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BackingInto

backinginto
Paul Cezanne:
Standing Bather, Seen from the Back (1879-82)


"Nothing better captures both the peril and reward …"


Contrary to popular notions, we humans perhaps most often BackInto our futures. I know, the mythology insists that we're upstanding and forward marching, but we're more often cowering and feeling overwhelmed by our next challenge. We can't quite face what's coming, so we quite naturally BackInto the face of it. This tendency need not be embarrassing. Once admitted, it might become a point of considerable pride in the same way that any natural human tendency sheds shame once acknowledged as such. As a species, we've always wrestled with the differences between what we believe we should be and what we actually turn out to be, for we were led to believe that we were special, perhaps even sacred, but continually discover that we're "just" flesh and bone. Of course, we're more than merely flesh and bone; we are never transcendently more, only slightly and never overwhelmingly better.

I imagine myself to be many magnificent things.
I imagine myself both rough and ready, able to initiate whatever needs doing when, in actuality, I'm often hesitant to engage. Spring surprises me however quickly or slowly it arrives, and one day, I hope to be better able to accept that it comes in its own time. I'd intended to prune the Sacred Apricot tree a month ago, on President's Day, but I came down with a cold and begged off my responsibility, a definite sin. One cannot go begging off on a responsibility and hope to maintain self-esteem. And then it came to pass that The Muse and I left that weekend for what would become a two-week absence. Three weeks past my original obligation when I returned, I didn't just jump in to fulfill what I'd clearly shirked. I had other work pressing and so continued messing with my fate as well as my reputation. Another week slinked by.

This week, though, now an entire month past my original President's Day target, I have been blessed with a tardy Spring. The Sacred Apricot has not yet started budding, let alone blooming, so I have not yet managed to completely screw up this sacred obligation. I might still squeak by with few the wiser if I can finish my hesitant BackingInto procedure over the next few days. I expect fresh along with the usual distractions to tempt me, but I might this year manage to redeem myself just before I become eternally damned.

I am just a man, I explain to myself, trying to not be all that whiney about it, for whineyness hardly becomes a manly presence. A man is different from how he's been described. He's likely to disappoint expectations. He is a mythical creature who comes to believe his own myths, one whose self-esteem depends upon him believing he's something he never was. After some fashion, he manages to navigate his way around the world, but never in the way he was ever supposed to navigate his way around the world. Do not envy him either his possessions or habits for a second, for they're all illusions. He possesses nothing but occasional bouts of gumption, which visit him more than he deploys, and certain untrue notions about himself and his innate capabilities. A man isn't ever as he believes himself to be but something different.

I will stand beneath that Sacred Apricot, carefully pruning limbs that, if left, will produce fruit I will not be able to reach. I will bring down the canopy so I will be able to reach, and this act should prolong my favorite tree's life. It might well also lengthen mine, for a man lives by what he prunes. The myths insist that he thrives by what he grows, but what do myths know? They refuse to acknowledge that our future lies behind us because we can only face the past. We might try to peek over our shoulders but just catch glimpses of futures distorted from lack of perspective. I am BackingInto and secretly proud of this fact. Nothing better captures the peril and reward of trying to accomplish something than the simple acknowledgment that the accomplishment was not made face-on but by BackingInto it with luck, grit, and a fair measure of embarrassment.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved






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Uncrashing

uncrashing
Lucian and Mary Brown:
Untitled [close-up of wrecked car after crash] (c. 1950)


"It could well have been worse."


Aging amounts to remorse wrestling with inevitable loss, for none of us get to choose our demise and nobody warmly welcomes theirs. It does not help that we crash and burn at our own hands. We gain weight one mouthful at a time. Even when we limit our intake, our nibbles eventually do us in. Not even the lifestyles of the rich and famous amount to any real insurance against these crashes. We lease our youths. Not one of us ever owned theirs outright.

I overwhelmed my hard drive with the same process, one innocuous keystroke at a time.

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Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 3/14/2024

ws03142024
Oliver Herford: The Goat, for "The Crocodile," by Oliver Herford (1891)


Usual Long Morning’s Nap
A definite rhythm resumes as the vernal equinox and the end of this series nears. The sun, which could not even remotely be characterized as troublesome through the long winter months, turns pesky again, blinding me at my breakfast table and finally casting genuine shadows. Pruning season comes to find me unprepared, for I am the sole of the one thing not allowed in pruners: empathic. Pruning demands a loving heartlessness, a ruthless insistence upon reducing now for the purpose of enhancing later, but the timelines involved make the effort seem cruel. Our long Toodle from which we rightfully never returned, recedes into mildly unbelievable legend as the rightful rhythm returns. Max, our boy cat, melts into my lap when I sit in our enormous wing-backed chair to survey the world each morning. There, he holds on for dear life and purrs ecstatically while his sister Molly stands in the foreground window and surveys the budding morning outside. They’ll be out on their rounds within the hour before returning to the second-floor window, where they’ll cry for somebody to open the cat flap they’ll never figure out how to pass through unaided. I interrupt my writing to get up, let them in, and then cheer them on, for they are resetting my clock for this season that hasn’t quite arrived yet. They insist that hibernation’s already over before settling down for their usual long morning’s nap.

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Crashing

crashing
Oliver Herford:
The Crash, for "The Bashful Earthquake" (1898)

"It's a wonder any story ever results."

The most challenging part of writing comes from the technology intended to make it easier. We're centuries removed from the quill pen, but the modern equivalent demands skills every bit as arcane as whittling goose feathers. My MacBook Air usually requires me to do little more than find the unmarked 'on' key, but it demands an array of skills for which I haven't even the tiniest aptitude. File management remains beyond me. I only recently learned how to save image files so they don't take up more than a hundred 'k,' whatever 'k' means. I have developed schemes after decades of practice that may or may not satisfy at least the spirit of the formal rules of use, though I suspect they're just rituals based upon mistaken impressions.

I, for instance, need to keep several apps open to accomplish any morning's writing.

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TerriblePresuppositions

terriblepresuppositions
Aubrey Vincent Beardsley: The Birth of Fancy (1892)

" … the betrayals chance delivers …"

Almost everything significant in substance I've accomplished started with some presupposition. I assumed some skill, ability, or knowledge not previously in evidence, then somehow leveraged that presumed ability into actual accomplishment. I had never been evidently a best-selling writer until well after I presumed to write. I had never cooked that first supper until I somehow managed to cook that supper, after which I could reasonably presume myself to be a cook. Or, maybe I no longer had to presume I was a cook because I had cooked something. My earlier presupposition became reasonable only after my accomplishment. Before then, it might just as well have been delusional and probably was.

When does a presupposition qualify as delusional, then?

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Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 3/07/2024

ws03072024
Archibald McLees, Engraver:
New Spencerian compendium of penmanship, Part 2 (1879)


No Wonder Why
How curious that I seem to become most like the self I know when I'm away from home. It's almost as if when home, I need to keep up appearances, and when out and anonymous in the world, I can feel free to be whomever I feel moved to be. It might be that I feel more moved when traveling; the whole point of that activity being to move me. I see whatever I've seen before with fresh, if familiar, eyes and feel moved all over again by the flood of memories. The recounting of experiences on long-ago family vacations where we collected credibility measured in bumper stickers from Trees of Mystery and Sea Lion Caves, Marine World and Disneyland. The families with the greatest number of bumper stickers seemed the luckiest, though even my eight-year-old self wondered how those families managed to make any headway. Over the years, we collected our share and managed to experience almost every tourist trap between home and Los Angeles. Those were fine old days, a long time passing now, but I can remember myself as I was when traveling then and seem to come closer to him when traveling today. The Muse insists she travels with an eight-year-old driving, and I'm in no position to disagree, given that I hold so much responsibility to keep us both entertained. We agree that I become a dip, a dork, and a dweeb on the road. It's really no wonder why I cannot maintain those personna when home.

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QualityOfExperience

qualityofexperience
Pietro della Vecchia: Experiment of the Bowl (c. 1640)

"Everybody trying to win the race creates so damned many losers."

Our host suggested a route along which we might make the best time on our return trip. The Muse explained that we were not trying to make the best time. Momentarily taken aback, our host replied, "Oh, you're focusing on process, then." Upon some reflection, as we wended our way up a particularly satisfying long way around, The Muse reported that, no, we were not focusing on process, but something else. The Muse was once considered a process expert, a process analyst capable of minutely decomposing actions to make them more efficient. She now considers process derivative of experience, as if one could distill and abstract expertise into a single best way. The notion of single best ways has enjoyed a spotty reputation. It seems to encourage chasing phantoms and all manner of inhuman expectations for the purpose, of course, of improvement. One should properly wonder, "Improvement for whom?"

The history of process focus and improvement could fill a small library without necessarily creating compelling reading.

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Inconsistencies

inconsistencies
Donald J. Handel:
Behold the World and realize that nothing is so constant and inconsistency. (20th century)

"We weren't really heading anywhere but home again, anyway."

The modern American road system was expressly designed for freight trucks, not passenger cars. We see the resulting confusions, as cars struggle to wend their way around trucks, resulting in great frustration for all parties. The government ceded the highway system to trucks when it became obvious that it lacked the power to reign in the railroads' malign monopoly over their segment of society, forcing businesses to rely upon trucks to transport goods. Under the old highway system, trucks could not efficiently transport anything, so the government created the interstate highway system. The railroads were, therefore, able to cherry-pick what they would transport, prioritizing bulk items over passengers, and the American society began its slow descent into its current self-inflicted purgatory.

Toodling attempts to reintroduce sanity into the human portion of our thoroughly compromised transportation system by judicious injection of Inconsistencies.

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Reentry

reentery
William Turner: Study of a Tree in Bloom (c. 1835)

"It seems like entering the goddamned Garden of Eden …"

The barrenness of The Colorado Plateau wears on me, its stubbornly arid presentation, its stoic hard rock face, indifferent to season. It first seemed a vacation from the coast's riotous greens but soon degraded into oppression. I ached to escape. The distances didn't ease our exit. The Great American Desert is not meaningfully measured in miles. It might be gauged in numbnesses. My senses cannot assimilate so many layers. The windshield turns into a Viewmaster® screen, and the horizons shimmer as my brain fails to properly resolve depths and heights. I remain tightly focused on whatever shenanigans the freight truckers might get up to so I can avoid what sometimes seems inevitable collisions. Our exit seemed perilous between the truckers, the dedicated speeders, and the wind.

We arrived across the Tehachapi and down into the Central Valley just as Springtime came.

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DayOff

InfiniteSets
Hakuin Ekaku 白隠慧鶴: Poem (Mid 18th century)


" … to take a DayOff from our vacation."

How often have The Muse and I stayed in historic hotels only to find ourselves too busy to experience the places? They each presented themselves as space to escape, but they more often seemed to become places we'd get even more involved. We'd have a workshop to lead or a conference to attend, so we'd forego the amenities in favor of more urgent necessities. They considered themselves somehow literary and usually included extensive libraries of which guests were encouraged to take full advantage. A few fancied themselves writer destinations, typically places where someone famous had penned part of a popular novel. The rooms in one were named after famous literary figures, which many guests had probably never read. We primarily associate from some distance, as if mere presence could compensate for the effort literacy requires.

We declared a vacation from our vacation, a day off from our continual Toodling.

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Blown

Blown
Johann Georg Wille: Gale (1777)


" … hardly a memory by then."


Like every other human activity, Toodling depends upon a certain amount of good fortune. One can plan until their head nearly falls off, but weather will always trump planning. Routing along the least-taken roads does not guarantee that they will not be overflowing with traffic. Days where everything goes as planned might not be worth counting. Fortunately, most unplanned events turn out to be better than expected or, perhaps, better for not having been expected. Many happy accidents go into making any Toodle memorable. One sad one might render it the most memorable of all.

So we take to the road knowing we cannot know, reveling in the knowledge we're on vacation from knowing for sure.

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Halfsies

halfsies
William Henry Fox Talbot: [Calotype negative]
Portrait of Talbot’s Wife (Constance)
or Half-Sister (Caroline or Horatia)
(c. 1842)


"It's a one-way road."


The Muse and I toodled to Tucson for the expressed purpose of seeing Elizabeth, who'd lost her husband, Rich, last October. Rich and Elizabeth had been present at our wedding and had been good if distant friends and helpers for three decades, even before The Muse and I had discovered each other. They'd sheltered me when I visited their Menlo Park neighborhood and extended every courtesy and support over many adventures. Rich and Elizabeth (never Elizabeth and Rich) were like a single entity to me, as couples become after long proximity. They became indistinguishable from each other, parts of a distinct whole, each fulfilling their functions to create their unique presence. I held considerable angst about visiting with Rich absent. I didn't know what to expect.

The house seemed welcoming, though I immediately noticed the prominent absence—the same dog, the same decor, but absent some once-prominent markers.

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Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 2/29/2024

ws02922024
Théophile Alexandre Steinlen:
Diverse portret- en figuurstudies van vrouwen en mannen
(1869 - 1923)


Still Present From Our Own

The state of being gone has always fascinated me. In perhaps the most fundamental sense, no one can ever achieve goneness in their own presence. When I'm gone, I'm just absent from someplace in which I used to be present. I'm still present then but surrounded by perhaps less familiar territory. There's no place like home, but then there's no place very much like any other place. The Muse and I engage in our epic toodles not to escape but to delve more deeply. We seem to become closer and more interdependent when we're toodling, more patient and forgiving, and less distracted. We become precisely who we always were, only a little bit more so. Nothing's really very different except the scenery and the company. We remain intact. We receive daily reports on the state of the cats we left behind. They remind us we have a place to return to and people who notice we're missing. They're adapting as they always do—as we always do, too—and we'll require some reconnecting after we return from an absence we never entirely experienced for ourselves. We are absent from the cats' perspective while still present from our own.

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Forested

Forested
Kamisaka Sekka (神坂 雪佳: Forest (1909-10)

“I couldn't imagine.”

Contrary to popular mythology, little of the North American continent seems Forested. Yes, more of it once was than now remains, but even then, the bulk of this place was initially comprised of empty spaces. Anyone expecting to encounter forest primeval here must adjust their expectations or face severe disappointment. While histories might speak of vast arboreal Forests covering the original Eastern seaboard, a few centuries and a blight or two later have reduced what once seemed infinite into the essentially invisible. Great fires eliminated the once-great Northwoods. Lumbering humbled the once impenetrable Cascade and Sierra. We've successfully put nature in her place as a servant to humanity's desires, not that those have ever called upon terribly much humanity from man. We see nature as our resource to do with whatever we please, with remarkably predictable results.

A toodle across western lands mostly traverses what might appear to be wasteland.

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TimeTraveling

timetravelling
Carle Vernet: English Travellers (1815–25)


"I found a familiar sense of place …"


When toodling, The Muse and I are not merely traversing space but also TimeTraveling. All time seems present in The Schooner's cabin then, and even the territory we travel through seems unhinged and separate from the present. The ages of this world seem well-represented, from the earliest recorded activity to the present weather, all linked together. We do not seem just to inhabit the present, either. We're not just some audience passively watching a separate world pass, but an intricate part of those spaces and those times. Our conversation reflects this effect as it wanders through halls in its bathrobe, flitting from there and then to here and now, then forward to some future where and when. Our story's just as unhinged as our journey.

A stiff wind blowing sand met us as we entered The Mohave, and our stories shifted to that time when my birth family held up overnight behind a retaining wall behind a gas station there.

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CaliforniaRules

CaliforniaRules 2
Dwight C. Sturges: The Juggler (1934)


"I'm not the one to point out ironies …"


Toodling demands a high degree of adaptability. Not that anybody should ever attempt to become a chameleon. One should properly acknowledge the differing and varying local customs without trying too terribly hard to fit in, for such adaptation tends to highlight just how one does not fit in, often annoying locals. I say the visitor should properly stay precisely who they always were while deferring to whatever occurs around them. For instance, I consider myself a highly disciplined driver, as exhibited by the fact that I rarely, if ever, exceed the posted speed limit. I consider it a matter of virtue and discipline that I observe this limit and a form of immaturity to disregard it. Certain alien cultures see their world differently. In California, for instance, driving discipline entails almost the opposite of my parochial custom. In CaliforniaRules, speed limits serve as the baseline from which all driving must occur. A speed limit there does not mean 'do not exceed' but 'must exceed,' for it serves as a terminal minimum. Regardless of the conditions, a Californian must drive faster than any posted limit.

They seem to drive like lemmings.

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Finding

finding
Katsushika Hokusai 葛飾 北斎:
A Mild Breeze on a Fine Day
(Gaifu kaisei),
from the series “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji
(Fugaku sanjurokkei)”

(c. 1830/33)


" … maybe those things just found us …"


Finding doesn't necessarily require seeking. When I put myself out there, I stumble across something serviceable if I pay at least a halfway kind of attention. Presence or any particular mindfulness need not precede discovery, either. It's mostly a matter of me just being there. My more noteworthy discoveries might find me, though they might not seek me or anybody. It might be that these adventures, these plots and twists, result from random interaction and that all our fervent instruction in the supposed fine arts of seeking amounts to little more than attractive distractions, useful for diversion and entertainment but useless for their stated or presumed purpose. I've usually found something other than advertised when I attended some workshop or training, whatever the intended purpose. So it always seems.

Toodles seem to bring out the best of this class of experience in us.

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GreatBasin

bigbasin
Coy Aron Seward: Mountains and Desert (1929)


"We'll be on to someplace different before then."


At first, The Muse didn't believe me when I told her we would be toodling through a part of the country where rivers don't drain to the sea. Vast areas of the inner mountain west feature no outlet to any ocean. Whatever moisture falls there either evaporates or easily slips into the thin rocky soil. Whatever runoff proves too voluminous accumulates into salt lakes or sinks where it becomes unusable for irrigation or potage. Seasonally, much of the landscape sees moisture, especially if the winter, like this one, proves snowy. In late Winter, just before Spring, the landscape seems remarkably well-watered. What looks like a greasewood desert might be slough, a few inches deep in slow water from upland snow melt. Sheep might graze there for a few weeks before being herded into the higher country to finish their season.

Our little dish bowl valley would be a basin were it not open to drainage.

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Saidlines

saidlines
Pieter Cool: Chariot with the Seven Deadly Sins (c. 1590)


"Saidlines are not deadlines …"


The days leading up to any scheduled departure become increasingly challenging as the date approaches. My internal monologue escalates toward a frantic pitch as I enumerate fresh expectations to myself, setting Saidlines. I begin with a single relatively simple notion of something I should accomplish before allowing myself to leave, something like 'clean out the fridge,' always a good idea if I'll be absent for more than a week. If I could only leave my expectations there! I continue adding additional notions until I've amassed a burden no ten people could manage to accomplish before departing. I add these additional ones in innocence, for I don't tend to notice how onerous the list has become until after it's already overwhelmed me. Then, I'm negotiating from a position of little power or authority because that list has me by then. There's really only ever one way I will ever manage to exit and that's by deciding what I will leave undone.

I sense an underlying evolutionary imperative working here: I'm not just weird.

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Easing

easing
Charles E. Burchfield:
The Back Street [Two Houses under a Viaduct] (1931)


"It might be inhuman to learn this obvious lesson."


Language seems to be a means by which we represent by misrepresenting. There's nothing especially earthy about Earth. It's just a label, and dirt by any other name might smell every bit as musty. This can't become a problem as long as we hold the translation key. It becomes interesting when considering internal conversations where one encodes and decodes exclusively for oneself. We all employ little phrases to describe our experience to ourselves. These phrases are not necessarily meaningful to anyone else, but they only need to contain meaning for ourselves and nobody else. I continually characterize what I intend in ways that materially misrepresents my intention. I plan, for instance, to do things I should know I won't do in the way I describe them. I might insist that I'm going to jump right back into my everyday activities of daily living after laying low with a cold, though I might better describe what I'll do as Easing back into. I won't resume at cruising altitude or speed but will need some time to regain my previous momentum.

Two hours back into work after a few days of laying low, I felt as though I'd just swam a marathon.

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WellAgain

well
Urs Graf: The Healing of the Man with Dropsy (1511-15)


"We could not have experienced healing had we not first caught that terrible cold."


It feels like a miracle occurred overnight. I wake refreshed for a change, perhaps for the first time. I'd forgotten the effortlessly breathing sensation of merely being without the burden of anything intruding. Molly, so recently still a feral cat, has taken to cuddling in close on these cold nights, creating a crease of warmth between her and The Muse's comforter-covered leg. She welcomes me now as I reach to stroke her reclining body, ears to tail in the predawn darkness. She purrs like the kitten I long ago predicted she would eventually become under my tireless tutelage. She might one day soon even consent to sit on my lap. Then, her transformation into a kitten will be completed, and contentment will reign. I fear that she will never again be capable of reverting into her feral self, which means that I might not need to be nearly so wary but also that she will have finally forfeited her birthright fierceness. However close we might seem in these early mornings, she will always remain a killer inside.

I wish the world peace this morning.

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Better

Better
Denman Waldo Ross:
Portrait of a Young Man (19th-20th century)

"Maybe by tomorrow …"

At best, Better seems to be an incremental element, difficult to assess. The Muse asks if I feel Better today, and the best I can muster in response tends to be a lackluster "Maybe." I must measure altogether too much to draw any more definitive conclusion. I definitely felt better a few moments ago, but then my nose started running again just after I'd considered that portion of the program finished. It's fits and starts with plenty of backsliding. At best, I might be easing into Better, but I have not quite arrived there yet. I've heard stories of some people with cold-like symptoms taking weeks to finally resolve their situations. What began as no more than a slightly annoying tickle in my throat seemed to take the long route through and back out of this host organism. It's been so long, with the Damned Pandemic and all, since I had a cold that I'd entirely forgotten what the experience entailed. They sure do seem to be long-tailed infections.

I seem to remember that the sneezing represents a virus' last attempt to survive.

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Noisemaker

noisemaker
Unknown artist: Ivory Grogger (noise maker), Middle East or India, (20th century)


" … almost all the actual effort should seem lost in rounding."


A recent New Yorker article (The Next Scene by John Seabrook, February 5, 2024) reports on Sir Lucian Grainge, the chairman and CEO of Universal Music Group, the "largest music company in the world." In his decades in the music business, Grainge has survived many disruptions. He began his career in the LP era before facing the transition to CDs and then file sharing, each shift threatening to nudge him and his industry into oblivion. Now, AI looms. From a world where "labels were the only game in town" to one where platforms proliferate, … of the hundred and eighty-four million tracks available on streaming platforms, 86.2 percent received fewer than a thousand plays, and 24.8 percent—45.6 million tracks—had zero plays." Competing against a hundred and twenty thousand new tracks appearing online daily is tough.

Grainge dismissingly refers to most of this flood as "noise," and some of it certainly qualifies.

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Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 2/15/2024

ws02152024
Attributed to Wilhelm Leibl: Head of a Man (1879)


There But For The Grace


It might be true that the best work emerges during breaks. Certainly, this principle serves as the centerpiece of OpenSpace meeting technology, that conversations in the hall will reliably prove superior to any more formally organized in scheduled sessions. For me, too, my writing seems to come to fruition more fluidly when I’m being a foreign correspondent, attempting to post from some primitive replacement for my usual office, chair, and window overlooking The Center of the Universe. I usually find some coffee shop corner where I can bum some internet and sip an Americano while composing my posting. In San Francisco, though, coffee shops no longer offer chairs to patrons. The tables remain, but the chairs are absent. I suspect they do this to keep the homeless from encamping there. I found that I couldn’t enter without offering to buy someone a cuppa and some breakfast. It’s small potatoes for me and more significant for the receiver. Decency demands this, with at least a small remembrance that There But For The Grace Go I. I’d slink back to the hotel and write in a shady corner off the lobby while listening to the city waking up around me. That fog-shrouded light remains incomparable.

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Reprehensitive

reprehensitive
Small Jade Sculpture Representing a Crab Grasping a Branch of Blossoming Chrysanthemum
(18th century-Qing dynasty, 1644-1911) East Asia, China


" … a future better informed if not necessarily better served …"


Following Donald Trump's election in the Fall of 2016, a small group of local progressives scheduled a time to show up at the downtown office of our United States Representative to discuss issues. They were welcomed by an admin who listened and commented, but they were denied access to their actual representative. They returned each Tuesday morning for many following months until, apparently begrudgingly, she finally deigned to offer them an audience. She invited a local conservative businessman to attend, perhaps to buffer her opposition's presence. She listened after a fashion, railed against regulations, and nothing happened. Over the following years, her presence continued to be scarce. She would conduct so-called town meetings with her constituents but only announce the meeting time and location to members of her party. She'd often visit this city without announcing her arrival, conduct business privately, and then disappear back to Spokane or Washington with her opposition none the wiser. In frustration, a group conducted a rally on the courthouse lawn with the theme, Where's Cathy? Bikers showed up to drown out the speakers.

She announced her retirement last week, and the local paper quoted prominent party members, citing her unwavering support for our region.

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Candid-Ate

candid-ate
Unknown Artist: The Rail Candidate. (1918)


"Democracy is a form of governance utterly dependent upon such delusion."


During the presentation, I lean over to whisper into The Muse's ear, "It's rare to see a candidate simultaneously balance atop three third rails." The Candid-Ate, of course, seems oblivious. She appears to believe that her positions represent the very soul of reasonableness, and they might, within the narrow world she seems to have inhabited. We live on what must seem the fringes of her district. Her comparisons and even her metaphors employ characterizations that disclose that she doesn't know the perspectives of most of her electorate. It's okay; she's free to stand on anything during her candidacy, even abject public insanity. Lord knows the opposition often has and continues. She will be eaten alive by her competitors. I pray that her candidacy does not survive even until the primary. She's still too much the naive rookie to survive even a modestly better-informed challenge. She'll embarrass herself in anything like a public debate. She does exceptionally well in that department all by herself.

Candidacy seems like a simple extension of something most of us do.

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EscapeArtist

escapeartist
Peter Sekaer: Fire Escapes and Shadows (c. 1935 - 1938)


"I suppose I never had."


Our trip to San Francisco got my internal dialogue (iAlogue) generator humming. I remembered, fondly and otherwise, past lives, proximity reminding me with flashes of both brilliance and darkness. I can't help but conclude that I was probably clinically insane between the ages of forty and fifty, the period of my life when I set about to reinvent myself. Instead of ever getting away with anything, I became more emphatic examples of myself. Still, I managed to maintain a different enough lifestyle that even I struggled to describe what I was trying to achieve. I divorced and remarried twice. I created my seminal works and watched them struggle to gain acceptance. I'd escaped what I'd imagined as a great trap only to discover myself trapped at different logical levels. I might have enjoyed frequent-flier upgrades but lost the charm of unengaged Tuesday evenings. I became an EscapeArtist who ultimately never got away with anything.

I became familiar with a dozen different local rhythms, priding myself on my ability to find a decent bakery and acceptable coffee within about an hour of landing anywhere.

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Looking

looking
Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen (workshop of):
Portrait of Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen (c. 1533)


" … our faith in Spring, ourselves, and this universe renewed."


"You can see a lot by looking."
-Commonly attributed to Yogi Berra


A tradition was born on January 21, 1979, when a young family decided to take their ten-month-old son for a drive in the country. It was a Superbowl Sunday, a holiday for everybody except for this young family with a fussy baby. They found the roads down into the Willamette Valley remarkably empty. The typically cool and grey afternoon seemed distinctly more Spring-like than any they'd seen since their son was born. Over that year, they'd moved out of their final college apartment and into their first home, a genuine wreck of a place with potential. The husband and father had finally graduated from university, and with the addition of their delightful son, life seemed distinctly promising. About an hour into the toodle, they spotted a field filled with sheep and a few gamboling lambs. Nothing—and I mean nothing—better screams "Spring!" and hopefulness than a green field filled with gamboling lambs.

We took our son out of his car seat and stood transfixed beside that fenceline for the longest time.

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SF_Oh

SF-Oh
Coit Tower mural: Works Progress Administration, Telegraph Hill, San Francisco, California
Painters: Maxine Albro, Victor Arnautoff, Jane Berlandina, Ray Bertrand, Ray Boynton, Ralph Chesse, Rinaldo Cuneo, Ben Cunningham, Mallette Dean, Parker Hall, Edith Hamlin, George Harris, William Hesthal, John Langley Howard, Lucien Labaudt, Gordon Langdon, Jose Moya Del Pino, Otis Oldfield, Frederick Olmsted Jr., Ralph Stackpole, Suzanne Scheuer, Edward Terada, Frede Vidar, Clifford Wight and Bernard Zakheim. (1934)


"Light winds no clocks."


I first came to San Francisco seeking my future. I didn't find it there. Instead, I discovered a surprisingly immature city, one more suburban-seeming than New York City, one striving more than succeeding to seem European. It was impressively large and overwhelming. I couldn’t quite imagine myself unfolding there. I came home feeling like I'd been somewhere: Stanyon Street and Other Sorrows, Potrero Hill above the fog, the Golden Gate.

Rather than being a city that never slept, it seemed like one sleeping in, its ass end beneath the Marin Headland seeming to protrude halfway to China.

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Down_Time

Down_Time
Unknown Artist (postcard): Piped Down (1907 - 1908)


"I've experienced worse."


The Muse proposes the getaways in this family. I'd just as soon stay home. After all the difficulties we overcame to secure this place, we might just as well stay put. She argues in favor of Down_Time, which seems a distraction and might well be one. I'll make no headway on completing any of those urgent chores from which I have diligently procrastinated all winter. My routine will have to go begging. In her defense, The Muse insists that I almost always end up enjoying my time away. "Things happen when you're out in the world," she proclaims, and I cannot counter. Still, I dread time away. I worry about my kittens' well-being even though we entrust them to the most loving and reliable sitter ever. They even like her!

I was not raised by a modern family.

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Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 2/08/2024

ws02082024
Morris Shulman: The Writing Lesson (1935-43)


Better Acknowledge The Contradictions

Poised up here in my West-facing office window overlooking The Center Of The Universe, I must confess that I often feel far removed from everything. I use my office for creating more than for revisiting. I struggle to recreate even fond memories here. My responsibility extends no further than forward, inexorably moving beyond the experienced and past the known. Decades of experiences have not left me knowing even myself, much less anyone or anything else. I continue searching, increasingly wondering if my purpose ever was to finally find anything. I seek without the explicit expectation that I will find anything, even me, waiting at the end of my effort. I continue creating my purpose, adapting to emerging circumstances. This world, this life, and even this iAlogue Series were not as initially proposed. I proposed to find a motive rather than to frame an achievable objective. Should I achieve what I intended, I will have failed in the final performance. The reward for diligently seeking might finally be the need for even more diligent seeking. My purpose might never have been to conclude but to better acknowledge the contradictions. Thank you for following along.

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Vaxxer

vaxxer
Timothy Cole: Louis Pasteur (1925)


"We are not nothing, but we're never entirely anything, either."


It wasn't until the height of the recent pandemic that the concept of being for or against vaccinations became a public question. There had always been certain conservatives who refused their shots, insisting they disrupted God's plan or bespoiled the arms of man, but most just rolled up their sleeve when asked. It had become a form of civic pride, a demonstration of fealty, and even evidence of sanity. Who in their right mind would expose themself, let alone their children, to some contagion if the means existed to avoid it? I always thought of the issue in black-and-white terms until antivaxxers emerged.

Then came stories of measles parties, where self-proclaimed rational parents would take their kids to mingle with some who were exhibiting symptoms of the most contagious disease around.

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Grumps

grumps
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes:
Old man on a swing (1825/27)


" … You'll get grumpy, too."


I was not yet an old man when my grandson Roman was born. At sixty, my lifestyle had not appreciably changed in twenty years. Some enjoyed extended adolescence, while I extended my Middle Ages. Oh, I'd seen plenty of changes—two divorces and two marriages—over those twenty years, the heights of success and the depths of failure. I wouldn't want to suggest that my life hadn't been just as much a roller coaster as yours, but still, I had enjoyed good health, if not significant wealth, and great, if not necessarily sustaining success. I had managed to greet sixty with most of my optimism intact, and it was with pride as well as joy that I welcomed my grandson into this world. I introduced myself to him as "Grumps," his grumpy grandpa, a joke, intending irony. As everyone employing irony learns, irony eventually turns on its users. I grew Grumpier each year as my old age finally started overtaking me.

I was not on hand when he was born.

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Training

training
Totoya Hokkei: Trained Monkey Performing with Jingle and Gohei (1824)


" … many had been successfully entrained …"


I might be untrainable. I know something about training because I worked as a trainer for many years. Those who participated in the workshops I facilitated insisted that I was pretty good at training, too. I didn't often disclose my secret, that I steadfastly refused to train anybody, if only because I firmly believed that my "students" were much better positioned to train themselves. I'd give them permission and assign the odd exercise, but these most often served as useful distractions to direct attention away while the actual learning occurred elsewhere. My techniques would have probably proven to be lousy ways to train airline pilots, but I was never Training airline pilots. The usual cram and recall schtick couldn't help anyone learn what I was teaching, for I traded in life skills rather than theories, the knowledge that resides more in muscles than memories.

I believe that most knowledge resides somewhere other than the head and that our most significant difficulty lies in our unshakeable belief that our brains are in charge.

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Lyricist

lyricist
Hatta Kōyō 八田高容: Scholar’s Studio:
Rakushisha no aki [Autumn at the Rakushisha]
(1925)


" … overlooking the center of the universe from the edge of the familiar abyss."


Every morning, I ask myself what kind of writer I am. My usual response might surprise you as much as it surprises me. You see, I do not consider myself much of an essayist or story writer. You might have noticed that my writing style seems challenging to categorize. My stories do not seem precisely like stories. They're more vignettes, glimpses rather than fully fledged. Some seem complicated but rarely very long: three or four minutes. I think of them as songs and focus more on their rhythm than their contents when laying them down. I think of them as lyrics, for I was first and will, therefore, probably always remain a Lyricist. I almost exclusively write songs, though most still need music, or written and performed accompaniment, anyway. For me, they elicit their scores. I can hear their accompaniment in how I perform them and how I end up reading them to myself. Each story leans toward the lyrical.

Or, that's my self-image, anyway.

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Acculturating

acculturating
Albert Sterner:Three natures (1932)


“Nature is the realm of the unspeakable. It has no voice of its own, and nothing to say. We experience the unspeakability of nature as its utter indifference to human culture.”

— James P. Carse

Now that The Muse serves as a Port Commissioner, she gets called on to attend no end of local functions: fundraisers, friend raisers, and the odd assorted barn raising. I accompany, if only in my role as Arm Candy. I attend but never feel very at home there, for while I am from here, I never felt as though I was 'of' here, for the native culture always felt pretty alien to me. If I cannot feel at home in my own native culture, where, precisely, do I feel at home? It's an interesting question because I suppose I feel most at home as an alien. After decades of working far away from home and the dog years in exile, I feel I have no culture other than that of the typical hermit in transit. The Muse complains that I don't get out much, and her complaint seems accurate; it's just that I don't understand why my not getting out much qualifies as a complainable condition. If one has no culture, I suppose one tends to stay close to home, where the differences likely seem less glaring and where one can most conveniently associate with one's own kind.

As it is, I can hardly go out in public without noticing what certainly seems like some odd anomaly to me but probably not to anybody truly 'of' this culture.

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Disappearing

Disappearing
Claude Monet: Road toward the Farm Saint-Siméon, Honfleur (1867)


" … my world ultimately most skilled at Disappearing on me."


I write this iAlogue Story for anyone who ever lost their heart pursuing love. I mean, I mostly write this story for myself. I've lost more than my heart chasing love. I've also lost my mind pursuing reason and myself while seeking to find myself. Disappearing seems the common outcome of any attempted manifestation, for how could I have possibly known how to go about acquiring what I'd never had, never known? My plans unavoidably suffer from naive notions of both outcomes and necessary actions. I generally passionately head off in some wrong direction, thinking I understand which direction to head. Later, I might come to understand that I never understood. The Gods will have been cruel or kind by then, the single common outcome being the Disappearing.

I do not get to go back home again if only because home no longer exists by then.

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Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 2/01/2024

ws02012024
Elihu Vedder: Fisherman and Mermaid (1888-1889)


Unaccustomed To So Much Drama

As I was fixing my coffee this morning, a Neighbor cat, Tux, zoomed through the kitchen out of the basement. He’s always nervous when The Muse or I spot him on one of his trespasses. He’s a nice one, well-behaved, and more talented than our cats, neither of which has yet figured out how to use their cat flap door in that back second-floor window. Tux must have watched them hopping onto the deck superstructure where they can walk up the kitchen roof to meow at their flap door for The Muse or I to let them in. We’ve tried everything but have failed to teach them self-reliance. They crouch by the flap, crying for the help we rush to provide, making sure they leave outside that bird they’re holding. Had they learned to operate that door, the upstairs hall would be feathered sometimes. Tux clamored back upstairs and noisily let himself out that flap window while Molly, distracted from her breakfast, followed his progress by staring at the ceiling. Once she heard Tux landing on the deck, she was off outside for her morning’s adventures. Max, upstairs napping, was none the wiser. I took my coffee upstairs to finish creating my Weekly Writing Summary, unaccustomed to so much drama so early in the morning. Life continues in considerable earnestness, even in Heidi’s absence.

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FebYouWary

februewary
Edouard Manet - "La Prune" [Plum Brandy] (1877)


februewary1
Edouard Manet: "La Prune" [Plum Brandy] photograph, x-radiograph (1948)

" … clearly never really intended to understand anything."

My daughter Heidi was born on April Fool's Day, though she was never anybody's fool. Her birth transformed that day from one of pranks into one of deeper understanding. Foolishness runs no deeper than skin; underneath, things get serious. My daughter Heidi died on Groundhog's Day in February, the first month of Spring at this latitude, the month I always relied on to deliver hope after an exhausting Winter. Her death transformed February into FebYouWary for me, a time I approach hesitantly now, dreading its arrival. I do not dread Spring's arrival, just the Groundhog's Day re-reminder that Heidi's gone forever. I never understood Infinite until my darling daughter disappeared there. My world seems hollow without her here, trapped within the finite with me. She's free. I grieve.

February belongs to that class of words that have no proper pronunciation.

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Shouldering

shouldering
Henry Fuseli: Thetis Mourning the Body of Achilles (1780)

"Not one of us ever was whole or normal …"

We each possess some weakness, though it often seems like it possesses us. Either way, it comes to dominate some days, crowding out intendeds for its senseless imperative. In my time, I've suffered through various afflictions, not one of them worth mentioning in their absence. The details couldn't matter. I presently feel my right shoulder more than anyone should ever feel their right shoulder's presence. This weakness goes back to last Spring when I was over-enthusiastically prepping the back deck for painting. After a couple of days of vigorous sanding I was feeling done in. I diagnosed the condition as deltoid bursitis, but it could have been anything, for a stubbed toe by any other name, to paraphrase Shakespeare, would feel the same. I hired our painter to finish that job while setting out to cure that latest affliction. I was better two months later.

I am confident I do not know what I might have done to encourage this condition to occur.

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Indicting

Indicting
Walter Crane: Miss Goody Two Shoes, accused of witchcraft. (1874–76)


" … these episodes make me stronger and more resilient."


I would have made one Hell of a Puritan. Always watchful, I'm rarely able to slip anything by myself. I catch myself out and then indict without anything resembling a preponderance of evidence. The merest hint of an infraction, and I'm crawling up my own ass, complaining. I then set about worrying myself back into rough compliance, if that’s even possible. It isn’t always possible. I perform a form of penance, usually accepting the accusation without much questioning before joining in with the punishing portion of the performance. Quickly incarcerated with an immutable sentence, I set about serving my time. Having fallen short, I understand that I will never stand tall. Reform's beyond question. The best that could happen might be that, over time, I find that I've forgotten so that I no longer carry the full weight of my well-deserved burden.

I was painting, an occupation in which I usually exhibit competence.

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Chinooking

chinooking
Edward Hopper: The Evening Wind (1921)


"Just that breath of Spring reset the calendar."


In early January, I told myself that Winter was here for good. After a week or two of chilling temperatures and slick roads, I'm more than ready to hibernate until Spring. Everything freezes, even beliefs. Impossibilities come to dominate, and hope wisely recedes into some obscure corner. I go on autopilot and nap more than seems healthy. Then, I take an initiative. Just a small one, a chore I've been avoiding since we first bought this place. A typical obligation for which the proper time to dispatch it conveniently never arrived. A home properly contains a few dozen of these embarrassments. They understandably rarely, if ever, get addressed, so it seems newsworthy if one finally gets dispatched.

Just starting helps.

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Phantoms

Phantom
Mario Bettini: Imaginem in cylindrica superficie rectè formatam in plano horizontali ritè de formare.
[To form an image on a cylindrical surface correctly formed in a horizontal plane.]
(1645 - 1655)


"I continue hunting and pecking …"


I realize that I hold, at best, a severely superficial understanding of anything. I learned enough to convincingly fake it for a time, only to discover later that my knowledge would not prove sufficient. It appears there's always a deeper understanding lurking somewhere. This principle holds doubly true for procedures, which seem to exist in layers. The definable portion might get written down, though rarely very coherently. The rest exists as tacit understanding, or perhaps it is better described as contingent understanding, details that could never hold much meaning until after considerable superficial practice. Until I'm in over my head, depth holds little significance. Then, it suddenly becomes the most important dimension, just when I discover that I have little prior knowledge or understanding of coping with its presence.

The editor replied that I'd added "sections" to the manuscript, which had caused the paragraphs to strangely break, seemingly at random.

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NonProphet

NonProphet
John Singer Sargent: Study for the Prophet Obadiah,
Boston Public Library
(1892-1894)

"
I'm no prophet …"


Now that The Muse serves as an elected Port Commissioner, she finds herself under increasing demand. She's already been invited to join several non-profits as a board member or advisor, her electoral success perhaps perceived as a transferable skill. She remains wary since she's not yet fully aware of all her Commissioner role might demand of her, but she accepts the invitations if only to learn what's going on here. She's seen as one of the powerful now. Like anywhere, this valley benefits from many non-profits focusing on helping the less fortunate. They try to provide safety nets but often fail to fully satisfy the needs. The poor will, indeed, always be with us. These organizations employ armies of dedicated people and many volunteers, paying back and paying forward what their success afforded them.

The Muse sometimes insists that I tag along.

