I tried combining them all into one album, but that was like 52-card shuffle because some timestamps were off of the cameras, though the idea of real-time many-camera angles seems cool. Also, if you've got a set of photos I'm happy to add them to the list.)

August 23, 2010 09:12 PM

August 23, 2010 04:30 PM

(My emphasis.)

This is masturbatory nonsense. The ego doesn't dissolve at death; rather, among other inner-optical illusions it simply stops being generated by the brain. More importantly (and myopically), the human ego constantly undergoes processes of dissolution and reconstitution, and only the ignorant fear ego-dissolution or -suppression. Everyone who's paying attention understands that deep happiness - fulfillment - more or less consists of ego-dissolution. (Ever been 'lost in a book,' or so 'wrapped up' in some pleasurable activity that you 'forget yourself?') If Hitchens has accepted the materiality of his mind, which after all is something his brain does, then we needn't be suspicious of his insistence on the banality and boredom of death. If you're not lying to yourself about Entrance into Heaven and whatnot, if you've acknowledged the permeability and mutability of your self-consciousness and committed yourself to joyful action rather than literal Self-gratification, then of course death would seem like just another...thing.

But this is all separate from the etiquette matter. Yes, Hitchens has made waves with his articulate, angry atheism, and it's reasonable to talk to him about it. But the media/'critical' surprise that's greeted his ongoing refusal to embrace egotistical superstition is an embarrassment. He has no access to special wisdom except by having lived, been committed, worked hard, offered and received and laboured on behalf of love. Dying is just something you do once, maybe twice if you're lucky; it's almost always an accident; afterward your mind-functionality isn't around to worry about how it went or what's left; and being scared of death is an understandable and perfectly natural human shortcoming, like being afraid of the dark. Such fears are not admirable. How hard is that to understand?

Those who delude themselves so as not to be scared anymore are free to point out that their 'solution' works, if not robustly, but they should at least have the sense not to be proud - certainly not to call such delusion 'philosophy.'

August 22, 2010 11:20 PM

August 21, 2010 09:38 PM

August 20, 2010 12:39 AM

There exists a schism of what would appear to be a yawning chasm of disagreement between those who write history and those who write historically revealing stories; like the classic distinction between "science" and "humanities," the seeming Y in the path taken by those who pursue the one or the other, which then, in debate becomes a self-justification stated in words like "I follow 'the one' while you have chosen 'the other'." Curious the artificial distinctions that would divide the hearts of humankind. {I return to this in a brief clarification below.}

Yesterday, a correspondent revealed in his blog that his brother had offered an insightful critique of his own usual writing practices, seemingly preferred habituations into which his writing has slipped since ... well, since high school, I must suppose. Apparently the main critique addressed my correspondent's frequent slippage into the -- to make an equally curious joke -- cursive forms of expression. I have criticized his writing for the same facile approach myself from time to time.

However, in justice to all parties -- and not simply to take a 'let's make nice' middle road -- I should say that I think there is plenty of room open to the able writer to use .any word in the language -- any language -- that might fall below what is generally acceptable in [over]polite company: sometimes 'to fall below' might well mean 'to travel around the ferris wheel of usage' and occasionally, momentarily, end up on top of th world. Still, I do not feel similarly about the spoken language and do not let myself off the hook on that count should I use more earthy language to exclaim about or describe my own oral extravagances. There is a distinction to be made between employing words like fine instruments, surgical devices in service to expression, and resorting to any fallen branch with which to club what you mean into your reader; most of the time, the first employment will do, occasionally given startlingly clarified meaning when employment 'looks like' a simply lazy resort to an earthy form. This is a familiar practice in most modern fiction, while pretender fictive adventures tend toward an overabundance of what comes easy: some authors would never slip into coarser language, and then there are those who never use it either but whom you are well-advised not to bother reading if you wish to learn anything meaningful about language, literature, or life, which means that it is not the use of coarser language that decides the quality of storytelling. Still, such language can be a fair barometer of which you can expect: to be improved while being entertained or to be titillated while being reduced, diminished. It ain't a perfect measure but it is consistently suggestive, as when we say such things as "...about three feet" to ourselves when estimating the length of board we might need to build a bookshelf and, not just a bookshelf but, one that fits the available space.