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Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 1/25/2024

WS012524
Beatrix Potter: Mice with Candles (1903)


The New Finished
After only five and a half years of intermittent effort, I finally submitted one of my series for publication this week. The finish mirrored the process. I noticed as I skimmed through a compilation of the manuscript that I had not adequately indexed the text, so I went back through one final time to assign styles to everything: Body, Buried Lede, Caption, Verse, and Heading; this to ensure a consistent finished product and to ease making later changes. Just that morning, I discovered I’d inadvertently mislabeled my current series iOlogue instead of iAlogue. I’d felt stupid for making the mistake. Still, I felt redeemed when I immediately disciplined myself to go back and correct every instance of the error, which had proliferated in the over thirty days since I’d innocently committed it. I had to change records in my Blog master, manuscript master, Facebook intros, SubStack copies, and LinkedIn posts. This effort consumed more than two hours. With this experience fresh in my mind, I warily submitted that manuscript, aware that maintaining it would get even more complicated before publishing was finished. That manuscript’s final compilation revealed some inconsistencies in the compiling process. I submitted the damned thing anyway, noting to the editor that paragraph breaks seemed inconsistent from the source document. I figured that complication might be resolvable later. Not even that finished product was truly finished.

We labor in the misguided conviction that we might one day finish something when getting something started might be the very best we can ever hope to accomplish. Our work remains a work in process even long after we hoped it might be finished. Can’t Be Undone might be the new done.

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CrowdControl

crowdcontrol
Arthur Rothstein: Crowds at races,
Indianapolis, Indiana
(1938)


" … messier but more fully human …"


My internal dialogue rarely speaks in a single voice. It's more often an ensemble and often an unruly one. It can speak in contradictions or coherence, but it almost always features considerable noise in the channel, as if some connection was faulty. It can sometimes border on cacophony, deafening, dizzying, and more confusing than informing. It provides mixed messages that might encourage any action or any response. That level-headed reactions most often result sometimes seems like a miracle. I hear voices, some convincing recreations of voices now long past and others more similar to my own murmurings. I whisper to myself sometimes so that I can distinguish between emphatic direction and mere distraction. I seem like a ship steered by an unruly committee.

My work has always been rooted in my ability to control that crowd.

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Matter

matter
Stuart Davis, After Mark Rothko,
After William Baziotes:
Sketches of “Max,” Mark Rothko’s “No. 19,”
and William Baziotes’ “Moonstruck”
(1950)


"The fuzzy distinction between … won't become interesting until much later."


In Late January, Matter exists in one of two states: Sleeping or Not Sleeping. Not Sleeping Matter out-numbers Sleeping Matter several times, so much so that Sleeping Matter will sometimes seem a mythical state. Not Sleeping Matter often rests and might be easily mistaken for the Sleeping kind, but it differs in several ways. Sleeping Matter lacks self-consciousness, nor can it produce thumping noises like footsteps trundling down a hallway toward a bathroom. Sleeping Matter might snore, though it will deny that it holds that ability. Not Sleeping Matter tends toward grumpiness.

It's no wonder why Matter tends to bifurcate in Late January.

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Belligerence

beligerence
Jack Gould: Untitled [tug-of-war] (1955)


"Bruising sometimes occurs …"


Not every story wants to be told. Some seem adamant about remaining private. A few seem to employ extraordinary means to prevent their author from sharing them. On the other hand, a writer must sometimes insist, regardless of how vehemently a story might resist being tamed. The Belligerence, when opposing, sometimes seems overwhelming. While The Muse snoozes, I might be engaging in hostilities few should believe could happen. My office and desktop have seen countless wee-hour battles between my insistence and those stories' stubbornness, and I have not always won. Plenty of budding stories have lost their chance of becoming shared by merely holding their breath until they turned blue or just digging in their heels. Some of the best ones refused to be chronicled by me or anybody, and that's the honest truth.

As a lifelong pacifist, I cut a curious figure when I headed into battle with this Belligerence.

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ApoplecticAngels

apoplectic
Odilon Redon:
The Lost Angel Then Opened Black Wings, from Night (1886)


" … he noticed a shadow falling over his finished product …"


An Apoplectic Angel oversees my daily production. An even more apoplectic one supervises publication. Neither can quite comprehend what I'm doing. My work follows no standard development pattern: no plot, no protagonist other than the forbidden observer and The Muse, and no apparent purpose. The implied purpose does not seem well supported by the result. Readying my Cluelessness manuscript, posted initially as my CluelessSummer series in the summer of 2018, has taken five-and-a-half years to reach pre-publication, and even then, those ApoplecticAngels second guess my intentions. They compare what I've produced with what some other writer might have created and seem to have weighted their judgments in favor of the other fella. I hesitate, perhaps fatally, at the prospect of publishing this book.

I want to reread it, hoping that a sixth time through provides the experience the first five times didn't yield.

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ShopTalking

shoptalking
Adriaen van Ostade: Man and Woman Talking (17th century)


"It's a sincere form of caring to keep nodding rather than merely nodding off."


As The Muse assimilates into her new career as a Port Commissioner, her ArmCandy gets to learn previously unimaginable dialects. He had grown accustomed to her speaking in alien tongues when she signed on to work with the Biofuels program in The Department of Energy in DC fifteen years before. Learning the various terms and acronyms she began tossing around from day one was a bit of a chore. He knew his job was to help talk her down from whatever ledge her new job responsibilities had left her hanging from, even on those too-frequent three-gimlet evenings. He would listen as if he understood and grew to think himself awfully good at pretending to understand. He would occasionally toss in an innocent question and ask for a translation into generally accepted English, but usually just accepted as gibberish what seemed to hold such deep significance for her. Spouses have done no less throughout history.

Every profession carries its unique dialect.

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Discerning

discerning
Henriëtte Ronner: The Musicians (c. 1876 - 77)


" … betters tend to sum to worses …"


I think of myself as a Discerning person, my internal dialogue constantly comparing this to that and that to something else, seeking, if not best, better. I have little use for best and no reasonable way to determine its presence except by direct comparison. As a Discerning person, I am continually comparing, though, considering how well I'm doing. I often feel dissatisfied without being able to imagine alternative means to improve my experience. The simple act of dissatisfaction rarely carried its antidote along. Usually, it is quite the opposite, as dissatisfaction prevents me from perceiving any alternative.

I had long been dissatisfied with how I created my Weekly Writing Summaries.

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Writing Summary For The Week Ending 01/18/2024

ws01182024
Jan Ekels (II): A Writer Trimming his Pen (1784)



Some Hand Greater Than The Writer’s
This expectation I hold that I will always possess something worth disclosing usually serves me well. Writers come to understand the redeeming power of expectation, how the otherwise trivial act of expecting often results in producing something worth disclosing. No cause-or-effect relationship actually exists, though. Something else creates the result. I sometimes believe it’s the cornering effect at work. Reduce options to one, and often, that one remaining option will seem ideally suited to whatever couldn’t have even been intended. We speak of synchronicity but more often rely upon even greater mystery than synchronicity delivers. I could have sworn when posting this writing week’s stories that I had fallen short with every one. It was not until, as usual, I slowed down to reflect upon what I’d produced that I caught the edge I hadn’t noticed I’d created. Some hands more skilled than the writers always work the keys. Thank you for following along with me here.

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NightWatch

nightwatch
Rembrandt van Rijn: The Night Watch (1642)


“ … failing to make much sense of my mission again.”


Weather dominates my news through Winter's first quarter. Every day brings another aspect into focus as a series of fronts promising change move into and over the area. One morning, snow's expected. The following: record low temperatures. I anticipate each shift as if being invaded. My sleep, normally ragged and discontinuous, turns almost non-existent as I lie there, wondering if the next assault has started yet. I cannot seem to successfully ignore it or just let it happen. It seems to want a witness, and I seem to need to witness as if it couldn't occur without me there or as if some catastrophe might ensue if I were absent. I have been slouching in a reading chair most recent nights, peering out the big front window, waiting for the latest show to start, neither sleeping nor especially alert, on NightWatch.

My internal dialogue seems muted then.

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Interpreting

interpreting
Benjamin Gerritsz. Cuyp:
Joseph interpreting the dreams of the baker and the butler (1630)


" … just like everybody else."


My daughter Heidi, gone nearly three years now, worked as a teacher and interpreter, performing simultaneous translations for patients and plaintiffs unfamiliar with English. Her career focused precisely on what we all engage in, if less explicitly, for we are always Interpreting whatever we witness. No experience comes pre-interpreted for our convenience, and it's probably for the worst that we grow complacent over time, even losing the sense that we are Interpreting when it's all we ever do. Heidi complained of fierce headaches after a day of intentionally Interpreting. I sometimes register the same complaint. I often feel as though I never learned how to interpret and that I generally make a hash out of my attempts.

I am a particularly inept mind reader.

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Mumming

mumming
Eugène Romain Thirion: Study of the Head of the Angel
for “
Joan of Arc Listening to Voices” (c. 1876)


"I have no story today because I have not a thing to say to anybody …"


My internal dialogue never was continuous. Though it usually seems uninterrupted, breaks do occasionally appear. I do not always notice, and since I'm the only one serving as witness, if I don't notice, it's as if it never happened or just as good as never happening. I do sometimes notice, though. I notice these empty slots without commentary, for any comment would nullify the Mumming effect. Mumming appears like a slip of paper placed between pages in a set, a spacer. If it serves any more profound purpose, I have never been party to it. It signifies nothing and needs no meaning attached to justify its presence. I think of and about it only in its absence, for when it's present, I let it lie or leave it lay. My internal dialogue has nothing whatsoever to say while I'm Mumming.

With all the attention presencing attracts these days, I can sometimes seem altogether too present, too aware, too much in a moment.

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Unspeakables

unspeakables
Henri Martin: Silence (1894/97)


"Only I hold the power to counter that power … "


Silence surely stands as the most powerful of all the superpowers granted to mortals, though it's pure potential, so few suspect its presence. The Unspoken commands great authority in human affairs, and the Unspeakable unquestionably holds the greatest. A mouthful of Unspeakable feels like gravel. It's genuinely embarrassing. It seems illicit and dirty. It too easily convinces the one possessing it to remain silent, even perhaps unto death. The bulk of its great power comes from just this sense: if it's mentioned, great calamity might ensue. Someone might get offended. Relationships might have to be ended, friendships ruined, associations severed. A great and terrible truth might render asunder even the tenderest alliance.

The secret might consume its holder, rendering them not merely mute.

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gNattering

gNattering
Percy J. Billinghurst: The lion and the gnat. (1900)


"The human condition demands much worrying and little changing."


I consider myself to be a world-class worrier. I anticipate well and catastrophically. I natter better than almost everybody. I dread exceptionally well. This continual background noise in my cognitive channel might serve as my screen saver, exercising my internal dialogue without producing any overwhelming excess of anything, for gNattering produces nothing and might even disperse otherwise troubling accumulations. Nobody remembers whatever they might have been gNattering on about, for the exercise might have always been to prevent retaining. Had I been contemplating instead, I might have needed to store something for later reference, further filling my head. gNattering effectively prevented that inventory, leaving me more ready to acquire something substantial later, or not.

I understand that I only utilize some tiny portion of my brain's potential.

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DJ

discjockey
Dorothea Lange: Disc used in corn fields in California.
It is drawn by seven horses. Tulare County, California
(1938)
" … seems to be looking out for me."


My internal dialogue occurs on several seemingly concurrent channels, like SiriusXM Satellite Radio, which features dozens of channels, each carrying a specific type of program. I frequently listen to their Broadway channel, for instance, where I can usually access some big production numbers that lift my spirits, and their Sinatra channel, which plays The American Songbook. I mention this because my internal dialogue is not exclusively comprised of verbal interaction but also sometimes includes music, often with lyrics and sometimes without. Like with my Ruminating that I described in a recent story, my internal dialogue serves up more than conversation.

The musical channels fascinate me.

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Writing Summary For The Week Ending 01/11/2024

ws01112024
Yoon Kwang-cho: Heart Sutra (2007)


About To Happen

What would you do if your dream came true? I engineered most of my life to cope with not achieving a dream-come-true state. An encroaching dream coming true feels genuinely threatening to my well-practiced status quos. I know precisely how to cope with disappointment but feel totally unprepared to accept success, however modest. I procrastinate, hastening extremely slowly into its grasp as if it were a trap. I wonder what its embrace might bring. I puzzle over the changes it might insist upon my sacred routines, however shopworn they seem. I sense the potential that I'll have to write a different story, one I only secretly ever intended to author. Stay tuned. Something interesting's about to happen here.

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MorePerfect

MorePerfect
Photograph of Lincoln Memorial Youth March for Integrated Schools.
Photograph/National Archives Catalog.
Department of the Interior. National Park Service.
National Capital Parks. (10/9/1933 - 1/22/1962).


" … toward MorePerfect but not perfection …"


I admire Abraham Lincoln's facility with English. He could really turn a phrase. His most memorable moment came in his first inaugural where he spoke of our responsibility to create "a MorePerfect union." He cleverly avoided proposing perfection as a target yet deeply implied that it might lurk somewhere out there where we might move in its general direction. He managed to remain realistic while projecting an idealistic glow over the proceedings, producing one memorably masterful phrase.

MorePerfect probably describes much of my iOlogue.

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TrashTalkingToMyself

trashtalkingtomyself
Bothe, after Paul Friedrich Meyerheim:
Apen in een atelier [Apes in the studio] (1852 - 1915)


" … a great and enduring blessing in my life …"


My chattering mind never completely shuts down. It natters away night, day, and every moment in between. It has essentially nothing to say. It never did and probably never will, yet it still serves a beneficial and essential function in my psychological ecosystem. It might be my linguistic gyroscope, that part of my iOlogue, my internal dialogue, that keeps me sane. However, anyone besides me, privy to the conversation, might reasonably conclude the opposite. The content makes no objective sense, exemplifying nonsense. It sounds, even to me, as if I'm shoving shit at myself, for it's comprised of critique and passing commentary, seemingly just so much chattering, monkeys manning my belfry.

When The Muse and I arrived in exile in Washington, DC, I noticed two distinct cultures as I walked the streets.

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BothSides

BothSides
Joe E. Brown:
You Said a Mouthful, [Front cover, Pamplet] 1944


Talk out of both sides of your mouth: idiom
[US disapproving (also speak out of both sides of your mouth)]

To say something that is the opposite of what you have said before or to express different opinions about something in different situations in a way that may deceive people.
—Cambridge Dictionary

" … speak out of every side of every mouth …"


I never aspired to be recognized as the pinnacle of consistency. I try to appear reasonably coherent, but I'm apt to contradict myself anytime. I was not born with a mind that remembers what's come out of my mouth in the past, so I might innocently insist upon the opposite of what I formerly absolutely insisted upon. I explain to myself that the context shifted, but I doubt my more scrupulous listeners buy that excuse, even though it probably represents the whole truth. The truth is, I might appear to be lying. This isn't a strategic choice but almost always an accident, an honest representation of what's happening inside me. I hold some convictions very loosely.

I'm the kind of witness easily badgered on the stand.

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TalkingThruMyHat

talkingthrumyhat
Amedeo Modigliani: Madam Pompadour (1915)


" … frantic iOlogue might appear."


Talk through your hat: (idiom UK informal)

To talk about something without understanding what you are talking about:
"Nothing of what he said made sense - he was talking through his hat."

—Cambridge Dictionary

More often than I comfortably admit, I speak before I know. Before I know enough about the context. Before I know sufficient to knowingly comment. Before I know whether my target is even listening. I only sometimes embarrass myself after I should have embarrassed myself speaking. This occurred when I spoke too soon or had no charter to say anything. I often just wanted to stay in the conversation, to contribute my share even when—and maybe especially when—I felt I might not have anything intelligent to contribute. It's then when I tend to say something stupid and wear it as if I were wearing some outlandishly inappropriate hat that can't help but dominate my presence. I almost exclusively humiliate myself.

Strictly speaking, TalkingThruMyHat may not belong classified under iOlogue, internal dialogue.

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DrDoolittle

drdoolittle
Thomas Rowlandson:
Doctor Syntax drawing after nature (1812)


" … that conversation could also be pure projection."


Talking with animals seems rather like talking with God. It's only troublesome when the animals start talking back, though those of us dedicated to this practice often receive responses from our partners. I do not care if these responses come from my projections or if I only imagine a conversation occurring. I receive my intended result. I feel more connected, which might be close to the whole purpose of human existence. A person isn't always available or amenable to civil discourse, while most animals agreeably absorb whatever observation I might care to share with them. Even my friend Caroline's dog Banjo, who, strictly speaking, was never a scrupulous listener, seems to appreciate my comments as he attempts to whip me into submission with his tail. He's exuberant whenever company arrives.

I swear that the primary reason I'm a cat person must be their willingness to listen.

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Writing Summary For The Week Ending 01/04/2024

ws01042024
Ben Shahn: Sideshows at the Ashville,
July 4th celebration, Ashville, Ohio
(1938)


It's A Genuine Wonder
The winter holiday season provides several prominent mileage markers. I can easily anticipate whatever's coming next for several weeks before entering into January's relative wasteland. I find myself praying for weather, anything to differentiate one cold, foggy day from another. I tucked into a long-procrastinated painting project, one I'd imagined becoming a messy can of worms if started, but my dread was unrequited. As is often the case with procrastination, initiating effort disproved my delaying premise. I should feel grateful for an asperation really worth procrastinating over. Once finished, I will need to drum up another possible can of worms to properly dread or perhaps simply surrender to the January ennui. I might be in the final stages of signing a book contract. I fear that will also become a can of worms, so I have been expending some of my excess procrastination energy on not gaining closure on that effort. It's a genuine wonder I ever accomplish anything.

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Play-By-Play

play-by-play
Stefan Martin and Ben Shahn: Baseball (1968)


"I feel reassured then and tuck my head down …"


Besides TalkingMyselfInto, Through, and OutOf, my inner dialogue, my iOlogue, mainly consists of what I might best describe as Play-By-Play commentary. Like a sportscaster, I'm reporting on my performance in real time as the movie unfolds. Sure, I do my share of after-action reporting, but most of my attention focuses on the action happening right before me. Unlike most sportscasters, though, I also perform the role I describe. It's as if a pitcher was wired up and offering color commentary as he throws the game. If this seems as though it must be distracting, it tends to be, as you, dear reader, certainly know, for you probably fill the same role in whatever game you're calling. This must be how we each first attempt to make meaning of our performances. We'll reserve the right to make second, third, and even more guesses, but initial impressions tend to get laid down as the play progresses.

I deeply admire Play-By-Play announcers, the good ones, anyway.

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TalkingMyselfOutOf

talkingmyselfoutof
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres:
Studies for "The Martyrdom of Saint Symphorien"
(Saint, Mother, and Proconsul)
(1833)


"I fancy that I finish better whatever's left on my plate …"


I should probably be most grateful for all my many unanswered prayers, for as I have continued aging,  I have become an absolute idea generator. More bright ideas spring out of my imagination than any dozen Davids could ever follow up on, so I have, by necessity, become perhaps most skilled at TalkingMyselfOutOf. Out of doing. Out of completing. Out of starting in the first place. Most of my great ideas drift to the bottom of the very well they seem to spring from to compost or perhaps regenerate, likely for me to reject or deny them again. I suffer from idea indigestion. I rarely swallow.

I often wonder what my life would have become had I had to struggle for every alluring notion I needed to sustain me.

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HappyTalk

happytalk
Nelly Spoor: Kinderorkest in een tuin
[Children's orchestra in a garden]
(1912)


" … delighted to have even a bit part in this latest ongoing production."


My iOlogue, my internal dialogue, most often amounts to a soundtrack rather than a back-and-forth conversation, a concert more than a dialogue. I serve as a passive observer, witness, and fan. I firmly believe The Great American Songbook contains most of the advice worth taking in this world. If I had my druthers, I'd re-release The Bible as a compendium of Twentieth Century pop, jazz, and show tunes with lyrics more usefully instructive than any other moral/spiritual guidebook ever compiled. The vast majority of the tunes are so-called love songs and many focus on the more practical aspects of the emotion than does the typical heavenly host. Even the occasional vengeful tune employs language in ways that render them extremely attractive and unforgettable.

Rodgers and Hammerstein's
HappyTalk, from their hit Broadway show South Pacific, typifies what I'm talking about here.

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SilentPilot

silentpilot
Anders Zorn: Pilot (1919)


"Nobody ever was or ever will be an island …"


I claim to carry on an iOlogue, an internal dialogue for the purpose of navigation, but I might misrepresent the actual mechanism. I do carry on an iOlogue once inspiration visits, but inspiration visits silently, like that proverbial thief in the night, like Santa Claus, like nothing at all. However I might seek direction, it seems to take its own sweet time to come, for it owns that seeking time. The harder I strive, the longer I wait, or so it so often seems. The notion I seek doesn't speak to me so much as to tap me on my virtual shoulder to gain my attention. Once my attention focuses, the inspiration's passed and my benefactor returns to his natural state, which seems both silent and invisible. He surfaces relatively rarely even if usually daily, for the instant he appears measures in sub-seconds before he disappears again.

I speak of him as 'him,' but only for convenience.

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SummingUp

tottingup
Unknown Artist:
Daikon Radish and Accounting Book
(19th Century)


"I'm still wondering."


I create my series off calendar. I begin each on either a solstice or an equinox so that the ends of months and years never mark the end of any series. The twelfth installment of this iOlogue Series falls on the last day of this year, 2023, and it feels right as well as proper to pull over here and at least try to take stock of what this year has wrought or what I've managed to wrought this year. Reviewing my work, I'm first taken by how little I crisply remember. It seems to have left little in any way resembling a permanent impression. I have written daily, ninety-some stories each quarter, at least two-hundred-sixty over the year in parts of five different series, yet I have to reference my archive to even remember the names of the series I labored so diligently to produce.

What must it mean to have produced so much while remembering so little?

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TalkingMyselfThrough

talkingmyselfthrough
Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen:
Tramp Passing Through a Sleeping Village (1902)


"I still have mentors, but none better than the one I found lurking near the end of my journaling pencil."

As my fortieth birthday approached, my life grew increasingly complicated. I had not willed this change. It just seemed to visit me unbidden. Fortunately, helpers emerged as if somehow deliberately called to assist. Powerful teachers just seemed to find me and I entered into a fresh phase of learning, of living. Almost everything in my life would have to crumble before I would emerge on whatever passed for the other side, but the shift was never nearly as clear-cut or dichotomous as that. It first felt like a descent from my achievements long before it seemed anything like an improvement. I later learned that this challenge had long been considered routine, nominally labeled Mid-Life Crisis. The reality of the experience far overshadowed the seemingly benign name we'd assigned to it. In  his Divine Comedy, Dante described it: "In the middle of my life, I awoke in a dark wood where the true way was wholly lost."

I was merely on the edge of learning my most profound life lessons thus far.

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Writing Summary For The Week Ending 12/28/2023

WS12282023
Gustave Doré:
Daniel interpreting the writing on the wall (1866)


The Mysteries Will Prevail
I tell myself I keep moving forward but cannot honestly tell. I lack the perspective to determine. I follow my established as well as emerging rituals, wondering where all this might be leading while simultaneously convinced that I know full well where I'm headed. Writing seems to be one of those skills where, to be successful, one must never know before finishing. That not knowing might serve as the absolutely necessary predicate to achieving. One comes to know without knowing beforehand. The initial innocence and ignorance serve as essential leverage. No reader needs to understand any of this. In fact, the reader's experience might be improved by their misconceptions of what authorship entails. It involves much speculation and ritual with a pinch of discovery mixed in. Some weeks prove more enlightening than others. Some prove stellar. There's never any predicting except that the mysteries will prevail; there will never be any vanquishing them.

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TalkingMyselfInto

talkingmyselfinto
David Deuchar:
Man Wearing an Apron, Talking with a Boy
(18th-19th century)


" … I just have to try your patience first."


I tend to be a tough sell. Try as anyone might, I often prove inconvincable by any means, or any means other than one. In the end, if I am to be convinced, it just has to be me doing the convincing. I mean I have to TalkMyselfInto it, whatever it is. I need to find my own damned reason and cannot ever quite countenance acquiescing to anyone else's. I suspect my apparent stubbornness stems from my sense that I'm natively gullible, too easily persuaded or goaded into doing what's not always best for myself. I hate to say it, but I distrust. Last night at dinner, a trainee waiter admitted that he was upselling, an admission that undermined his purpose, but he was still learning. I would that everyone attempting sales could engage so transparently. I don't mind being upsold as much as I resent being fooled. Why do salespeople seem to treat honesty as their enemy?

I often simply fail to understand at first.

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SelfTalk

selftalk
Edvard Munch: Self-Portrait in Moonlight (1904–06)


"I might one day learn just to appreciate its presence…"


My story shifts from day to day. One day, I might feel the hero, and another, the cad. More consequently, the story I tell myself about myself also constantly shifts. Whether I think myself a hero or a cad might matter. Some studies suggest that I might even be capable of talking myself into performing either role by simply repeating a story suggesting as much. SelfTalk, one of the pillars of the ever-burgeoning self-helpless industry, refers to these stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. The accuracy of these stories seems to have little to do with the effects they encourage. If I think myself a cad and tell myself stories reinforcing this notion, I might be much more likely to act out as if those stories were accurate in what might be considered a self-fulfilling prophecy. Regardless of its initial validity, I might become the story I tell myself about myself.

This notion suggests that I had best be careful when choosing my internal narrative, implying that I should nurture only the best opinion of myself regardless of my actual performance, lest my SelfTalk degrade my experience.

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Holidayed

holidayed
Unknown: Puzzle jug (c. 1750)


"The chestnuts, alas, were inedible after roasting."


For me, holidays mainly exist in my anticipation of them. Before they occur, I feel perfectly free to imagine them becoming anything. Once they arrive, my degrees of freedom when anticipating collapse into one or two definite outcomes. By the end of the day, not even that was left: a kitchen filled with dirty dishes and some lingering puzzles about what that was supposed to be about. They were never any different. The jolly tends to leach out a day or two before the mistletoe engages and seems scarce on the actual day of. The day of becomes more focused on producing tangible results, inherently less satisfying effort than anticipating ever was. Stockings hung hold enormous potential. Once filled, they become more or less has-beens until the following ultimately hollowing season.

The absence of the need to be preparing eliminates what had been my primary motivation. It had been what had been getting me up mornings.

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Epiphany

epiphany
Paul Cézanne: Jules Peyron (c. 1885-1887)


"There will always be the before and then the ever after …"


I am an Epiphany junkie. The urge to experience Epiphany drives me. It's what gets me up in the morning. I am always, always looking for the anomaly, the odd ant/elephant combination that might harbor an insight, for I believe Epiphany to be accessible to everybody all the time. Certain religious holidays advertise themselves as Epiphany-related, but I firmly believe that everyone retains access to the transcendent, to the glorious. It's not reserved for Sundays or Feasts of Grand Retribution but remains an everyday thing, extraordinary yet perfectly ordinary, remarkable yet common.

Remarkable Yet Common might as well serve as my tagline, for I have no personal use for the exclusive.

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InfiniteSets

InfiniteSets
Hakuin Ekaku 白隠慧鶴:
Poem on Meditation [Poem about Snow]
(Edo period, 1615-1868)


"I carry on these internal dialogues as if they might prove helpful."


I realize that every one of my dilemmas stems from dealing with essentially InfiniteSets. I define an InfiniteSet as any entity, idea, or thing that seems fundamentally indeterminate in size. These might, indeed, qualify as uncountables or just prove essentially impossible to count. Any entity so vast as to chase off any practical strategy for rendering it definite becomes infinite by default. By this definition, I am presently living an infinite life because while I know for sure it will at some time end, that ending remains essentially indeterminate. This need not goad me into profligacy, for I can always respect my potential without burning whatever candle I have remaining at both ends. I can conserve as well as consume my InfiniteSets.

I can write because language proves to be one of those essentially InfiniteSets.

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PoemCycling

poemcycling
Tosa Mitsuoki:
Autumn Maples with Poem Slips (c. 1675)


"I suspect Santa experiences a similar reveal …"


For each holiday season for at least the last twenty years, I have created a poem cycle instead of buying presents. A poem cycle amounts to a small collection of poems written on more or less the same subject, this cycle's topic: the Winter holidays. I give the resulting poems to family and close friends instead of giving them something I've purchased. I devised this strategy after many years of disatisfying effort attempting to guess what gift might please which recipient. I was always a lousy guesser, and I suspected that I usually guessed wrong, though few ever confirmed my suspicion. Feigned delight resulted in gracious acceptance being the exchange's only redeeming element. In the first few years, the poems seemed an even lamer excuse for gifts, but over time, recipients grew to expect them and transferred their feigned acceptance to this new medium. Don't get me wrong, these were rarely James Whitcomb Riley-quality works. They were, by and large, lame poems exhibiting, above all, just how much it might be the underlying thought that actually counts.

I initially held myself to producing these works between midafternoon Christmas Eve and Christmas Morning.

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iAloguing With The Deafened

iologuingwiththedeafened
Will Hicock Low: Deafening the Swallows’ Twitter, Came a Thrill of Trumpets (1885)


" … a halfway decent conversation with myself."


As one newly introduced to iOlogue, the fine art of solo dialogue or talking to myself, I can report that it's a challenge, given all the foreground noise. If I didn't know better—and I might not know better—I'd insist there's a vast and insidious conspiracy against anyone even attempting to hear themself think, just as if they considered that sort of thing dangerous and to be dissuaded at every turn. Significantly, during this sacred season, the competition expands beyond all reason. Wherever I go, holiday music follows or greets me as I enter. I recognize that It's Looking Like A Lot Like Christmas without having that recognition blasted into what's left of my consciousness every time I enter a store. I know why I cannot remember what I came into the store to purchase because my inboard navigation system was short-circuited by the Musac® there.

Even when it's not the sacred season, the competition seems staggering.

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Writing Summary For The Week Ending 12/21/2023

ws12212023
Forbes Mac Bean: Public Writer (1854)


Whatever Change Was Supposed To Promise
I believe we're all here to spot curious convergences. We might try to establish routines to make our lives more efficient, but something, thank Heaven, always seems to manage somehow to disrupt them. While we struggle to reestablish what was probably never destined to be sustained, we tend to stumble upon change. We speak of change as if we might one day master it, but I believe we're destined to remain its humble or humbled servant. Our clever strategies for creating it often leave us feeling like fools while its designs for insinuating itself into our lives properly leave us gasping. We were never intended to master change but to be shifted by it. We should lose our mooring. We should lose our heading. When we can keep our wits about us, we often spot something interesting. When we lose our wits, the experience can become even more interesting. Reasoning’s definitely not required. Of course we cannot yet understand its eventual significance. It travels in relative obscurity, seemingly fueled by synchronicity, accidentlies on purpose, accidentlies bringing renewed purpose in clever disguise. This final week of GoodNuff stuff brought all of whatever change was always supposed to promise. I feel changed for the good as a result.

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FinishingIn

FinishingIn
Charles Folkard:
She found...ripe strawberries, poking up dark red out of the snow. (1911)


"… an appropriate backdrop for such a ragged undertaking."


I do not believe in smooth transitions but ragged ones. In theory, we finish before beginning anew, but we probably never do in practice. There's always some tail dragging behind the prow, some finishing touches needed even after a masterpiece was exhibited. I segment my days into tidy-seeming stories, but my internal dialogue discloses the underlying mess. I require much forgiveness to start before I've completely finished, but I could never begin if required to complete my prior work. Yesterday, I published my reported "last" installment of my GoodNuff Series. I even accomplished what I'd never managed before. I completed assembling those ninety-four stories into a finished manuscript. I even compiled them into a single document, complete with illustrations, suitable for submission on the same day I posted the final piece. I usually drag a finished series behind me for a very long time before I finally catch up to compiling the completed manuscript. My life seems more than littered with unfinished business.

The moment I finished compiling that series, though, The Muse mentioned that I'd misspelled something in that last story, negating my advance.

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iAlogue

iologue
Quiringh Gerritsz. van Brekelenkam:
A Confidential Chat (1661)


" … engaging in solo dialogue …"


It's accepted wisdom within the publishing business that an author must know his comparables. This essential knowledge becomes critical when classifying a work, and classifying has always been necessary before a work can become a marketable book, for without a classification, no librarian or bookseller could know where to display the damned thing. So, a few years ago, I asked a friend who teaches library science at a prestigious Eastern university to gift me with a classification for my work. He returned with one I found only distantly satisfying: Historical Autobiographical Philosophical Fiction. He claimed this grouping included many of the most popular authors publishing today. I felt flattered to be included in any category, let alone such a prestigious one, but I couldn't help feeling like I was still missing something.

The authors he listed as comparables didn't seem to be in the same business as I had been.

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HowIDo2

HowIDo2
Jack Gould:
Untitled [workmen constructing new house] (1950)


“Another GoodNuff Story's published!”


Like with all activities, "finishing" does not necessarily mean done. I say I'm writing even though the writing might take up less than half the time I spend "writing." As I said in the last installment, the writing, initiated after lengthy context and content-setting work, occurs in timeless space. I must not think too much while writing lest I disrupt what might pass for flow. I learned long ago to separate editing from writing, for instance, because the two activities remain antagonistic and seem better left sequential. Once I've "finished" writing, I begin editing. If anything, I've increased my editing efforts in more recent years. I once over-revered my native voice, preserving my hems and haws as representing greater authenticity. In most realities, many asides make for difficult reading. Editing can streamline stream-of-consciousness writing, rendering it more palatable, understandable, and, therefore, more enjoyable to read.

I start my editing passes by slowing myself down.

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HowIDo

howido
Honoré-Victorin Daumier:
"Let's go..., my friend, I do not find this painting pretty..."
From the book:
L' Exposition de 1859, 11 (Le Charivari, 21 June 1859)
Original Language Title:
"Viens donc..., mon ami, je ne trouve pas..." (1859)


Writing, like all activities, has little to do with itself. The activity of writing seems almost beside the point, for much context-setting and content-framing work must occur before writing can productively commence. These set-up activities sometimes prove insurmountable, especially if a writer cannot transform many into rote routines or preparatory rituals. I think of my writing set-up routine as sacred since all I produce must first pass through it. Without it, I could produce precisely nothing, so my HowIDo explanation seems worthy of perhaps even an overly wordy presentation with pictures. Here come some picky details:

Who knows where the idea of a story originates?

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WhatIWillNot

WhatIWillNotDo
Leonard Leslie Brooke:
The eldest son refuses the old grey man
[from The Golden Goose Book]
1905


"I am my own audience."


I have made some decisions over the years I have engaged in this writing experiment. I have been honing my skills, which always involves removing some of the blade to improve performance. Less becomes more. I would write about anything early on, for my explorations remained relatively unconstrained. I had yet to develop many preferences and had not formed what I might describe as taste. I would catch myself being myself and sometimes quake at what I witnessed. That much of my early work was uninformed by very much of a body of preferences showed in ten thousand ways. With many repetitions, some druthers emerged slowly, ranging from preference choices to down-right insistences. Mark Twain insisted that the primary difference between the common jackass and the typical human has always been that there are some things a common jackass won't do. With adequate iteration, though, even the typical human might manage to back into a list of things he steadfastly refuses to do.

I refuse to dispense advice.

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WhatIDo

whatido
Jean François Millet: Peasants Going to Work (1863)


"If you glimpse yourself in there, you're finally seeing the other."


I write loosely autobiographical sketches, whatever that might mean. What that might mean remains an issue of considerable interest to me since I turn out to be the author of my experience, of these experiences. I harbor deep doubts that I know how to actually do what I claim to be up to. So deep run those doubts that they entice me up and out of my bed every morning to see if I might manage to prove my case to myself. Some mornings, I feel as though I've come close to approaching that purpose, but even then, I still feel aspiring.

My specific autobiographical details should properly be of little interest to any of my readers.

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Writing Summary For The Week Ending 12/14/2023

ws12142023
Ishikawa Toyonobu: Writing on a Fan (1765)


"I work for nobody but my legacy and my readers now."


I have been wondering with renewed energy what I have been doing here for the past six and a half years. From the morning I began writing this series of series, Summer Solstice 2017, I have been dedicated to producing stories every blesséd morning. This occupation has almost always been refreshing. I do not very often consider this occupation all that onerous. I have been learning—perhaps even teaching myself—that my muse proves reliable. When I ask, she delivers. I seldom even need to insist. But now, as I look at this next to last week of my twenty-sixth series, I suppose I'm bumping into one of those Is That All There Is? Moments where I feel compelled to question purpose. I began wanting to describe my manner of living, whatever that might mean, and have ended up creating an overwhelming result, something on the order of ten thousand pages. It would take me over two and a half weeks just to read through the twenty-six manuscripts. I have copyedited only a few of them to completion. Am I destined one day to cease producing new stories so that I  might focus my attention on the previously finished ones? I wonder what anyone might glean from reading them. I wonder what I might glean from rereading them.

I suspect my questions amount to completely normal ones, for nobody ever knows the ramifications of anything they're doing from the beginning. We begin in innocence—necessary and beneficial—and work toward experience. We should rightfully wonder along the way what we originally intended, whether that intention holds and has proven satisfying. As I back into the longest night of the year, my path should rightfully seem obscured. I had no real reason to believe that I knew what I was doing. I might feel perfectly free to change my justification along the way. I work for nobody but my legacy and my readers now.

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BackToWork

backtowork
Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen:
Laundresses Carrying Back Their Work (1898)


"It might qualify as an obsession."


With one exception, whatever else I'm doing, I know what I should be doing instead. I should be doing my work instead of whatever else I'm doing unless, of course, I'm doing my work. I might be obsessed, though I confess I do not know how to do otherwise. My work calls me, and it punishes me if I do not heed it. I fear offending whichever god granted me my work, for I do not feel as though I chose it. Maybe it chose me. However it came to be, it owns me. It jealously guards my time, scrutinizing how I allocate it. I, therefore, inhabit one of two states. I'm either doing my work or playing hooky from doing my work. Doing my work does not satisfy any obligation I might hold to be doing my work. It's not worthy of reward, just not subject to chastisement.

When doing my work, I do not feel haunted by ghosts pulling me back into my work.

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PublicService

publicservice
Unknown: Washington swearing the oath of office (nineteenth century)


" … the only thing standing between any of us and absolute tyranny."


The Muse returned from Port Commissioner Training with new information. She'd won the election with less than a complete understanding of what she was running for then. The office had a rough job description, but then job descriptions, by long tradition, barely scratch the surface of describing actual responsibilities. Historical precedent tends to expand or contract the delineated scope, and simple preference can profoundly influence what such jobs entail. She could become an activist or a pacifist, depending. The training presented legal boundaries and explained implications. The notion that candidates cannot be required to satisfy certain conditions proved to be among the more surprising revelations.

Candidates have always been required to meet two broad conditions: that they are a citizen of a certain age of the municipality within which they intend to serve and that they swear to uphold the constitution of that same place.

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TheBus

thebus
Jack Gould: Untitled (passengers on crowded city bus) (c. 1950)


"I wonder if we'll follow through."


Elizabeth, the other car I primarily use as a pickup, even though it's a luxury Lexus, was in the shop but ready to get picked up. I decided that I would, for a change if for nothing else, hop TheBus down to the shop. I could have walked it in reasonably short order, but it was a drizzly morning, and after last week's traveling, I needed something different. The Muse said she could just drop me off, but where was the adventure in that? I invited her to ride TheBus with me instead, if only to see how some of her new constituents lived. She accepted.

The Muse and I are staunch bus veterans, each hopping busses through most of our first professional careers.

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ShowingUp

showingup
Jan Toorop: The Arrival of the Muses of Art at Architecture (1890)


" … tomorrow will bring yet another opportunity for selfless service."

The ArmCandy role requires more than merely SuitingUp. The successful incumbent must also ShowUp at a surprising variety of functions, many innocuous and many others substantive. Evenings, once reserved for rest and recuperation, become crowded with invitations. Organizations of every stripe send invitations where the Commissioner simply must appear. Her appearances with ArmCandy in tow might improve her visibility and effectiveness. I'm expected to show up invisible, sans obvious agenda, and do little more than whisper encouragement and questions. I do not have to pay attention to the proceedings. Indeed, it might be better for all involved if I reserve comment, for I'm no fool. I carry decades of group process experience and can determine when another cluster fuck's emerging. It's not the ArmCandy's job to intervene, though. I can mutely watch or quietly excuse myself when the proceedings turn too dicey.

Of course, I'm not merely The Muse's ArmCandy.

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SuitingUp

suitingup
North German: Infantry Armor (c. 1550-60)


" … may I please remember who I've been and who I became …"


Starting to explore the positives associated with my new role as ArmCandy, I experienced a sensation from the past when dressing for an outing: the feeling of truly fine shirt fabric against my skin. I surrendered my wardrobe once it became moot. When I no longer had any reason to be SuitingUp in the morning, I reverted to more practical choices. My three-piece suits fell into disuse. Even my sports coats moldered in the furthest back corner of my closet. Most eventually gravitated toward a donation bin at a local Goodwill® shop and were soon forgotten. Not so easily discarded, though, was that sensation of SuitingUp. I missed that ritual, that reassuring sequence of unfolding the laundered shirt and putting on those pants, choosing a tie to match, and filling my pockets with wallet, comb, and handkerchief. I wouldn't leave until I'd passed muster with everything in place. I felt as though I was donning my armor in preparation for combat. I probably was.

In the evening, I'd reverse the sequence.

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ArmCandy

armcandy
Paul Giambarba: The Withered Arm (c. 1960)


" … practicing holding out my pinkie finger just so …"


The Muse was invited to attend a Port Commissioner Orientation session as her first official function in her newly elected role. This would undoubtedly be the first of innumerable functions she will attend after she's sworn into office later this month. Like many elected offices, the Commissioner's role might be fairly classified as functionary since it involves performing official functions, often publicly. These will include endless lunches and official dinners, many of which the spouse has traditionally been obligated to attend. As the first female Port Commissioner in this body's history, The Muse drags along her form of First Husband rather than the more traditional aging bride. The beauty accompanying the functionary beast has traditionally been colloquially referred to as ArmCandy, a role I have now been conscripted to play.

I was not elected to the ArmCandy position.