Here's an example of such measuring: it used to be that in classical ages nearly every book written was measured to be nothing more or less than twelve chapters, which was intended as a mirror of the several months of the year and hours of the half day, which in turn would allow the same authors to consider a twenty-four chapter book, both being an even number, thus no thirteen or twenty-one chapter books were thought acceptable. Almost no one feels constrained by such conventions today: one writes the book one has to write. Today, the writer may 'estimate,' story measures. I think that choice of language, of 'best' writing works on about the same standard: you imagine what you would write while the story measures what you do write, and you select the particular words that would work best to tell that story (instead of imply or tell another one). Perhaps the perfect example of this is that some writers seem ever to write, then rewrite, the same story, over and over again; but the different stories use different words. [The Robert B. Parker Spenser Novels are a specific example of this curiosity of ever-refilling potboiler practice that results in fortune. Parker is good at it. Whether in book form or on audio tape, he can hold one's attention -- that same way that his Appaloosa series westerns -- the Virgil Cole/Everett Hitch novels] -- or Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove series do. They rely on just enough true west history while the easily read dialogue and descriptions that even lazy readers can not only enjoy but perhaps come to know that aspect of American history with greater appreciation. (Well, I can hope.)

I intend this blog entry as a way for my correspondent and others to come to realize that, while you might still think that "They," meaning 'the rest of the world,' "...can take me as I am, nothing less!" the deeper truth is that the world must take you to be as you present yourself, nothing more. This is hard news, no doubt, for many [who will deny it to be so] while for others it might be an inspiration to strive more deliberately, to endeavor to yet become that something more one imagines one might be. Might be. Language, how we craft it, plays a significant role in how seriously we are taken -- some of us as over-serious, even grave, or self-important -- or to what degree we become as significant as single-use Kleenex® after a backseat tryst. The question for your potential readers becomes, "Why would I bother." Why indeed.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________
A Clarification of "How I Think," or 'Why I think the way I do.': In English historical context, the best writers have always been those who are most current in the natural sciences -- Keats and Byron are two such examples that come immediately to mind -- just as Darwin's search for God led him to his window-opening hypothesis of that something called evolution that has been artificially and, in my view, corruptly used to split something called 'science' from the realm of that elemental and, for Darwin, same thing called 'faith.' This is very like the divide created by avariciously motivated 'environmental' groups that have suggested or asserted that the creature called 'man' is fundamentally different from that something all around us that is called 'nature,' when we all understand that man is but a significant animal on the natural spectrum of species. This is not to deny the impact of man to the horizons of our group and individual experience but to make note of 'how we think' is subject to reconsideration of 'how we are led to believe,' while at the same time overwhelming numbers of us wander about in a state of unbelief that (to reduce this to some bittersweet humor) leaves me in a state of disbelief.

August 17, 2010 03:21 PM

August 14, 2010 03:41 PM

August 14, 2010 03:34 PM

Still hanging around Target Field waiting for the post-game fireworks. The Twins pulled out a close victory, despite being out hit 14-5, on the heels of a beautiful sacrifice squeeze bunt from Drew Butera to score Danny Valencia.

But enough about the game... now for why I'm here at all.

Monday is my parents' 30th wedding anniversary. In honor, my father bought four tickets to tonight's game, one for each of my parents, one for my sister, and the final one, unbeknownst to my mother, for me. And so, I flew into Minneapolis this morning and wandered around Minnehaha Falls and the Mall of America (basically, wherever I could get on the light rail), waiting for my cousin to call me to hand off the ticket. Earlier in the week, she had gotten our garage door code from my sister and "broken in" to our house to take the fourth ticket while my parents were at the lake.

After a successful handoff, I headed over to the stadium (where I met my old friends from New York mentioned in the last post) and waited around for the rest of my family to show up. After about 45 minutes, I heard my mother's voice calling my name in disbelief. Mission accomplished -- she had no idea I was coming, despite the fact that pretty much everyone else did.

That would have been surprise enough, but in the 5th inning, the finishing touches of my dad's plan came into place with a big screen announcement wishing her a happy 30th anniversary. Mission accomplished again -- she wasn't expecting that one either.

Check out the Twins-O-Gram in the lower right!

And for the cherry on the sundae, the Twins won to stay atop the AL Central.