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Writing Summary For The Week Ending 12/07/2023

ws12072023
Jean Jacques de Boissieu: The Public Scribe (1790)


To Thrive On The Absurdity
They refer to them as old haunts not because the present revisits the past there but because what's now past was present then, and we who were present were ghosts then, just as certainly as we continue to be ghosts today. Consider how much of our presence hung around on that stage to be revisited later. (Nada!) This writing week's revelation revealed simply that concept, as I attempted to explain in GhostVisiting. I barely qualify as a being, just about as much as I ever qualified as a had-been or as a has-been, either. I keep moving, hardly resting between infatuations, sincerely dreading each new attraction. I remain sincerely up to something of very little consequence. I almost exclusively accomplish the ethereal. I produce little material, rarely bothering to print off my production, that being both expensive and curiously redundant. My work should properly remain virtual, ghostly, and essentially immaterial. I amuse myself by making my keyboard click. I seem to thrive on the absurdity of this.

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ChildishThings

ChildishThings
Maxfield Parrish: Seein' Things (1904)


"I was once addicted to life …"


Aging seems to reduce into a process of weaning myself off earlier fixations, some of which managed to metastasize into genuine addictions while others never progressed beyond predilection. Of all the so-called skills I've acquired in this life, my begrudging ability to break entrenched behavior patterns amounts to my greatest superpower. I always initiated these terrible interventions under unadvantageous circumstances, often without a shred of evidence that I might succeed. I initially forced myself, no matter how necessary or desperate the effort. I never once wanted to grow up in that way, to finally face responsibility and make anything better. I was never courageous, never brave, though I admit that I sometimes ascribed success as the result of my dedication rather than desperation.

Meals were once a necessity.

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GhostVisiting

ghostvisiting
Albrecht Dürer: Descent of the Holy Ghost (c. 1510)


“I must be the ghost of my Christmases past …”


The Muse, my son Wilder, and I reverently stood in shock over my daughter's gravestone. The conflict inherent in seeing evidence of a member of the next generation gone took my breath. Whatever story I might have conjured to explain her absence these last two years and ten months resolved itself in granite, for there it was, the name my first wife Betsy and I had given our darling baby daughter, etched in stone, the stone of her maternal great grandmother with whom she shared the name Astrid and now her grave. I've always loved that name, and it so well complemented her first name, Heidi. Heidi Astrid, 1982 - 2021: was her presence already receding, or was ours just proceeding onward?

There are many reasons we pray that our children will outlive us here.

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GhostWriting

ghostwriter
Bartolomeo Pinelli:
The Letter-writer in Piazza Montanara in Rome
(19th century)


" … an utterly impossible aspiration …"


This week's excursion has taken us into territory I once inhabited, though seemingly several lifetimes ago. I have been experiencing real trouble distinguishing between now and then, and I'm finding that I revere the past more than the present. The present seems like a Fun House Mirror reflection of the familiar, similar but degraded, whatever the advertised improvement. The world has changed over the last fifty years but somehow failed to improve, for the replacements I find masquerading fall utterly flat when attempting to live up to even a distant shadow of my expectations. When home, continual exposure lessens this effect, though it's certainly still present. Traveling, I have only current sensory experience to compare with my expectations, so I live in continual discouragement.

I remember when because I still live there.

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Vexpectations

vexpectations
John Singer Sargent: Olive Trees, Corfu (1909)


" … just the sort of vigilance succeeding demands."


Much of whatever ends up constituting GoodNuff stems from expectations. It seems I can guarantee better-than-expected results by merely expecting things to turn out worse. While this focus might produce an Eeyore existence, it might reasonably assure that actual experience, aside from the self-induced expecting, reliably ends up being better than expected, if only because whatever else I might propose, the worse rarely results. More often, an outcome registers a meh on the grand scale of experience, neither great nor terrible, somewhere in the middle. The outcome might only sometimes register, given the swirl of experiences stemming from a swirl of expectations. Connections easily get lost and seem meaningless. Even when I fuss and fret, my anticipations might get lost in rounding on my monthly account statement. It sometimes pays to be inattentive.

Our drive from Portland to Sleaseattle proved almost effortless, even though I'd invested so much time dreading the experience.

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Dread

dread1
Cornelis Anthonisz:
Allegorie met Waarheid, Kennis, Haat en Vrees
[Allegory with Truth, Knowledge, Hatred, and Fear]

(1507 - 1553)

"I seem to chase off worst case scenarios …"


I prepare for each of my adventures by practicing Dread. Over my lifetime, I've fed myself so much anticipatory doom that it's a genuine marvel that I have somehow survived. I might have succumbed to the effects of pre-living my demise. My salvation might no longer be possible by any means. I might have doomed myself by conjuring visions of my end whenever I even consider engaging in anything. If we get what we expect, I should rightfully expect Hellfire and eternal damnation coming, for that's surely what I have been expecting, though every damned time so far, I've somehow sidestepped that sure and all but inevitable fate. I suppose that it's never too late to fail, but my long string of successes has so far delayed the reckoning. I feel certain each time, though, that this time, I might finally be destined to succeed in failing, and so I dread anew.

I invested much of the week before this latest excursion, denying it would happen.

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Hardworker

hardworker
Lewis Wickes Hine:
A View Of Workers In Ewen Breaker
Of Pennsylvania Coal Company
(1911)


"One might, with practice, even eventually become an EasyWorker sometimes."


Whatever the profession, in this culture, we expect every practitioner to be a self-proclaimed HardWorker. Hard work, as opposed to all the other kinds of work, seems to be an integral part of the much-touted and probably mythical American Way. If we're not killing ourselves to maintain our existence, our existence ain't worth much. HardWorker seems to be the essential marker of morally upstanding people, too, for lowlifes seem best characterized as slackers. HardWorkers have no time for lowlier pursuits. They're tuckered out by the end of their shifts.

Curiously, the HardWorker designation belongs to more than just the exhausted laborer.

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Writing Summary For The Week Ending 11/30/2023

ws11302023
After Raffaello Sanzio, called Raphael:
Seated Youth Writing in Book (17th/18th century)


I Am Not As Advertised
The freshly shaven yard looks more like a golf green than anything I should be walking on. I remind myself just how powerful I always was when wielding a simple fine-toothed steel-tined rake, standing up the grass, wrenching out tangles and moss. The soil underneath seems more moist than it's been since last December, with tiny, shiny red ornamental crabapples hiding in the crevices. A flight of geese startles from the nearby creekbed, fleeing into the past participle of themselves in the process: A Fluck of Geese. The scents and colors suggest Galacia, some Old World land between empires. I am a peasant at heart here, and may I always remain one. I tried to take comportment lessons, to dress in the proper colors for each season, and to become invisible in the hope of fitting in. Proper society struggles to permit requisite variety, and so always works to undermine its stated intention. I write, and so I eventually tend to embarrass myself. I am not as advertised, thank heavens, and am in no need of reform.

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Enormity

enormity
Charles Martin:
Gazette du Bon Ton, 1914 - No. 1, Pl. III:
L'Arbre Merveilleux / Costumes d'enfants pour Noël
(1914)


"The magic only ever comes after I feel overwhelmed enough… "


Once the leaves fall, the street opens up, appearing much broader and longer than during Spring or Summer. With winter closing fast, the world seems to be expanding. Its expectations stretch, too. I feel humbled by the sheer Enormity of the upcoming weeks. They seem irreducibly huge, and I feel incapable of coping with the expectations they bring. More threat than promise, the holiday season falls upon us, bringing a fresh set of obligations while we seem to have yet to greatly expand our capacities. These two hands will not become three regardless of the needs encountered. These two feet will slip when the street freezes. Socks have already become a mandatory part of the standard uniform again. I feel like Atlas, expected to hold the world on my shoulder, or Sisyphus, rolling the world uphill like a boulder, only for it to slip back toward the bottom again and again. It's Autumn for a reason.

I suspect that fresh challenges feel overwhelming for that reason.

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Indecision

indecision
Odilon Redon: Profile of Shadow (c. 1895)

"I'm still not doing anything except not deciding yet."


Growing up in the Inland Northwest provided ample opportunity for me to study the fine art of Indecision. I've seen innumerable books touting The Art Of Decision-Making, but I've seen none promoting its equally important opposite, for Indecision seems every bit as essential, if not more so, as its counterpart. Here, for instance, the winter weather patterns offer almost endless Indecision points. The Muse and I were planning to drive to the state's Western side. Which route should we take? In November, the mountain pass route rarely seems the best choice, for capricious snows and such complicate passage. The alternate route, down the vaunted Columbia Gorge, also offers complications with notorious winds and frequent weather changes. Two days out, Indecision rules, and while it might seem necessary to—just Decide, already!—the tenets of Indecision counsel otherwise.

In this culture, Indecision is widely considered the eighth mortal sin, following and resembling sloth, for Indecision seems like nothing, and nothing's never considered a viable choice.

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Conventions

convention
Attributed to Firuz Mirza Nusrat al-Dawla:
Practice Calligraphy [Siah Mashkh] (c. 1850-1886)


"Writers create by means of surface imperfections."


Each profession and every practice holds certain principles and actions as necessary and sufficient. We, especially fellow practitioners, hold anyone claiming to practice a discipline responsible for exhibiting these skills. Innovation comes from flouting these rules, often at the cost of early adopters' reputations. Early in his career, the art establishment did not hold Matisse to be a very skilled painter. He flouted color Conventions, for instance. The earliest Impressionists couldn't paint straight, apparently incapable of reproducing with photographic integrity. The earliest abstractionists were considered crazy, mainly because the orthodoxy could not comprehend the artists' Conventions, which were still evolving. Eventually, Matisse came to exemplify an evolved set of Conventions, as did the impressionists and abstractionists, though their Conventions, too, were later flouted by upstart practitioners.

Paul Lynch, who won this year’s coveted Booker Prize, declared, “Well, there goes my hard-won anonymity,” as he accepted his prestigious prize.

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ThePalouse

thepalouse
Russell Lee: Sign. Whitman County, Washington.
The Palouse country is most famous for its extensive wheatland

(1941)

" … dense fog settled around us."


Just to the north of this valley lies a rare country on this continent and in this world. Loess hills define Palouse Country, an area South of Spokane and West of Idaho, East of I-90, and North of the confluence of The Snake and Columbia Rivers, something less than a hundred miles square. Within this space lies considerable space, as if wide open was reimagined and arrayed in three full dimensions. Within its confines, tiny towns and isolated wheat stations dot a rolling landscape where wheat and lentils grow, and some of the finest barns anywhere stand. Driving through ThePalouse has always been a cleansing, a new beginning, a small vacation into another world.

I can't imagine ThePalouse when I'm not embedded within it.

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Trajectories

trajectory
Giorgio Ghisi?, After Giulio Romano:
The Prison (16th century)


" … Trajectories upon which I warmly rely."


This week, I stumbled upon a short video of astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson describing what science has discovered about the afterlife. He was brief and unemotional as he explained that neither biology nor physics has anything to say about the subject. Neither field has uncovered any evidence that such a state exists in nature. Of course, other fields exist. Theology, for instance, seems to have little to say besides afterlife commentary, though different branches have produced different stories. Most theologies at least agree that such a state exists, though they, too, lack the observable proof any physical science requires. Theology and related fields inject a property science refuses to employ: belief. They circle their square by insisting that their perspective only works; indeed, it was only ever intended to work for those exhibiting steadfast and unshakeable belief in it. Their philosophy seems to sum to, "If you believe in it, it will manifest."

I have long jealously admired the facility with which true believers navigate this world.

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NaughtKnowing

naughtknowing
Pieter van der Heyden
after
Pieter Bruegel, the elder
published by
Hieronymus Cock:
Big Fish Eat Little Fish (1557)


“I hope somebody influential is praying for us.”


The cobbler and I inhabit different worlds. As I appreciated him for fixing that pair of boots, I asked him how long he thought he might continue practicing his craft. "Well, I turn seventy next week," he replied. "It mostly depends upon how long the government will let me continue." What followed left me gasping. The most remarkable spew of hearsay and innuendo I'd ever heard described a world I was not familiar with, one where our government conspires against innocent shop owners to undermine their lifestyles. "That carbon tax should have been put to a vote. It's illegitimate and will eventually raise the gas price by a dollar a gallon!" As if that would be a bad thing. How else could our government convince people to use less gas if it doesn't raise the price of it?

After The Muse and I made our awkward escape, I realized that I'd witnessed Confirmation Bias in action.

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Writing Summary For The Week Ending 11/23/2023

ws11232023
Pierre-Paul Prud'hon: Dr. Thomas Dagoumer (1819)


The Fussing Seems Eternal
I often wonder what benefit my writing provides. I engage in the sometimes requited belief that engaging might eventually accomplish something, though the progress most often seems slow and almost begrudging. Some weeks, I could swear nothing happened. Other weeks seem filled with insights and other visitations. This writing week represented a transition from a period where it might have still been possible to deny the encroaching winter into when that would no longer seem plausible. Denial or acceptance seem the stark choices. I usually tend toward choosing both, investing without going all in and denying without constructing much of a believable argument against. I often feel in suspense, between, impending. This week, I seem to have successfully transitioned from before into now, from past into my next future. I have a scant month remaining before this GoodNuff Series will be finished. I suspect that this series has been progressing normally. Once I've cleaned up the leaves, I move on to other fussing. The fussing, though, seems eternal.

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Prep

prep1
Attributed to Paolo Antonio Barbieri:
Kitchen Still Life (c. 1640)


"Bless all those less fortunate than us."


The Muse and I celebrate holidays primarily through Prep. The actual feast always turns out okay, but it takes so little time compared to completing the steps leading up to the sitting. Prep typically starts weeks in advance, with The Muse initiating some of the effort. In between, there's much gathering and sorting, considering and deciding, baking and boiling. There were times, much earlier in our relationship, when all this effort seemed unique. Now, it's taken the form of ritual, still unique enough but also terribly familiar. We solve few mysteries between larder and table, besides the pedestrian kind of finding key ingredients like
Giblets. We're not interested in what The Post and Times suggest we include on our menu, for we're observing traditions stretching back generations. And, no, there will be no Jello® salad served.

I say "we" when I mean "she” for The Muse performs the bulk of the Prep.

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Fogging

fogging
Winslow Homer: The Fog Warning (1905 - 1915)


" … remind us what we cannot see …"


I hail from the country Rudolf The Red-Nosed Reindeer must have hailed from. Come November, and through into the following year, we experience deep, sometimes freezing fogs. We locals curse their arrival as our nearby neighbors enjoy clear skies. We valley-dwellers know the curse. We lose our horizon. We lose our stars. We cannot see to the end of our own block. We drive as if suspended within space and time, both more visible than useful. We hear of the Fog of War but know The Fog of Everything, for fog becomes our baseline experience through those darkening weeks. We have The Fog of Breakfast, The Fog of Lunch, The Fog of Supper, as well as The Fog of Midnight and The Fog of Noon. Veterans have spent at least one night in Seattle after their late-night flight was forced back due to limited landing visibility here. We could see clear down to the ground but not straight ahead. Fog messes with your head.

I'm trying a fresh attitude toward our hazy resident this season.

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Hexpectations

hexpectations
Jean-Baptiste Oudry:
Quizzical Bird; verso: blank (18th century)


"You might not ever be the master of your fate …"


I began my rounds confident that my mission would fail, for I had declared the unlikelihood of success as a part of my mission statement. I complained that the likelihood of finding Giblets here, so near the end of every supply chain, would very likely be tiny. Instead, I insisted upon eventual failure to maintain my haughty worldview that I would be suffering, doing without, nobly bereft. Imagine my surprise when I found my Giblets on my first stop! I'd imagined a course that would take me from shop to shop, allocating a couple of hours to the effort. Immediate success spoiled my whole premise. I guess I should have felt delighted, but I was pissed instead. I came prepared to sacrifice, not succeed. Under those conditions, success sucked!

I had not thought about this very much before this fresh experience.

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Giblets

giblets
Harry Annas:
Untitled [two men holding turkeys] (c. 1950)


"We're willing to go through Hell to receive that blessing."


The Muse and I start our annual search for Giblets as the holidays approach. When we lived closer to the beginning than the end of this economy's supply chain, our search was never in vain, for supplies of everything seemed more certain. We'd often drive a hundred miles to find some fresh citron, a point of considerable seasonal frustration, but Giblets were common and widely available then. Here, nearer the Center of the Universe but further from the source of much, supplies are such that it seems more a matter of luck than anything when we manage to assemble our seasonal essentials. It would be much simpler if we had ever managed just to lie down and accept the inevitable homogenization of even our most heartfelt celebrations. Had we settled for whatever we quickly found, we would have eliminated our seasonal running around. Still, as entropy continues trying to eradicate all tradition, it's gotten to the point that we take it as a personal challenge to continue our mission unto perdition if necessary. It sometimes seems essential.

I might refer to as Giblets any picky addition anyone deems necessary to properly celebrate.

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TheRains

therains
Helen Hyde: In the Rain (1898)


"I might just as well be hibernating."


All the week before, I worked like a man possessed, for word on the street predicted their arrival. There would be the time before and then the time after, and I had work to complete before the time before ended. I admit that mine was a bogus alarm, for nothing would be won or lost whether or not I successfully prepared. I sometimes construct phony deadlines to goose myself into action. I suppose everyone does. Still, my concern seems real. I drive myself. I exceed my capacities and work through my lunch, exhausting myself as if I was making a difference—an as if that seems to work regardless of whether that difference matters. I cleared the yard of leaves before TheRains arrived, satisfying myself and maybe saving some additional effort. A soggy leaf pile, the approximate volume of a Volkswagen bus, hugs the curb out front. It seems like the largest on the block, a point of considerable pride for me and my underlying bogosity.

In my youth, I often constructed deadlines for myself.

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Leavfing

leavfing
Karl Gustav von Amling: Autumn (1698)


" … really looking like home."


I harvest a prodigious crop of leaves each autumn. I take great pride in scraping my yard bare before the snow starts falling and in time for the final municipal leaf collection. I think of this work as a civic responsibility, but I actually do it for myself, for no other activity provides the opportunity to practice one of my minor masteries. I'm very good at raking leaves. Leaf raking can be a frustrating business, for they're surprisingly heavy, and even when they fall light and airy, they cannot be meaningfully condensed and must be removed in tiny stages. A tarpload of wet leaves weighs hundreds of pounds and feels like dragging a carcass across the lawn. A steady pace succeeds where brute force fails. Leave-taking tries patience.

It's chess played on a grander scale, requiring strategy and tenacity in more or less equal measure.

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Writing Summary For The Week Ending 11/16/2023

ws11162023
Karl Bauer:
Portrait of the Writer Stefan George
(19th-20th century)


When It Made Me Special, I Was Less For It
I once worked in a place I had to commute to by airplane. My work week involved predawn departures and late evening arrivals with a corporate apartment where I could never remember whether the refrigerator needed milk. I spread myself thinly then, continually leaving, saying goodbye more than I ever said, "Hi!" I learned to live alone. I almost became self-reliant but failed the exit exam. I often felt empty-handed, dependent upon resources I'd left on the other end of my commute. Traveling now dredges up those memories of when it mattered to me that I got upgraded when I'd accumulated more frequent flier miles than Croesus ever did, when I’d garnered recognition. Now, I'm relegated to the last boarding group, hopeful to be the last one on board. I'm assigned the window seat without a window or the last row, where the seats can't recline. I hope for a fussy baby nearby. I never reclined my seatback, always wary of inconveniencing anyone behind me, even if the person seated before me wasn't so thoughtful. I travel to remember why I stay home. I see it as a necessary evil, a means to another end, a mere bookend. When it made me special, I was less for it.

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FinishedSketches

sketchingfinish
Claude-Emile Schuffenecker:
Study for "Landscape with Figure and Houses" (c. 1891)


" … precisely what she's so confidently projected …"


The Muse figures that, based upon remaining ballots and her win rate so far, once the final ballot count finishes, she will have garnered 8,126 votes, precisely the number she projected she'd need to win before she even began her campaign.

In April, The Muse roused me from whatever more critical activity I was doing to sequester me in the largely unused front upstairs room.

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SeparationDance

separationdance
Artist unknown: The Dancing Fox (1766)


"By this time tomorrow …"


By the final day of an excursion, the new has worn off. Discovery, which dominated the first days, no longer rules. We know how to get from here to everywhere. We've stumbled upon enough to fully satisfy our objectives yet we still have a day to fill. We've grown listless, muscles remembering the first day's exuberance. We're sanguine, almost indifferent. We barely manage to feed ourselves.

We fill in with the remaining items we promised ourselves we'd see, but these were never our primary purpose, and they only partially satisfied.

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Glimpsing

glimpsing
Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas:
Singer with a Glove (c. 1878)


" … what should I make of that?"


Gurus insist that emptying the mind encourages these experiences, though I, who've never once managed to quiet my chattering monkeys, notice perhaps more than my fair share. You know what I'm speaking of here: the Glimpsing of the extraordinary lurking within the otherwise most ordinary situation. A wrinkle in space or time impresses upon your consciousness, producing a glimpse of the profound when you had no intention of stumbling into any such encumbrance there. You were just going about your ordinary business when the infinite intruded, when beauty or profound truth or the eternal dropped in and left you breathless. Some of us experience this sensation more than others, or so we all seem to believe, though not one possesses any factual basis to hold this conviction. It might be that we're all constantly Glimpsing, that we need no special training to encourage it other than perhaps to remember to pay attention, though failing to pay attention seems to encourage it, too.

Traveling tends to increase the number of Glimpsing events, perhaps because, out of ordinary circumstances, more things just qualify as eye-catching, as unusual enough to attract this sort of attention.

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Museuming

museuming
John Singer Sargent:
Venetian Glass Workers (1880–82)


" … none of them the one the artist might have intended."


As The Muse and I waited to board our flight out of The Valley Near The Center Of The Universe, I used that idle time to check messages. Like you, I maintain a tenuous relationship with my iPhone. I utterly rely upon it while it continually disappoints my expectations. I often fail to receive notice upon receipt of a text message, so I usually go for days before discovering that I received one. People have come to use texting more often than calling, which means that attempts to contact me almost always fail to reach me at first. The worst-case scenario involves a real emergency where the informing party texts me. A week or so later, I might saunter into my Messages app to find a smoldering ember remaining from some three-alarm fire.

This text had come early the previous morning, informing me that my new lenses were in.

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SmallestTown

smallesttown
William Merritt Chase: A City Park (c. 1887)


"It sure feels like home."


Though I hail from a small city, I do not even pretend to represent the interests of small towns or their people, for mine's not the smallest or the largest town in that category. No, the SmallestTown I've ever visited must be New York City, for it represents everything a small town or city should properly embody. I know it does appear to exhibit a somewhat inhibiting size, which would seem, at first glance, to disqualify it as if not a smallish place, then certainly as the smallest. Yet I insist New York City is the perfect example of the SmallestTown I've so far found. I won't pretend that other contenders might exist, but I will insist that I stopped searching after visiting here and discovered perhaps its most closely held secret: its size.

You see, this place is not a single place but a series of tightly nested and uncontested neighborhoods, each featuring remarkably few people, each of whom understands their place.

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Reveling

reveling
Johann Sadeler: De mensheid voor de zondvloed
[Humanity before the flood] (1581 - 1585)


"Excess is not synonymous with success …"


In New York City, to celebrate The Muse's campaign victory, we're faced with how we might go about Reveling in the success. The traditional wine, women, and song won't work with The Muse involved, so we settle for wine, dinner, and song. The musicals we're scheduled to see should adequately cover the song part of our Reveling. We discover that we've booked a hotel on the fabled Tin Pan Alley, an auspicious sign if ever I've encountered one—the wine we handle with a decent Aglianico, purchased in a lovely little Italian bistro. We're seated in a basement annex, perfectly out of the usual distracting noise and bustle, with a waitress whose accent I cannot begin to wade through. Fortunately, The Muse makes sense of her sentences, and we settle in for a celebratory feast.

After a day of fasting on the cross-country flight, we're famished.

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Writing Summary For The Week Ending 11/09/2023

ws11092023
Stefano Della Bella: Boy Writing (17th century)


I Wonder If I Ever Leave
I should be packing, but here I am writing again. The Muse and I intend to spend a few days away to kickstart the recovery from six dog months of campaigning. The transitions seem the most troublesome, for they offer little to distract one from all that's suddenly missing. The routine no longer needed, and no replacement routine ready yet; we figure we'll be better off far away from our usual surroundings, wandering. I continue to hold my precious patterns, writing rather than packing, condensing departure into a frantic few minutes. I expect to forget something important, but not my writing, my constant companion, my one abiding obligation. I do not know what I would be doing if I was not describing something. I take no vacations from my vocation. I take my obligations with me when I go. I wonder if I ever leave.

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Palning

palning
Koloman Moser: "Golden Butterflies" wallpaper design
from the portfolio "Surface Decoration"
(1902)


"… better to disappoint ourselves by sequencing our desires  …"


Planning for a few days’ respite in New York City, I again encounter my embarrassing relationship with planning. Though I spent the bulk of my working life actively engaged in planning, I have always been lousy at it. I might have been attracted to the activity merely because I performed it so poorly. I might have mistakenly believed practice would eventually resolve this increasingly glaring shortcoming, but it hasn't. I worked my way up the career ladder instead, moving on from participating in creating plans into teaching others how to do what I had clearly never mastered. I might have even risen to the peak of my ineptness there, embodying every element of the infamous Peter Principle, rising to inhabit the pinnacle of my incompetence. My heritage and legacy stand there, a testament to man's inherent inhumanity, how one might embrace their inability rather than master something for themselves.

This might be the most human trick, the call of desire muffling reasoning.

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ComingUpRoses

cominguproses
Koloman (Kolo) Moser: Woman’s Head with Roses (1899)


"That sweet scent sure seems familiar …"


In the 1959 Broadway musical Gypsy, songwriter Jule Styne and lyricist Stephen Sondheim created a song they intended to sound as if it had been a common idiom for ages. They succeeded with a repurposed melody and Sondheim's remarkable turn of the phrase, creating what would become star Ethel Merman's signature song, Everything's Coming Up Roses. When first introduced to the tune, show director Jerome Robbins asked, "Everything's coming up Rose's what?" Fortunately, Sondheim accurately predicted that nobody would be asking that question after hearing the song, which has since become one of the standard soundtracks accompanying success, so when The Muse appeared to win her election for Port Commissioner, this
melody popped into my head and hasn't yet left. It's become the earworm for what promises to be a new age here.

Some days, everything shifts. Something of actual consequence happens, and whatever remnants of any odd old status quo cannot make the shift.

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JudgementDay

judgementday
John F. Peto: Lights of Other Days (1906)


"That difference will not be undone."


Six months ago, The Muse began her campaign by researching histories of local campaigns to discover what had gone wrong and right so that she might focus upon elements likely to help her get elected. She feigned disinterest, insisting that she was just weighing the pros and cons to decide, but she had already decided to run. Her only questions were about how to productively pursue that end. She registered as a candidate on the first day registration opened. She rented a post office box, set up a bank account, and set about designing her campaign's look and feel, and while she had help, she decided. She chided me into volunteering as her campaign manager, a role I later renamed Campaign Mismanager, a title that better described my contribution. Please make no mistake: I played the role of placeholder. She managed her own affairs.

There should have been a rule that spouses couldn't serve in any formal role on any campaign because a couple's peccadillos couldn't help but go on public display whenever that occurred.

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Oven

oven
Jan Joris van Vliet: Baker (1635)


" … the answer approaches the infinite."


I never was anybody's baker. Oh, I have proven capable of roasting the odd chicken at three hundred fifty degrees for an hour and slowly braising a pan of pork cheeks on a bed of seasonal veg for longer, but the more intricate recipes I leave to The Muse. Bread has always been beyond me, for instance. I've convinced myself that my shortcoming stems from my dyscalculia, my inherent inability to perform specific calculations, for an Oven operates on a complicated table of equivalents, variables requiring understanding to balance. To complicate this calculus further, The Muse bought a Combi Oven Christmas before last. This Oven is an Oven on steroids. It adds an additional heat source (top, bottom,
and back), steam, and a fan to create conditions utterly unanticipatable by this man. If I fly blind operating a standard Oven, I fly comatose with this one.

I ironically call this Oven my EZBake Oven in homage to the light bulb-operated one my sisters had when we were kids.

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DarknessSavingsTime

darknesssavingstime
Ben Shahn:
Untitled [Cherry Street, New York City] (1933-1935)


"To not do so seems inhuman."


I am told that I have sometimes accepted change as if I were a mature adult. Not often, mind you, or necessarily memorably, but I apparently have some track record. Still, nobody's surprised when I react to some change by kicking and screaming; obviously, I'm not always able to help myself. The progress of humankind seems especially ragged sometimes, so it's little surprise that my maturity fades in and out accordingly. I, for instance, have always considered Daylight Savings Time to be humankind's finest invention, mainly because it had no moving parts yet carried a profound positive influence. It required compliance, nothing more, to work its magic, and it managed to achieve that compliance without resorting to marshaling tactics. People obeyed without more than minor grumbling. Everyone benefitted!

So it's understandable when backsliding brings out the worst in me.

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Between

between
Alfred Stieglitz: The Net Mender (1894)


" … when all finally seems right enough with this world."


I find myself Between passions. The Muse's campaign all but over, my contribution finished, and my next passion pending; I feel at more or less loose ends. I presently have no particular end in mind. Not even our impending excursion to New York City interests this homebody. I move listlessly, as if little matters, probably because very little seems to matter at this moment. I understand that I'm supposed to be actively engaging, appreciating my good health while I still have it, flaunting my lack of physical complaints. I have no complaints. Disappointments haven't tainted my outlook. I've harbored no grudges. I've not been wronged. Nor have I taken it upon myself to change this world, however much it might scream for someone's intervention. Archimedes taught me everything I understand about leverage, and I feel certain there's no fulcrum sufficient to change even a willing world, and ours doesn't appear to be all that willing to me.

I rise at my usual time but lengthen my preparation.

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Writing Summary For The Week Ending 11/02/2023

ws11022023
Dodge Macknight: A Narrow Way, Montpezat (1885)


More Complex … Not In Need Of Further Simplification
I am increasingly convinced that none of us understand what's happening around us. We unknowingly speculate. The purpose of civilization sometimes seems to protect us from knowing the purpose of our civilization, for it seems in odd moments to be conspiring against us, against us ever understanding our purpose here. It insists, for instance, that we focus out there, as if out there might hold the secrets to ourselves. We, in turn, might counter with introspection, insisting that our essence might be better defined in absentia of our context. In practice, we might be both-and animals, neither feral nor conditioned, neither learned nor especially ignorant. These transition weeks tend to highlight these inherent contradictions. We aspire to be able to declare some simple definitions. We tend to eventually learn that we were both more complex than that and certainly not in need of further simplification.

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Change

change
Dodge Macknight: Rain (19th-20th century)

"The living actively practice forgetfulness …"


"And if you achieved that, how would you know?" My consulting clients always struggled with this question, for wanting seems an inherently subjective experience while describing aches for more objective specificity. A raft of difficulties always emerged whenever I asked this question, and, indeed, I never knew how to answer it, either, for it teeters on the edge of Fundamentally Undecidable. It might not matter how anyone answers. It mattered more that someone struggled to respond, for a deeper understanding can't hardly help but come from the struggle to answer. I asked the question to encourage insight more than a definitive answer, anyway. Rarely would any client produce an answer they found completely satisfying. Inducing that dissatisfaction might have always been my deeper purpose in asking, for there are few things worse than a cock-sure client who believes that they'll know change when they see it. We might all be much better off accepting inherent ambiguity than precisely knowing. Few future things benefit from precise proposals.

I knew, or at least strongly suspected, that we would not need much specification before beginning.

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Effolution

effolution
François Bernier:
La Liberté, soutenue par la Raison,
protège l’Innocence et couronne la Vertu
[Liberty, Supported by Reason,
Protects Innocence and Crowns Virtue]

(1793)


" … just buy a replacement whenever their dreams need repair."


This culture believes in positive progression, perhaps above all else. Our future has always been destined to be better than our parents. Our sons will be better off than we ever were. Whether through evolution, revolution, or simple propulsion, we would move ever forward, ever onward, upward, and away. While this notion might represent reality across decades, generations, or centuries, the actual on-the-ground experience of these -volutions tends to be much messier than expected. We didn't, for instance, evolve from Neanderthal to human in a single generation. Many trials and inevitable errors emerged. I suspect this shift involved all of the usual struggles our cerebral models tend to ignore. We crawl forward more than march and might move backward on the way. Straight and narrow paths exclusively belong to myths.

As a kid, I was fed a steady diet of myth.

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WryDing

wryding
Pierre-Quentin Chedel:
Le Maître d'école [Writing School ] (18th century)


"That's how I use the English language."


I cannot rightfully claim to feel proud of my profession. Indeed, I cannot even rightfully proclaim to have a profession. I fancy myself a writer. I trade in writing or WryDing, as I might more accurately describe it. It can't qualify as a profession because it has never really amounted to anything. It's never translated into something even vaguely resembling a living. Over my lifetime, my WryDing has produced a deficit, a record kept exclusively in red ink, revenue never once exceeding expenses. Were it a business, it would have been shuttered ages ago, and its proprietor would have shuffled off to some other field or wisely retired. The usual rules for comportment, investment strategies, and civil niceties don't seem to apply. A terribly narrow set of general guidelines apply instead: Keep WryDing.

Should a day slip by without at least a little transcribing, identity crumbles, for WryDing demands full attention.

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SuperImpositioning

superimpositioning
Edward Hopper: American Landscape (1920)


"Old campaigners never die …"


A point comes in every political campaign when the election process enters the quantum realm, most prominently during that excruciatingly brief period when both candidates have won. After the mail-in ballots drop but before votes are counted, Schrödinger manages the ballot box. That box holds both victory and defeat without definitively disclosing which outcome will ultimately manifest. There's nothing a candidate or an electorate can do to influence an outcome that's already moved out of their hands. The results exist in superposition, both-and rather than either-or. However, by the evening of election day, their quantum state will finally resolve after a frustrating fortnight of SuperImpositioning, the supreme imposition not knowing induces. The Muse has fliers remaining but little means to influence voters now. Many already voted, one way or another, and those that haven't voted become increasingly less influenceable, especially since it's an off-year election featuring only local races. Ballot return rates have historically measured in the low two digits regardless, yielding an unpredictable race.

The die cast but yet to land, out of hand but not yet settled and countable.

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HighCrimes

highcrimes
Lucian and Mary Brown:
Untitled [little boy throwing baseball] (c. 1950)


"I do not believe in anything like learning to forget some things."


Premeditation aside, the worst crimes tend to be crimes of inadvertency. One backs into these infractions without malign intentions, often with innocent misconceptions. These crimes seem less committed than incurred. They're usually wrong-place-wrong-time shortfalls, actions that would have never happened save for convergent conditions. We walk on someone else's territory not to trespass but simply in passing. We might not even notice at first. Another might finally clue us in, or we clue ourselves in well after the fact. However we learn about our crime, we might well always remember it. Punishment might become a life-long haunting remembrance of the event, something no amount of penance or forgiveness will ever adequately compensate for committing or erase the accompanying sensations. We wound another by backing our bus over them without noticing.

These sins can never be undone.

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OddConvergences

OddConvergences
Arthur Rackham:
They'd such very odd heads and such very odd tails.
(1911)


" … just happened to be passing …"


One iron-clad rule I should never disobey pertains to disclosing the content of one of my PureSchmaltz Friday Zoom Chats. I began convening these weekly sessions early in the pandemic and continue them today. I originally designated them as dialogues without specific agenda, so they tend to contain whatever seems to need saying in that moment. I deliberately avoid recording the proceedings because I intend them to be the sort of conversation where you must have been there to understand whatever happened. Not to paint them too awfully mysterious, they feature the usual insightful comments about the weather interspersed with genuine genius. One must pay close attention some weeks to catch the genius, but it always emerges. I leave these sessions with a renewed appreciation of the brilliance lurking within everyday conversation. Something always happens.

To violate my iron-clad rule about my Zoom Chats, one of the participants said precisely that: Something Always Happens, in response to my reflection on my earlier posting,
Prabability, where I recounted the story of The Muse discovering that the gentleman seated next to her at a banquet was the nephew of her grade school bus driver, an OddConvergence.

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Inanity

inanity
Cornelis Dusart:
Violin Player Seated in the Inn (1685)


" … we washed up on this shore rather than some other."


My work seems either inane, insane, or both, probably both. It exemplifies doing the same thing and expecting different results, for I seem to follow the same damned process whatever I do. Not precisely the same steps, but viewed from a certain distance or altitude, it includes similar stages: from not knowing to finally dispatching, the flow varies little. Sure, the results seem different every time. This story never existed before this moment and will never appear in anything near to this form again. I do not plagiarize from myself, not yet, anyway. However, I can imagine a day when, steadfastly focusing on my rut, I invent an utterly unoriginal story, a mimeographed copy of some earlier one. This could happen, if only due to the similarities in my process.

Creativity turns out to be different from what it promised.

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Writing Summary For The Week Ending 10/26/2023

ws10262023
John Simmons: Window Writing, Chicago (1969)


Odds Might Not Matter
At times in my past, I still believed that I might get away with something. I suspected that I was only fooling myself but still engaged as if I might be wrong, that my life might be crafted for a song without hard labor, without undue or undeserved suffering. I found no convenient backdoor to anything, though, because stuff just happens. I'm uncertain if I believe in karma, for I've seen too many innocents visited with undeserved curses. I prefer to believe in a benevolent God, though I suspect she's at best indifferent. I can't not care deeply, though, often more for others than for myself. After almost a lifetime of surprises, I've practically lost the need to succeed. I do not expect my predictions to come true. I don't buy lottery tickets, either. I write for reasons other than pleasing anyone, often even myself. I might write to let an indifferent God know I was here, producing against insurmountable odds. The odds might not matter if I play to achieve something other than winning something. This is, after all, the letting go season.

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EmptyAir

EmptyAir
Camille Pissarro:
Woman Emptying a Wheelbarrow (1880)


"The hunter dreams of tomorrow's hunt …"


I had been steadily canvassing through a difficult precinct—streets with gravel verges instead of sidewalks, long distances between porches—and settling into the by-then familiar sweaty collar and yoke when The Muse called. She'd finished her video call and was ready to meet up with me to finish canvassing this latest Turf. I disclosed my location and predicted where I'd be fifteen minutes later before continuing to drop campaign literature on those increasingly rural porches. She arrived on time and parked in a turnout so we could confer. As usual, the software misbehaved, complicating our synching up. I proposed that she drive around to those places I'd passed up because the houses were too far from the main road, and she couldn't seem to find which houses I referred to. In frustration, I pleaded with her to at least deliver a sign to one homeowner who'd requested one. She needed literature I couldn't spare, so I passed the key to the other car where I'd left my excess. She drove away in some frustration, and I continued dropping fliers.

A mile later, she showed up again, explaining that her mailing had hit mailboxes that morning, so that canvassing might be too much information that day.

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ButtoningDown

buttoningdown
Ann Nooney: Closing time (1937-1942)


"I wonder if he'll ever discover the secret."


Eventually, every inevitable comes, every denial fails, and time slinks on. Even the once-endless Summer, gone to Autumn over a month ago, also ends. The first frost arrives with the news of the first frost's arrival, for it sucks the final sense that we might make it to Thanksgiving without regrets, without forfeiting anything. The slow Summer builds, gardens finally grown to blossom and fruit still look as though they might last forever. Some neighbors pre-emptively pull their impatiens, geraniums, and petunias, assassinating offspring to deny the assassin the satisfaction of freezing them out. I'll collect our corpses once they're well-wilted and ready for composting.

The Muse pulled her summer garden, cucumbers, tomatoes, and peppers, picked over and uprooted.

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Insensibility

insensibility
Designed and executed by Florence Elizabeth Marvin:
Crazy Quilt with Animals (1886)


" … praying for deliverance."


We each possess gifts more or less unique to us. None of us were produced with cookie cutters. We're each different and different in non-obvious ways. We look deceptively similar, which can confuse even the most patient and otherwise understanding, but we seem to be most deceptively dissimilar. Diversity, lately the hobgoblin of conservative commentators, might be inescapable and uniformity unlikely regardless of how anyone might otherwise insist. We are different.

Try to design a one-size-fits-all experience, and you'll most likely fail.

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Prabability

prabability
George Baxter: I Don't Like It! (19th century)


We parse our world with probabilities. We ask, "What was the likelihood?" without considering whether we're dealing with a situation where probability might rule, for its domain does not seem as universal or infinite on close investigation as it initially might. Not every event falls beneath the governance of the law of large numbers. Many carry an essentially zero likelihood of ever occurring, yet they still somehow manage to manifest. While doubtless only partially purposeful, our development probably also doesn't qualify as random, either. The likelihood of me becoming who I am today was zero when I was born, but then nobody could foresee very much of anything that would be coming, so one might wonder what sort of fiction anyone could have been predicting.

The unlikely seems commonplace.

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LapCat

lapcat
Inagaki Tomoo: Seated Cat (Shōwa period, 1926-1989)
Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Bequest of C. Adrian Rübel


" … get on with my morning. "


Max has grown into the LapCat I'd once imagined he might become. When trying out a potential new cat member of the family, I was deliberately very picky. My memories of prior cats colored my judgment, turning every candidate into an unlikely companion. Their coloring seemed wrong, or their temperament suspect. Of course, it should have been impossible to tell if a six-month-old kitten might grow into a tolerable companion, but I persisted in my gruff assessments. The Muse and the visiting Grand Otter returned from a visit to the cat shelter insisting that they'd found the replacement I had been seeking, so at their invitation, I accompanied them back to the place to test drive this latest contestant.

He was the right color and perhaps the proper temperament.

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WritingSummary For The Week Ending 10/19/2023

ws10192023
Carlo Marchionni or Pier Leone Ghezzi:
Caricature of Man Writing (n.d.)


A Familiar Place I Should Feel More Accustomed To
I might have finally run out of time. I'd felt a certain draining of my resources as if mice had invisibly invaded my pantry and begun quietly consuming my commodities. I hadn't noticed any particular shortages, though. The flour, sugar, and other stores seemed unviolated, yet I continued feeling shorted. This sense might have been pre-emptive, a feeling intended to prepare myself for a future loss, just as if such preemption were possible. I engage in many just-as-ifs these days. My days absolutely depend upon just this sort of speculation. I am predominantly a faith-based initiative. I move forward on rumors more often than facts. I never feel very confident about anything, even in retrospect. I do know, though, that the sun's arriving later every morning and leaving inexorably earlier every evening, leaving me in the dark, a familiar place I should feel more accustomed to than I seem.

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Amaficient

Amaficient
Johann Theodor de Bry:
De ezel op school [The Donkey At School] (1596)


"I never come close to producing my best until I leave the paycheck out of the effort."

In this culture, my culture, we speak glowingly of The Professional, as if it occupied the highest rung of some hierarchy of goodness. Amateur might be just fine but it's never the quality a professional might produce, as if making money, getting paid for performing, somehow sanctifies an effort. Interesting how most of the effort expended in this culture cannot be properly classified as professional. We cede our most important work to amateurs.

I was once a professional.

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Laming

laming
Cornelis Massijs: The Lame Dancers,
from La danse des estropiés, Plate 10
(1538)


" … bare trees and I will still be standing."


Every step I take might advance me, but it also somewhat hobbles me, for I remain far from an infinite resource. I experience wear and tear and might never fully recover from any exertion. I poison myself as I nourish myself, this dichotomy apparently indivisible. I can't have one without the other. This fact comes into sharper focus whenever I exert extraordinary effort. Though I do not immediately recognize this shift, my limits might have receded to well beneath my earlier edges. I remain focused on my goal while imagining employing the same old machinery. I seem increasingly an imaginary character, fueled by fiction and grounded by my creepingly prominent limitations. I can still stretch to excess, but only if I'm willing to pay the price. I’m almost always willing.

I hope to never engage with cautious circumspection.

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Foreboding

foreboding
François Bonvin: Woman at the Spinet (1860)


" … before conceding that I would not succeed."


Fall predictably brings Foreboding, for we all know what's coming. We do not know—we never know—precisely when, but we understand what's coming next. Summer, which seemed permanent while it lasted, left without notice. I always hold my faith in Summer until it's been well and truly betrayed by a chill wind or days of rain. I never believe in Fall, for it seems to move unreliably, some days hot and some days almost cold, an outlier day nearly eighty, an easily ignored forty early one morning. My sweatshirts creep back into my wardrobe. Socks seem necessary again. As I said, I know where this is going and feel powerless to suppress it.

As usual, my work's backed up.

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MightyMachine

mightymachine
Robert Bénard: Goldsmiths' Cast Machine (1771)


"It was always destined to become a one-and-done contraption."


An old Pennsylvania Dutch caution insists we're "too late schmart." Smarts emerge only after stupidity tuckers out, usually much nearer the end than any beginning. Whenever we set about trying to accomplish something, we first set about learning how we might achieve that desired end. We might spend much more than half the time we've allotted to accomplishing, quite literally not accomplishing, making mistakes and course correcting. We might not finally stumble upon the magic combination enabling accomplishing until very near the end of the pursuit. Once accomplished, the by then MightyMachine we assembled to achieve our end probably becomes moot. We seldom find ourselves in a position to accomplish the same thing again.

Our learnings might go into cold storage until another related effort begins, but even then, considerable adaptation will be required before those past learnings find fresh relevance.

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BibleStudy

biblestudy
Rembrandt van Rijn: Woman Reading (1634)


"Please have mercy on the rest of us first!"


The Muse and I were invited to a dinner party of sorts. I say "of sorts" because the premise seemed suspicious since it was organized as a kind of lottery where somebody other than the host decided who would attend. That somebody was a group The Muse belongs to that also musters an annual used book sale, which has become a standing ritual on the local calendar with collection boxes prominently positioned throughout the town. The Muse sometimes disappears for an afternoon, claiming that she's going to "sort books," a good enough excuse and better than some. I anticipate these gatherings as if they were teeth cleanings. It's not that I'm anti-social. I just prefer to limit my social exposure to well south of any lottery.

We had met our host for the evening at an earlier ginned-up gathering, and I remembered her as a most unusual dinner companion.

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RandomWalking

randomwalking
Giovanni Fattori: Wooded Walk with Figure (n.d.)


"Discovery better imprints than simple direction ever does."


The Muse uses an app to guide her volunteers in performing literature drops. A Literature Drop refers to a distinct kind of Canvassing, the purpose of which is not to contact anybody but to leave a piece of campaign literature where a resident can find it and get influenced. Lit Drops can cover an entire precinct in an afternoon, while door knocking and full-out Canvassing take much longer and might even prove less effective because of the reduced number of houses full-out Canvassing can cover. This app guiding the volunteers does not prescribe a path through a precinct. Instead, it presents a picture of the target houses arrayed on a map. Since precincts are essentially arbitrary constructions devised for purposes other than creating an easily walked-through route, the volunteer must concoct their path, which will inevitably seem to make little sense to any outside observer, often even the volunteer.

Pattern seeker that I have always been, I search each precinct map for a path of, if not least resistance, then at least one demanding minimum effort.

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WritingSummary For The Week Ending 10/12/2023

ws10122023
Edgar Degas:
Mary Cassatt at the Louvre: The Paintings Gallery
(1885)

I Wonder What Insufficiency Buys Me
In my seemingly endless search for sufficiency, I do not always notice just how extraordinary I might already be. I may have been too focused on improvement to muster a decent acceptance that how, what, or who I was might have surprisingly qualified as plenty, as enough. Our culture seems obsessed with pursuing continuous improvement, which amounts to a self-image of continual inadequacy. Who would hope to be presently inadequate so they might find themselves improved later? If we're not quite ourselves yet, who was supposed to pursue the aspired for improvement? We can deny that we're adequate, but what do my convictions of insufficiency buy me, really?

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RichLife

richlife
Pieter van der Heyden:
"Nemo Non” (Every man looks for his own profit) (c. 1563)


"I missed him before he left."


I received word that my dear friend Rich VanHorn died. He had been under hospice care since his physicians had released him from treatment two months before after eight months of effort to cure what started as a case of stage four lung cancer, which had migrated into his brain. He began treatment just as The Muse ended her immunotherapy response to early-stage throat cancer, with every expectation of a full recovery since he was an atypical patient. Never having smoked, the source of his cancer seemed mysterious, and he had access to one of the best clinics in the world. Initial responses seemed promising, but the cancer continued spreading until his doctors advised that he stop chasing a cure. He settled into that news with circumspection as if this phase of the disease had been sent to teach him something.

Rich took his undergraduate degree from Columbia Divinity, graduating into a position in the fabled Western Electric Human Resources Department in New Jersey.

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Overreaching

overreach
Jan Asselijn: The Threatened Swan (c. 1650)


"We were supposed to be better than this."


It seems to be in our human nature to Overreach. We tend to take some stand and then over-play our hand, undermining our intentions. Moderation might be the only reasonable cure, but since when did moderation come into play when anyone engages with passion? And we revere the passion over-playing our hand induces, for then the complex world reduces into a single blinding right outshining almost every other wrong. To find myself on the side of not just right but righteousness invigorates me in ways I cannot deny and dare not avoid. Such passion might be the right that can only go wrong, but one we willingly embrace and with which we feel especially blessed. Save us from such righteousness.

Our enemies tend to be invisibly passionate, just as we tend to be, too.

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Portending

portents
Adolf Hohenstein: Time Cooperative (1899)


" … giving my existence special meaning here."


As a dedicated fantasist, I can see anything in almost anything; everything's an omen of something. For instance, while driving home yesterday, the Schooner's rear driver's side tire went flat. Flat tires have become genuinely rare occurrences. I can't remember experiencing one since I was in my twenties, maybe fifty years ago. I'd known that the tires were getting near when they'd need replacing, but, as usual, I was stretching as much life as I could get out of them. The perfect tire seems to be the one that has less than a mile of useful life left in it when it's replaced. I'd found the one weak sister among the four and driven too far.

I pulled into a handy farmer's field to change the tire, an experience which I expected to become an ordeal but which I easily completed

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PacingMyself

pacingmyself
Will Hicock Low:
Foremost in the Envious Race (1885)


" … Traveling hopefully, if never fully arriving."


I never was exceptionally skilled at PacingMyself. My eyes have always been bigger than my stomach, my aspirations greater than my capabilities. These tendencies combine to render me a much better dreamer than a manifester. As a writer, dreaming might be indistinguishable from manifesting, so I might have chosen my profession well. However, I suspect that my work chose me rather than the other way around. However I've found my way here, I am well familiar with exceeding my limits, with hurting myself. I expect more of myself than later seems reasonable, and I suspect I remain relatively immature in that respect. I might have imagined learning over time more precisely where my limits lie, but I have failed to assimilate this sort of knowledge.

Fortunately for me, my subconscious tends to be watching out for me.

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Celebrity

celebrity
Ben Shahn: Sideshows at the Ashville,
July 4th celebration, Ashville, Ohio
(1938)


" … providing the forehead The Muse uses to bounce her hair-brained ideas off of …"


The Muse's campaign to become elected Port Commissioner has already turned her into a local Celebrity. She's forever running into somebody she knows. It seems wherever she goes now, her reputation preceded her arrival. She's also taken to dropping names, not to show off, but to ascribe stories. Most of the names I do not recognize, but I understand that they mainly belong to those who already joined the ranks of the locally famous: leaders of various colors, executive directors, movers, as well as shakers. She was apparently inducted into that company, if only due to her audacity. She lost whatever anonymity she ever possessed when she started making a name for herself. Whether she was born a leader doesn't much matter. She now has many followers.

I have taken to introducing myself as The Muse's Arm Candy.

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MerelyHuman

merelyhuman
Gustave Courbet: Mère Grégoire (1855 and 1857/59)
" … the questionable superpower that comes from wearing Spandex®"


Like it or not, we live in a world that worships the superhuman rather than the more ordinary kind. Half the movies produced these days feature characters sporting so-called superpowers, capabilities no mere human ever possessed. These powers tend to be of limited utility, seemingly most often centered around fistfighting, for the villains in these films seem to be stuck in some pugilistic past where might makes right rather than in a more believable future where the bulk of the actual action occurs in firmware. The Spandex® suits suit few physiques, too, since few benefit from a costume that might just as well have been painted on. A more cultured hero might prefer to sport pleats and the occasional pattern rather than the uni-color jumpsuit with the obligatory logo.

Much of my life has been spent in the shadow of one or another superhero.

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CrowdingOut

crowdedout
William Henry Jackson,
The Immense Crowd, World's Columbian Exposition (1894)


"Even the CrowdingOut gets crowded out sometimes."


I hesitated when The Muse asked me to sign on as her campaign manager. Truth told I'd advised her not to run, but she went right ahead and ran anyway. To enlist someone who demonstrated their dedication to the effort the way I had bound me up, though I eventually relented. However, I did so, still clinging to my original misgivings. It wasn't that I didn't want to support her in this latest delusion. I was more trying to avoid colluding with myself against my own best interests. I avoid making too many commitments because I fear I will, by default, be CrowdingOut more critical stuff. I can never tell what that stuff might entail, but I keep my schedule more to the wide-open end of the scale than the slammed-shut side. Most importantly, I strongly need to protect my sacred writing time because I know how vulnerable that can become.

Writing fails exclusively through sins of omission rather than by commission.

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WritingSummary For The Week Ending 10/05/2023

ws10052023
Michelet: Een vermetel plan [An Audacious Plan](1888)


Careful Whatever I Wish For
My side work profoundly influenced this writing week, my day job mismanaging The Muse's political campaign. In that work, I found insight into what I might have been attempting in my real job, this story-writing occupation that only pays me in satisfaction. I watched myself meandering yet still making progress. I caught myself exhausting myself, too, and wondered who taught me to be so damned self-sacrificial. I suspect my loving parents taught me how to deeply wound myself because theirs had taught them the same lesson learned in the heartless heart of The Great Depression. Intergenerational self-destruction in pursuit of survival, perhaps even success, seems like a worthy inheritance. It seems pleasingly paradoxical yet stunningly familiar, an audacious solution for a common problem. I must be careful whatever I wish for because I can hurt myself in any pursuit.

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PreparationDance

preparationdance
William Strutt: A Lioness Preparing to Spring (August 8, 1889)


"Appearing genuine requires much preparation."


The week leading up to The Muse's first public debate in her Port Commissioner campaign featured what might be labeled her PreperationDance. Intricate and filled with significance, this dance involves about as much ritual as invention, along with ample idle periods. She remains focused in story, if not necessarily in practice. She begs off almost every invitation, explaining that she's in the middle of preparation. There's no successful arguing against her assertion, for she's maintaining a laser-like focus on the prize. She will make up through repetitive practice whatever she lacks in raw talent. She will leave little to chance.

I first noticed the dance when I heard rattling and commotion coming from our almost unused front upstairs room.

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Exhausted

exhausted
Rembrandt van Rijn: The Rest on the Flight into Egypt (c. 1644)


" … much better off just staying away from engaging."


Exhaustion might be the most dangerous of the human conditions, for those experiencing it lose their ability to recognize its presence and influence. Judgment typically goes to Hell, while once trustworthy intuition fails. Because of these and other ramifications, it's considered best just to avoid exhaustion. This probably means expending significantly less than one hundred percent of one's energy in any single instance to maintain some reserve and preserve some semblance of balance. For over-achievers, this moderation might feel indistinguishable from slacking and appear to observers as an absence of requisite dedication, as if one really should be killing themselves to show their deep commitment. The perfectly human tendency to turn even innocent activities into internal competitions only exacerbates this difficulty because competing further inhibits sensitivity. We willingly kill ourselves, often exuberantly!

We wash up on desolate beaches after falling overboard.

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Amounting

amounting
Ridolfo Ghirlandaio: Portrait of a Gentleman (c. 1505)


" … we might misattribute to ourselves."


I've taken to totting up my Canvassing efforts once I return to The Villa. So far, I've yet to cover neighborhoods too distant, all well within walking distance, but Canvassing distances differ surprisingly from any straight-line ones. I have yet to discover the conversion factor, and I might not. I just understand that the differences seem significant. On the first day out, I ranged up to two blocks from our front door yet still managed to clock nearly four miles when counting steps. Don't worry, I'm not nearly anal enough to actually count my steps, but The Muse reminded me that my iPhone has an App that cannot be turned off, which surreptitiously counts steps. Finding a website dedicated to translating step counts into distances, insignificant increments into numbers that actually seem to amount to something was a simple matter. Five days in, I broke over twenty miles marched, and that's only counting two precincts!

I've noticed before that progress comes exclusively in
InsignificantIncrements.

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ThePromisedLand

thepromisedland
Pierre François Basan:
View in the Neighborhood of Orléans (18th century)


"When the school seems like the fanciest property in the whole precinct …"


As my old hometown transforms into a destination resort featuring innumerable wine-tasting rooms and new high-end restaurants, I spent an afternoon walking around the neighborhood where I grew up sixty and more years ago. Fortunately, I was born into a boom time, Post-War, filled with promise. Most houses were filled with families who kept them up, with few exceptions. Lawns were regularly mowed, shrubbery trimmed. I've said it before: I grew up in a Walt Disney® movie.

It's instructive to see what's become of all that promise.

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Canvassing

canvassing
Siegfried Lauterwasser:
Outside the Door, Cologne (1950)


" … we might just be GoodNuff to accomplish that."


When The Muse was still considering whether to run for our county's Port Commission, I dreaded one aspect of campaigning. I figured that I could easily assimilate many of the duties of the role of the campaign manager she insisted I become, all but one: Canvassing. I carried a not unreasonable fear of going door-to-door to promote the candidate. This aspect dredged up images of selling vacuum cleaners and collecting for my paper route, my idea of the worst dead-end job, and my least favorite part of running my newspaper route. I was introverted enough to revel in riding my bike six and a half miles every morning, rain or shine, delivering papers. Still, I dreaded meeting the customers I served. I much preferred to be like the milkman, reliable yet unseen. I didn't want to creep around on people's porches interrupting routines. I also feared encountering one of those baby-eating MAGA morons who might try to use me for target practice.

I hesitantly agreed to try to fulfill the role of her campaign manager, a role I've recently renamed Campaign Mismanager because that title better describes the services I provide.

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WritingSummary For The Week Ending 09/28/2023

ws09282023
Hippolyte Petitjean: Self-Portrait at Easel (1897)


Light Seeps In Regardless
When The Muse gets The Blues, there's little I can do. Even though I am our relationship's recognized Emotional Support Animal, my powers do not stretch much further than my fingertips. When The Muse gets The Blues, there will be no laying upon of my fingertips. I cower in my corner, which, at that moment, feels more like hers, and I hope for the best. She cannot maintain her Blues for more than a few scant days, which, of course, last forever. She will have been actively working her way out of her ditch and around her wall since slightly before her fall, and she's never yet failed to find an exit. The moment she glimpsed the exit, the atmosphere brightend around here. Even the cats noticed the retreating low-pressure area. Life returned to what passes for normal again, though the receding downtime was not precisely alien. We know the whole mix that constitutes the human experience. I try to keep my head down and focus on my work when The Muse gets The Blues. I claim she was experiencing some campaign doldrums, a perfectly normal condition every campaign and campaigner has experienced before her. Light seeps in regardless, and the story continues with renewed earnestness, GoodNuff for our intents and purposes.

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AlreadyKnowing

alreadyknowing
Pierre-Auguste Renoir:
Madame Pierre Henri Renoir [Blanche-Marie Blanc] (1870)


"We're both still learning, or could be."


The older I become, the more I carry a sense of AlreadyKnowing, and this sensation seems like an awful burden. I could once routinely show up knowing I didn't know, leaning into a learning, open to new experience. Now, I often arrive dreading the upcoming experience, knowing that I will undoubtedly encounter some warmed-over rendition of something we did much better back in the day. Civilization progresses curiously, if it actually advances at all, for each successive generation seems to need to reject or otherwise forget their forebears' learning and reinvent their wheels. The result often seems to be wanting to anyone present when the original was operating. So much the worse for that witness, who can no more resurrect the past than revisit it. He's sentenced to the present disappointment.

Frustration results.

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TurningAround

turningaround
Edgar Degas: Dancer Turning (c. 1876)


"I solved nothing and resolved everything …"


Contrary to popular misconception, most difficulties do not need fixing. Yes, they certainly seem to need fixing, but this appearance often proves misleading. I spoke yesterday of TheWall, a real barrier to forward progress. I insisted that I would need to find some way over, under, around, or through that wall to unstick myself, but that insistence played into this prevalent misconception. I managed to escape that wall's influence by less radical means, by what I might call a GoodNuff technique. Please make no mistake, TheWall's still there, but it no longer holds much influence over my progress. Did I go over, under, around, or through it? No, I didn't. I evaporated its power over me instead.

Promise wields great and mysterious influence. I can, for instance, feel absolutely up against TheWall one minute and, the next minute, feel utterly liberated from that wall's influence.

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TheWall

thewall
Josephus Augustus Knip: The Aurelian Wall in Rome (c. 1809-12)


" … always stumbled upon some resolution."


It's not if but when. Never whether, either, because as near as I can tell, we each encounter TheWall, usually at an inconvenient time. TheWall often amounts to more of a cognitive barrier than a physical one, but the way this universe works, sometimes a physical barrier brings the metaphor into sharper focus. Anything that seems to stand in the way of forward progress can stand in as TheWall. Discouragement has always been a popular flavor if not necessarily a crowd-pleaser. Whatever flavor your barrier comes in, it will be your challenge to find some way to overcome the blockage. It rarely matters if one manages to go over, under, around, or through. The fates usually leave that choice up to you and the conditions at hand to influence. Some cognitive walls can be imagined into falling. Most walls turn out to be cognitive ones.

There seem to be rules against publicly admitting to the presence of a personal wall.

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The Wabi-Sabi Corner

the_wabi-sabi_corner
Tajima Hiroyuki: Small Garden (Shōwa period, dated 1967)


In traditional Japanese aesthetics, wabi-sabi (
侘寂) is a worldview centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of appreciating beauty that is "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete" in nature. It is prevalent in many forms of Japanese art. -Wikipedia

" … a universal rule insisting upon less than perfection …"


Every gardener should maintain a Wabi-Sabi Corner, a corner deliberately unfinished, overgrown, and messy compared to the rest of the place. This practice helps keep the universe in balance, for this universe seems insistent upon maintaining a certain volume of unbridled messiness. Perfection might be its sworn enemy. Even the most famed gardens in the world feature one of these corners, though it might take some searching for a visitor to find them. They are never showcased, but they do exist. Even here, in The Villa Vatta Schmaltz Gardens, I scrupulously maintain an unmaintained corner of the yard. The Muse complains that this corner embarrasses her since it has traditionally been a corner everyone who passes can see. It's that edge just beyond the reach of every sprinkler, that corner not on my usual rounds. I've let the wildness take charge there, and the universe remains balanced. You're welcome!

Our neighborhood, too, has featured a Wabi-Sabi Corner property.

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Incomparable

incomparable
Billy Rose Theatre Division,
The New York Public Library
. (1911).
The Incomparable Albini Retrieved from
https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/b5cfbf49-a59f-7548-e040-e00a18060aef


"What if we've already arrived …?"


One of the more innocent human tricks involves comparing ourselves with others. A practitioner might select from an infinite number of attributes to compare, most of them utterly subjective. From the wicked witch's question—Who's the fairest one of all?—to questions of relative intelligence, each might represent Fundamentally Unanswerable Questions, FUQs. They might be responded to in an equally infinite number of ways, any of which might produce reassurance or devastation, depending on the situation. One rarely slows down to consider if these questions might be worth asking. What would you have if you truly were the fairest one of all? Fairness seems a fleeting attribute and rather superficial. Such assessments, especially when self-assessments, seem questionable. Other than a temporary boost to self-esteem, the question might not be worth asking under The Don't Ask Questions You Don't Really Want The Answer To Rule.

Let's say we're all the fairest in the land. If this notion seems untenable, consider the alternatives.

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AModestProposal

amodestproposal
Francis Gilbert Attwood:
General Benjamin F. Butler's Nightmare:
Proposed Procession of the Unemployed

(19th century)


"What if we're already plenty …"


To this day, I am assailed by the same old come-ons promising to make me a great leader. When did this sort of promotion ever have traction? I cannot imagine Abraham Lincoln, who was undoubtedly the most outstanding leader of his time, enrolling with an equivalent teacher to learn the "secrets to success," and not just modest success, but the very best there ever was. This very attitude renders its message untenable and unbelievable, yet they persist. If they did not exist in Lincoln's time, though I feel confident they did, what is it about our time that sees such a proliferation of these? Some skills cannot be taught, for they are not acquired through coaching, counseling, or conventional teaching. Whatever that is, leadership probably stands near the top of this pile. However, above all other topics, it enjoys the most significant proliferation of teachers and preachers, promising what anyone qualified to become a great leader must undoubtedly be able to see right through. This thought leads me to suggest that only those destined to become mediocre leaders need ever apply to learn these secrets, though they'd properly be sworn to secrecy upon acceptance.

The secret about greatness might be that greatness holds few secrets.

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CurtainCall

CurtainCall
Riva Helfond, Curtain Factory (1939)


"My purpose sleeps in the basement or beneath the neighbor's bushes."


I woke in the middle of my short night to crawl under the covers. Two hours later, I was crawling out into my morning, knowing I was crawling into an ending. I swear that I dread almost everything now, especially the inevitable. My Summer slips over a horizon foreshortened by low clouds and an utterly alien rain. The painting suspended for a day; I built my first fire of the season just to see that I hadn't lost that ability through the unrelenting Summer heat. When the turn comes, it shocks even the best-prepared, most anticipatory person, even the one who'd been counting down, even the one focused upon Honing.

It must not matter what topic I choose.

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WritingSummary For The Week Ending 09/21/2023

ws09212023
Ryūryūkyo Shinsai:
Boy Writing (Edo period, 1615-1868)


Stumble Into An Ownership
Experience doesn't very deeply influence some things. This week, I almost finished my twenty-fifth series, Honing, but nothing I'd ever experienced before properly prepared me for this almost event. I should have become accustomed to nearly finishing by now, but it remains a shocking and unsettling experience, not even the same way once. I started this series thirteen weeks ago and struggled, as I always do, to feel as though it belonged to me. I created the first stories as an imposter, holding my breath while hoping not to be discovered. I grew into their author, only recently feeling as though they might somehow come from and belong to me. It was never different. I crawl before walking and walk before I fly. I finally fly only to discover that I've run out of sky. The allotted time for this series is over, and I dare not linger over the carcass. This is how this writer experiences accomplishment. I finally stumble into an ownership, only to forfeit it to start my mystery anew.

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ExitStageLeft

exitstageleft
Edgar Degas: On Stage I (1876)


"All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages."

—William Shakespeare
(from As You Like It, spoken by Jaques)


" … one final curtain call for this production that never actually was."


Contrary to popular misconception, all the world never was a stage, and all the men and women were always much more than "merely players." Yes, they might have their exits and entrances, but they do much more than just play parts in several acts. That's all analogies, and the one thing one must understand about analogies should always be that they do not describe actual anything. The fact that Shakespeare employed this analogy means precisely that all the world is not now, nor was it ever a stage. To think otherwise violates the first rule of analogy, which insists that they never be taken literally. We see the terrible result of mistaking analogy for description played out in the world's great religions, each of which seems to possess a widely misinterpreted guidebook. While it's undoubtedly true that misinterpreting makes miracles much easier to manifest, they also materially mislead. Misinterpreting brings glorious suggestions into the realm of misleading definitions where an analogous savior somehow manages to feed a multitude with a single small can of tuna.

How much richer our lives might become if we could steadfastly refuse to take anything literally, anything at its unavoidably misleading face value.

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UsedTos

usedto
Rembrandt van Rijn:
The Sampling Officials of the Amsterdam Drapers’ Guild,
Known as ‘The Syndics’
(1662)


"I UsedTo be an innocent, but now I'm more experienced."


I possess a long and ever-growing list of UsedTos: things I used to do, beliefs I once held but outgrew, foods I once treasured but now consider illegal, and assorted discarded habits, vices, attractions, loves, and hates. I like to think that my tastes have moderated over time, that my sophistication has been steadily climbing some evolutionary ladder, but that's probably idle chatter, my monkey mind keeping me distracted and entertained. I still declare several of my UsedTos as remaining on my list of current skills, though I'm surely out of practice on many. I was once successful, for instance, but it's been ages since my successes or failures have influenced my choices. I no longer strive after achievement. I put down my head and continue onward instead.

The purposeful life isn't all it was once cracked up to be.

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Estrangement

estrangement
Charles Émile Jacque:
Entrance to an Inn, with Peasant Drinking (1849)


"We remain related regardless …"


What can I say about Estrangement? It seems the strangest form of human engagement, for it can only exist between people who were once rather tightly connected. Strangers can never become estranged; only friends and family can. Usually, something happens or was said to occur before becoming a legend, a defining event, or a Rubicon crossed. The memory might have never captured the offense, but it will never forget the occurrence. Over time, the relationship will seem irreparable, and the principles involved accept this and move on. "On to where?" might be the operant question. It might have seemed slight to one of the parties, but the effect will become tectonic for both. An absence appears by mutual consent, and people move on with their lives, disappointed with how that one point turned out, yet powerless to make it different. The experience gets filed under Regrets but will never be understood in the same way or entirely forgotten by either party.

We read of Prodigal Sons and more distant relatives reconnecting after lengthy separations.

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Reading

reading1
Édouard Manet: Woman Reading (1880/81)


" … successful distraction might disrupt anything, even distraction itself."


I am a cog in an enormous machine every bit as threatening as the much-feared Military-Industrial Complex. I might label mine The Non-Military Conscientious-Objector Complex because of my background with the military draft, though my complex has little to do with military matters. Mine's all about conscience, conscientiousness, and consciousness, three similar words with enormously different meanings. These three terms share at least one thing in common, which might be, without stretching their native definitions or attempting to create controversy or conspiracy, Reading. I read because it's always the right thing to do. I can never go astray if I'm reading. I also read so that I might live well. I believe it's impossible to live well unless surrounded by books. I also read to achieve the awareness required to comprehend this life. I consider it my moral and civil duty to at least try to remain literarily current.

My occupation feeds this machine.

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Betterment

betterment 2
Paula Modersohn-Becker:
Portrait of a Peasant Woman (1898/99)


"I've written plenty, but that only matters if I'm still writing."


I began writing these stories to prove something to myself. I intended them to serve as a dedication test, proof that I was, as I believed myself to be, a writer because writers don't just declare their profession; they write. If they pursue commercial success, writers must also publish; indeed, those might well budget more time for promotion than production. Most writers were never published, for they created for purposes other than publication. We believe that the system set up to identify and distribute the best writing succeeds in achieving that end. Still, we have no way to verify that this is or ever was the case, for the stuff the system failed to identify was never included in the assessment and couldn't have been. In Dicken's time, for instance, it seems entirely possible that a few dozen scribblers produced novels immeasurably better than anything he ever imagined. However, for one reason or another, they never found a publisher or any means of distribution. Their neighbors might have seen those authors as eccentrics, perhaps even hermits; they maybe even became the butt of ungenerous stories about how they only thought of themselves as writers. Only the writers themselves ever knew the truth. If they wrote, they were writers.

I long ago proved the point of my experiment.

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BetterStory

betterstory
Lewis Wickes Hine: Climbing up the Beams on the Empire State-100 Stories Up (1931)


" … it will only be my legacy."


I have lately encountered several people who seem to be living disappointing stories. They serve as complainants in their own lives, disgruntled by their plotlines. I wonder why they chose to feature those stories, ones which seemed especially designed to disappoint them when they might have chosen any of a nearly infinite array of more satisfying ones. I didn't ask any of them that question, and I suspect, without testing my suspicion, that few of them would offer an easy or appreciative response.

What about reality?

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WritingSummary For The Week Ending 09/14/2023

ws09142023
Edward Wadsworth: Requiescat (1940)


After The Physical Experience Ends
My weekly writing summaries serve as both reminiscence and discovery. I inevitably discover insights that hadn't connected through the week before I paused to reflect. This might be the highest best purpose of reflection, that it sometimes elevates experience into insight. We move through our lives as innocents—ignorants—only understanding later, often after it's too late to make any difference. We sit, then, wondering how our experience might have felt different had we understood before we stumbled into the associated insight. Experience never ends at the apparent end of the experience. The ending lags at least a few beats beyond where the incoming ceases. Without reflection, the sensory experiences, even the lived experiences, make little sense. The meaning emerges shortly (or longly) after the physical experience ends. Better, probably, when we can acknowledge this difference.


Weekly Writing Summary

I began my writing week by reprising a posting from July, 2022 about
Sleep "I realize I'm a lousy sleeper. I never aspired to become any better at it than I've become. Indeed, my current lack of skill represents a lifetime of focused practice, the payoff, not an absence."

I admitted to an introvertion preference and described the effect of too much extroversion as
ExtroversionPoisoning. This story proved the most popular this period. "I sometimes feel after over-extended exposure that I'm suffocating and can hardly continue breathing. These times alarm me most, for the weight of the world presses down upon my chest, and I simply must find respite. I will decline your invitations then and avoid promising to attend. I will not attempt to be anybody's friend, for I must befriend myself again before I can be anybody else's credible companion."

I wondered if I overthink as much as I think I overthink in
OverThinking. "It seems a genuine wonder to me when I successfully complete anything. After working my way through a hazy half-dozen scenarios, each demonstrating how I could not possibly succeed, the most unlikely result always, always, always shocks and surprises me. I wonder then if I really do overthink as much as I think I do or if the accompanying rigamarole might just be necessary for me to get begun and then get through anything to done."

I experienced a familiar scenario this week so I wrote a story about its substance,
Idiot-Making. "We seem to be, as a species, very skilled at Idiot-Making. We can transform virtually anyone into an idiot by merely less than generously interpreting their performance."

I posted a curious story about the
DangerousPlaces I inhabit. "Cynicism happens when life wounds an optimist, innocence disappoints, and a certain kind of ignorance takes preference. Cynicism produces self-inflicted first-degree knife wounds that seem to be the devil's own work to heal."

I reported on a delightful rediscovery, that my life's work apparently resides in weeding and manuscriopt-making in
SafeHavens. "I felt surrounded by so much familiar that I lost that sense of alienation my wildly fecund prior month had induced. I felt fully re-immersed in my most treasured SafeHavens, writing and weeding. The world could go to Hell, though I'd miss it terribly. I was temporarily suspended in the space intended for me, manuscript-making and weeding, two seasonal rewards there for the taking."

I ended my writing week trying to describe an alien form of organization and operation, one I quietly envied when I encounter it in
IndustrialCivility. "They do not possess a prestigious address, nor do they ever care to. They know what they do, and they do that well. There's no identity crisis or search for deeper meaning. The operation is just what it seems to be, no questions asked. "

This writing week felt like a roller-coaster ride. I began by reprising something I'd written fourteen months before. This felt like both an abrogation—what? Nothing original this morning?—and an acknowledgment and recognition that I needn't necessarily reinvent what I've already adequately considered. I honored my past by making it present again. I acknowledged the cost of fulfilling obligations and over-extending myself with ExtroversionPoisoning. I wondered if I really was that guilty of OverThinking. This question, of course, needed no answering. I encountered some vehement Idiot-Making where I was the idiot again. I admitted to living in proximity to DangerousPlaces, which doesn't make me even a little bit different or unique. I then described my protective SafeHavens. I ended this writing week admitting a tinge of jealousy for a subculture I've never personally experienced, but to which I still feel an attraction. Thank you for following along. It looks like we're finally entering the final week of Honing Stories.

©2023 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved







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IndustrialCivility

IndustrialCivility
Edward Alexander Wadsworth: Illustration (Typhoon) (1914–1915)


" … people like me can only ever be a visitor. "


We inhabit a culture comprised of innumerable subcultures, each with unique rules and protocols. These subcultures might be the many we claim to come out of, E Pluribus Unum. Encountering any subculture can make anyone more aware of their own, which ordinarily exists like a fish's water, present but not accounted for. We receive little more than glimpses of other's subcultures, often through cues that seem somehow alien, different. I recently encountered one that I found enduring, heartwarming. I labeled it IndustrialCivility because it appeared to me, in my experience, most prevalent in industrial settings, a standard set of protocols common to those enterprises. These seem starkly different than the practices I've experienced in offices, for instance, or in clinics.

IndustrialCivility first appears orderly with almost a military discipline.

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SafeHavens

safehavens
Camille Pissarro: Young Peasant Having Her Coffee (1881)


"… rewards there for the taking."


The hapless homeowner faces a fecund entropy through the month following mid-August. The garden's finally producing and achieving exponential returns. The Eurasian Stinkbugs find their prey, too, and threaten to spoil The Muse's long-awaited tomato party as well as the rhubarb. Weeds take full advantage of the often frantic watering as humidity levels plummet to the lowest of the year while solar radiation threatens to burn everything in place. It's usually a frenetic pace, a plate-juggling class of fruitless efforts. Self-esteem plummets in the face of overwhelming opposition to the regular rules of order. Fertility leads to pregnancy and pregnancy to a disruptive addition to the family. I struggle to fulfill my resulting unintended obligations.

I think of our Villa Vatta Schmaltz as one of our SafeHavens, a secure spot within the chaos.

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DangerousPlaces

dangerousplaces
Martin Schongauer: The Griffin (c. 1480–90)


" … some days seem to need almost the whole day to recover …"


I often forget about the DangerousPlaces my work compels me into. I engage almost blithely, innocently exploring when I might more thoughtfully engage. I consider my manner of engaging anything but calloused, for I firmly believe that one must never become cynical. I hold myself to knowing enough to justify cynicism but choosing not to become cynical as my way to get even or stay balanced. This sometimes works. Cynicism happens when life wounds an optimist, innocence disappoints, and a certain kind of ignorance takes preference. Cynicism produces self-inflicted first-degree knife wounds that seem to be the devil's own work to heal. Better to become a Griffin's dinner than to live a cynical existence.

These DangerousPlaces sometimes deeply wound me.

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Idiot-Making

idiot-making
William Nicholson: I for Idiot (1898)


"What I choose to do in that moment always defines the outcome of my effort."


When contracting for consulting work, I'd usually confide to my prospective client that if we agreed to terms, at some point during the following engagement, he would find himself convinced that he had hired a complete idiot as a consultant. I suggested that what we chose to do then would define the effort's success. This prediction usually came true, not because I possess any particular foresight but because it was in the nature of the sort of work I contracted to perform that I would usually appear to be an idiot if I performed well. I would not always seem capable of foreseeing because what I would be doing could not be foreseen but always needed to be prized out, discovered in stream, and not usually beforehand. It was more hunt-and-peck work that the less experienced invariably attempted to manage utilizing prior specification, a sure and certain recipe for the appearance of idiocy at some time during the proceedings.

We seem to be, as a species, very skilled at Idiot-Making.

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ExtroversionPoisoning

extroversionpoisoning
William Henry Johnson: The Blind Singer (c 1945)


" … I must befriend myself again …"


I "am" an introvert. This improper way to describe my preference ignores the fact the introversion/extroversion dichotomy does not express identity but preference. I remain capable of both extroverted activities as well as my more native introverted ones. The extroverted efforts seem to take more significant tolls, though. I can always engage as an introvert for extended periods without requiring any mental health break from the activity. I do not remember ever even once needing an extroversion break, where I felt compelled to find someone to spill my guts to so that I could maintain some internal balance. I often, though, flee into any handy old cave to recover from too much interaction, a condition I refer to as ExtroversionPoisoning.

Sometimes, I seem to become altogether too much of this world.

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WritingSummary For The Week Ending 09/07/2023

ws09072023
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec: Wisdom (1893)


Not Letting My Reticence Chase You Off
The Muse insists that I and the world are inevitably better off when I get out and mingle in the world. I tend to disagree on principles. As an introvert, my world revolves around something other than public spectacle, but I cannot successfully disagree that more variety appears when I get off my duff and mingle. Her candidate booth at the local fair, as well as her entry into the accompanying parade, had me living well outside my usual comfort zone through almost this entire writing week. I didn't die. I might have even thrived. I might admit under mild duress that I, at times, even almost enjoyed the engagements, but mum's the word on that account. I remain a writer, your writer, and not some itinerant schmoozer. I'm the guy who appreciates those with social skills, who gratefully cedes center stage to those who seem to gain satisfaction from standing there. I'm atmosphere people, more than satisfied to chronicle my emotional experiences via the PureSchmaltz. Thank you so very much for following along and not letting my reticence chase you off.

Weekly Writing Summary

I began this writing week with an encounter with bureaucracy that left me feeling absolutely
Gutted.

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Disconceptions

disconceptions
Percy Billinghurst:
The Fool Who Sold Wisdom (1900)


“ … a particular sort of Hell.”

My time in The Muse's Fair booth unsettled me. I saw an alarming erosion of conception before me as I spoke with some people. They possessed what they might accept as received wisdom, which seemed more like bullshit. I wondered how these people could each spout the same nonsense. I wondered about the source of their understanding, for it appeared unusually unshakeable. It reflected an apparently preconscious conviction that they possessed a wisdom denied their lesser brethren. I felt them suspiciously classifying me, passing me a sort of test to determine if I was one of them or one of those. I never once aspired for them to classify me as one of them in any of these conversations, but then I was also dancing along an edge because I didn't want to chase off any potential voters for The Muse.

Friends told me that these folks were victims of Fox News, an outlet I cannot get since The Muse disabled the remote control to ignore those channels.

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Last_Night

last_night
Edgar Degas: Portrait after a Costume Ball
(Portrait of Madame Dietz-Monnin)
(1879)


"May we always remember."

Every exhibitor finally figures out their trade on the last night of the Fair. The five long days before were merely practice for this grand finale performance. By five pm, everyone's walking around like zombies, the unavoidable effect of back-to-back-to-back-to-back twelve-hour days standing on unforgiving concrete or sitting in equally torturous folding chairs. Each became a master of their wares by repetition. The come-on tried a dozen ways before finally settling on one that reliably worked. Still, more strolled by than lingered, but those who lingered on the Last_Night stayed a little longer. Everyone knows full well that this show's just about through, and most seem to want to savor its presence while that's still possible.

We've come to know those showing around us.

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FlatWrong

flatwrong
Egyptian: Plaque Depicting a Quail Chick
(
Ptolemaic Period [332–30 BCE])


" … never any different from antiquity to present."


There's wrong, and then there's FlatWrong. Wrong tends to be a run-of-the-mill error, while FlatWrong catches the perpetrator by complete surprise. Wrong might surprise, too, but it carries little consequence. Wrong turns almost always seem easily corrected. Even taking that wrong freeway out of Lexington, Kentucky, without discovering my error for over an hour resulted only in a different route home. I couldn't turn around without adding another hour to a trip I'd already lengthened by about an hour, so that error produced a plot twist of little consequence. FlatWrong cannot usually be undone. It's an unintended center stage pratfall on opening night. There's no undoing that sort of performance.

The truth's out, then.

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TheSchmoozeAlarm

theschmoozealarm
Thomas Jones Barker: Two School Boys (c. 1830)


Schmooze: To converse informally, make small talk or chat (שמועסן, shmuesn, 'converse', from Hebrew: שמועות, shəmūʿōth, 'reports/gossip'; OED, MW). Noun: schmoozer, abbr. schmooze. Wikipedia

"Blessed are the Schmoozers …"


We're each familiar with the snooze alarm, that feature of modern alarm clocks that allows us to temporarily turn off an alarm clock without actually waking, setting up an unconscious response cycle destined to undermine the very intention of setting the alarm. I would count this invention as one of humanity's peak innovations, for it reliably achieves the opposite of its designer's intentions before going on to be in almost ubiquitous use. Everyone has one, and everyone learns to sleep right through it. The very term Snooze Alarm has come to describe where an explanation further confuses and where an excuse convinces otherwise. No salesperson or pitchman wants to "hit The Snooze Alarm" when attempting to persuade. No politician does, either.

A friend running for office might be what anyone might call a wonk, a person so enthused by his knowledge about a subject that he can almost instantly chase anyone else off by just starting an explanation.

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Roe-Day-O

roe-day-o
Harold Edgerton: Rodeo (1940)


"Who or what was never made explicit."