(Unfortunately for my dad, my mom claims to have not gotten him anything yet. She has a lot to do to catch up with this one!)

August 14, 2010 03:22 AM

Remember when I posted that I had taken a tour of Target Field and memorized the username and password for the wireless network that was posted in the visitors locker room? No? Well, I did, and they haven't changed the password.

So, while the Twins are currently beating Oakland 4-2 in the 7th, here's my small world story from earlier in the day.

I got to the ballpark about an hour and a half before the game started to wait for my family to meet me. (Why I was meeting them there is a longer story for another post... probably the next one.) I wandered down towards the field and saw two guys, one in his 50s or so, one in his 20s -- probably father and son -- looking at me.

"Is that her? I think that's her," I hear them say.

I look over at them, but don't recognize them at all.

"It is her!"

Now I'm confused because I really don't recognize them.

"Hey, you were at Yankee Stadium, right?"

"Um, yeah..."

"We were sitting right behind you."

"Oh yeah!"

"Were you at the Mall of America earlier? My son swore he saw you and
I figured he was wrong, but here you are!"

"Yeah, I was!"

They had (also) flown in just for the game (they live in New York). Upon further discussion, we were all also at the same games in Philadelphia and Citi Field. We chatted for a bit and before parting ways again.

Small world, indeed!

Joe Mauer's up now with two outs and runners on the corners... and he grounds out to second to end the inning. Full game report with the story of how we managed to really surprise my mother coming later.

August 14, 2010 02:23 AM

You've heard or perhaps said before: "The man in that bed is no longer my father...." If it were not for imbedded clues -- "The man," and "...in that bed" -- one might suppose the speaker were speaking of a rejection of paternity or, upon a change of pronoun indicating the opposite gender, maternity. Most frequently today, we know differently.

Apparent senility often reveals itself to be nothing less than full blown Alzheimer's disease, something I have had a degree of intimacy with among only too many elderly friends who have fallen under its perverse spell and, then, finally fallen off -- or as poet Marvin Bell once wrote of the earth, "People are falling off all the time." If you are the caretaker relation -- the husband, wife, or child -- of such an afflicted person, you can be worn down by the inevitable erasure of, first, character, then personality, and at last personhood of the beloved relation.

The response to such step-by-step diminishment can be a degree of self-imposed distancing...and then a fully perpendicular compass reading. The words "My husband..." and "My father..." become, howsoever slowly, "The man...." Except that this is offered not good-naturedly but bitterly, defeatedly, it harkens back to the story about the recently repatriated Robyn of Loxley, Sheffield (in South Yorkshire,England) encountering John Little (known as Little John), both men intending passage upon a felled log across a river in Albion. The renowned battle of skill with cudgels is inevitable.

More to the point is the, hereupon conveniently altered, story of the young motorcyclist, a supposed orphan -- reared on the wild side of another country where he had been transplanted by the chauffer and nurse who served a rich man -- who arrived at a stone-strewn Grecian crossroads simultaneously with the arrival of an older man being driven by a chauffer: the older man demanded right-of-way from the young turk who refused to relinquish the right-of-way. A battle ensued and the older man was killed -- an almost forgettable circumstance for the callow youth who soon distanced himself from the crossroads and the killing, putting miles upon miles of dusty road behind him, having hopped back onto his bike, leaving the chauffer to clean up the mess the biker had left behind. He had roared forward into the late day bound for a place of hired lodging for the oncoming night, something to eat, and above all something liquid to swallow. Having found it, he liked the setting, the pastoral township, the roads that seemed to release his bike for the centrifugal corners and rises in elevation that let one off to rush downward in a near spiral to the surrounding furrowed plains peopled by glossy farmers, their cheerful wives and welcoming daughters. He settled in. Soon recognizing his native skills the townsfolk welcomed them and, so, him. He began taking dinners among local householders and, after a short time -- his bike now long neglected -- his newfound friends began to introduce him to local women ready for marriage and children. The one he chose was a wealthy young widow of a murdered man, felled by an unknown hand -- an older man; she was close to his own age, graceful and charming -- desirable. Married, they soon enough began to have children. Then the former biker -- well-dressed, well fed, and generous -- was enlisted to run for mayor, an election he won, that was celebrated by a carnival troupe hired by the happy wife, to which was drawn a renowned soothsayer. Teased by his wife and children, the new mayor visited her moon-strewn tent, where he was told that he is stalked by a secret about his own parentage that will destroy him. He paid the gypsy and left laughing, tousling the hair of his children. The encounter at the crossroads was so distant and meaningless that it no longer had any connection to him. Yet, later, as he intermixed with villagers, farmers, tradesmen, especially his own wife whose concerns for the crime against her first husband have not been resolved, even his own children who wonder why their mother is so often saddened when lingering in the garden, doubts developed. They were astonishingly resolved when he met the former chauffer who had returned to reclaim his former position -- after long ago having reporting the death, the crime at the crossroads -- had then left his post and retreated to the comforts of his native family living in another country. Upon meeting the young mayor, the chauffer was startled and exclaimed, "My God, it is you!" When the mayor learned what the former chauffer meant, he became angry and, after other violences, he paused: he thought and determined that it had been his own envy to be first, his jealousy to have what others might get, his lust of nubile women and of wealth that had brought him to his present state. Aware that he has killed his father, has slept with his mother, is sibling to his own children, he blamed his sight as the trigger for all his miseries, whereupon he ripped out his eyes.