I'd never been. I'd never attended the rodeo part in the sixty-some years since I first attended The Southeastern Washington Fair and Rodeo. It required an additional admission, and I had no particular interest. The Fair had also featured parimutuel horse racing, something for which I possessed neither curiosity nor inclination, so my birth family and I satisfied ourselves with the offerings on the Fair side of the fairgrounds: the midway, rides, animal barns, and 4-'achie entries, massive ice cream bars, and, of course, the Dippy Dogs, the local variation on corn dogs, and turkey legs. We'd see the fair queens in the parade and witness loads of cowboys, even some with cattle as well as hat, but we were never once tempted to enter into that world, even as witnesses. Never once until last night, that is.

Friends offered us loge seats in one of the newly-constructed platform boxes suspended above the chutes on the opposite side of the arena.

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RealPolitic

RealPolitic
Jack Gould:
Untitled [several people holding political posters
and signs at mock convention]
(1955)


The Muse works the passing crowd. The Pavilion at the Fair serves as its Grand Central Station. Families move through the aisles, stopping at booths to collect free handouts and enter raffles. One booth offers a free set of Bluetooth speakers; another, eternal salvation. The politicians do not dominate this space, though they are present: a city council candidate and The Muse, candidate for an open position on the local Port commission. I swear she can pull almost anyone in for at least a brief conversation—many last much longer as she makes some personal connection with the potential voter.

She starts with The Question, the qualifying question intended to winnow out those who cannot vote for her. "Are you a voter in this county?"

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Gutted

gutted
Russell Lee:
Gutting tuna at the
Columbia River Packing Association.
Astoria, Oregon
(1941)


"It would have just been my fault."
——
The Frog

Be kind and tender to the Frog,
And do not call him names,
As ‘Slimy skin,’ or ‘Polly-wog,’
Or likewise ‘Ugly James,’
Or ‘Gape-a-grin,’ or ‘Toad-gone-wrong,’
Or ‘Billy Bandy-knees’:
The Frog is justly sensitive
To epithets like these.
No animal will more repay
A treatment kind and fair;
At least so lonely people say
Who keep a frog (and, by the way,
They are extremely rare).

HILAIRE BELLOC

I arrived at the Fairgrounds just after eight a.m.

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WritingSummary For The Week Ending 08/31/2023

ws08312023
Stefano Della Bella: Boy Writing (17th century)


Something More Suited For The Ages
I sometimes forget just how very delicate everything is. Nothing's robust or built to last. Everything’s destined to dust, however unlikely that fate seems near the beginning of anything. That head of fresh lettuce seems eternal until a few days later, when it, too, betrays your trust. I flipped my compost heap this week, an infrequent pleasure I'd delayed due to a volunteer pumpkin vine that had sprouted out of the middle bin early in the season.

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FairTrade

fairtrade
Hans Sebald Beham:
Dansend boerenpaar [Dancing Farm Couple] (1537)


" … invulnerable to most of the ailments common to mere fair visitors."


Like every public entity, Fairs operate on an Upstairs/Downstairs model. There are insiders, and then there are visitors. Staff and exhibitors live on the inside while guests remain on the outside, even after paying their admission fee, largely ignorant of the machine supporting their experience. The visitor might see the gatekeeper but will register few of the insiders making their experience possible, for insiders try hard to remain invisible. One might see somebody with Security printed on their jacket but never really witness security in action, escorting an unruly guest to the gate or invisibly monitoring booth traffic. This year, given that The Muse has contracted for exhibit space to advertise her candidacy for Port Commissioner and interact with voters, She and I get to be Fair insiders.

I revel in the permissions granted me.

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TheTurning

theturning
Suzuki Kiitsuexpan:
Moon and Waves
(First half of the nineteenth century)


" … surveying my small kingdom …"


However subtly this season might start to change, it finishes the job in a swoosh. A mighty wind blows the last complacency aside, and the world turns upside down in a single afternoon. Change seems to resist itself for the longest time before finally caving into its inevitable, unable ever after to recover what it ultimately could no longer retain. It's always been the same. The only question has always been precisely when, a question without anything resembling a reasonable response. TheTurning does not pivot on preciselies but on eventualities. Eventually, inevitably, the change appears, however lengthy the preceding longing might have been.

The Fall term starts as if to set off TheTurning.

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Fairness

fairness
Russel Lee: At the Imperial County Fair, California
(1942)


"Everybody heads home a winner anyway!"


I feel confident that I have no idea how to describe The Southeast Washington Fair and Rodeo, though I've attended this celebration for more than sixty years. The "Fair" seemed enormous and exciting in my youth, a vast playground of unusual sights and experiences. Rides, sure, but also animal barns where the farm kids would camp out with their prize stock and walk around with straw in their hair. In the old days, the Midway was a place of awe and petty crime where carnies and unlikely charlatans took the usual advantage of gullible townies. One of those sharps correctly named my first-grade teacher's first name, an astounding feat made more remarkable by the fact that her name was Pearl. What were the odds besides impossible? That single transaction convinced me to avoid betting on anything ever again. The odds are very likely somehow invisibly in someone else's favor.

The modern-day Fair seems tame, down-right lame in comparison.

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MoreAuthentic

moreauthentic
John Downman: Attention
(n.d., late 18th, early 19th Century)


"Whomever created this clockwork universe seems to have installed it backward."


We deem old stuff as MoreAuthentic than more modern things. We seem to revere the good old days with our language, for it seems to disparage newness. They must actually not build them like they used to; every updated everything, worse, slower, and ultimately more expensive rather than better, faster, or cheaper. Upgrades degrade performance and disable familiar capabilities and should be deferred as long as possible. Replacement parts invariably fail to fit properly or seem so much more cheaply manufactured that they never quite match original surroundings. New and improved prove to be an oxymoronic marriage incapable of fulfilling its promises. We remain wary of improvements and most likely should be. Progress never was anybody's most important product; entropy was.

When penny candy costs a quarter, the future has arrived as feared.

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Authentic

authentic
Jozef Israëls: A Laren Scene (1905)


" … a caricature of its original intentions."


Here in The Napa Of The North, we're noticing an encroaching reduction in authenticity as the BIG growers buy land and move into this valley. Main Street, which once offered every service imaginable in its few short blocks, now primarily features what the locals call Cute Crap Shoppes and wine-tasting rooms, so many that I haven't mustered the courage to enter any of them. They seem undifferentiated, each featuring essentially the same decor and identical ambiance. Perhaps the wine's unique to each, but I doubt that. If I attempted a tasting tour of Main Street, I doubt I could make it there and back again without over-indulging on modest pours and origin stories. Each winery and vineyard must possess a founding myth and an abiding ethos to justify its existence. The wine business never really was that much about wine.

Visitors arrive aching to experience The Walla Walla Difference.

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SlippingAway

slippingaway
Utagawa Hiroshige 歌川 広重:
Yoshitsune Awaits Benkei at Gojo Bridge (c. 1840)


“ …leaves drying before turning …”


Summer, above all seasons, seems just to slip away. Once fierce, it tames. Its once dominant sun loses weight. Somebody blows out some of her candles. Even when the thermometer hits eighty, it's a toothless and unconvincing heat. It's just going through the motions with almost another month left where it will be expected to continue fulfilling obligations. The time for frying eggs on sidewalks has already past. Successive cues will continue before this season's gone, but it’s now become an imposter and will not return until next year.

Summer became the scariest season, replacing Winter over recent years.

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Returning

Returning
Jean-François Millet:
Peasant Returning from the Manure Heap (1855–56)


"Nobody needs everlasting anything."


Returning rarely carries the cachet leaving exudes. Departure reeks of adventure, while Returning more often smells of dirty underwear and sour beach sand warming in late summer sunshine. Whatever the season, it will seem to have changed during the absence. Summer will suddenly be leaving, when a week before it had settled in until at least November. The first signs of Autumn will appear in some sunburnt Vine Maple still turning color despite the drought's malign influence. While leaving seemed an escape, Returning seems an acceptance. However adventurous the departure seemed, Returning requires genuine courage to face with renewed dedication what might have driven you away.

The hero never returns from his adventures.

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ValleyOfThe

valleyofthe
Roger Fenton:
The Valley of the Shadow of Death (1855)


"Stories never end."


The Old Wives insisted that deaths arrive in threes. I remember this notion being considered fact from my earliest recollections. I remember it proving true, too, which seemed even more disconcerting, for it was one thing to presume and quite another to experience confirmation. After my great-grandmother died when I was twelve, I dreaded another funeral for weeks after that event. These days, I've matured enough to recognize the fundamentally random distribution of such events and how my parsing can make unrelated events seem causally associated. I remain wary. When one drops, I anticipate a follow-on. When that occurs—notice how I didn't use the descriptor 'if'—I always expect a third and am rarely disappointed, though successfully anticipating departures doesn't qualify as a win. "There it goes again," I mumble to myself. Whoever posited that third time's a charm was not paying close enough attention.

I wrote this week about losing my dear friend TheAngelClair.

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Waiting...

Waiting...
Winslow Homer: Waiting for a Bite (1874)


" … reduced to roughly the equivalent of the quality of your Waiting…"


(I submit this story in recognition of The Muse’s birthday.)

No travel guidebook worth its salt would dedicate a chapter to the underappreciated art of Waiting… . This one will, though strictly speaking, this collection of Honing Stories doesn't quite qualify as a guidebook, or at least not as a conventional one. I've reported before that I have little use for guidebooks. Nobody can ever recreate another's travel or adventure, so one should properly read guidebooks only as biography or fiction—probably fiction—and work hard to avoid trying to replicate the author's experience with their own. It cannot be done, and attempting it will very likely ruin your vacation. All that said, I will try today to write a sincere appreciation of the magnificent and underappreciated art of Waiting…; for some significant portion of every adventure, every vacation, every damned day gets expended with Waiting…, and we seem ill-prepared for this effort.

The Muse and I checked the ferry schedule to learn that we would have needed to schedule our trip sometime in the past to secure a reservation on any crossing before nine-fifteen that evening.

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YachtSeen

yachtseen
Gustave Caillebotte:
Study of a Man with Hands in His Pockets (1893)


"Let the inquiry fail to resolve the mystery."


The Muse and I, putting up in an ancient Bridge Tender's Shack while visiting old friends in a small hamlet on Puget Sound, encountered a culture for which we have no referent. We can register its presence but cannot reason ourselves into comprehension of it. The Yacht Culture, the denizens of which tie up their vessels at the modest town dock, which the deck of our tiny shack overlooks. The Muse Googles to find that the biggest one would sell for well over a million dollars and comfortably sleep six couples. Our friend recalls watching one embark with a crew following their captain's directions via Bluetooth headsets. Such grandeur! Such pretense!

I cannot imagine that scale of existence, the idle time required to engage in it, or the wealth needed to support it.

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Rememberer

rememberer
Thomas Wood: Remembrance (valentine) (c. 1850)
(I could find no biographical information on this artist.)


"They hold us upright …"


Of all the roles I have played and continue playing in this life, the role of Rememberer might qualify as the sleeper. I focus most of my energy into my role of primary experiencer, for that seems to be the most purpose-laden role available. I make my history by engaging in the innumerable activities that will eventually comprise my history. I never schedule time to set aside engaging to do some serious remembering, even though much of my activity involves writing, which relies upon recollections. I never catch myself stuffing away reflections. They seem to accumulate more or less automatically, never by me more tightly focusing my attention. Indeed, squinching my mind in order to capture memories better seems paradoxical. One does not really capture anything for later consumption. Some stuff just seems to stick.

I remember visiting St. Peter's in Rome only to find the place overrun with people carrying video cameras attempting to capture their visit to St. Peter's.

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TheAngelClair

theangelclair
Odilon Redon: THE APOCALYPSE OF SAINT JOHN
And Another Angel Came Out of the Temple
which is in Heaven,
and He also Having a Sharp Sickle

1899


"Travel well, ya old bastard!"


On the morning of my seventy-second birthday, I received news from an old Takoma Park neighbor that our mutual friend and former neighbor Clair had died of congestive heart failure and dementia. I had anticipated and dreaded this news since my last visit to our exile. On that visit, Clair had agreed to fetch me from some bus stop somewhere but was uncharacteristically tardy. I started walking the route I knew he'd take, and eventually, he came along in his familiar red Prius, though it seemed to have suffered extensive front-end damage. He pulled over, I clambered in, and we retired back to his familiar home next door to the site of the first rental of our exile. He explained that it was "the damnedest thing" that his car seemed to damage itself. Michele, his artist wife, was displeased that he was still driving. He slurred his story.

I'd met Clair one bright June Sunday morning.

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Vacatering

vacatering
Eugène-Louis Boudin:
Vacationers on the Beach at Trouville (1864)


" … every other place an also-ran."


We simply must leave preparation for the very last minute. The Muse must run out to The Home Despot as the sun sets to buy replacement parts for the watering computers we hadn't used since we couldn't remember when. Leaving home in mid-summer makes no sense because who will water in our absence? We have a long history of losing plants when our automatic watering system fails. I can't use the damned things because their user interface is written in machine language. The Muse can even change their batteries. We stood in the sideyard, testing long-unused sprinklers, working out a strategy. I usually use three of our vast array of sprinklers, moving the same ones from place to place. We have no such luxury available in our absence. We must set zones so that every inch of the property gets watered without human intervention because we will be off Vacatering, absent.

I worry over the cats, who I know can take care of themselves.

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WritingSummary 08/17/2023

ws08172023
Johann Andreas Benjamin Nothnagel:
Hermit Writing (18th century)


I Seem To Flourish Anyway.

It has almost always been the case that the greater my feeling of inadequacy when publishing or posting something, the greater the readers' appreciation. This does not translate into any meaningful or particularly useful metric, for I can't seem to leverage my sense of inadequacy into validation. I quite naturally quake when feeling that all-too-familiar sensation that I've fallen short again. It must be a particularly ironic blessing that these very items that spark my greatest concern tend to return the greatest appreciations. I cringe and publish anyway, understanding enough about the process to appreciate that whatever comes out represents the best I'm likely to produce that day. I receive remarkably few invitations to submit do-overs. Given the paradoxical feedback my audience feeds me, it's a wonder that I continue. I seem to flourish anyway.

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Harvust

harvust
Paul Sérusier: The Harvest of Buckwheat (1899)


"We will not need to make time then …"


Late Summer emerges from a hot and dusty sameness anyone would swear might be neverending. Crops start ripening and, in their fashion, quickly overwhelm anyone engaging with them. Narrow windows hold promise, a precious week for some and only slightly longer for others. One starts gathering rosebuds while they may. Miss a day, and I might miss the whole year. Time becomes the premium resource, for the calendar already seemed full. Each successive crop squeezes in anyway, sideways and unsympathetic toward any whining. One learns early, and the lessons stick through frequent repetition, be prepared to sacrifice anything to preserve the Harvust.

Each year I try to hone my technique.

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SocialMorality5

socialmorality5
Claude Monet: House of the Customs Officer, Varengeville (1882)


"Would be potentates might finally receive a subpoena."


Now and then, a politician will come along primarily dedicated to misrepresenting everything. They might start small but eventually expand their practice to include every blessed thing that comes out of their mouth. They seem to be enjoying the time of their life without compunction or consequences at first. They don't age. Their story changes unselfconsciously into whatever form seems most useful at any moment, always delivered with the same supreme confidence. Anyone might come to question their judgment listening to these lies, for it violates some primal comportment to so blithely misrepresent. Eventually, even gravity loses meaning. There are those still believing, and everyone else. True believers, by which I mean those who have built their belief upon utter falsehoods, will maintain unshakeable belief, and that belief will become their uncontestable truth.

Not even politicians ever manage to avoid the truth forever.

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SocialMorality4

socialmorality4
Govaert Flinck: Blessing of Jacob (1638)


Mrs Snipkin and Mrs Wobblechin

Skinny Mrs. Snipkin,
With her little pipkin,
Sat by the fireside a-warming of her toes.
Fat Mrs. Wobblechin,
With her little doublechin,
Sat by the window a-cooling of her nose.

Says this one to that one,
"Oh! you silly fat one,
Will you shut the window down? You're freezing me to death!"
Says that one to t' other one,
"Good gracious, how you bother one!
There isn't air enough for me to draw my precious breath!"

Skinny Mrs. Snipkin,
Took her little pipkin,
Threw it straight across the room as hard as she could throw;
Hit Mrs. Wobblechin
On her little doublechin,
And out of the window a-tumble she did go.

Laura Elizabeth Richards


" … the riskiest of all propositions …"


Morality, the Thou Shalts of behavior, necessarily restricts some behaviors and altogether enjoins against others. It would prove an absolute fool's mission for me or anyone to attempt to delineate all the terms and conditions within our or anyone's SocialMorality. In very real ways, one must come to know without explicit instruction; much of that learning can only come from sincere observation. Woe be to the unobservant, for they seem destined to embarrass themselves without knowing it. They will become the ones quietly looked down upon, the self-selected second- and third-class citizens who repeatedly disqualify themselves through their actions. These feral citizens complicate the operation of any decency-seeking society and create an attractive nuisance for the more acculturated, for unlike our Skinny Mrs. Snipkin, we daresent go throwing our little pipkins every time another manages to offend us. Rightness does not empower anyone to start tossing around their pipkin, however righteously engaged in.

The righteous hold greater responsibility than anybody.

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SocialMorality3

SocialMorality3
Edmund J. Sullivan:
Ah, love! could thou and I with faith conspire (1913)


"We remain in moral peril …"


Morality seems an inherently social entity, for it's anchored in commandments. An ethic involves an individual swearing to do something, I Shall, while a moral entails accepting a commandment, Thou Shalt. An immoral act involves disobeying an order or an understanding, violating a covenant between a respected authority and its supplicant. In the case of SocialMorality, the authority might well be disembodied, a cultural understanding. "One simply never on a Sunday does," for instance, the agreement appears more often tacit than explicit. The rules seem to have been forgotten or never understood in modern times. Throughout history, modern times have considered themselves the exception, present expressly to break traditions and make new ones. A core of more or less permanent morals has weathered such abuse and tends to resurface after much misuse and disservice. Gentlemen have comported themselves in specific ways throughout the ages despite passing fancies, for instance.

The new presents this unique challenge for us.

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SocialMorality2

socialmorality2
Mervin Jules: The Art Lover (1937)


" … seeking to act upon our interdependent moral duties …"


Every social act seems presumptuous, for we are born autonomous beings utterly dependent upon each other. Our social lives seem contradictory to our survival, but they aren't. Our autonomy too convincingly encourages us to isolate, discriminate, and individuate when we are inescapably plurals, “beings," not merely "being." It's all terribly confusing, and without some orientation, we might be destined to attempt to be -ists: rugged individualists or survivalists, neither of which seem anywhere near anybody's crown of creation. We live in communion, or we fail to thrive. Primitive formations of communion include cults, competing clubs, and patriotism, each of which paradoxically relies upon separatism as the medium for community, as its unifying purpose. Each vilifies difference instead of holding it supremely sacred. SocialMorality utterly depends upon a deep reverence for difference, not just the tolerance of it but an admiration equal to the wonder that difference actually entails. Difference seems to be the unifying principle underlying all social activity and, therefore, SocialMorality.

The purpose of school should be an orientation to—learning—SocialMorality.

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VelveteenEvening

velveteenevening
Hashimoto Okiie: Quiet Evening (1958)


"Once they're here, they're gone."


By late afternoon, the cats emerge from their moist shady lairs to make their way toward the back deck. If she's back from her day campaigning, the Muse shows up at about the same time. I'm already there waiting for this moment. I find the food and set out the cats' dinner. The Muse and I take to our chairs and survey the yard. She might wander back to check her tomato plants and cucumbers. Stink bugs have infested her tomatoes, and we're trying to chase them away with diatomaceous earth. We have yet to succeed. We ease into another VelveteenEvening.

I might set up the sprinkler, a considerable undertaking: moving hoses and figuring angles.

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WritingSummary 08/10/2023

ws08102023
William Merritt Chase:
Head of a Boy (Date unknown, late 19th century)


"When I wonder why I keep doing this …"


In The Middle of a Muddle
Summer seems to stretch on forever and ever from everywhere here. Rain visited this week, bringing the first measurable moisture since April and a velvety feel to the starch-crisp breeze. The apricot tree finally stopped pelting us with jam bombs, and I let the lawn grow an extra week before mowing it again, mainly to protect my shoulder from any fresh insult. I relearned the folly of my native hesitance to visit the doctor after investing three months in ineffective treatment and discomfort, a repeating pattern. I deferred several projects in favor of nursing an unnecessary wound. I suspect I'll repeat this old pattern when I hurt myself again. A cluster of clogs cleared out this week, blockages that had been inhibiting movement and growth. As I wrote, unstuckness always turns out to be inevitable though it's the very last thing to seem possible from in the middle of a muddle.

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Campaigning

campaigning
William Merritt Chase:
Portrait of Dora Wheeler (1882–83)


"I'm still dabbling."


The picky details stall me. I don't understand the underlying patterns governing the effort. I cannot find what I need when I need it. Her organization baffles me. My organization has yet to emerge, and might never. I've forgotten how to sort a spreadsheet if I ever knew how. I cannot access her Google Drive. I have to take a photo of her QR Code, attach that to an email, then retrieve and edit it into a graphic for use in the document I'm creating. I haven't heard half the rumors governing the effort. I just learned about some gatherings I thought I was supposed to be scheduling. Just creating a simple invitation freezes me. I suddenly do not know what to say to anybody. She produced a handout using the free software that came with some stationery? I can't reuse any of that content, so I use my two-and-a-half typing fingers to transcribe it. She uses a font I do not have and don't want. I'm supposed to call somebody about something, but I've forgotten who and what.

Campaigns are supposed to start naive and full of hope.

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Convergence

convergence1
Hanns Lautensack: Landscape with the Town on a River
and the Cottage between Trees
(1551)


" … purposefully moving forward again."


Once stuck, things tend to stay stuck forever—or almost forever. Points of Convergence emerge. Who knows from where? It's as if stuckness becomes disgusted with itself, weary of the abiding irresolution, to finally take its fate into its own fists, for stuckness seems a wasting state, one inherently incapable of sustaining itself forever. It appears to possess some self-respect such that it cannot abide its own idleness and finally injects some mobility into its existence. However this happens, one can be sure this will happen regardless of how hopeless any context seems. There's always space for dreams, which take up very little space, though dreams seem infinitely expandable. To have one might be to hold the whole universe because with them on hand, anything seems possible.

Since my shoulder seized up in April—it's now August—I fell into a period of stuckness.

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InstantMessaging

instantmessenger
Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze:
Entertaining the Messenger in the Outer Hall (1856)


"We are the apps we invoke …"


I live surrounded by apps I do not know how to operate, whose instruction manual might just as well not exist. I've never cracked an instruction manual for even the most complicated. I have consented to try to sit through a tutorial or two, but certainly not more than a couple, and even those, I'm sure I never made it to the bottom of any of them. Apps are supposed to be intuitively designed, meaning they're supposed to work the way any odd user might expect them to work. Certain conventions seem universal across whole classes of apps. Map apps work similarly, and so do search apps. The differences between them might only come into play if one aspires to become a PowerUser, the sole class of app user who understands how an app works. These are such a tiny minority as not to be worth counting or counting on. They're the ones who supply the incomprehensible answers to the questions you post on an app's User Forum.

I presume I know how to operate the more prominent apps on my devices.

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Surly

surly
Paul Signac: Chromatic Circle (1888)


" … if you woke up as somebody else again …"


What kind of person am I? This question qualifies as a trick one because it couldn't have just one answer. Like those math problems that produce ambiguous yet valid solutions, this question undermines the whole purpose of calculating, of asking. The presumption that there might be a crisp and straightforward response disqualifies any more nuanced or less precise reply, however more accurate any might be. I am many things and irreducible to any single characterization. Like everybody, I consider myself generally nice, but even I've noticed some exceptions. Keep me from my work, and I can get Surly and disagreeable, "uncharacteristically" cranky, short-tempered, and even mean. I might justify this switch to myself in ten thousand ways, but none genuinely explains such a flip. It's uncalled for, seen as unseemly, perhaps unforgivable. The least civil among us are probably just the most scared.

I depend upon myself to prevent such slides.

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Beaning

beaning
Paul Cézanne: Road in Provence (c. 1885)


" … the Rosetta Stone recipe for beans."


My life as an erstwhile cook might most easily represent an extended study of dry beans in their near-infinite variety. I was always a fancier of beans. Bean Pot qualified as my favorite childhood supper. I'd ladle pressure-cooked pintos over a slice of bread and swirl a melting hunk of Tillamook Medium Cheddar into the mix to complete the protein and complicate the flavor. From there, I attempted to cook every size, shape, and variety of dry beans I encountered, from split dal to Christmas Limas, with varying success. My beans would often seem overcooked, lacking bite and texture, refried right out of the pot. Other times, I could not get the buggers to soften. Nobody's gastrointestinal tract appreciates blood-rare garbanzos.Further, the locations of my various kitchens and varying techniques influenced the results. Beans might never thoroughly cook at nine-thousand feet in the Rockies and might finish too quickly so that a moment's inattention can render them ruined nearer sea level in Seattle or Portland or even here at The Villa. I remained an enthusiastic, if inconsistent, producer in the Beaning department.

Three significant insights have improved my results over time, and an additional most recent experience promises more consistent future results.

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Paean

paean
Paul Cézanne:
Pistachio Tree at Château Noir (c. 1900)


Paean: a thing that expresses enthusiastic praise. (Oxford Languages)

" … nothing compared to most."


I sing today a song of praise for pain, that preeminent sensation. Above all others, it garners attention. It amplifies apprehension and can inflict damage with mere anticipation. Its sharpness can dull the brightest. Its dullness can sharpen even the boldest. Its lingering promise can thwart even the finest intentions. Its promise can utterly undermine inspiration. The dread of it distorts reason. Attempting to shed it encourages addiction.

Why a Paean for pain?

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WritingSummary 08/03/2023

ws08032023
Paul Lemperly: Correspondence (1896)


Right Enough With This World
A numbing sameness settles in for the second, the downhill half of any season. What was heartily welcomed becomes merely moribund, done yet continuing, a walking finish. I revel in open windows to sit at my desk with a morning breeze blowing over, around, and almost through me while I write, yet I warmly anticipate an overnight low, rendering it too cold some days. The Muse and I flee indoors during the hottest part of the day, hiding until the fierce sun slips further West to leave the back deck in shadows while a sprinkler whispers beneath us. As context goes, so goes content. My writing week mirrored this context. I felt over-stretched, reaching as if I was reduced to leaching out the final inches from an over-used well. The water bill will astound us. The stink bugs have been assaulting The Muse's tomatoes. The composter groans beneath its belly, full of cull apricots. The driveway features leathery patches where the sun dried some apricots before I could clean them up. The yard smells like apricot jam. All's right enough with this world.

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Politicking

politicking
Paul Cezanne: Bathers (1890/94)


"I'm learning to believe."


The Muse turns out to be the most naturally gifted retail politician I've ever known. She might be better than Bill Clinton ever was and a damn sight more authentic, too. She insists that as a candidate (for District 2 Walla Walla Port Commissioner), she only has two responsibilities, 1) talk to as many people as possible, and 2) raise money. She's so far, with two and a half months since she registered as a candidate, excelling at both responsibilities. Fortunately, she's also assembled a crackerjack campaign team, of which I'm the conscripted and periodically competent campaign manager. Still trying to find my footing, I have yet to act like a campaign manager; but the strategy seems not to have suffered from my initial ineptness.

Not a day passes, but what she returns with another astounding story.

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Harmony

harmony
Paul Signac:
In the Time of Harmony:
the Golden Age is not in the Past,
it is in the Future
(1893-95)


"The road to wherever we're going …"


Yesterday, our Justice Department indicted our former president on conspiracy charges. A man who swore to defend our constitution conspired to undermine it. He'll be arraigned tomorrow, and his actual trial might not begin until a year from now. Most commentators contend that it will only end after he exhausts all of his appeals, which might take years. Still, I feel relieved that the indictment's finally public. After the string of House January 6th Committee hearings, completed seven full months ago, many wondered if Justice would ever carry out the committee's recommendations and indict at least the ex-president. Six unindicted co-conspirators were also mentioned in the indictment, not because they will not be indicted, but apparently to keep this indictment simple enough to allow clean litigation. The ex-president has already proven that he'll employ any means to delay prosecution. Courts have been actively denying his frivolous motions since his first indictment. This latest string of accusations seems the most serious and might take precedent over his many other charges, moving this set to the head of an ever-lengthening line. Nobody sees any end to this.

I slept the sleep of the satisfied last night, even though I know yesterday was more like the start than any end of anything.

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Incompetenced

incompetenced
Paul Cezanne:
Madame Cezanne in a Yellow Chair (1888-90)


" … how to compensate for my obvious shortcomings."


"At some point during our upcoming engagement, you should come to believe that you've hired the most incompetent consultant that ever lived. It's what we choose to do then that will determine the success of this effort." This was how I often summed up my contracting conversation with a prospective client. It sometimes seemed even to me that I was attempting to sabotage the effort before beginning work, for even speaking of incompetence might awaken a genuine jinx and damn the effort before it started. Furthermore, in this culture, one should never speak of incompetence in the first person or admit to even glancing knowledge about the affliction. Incompetence is believed to exclusively belong to somebody else and never, ever, anyone's self, yet there I was, freely admitting an impending personal incompetence. I suppose I was daring my client to reject me or hold me blameless. My experience had taught me that every engagement would eventually encourage, if not insist, upon manifesting some incompetence. What value would I encourage by pretending it wouldn't happen this time?

It happens.

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AnotherEpic

anotherepic
Paul Cezanne: Auvers, Panoramic View (1873-75)


" … surrounded by easily investigated difference …"


The Muse insists a principal's involved. Those who live in a bowl must occasionally rear their heads above the rim to see what's beyond their usual horizon. Bowl-living demands that shift in perspective, and it needn't take much, just a patch of slightly higher ground, anyplace from which one might take a different look around.

We'd both been exhibiting extreme symptoms of late-stage vacation deprivation, our lives demanding our undivided attention again. One can only defer the necessary for so long before their defenses start to take over. Nobody notices the encroaching lack of focus at first, and few ever suspect that they'll be next to completely lose their context. We need a rest sometimes, a time away from the trivial and the essential, a spacer between our endless engagements. We prefer the Toodle, a humble form of reasonably aimless driving. Toodling's best if undertaken without much of an objective, just getting away. I'd plotted an attractive course from which The Muse, as the designated navigator, almost immediately began improvising. In this way, we would stumble upon AnotherEpic adventure where we mostly traveled by secret passages I hadn't even noticed when I first set out our course.

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pRead

pread
Paul César Helleu: Lezende vrouw in een stoel
[Woman reading in a chair]
(late 19th Century)


" … destined to replicate that one imperative."


I noticed a difference when I first encountered information presented on a screen, a mid-seventies CRT, primitive technology by today's standards. Big and bulky, it required a heads-up stance to read what I had formerly mostly absorbed in a heads-down fashion. I found that I could not retain what entered horizontally. The information seemed to slip right through me. It seemed perfectly suitable for transmitting anything that shouldn't require remembering. Indeed, those CRTs were mainly employed to present reference information, data formatted into templates where the same information was placed in the same position from case to case to case. The application seemed ideally suited to disseminating such eminently disposable information. If it needed deeper scrutiny, a screen print function allowed for a more traditional presentation.

Later, training materials began migrating to the electronic platform, baffling me.

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AlreadyGone

alreadygone
Giovanni Boldini:
Paul-César Helleu, Asleep (c. 1897)


"Time will come when time returns."


My priorities changed as I aged. Twenty years ago, I was all about presence. I actively practiced what I would have unashamedly referred to as "presencing," hoping to seize each moment or something. Twenty years later, I more often seek absence, an active disappearance into whatever I catch myself doing. If something's worth engaging in, it's well worth losing myself in, so I enter with the expressed desire to be transported elsewhere, where might not matter nearly as much as does that transcendent sense of having been utterly transported, slipping through the cracks, flying off the tracks, swiping an AWOL pass.

Flow, for instance, never seemed to be an example of presence but of absence.

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Vacationing

vacationing
Paul Cezanne:
The Bay of Marseille, Seen from L’Estaque (c. 1885)


" … impatiently waiting for my body to catch on …"


I'm never ready for Vacationing. I dread it like I dread taxes. It seems extractive, determined to undermine my sacred routines. I've never been one to take the same two weeks every August to visit the same home away from home, no familiar lake cabin or annual beach rental. For me, Vacationing usually comes as a last-minute notion. The Muse will insist that we get away when she notices a wrinkle in her schedule. Of course, we've not made reservations, and we plot our path employing accidents, invariably happy ones. We see more than we imagined seeing had we planned the excursion. We vacate for a few days and return glad to be returning, a few fresh stories captured along with some new perspectives.

When I think of Vacationing, I wonder how the watering schedule might be maintained in our absence and who will attend to the cats, not just feed them, but be their companion, for they're family and need more than just access to their feed.

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WritingSummary 07/27/2023

ws070272023
John Singer Sargent: Drawing of Paul César Helleu
from the early 1880s.
Sargent cherished this candid drawing
of his lifelong friend
and hung it in the dining room
of his Paris apartment.


To Confuse and Occasionally Astound Myself
I have this persistent sense that I really should understand whatever I'm doing by now, and some days I almost feel convinced that I might. Later, I stumble upon the depth—or the shallowness?—of my delusion to conclude that I do not know what I'm doing and never have. Should this not prove disqualifying? If I really don't know what I'm doing, what benefit does knowing bring? I realize or hope that purpose might remain emergent, never evident until long after the act. Its absence should not necessarily inhibit my continuing engagement, but writing remains a deeply faith-based initiative, not as advertised or anticipated. I might engage in serial bait-and-switch, but not to hoodwink anybody but myself. The stories tend to untangle themselves in longer runs, on a Contingency basis, often just when needed though rarely under foreseen conditions. I might write to confuse and occasionally astound myself.

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Invisible

invisible1
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec:
Invitation to a Glass of Milk (1897)


"We see everything as we are rather than how it is."


Fortunately for us, this world remains altogether too big and far too complex for any of us to grasp. We too easily see pieces as if they weren't disconnected, and we quickly jump to otherwise unwarranted conclusions. We often misplace the knowledge that we fundamentally understand nothing. The budding satisfaction we feel when things finally seem to be coming clear amounts to the largest illusion by far, for that feeling might be desperately trying to tell us almost the exact opposite of what we suppose it says. We think it means we know when it should reinforce our deepening sense of ignorance. An abiding innocence accompanies all this fuss. We're never nearly as sophisticated as we suppose, and this, too, serves as a sort of buffer. It's very likely that nothing's our fault. Not Global Warming or the rising popularity of the right-wing media, for both were born from our insistent ignorance and the utter invisibility of everything surrounding us and from our unwarranted conclusions, the drawing of which perhaps constitutes our only truly human ability.

I do not intend to make excuses here.

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Reconnecting

reconnecting2
John Rubens Smith:
Arms - proportions and attitudes. (1831)
"Plot twists never redefine our heroes."


What experience serves as information and what as definition seems as a much better question, Mr. Shakespeare. To be or not to be comes in, at best, a distant second, for many different states of being exist simultaneously, and not being seems to take the whole question of that side of the equation out of the running. Being or nothingness or Being And Nothingness? These hardly amount to questions, either. The Information/Definition Divide continually haunts each of us and profoundly influences our choices. My fleeing bout of Deltoid Bursitis adopted both guises throughout its tenure. It arrived as simple information, spawning questions first focused on identifying causes. I then held no doubt that the disability would pass quickly. My denial of it characterized our initial relationship. I analyzed it as if it afflicted somebody else. I mostly felt confused by its informational content.

I later came to mistake it as definitional.

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Reagency

reagency
Isaac van Ostade:
Interior of a Stable with three Children (1642)


" … driving home with dirty blues blaring …"


By late July, the garden takes on a frantic aspect. Its regeneration has gone exponential. Cucumbers mature from flowers overnight, and The Muse leaves her morning perusal with both hands full of produce. The tomatoes come next, challenging our tolerance for beneficence and Caprese salads. The apricots produced five years of fruit in a single season, and even the geraniums have gone frantic, needing nearly daily deadheading. We're suddenly running to keep up with what seemed passive last week. It's difficult for me to remember that half the growing season's already gone and that abundance tends to be backloaded, appearing only well after seemingly unacknowledged nurturing occurred. The return comes later when it's almost completely disconnected from its origins, the entire operation utterly dependent upon equal portions of prior knowledge and patience.

I visited the acupuncturist yesterday, an entire month after scheduling the appointment, a whole month and more after the immediate care doctor gave me his diagnosis.

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ContingentStory

contigentstory
Eugène-Louis Boudin: Approaching Storm (1864)


" … the last taste of unremarkable normalcy …"


I write this story for another time, for the time when it will be necessary. Today is not that time, for all seems relatively healthy and humming this morning. One day, though—not today and probably not tomorrow— such a story will be necessary, and the need will be evident to everybody. It seems as though days follow head to toe in an unchanging succession, but sometimes something disrupts that rhythm, transforming the familiar into alien form. Nobody knows how to respond. We lose our minds then or find it impossible to find them. We have no pattern from which to draw. We only notice something missing. I write this story for that morning, for the time I know for certain is coming without knowing anything about when it might appear. When that eventually occurs, may I happen upon this story buried in my archives and find solace and reassurance. I do not know precisely what I might need then, but I can pretend this story might satisfy what I cannot foresee. Let this one serve as my ContingencyStory.

I direct myself to remember when, to look back to the morning when I created this story, back before the previously unthinkable happened.

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Testing

testing
Pierre-Paul Prud'hon:
Cupid Testing His Arrow
(Late 18th, early 19th century)


" … counting my cards, plotting my escape …"


I split these days between resting—forced idleness—and Testing—challenging my barriers. I'm supposed to cool my heels, but my heels already seem plenty chilled, and there's stuff in which I really should be engaging. The apricots won't pick themselves. The yard can't water itself, either, and supper, if it's ever going to come, requires some goading, some human intervention, or else I'll have to accept that I'll go without it again. I have my writing ritual to maintain, too, so I feel compelled to continue doing, albeit on a significantly reduced scale, or not doing will very likely become what truly ails me.

I was born to poke sticks into darkness, continually probing edges.

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Rest

rest1
John J. A. Murphy: Athletes at Rest (20th Century)


"A discontented grumbling accompanies …"


Forced rest seems anything but restful. It quickly induces resentful feelings, even in the more practiced procrastinators, for it looks really different from playing hooky—genuine slacking. Being ordered to relax leaches much of the fun out of the effort, rendering it more work than fun. One cannot be meaningfully permitted to possess what must rightfully only be freely taken. Without that freedom, Rest becomes nothing like what the sentencing judge intends. It cannot possibly be healing. It becomes a form of avoidance, a demerit rather than an accomplishment, a ruthless, if not all that unusual, form of punishment. The urge to idle ages poorly, quickly transforming itself into simple boredom, turning its practitioner into nobody worth emulating, worse than worthless in his own eyes.

All the work not engaged in gathers around him.

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Recovering

recovering
Indonesia, Central Java:
God Ganesha, Remover of Obstacles
(9th/10th century)


"I have no fallback position …"


I despise lingering. I much prefer events to come and go cleanly without smearing messes all over the countertops. My wounded shoulder (Deltoid Bursitis, the doctor diagnosed) continues lingering, leaving me feeling like a malingerer in the middle of harvest season. I've been resting as the doctor prescribed, resting then testing, for I know of no other way to determine if the ailment's past than to do things beyond the prescribed boundaries of resting. I have accumulated enough rest over the past two months to make up for every sleepless night I've ever experienced, and still, the pain returns with little encouragement. Lifting a gallon of milk recently set it off again. I am becoming surprisingly adept at using my left arm for most things.

I realize that I'm enrolled in some graduate studies in the fine and frequent art of Recovering.

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WritingSummary 07/20/2023

ws070202023
Anders Zorn:
Augustus Saint Gaudens II
[Saint Gaudens and his model] (1897)


A Step In A Very Long Cycle
I find partially decomposed apricot pits in my flowerbeds because in years past, I threw the culls into our compost heap, where the fruits would quickly decompose into rich dirt, but the pits would remain like small stones in the mix. The Rule of Compost insists that whatever ends up in there will be resurrected many times, eventually becoming indistinguishable from surrounding dirt—eventually becoming dirt—except for those pits, which remain for decades as markers of the dirt's heritage. This writing week found me loading up the compost heap with apricot culls again. We've had more bumper crop than we can keep up with, so each day has a period where I collect smashed remains. I set down tarps to catch most of them because it's easier to scoop up the goopier ones off the tarp than off the sidewalk. This chore will be the first step in a very long cycle, one which will continue long after The Muse and I leave this place behind us. This weekly writing summary seems like a similar effort, a step in a very long cycle, too.

Weekly Writing Summary

I began my writing week recounting my experiences U Picking produce after an afternoon picking somebody else's cherries in
ForToBe. "I seem to need to be a multiplicity, switching roles and identities. I could never bear to merely remain whatever I'd become. Achievement breeds its own dissatisfactions."
fortobe
Winslow Homer: For to Be a Farmer’s Boy (1887)

"ForToBe a farmer, or a manager, or just a writer sometimes."

I continued writing, remembering when I discovered a cache of my mother's home-canned Italian Prunes when cleaning out the old home place in
Preserving. "We preserve for an uncertain future. Perhaps we only preserve for ourselves. Or maybe, just maybe, we preserve to preserve the tradition."
preserving
Vincent van Gogh: The Blue Cart
[Harvest at La Crau]
(1888)

" … wipe away my leaking past."

I explained how I source the images I use in my postings in
Museo. "It's a brilliant contribution, and in the spirit that I post and in which the Internet was created, it's not seeking profit, just a better world."
Museo
Edward Burne-Jones: The Garden Court (1870–75)

" This work continues in earnestness and love."

I told the story of what I labeled the
StandardDilemmas, those situations which render us powerless. "We're raised on fables and typically so damned full of ourselves that we cannot quite believe in our occasional powerlessness. We rarely acquiesce, thinking it a form of cowardice, so we make a fuss and produce much of the drama surrounding us."
standarddilemmas
Lucas van Leyden:
The Expulsion from Paradise (1510)

" … continue collecting experiences."

I described how a friend had agreed to pay a cool half million dollars to buy a hovel in a neighborhood of other half-million dollar hovels in
*Homemading. This story proved the most popular this period! "Societies thrive on humble beginnings that promise, fifty years hence, a fenced yard where the grandkids can romp with the neighbor kids."
homemading
Carl Mydans:
Tar papered house in New Jersey. (1936)

"Societies go to wither and die where everybody tries to earn a cool million in real estate."

I next spoke of dreams not coming true and of how I managed to get through my first great disappointment by playing
A Different-Shaped Guitar. "I lost nothing of substance when I hit that wall. I only lost a medium that, truth told, had not been working for me for a very long time. Dreams, even the best of them, can only ever sustain a dreamer so far."
ADifferent-ShapedGuitar
Imitator of
Juan Gris: Still Life with Guitar (1913)

" … a success or a failure might depend upon nothing other than whether …"

I ended my writing week on a serious but lighter note, describing what I personally consider to be
SartorialSanity. "The Muse is forever asking me how I like her "top" I hadn't noticed. I almost always insist that whatever she's wearing looks just fine. I wonder what she thinks she's doing, asking the opinion of someone who considers his stained Chambray painting shirt the height of SartorialSanity."
SartorialSanity
John Singleton Copley: Nicholas Boylston (1767)

"It's all about how they feel."


We're in that season where every morning promises to turn into Too Darned Hot before noon. Early morning offers the only respite. The cats and I inhabit those hours like refugees, reveling in sweet breezes before they become dehydrating again. MidSummer's a dreaming season, like its first cousin MidWinter, where sanity depends on an active imagination. I began this writing week with ForToBe, imagining someone I only occasionally get to be and never completely. The Muse and I accomplished some Preserving, thinking we were mainly trying to preserve ourselves and our traditions. I stumbled into a nest of Standard Dilemmas. Who doesn't sometimes? I was reminded of the downside of ever-expanding real estate markets and fondly recalled learning to play A Different-Shaped Guitar. I ended the week appreciating the insanity that manages, most days, to keep me sane and beautifully dressed, at least according to my standards. Thank you for following along here.

©2023 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved






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SartorialSanity

SartorialSanity
John Singleton Copley: Nicholas Boylston (1767)


"It's all about how they feel."


I have been Honing my fashion sense since my early teens, and I formally swore off short-sleeved shirts. During my professional career, I insisted on wearing starched shirts and woolen trousers regardless of the season, later gravitating toward blue jeans and simple cotton shirts. In recent years, I've reduced my wardrobe to the basics: long-sleeved blue chambray shirts, blue jeans, and Barefoot® shoes. My nod to seasons includes optional socks in the summer and cotton jersey pullovers through the cooler months. My closet holds a dozen almost identical cotton shirts and a spare pair of jeans. That's as dressy as I ever care to be these days.

I do not wear shorts, whatever the weather.

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A Different-Shaped Guitar

ADifferent-ShapedGuitar
Imitator of Juan Gris: Still Life with Guitar (1913)


" … a success or a failure might depend upon nothing other than whether …"


At some point in their career, everyone hits their wall. The fortunate find more than one. The experience fully qualifies as the most discouraging anyone ever encounters because it represents the end of a long and satisfying dreaming period. The Wall, at first innocuous, eventually becomes a serious barrier, impossible to go over, under, around, or through. What's a protagonist to do in the face of this flummox? The standard answer responds "Something else." Anything else.

The 'anything else' comes as a forced choice, a coerced alternative that nobody would ever wish upon themselves.

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Homemading

homemading
Carl Mydans:
Tar papered house in New Jersey. (1936)


"Societies go to wither and die where everybody tries to earn a cool million in real estate."

The Villa Vatta Schmaltz was no villa when The Muse and I bought the place nearly a quarter century ago. It then promised to serve as our fixer-upper, our bottomless money pit, our eventual salvation. We paid too much for it, which would not get us into a dilapidated garage in the current market. Like many neighbors, we could not afford our place if we tried to buy it at today's prices. Today's real estate prices have always seemed insane. Yesterday's have always seemed crazy, too, but for the opposite reason.

I bought my first house for $49,950.

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StandardDilemmas

standarddilemmas
Lucas van Leyden:
The Expulsion from Paradise (1510)


" … continue collecting experiences."


I believe in the existence of a set of StandardDilemmas whose primary nature has always been that they utterly negate human agency. No matter what even the most well-meaning human might muster in the face of any of these, that human will remain utterly powerless against it. One might exhibit wisdom when encountering one of them to cede to the superior force, to go without much kicking or screaming, for they represent incarnate fate. If there's nothing to be done, then nothing might serve as the proper response. Yet people rarely exhibit such rationality when facing inevitables. We're raised on fables and typically so damned full of ourselves that we cannot quite believe in our occasional powerlessness. We rarely acquiesce, thinking it a form of cowardice, so we make a fuss and produce much of the drama surrounding us. If the arrested person would just go without a fuss as the arresting officer thoughtfully asked, the unfortunate experience might pass without raising a ripple in the pond. We often insist upon making needless tidal waves instead.

It's not that we don't usually know when we've encountered one of The StandardDilemmas.

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Museo

Museo
Edward Burne-Jones: The Garden Court (1870–75)


" This work continues in earnestness and love."


Their structure has changed in the six years and counting since I began writing these story series. Early postings featured inconsistent format from story to story, though all have remained about the same size, approximately seven hundred words, give or take. Each has featured an image, one which I used to help me focus, for I always, always, always seek an image first before I start writing a story. The image allows me to envision what I'm doing and serves as my companion as I create. I often find myself taken by an image, its creator's story, or both. You might have noticed that sometimes I've employed a series of pieces by the same artist over a week or ten days because I was just so taken by that artist's work,
Matsubara Naoko a great example.

Finding that art has become easier over time.

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Preserving

preserving
Vincent van Gogh: The Blue Cart
[Harvest at La Crau]
(1888)


" … wipe away my leaking past."


After my father died and my mom relocated from the family home into assisted living, I helped clean out that old home place. It was over-filled with memories of times by then long past, as embodied in my mom's knick-knack collection, the mere existence of which spoke of bygone ages. Do people still collect knick-knacks? Most stuff elicited no emotional response from me, but somebody in the family found almost every "treasure" evocative. For me, the basement Fruit Room held by far the fondest memories and evoked an epic lumpy throat. Those shelves behind those plain plywood doors held at least thirty years of Preserving experience in fine quart jars still lined up like well-disciplined soldiers standing at attention.

There were Italian Prunes from the late sixties, I swear. I think I was there when she "canned" them in the steamy mid-summer kitchen.

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ForToBe

fortobe
Winslow Homer: For to Be a Farmer’s Boy (1887)


"ForToBe a farmer, or a manager, or just a writer sometimes."


Fruit picking has been a part of my life since I was a toddler. I felt liberated yesterday when standing near the top of that tall orchard ladder with my head nearer the stars and my hands pulling five, six, seven, or eight cherries off at a time! Whatever the crop, my experience seems similar. I face a randomly-distributed collection that I try to tame. I feel challenged to figure out a process that promises progress as well as satisfaction. I often need to recover almost-forgotten techniques, though no harvesting yields to any single best way. The Muse scrambles up very near the top of any ladder she climbs, preferring altitude above all else, while I typically make my stand mid-way. We pick at almost the same rate.

Some crops demand that I get down on my knees as if to pray and reverently harvest.

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WritingSummary 07/13/2023

ws070132023
Gust van de Wall Perné:
Vrouw schrikt van een kikker
[Woman scared by a frog]
(1887 - 1911)


More Abundant Than Strictly Necessary
This writing week was a genuine embarrassment of riches. The apricot tree's fruit finally ripened, always a momentous happening. It produces more fruit than any ten families could reasonably consume. I realized I still needed to purchase a tall ladder to reach the highest branches. This fruit ripens first and plummets to the ground or onto anyone passing beneath. The fruit seems almost liquid, splatting in joyous reunion with gravity and the Earth. I spend some time each morning shagging fallen cots, collecting their smeared carcasses before interring them in the compost heap. The world seems too alive by at least half, and The Muse and I rush to try to keep up, a fool's mission, a cherished task. This world seems more abundant than strictly necessary, extravagant, and ultimately wasteful. It specializes in conspicuous production, so we might specialize in conspicuous consumption. The homegrown heirloom tomatoes even started coming on. Harvest should continue uninterrupted until after Autumn arrives.

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Pairings

Pairings
Bernhardt Wall: Sunbonnet twins baking. (1906)


" … just like every other Pairing of The Muse and her surroundings …"


The Muse continues to hone her political presence. Two months into her campaign, she's repeated her elevator speech dozens of times and has yet to completely memorize it. She is not practicing as an actor might with the idea of replicating each performance but with the notion that each iteration might prove authentic. Authenticity changes from performance to performance as each occurs within a unique context. There's never any telling which part of any context might prove defining. Sometimes it's the people, and other times, the hall; consistency couldn't possibly be the purpose of her practicing.

Here in this wine country, there's a lot of talk of Pairing, for each wine best combines with some sample of each menu.

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WorstKept

worstkept
Unknown artist (German) or William Kent
Two Travelers under Tree
with Village and Bridge in Distance
(1707)


"Thanks ever so much for finally …"


With the possible exception of confidential and top-secret government material, the best-kept secrets tend to be the WorstKept ones. This conclusion partly stems from the inescapable fact that anyone holding a secret might as well carry a neon sign across their chest declaring that they're holding a secret. With the possible exception of deep cover spies, almost everyone can tell when someone's withholding the whole truth and nothing but. That private business almost always turns out to be a whole lot more public than its holder ever suspects. If the lips don't loosen, some other body part will. As humans, we seem to ache to disclose, and this innate need renders our secrets into an abstruse form of public knowledge. They might not know the details yet, but they know for sure you're withholding and that the underlying story's eventually coming.

It's usually just a matter of waiting or asking.

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CuttingCords

cuttingcords
Jan Harmensz. Muller:
Creation of the World: Day One,
separation of light from dark
(1589)


"I might regret the radical act, but later."


I'd decided when I first reviewed the standard contract they'd sent in response to my query. I'd been dreaming of working with this publisher for over a year, yet when confronted with the details of what that might entail, I knew in that instant we'd never consummate a deal. I'm no lawyer, a declaration my Business Law professor insisted I memorize, but I didn't need to be an expert in contract law to recognize an embarrassingly amateurish piece of ‘work.’ I felt embarrassed and angry. Embarrassed for the representative offering this P.O.S. and angry that anyone would have ever thought it might pass muster under any condition. I thought it must show the state of desperation and innocence combined in aspiring authors that anyone would ever sign such a thing, and then I felt embarrassed all over again for my compatriots.

A part of me thought I might have been too picky.

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Wronging

wronging
Hans Weiditz (II):
Behaarde man kruipt door een bos
[Hairy man crawls through a forest]
(1514 - 1531)


" … without expecting to eventually avoid making more."


The Honing life involves more than and seems different from positive feedback loops. It primarily entails catching myself doing something wrong and nudging myself closer toward some path of righteousness, correcting my error if possible. My legacy might end up being a long series of close misses with a few more spectacular further misses sprinkled in for variety. Few hits and many, many misses. In the end, I will contend that I was in the game without often experiencing a winning season because my standards were never quite satisfied. My successes were failures, too, not usually on the scale of my catastrophes but of similar quality.

This lifestyle's no tragedy, far from it.

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RealPain

realpain
Theodore Lane: Champagne verdrijft de pijn
[Champagne driving away real pain]
(1825 - 1826)


"Waiting seems the worse sort of RealPain."


I, probably like you, have sometimes been called a real pain in the ass. I confess to the charges even though I struggle to accept the concept of RealPain, for pain seems almost entirely illusory. That's not to say that pain can't make a reasonably convincing case that it sometimes has substance; it's just that whatever that substance might be, it seems extraordinarily elusive. Even medical doctors rely upon a silly cartoon chart to asses pain levels, and their test requires patients to assess and report their own levels when most patients lack adequate experience to pass such judgments. My little sister, who would cry at the drop of a hankie, might declare a pain level of eleven for something I'd most likely label a twinge.

I've lived with chronic pain but learned not to take it very seriously.

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ZombieLand

zombieland
Hablot Knight Browne:
The Broken Cart-Rope
(n.d.-mid-nineteenth century)


Just before the 1929 market crash, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that his grandchildren would, a hundred years hence, inhabit a world requiring them to work no more than fifteen hours per week. Even then, he insisted that fifteen hours would provide more labor than the economy would strictly need to effectively operate. We easily notice today that this prediction has yet to come to fruition, though we might notice too easily and miss seeing what's happening around us. Yes, most report ever-growing pressure to work ever more hours. Yes, overwork has developed somewhat of a cachet, a status symbol such that those who work the most believe themselves to be the most essential. Yes, everyone complains about their lack of leisure time, but I'm curious if leisure means what it meant back in 1929 when Keynes published his prediction.

Leisure time then didn't include a minute of cell phone time.

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TottingUp

tottingup
Unknown Artist:
Daikon Radish and Accounting Book (19th century)


“Data-Driven crazy …”


Come Friday morning, I'm TottingUp the week's receipts, just as if I ran a small business. I count the customers and imagine significances like bean counters have always done. I avoid the formal metrics, Google Analytics® and the like, because something about how I initially organized my web presence rendered it impossible to formally evaluate. I count contacts instead: likes, comments, and views assigning a nominal value of one (1) to each. For instance, a post like this week's Discernment attracted forty-nine views, no comments, and a single like on Facebook. It also showed twelve accesses via a LinkedIn link and twenty-one via my newer Substack path, for a total of eighty-four somethings. I have no idea what that number means other than it represents something equally indeterminant and rewarding. It's my payoff!

Since each of my stories seems separate and unique, they aren't comparable.

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WritingSummary 07/06/2023

writingsummary07_05_2023
Lucian and Mary Brown:
Untitled [baby reaching for typewriter] (1950)


We Almost Exclusively Worship Mammon
General Electric, the once proud exemplar of mid-century industrial America, spouted its motto: "Progress is our most important product" in grandiose television advertisements. Productizing progress seems a fair portrait of our post-war arrogance, one still firmly held by our more conservative neighbors. GE's pride prefaced their fall at the hands of another CEO who firmly believed himself brighter than everyone before him. The ones since he retired have found ample reasons to wax their vitaes, too, since history seems to see old Jack Welch as short-sighted now. Such is vision when it confronts experience. It becomes so much schmutz on the old eyeglasses, eventually in the way of seeing what's right before one and whatever's behind. I exclusively wend my way. I take my time. I'm in no hurry to arrive; Lord knows where. I'm more of a journey-focused person. I feel fortunate to have stumbled into my present and even to be dragging my considerable past behind me. I gratefully do not have to drag all that much progress behind me. It might be that the Chamber of Commerce's mid-century characterizations of the future coming, featuring flying cars driven by Spandex® citizens, helped me better appreciate how it was rather than worship progress. I'm down on my knees most mornings whispering prayers of thanksgiving that this nation was not founded Christian. We almost exclusively worship mammon here, if we can think of that as any kind of organized religion.

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OutOfSight

outofsight
Collection of Barnett and Annalee Newman:
Eyeglasses, in case (20th century)


" … everything becomes clearer."


My eyeglasses collect schmutz better than any other substance known to man. I cannot keep up with them. Further, this schmutz seems invulnerable to any but a serious professional's hand. I, for instance, am powerless to clean my glasses. The Muse is forever noticing that I probably cannot see anything through the grimy layer accumulated on my lenses. She's apt to snatch them from my face, take them into the kitchen, and subject them to vigorous scrubbing before returning them, disgusted at my lack of hygiene and caring. I have grown indifferent and consider it my fate to move through the world half-blinded by schmutz. I occasionally visit a local optometrist to get that stuff professionally removed. My latest visit started a mystery that entertained me for two full weeks.

The person cleaning my glasses noted that the lenses had become seriously scratched in addition to the almost impenetrable layer of Schmutz.

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RetailPolitics

retailpolitics
Russell Lee:
Group of residents of Weatherford, Texas,
listening to politician speak

(1939)


"This just seems a fait accomplis."


Politicians, like used-car salespersons, mostly deserve their terrible reputations. They seem to shave the truth more proficiently than a barber might shave a baby and just as unnecessarily. We approach them warily, if at all. We understand that they can put almost anybody under a thrall. We swear we will not fall again then we reliably do. We hold ourselves to blame but sense something profoundly unsound in our characterization. The politician can seem to be everybody's friend and also frame anybody as their enemy, seemingly the same person, sometimes simultaneously. We sense a dark art at work, another bait and switch, yet we still take sides. We justify the better of two obvious evils before voting the same straight ticket. Forced choice voting often leaves us sensing little choice at all.

The Muse is running for public office and so might well be fairly characterized as a politician, a politician being one who runs for public office.

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Dandy

dandy
William Nicholson: An Alphabet: D is for Dandy (1897)


“ … not as anybody's Dandy, Yankee Doodle-Do, or died.”


I am not a Dandy, Doodle-Do, or otherwise. Come the Fourth of July, I do not rush out to buy my weight in fireworks. I'm more apt to hide behind the garage, praying with my eyes closed for an early cessation of whatever hostilities fueled the heavenly outrage. I do not consider the recreation of artillery barrages a fitting representation of our Democracy's intentions. We were never defined by our hostilities but by our peaceful nature. We were never the type to pick the fight, more the type to work hard to end it, though our record could be better on this one. We have been known as haughty but never in the way that monarchs can get. You know how they can get. Those dudes seem as Dandified as all get out. They look and act ridiculous. Not like Democrats or even Republicans, with exceptions notable because of their extreme departure from our usual No Dandies traditions.

We prefer the plain-spoken sort of politicians who can tell their story straight.

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MakingDo

makingdo
Lewis Wickes Hine: Making Pittsburg Stogies (1909)


"Envy us."


The Muse and I feel blessed to live very near the end of most commercial logistics networks. This Center of Our Universe isn't conveniently on the way to or from anywhere. Our founding fathers made deliberate decisions to isolate this valley. Rebuffing the railroads, they chose to forego what would have most certainly caused commercial development. At the time of the great silver rush into Northern Idaho, Spokane, today a city of over 200,000 souls, amounted to a sawmill and an isolated Indian Agency. Walla Walla reached its commercial peak then, about the same size as now, with both prospectors and their supplies routed North through what was then the commercial center of the whole Northwest. No longer.

Likely, a few things on our shopping lists will not be available here for any price.

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Garge

garge
Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin:
The Attributes of the Arts and the Rewards Which Are Accorded Them
(1766)


" … I tidy until my soul can breathe again."


I think of myself as reasonably fastidious but lapse a lot in practice. My garage serves as my center, the abiding indicator of my general well-being. For many, their desktop serves this purpose, the clutter or absence of it the reliable outward sign of an inward orderliness. My desktop has never not been an apparent disaster, yet I can place a finger on anything teetering there faster than I can recover anything anywhere. Obvious clutter does not necessarily speak to internal disorderliness except in the case of my garage or, as I refer to it, my Garge.

Being the absolute center of my universe, my Garge says most about my mental health.

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Arcing

arcing
Aaron Bohrod's America, its history (1946)


"We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. "
–Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,
“Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.”
Speech given at the National Cathedral,
March 31, 1968


" … thinking ourselves especially blessed."


The history of these United States records a definite Arcing trajectory. We do not do straight lines. Neither did our forebears. We sidle up to our futures and tend to wend away from our results. We move like drunken sailors inexorably toward our salvation, and we, probably above everything, firmly believe in our eventual salvation. Any half-baked efficiency expert could demonstrate the obvious errors in our ways, in our methods, but we seem unteachable, uninterested in straightforward pathways. We're so damned busy meandering that we can only ever see trees, rarely forest. We disagree about almost everything yet insist that we're somehow united, one nation under our multitudinous God, with aspiration enough for all. Liberty and justice might seem to be trailing ever further behind, but that's just an illusion, the result of our Arcing course, making it damnably difficult to precisely pinpoint our position on our path toward our sure salvation.

Democracy amounts to the ultimate faith-based initiative.

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WritingSummary 06/29/2023

ws06292023
Percy Loom Sperr:
One of the letter writers in the
Ellis Island Hospital Library

(c. 1920s)


Considerably More Alive
I cannot over-emphasize the importance of this week's revelations. My Vanity story couldn't describe the depth of my discovery because I wrote it just as I noticed the shift starting. A few days later, I continue reeling, realizing I could become a proudly vain author. Vanity Publishing seems a pejorative term bestowed by its competition to demean it in the author's eyes. It delineates an elite by omission, a chosen few selected to represent a whole with a decided minority. It elevates the importance of gatekeepers and reputation as if follow-on success were necessarily the product of past performance when the future remains undecided until well after it’s past. I now feel embarrassed by my hesitation to fully engage with my gifts, however questionable, in favor of impatiently waiting for recognition that was always unlikely to arrive. I feel considerably more alive after this writing week. May this sensation continue and expand.

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PerfectGame

perfectgame
Juan Gris: Glass and Playing Cards (1915)


"Play ball, not perfection!"


"The 10 regular seasons in between (2013 through 2022) featured 22,765 imperfect games," wrote NYTimes sportswriter Tyler Kepner the morning after. A PerfectGame was pitched the evening before by Yankee's pitcher Domingo Germán, who fans booed off the mound his previous start. It had been eleven years since the last Major League Baseball PerfectGame. Only twenty-four have been accomplished in MLB's long history stretching back to the 1800s. The feat will not guarantee the pitcher Hall of Fame notoriety. If history's any predictor, he's much more likely to retire into obscurity. Perfection remains just what it used to be, without lasting honor, especially in its own land.

I Hone with the implicit notion that I am seeking more perfection.

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Chronic

chronic
Duane Stephen Michals:
The Human Condition (1969)


"The Human Condition exclusively works in ways mysterious."


The Human Condition first seems acute and only later appears Chronic. There never was a cure for it, and though it at first seems passing—eminently overcomeable—it isn't. It never was. It seems more applicable to others than to you or me, but it belongs to everybody, though not necessarily equally. I acquire my aches and pains the same way as everybody. They visit, often without discernible reason, first acute, then, some of them becoming Chronic without rhyme or particular cause. The Chronic ones might settle in forever or seem to. My problem centers around my expectations. When I believe my pain's just visiting, I treat it as a guest. They might be my sensations, but I won't take them as seriously as if they were a permanent part of my extended family. Pain or Human Condition seems very much the same; we can reasonably anticipate them bedeviling us again and again and again.

My revelation yesterday transformed a long-standing acute condition into a Chronic one.

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Vanity

vanity1
Jan Saenredam after Abraham Bloemaert, published by Robert de Baudous:
Vanity, Vanity, All is Vanity (c. 1600)


"Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher,
vanity of vanities; all is vanity.
What profit hath a man of all his labour
which he taketh under the sun?
One generation passeth away,
and another generation cometh:
but the earth abideth for ever."

Ecclesiastes 1:2-8 King James Version


I have for years danced against the idea that I might work with a "vanity" publisher. The vanity press represents that part of the publishing world where an author contracts with a service bureau to do all a standard publisher might do. These tasks include: registering a work and securing an
ISBN—a unique registration number assigned to each edition of a published work, designing format and layout, cover design, production, and placement, among many other possible services, paid for up front by the author. The mythology of authorship insists it's humiliating to work with a vanity publisher because a real author should properly be discovered and pampered into print by a benevolent publisher who fronts the resources necessary to produce the work. In the myth, the publisher more than recoups their investment from the resulting widespread acceptance. Each new title is always destined to become a best-seller, and every author produces well above average sales.

In practice, many fewer than one percent of published works recoup their production cost.

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Blindly

blindly
Paul Klee:
Follows with Concern, As Both are Blind (1927)


"… I'm unlikely to really understand how or why."


I might say that I resolved my hash mark issue, but that would, at best, be a partial truth. The issue was resolved, and yes, I was involved, but it would be a stretch to claim that the resolution was my fault. As I explained in earlier installments—
ArrowingThrough and StrategicHesitation—I'd received hints and instructions from fellow users of my manuscripting app, though they didn't immediately resolve my issue. Five tries had left my situation worse and me increasingly frantic. I'd decided to give it a rest, resolving to stand aside and leave that sleeping dog lie for a day before making a sixth attempt to fix anything. The lag time worked, for my sixth attempt resolved the issue, though I cannot definitively say why. I did what I'd intended to do the first five times, but only that last attempt worked. I'm left no wiser and, if anything, more hesitant to engage in further Honing efforts. The headings seem slightly too small, but I'm more inclined to leave them as they are since my earlier efforts had somehow made them disappear.

I Hone after some ideal, often just a notion of what might be possible, essentially Blindly.

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Insignificant Increments

insignificantincrements
Alberto Giacometti: Le Buffet (1957)


" … grown to annoying dominance …"


Honing work—and perhaps all work—exclusively occurs in InsignificantIncrements. Each piece initially reeks of insignificance and even accumulated into bunches, rarely seeming like very much. My Weekly Writing Summaries, which I push out early every Friday morning, sometimes seem to approach significance. Still, even those seem comprised of more grunt work than any casual reader might suspect. I've come to dread Thursdays, the end of my writing week, because they always bring this obligation which I swear is sacred but the creation of which most often feels perversely secular. I buck up and perform my work as if it might eventually prove meaningful, though I also compose it exclusively in InsignificantIncrements. Any thought I might be up to anything grandiose fails to pass my Smell Test.

Once I manage to accumulate ninety of my stories into manuscripts, I once thought those might rise to some level of significance, but those, too, prove to be stunningly banal in creation.

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StrategicHesitating

hesitatating
Alfred Stevens: Hesitation (Madame Monteaux?) (c. 1867)

" … obscured in utter ignorance.#


#

After receiving the fifth follow-up advice for fixing my hash mark difficulty, I engaged in StrategicHesitating. I rarely immediately follow up on any instruction. I ruminate on it first. I was not interested in a quick fix, for in my experience, quick fixes tend to encourage downward spirals where I end up in deeper and more mysterious trouble than I had before I'd asked for assistance. I need to circle the solution first. As I did in this instance, I will pretend to implement the fix, accessing the seemingly appropriate pages but not saving any adjustments. I wanted to determine what would happen if I saved the changes without exposing myself to the risk of actually changing them. I still didn't know what I was doing, but instead considered following essentially blind instructions. It's not that I didn't trust the advice, either, just that I was confident that I didn't understand the whole of it. I needed further orientation.

#

StragegicHesitating seems like a small investment.

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ArrowingThrough

arrowingthrough
Fernand Léger:
The Railway Crossing (Sketch) (1919)


" … colleagues who don't quite understand why I don't quite understand."


Filled with the resolution of a new series, I chose to report what appeared to be a bug with my manuscripting system. I often work around shortcomings with software because I've been run around the block enough to understand that I'm probably misusing the system. Its keepers do not always warmly receive my reports. They often blame the messenger. Not that this messenger was ever necessarily blameless, mind you, but the interactions can feel abusive and are not always conducive to progress. Most of the systems I use feature areas where I, by experience or habit, refuse to go. I've learned that some functions work for others but not for me. I've grown to understand that I very likely misuse every system I employ, not just because they were seemingly designed backward, though most were. I cannot recall one I've used that was designed forward.

So, it was with circumspection that I reported this shortcoming.

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WritingSummary 06/22/2023

ws06222023
Attributed to Elisabetta Sirani:
Young Woman Writing or Drawing
(n.d. - mid-17th Century)


Now Is The Time
There's nothing else like the enthusiasm accompanying a New Beginning. Old beginnings seem materially different because we've already traveled those routes before. The New Beginnings involve different paths and destinations, so not even our best imaginations can properly set expectations. I dream big then as if precedent were meaningless and everything might be different this time. There will be space to relearn that space and time remain relatively unchanged regardless of the charted path. We remain denizens of the same neighborhood regardless of where we travel. A new series, though, opens many doors. I already perceive my usual routine as different. I'm focusing on other things than I attended to when writing my Publishing Series. Honing might allow me to implement lasting improvements, which might even make my life a little easier. I've already created a little template that might allow me to avoid ten minutes of typing each morning. This after doing the alternative only about twenty-one hundred times. New Beginnings insist that now is the time, and so it is.

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FineTuning

finetuning
Jules Bastien-Lepage:
Mower Honing a Scythe (1878)


I woke feeling ill at ease on this first full day of Summer. I finished my Publishing series yesterday and finished reading the manuscript I'd created in the background of writing that series by midafternoon. I had yet to decide whether to continue creating a new series this morning or take an extended break to try my hand at something else for a change. The world seemed more disconnected than usual in the predawn darkness. The cats noticed that the rhythm of my morning routine had been broken. We ached together for its return. There was no more obvious cure than simply starting another series, but what topic?

I looked back at my last few series: Authoring, Reconning, Againing, SetTheory, Success, and Publishing, wondering what might serve as a natural next in the progression.

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MoreBegendings

morebegendings
Winslow Homer:
The End of the Day, Adirondacks (1890)


" … the serious side of the practice."


Today is slated to extend fifteen hours and forty-five minutes, with sunlight visible for seventeen hours. These conditions make this the perfect day to end something. They also suggest a new beginning, for each ending abuts into whatever comes next. This day marks six years since I began this now lengthy experiment where I would try to create a new story each morning. I long ago lost the need to try very hard to accomplish this end. The stories slip out as a matter of course now. This morning, though, I wonder if this story, this final story in my Publishing Series, shouldn't be my last produced under this regimen. I began this practice following a professional disappointment and a lengthy discouragement. I thought it might prove courageous or at least foolhardy to create a story every morning to try to prove something. If writers write, it would not be unreasonable to expect me to write each morning since that's what writers do. That or else, perhaps I wasn't quite the writer I'd imagined myself to be.

I turned out to at least be the writer I'd imagined myself to be and more.

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TidyingUp

tidyingup
Russell Lee: Cleaning up manure in milking shed. Large dairy, Tom Green County, Texas (1939)


"It's up to the protagonist to decide what …"


Almost as if by magic, another ending arrives. The distance to the end appears impossibly long at the beginning, and it stays that way until the last few days. The morning before the final one, it might suddenly dawn on me that I never intended this series to last forever and that it, too, would be ending soon. I'm rarely ready to begin anything and even less prepared to finish. I have yet to produce what I imagined I would produce back when I chose Publishing as my theme for this quarter. I'd imagined I would have published something by now, but I have yet to. I moved closer to a point of publication, but I cannot determine for certain. I made progress preparing a single manuscript without finishing that work, though there's still time to cross that line before this series runs out of allotted time tomorrow.

Things take as long as they take.

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MakingMantras

makingmantras
Rockwell Kent: Meditation (1929)


" … merely MakingMantras all along."


While reading beneath one of our backyard ornamental crabapple trees, it occurred to me that reading works like meditation. It seems to focus attention away as well as within, into, and without, the purpose often in doubt. I was reading a biography of John Singer Sargent, but it hardly matters the reading matter's content, for any words might encourage identical contemplations or self-similar ones. However thoughtfully crafted, the book and its contents do not serve as the sole or even the primary purpose of reading. They serve as mere mantras for the focus. They exist as context.

I was raised to believe—or somehow convinced myself—that the book was the object, the stuff that Publishing produced, but I might have been mistaken.

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AngryArm

angryarm
Paul Giambarba: The Withered Arm (c. 1960)


" … no fixing in the immediate offing."


I am taken by how much foreground attention even a superficial wound can command. The Vengeful god residing in my arm leaves it feeling angry and complaining whatever I do. I suddenly seem incapable of accomplishing anything without further insulting that AngryArm. I cannot play catch with my grandson without wounding the thing, so I decline to play. I cannot do anything without incurring more damage. As the list of things I cannot do without wincing continues growing, I wonder where all this might be going. The doctor who diagnosed the ailment (Deltoid Bursitis for those not paying close attention) wrote me a script for a ninety-day supply of remarkably ineffective pain medication. This prescription suggests that he anticipated a longer haul than a short one. I might be hosting this AngryArm for some considerable time to come. I try but fail not to think about this.

Now, everything seems influenced by the presence of this AngryArm, even my Publishing efforts.

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TheIllusion

theillusion
Strobridge & Co. Lith.:
Kellar and his perplexing cabinet mysteries (1894)


"The problem with communication is the illusion that it's occurred."

a common bit of folk wisdom


Publishing serves as a means of communication, and as such, it's subject to all the laws governing it. Primary among those laws might be TheIllusion, TheIllusion that it occurred. We inhabit the pointy end of eons of development of our communication channels. The very best I can claim about any of them might be that they're still subject to the same illusion that communication ever occurs. I famously struggle to keep up with my email, for instance, whatever 'keeping up' might entail. I understand that the probability of me receiving and comprehending any individual email as its sender intended remains slight, almost zero. The Muse is forever discovering that I never received the message she forwarded to me last week and, upon researching the cause, typically finds the message right where she had thought it would be, sitting plaintively in my email queue. It had somehow slipped by me without my noticing. Independent of her intervention, I never would have "received" it. It's the same for everybody.

Face-to-face oral communication seems just as likely to surprise and fail.

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WritingSummary: 06/15/2023

ws06152023
Bartolomeo Pinelli:
The Letter-writer in Piazza Montanara in Rome
(19th century)


We Inhabit Middles.
I realize I've already completed this series's final whole writing week. It might reasonably continue forever, and just how arbitrary was my decision to dedicate only a quarter to considering my Publishing issues. I've scratched some surfaces, some severely, but I surely leave remaining more questions than I've investigated. Each subject, each focus, seems to open something infinite within us. Yes, we might well find a universe within any old anything, for our curiosities reveal tremendous self-similarity. Each part of any infinite must also represent its whole; a piece of infinity might well seem indistinguishable from the total, smaller infinities retaining their context's character. Each writing week might be destined to fall short and leave more questions unanswered, but no amount of writing—or anything—looks very likely to ever get to the bottom of anything. We inhabit middles.

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20YearJob

20yearjob
William Merritt Chase: A City Park (c. 1887)


" … knowing that probably nobody will notice."


Most of my work seems short-lived. Mowing the lawn, for instance, buys me, at most, a week's reprieve from needing to mow the lawn again. Cleaning up the kitchen extinguishes in mere hours. According to my schedule, my writing, which I sometimes think of as eternal, must be added to each morning so its reprieve extends less than a day. If I finish writing a story by six am, another aches to be born by four the following morning. House maintenance work tends to run on much longer cycles. One repaints infrequently, often a few years after it becomes absolutely necessary. I think of it as a 20YearJob, one for which I will be much older by the time it needs refreshing. It might take me three or four years to entirely paint the Villa exterior, so it’s good that its frequency moves more like an ice age.

Yesterday, I finished refinishing three cast iron-framed park benches The Villa's prior owners left behind when they moved.

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Rapt

rapt_study_
Stuart Davis: Study for “Rapt at Rappaport’s” (1952)

rapt
Stuart Davis: Rapt at Rappaport's (1952)


"Publishing ain't whitewashing …"


Writers and editors long ago acknowledged that authors make lousy proofreaders and copyeditors because they're too involved with and invested in the object of their efforts. One would never dream of employing any craftsperson as their quality control inspector, for use demands a separate set of imperatives than fabrication ever does. The maker should fall under a thrall with his creations, ardor which properly disqualifies them from passing sound finishing judgments. While creating my latest manuscript, I harbored deep doubts about the product of my effort. Well into the first third of the project, I complained that I had not yet found the rhythm of it and openly wondered if the concept possessed any inherent rhythm within it. Only when I was more than halfway done did an underlying logic emerge. Then I became more protective than critical, more the father than the humble subcontractor.

A form of evolution governs the creation of a finished work.

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HearingMyselfThink

hearingmyselfthink
Follower of Frans Hals:
The Rommel-Pot Player (c. 1630)


"Nobody ever discloses greater secrets."


I believe, without hard evidence, that we each maintain a unique dialect of how we think. Unrelated to physical speech patterns, this manner of speaking to ourselves results from a lifetime of considering in the most personal possible ways. This voice accompanied us on our most harrowing as well as our most reassuring excursions. It was, quite literally, there then and remembers. It guided most of the figuring out we've ever accomplished. We might just as well consider it our most trustworthy friend.

It's a great gift when we're able to HearOurselvesThink.

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Contact

contact
Follower of Peter Paul Rubens:
The Apotheosis of the Hero (1630/40)


"We'll see where that takes us."


A year ago this week, a publisher contacted me to see if I might be interested in working with her organization. I reluctantly receive such calls because the caller often feels compelled to pressure me into agreeing to something before I understand the offer. Nobody appreciates feeling pressured into anything, so I feel baffled about why anyone relying upon persuasion or merely information to sell something would ever resort to pressuring anyone, but they do. I always ask for more details, paper if they've got it. I want to slow down the interaction so we might get to know each other before moving on to first or second base.

I've noticed a similar strategy at work when investigating the purchase of software.

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Harbingers

harbingers
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn and Workshop:
Young Woman at an Open Half-Door (1645)


“The outcome should properly prove surprising …”


The immediate care doctor reassured me that my latest ache need not be a Harbinger of things to come. It represents a strain that, properly treated, need not become chronic or recurring. I wonder, though, when aches and pains appear, whether they're here permanently, for good, ill, or whatever. In my youth, I imagined that aches and pains amounted to karma, just desserts due to some prior shortcoming or committed sin. Smoke for fifty years and see what happens. But as I've aged, I might have started learning better that much misfortune visits without an antecedent rhyme or reason, without representing anything but fortune. "It just happened" probably explains more than all the root cause analyses in the world. I still wonder which of my maladies might become permanent companions and which might reasonably disappear over time.

A month ago, I could quack like a duck, even flap my right arm wing-like in unison.

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WorkingWounded

workingwounded
Théodore Géricault:
The Wounded Cuirassier
[French: Le Cuirassier blessé quittant le feu]
(1814)


" … because that's what I do."


I admit to a certain degree of DIYdiocy. I do more than attempt to Do It Myself but sometimes seem to be actively engaging in Doing Myself In! A month or more ago, I finally set about cutting up those shrub trimmings clogging the driveway so that I could stuff them into the green waste can. After that work, an annoying ache took up residence in the region of my right deltoid, a shoulder muscle. I could manage that pain with regular doses of Ibuprofen and did. I tried to avoid activities that annoyed that spot, though just moving my arm laterally up or down could elicit a wince. I added some dedicated rest periods to my schedule and continued.

Repainting the back deck railings and superstructure brought fresh insults to my wound.

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FallingInto

fallinginto
Giuseppe Maria Crespi:
Bertoldino Falling into the Fish Pond (c. 1665-1747)


"How could I not continue?"


I prefer to think about the future as something I'm FallingInto. I understand the more popular notions insisting that we create and craft or design our futures, but those operations seem severely limited. Whatever my intentions or preferences, I might, at best, be able to choose my seat. The destination's almost always out of my control. This goes double for those engagements where I've taken charge of creating something. My influence, even under those conditions, seems at best secondary. Writing my current manuscript only came about partly by design. An awful lot of happenstance guided my hand. Much of my effort was only partially consciously driven. Writing anything includes elements perhaps best described as coming together. Set up a context, and much just follows. Any practice depends upon gravity guiding some FallingInto.

I do not suggest that I am mere flotsam. I exert great influence, just not as great and not necessarily to the degree I imagine.

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WritingSummary: 6/08/2023

ws06082023
Claude Emile Schuffenecker: Portrait of a Man Writing (19th-20th century)

If Irises Carried Grudges, Our Winters Would Never End.
I feel as though I made little progress this week, what with all the diversions and distractions presently haunting me. I might be blessed with so many interesting sidelines, but the ancient Chinese curse about living in interesting times echoes in more than just the background; it accompanies the foreground, too. Our front yard iris garden might best represent this writing week. This time last week, dozens of blooms graced the otherwise barren flowerbed. Now, only desiccated fronds remain a week later, and memories of those brilliant colors and alluring scents. Iris season lasts at most ten days, yet they require tending through the entire year. In winter, careless joggers and dog walkers tromp right through their territory. Come Spring, the unpromising plants come to reassuring life again, forgiving our many trespasses, each of which we most probably unknowingly visited upon ourselves. If Irises carried grudges, our winters would never end.

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CriticalEar

criticalear
William H. Martin: The largest ear of corn grown (c. 1908)

"I might have to smother it if I expect to succeed."


I get an earful when preparing my manuscript for Publishing. I listen to the stories in different ways than I listened to them just after writing them, and also different than I did while assembling them. Once assembled into a contiguous whole, I hear different voices than I remember hearing before. After so many repetitive listenings, my ear had learned to become more critical. If I'm not careful, and perhaps even if I manage to become really careful, my ear becomes critical. My prose relies upon a certain innocence from listening ears. Experienced through a critical filter, it seems to need endless reworking. It could have been simpler, my suddenly CriticalEar suggests. It could have been more eloquent. There's no end to the little improvements the later listenings suggest, just to be helpful, only to enhance.

I'm experienced enough to understand that the time for wholesale improvement has already passed.

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Diversions

diversions
Michael Wolgemut and Workshop
published by
Anton Koberger:
The Virtues of Christ and the Wickedness of His Enemies
Symbolized by Diverse Birds and Beasts (verso);
The Last Supper (recto),
pages 66 and 65 from the Treasury (Schatzbehalter)
(1491)


"… another good or great intention …"


Nexts tailgate my Publishing efforts as I move ever closer to concluding them, or I would be moving ever closer to finishing them were it not for the nexts crowding ever more closely and diverting my attention. I'm painting the back deck, by which I mean that I'm painting everything associated with the back deck except the deck surface, which was fabricated out of melted milk jugs and doesn't need painting. The railings and pergola-like superstructure above need repainting, so I set about to sand, wash, and sweep before settling into painting, a three-coat diversion that might take me a week to complete, what with the other diversions swarming my space. I started arranging to buy some tee shirts yesterday in lieu of painting and also instead of Publishing because The Muse is running for public office, Port Commissioner and I'm her campaign manager. Buying tee shirts pretty much marks the official start of her run. I'd been feeling delinquent because of all the Diversions lately tailgating my every movement.

I'll make no excuses or no concerted ones.