That is what we are like when we isolate our emotions from our real sufferings for, once isolated, it waxes facile to distance ourselves from our caring, our love, and the essential humanity demanded of us by human suffering -- that and our own pain. Each of them -- our own fathers, our mothers, our sisters, our brothers, our husbands, our wives -- remains who they were before being afflicted by what changes them, no matter their outbursts of bad or hurtful temperament, whether words or actions. As in the onset of Azheimer's, they remain themselves and ours even as they appear to disappear. Distancing ourselves from these things is a severe form of denial, stark and merely a lie we tell ourselves so that, we imagine, we might continue to provide caring; but that form of caring is so distanced as to be provided by an automaton, a robot, a cold-hearted and perfunctory stranger. Such a lie is convenient, self-protective, and in the end it is manifestly uncaring.

Most of all it is a failure of caring for ourselves, of watching out for our character, our personality, our very personhood, our keen sense of relationship in the world -- and from our root selves. Figuratively speaking, if we deny those elements, we have ripped them out.

Who is left? Where are we? (Who, then, is our father, our mother, our sibling, our child?)

August 13, 2010 03:48 PM

August 11, 2010 04:11 PM

August 10, 2010 07:51 PM

August 10, 2010 04:24 PM

August 09, 2010 07:56 PM

"Weddings," it turns out -- besides having taken three separate 'saves" to conclude -- is a loose 'think piece' that apparently results from my bad habit of rehearsing both what is past and what might be, a complication of my mental life that manages to slow me down more than my usually misconceived verbal insertions into and responses to Life that are so often mistaken by friends and strangers alike might insist of my too too quick readiness to contribute, and so it is probably a coping mechanism (so much for the reflective psychological study in miniature). one that has become habitual or addictive...I am uncertain which. The thing, the one at hand, is that Our Family -- and a broad expanse of acquaintances and friends, both old and suddenly new as theyare -- gathered at an inn nestled up against the Vermont foothills that divide that state from New York this past weekend to participate or to be witnesses to the wedding of my youngest sister's eldest daughter (pursuing a doctoral degree in one of the finer aspects of the more arcane biological sciences) to a fine young man from Connecticut (a specialist overseeing certain facets of the EPA dredging of the Hudson River, ostensibly to remove carcinogenic PCB oils from the river bottom between Hudson Falls and Fort Edward, NY, to some point short of Albany). At but 73 participants reported, it was a small wedding -- graceful and lovely at all slow moving moments.

The non-specific "they," to whom we all so often refer, call a wedding "The Bride's Day." It is. The prudent groom suspects that he would be far better off during all preparations, and for years after, to defer carefully, precisely -- surgically -- to the 'druthers' of his bride and the family core from which she springs; and it is the philosophical groom who also intends to ensure that each moment to which he contributes the least influence is made to reflect his gladness and to promote the enthusiastic happiness of his bride. Would that it were that each participant and witness in, of, and to a wedding be mindful enough to do likewise, though it is seldom so. Self-interest and self-promotion get into the way, problems erupt, feelings are hurt, individuals become exultant or sullen. When we see it, we wonder why it is, but we already know: mankind pretends flawlessness of self when, on the face of that same creature, blood runs from the maw where it has torn into the sanctity of another, or others, for the benefit of its own belly or the appetite of its own ego and id. That is the short story of most weddings I have attended. I think myself fortunate as the bride and groom that I saw and felt little of it at the wedding this past weekend, despite the opportunities I saw for it to become manifest owing to layers of family structure between parents and children that is so commonly observed in communities today. It left me feel proud for the families mainly involved, for they might have outwardly spoken and acted quite differently.