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TechSupport

TechSupport
Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo:
God the Father Supported by Angels in Clouds, II (c. 1759)


"I once insisted that I would somehow maintain my naive state …"


I foolishly swore an oath when I was first introduced to what I referred to then as Barbie and Ken Computers. I referred to the so-called personal computers, those handy, steadily shrinking little machines we're not supposed to take too awfully seriously but do. My oath insisted that I would do everything in my power to remain a naive user of the damnable little things because I'd seen otherwise sentient beings disappear into some passionate swirl of technical engagement. Whether that attention went into coding or merely formatting didn't matter. My nonrefundable time mattered to me, and I swore my oath in the naive belief that I might somehow possess the power to make good on it, which, of course, I didn't.

To engage with technology inescapably transforms anybody into their own TechSupport.

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TeachingMyself

teachingmyself
Theodore Roussel: Portrait of Myself (1901)


"Teacher, teach thyself."


What sort of book have I written? What does this manuscript aspire to become, and what have I achieved by creating it? These questions dominate my internal dialogue as I listen to this almost-finished work for the very first time after spending months producing it. The story–the narrative arc—seems familiar but not overwhelmingly so. I only sometimes know where each story's going from its beginning, for I seem to have been blessed with a remarkably short memory. Each story's conclusions also seem familiar, though I often feel that I hadn't previously recognized some aspects. I often think the endings, in particular, exhibit a certain eloquence, a sense of accurately summing up something, but what am I reading? Fiction or non? Biography or vanity? Gibberish or wisdom or some tragic combination of the two?

The work seems just fictional enough to hold attention, though I based most of the stories upon actual events, however embellished.

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StoryTime

storytime
Attributed to Sumiyoshi Jokei:
A Story of Crickets (second half 17th century)


"The sweetest dreams always came before sleep …"


When I was a child, StoryTime was my favorite time of any day. My dad used to read to his children. We'd gather around, me often perching on the back of the couch, for the first imperative would always be to get just as close as possible to the narrator. The little sisters tucked in closest. He'd smell of aftershave. His baritone resonated whatever he recited. He was one of those who could read the stock market report to rapt audiences; the story's content always seemed much less important than his performance.

But even when he was unavailable to read, someone would read aloud, the older sister or even the youngest one when she was first learning to read.

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MindSetting

MindSetting
Adolf Hohneck, After Gustav Friedrich Schlick:
"My Peace of Mind is gone" [Faust] (1834)

"I could found The Truly Terrible Publishing Company to distribute my mediocre works out into an already grossly over- stuffed marketplace featuring ever fewer interested consumers." from my Success Series, TheGames, 12/26/2022

Sitting down to finally read through that freshly compiled manuscript proves impossible. Its author feels guilty instead. He senses he might be better off if he just skips reading through the result. He expects not to like what he's created as if the mere act of reading it could only disclose a previously undetected fatal error. If he was to be honest with himself, he could only reject the work and relegate it to history's ashcan, humiliated. So instead, he dances around the job, grateful he doesn't have a printer powerful enough to render its three hundred-plus pages to paper. He distracts himself, busying his attention elsewhere, hiding out. He cannot find an appropriate mind with which to engage in this work. He consequently feels justified in just shirking this necessary next step.

Perhaps he could just move to assembling the next series in line and become, rather than published, more accomplished at assembling, a necessary skill in the vast Publishing world.

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OldWeaknesses

oldweakness
Adolphe Martial Potémont:
Old Oaks at Bas Bréau (c. 1865)
“ … shamelessly incorporating our OldWeaknesses …”

I remain a change skeptic. I see clear evidence of change but perhaps clearer evidence that nothing very drastically changes. I remain who I always was, changes in context probably contributing more to the appearance of change than to any substance. I remain distinctly recognizable, even if my once girlish figure has disappeared into belly and sags. I still feel fairly youthful for my age. My OldWeaknesses remain if more contained than they were at times. My tastes have expanded some. My palate more refined. My experience clearly greater, but the unknowns still far outnumber the knowns, and my unknowables seem essentially unchanged across decades. I remain remarkably contained.

I suspect that my OldWeaknesses are my secret strengths.

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WritingSummary: 6/01/2023

ws06012023
Johann Andreas Benjamin Nothnagel:
Hermit Writing (18th Century)

A Decent Chance Of Becoming Requitable
Now that I've finished assembling my manuscript, my schedule allows me some distractions and respite from that all-consuming focus. I became a wannabe handyman again, entering The Home Despot only to have my desires dashed by the harsh realities they almost exclusively dispense there. Between that visit and a following one to a lumber yard, my grand plan to accomplish something besides manuscript assembling fell apart. I took these experiences particularly hard, for tight on the sense of success completing assembly had brought; I'd thought myself invulnerable to disappointment, only to learn better, by which I, of course, mean worse. I realize that my small successes influence little, almost nothing, yet they still feel consequential, at least until this old world starts dispensing its usual disappointments again. Again, I'm reminded of why I became a writer. It allows me to inhabit a world primarily of my own making, where my notions of what's possible hold a decent chance of becoming requitable.

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OnSpec

onspec
Constant Troyon: The Road to Market (1858/59)
" … worth gratefully beyond measure."

It pays nobody to misunderstand how Publishing works. It does not work like most markets or, depending upon one's ability to swallow experience, it works precisely like all markets, which is to say it works mindlessly. Those who believe they can predict how a particular work might sell, especially if from an unknown author, fool themselves first. Those who believe their book might make them rich and/or famous would be better served investing in lottery tickets, where the odds are somewhat better than those offered by Publishing's invisible thumb. Invisible hands put in their place, one need not necessarily remain naive to engage. Donald Trump, Jr., barely literate by most accounts, produced a best seller, but by the most tried and true method yet devised. The Republican National Committee purchased a hundred thousand dollars worth of the forgettable title "Triggered" the week it was released for use as "collateral," giving away a "free" copy with every donation. Trump's re-election campaign repeated that purchase with an even bigger buy. This market manipulation has become common among some wildly successful authors. You'd readily recognize their names.

Random House must be the most accurately named Publishing house ever, for the markets it serves primarily serve randomness to its players.

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Read

read
Nicolas Lagneau:
Elderly Man Reading a Book (C.1650)
" … one can be fairly certain it isn't …"

What does a writer really do? This kind of question seems useful, whatever the profession, for professions notoriously label themselves as something other than the professional's primary occupation. A cook might spend considerably more time prepping than cooking. A typical astronaut might spend less than 1% of their time actually astronauting, the balance spent primarily in training. Surgeons can only spend a few hours each day in surgery and expend the balance of their days engaging in all the ancillary activities attendant to performing surgery: diagnosis, evaluation, follow-up, consultation, etc. Nobody actually does what they're advertised as doing, not primarily, and a writer's no exception. So what do writers do in lieu of writing? They read.

Every book I've ever read about how to become a writer prescribed precisely the same regimen: Read.

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Poifection

poifection
Ben Shahn:
Detail of a log fence in central Ohio (1938)

"It must have been a form of magic …"

Nothing amplifies a sense of accomplishment like a long lead-up. Finish anything quickly and effortlessly, and little sense of elation accompanies the closure. Struggle over it, though, and it seems like a very big deal, indeed. Even the more evident and normal surface imperfections might seem to disappear in the shadow of the resulting joy. And so it seemed for this dreamer who set out to publish one of his works into something resembling a book. He learned that books do not just happen, nor are they the inevitable result of the concatenation of individual parts. They must be crafted, reworked, and reimagined, whatever their original form or concept. Much picky work and many unexciting details combine to finally produce something resembling a finished product. There's even more effort required after, but the appearance of something resembling a book works as a new beginning, a platform from which further adventures might resume.

I somehow managed to stumble upon the secret, that magic something allowing me to proceed to Go and collect my obligatory Two Hundred Dollars.

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PickyDetails

pickydetails
Charles Herbert Moore,
Copy after
Vittore Carpaccio:
Much Reduced Study of the Dragon in
Carpaccio's Picture of St. George and the Dragon,
in the Chapel of S. Giorgio dei [sic] Schiavoni, Venice
, 1876
"I'll never be much more than not quite a rank amateur …"

Once assembled, my manuscript must be printed before one more round of rereading and review. The formatting's not quite right, meaning I've entered the long-dreaded PickyDetails part of this Publishing process. I've long dreaded this stage because I have not even nearly mastered my manuscripting software, which seems by any measure an absolute behemoth. It does too much for any app even to attempt. Being a purported master of so many realms, the user who seeks no more than an informal relationship seems sunk from the outset. A unique vocabulary seems at least necessary to make any headway, and I still have not begun to master even a pigeon-English dialect for this one. The app comes with hours of detailed tutorial videos which introduce the app in curious slices. These videos induce sleep better than a bootleg prescription of Nembutal. Five or six years of experience with this app still leaves me well within the Naive User classification.

The question comes down to how I might accomplish this.

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Onward&Inward

onward_inward
Jessie Willcox Smith:
One foot up, the other foot down (1918)
" … exclusively produced by fools like me …"

Two months later, I stumbled across a finish line of sorts. I finally put together that manuscript I started assembling sixty days ago. This achievement amounts to more of a milestone event than a finish line one, for many subsequent steps remain along paths as yet clearly charted. I do not yet understand where this thread continues, just that I'm not at the end of it yet. However, this event still feels momentous, for assembling this bugger was a genuine struggle. Much of the effort required patience, a commodity perennially in short supply, especially when and if one's anxious to finish. The more one wishes to accomplish something, the more difficult it becomes to achieve. I suspect that if I could only become indifferent to accomplishing anything, my life would become a breeze, but without enough passion to sustain anyone, let alone me.  Besides testing dedication, frustrations help maintain momentum and purpose. I've made progress! Sixty-six thousand, nine-hundred and ten words, projected to produce three hundred and thirteen pages when printed. Estimated reading time: four hours and forty-seven minutes.

Next comes some different challenges.

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MixingMetaphors

mixingmetaphors
Jessie Willcox Smith:
Girl seated in flower garden (1905)
"Beware of good advice and even warier of better."

As I assemble my manuscript, I catch myself unable to imagine its contents. Yes, I wrote every word, but even after creating each story and reading through each several times, I cannot quite bring to mind most of its contents. I carry a general impression of whatever's between the covers, but the details escape me, or they would escape if they'd ever been captive. I sense that I might be especially stupid to find myself unable to crisply recall what I've written. When I reread a story, I quickly realized it was mine. I recognize the voice. I usually even recall the context within which each one emerged, but I'm almost at a loss to describe much of the manuscript's contents absent that prompting. I consider this a serious shortcoming.
Like all advice-givers and consultants, I once encouraged my clients to start with a singular focus.

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Introduction

introduction
Jessie Willcox Smith:
Heidi introduced each in turn by its name to her friend Clara (1922)

The Introduction tends to be the last chapter written and the first one read. The author might have drafted an Intro as at least a placeholder before writing the contents. That one better represented the writer's intentions but intentions rarely survive encounters with a keyboard. Like every paper you tried to write to the outline you were instructed to create before you started writing, writing takes intentions in different directions. By the time the author's finished writing, he holds a firmer impression of who he's become while creating the manuscript. More likely, it won't be until after he's finished assembling the manuscript before he finally manages to catch up with himself and affect some sort of Introduction. By then, he will have become different from the aspiring author he was at the beginning and even different from the more seasoned hack he became after he'd finished writing. The proofing and sequencing effort couldn't have helped but change more than just his perspective. It changed him into someone needing an Introduction to himself.
I have watched myself as I've crawled through this latest manuscript assembly.

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WritingSummary: 4/25/2023

writingsummary-_4_25_2023
Jessie Willcox Smith: Heidi writing (1922)


Refreshed if Groggy
I primarily create my weekly writing summaries for myself. I need the reminder of how I have spent my week, of what I've discovered. Once written, an insight's quickly forgotten, buried beneath subsequent discoveries. As I've assembled my latest manuscript, I have discovered plenty. I've been continually stumbling upon identities I'd forgotten I'd ever assumed, stories written in stone but still somehow lost, bits and pieces needing connecting. These stories do not just connect themselves. Connection requires deliberation, focused attention, and clear intentions. I catch myself over-anticipating creating these summaries. Come Thursday, I foresee a lengthy effort coming Friday morning. Often, something happens on Thursday that leaves me late to bed. The alarm rings almost viciously come early Friday morning. Still, I finish the summarizing effort, pleased with myself for having done it, for it marks a milestone as I create my next manuscript. I start my new writing week refreshed if groggy, clearer about my recent history, and ready to proceed into the upcoming unknowns.

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Resolute

resolute
O. Louis Guglielmi: The River (1942)


"Where another inertia ruled the start, its counterpart commands the finish."


I can't fairly characterize myself as relentless, but beyond a certain uncertain point, I have known myself to turn Resolute. This Publishing business, for instance, which has turned out to hold far more dimensions than I at first suspected, has left me feeling, in turns, helpless and reassured, overwhelmed and bored stiff. It has offered a gauntlet of negative reinforcement and many must-dos between the beginning and realizing my aspiration. I'd even gladly bartered away my beginning naivety for a better story once I realized that I could hold my dream or realize something tangible, but not both. Now that I'm down to the final few weeks of the planned excursion, I've grown more comfortable with the intrusion. I can sense an impending resolution; I swear that I can smell it now. Downwind of resolution, I might just as well turn Resolute.

My schedule, sometimes my staunch opponent, has now become my ally.

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TwoMillionPlus

twomillionplus
Giovanni di Paolo:
Saint John the Baptist Entering the Wilderness (1455/60)


"… we periodically pretended together that it was."


I claim to be a political Progressive, meaning I subscribe to the curious notion that progress remains both possible and net positive; unlike political Conservatives who view their future skeptically, often cynically, as if it serves as a descent from prior greatness, Progressives claw ever forward. In contrast, Conservatives seek to return to past glory. We cannot possibly experience either perspective, what with entropy and all, but they're belief structures, not intended to represent reality but to harbor aspirations. As a Progressive, I hold lofty aspirations. My Conservative neighbors seem to hold more catastrophic ones. It comes down to what sort of future I imagine since an actual future has yet to manifest and perennially can't.

The question of progress made and experienced eventually enters into every human activity.

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MysteryWithin

mysterywithin
Paul Gauguin: Arlésiennes (Mistral) (1888)

"He always was before."


I dreamed I was solving a mystery. Clues appeared before me, and I dutifully tracked them down, slowly building my case. Just when I felt as though I might be getting close to identifying the guilty parties, a thought visited me, an idea that, just for a second, wondered who was writing the story. Was I solving a mystery or staring in a story where I was cast as the detective, not really solving anything but more like serving as an author's character in some work of fiction, my role not real but made up. I considered shifting my focus then from merely acting as a mystery solver to chasing after the deeper mystery to see if I could identify who was this author. I received surprise testimony from a woman who claimed to be the actual author's mother, but even she needed help determining which part of the puzzle was figure and which was serving as ground.

I remember happening upon helpful strangers, of feeling baffled just before, as if by fortunate accident, fresh useful information came into my possession.

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Clicks

clicks
Albrecht Dürer:
The Four Horsemen, from The Apocalypse (c. 1498)


"How do I compare thee to a provocative headline?"


The cynicism in this world expands at an ever-expanding rate. What passed for crass fifty years ago will hardly make noteworthy today. From
Fuck Biden bumper stickers to clickbait social media headlines, today's world trades in raw attention—the less refined, the better. Publishing, too, has fallen prey to these emerging values—if I dare use value to describe what I see happening inside. Almost twenty years ago, some brilliant upstart experienced a revelation. Where Publishing had forever focused on distributing content as its purpose, an emergent goal appeared: attention. On the internet, the Click became the metric and the purpose, and everything was or would eventually be distributed via the internet. A hollow piece with an attractive title would easily attract more attention than any unprovocative, thoughtful piece. First one, then almost all others began focusing their attention upon attracting attention, upon encouraging Clicks. The brilliant insight centered around the realization that Clicks pay, but content doesn't.

At first, It didn't matter how long attention focused on any individual item.

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Obswerving

obswerving
Vincent van Gogh:
Terrace and Observation Deck at the Moulin de Blute-Fin, Montmartre
(early 1887)


"The finished work isn't finished …"


I claim to be writing a series about Publishing, but I've grown increasingly uncertain if this effort will produce what it initially implied. I know, I know, that bait-and-switch suggestion might qualify as the subtext of this whole series so far. I can hardly pick up a stick but what that stick transforms into something else, or sure seems to. Iterate that experience a few dozen times, and anyone might come to question the basis upon which they'd drawn their conclusions. The jury might opt to continue deliberations and might not ever come to any firm conclusions other than that the case was clearly not as presented and not really as expected, either. It turned into something different.

Could I once, just once, leave well enough alone?

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WritingSummary: 4/18/2023

weeklywritingsummary4_18_2023
After Raffaello Sanzio, called Raphael:
Seated Youth Writing in Book (17th/18th century)


Thrive On The Unresolvable
This week brought me back into my regular writing schedule after missing parts of three writing weeks. I had worried that I'd broken the trance that usually carries me into and through my writing work. I can be superstitious about my habits, mistaking them for necessary imperatives when they're more likely no more than random patterns. I learned—or I am still learning—that I need not necessarily fear upsetting my patterns. I am no longer the sum total of the habits I keep, for I have been actively breaking bad habits in favor of better ones, so far, without evident damage. In my relative youth, I might have been addicted to my life, convinced of the necessity of so many of my choices. One of the great gifts aging brings seems to be a loosening of those encumbering imperatives. I increasingly see that I am unnecessary, though I might still qualify as nice-to-have. I am no longer necessary if I ever was; my stories are not what they seem. It might be that our purpose here was never to resolve any great mysteries but to discover more of them. This world seems to thrive on the unresolvable.

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Piles

piles
Battista Franco: Rib Cages (early 1540s)

"Delusions like this one keep me moving forward."

One can tell a lot about an artist by learning how they organize their work. I utilize the venerable Pile, which started as a page, and emerged from an inadvertently random-access filing system. My legitimacy was always suspect because of the primitive methods I employed to keep track of my output. For me, Publishing attempts to right this error, to finally put form to what emerged almost randomly. My great sin as a writer and creator has always been that I have never understood what form my collected works might eventually take. I failed to properly anticipate. I'd produce a word, then a sentence at a time without deeply considering where I might store the product or what structure might best serve my someday heirs and archivists in the unlikely event that I left either behind. I'd pile one page upon another until the pile threatened to tip over, then I'd start another pile. Fifty years later, my library looks like an abandoned recycling center.

Fortunately, most of my pages and Piles are virtual.

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Repurposeful

repurposeful
Katsushika Hokusai 葛飾 北斎: Recycling Paper (1821)


"I repurpose and therefore am."


By the time this story becomes part of a manuscript, I will have repurposed it several times. The manuscript itself might have always been the purpose of creating the story, but each seemed to need several interim iterations before I could quietly put it to rest there. It first appeared as a part of my daily production, my each and every morning writing practice. This initial iteration sure seems finished when I first post it, but it needs fixing before it can reach anything even remotely like its final destination. I often wonder if I could simplify this terribly complicated and intricate process until I recall that this present instance represents years of evolving improvements. The process isn't yet completely static, but it's become both much simpler and more complicated as various purposes have emerged and stuck into more or less permanent practices. I've become a Repurposeful writer, poster, and publisher, reworking essentially the same kernels to satisfy their varying purposes.

Much of this effort amounts to relatively mindless copying and pasting.

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Distracting

distracting
Allart van Everdingen:
Reynard disguises as monk and distracts cock
(17th century)


" … few intentions seem very far beyond us."


Publishing sure seems like an occupation especially designed to try a practitioner's patience. Every damned thing involved in the engagement takes longer than expected and ultimately seems more complicated than strictly necessary. Still, under the It Takes Whatever It Takes Rule, I cannot characterize even these demands as excessive. They simply refuse to align with my tastes. Someone somewhere would very likely find this work rewarding, but probably nobody who'd ever very likely find themselves actually asking to engage in it. Some professions seem just like this. They seem the exclusive domains of misanthropes, those who never hoped to find their gainful employment shipping out beneath those masts. Dies cast as they cast. I might just as easily insist that I've been blessed with my Publishing mess.

I lack sufficient discipline to make the headway I had been expecting, though, as with many things, I suspect my metaphor's lacking.

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Skeptical

skeptical
Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins:
Miss Alice Kurtz (1903)


" … who once upon a time left a few utterly ordinary stories behind …"


I'm not much of a Booster. I'd make a piss-poor Rotarian, Kiwanian, or member in decent standing of the local Chamber of Commerce. My father before me stood off to the side, not precisely hiding but actively trying not to become the center of anyone's attention. The salesmen and hail fellows gladhand their way through their lives while others stand aside and gladly bid them pass by, for they seem to be on some mission. They're going somewhere, sure and certain of their own salvation, and excited at the prospect of improving others' chances, too. They seem to hold God's ear, his attention, with the explicit intention of collecting their due.

I feel uncertain whether I'm on a righteous path.

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Confidence

confidence
Adélaïde Labille-Guiard:
Portrait of Dublin-Tornelle (c. 1799)


"How could any of us ever experience the considerable benefits of our doubts if we've smothered them with our Confidence first?"


Confidence proves neither necessary nor sufficient to support any creative endeavor. It more often undermines an artist, who might find himself better served by slathering himself in criticism or doubt, for Confidence accentuates the positive at the onerous cost of other perspectives. It too easily evolves into studied self-deception, unshakable notions, and devotion to lesser Gods who grant unearned permissions and the pursuit of unwarranted commissions. One too easily falls into playing the Confidence Man, so practiced at self-deception that deception becomes first nature, trading in hollow and narrow platitudes, knowing for certain what nobody could ever know for sure, selling soap and Bibles.

The Confident author might not be worth reading other than as an example of what one should avoid reading.

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Outlying

outlying
Sebald Beham:
The Guard Near the Powder Casks
(Not Dated, c. 1520-1550)


" … my books look different than most others."


Each publication should be different than anything published before it. Not necessarily radically different, but just different enough. Nobody, for instance, really wants their New York Times to arrive looking like a tabloid Post or US News, for that difference makes little sense. So, superficially, each edition of The Times should appear, from a slight distance, almost precisely the same as every other, though once a decade or so, something so outrageous happens that the front page of even the staid and solemn Times might become an Outlier of itself to amplify the rarity of the reported event.

I try to make each of my stories unique.

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Disrupted

disrupted
Anonymous Germany (Wittenberg): Moses Destroying the Tablets (1558)


" … getting good and lost along the way?"


I usually isolate my stories from current events, hoping this convention will endow them with longer-lasting relevance. However, I make an exception with this story since this one considers Distruption. Today marks the end of the coronavirus public emergency, which, officials emphasize, does not mark the end of the coronavirus' influence on our lives. I, for instance, just tested positive (again) this morning, marking the thirteenth day of my first and so-far only Covid infection. The Muse recovered from hers more than a week ago and has been flitting around attending public meetings since then while I've hung out in the guest bedroom licking my wounds.

The libertarians, primitive thinkers that they've reliably proven themselves to be, gleefully proclaim that we live in an age of Disruption, just as if this condition were reason for celebration.

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Chiseling

chiseling
Unknown Indonedian/ Central Javaian Sculptor:
God Ganesha, Remover of Obstacles
(9th/10th century)


" … which explains my aching shoulder."


Publishing might qualify as a form of worship. Like all forms of worship, Publishing demands extended effort, as if Chiseling something out of stone, sculpting a practice from indifferent material. The practice itself needs to be coaxed into being using tools that should properly seem distinctly unsuited for their purpose, with straight edges intended to create curving lines and blunt instruments guiding the creation of fine edges. The outcome should seem unlikely from the outset and, if anything, even less likely as the faithful progress. This very difficulty feeds the resulting faith, encourages penitence, and sanctifies the practice. If it proved easy or convenient, it would prove worthless.

I mention this effort because the Amplified Collective revisited me yesterday.

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Rededicating

rededicating
Christian Julius Gustav Planer,
After
Philips Koninck: Hermit Reading (19th century)


"I might just as well be Rededicating my efforts …"


It doesn't take much to distract me. A tiny break in even a long-standing routine usually serves as more than an adequate impetus to go off my rails. I think of myself as a dedicated worker, but I seem to stand with one foot out the door, ready to divert my attention at the mere rumor of a hat dropping somewhere, anywhere. One might easily conclude that I lack an underlying discipline, and this observation might well prove both accurate as well as beside any useful point. Discipline should not be necessary and only prove essential in cases where one's held hostage, attempting to complete someone else's effort. Completing's one's own work should prove to enliven such that little discipline's demanded. I believe that if I'm focused on achieving my objectives, motivation should naturally take care of itself. That it only sometimes takes care of itself occasionally puts me at a distinct disadvantage.

The end of my Covid infection left me feeling ambivalent about Publishing, about everything.

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BoogeyMens

boogeymens
Vincent van Gogh: The Drinkers (1890)


“Our future seems secure together.”


Writing sometimes seems more like a haunting, for I am usually dredging up memories of past experiences to serve as grist for my work. I also sometimes exhume as yet unexperienced futures, and these can also prove to be problems. I imagine a few of my futures to be warm and inviting but more likely to harbor threats, many inhabited by BoogeyMens. The Boogeys remain from childhood stories rather than from lived experience. Their prior lives entirely consisted of stories, some of the types usually shared around a campfire on shadowy summer nights with a forest crowding in too tightly. Those stories promised an impending visit, scheduled for sometime between then and dawn. Later, some disturbance on the side of the tent will seem to announce doom's arrival, sparking some real drama inside. However, we almost always discovered the next morning some completely benign explanation for what we'd presumed had been our grisly demise. We'd somehow survived.

I've also somehow survived so far, though I often glimpse futures I would not willingly wish upon anyone, let alone myself.

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ReBeginningAgain

rebeginningagain
Attributed to Henry Fuseli: Perseus Starting from the Cave of the Gorgons (c. 1816)


"I should never again, ever be mistaken for anybody's spring chicken."


I somehow got the impression that beginnings and endings exclusively—or almost exclusively—came in matched pairs, with precisely one ending for each beginning and a single starting point for every ending. This notion could plausibly be further from the truth, but it needn't travel that far to expose its underlying fallacy. We've each seen multiple endings spawned from a single humble starting point, and many beginnings merge into a single ending. Commonly, something started finds itself interrupted, its routine disrupted, only to re-begin again; not usually to wholesale entirely start all over, but perhaps backtrack a little before trying to slip back into an established rut. These ReBeginnings always seem awkward, for it certainly seemed that the established routine had become well-engrained and unforgettable before the disruption. Some remembering with attendant struggling still seems evident. Nothing flawlessly re-begins.

Further, psychologists and metaphysicists insist that humans require disruption in their routines, however paradoxical this notion might seem.

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JustWhen

justwhen
William Michael Harnett: Just Dessert (1891)


"Life most often proceeds by other means than planned."


It might be an immutable law of this universe that JustWhen something seems lined up and ready to go, something else intrudes to blow up whatever best-laid plan was guiding the move. This presence justifies all the encouragement anyone can ever attract. But, regardless of how it feels, these intrusions are never about you. They're just this unsettling property of the universe breaking through at the invariably least convenient times. I know that it seems you get more of these than anybody, but that's a perspective illusion created by you having the only seat situated to see what happens to you but not to anybody else. Ninety percent of these JustWhens are invisible to everyone but the victim.

The occurrence of another JustWhen, no matter how common they seem, does not necessarily render the recipient a victim.

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CreepingFormality

creepingformality
Abraham Delfos: Oude man, schrijvend in boek
[Old Man, Writing In Book]
(1777)


"I do not yet know how I'll know when I'm finished."


As I prepare a manuscript for publication, I notice a CreepingFormality entering the effort. I began as I begin most things, naive and hope-filled. I will end this effort a little wiser and even a little more knowledgeable: more domesticated. The wild streak that fueled my first steps will have been tamed into a kind of compliance, for certain principles and practices have been replacing my feral enthusiasm with deeper understanding. I've already incorporated my earlier stage discoveries into more consistent practice. No longer simply hunting and pecking, I have been watching myself gain circumspection. No longer merely writing, I'm learning to avoid do-overs. This, despite the sure understanding that one tends to get whatever one attempt to avoid.

I sense a more profound responsibility to my broadening audience as I prepare postings for formal publication.

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Swooshing

swooshing
Peter Sheaf Hersey Newell:
Old Father William Turning a Somersault,
from "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"
(c. 1901)


"I might accomplish my Publishing without too much suffering …"


The prospect of a four-and-a-half-hour airplane ride opened up some space I couldn't find while sitting at my desk. I had been unable to locate the space I felt I needed to complete the arduous manuscript assembly process for just one of the titles I'd started assembling when I began this series. I have more than a dozen backlogged. I'd been dutifully chronicling activities I had not actually been doing, but then that tactic seemed typical of my usual approach to anything. I feel the urge to nail down the philosophy of something before fully immersing myself in it. Why should Publishing prove any different? Especially the daunting effort to assemble individual blog posts into manuscript form, an inevitable copy/paste/match-style coma inducer, intricate, supremely dull, and requiring pulling down commands because I cannot decipher their keystroke equivalents:
⌘⌥⌃V, for instance.

I admit I had avoided getting too much into the thick of this effort. It scared me.

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'Tweenings

_tweening
Adriaen Pietersz van de Venne:
Fishing for Souls (1614)


" … always somewhere in between."


I spend most of my days neither here nor there. I tend to transition between one and another state, not quite gone nor quite fully arrived at any particular point in time. My experience here has therefore seemed more of a smear than an occupation, not even my transitions precisely true to any clear standard. I have proven myself fully capable of fooling myself into insisting that I've successfully made transitions and somehow managed to grow up, for instance, even though many cues strongly suggest that I remain in transition. My presence anywhere remains distinctly ambiguous.

My Renewing efforts seem to be ending, or at least The Muse and I will be returning to ordinary time today.

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Renewing

renewing
Théodore Géricault, after Nicolas Poussin:
Man Clutching a Horse in Water,
after
Poussin's "Deluge" (1816)


" … a seemingly new you to see it through."


Renewing seems indistinguishable until after it’s over. During, it might be anything. It runs on intention until it succeeds or fails. One intends to renew, but one never really knows whether one'll be successful until the resulting feeling finally catches up to them. Until then, Renewing can resemble anything, even its opposite.

This underlying feature renders Renewing more similar than different from other intentions.

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PrimitiveProgress

primitiveprogress
Edward Sheriff Curtis:
The Primitive Artist - Paviotso (1924)


"I might scratch a story in a sandstone wall …"


Backward steps can produce forward progress. I tend to get so focused on improvements that I can lose the more primal assurance I can do without all my usual accoutrements. I only really need some of the utensils my kitchen holds, for instance, or a few of the array of pens I keep on my desktop at home. I am not only capable of making do without these tools, but I might also sometimes leave myself feeling better off without them.

It's long been understood that sudden reversals of fortune can produce personal improvement, a sense of freedom curiously lacking when surrounded by the trappings of success.

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ARRR&ARRR

arrr_arrr
John J. A. Murphy: Athletes at Rest (20th Century)


" … they get away with murder …"


The Gospel of Efficiency fails to mention the necessity of Rest and Recuperation. It exclusively focuses on nose-to-the-grindstone dedication, personal sacrifice, of laser-like focus. It calculates using only the sparest arithmetic, not the more complicated calculus of human-powered action. We naturally work in fits and starts, sprints and collapses rather than by more primitive fixed and so-called standard methods. We create by means mysterious, especially to us, so we seem prone to misrepresent our efforts, even to ourselves. We might, for instance, apply fierce dedication when some slacking might better serve. We can insist upon creating by the least creative means, defaulting to mistaking context for something industrial. We're apt to mix our metaphors and garble our messages, then follow our internal directions as if they made sense simply because we created them.

It's not until we catch ourselves slacking that we might notice that something significant must have been lacking from our earlier strategies.

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Backgrounded

backgrounding
Agnes Winterbottom Cooney:
Backyard View, Public School in Background,
Rulo, Nebraska (c. 1900)


" … a little embarrassed at my previous blindnesses."


Writing and, lately, Publishing have been my foreground occupations. These occurred within some background, typically unmentioned and perhaps unworthy of mention, for background just is and rarely seems to warrant acknowledgment. We humans are notorious for presenting ourselves as unconnected, as if we were not utterly dependent upon some fairly heavy infrastructure. Each of us belongs to a family which, depending, might or might not warrant mention. We inhabit places, sometimes embarrassing ones, which might seem as if mentioning them would somehow demean us in someone else's eyes, as a small-town rube or a big-city slicker. We conveniently neglect to mention details that might overly complicate how we wish to be perceived by others or even by ourselves. We mostly remain mum on many levels.

But we all understand that we're each imbedded within endless complications.

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Manifestering

manifestering
William Hogarth, Printmaker:
Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism. A Medley.
(1762)


" … never grant us any deeper understanding."


Publishing exists as an essentially infinite field. From an author's perspective, interacting with it carries all the context markers of any encounter with any infinite, by which I mean that there's no reasoning with it. Any individual interaction holds an essentially random possibility for any outcome: positive, negative, but mostly indifferent. In this way, at least, publishing does not quite qualify as a classic system. I might better describe it as a field and its products as perturbations. Something happens, but whatever occurs was never beforehand predictable. One casts into Publishing without ever knowing what might become of the encounter. One might dream of great good fortune, but there's no guaranteeing any outcome. The best anyone can promise might be an entry, an attractive offering. Whether anyone reads the damned thing, a matter of marketing, by which I mean a matter of credulity, superstition, and fanaticism: mysticism.

Ask any author how he happened to become successful, and the honest ones will answer with complete mystery.

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Erratics

erratics
William Pether after Joseph Wright of Derby:
Three Persons Viewing the Gladiator by Candlelight
(1769)


" … evidence of history having happened and still present …"


What makes these stories a collected work? What unifying theme do they exhibit? Publishers seem to love to ask authors these sorts of questions, for they seek a discernible purpose for publishing something. One does not properly throw any odd old bunch of pieces together and label them A Work. Consequently, I choose a theme, this series' theme being Publishing, then head out into the wilderness to see what startles up out of the underbrush. I do not work from an outline, which I'm convinced only ever exists in fifth-grade writing teachers' fantasies. I try to keep my wits about me and observe what I do, and these observations become the grist for most of the resulting stories. This series could not exist without the provocation of the overarching theme and my own continuing observing. Still, the resulting series sure does seem awful various from a publisher's perspective, Erratic.

What do I look for when I'm so aimlessly wandering through my writing wilderness?

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SwimmingLessons

swimminglesson
Fernand Siméon: Gazette du Bon Ton,
1921 - No. 6, Pl. 41:
La leçon de natation /
Costume et chale, pour le bain
[The Swimming Lesson /
Suit and shawl, for the bath] (1921)


"We all engage in SwimmingLessons which we'll never master."


I do not yet consider myself a competent practitioner of whatever it is that I do. I falsely claim to be a writer because I write, not because I consider my writing to demonstrate my competence. I no longer believe that practice might one day render me capable. I engage in a paranoid fashion, not merely as an imposter fearful of discovery, but as if I work on probation, subject to immediate dismissal at the whim of any uncaring overseer. I consider everyone competent to pass judgment on my production, their opinion, their own, and outside my direct influence. I no longer believe that I might one day manage to master my profession, but I will forever aspire to enter journeyman status from apprentice. Rather than practice, I work as if engaging in lessons, SwimmingLessons.

The ocean has never once been conquered.

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MetaProcessing

metaprocessing
Unknown, after
Masaccio: Procession of Figures (1700–1899)


" … mistaking wheel reinvention as some sort of fatal mistake …"


I've long suspected something fishy about process, and not just because of my professional encounters with Process Nazis, those people who could only see their worlds as a series of sequential procedures due to a genetic mutation or something. Modern recipes have no ancient counterpart, for the ancients never managed to become slaves to their routines. Instead, they seemed to have retained the ability to hold their intentions more lightly. As a result, they could only mass-produce a little of anything. Also likely true, they probably lived more satisfying lives as a result.

Now, we inhabit civilizations addicted to our processes.

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Bletting

bletting
Pieter Withoos: Still Life with Plums, White Plums, Peaches and Medlars (17th century)

" … maturing into final form."

Some fruits require aging beyond their tree to become edible: quince, persimmon, and medlar most prominent among these. Each proves too astringent without further curing, the medlar famous for needing to age right to the edge of rotten before it attains its highly-prized and unique flavor. This curing process, called Bletting, historically occurred in some cool, dark place on straw to cushion the curing fruit. Bletting delays the usual essentially instantaneous fruit-consuming process. Typically, fruit's fate has been immediate consumption once spotted, stored for only very short periods, or preserved, for it usually features a remarkably short shelf life. Some portion of the fruit I purchase ends up in the compost bin because I can't quite keep up with it. It's living while actively dying, and I often lose track of where it’s going until after it's already gone.

The medlar, praised since Roman times, seems especially ancient, for it might need six or even more weeks of Bletting before it comes into its own for consumption, which often involves making a jam or sauce to enhance other flavors, especially wine.

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Parallelling

parallelling
Rudolph Ruzicka:
Lowell House, Harvard University (c. 1931-32)

"My world, like yours, thrives on such intentions."

I maintain and manage a massively parallel publishing system consisting of many disparate parts conceptually connected but otherwise distant from and invisible to each other. I serve as the sole integrating factor, for only I know where the bodies have been buried because I was the one who buried every one. Using this system resembles serial graverobbing, in which my skills must approach master status. The resulting operation stretches the formal definition of system, as all integrated systems must. It was never designed and shows it. Nor has it ever been documented. Instead, it operates via a complex code of local knowledge and rumor. Some pieces barely serve their purpose, but its sole user knows of no better components or, at least, none cheaper. It includes nothing designed or marketed by Microsoft®, for our operator finds their products fundamentally unusable. This means that my publishing system most emphatically does not include MS-Word®, which, as near as I can tell, exists for the sole purpose of rendering writing, and so Publishing, fundamentally impossible.

This story, as every story I've written in this and every other series, simultaneously exists on several supposedly parallel planes.

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StrategicHesitation

strategichesitation
Alfred Stevens: Hesitation [Madame Monteaux?] (c. 1867)

"I might just be playing chicken with myself."


All who hesitate are not necessarily lost. Some certainly must be lost, but many engage strategically, not wanting to waste effort by expending it overenthusiastically and in a naive fashion. Especially immediately after experiencing some fresh revelation, people tend to go off half or even less than half-cocked, exercising freshly-discovered muscles in ways most likely to undermine intention and strain unaccustomed ligaments. I believe it essential then to resist that urge to charge forward holding that newly-discovered sword, lest that nascent swordsman do more damage than good to their cause. The first use of any insight might well best remain a sparing one. It's far too easy to overuse or even abuse unfamiliar forms of magic. It's often best to just use a sprinkle at first.

I have been encountering insights as I've explored Publishing.

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KnowingNuthingness

knowingnuthingness
Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard Grandville:
Artist admiring his work.
Jerome Paturot a la recherche d'une position sociale
[Jerome Paturot is looking for a social position] 1846

"It's an unfair trade …"

Any profession diligently practiced eventually leads its practitioner back into a state of KnowingNuthingness. Any iteration of knowing action ultimately leads to fracturing understanding. One morning, or one late evening, our protagonist will experience KnowingNuthingness, just as if he was forever before merely faking facility as if he'd never actually known a blesséd thing. He will feel embarrassed recognizing the scores of stories he'd previously and irrevocably published, tales with gross errors embedded within them, each of which quietly disclosed just what an idiot he was, how filled with presumption he had been, how he had been masquerading while probably only successfully deceiving himself. The scales fall from his eyes in that brilliant moment, and he experiences his profession's peak sensation: Nuthingness again. He knows only in that memorable moment that he never knew Nuthing, that all of his passionate strivings had successfully guided him back to zero again. Again!

The wise ones insist that these sorts of experiences benefit the professional.

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Homogenizing

homogenizing
Harold Edgerton: Milk Drop into Cup of Milk (2) (1935)

“ … only become accessible once Homogenized …”

Those final editing passes amount to a kind of Homogenizing of the manuscript. First drafts tend to seem rough and feral in form. When creating, the writer wisely ignored many of the lessons their teachers tried to impart in favor of listening to their small, almost still voices emanating from their heart. Hearts do not know crap about comma placement, however, and no amount of intuition, no matter how damned well-intended, can predict what a Grammar Nazi might insist. It seems helpful to pass the work by Hoyle to gain his perspective, but a writer must never cede creative rights to any rule book. Much that makes a piece of writing interesting comes from its personality, tone, and innate quirkiness. Nobody appreciates a voice victimized by too damned much Homogenizing.

The A-Eye Grammar Engine seems determined to homogenize my writing.

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Choreography

choreography
Thomas Lord Busby: Billy Waters, a one-legged busker.
Colored engraving from Costumes of the Lower Orders in Paris (1820)


"I build my castle upon shifting sands."

The steps I follow to successfully publish one of my daily stories have multiplied since I started writing this Publishing series. What previously seemed simple became complicated, though my intentions never considered creating anything convoluted. We all understand that this sort of outcome happens, though we remain largely baffled at how an urge to simplify produces complications. The expansion comes in insignificant increments, so-called inch-pebbles, rather than by milestones. An embellishment might require much more work yet produce an effect that seems damned well worth what initially seemed like a small additional effort. Multiply that tweak by twelve or even by five, and the resulting steps become challenging to hold in one's head yet remain too fresh to be easily turned into a checklist.

At some point, what starts as an inspired improvisation becomes an imperative, no longer mere embellishment but an integral part of every performance, not to be omitted.

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A-Eye

a_-eye
Lewis Wickes Hine: Powerhouse Mechanic (1921)


" … a rather bleak and lonely job …"


I have a confession to make. I sincerely hope that this one will prove to be good for my soul, as I'm reliably informed that confessions tend to be good for the confessor's soul. As with all confessions, this one might involve the disclosure of some sin I've committed or, if not precisely, a sin, some shortcoming. One confesses, I guess, in the sincere hope that one might gain forgiveness, at least from themself and, perhaps, from others. Atonement might or might not be indicated in this situation. I risk ruining my reputation, though, so listen generously, please, understanding that I'm just flesh, more than capable of falling short of any ideal.

I started using AI this week in the form of an Artificially Intelligent copyediting engine.

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RabbitHoling

rabbitholing
Camille Pissarro: Rabbit Warren at Pontoise (1879)


" … yet still enormously proud."