The service was in the pleasant setting enhanced by a small pond, garden, stonewall and bowered gateway with slopes, copses and forests at the fringes of view beyond the large meadows intervening, populated by intermittent pudgy woodchucks, grazing alpaca, and the silences that accompanies the hushing of large and overspreading green. Behind us, the inn stood in witness to the proceedings, and later we mingled to admire and bless the parents, attendants, and newlyweds, later retiring to the nearby wellkempt barn for drinks, appetitzers, and then the procession before dinner and dancing, gentle music by an able duet throughout.

In the morning, we shared a buffet breakfast, initial goodbye wishes, the repacking of multiple cars, and then...then, like after most weddings, the tired drive back home. We were in bed by 8:30 p.m. and (despite some resistance from our bodies that had begun to scream "Up! about 3:45 a.m.) we managed to stay right there and mostly asleep until 5:30 this morning. After breakfast, SWMBO went off to work and I returned to my morning newspapers, and audio novel on the livingroom Bose®, and my reverie and philosophical review of the subject of this blog entry: wedding/v and weddings/n. Turns out it is a more dense subject than we usually intone in casual conversation: for instance, I have long reminded disconcerted husbands and fathers that a) they may be focusing on the wrong things, and b) the word 'wife' comes down to us through a form that means 'gift,' which is as I have long found it - but of course I knew that etymology (that I consider another form of declension) from well before being married, which only means that at first glance I didn't have to work for that appreciation, which is, of course, too too easy a denial of the real work that goes into building a marriage after what some would call the 'mere formality,' which is, likewise, never true. You invest into it OR you underestimate the significance, the depth of the 'cut,' the wound, the blessing that public acknowledgement in ritual has on the human community even beyond those who are participants in or witnesses to that/those ritual/s. Even beyond how we 'hold them in regard,' or do not, how we 'do' them.

We live in an age when 'nostalgia' is held in contempt. That is because the word is applied as if all nostalgia were merely sentimental childishness unbefitting mature minds and suggesting, then, that those who express any iota of nostalgia are somehow not so intelligent as 'the rest of us having this conversation.' What is truly unbefitting mature minds and hearts, and I stress hearts, to diminish the status of those whose minds and hearts are open to the experience of feeling what is past and often lost insomuch they must also live in the present condition of what is as they, like the rest of us, prepare their minds and hearts for what is ahead and unknown. The Apostle Paul had something to say about this [perhaps most especially I Corinthians 12:4-11 and Ephesians 4:11-16] that either well admonishes or rebukes us. (There is more that Paul says about how to treat people that I,me, this country boy ought ever to keep in mind when he is about to open my mouth and react to felt offense or internal or provoked anger instead of offering a more mature and measured response.) In these regards, we human beings can be very unmindful and downright ugly. We should keep it in mind before attending weddings and all other private and public gatherings and rituals.

Weddings, unlike wakes and funerals, frequently draw as large a gathering as the bride and groom can imagine and afford; yet weddings and wakes/funerals, the most frequently occurring rituals, do draw the most numerous commonly sized groups that occur in most communities with the possible exception of sports events in smaller communities or sports events and musical tour events in larger communities. Yet weddings are always peopled by only two people everyone present puts almost everything else on hold, each feeling is suspended, each thought hangs on the wonder of what is happening, might happen -- and then, without missing a beat, it is all over: the intended are undeniably married, stitched together with bonds even stronger than they can yet imagine, their lives sewn up and thrown up into the awaiting air on which they have been feeling as if they were floating, on which they are now afloat.

(Later on, that float comes down to earth, often with a thud, but come down it does and the routine of being married begins.)

But the wedding is, in this context, not yet over beyond the ritual of being wed, marrying, joining at the rib. Instead, we observers/participants continue in the lead set by the happy and awestruck couple and do what we might do either because it serves the needs of the event or simply because it made possible of us as individuals for the moment -- engaging in behaviors, like dancing, that we rarely consider doing because ... well, why is it? ... that usual activity of our lives is or seems to be a former life for us because of how we have moved on and become unaccustomed to some things. If we found reason to catch ourselves weeping during the wedding that has just taken place, now we both hope to understand why that caught us by surprise and to learn whether it had happened to our partner as well (I note that progenitor parents, now divorced, who are both attending a wedding seem never to submit themselves to tears, and find myself glad to be not in their number but grieving for them, the dynamics of simply attending one's child's wedding seeming to be so complicating for them, stressing, when it is joy we would all have for them despite the pasts that divided them, that now might be healed in a new way if that is possible for them to accept.

We attended such a wedding this past weekend -- a wedding that included one set of long married parents of one party and one set of parents of the other party, parties being persons in this context. As for me, I ignored the inevitable implications and milled among them all, mixed closely with as many as might share a conversation, including airing shared memories. I saw it as the ony way for me to productively inspire gladness instead of planting seeds of renowned discontent. Well, it's easy for me to say and do because I am not the one who suffered in the direct sense, yet, trust me, once you attach your heart to the spouse of a close relative -- in my case sisters -- it is not easy to release one's grip on what you recall to have been 'the best' moments with the now estranged spouse. What heals that for me -- what makes it possible, is that it is not easy to hate an ex-spouse either, which only ends up, I think, planting a devouring foreign and living thing or dense object inside one's vulnerable breast.

Finally, there is the matter of the relations between the so-called 'close relatives' of the starring couples, bride or groom or both. At a time I served as a political chairman of a small city political committee and so as the representative of that committee to the county committee, a friend once observed for me that what I had to watch out for was not the members of the opposing camp but those who stood closest to me. His reasons, reduced to the readiest comprehensible form, were that they would be the ones who would first see me make progress or lose my stride, and that, in either case, out of self-interest, they would take advantage of me at every turn and smile while doing so, even should there be nothing to be gained by doing so, but that they would do so simply to slow me to their own level of incompetence if they might, which turned out to be prescient as I learned almost immediately the same day. Family members are often like that: they can be envious over matters about which one is entirely unaware that make a distinction between you and them that matters not one iota: indeed, usually it doesn't really matter and has no worth of actual value in any context. A man or a woman might expect such behavior from their parents, siblings, and extended family members at a wedding, especially if they do not mix easily among others who are complete strangers. [It would be too easy of one to take it very seriously: blood remains thicker than water unless that water is the tears of sensed offense or self-pity, and so such behaviors ought best to be ignored or taken head-on. Should you prefer the latter, then it might well be best to wait until after the event is put completely to sleep, for at the time of the very event, as we learn in Hamlet, is not ripe at that moment and might likely only undo significant pleasure we are supposed to be ensuring for the bride and the groom in the midst of their moment of triumph, glory, and most especially their joy.]

From the point of view of those whose disconcertedness is...well, ignored...they are left to their own devices and dependent on their own resources to overcome displeasure in the midst of nearly universal pleasure. As for the members of the families that have been long estranged, no one is to imagine that the distance, the range, the wall that has long been erected between them and their opposites across the family divide and, indeed, to some degree their own children, grandchildren, cousins -- friends -- is not hurtful: surely, that may be what is intended by their own opposites across the family divide. This is a witches knot. How shall we -- do we have any responsibility to -- help dampen, diminish, potentially erase the pain? We who are outside this difficult triangle cannot, though we properly must try to, do so; and so we are left with only one device that seems to make any sense to what is so aged and well known inside of ourselves: we once related to those persons on both sides through shared moments, conversation, activities, and various degrees of caring and love, and so we have no reason to ignore or attempt to elude those realities, but should treat everyone among them as if now was both "then" and the present participation in communal happiness, gladness, joy. We shake hands, hug, engage in conversation, sit down to meals, listen carefully and sincerely and, in the end, come away from those moments and the event both resolved and gentled, our emotions embanked, ourselves perhaps improved.

One can overwork this matter enough for two days and ought to leave it rest until graced by greater understanding than I perhaps do so soon after watching and intermixing with so many facets of the bejeweled weekend recently past, might God grant me time and the insight to see, learn, and know more about it. As for you, those who have read this and kept up with its changing first level, do not let it go simply because you have read it or because it seems so possibly unpleasant when what you think you need is something consistently pleasant and pleasurable. Life demands too much of us but gives so much that we each truly need to contemplate such matters as thoroughly as we are able...according to systems of ordered thought and tested proofs ... or not.

August 09, 2010 05:30 PM

Anyone who believes Android is 'more open' than the iPhone is naive and mistaken. Google has far more control over users' experience of the Internet than any other company, by decade-long design; Android is part of that design.

Disagree? Very well. Send me a message from your Google-provided 'free' email service, then go stick your head in a bucket of water.

August 06, 2010 07:33 PM

August 06, 2010 02:16 AM

BIRTHDAY!

Your mother was your newly reached age plus nine months when you were born, and I was 36-years-old.

You keep me young.

You can make me feel old and out-or-touch with ...

technology
social mores
political enthusiasms

...but oh so in touch with Life!

Happy Birthday, Girl!

We love...We love you ~ I love you!
Dad

August 04, 2010 03:29 PM

$20, used! Such a deal. And in a rare fabric pattern to boot...

August 04, 2010 02:33 AM

Of all the wedding-related stuff that's going on, the one that I'm the most worried about and has been the most time-consuming is the table seating. I keep revising it, thinking that people would prefer to sit with people they know rather than strangers, but then what's the point of having everyone together if they don't mingle with each other and start dating each other and then have babies? Yeah babies! In any case, it's been like one of those word puzzles where Tom is to the left of Jack but then Suzy needs to be in the middle of them and Jane and Suzy will fight if together but not if Bob is around.

Rules that I should have come up with a spreadsheet for and made C script:
Certain exes can't sit next to each other. I mean heck, certain family members can't sit next to each other.
Family and friends should mostly be kept separate.
As even of a male to female ratio as possible.
Everyone should each have someone that they know and feel comfortable with, but also someone they don't know that they may enjoy talking to.
Conversely, the people that have travelled the most probably want to sit with the people they know because they get to so rarely.
Parents sit with kids.
Singles sit with at least 2 people they know.
At least 1 outgoing person per table.
People that don't like kids can't sit next to them.
Commonalities sit together: entrepreneurs, climbers, athletes, geographic locales, etc.

But then I get side-tracked trying to figure out whether people would rather get to know other people in their same geo or ones that kayak, and it all gets overwhelming again.

So, the new optimization rule is this: you all get at least one person you know, and up to 7 you don't. I hope you still end up having fun! (If you don't, don't tell me because I'll feel personally responsible and then miserable.)

August 03, 2010 09:37 PM

100802 Early in the latter days of July, I hopped in the truck near dawn one morning to begin a road trip visiting longtime friends in Pennsylvania and two distantly located small cities in Illinois ~ Springfield in the lower reaches of the state, and Palatine outside Chicago. What could not be fitted in were various visits in Iowa City where I was once a graduate student, Waterloo, and Elgin (about three hours from Madison, Wisconsin, and my objective).

I (well, SWMBO and I) have a variety of longtime friends stretched out across the full breadth and some depth of this country so that one imagines that one day he might hop in the truck and drive coast to coast visiting an assortment of those longtime friends, and back again visiting others. Pretty neat thought ... and wholly unlikely. But the most interesting thing to me is that in each instance I have found that distance has been no hindrance to friendship: i.e., from the moment of first reacquaintance after even years of distance, perhaps skipped years in silence, the conversation that ensues has the feel of ongoingness that makes true friendship, deep friendship, actual.

Of course, despite thankfulness for having been able to make my schedule match that of everyone else I visited, there is only the rare duplicate experience to compare with that of finding one's child on the far end of a long journey pounding cement and asphalt, and to reclaim love with the touch of a hug and, yes, more and more familiar conversation that unfolds flawlessly. I was spoiled by the woman whom, for the purposes of this blog, I call The Girl and others know as ShaZam, including that over the course of three days she reintroduced me (it was my third visitation) to Her Madison, topping it off with a terrific steak dinner at the locally renowned Tornado Room, preceded by a Maker's Manhattan and something I have not paused to enjoy in probably fifteen to twenty years ~ a Stinger, which was incidentally poured Wisconsin Full, to coin a phrase.

It was on the way back that The Girl and I -- for I made the trip to retrieve her and her belongings for a move back to CT -- stopped in Palatine, arriving early enough in the evening to express much deserved gratitude for a kindness to our family and especially to The Girl at Thanksgiving in 2007, to sleep "tight" overnight, then to awaken to an already prepared full breakfast, and to hit the road as soon as we all calculated that the rush hour traffic might be diminished, which it was.

Eight hours later we piled into what we called a fleabag Tally-Ho[tel] in Eirie, PA, grabbed a sit-down pizza (and quite flavorful it was) across the highway; spent a LOUSY night attempting to sleep behind paper-thin walls on a Friday night [Man-O-Man! did we plan this stopover!], and escaped into the twilight morning headed for a TA up the highway where we sat down to a terrific and much needed breakfast before hopping back in what modestly might be called an overstuffed pickup for seven or eight hour drive into the New York Capital District. Which is what this blog entry is all about.

Homecoming. Being home. Home. Our welcome by SWMBO was total and fulsome, loving in the the most warmly comfortable manner that provides stability, order, fulfilled expectations of the commonplace, and much needed rest in a most familiar bed. Be sure that I snored, piddled, and snored some more; and after a full breakfast early Sunday morning we all hopped back into the truck, my personal effects having been removed the previous night (failing which there would have been no room), and drove to that destination most fixed in the heart of The Girl: Middletown, CT. She, too, found home.

I wish it for each of you ~ that dimension of comfort and even escape where your heart can best heal and be healed.

August 02, 2010 04:17 PM

August 01, 2010 10:09 PM

Last night I got a chance to see my former local team, the Detroit Tigers, take on the Boston Red Sox. I wanted the Tigers to lose because they're a little too close to the Twins in the AL Central standings, but when the Tigers scored quickly in the first, I found myself wanting to join the Michigan loyals just a little bit in cheering them on. And after all, I was wearing a Toledo Mudhens shirt, the Tigers AAA team -- and at least three of the Tigers had been playing for Toledo earlier in the week.

But the oddest part of the game was who was sitting next to us. I went with my co-worker who speaks fluent French and Spanish, so I asked her to help me figure out what language the guys next to us were speaking. It turns out, it was French, but not quite the French she spoke -- it was Quebecois French. Later in the game, when I pointed out to her the Rod Carew Twins jersey a few rows in front of us, one of the Canadians started talking to me (in English) about Rod Carew. (Oddly enough, I later saw a Harmon Killebrew Twins jersey while waiting for the bathroom.)

It turns out these guys were real life Montreal baseball fans. They had been Expos fans for years, but now are sort of baseball nomads. Generally, they drive to either Boston or Toronto (the two closest cities) to see games, but they also go all over the States when they get a chance -- one of them is going to Wrigley next weekend. We swapped stories about ballparks and I asked them if they cheered for the Nationals or had been to a game there. "No, absolutely not!" they said, almost in unison.

As for the game itself, the Tigers appeared to be walking away with it with a 6-1 lead in the 9th. But Tigers pitcher Jose Valverde gave up three consecutive walks to load the bases with Big Papi coming to the plate. Fenway got loud as Ortiz fouled the first pitch and took a ball for the second pitch. Then suddenly... *bam* Grand slam, deep to right. Two batters later, Adrian Beltre doubled and it looked like the Red Sox might pull off the come back with two outs in the 9th with J.D. Drew pinch hitting in classic "Mighty Casey at the Bat" scenario. But then the Tigers turned chicken and intentionally walked Drew to face Mike Cameron... who struck out to end the game.

August 01, 2010 02:29 AM

July 30, 2010 01:16 PM

Resilient Broken Heart, originally uploaded by Burning Cow.

I think this photo with accompanying title speaks for itself.

This song and video partially inspired this photo.

re·sil·ient (-yənt, -ē ənt)

a.) recovering readily from adversity, depression, or the like

b.) the physical property of a material that can return to its original shape or position after deformation that does not exceed its elastic limit

As the great Gord Downie once said "everyone's got their breaking point/ with me it's spiders/ with you it's me."

July 29, 2010 03:07 AM