Final editing seems like preparing a corpse for burial. The body's mass and shape serve as no concern; only appearance matters then. The time for constructive criticism passed long before. The plot's pattern resolved; the author wants only to remember this story as one he finished without regrets. It will always be just as he leaves it now, and the work, on exit, nudges its author into what appear to be warrens, twisting tunnels down surprising holes. The final effort before publishing might as well be labeled RabbitHoling.

The actual finishing work feels remarkably renewing.

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PastSins

pastsins
Circle of
Hendrick van Cleve III:
Landscape (c. 1525-1589)


"A writer's work never gets done."


Publishing serves as the terminating step in a long series of creations. It works like beatification in that it represents a work's entry into that much-vaunted "state of bliss," whereby it might prove worthy of public veneration. More importantly, it moves out of what I might best describe as a persistent state of sin, for each unpublished work represents some PastSins as yet unforgiven. Writers feel haunted by their collected works which have yet to find publishers. These lay around like haphazardly set aside toys, interrupted before completing their mission. Many of those pieces probably could have never really qualified as more than practice, but they remain undead, never entirely forgotten.

The flotsam surrounding every working writer sometimes (like often) seems overwhelming.

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Grooving

grooving
Will Hicock Low:
Into the Green Recessed Woods They Flew (1885)


"The journey, not the arriving, might just be the purpose here after all."


I distrust anyone who seems to know where they're going from any outset, and that goes double for anyone who appears to know very much about how to get there. The first while should properly humble any adventurer as he settles into his somewhat surprising new context. It must be different than expected, or it’s not an adventure. More than half of any excitement comes from the surprise emanating from it. It really should seem different, though judgment had rarely matured to the point yet where very much appreciation accompanies these initiations. They're almost universally experienced as inconveniences, as problems, as broken and needing fixing. Usually and fortunately, by the time the initial disorientation settles down, some fresh Groove emerges from the chaos, and things at least start promising to unfold more smoothly, with no intervention to fix anything really necessary.

My inquiry into Publishing should have proven no different from any standard Class A excursion.

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FeedingSystems

feedingsystems
Joseph Pennell: Coal Mining Town (19th-20th century)


" … necessary effort …"


Writing works as a relatively self-contained and self-satisfying occupation because it's typically accomplished in near-perfect isolation. Just the writer and his thoughts bleeding out onto the keyboard, a tightly contained system. Publishing adds exponential complexity to writing's simplicity, to the point that writing might seem almost beside any point. The writer leaves the moment to live in anticipation of some future. He writes for an audience then and loses some connection to the familiar small, almost silent voices which had previously guided his hand. He gains the questionable gift of self-awareness, stage presence, and management obligations to engage in FeedingSystems.

That printed page proves insufficient to share and must be duplicated, packaged, and shipped somewhere, somehow, and all that requires systems.

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CopyWrongs

copywrongs
Jean Jacques de Boissieu [after Jacob van Ruisdael]:
The Public Scribe (1790)


… tend to default to their Bastard setting unless questioned …"


Publishing exercises what's called copyright, the right to copy. According to common law, copyright belongs to the creator of a work, though that ownership can and often is bargained away in exchange for Publishing. For example, one common precondition to achieve publication involves the creator agreeing to assign their copyright ownership to the work over to the publisher. This transaction has become so widespread now that it's rarely questioned, though other agreements remain possible. For example, some publishers satisfy themselves with First Print Rights, accepting that the author rightfully owns their work in perpetuity but that they might share the work more broadly without making an orphan out of it.

Copyright, in practice, seems a civilizing convention.

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UnwieldyMachine

unwieldymachine
Rube Goldberg:
Professor Butts and the Self-Operating Napkin (1931)

Soup spoon (A) is raised to mouth, pulling string (B) and thereby jerking ladle (C), which throws cracker (D) past toucan (E). Toucan jumps after cracker and perch (F) tilts, upsetting seeds (G) into pail (H). Extra weight in pail pulls cord (I), which opens and ignites lighter (J), setting off skyrocket (K), which causes sickle (L) to cut string (M), allowing pendulum with attached napkin to swing back and forth, thereby wiping chin.

"We're none of us terribly efficient."


My decades of experience with Systems Thinking leaves me incapable of not thinking of Publishing as just another sort of machine, though it seems at best an UnwieldlyMachine. Some devices, though complicated, seem relatively simple. Not so Publishing. I suspect it acquires its apparent unwieldiness from the human effort embedded within it, for Publishing's never accomplished by the mere flick of a switch. Some pieces have been long automated to various degrees. I'm thinking of Gutenberg and his bible printing machines, but even those required excessive amounts of tedious human effort to produce their product. They represented a quantum leap beyond hand-producing illustrated manuscripts, but they remained tedious as, indeed, has the overall Publishing "system" to this day.

Its necessary mindfulness helps render it Unwieldy, for mindfulness takes time when the whole purpose of systems seems focused upon trimming time from production.

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SelfReliance

selfreliance
Edvard Munch: Self-Portrait in Moonlight (1904–06)


" … a lesson which I never expect to stop learning."


However steeped in frontier tradition the concept might be, SelfReliance seems worthless when Publishing. While writing might be fairly characterized as a solo endeavor, Publishing's inescapably plural. It features altogether too many moving parts and picky pieces for any individual to master. It takes a village, and all that, to publish.

Still, the writer blanches through acceptance of this humbling fact.

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ShelfDiscipline

shelfdiscipline
Lucian and Mary Brown:
Untitled [boy playing with action figures on shelf] (c. 1950)


" … groaning in the background."


The manuscript shelves in my office hold printed, unfinished manuscripts. It serves as one of the stages in my never-ending seeming copyediting queue. Since I find copyediting disquieting, I rarely visit those shelves, so they also serve as an essentially infinite queue. I cannot imagine ever arriving at the end of that pile. It grows by one fresh member every quarter, and I'm several quarters behind. How many? I cannot tell for certain, for I only managed to start a list when I began writing this Publishing series. I've not yet finished it.

I seem to lack a specific sort of discipline; the ShelfDiscipline required to conquer my copyediting queue.

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PluralSelves

pluralselves
Frédéric Bazille: Self-Portrait (1865/66)


" … a life far removed from its author."


Most of the great nineteenth and twentieth-century painters produced self-portraits, works that at first looked very much like them but which later took on other lives. Writers perform this trick, too, for they also inescapably produce self-portraits. I might argue that anything any artist produces amounts to another self-portrait, whatever the content, and that each work goes on to live a separate life from its creator. Artists live life as PluralSelves, with at least as many instances of themself as works they produced. Publishing distributes an artist's work more broadly than their studio. In this way, an artist's presence need not depend upon that artist's physical presence. Their influence stretches much farther than they ever know.

Few consumers of any artist's work ever think to drop that artist a note of appreciation to thank them for exerting the influence they produced.

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APublication

apublication
Utagawa Toyoharu:
Newly Published Perspective Picture of the Gate
of the Palace of the Dragon King
(Shinpan uki-e Ryugu karamon no zu)
(c. 1772/89)


" … illegal prepositions at the end of imperfect sentences."


My son Wilder, visiting with his two kids over Spring Break, slipped upstairs as we waited for breakfast, returning with a slim volume. It was the long-awaited book of my dearly departed Dwarlink Dwaughta Heidi's poetry, freshly published. After she died, a family friend who had also lost her poet daughter at an even younger age volunteered to edit a volume of Heidi's surviving works, for her poetry seemed suddenly immortal, certainly more so than their author. My first wife wrote a brief forward, I contributed an afterword, and my son, an accomplished fine artist, produced the cover art. I held a thin slice of time in my hand.

APublication can achieve this sort of impossible.

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DamnedPandemic

damnedpendic
Weegee (Arthur Fellig):
Audience Reaction (c. 1940 - c. 1950)


"I'll always continue wearing my mask."


Our continuing Damned Pandemic has utterly changed my relationship with this world. Previously unimaginable reactions to what certainly appeared to be clear and present dangers left me feeling extremely paranoid. I gratefully took to wearing my mask, baffled why some found the task onerous. Fresh definitions of freedom emerged: I, with my freedom to wear my mask in public, a great and reassuring liberty to me, and others, with their belligerent insistence to never wear one, whatever the personal or collective consequences. I saw self-centered cynicism run rampant, even among family members. I, myself, sequestered. I took respite behind firm defenses. My paltry social existence further withered. I essentially became a hermit.

I invited a few into my bubble, and a blesséd few accepted my offer.

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SmallStumbles

smallstumbles
Attributed to Augustus Cordus:
The Fall of Man with Scenes of the Creation (1544)


"This is Publishing?"


The first few steps disorient me. I had become accustomed to success, easy success, and actions taken within my domain. Outside, trying different, I find walking disorienting. I cannot find my spot. I need to think carefully, ponderously, before moving, and even then, I discover that I'm moving in some wrong direction, not precisely backward, but not precisely forward, either. I seem capable only of SmallStumbles. I inch my way along. My more grandiose schemes utterly gone, I seek footholds and still stumble. I relearn that I can move forward in reverse, backing my way into my future, but I have to look over my shoulder. My perspective narrowed, and I feel grateful for achieving any momentum and calling that progress. Small steps with SmallStumbles amounts to initial success.

I'm not yet sold on the idea of Publishing.

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BreakingGround

breakingground
Winslow Homer: The Brush Harrow (1865)


" … hoping for better without ever really expecting it."


Spring threatens before arriving. I can imagine it already here, even before the equinox, even while it continues snowing some mornings. The sun's angle serves as inexorable evidence of its imminent arrival. I'm caught unprepared. Even if I had properly prepared last Fall, I would still feel unprepared because everything suddenly wants doing at once. Wherever I might begin will feel like the wrong place to start, a distracting sideshow from the actual effort needed. It doesn't matter where I get started. It very much matters that I begin.

However much I might have prayed for these days' arrival, I will drag my heels.

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Averting

averting
Rembrandt van Rijn:
Bust of an Old Bearded Man, Looking Down,
Three Quarters Right
(1631)


"I imagine that I am watching for it."


It's been a tough week here in old Lake Woebegone, or so Garrison Keillor would have said, starting another in a decades-long weekly update from his fictional hometown on the prairie. He and his Prairie Home Companion radio program long ago left my Saturday afternoons, but it was a staple while it persisted—little remains of much of my experience. I retain more writing than I seem able to manage and a few relatively scant memories. I took very few pictures, opting for the primary experience rather than the experience of attempting to capture that experience. Shifting my focus toward Publishing, the challenges seem overwhelming. I find myself Averting my attention from the full ramifications of my fresh choice. I deliberately avoid trying to see the whole expanse before me. I can barely deal with whatever's right before me. I do not need the complications a panoramic perspective provides.

Averting seems like a minor art form, yet still a definite skill.

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HelpAsk

helpask
Pieter Jansz Quast: Lame Beggar Asking for Alms,
from T is al verwart-gaern [It’s already confusing]

(not dated-early 17th Century)


" … continue into the thoroughly unforeseeable future."


If Publishing differs from writing because it requires a community's effort, an early shift for the aspiring-to-publish writer must include the HelpAsk. This act does not resemble asking for help, for our publisher nee writer can't yet form proper requests. He does not know what the difficulty might be. He suffers from symptoms and knows it. He further lacks even the expertise to properly select an expert to help. He might start 'asking around' only to find that he's surrounded by helpers whose capabilities he never suspected. One, then another, will disqualify themselves for the best of excuses. The community first grows to include the self-rejected, though these people help, too, for their refusals help narrow the search and might even render the seeker a tad less clueless, though he's unlikely to feel any improvement. He comes to understand that he's more lost than he imagined, that he'd been inhabiting a kind of fantasyland where a sense of competence served as the common experience. He grows less competent by the minute and feels this.

It would be perfectly acceptable to reject the call to this adventure.

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FamiliarTerritory

familiarterritory
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes:
A Way of Flying, from Disparates [Nonsense],
published as plate 13 in Los Proverbios [Proverbs]

(1815–17, published 1864)


"This lost feeling surely shows progress."


My blog's not working again this morning, an all-too-familiar start to my day. I'll write my daily missive in the blog software's word processor anyway, out of long habit rather than for any rational reason. I inhabit FamiliarTerritory, a Very Late Status Quo Space, a convergence of shortcomings I have been watching closely in on me for a very, very long time. The blog software has been hinting at impending failure for ages. I've been investigating resolutions without making discernible progress. Yesterday, I began a fresh series and stumbled rather badly out of the blocks. I finally successfully posted something to SubStack before spending much of my following morning editing that content, fixing apparently unavoidable errors. SubStack turned out to be just as opaque of an application as my month spent researching it suggested it would be. I should properly be months, if ever, sorting out details on that platform.

It always starts like this.

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Authoring

authoring
Ryūryūkyo Shinsai:
Boy Writing (Edo period, 1615-1868)


"Welcome along for the ride!"


I became a professional writer thirty years ago, when I sold an article to a periodical for a couple of hundred bucks. I've been professing to being a writer ever since, though my brushes with actual publication have been infrequent. This distinction between writing and publishing gets to the heart of Publishing, for an author does much more than just write. Sure, writing's a huge part of the profession, but it amounts to little more than a beginning. While writing can be an isolating undertaking, Authoring's much more social. It requires a community to author anything, however hermit-like the writer's habits. Authoring requires emerging from that shell to engage with a broader world. Any introvert worth his temperament should shudder a little at this prospect.

My writing practice seems unsustainable unless I manage to connect to an output spigot.

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Sseccus

sseccus
Katsukawa Shunsho 勝川 春章:
Man Falling Backward, Startled by a Woman’s Ghost over a River
(c. 1782)


" … because it couldn't."


I came to understand that I previously understood Success backward. It was not as I'd imagined it before I began this dialogue with myself over its nature. I make no firm conclusions, just this observation I must have previously understood backward. I might acknowledge that properly engaged in dialogue often produces this result, which is no conclusive result at all other than to suspect a previous backward understanding. Understanding grew but also created less certainty, an apparent paradox that everyone might notice seems perfectly congruent with their own experience. As a general rule, we do not ever get to the bottom of anything, though we might sometimes misleadingly sense that we're moving in that general direction.

The purpose of dialogue might just as well be this very outcome.

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Futures

futures
Giulio Bonasone, After Giulio Romano:
An Omen of the Future Greatness of Augustus (16th century)


" … we're heading in precisely that direction!"


Optimism seems an intrinsic part of Success. I can't imagine Success without a significant contribution from positive anticipation. The Eeyores of this world can't experience Success, perhaps because their perspective won't allow it to manifest. Those who firmly believe in their own positive potential seem to more comfortably realize some semblance of it. The belief need not necessarily be based upon any verifiable facts and might eventually prove to have been pure fantasy.

Nevertheless, it might still positively contribute to some sense of Success, even if it proves to be less than anticipated.

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Pasts

pasts
Johann Georg Wille: The Philosopher of the Past (1782)


"It isn't, but was, and promises to one day be before slipping behind me again."


I often imagine my Successes as assets, like coins stored in a bank, except I know there’s no bank there. I remember high points, but I must admit that I do not reside near them. Instead, they belong to my Pasts, the many and various people I've been and places I've inhabited. Each Success seems forever tied to the particular place and time in which it occurred, and though I sometimes think of them as tangible possessions, I understand that they are not and never were. Instead, they exist as memories, which seem tricky characters sometimes capable of appearing real, as if they are living in this present moment rather than suspended somewhere before.

Each of my careers experienced some Successes.

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Grudgements

begrudgements
Jacob Duck:
Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist
(mid-1600s)


" … steal every possibility for achieving Success"


I possess no foolproof method for attracting Success, just the collected anecdotes included in this almost-finished series. These, distilled together, would not render much of a magic potion, and I did not intend to write a how-do, Do-In-Yourself series on attracting Success. Success never was a commodity to be traded and conjured but more of an ecosystem of experiences, emotions, knowledge, and actions. Attracting Success seems a fool's mission, but not quite so success’s opposite. I believe that the least of us can reliably chase away Success, and often without even thinking very hard, probably usually without thinking at all. One element seems to undermine Success wherever and whenever it occurs, and that element seems to be Grudgement. Carrying a grudge naturally chases most of the positive energy out of the vehicle and renders the driver its slave. Holding a grudge seems the surest way to ensure that Success stays just as far away as possible.

I present as evidence our most recent former President, who still hasn't conceded his most recent defeat even while claiming to be running for a repeat performance.

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TimePassing

timepassing
Claude Monet: Cliff Walk at Pourville (1882)


"Everything was different after that."


Success and failure seem every bit as mercurial as time, for the mere passage of time seems capable of utterly changing either's nature. An apparent failure can become an evident Success when seen through the long-ish shadow of additional experience. Events that seemed apparent Successes in the moment they occurred can erode themselves into even more apparent failures later. TimePassing seems capable of utterly reversing almost any experience, of turning pretty much any event into its opposite. There's real wisdom in the advice to sit on or with a failure before wallowing in it, for The Gods, or somebody, remain capable of fiddling with events, reversing their nature. A stumble might enable a better rhythm to emerge later.

I'm sure that we all have our stories of catastrophes narrowly averted by what, at the moment, appeared to have been a serious setback of fortunes.

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Puzzlements

puzzlements
Okumura Masanobu:
Solving a Puzzle (n.d., circa 1700-1760s)


" … no more often than occasionally, please."


When the annual New Yorker Puzzle Edition arrives, I resign myself to missing my usual reading material that week. I won't even look at the offered puzzles because they have always just confused me. Likewise, I hop over the New York Times crossword puzzle page. I find puzzles puzzling rather than entertaining. I consider those who dedicate themselves to Wordle, whatever that is, unfortunate. The Muse is forever playing solitaire or something on her phone. I find even the mention of card games boring. I will not submit to playing board games, either, with the very occasional exception of Scrabble. I find board games aptly named in that they seem boring. Given a choice between sitting quietly in some corner and solving a puzzle, I'll choose sitting quietly in some corner fifty times out of twenty.

I admit that Success sometimes demands that I solve some genuine Puzzlement.

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|Success|

_success_
Claude Monet:
The Departure of the Boats, Étretat (1885)


" … my purpose must be clear,
for it is always and without exception,
what my actions manifest here."


I think of Success and failure as positive and negative arcs on the same old number line, with Successes progressing outward to the right of the midpoint and failures fading outward to the left. Both great Success and great failure can be represented there by their distance from the center. Some Successes don't really amount to much, less than ten on an infinite scale, while others loop off into the far, far distance. Same story with failures, though their emotional content leans toward the sorrowful rather than the joyful. Each point on both sides denotes some emotional range, from minor to great, and therefore might qualify for assessment as absolute values rather than as opposites. Yes, sadness differs in content while similar in strength. A ten on either pole might then be considered roughly equal in scope, though opposite in emotional texture.

I bring up this admittedly arcane point for a potentially practical reason.

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AbjectSuccess

abjectsuccess
Walter Crane: King Midas with his daughter,
from
Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1893 edition of
A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys
(1893)


"The absence of its opposite …"


Midas stands as the archetypal embodiment of a specific sort of Success none of us hope to achieve. To at least try to be honest, his error seems innocent enough. He had not thought his greed to or through its logical extents. He overreached. Each of us has just as innocently stepped over some similarly unseen edge, if only when gorging at a holiday table. We celebrate our great Success, only to render ourselves miserable as a result. Too much of some good things seem worse than the worst of all possible outcomes. Midas sought a magic touch such that everything he touched might turn to gold. Granted that short-sighted wish, he found himself unable to eat or drink and, when he touched his beloved daughter, Abjectly Successful.

I suspect that each of us holds this capacity.

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Hackcess

hackcess
Pierre-Auguste Renoir: Self-Portrait (1876)


"Hackcess ever only happens once …"


I admit that I've mostly lived outside the boundaries of propriety. I didn't seek an advanced degree before practicing my professions but made up my approaches as I went along. I experienced at least my fair share of Success, but perhaps by unfair means. I dropped out of my high school typing class rather than flunk it, but I still went on to become a best-selling author, though I'm still an absolute hack typist. I present my two and a half typing fingers as prima facie evidence, along with my bestseller and the second dozen manuscripts I will have finished by this Summer's solstice. I garden, but not according to anyone's rules, not even my own, since I seem to continue making up my practice as I go along. I'm always learning but never learnéd. Forever the hacker.

One way to most reliably fail seems to me to be to hold oneself to someone else's recipe, the way things are supposed to be done.

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ThePrice

theprice
Honoré Victorin Daumier:
The Print Collector (c. 1857/63)


"Success seems priceless"


The cost of Success might eventually come into question. The underlying idea being that the value of the Success should stand in excess of the price and that Successful action should properly show a profit rather than a loss. Upon reflection, this sort of cost accounting should seem spurious since it employs less than uniform units. How might one assess value, and on what basis? Likewise, how might one reasonably account for profit and, again, using which values? Scrutiny should properly find the whole effort spurious, if not entirely worthless. Few of us won't catch ourselves attempting to complete such an assessment, though, us having been reared within a capitalist system. We were raised to produce profit and loss statements.

When it comes to Success, though, we might prefer to cipher in units of happiness or joy.

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TrueConfessions

trueconfessions
Alfred Stieglitz: Dorothy True (1919)


"I must tell my stories or else …"


It's always seemed unlikely to me that I might ever Successfully meet any challenge. I tend to start with a glass already half empty or, more often, no glass at all with which to address the challenge. I eventually discovered my adequacies lurking in eternally unexpected places and that I almost always proved capable of Success, however impossible it had earlier seemed. I suspect a lesson lurking to be discovered in there, but I hope it's not an obvious one. I despise finding out that I've been seeing right through some prominent something, the last one in the room to finally acknowledge what everyone else long ago perceived. It peeves me. It might be true, though, that I was never nearly as inadequate as I felt. I could have always interpreted those sensations as representing something else besides my inadequacies, whatever that might have been. I might have always actually been more than adequate without hardly ever feeling as though I was.

I am learning that confessing really does clean up the spirit.

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Starting

starting
Hans Kleiber: Starting on the Hunt (20th century)


" … much, much, much better at it than I've ever been."


I think of Success as necessarily tied to completing something, but its natural antecedent lies in Starting something. I can become an enthusiastic finisher once some pattern of execution settles in, but Starting seems to be my nemesis. I do not easily get moving in any direction, regardless of how alluring any impending Success might seem. Until I've found some rhythm and anticipatable pattern, each opportunity just seems like another unopened can of worms offering otherwise unnecessary complications. These complications might always be necessary, little dedication tests left expressly for my challenge, for if I cannot get myself Starting, I'll never propel myself into any Success.

I search for a handhold, someplace to start, for each effort seems first a smooth, blank wall.

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QuestioningDichotomies

questioningdichotomies
De Scott Evans: The Irish Question (1880s)


"We all know what happens then."


A decent inquiry seems to follow a predictable trajectory. It begins by making some clear distinctions and defining its territory. Later, this initiating dichotomy starts breaking down as the earlier clear distinction starts evaporating, first a little, and later, a lot. By the end of the investigation, the initial distinction should have almost completely fallen apart such that the beginning arguments might seem utter nonsense, the subject having been rendered nearly absurd by then. Like this series, started in relative innocence, into the nature of Success, I have grown to question my founding premise. I no longer believe in Success as I once presumed it existed. I've reached no definitive conclusion, which is also typical of any genuine investigation. Our expectations might have been utterly poisoned by our too-close exposures to crime fiction, where endings bring resolutions. The real world deals more in enlightening confusions.

It might just be that all dichotomies must ultimately prove to have been fictions.

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SuccessDelayed

successdelayed
Peter Paul Rubens:
The Voyage of the Cardinal Infante Ferdinand of Spain from Barcelona to Genoa in April 1633, with Neptune Calming the Tempest, Alternate Title: Quos Ego (1635)


"I revel most in those long-delayed Successes!"


Some messes prove difficult to resolve. I do not know why. The pile of boxes accumulating in the basement dated from a year ago last Christmas, if my forensic flattening figured out anything. Finally, yesterday, I tore into that mess and resolved it in something under an hour. I loaded up Elizabeth, our Lexus pick-up truck stand-in, and The Muse and I performed a royal procession to the cardboard recycling station at the local landfill. We were filled with a deep sense of genuine accomplishment, a feeling far greater and more rewarding than could have ever come from routinely dealing with those boxes as they'd come. That pile of boxes, long a source of quiet disgust, held great potential to produce tremendous satisfaction, but only after it had been liberally marinated in fifteen months of my most dedicatedly degrading procrastination.

Those months of quiet disgust at just how slovenly I'd been turned into the most extraordinary sensation of Success I'd felt since before last Christmas.

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Nullness

Nullness
Thomas Wright:
An original theory or new hypothesis of the universe
(1750)


"Success often resides in no result."


Determining when something's working can prove damnably difficult. Over many years, scientists have devised counter-intuitive methods for better bulletproofing their assertions. Prominent among them must be The Null Hypothesis. This convention turns inquiry on its head because instead of presuming effectiveness, i.e., something's different, it presumes no change at all, or no significant change. Success under this arrangement must be inferred because it might not prove directly observable. We can see what isn't much easier than we might see what might be there. This convention leads scientists to produce different conclusions than those made by the typical layperson, even one armed with connection to The Internets, because the layperson tends to ask the wrong sorts of questions.

Search, for instance, isn't very closely correlated with research.

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Judge

judge
William Blake: God Judging Adam (ca. 1795)


" … exclusively reserved for my inner masochist."


Who judges Successes and failures? For me, most of the time, it's nobody but me. This assertion makes sense since nobody but I witnesses most of what I do. I am usually the only witness to my actions. Only a select few of my engagements ever prove witnessable because most of them occur entirely, or mostly, in my head. A few busybodies with nothing better to do might be snooping over the back fence, but nobody really cares about their judgments, so they make lousy Judges, anyway. The ever-feared Court Of Public Opinion might render the occasional decision, too, but only the upwardly mobile ever really care to seek their opinion. Bosses, spouses, and police forces each seem inattentive compared to my primary Judges: me, myself, and I.

I sometimes wonder why I ever subject myself to harsh judgment.

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SelfSaboteur

selfsabatour
Jean-Siméon Chardin:
Self-Portrait with a Visor (c. 1776)


" … my fair share of nothing much at all."


However Successful I might have otherwise become, I might always remain most Successful as a SelfSaboteur. I undermine my intentions in at least ten thousand shifting ways, rarely precisely the same way twice. I head myself off and detour my own progress. I discourage myself like a master chef fillets a salmon, one clean cut, and my courage pulls free, leaving exposed flesh. I can be critical. I become distracted. I shift my priorities so my heart's most fervent desire can't find itself on my schedule. I fritter most mornings away. I go to bed early and rise even earlier until I swear I can find no time to accomplish anything. Most of my life has always seemed to be pending, idling, waiting for something. In all these things and many more, I count myself most Successful.

Success, though, real Success hardly requires much excess time or talent.

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FeyLure

feylure
Hieronymus Wierix, after Ambrosius Francken:
Volwassenheid [Maturity] (1563 - 1584)


" … our world seems much more Successful for our forebears' fumbled passes."


My parents' generation matriculated in the school of hard knocks. Their elementary education, such as it was, occurred through the depths of The Great Depression. They came of age into a world at war with itself, where the battle between good and evil actually killed their cousins. As a result, they were traumatized and paranoid adults, easy prey for the day’s propaganda. They saluted the flag or else. They devoutly opposed everything Communist. They voted the straight Republican ticket because Eisenhower embodied the victory over evil in this world. They tried and gratefully failed to instill their worldview into their children.

It has always been thus, parents failing to fully enlist their offspring into the trauma that fashioned their adulthood.

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AlsoRan

alsoran
Charles François Daubigny: The Dray Horses (1850)


"Such is the eventual nature of continual competition …"


Every horse race features a winner along with a second and third-place finisher, losers, but still paying off some bettors. The balance of the field AlsoRan, but ran out of any money. These animals lost the race. They aren't even really considered contenders. Their statistics will reflect this disappointing outing. Some of this crowd, for it comprises the majority of the entries, will be on their way up, destined for better, while others experience another step on a long and inexorable slide. It might be that the majority of every field—the entrants in every race—contribute nothing more than contextual significance. They were never destined to win, more destined to lose or not really compete, certainly never competing in the way that the reliable winners might. They could be counted as present but without distinction. They showed up without showing.

This AlsoRan state describes me most of the time.

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HasBeen

hasbeen
Hendrick Goltzius: Gillis van Breen (1588/92)


" … the most Successful HasBeen I can remember."


No inquiry into Success could be considered complete without at least mentioning the HasBeen. The HasBeen might have once held high office, but no longer. His legend's much more potent than his presence. He once was but is no longer. In government service, a protocol insists that anyone retired shall forever be acknowledged by the honorific appropriate to the highest office they held. A former President shall be forever referred to as Mr. President, even though he might have also once been a dog catcher or a Senator. Ambassadors might come a dime a dozen, but nobody outlives that designation. There's just no living down some things. Those of us who never served in government might struggle to identify the highest role we ever fulfilled. Protocol remains mute on whether it's appropriate to refer to an ex-Data Analyst II's most elevated position when acknowledging them or if the less noteworthy titles defer to Mr. or Ms. However, this suggestion backs up to treacherous pronoun territory, which should be avoided under every possible condition.

One ages into a HasBeen without volition.

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Begrudging

begrudging
Pieter van der Borcht:
Christus in het huis van Martha en Maria
[Christ in the house of Martha and Mary]
(1555-1608)


"Success brings no wisdom."


Begrudging seems the least likely side effect of Success, yet billionaires everywhere seem to have become full-time disgruntled social commentators. I would have thought that a billion bought a certain sustainable level of satisfaction, but I would have apparently been wrong and not a little wrong. Indeed, the very rich and (if only by implication, then) the very Successful seem to have been grievously wounded on their way up through the ranks. Not even those homes located in fabulous places or their super yachts or private airliners serve to salve those festering wounds, which appear to have become incapable of ever healing. Some spend lavishly churning up the rabble, funding propaganda campaigns and think tanks so well endowed that they never have to resort to actually thinking. Begrudging might seem beneath them, but it turns out to be their purpose instead.

Why, I wonder, do so many of the uber-successful consider themselves radical conservatives?

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Levitating

levitating
Lucian and Mary Brown:
Untitled [child floating in water] (c. 1950)


" … and it's "just" a feeling."


The Successful seem subject to overall less gravity weighing down their lives. They seem to Levitate above many of the most common human concerns. While I'm almost certain they are subjected to precisely the same gravitational forces the rest of us carry, those forces seem to affect the Successful differently. They seem less a burden, less encumbering as if they possessed their gravity rather than gravity possessing—owning—them. The unsuccessful seem like some onerous forces owned them, invisible yet seemingly inescapable. Maybe just an attitude distinguishes one from the other. If so, that difference sure seems to make a huge difference. They've always insisted that success breeds success, but it does more than that. It's like Success bestows a higher rate of return. The Successful seem to earn more than their more disappointed counterparts for the same amount of effort. Life does not seem to get them in the same way it gets others.

The Successful seem to age more slowly.

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-itating

-itating
Torii Kiyonobu II:
A Priest Sweeping in the Snow (1731)


" … sweeping that floor that never needed sweeping."


If you or I were to run off to a monastery to seek enlightenment, upon arrival, the Master would undoubtedly assign us some seemingly menial task and solemnly declare that work our chief responsibility. Basically, these assignments usually amount to sweeping floors that apparently do not need sweeping. If we find ourselves bored and go back to the Master seeking some more challenging assignment, our request would most certainly be rebuffed. Instead, we would be told to stick to the given job. Eventually, we might discover the more profound significance of our job that does not need doing, that we were not so much sweeping some floor that didn't need sweeping, but we were -itating instead, in this instance, med-itating.

Whether iterated sweeping floors that don't need sweeping necessarily leads to enlightenment isn't for me to say.

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Chimera

chimera
Gustave Moreau: The Chimera (1867)


" … just wait a minute and see what's served up next."


I suspect that the subject of any inquiry might eventually come to lose its initial identity. What began almost pristine in its innate separateness eventually faded into a seemingly self-sameness with its surroundings, to the point that it might have just disappeared. What was once such a specialized focus evolved to involve pretty much everything else. Try though he might, the investigator would find himself unable to segregate his inquiry into ever sharper foci, for the more he'd come to know his subject, the more it might well seem universal. Success, for instance, my focus these past two months, has expanded far beyond what I initially presumed might be its reasonable territory. I'm coming to believe that I could consider anything—any idea, any object, any emotion—in the light of Success and find that idea, object, or feeling, somehow another integral part of it. This inquisitor's moved to wonder if this effect amounts to enlightenment because it seems quite the opposite. Is endarkenment even a term?

The naive separation into individual pieces seems a reasonable enough starting point.

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DeepMystery

deepmystery
Gustave Moreau: Hercules and the Lernaean Hydra
(1875/76)


"Success often seems a stranger to me."


I hold many things to be DeepMysteries to the point that I, like everybody, believe myself unique—and not in any particularly good way. My DeepMysteries prevent me from engaging with this world as I imagine that I might, had I proven myself capable of resolving these DeepMysteries. These irresolutions do not really affect significant situations, just minor ones, making them even more insidious in most ways. I’m often stymied by some innocuous door handle or, even more often, by packaging. I cannot get to the product inside, thanks to the paranoid-level security system wrapped around the thing, which sits there so innocently within its perfectly transparent yet utterly impenetrable outer shell. I usually call for The Muse to help since such things only very rarely stymie her. She seems to be able to quickly, even preconsciously, slip through barriers I cannot penetrate under any condition.

I purchased an industrial-sized package of dishwashing detergent this week.

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Ex-Success

ex-success
Peter James Studio: Untitled
[man posing with "success" poster] (1952)


"Success only exists in past tenses …"


How long might a Success last? Some seem genuinely eternal, while others quickly evaporate. We celebrate some Successes forever. Christmas, the celebration of light Succeeding over darkness, comes to mind. When the home team wins the pennant, it seems in that minute as if every fan in those stands has experienced something genuinely eternal, yet two short seasons later, those once heroes have become a gang of bums again, spoken of derisively by the delicatessen counterman. Most Success seems alarmingly fleeting, however peaky the initial experience. Repeat the story enough times, and even the hero would really rather forget that journey. After a point, it turns into nostalgia which no amount of retelling could ever reincarnate.

I carry my standard packet of Success stories.

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Fuccess

fuccess
Franz von Stuck: Wounded Amazon (1905)


"I'll never erase those debts my Fuccesses inflicted …"


I speak today of Success that feels like failure, the advancing through terrifying turbulence, the wounding of the enthusiastic optimist. We've all been through this, where the cost of advancement hardly seems worth the effort, though we convince ourselves that it probably will be, eventually, even if it doesn't feel worth it that day. Success can be a terrible taskmaster, demanding much more than we would have willingly invested when we started, but often no more than we'd enthusiastically part with under coercion, as necessary to turn off the punishment or nudge us across some promising finish line. We imagine the expense worth it, though validation of that presumption usually has to come later. We might always carry the scar of that Success, for that wound might have made all the difference, a debt carried forward, a down payment never actually repaid. Sometimes Success changes more than one's fortune.

One might learn to approach each opportunity warily as if Success features teeth and claws once it has wounded.

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Method

method
Albrecht Dürer: Tekenaar tekent een luit
[Draftsman Draws A Lute]
(1525)


" … perhaps they're necessary, …"


Method might be necessary but never sufficient. The baker needs much more than a recipe to Succeed. So does everybody, yet the trainers invariably start by sharing recipes. They possess a "methodology,” and they promote it just as if it could contain baking's Gestalt, its practice. I suppose that teachers have to start somewhere, and wherever they begin just must prove inadequate to describe the complexities of the practice. Still, even the canny apprentice tends to imprint upon the recipe, their earliest introduction, as somehow emblematic of their practice, when it's just at best necessary but always, always, always inadequate, just like any entrance isn't the contents.

The recipes for Success seem numerous.

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Stinginess

stinginess
Juste de Juste: Pyramid of Five Men (c. 1543)


"Those who share the most toys, never really die."


Stinginess seems to have always been one of the more reliable indicators of Success. The Successful seem to become Scrooges while the more humbled remain generous Jacob Marleys. This apparent paradox, where those most able to afford, dedicate themselves to hoarding rather than sharing, has become the very foundation of modern economics, where, even more than in ancient and even antebellum times, wealth flows upward toward those least in need of it and away from those most struggling to supply it. The whole system seems some combination of heartless and needless, unnecessary, one of those anomalies we should have collectively figured out how to resolve, but we have not. Instead, we seem to be sliding even further from resolution.

I've never understood why any sentient employer would fight their employees forming a union.

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Impostoring

impostoring
Suzuki Harunobu: The Face in the Mirror (1766)


"… must be merely hollow inside."


It would surprise nobody to learn that virtually everybody engages in Impostoring, though there seem to be varying grades of individual mastery. Some practitioners work like ventriloquists, never moving lips or larynx, while others perform like the four-year-old in the family production, exhibiting much more enthusiasm than talent. Fifty years ago, this notion that even the apparently very Successful experience abiding senses of inadequacy was still a closely-held secret. It might have been a prominent presence in even the most Successful's lives, but this had not yet been discovered and named. The pair that discovered and named this condition referred to it not as a syndrome, as it has become popularly known, but as a less dramatic phenomenon. In the years since this eighth sense has taken as prominent a placement as has competence in the skill set of the genuinely Successful. One can hardly Succeed these days without, at some level formally faking the skill.

When I finished my big book, I remarked that it would forever stand as testament to what a sincere lack of faith in my ability can accomplish, for I never once had a sense when creating it that I was crafting anything extraordinary.

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Satiability

Satiability
Honoré Victorin Daumier:
“- Mr. Alfred Cabassol! You are the only one in the class who succeeded
to get through the entire week without blowing your nose into your sleeve.
Please stand to receive this prize of honour for cleanliness,”
plate 6 from Professeurs Et Moutards
(1846)


" … moving forward, if not necessarily ahead."


Given the human tendency toward dissatisfaction, I suspect that the average Satiability of the typical Success seeker might be measured in minuscule quantities, hours and days rather than months and years, but I could be wrong. I know, or think I know, that when pursuing Success, I tend to get very single-minded, as if that objective was the whole of my existence and the satisfaction I'll experience will approach infinite. After, and often even just after achieving it, I feel more of an "Oh, Is That All?" sort of sensation before going back into trolling for yet another infinite-seeming satisfaction, which will, of course, fall short of expectation once delivered. Around and around and around, I go. You might go around like this, too.

Some Success seems more sticky.

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EmergenceScenes

emergencescene
Rodolphe Bresdin: Biblical Scenes (Not Dated)


" … Successfully seeming so damned ordinary."


What if a writer didn't start with his story's end in mind? What if he considered his art, his calling, to be different from transcription of a cleverly pre-developed plot? What if he never gave plot a single thought but instead considered conveying plot to be an emergent property rather than an underlying purpose of his work? What might result, aside from said writer being rudely thrown out of the fraternity? The result might produce EmergenceScenes, glimpses of what might easily be mistaken for deliberate plot were they not so divergent. After considerable consideration, they might sum to the same thing to produce a certain coherence not evident while the emergence was busy unfolding. Rather than starting with his ending in mind, the creator of EmergentScenes begins with the intention of discovering what might later be mistaken for a plot line. He begins by simply starting with intention.

In our real world, in our lived lives, no clever plotlines exist.

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Spot

spot
Gordon W. Gahan: Star's Daughter (Fourth of eleven):
Her favorite spot for studying scripts is the big window sill in her Manhattan apartment. (1964-65)


"My internal state determines my Success …"


I have a Spot, a place where I feel emotionally, psychologically, intellectually, and physically balanced and secure. I do not continuously inhabit this place but seem to be trending toward inhabiting it instead. Some days, I find myself smack dap in the center of it, while on others, I cannot seem to find even its slightest edge. When I stand near the center of this Spot, I feel remarkably powerful and comfortable "in my skin," as the old saying goes. Though not always profoundly, I feel the absence when I’m away from it. I understand I’m more likely to do something short-sighted or stupid when absent. I'm divorced from my very best when I lose my Spot. Losing it serves as grounds for serious searching, and often in vain, for I usually prove inept when I've lost my Spot.

My Successes seem strongly correlated with my inhabiting my Spot.

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CruelOptimism

crueloptimism
Pierre-Paul Prud'hon:
Le Cruel rit des pleurs qu'il fait verser
[The Cruel One Laughs at the Tears Which It Causes To Be Shed]
(1793)

" …
getting better and better!"


Novelist and radio personality Garrison Keillor described his fictional Minnesota town of Lake Woebegone as "where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average." Nobody needs me to tell them that in no population do all the members measure above average for anything. We have all been schooled in proper comportment, at least to the extent that we understand that a passing question like, "How are you?" must be responded to in the positive: "Fine, thanks. You?" Our response might qualify as pure fiction, but then so was the question, for it was a mere acknowledgment of presence and never intended to encourage disclosure. Societies depend upon such understandings.

Last night I began reading a book that I'm sure I will never finish.

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Style

style
Dominicus Custos:
A Grotesque Head with a Helmet in the Style of Arcimboldo (1594)


" … a nearly sacred responsibility to judge my own behavior …"


I yesterday experienced an existential crisis. I encountered another dark side of Success, the idea that it might be all about competing. I felt as though I'd fallen into an inescapable pit, like I'd made a poor, perhaps even hasty, choice when selecting Success as my focus for a series. As with any existential crisis, I was blinded by insight and could not see beyond it. I scratched a barely legible note on my cell wall and moved on into my day, feeling supremely disappointed in myself. I sank into a bout of self-pity from which I figure I might one day recover. My realization shook me to my core. My inquiry into Success had produced an overwhelming feeling of failure, for I had not intended and never wanted to cast myself as a competitor. I consider competition a serious illness best treated by refusing to engage. I'd imagined that Success might be managed as something other than competition. I still believe this must be possible.

I could take each of the seven deadly sins and expose each as a primary means for achieving Success.

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Complitition

complitition
Édouard Manet:
Beggar with a Duffle Coat [Philosopher] (1865/67)


" … might be an improvement."


I tried to imagine Success as something other than a result of some kind of competition. I failed.

I tried to imagine Success as something independent from winning or losing.

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T/MakingStock

t_makingstock
Berthe Morisot: Woman at Her Toilette (1875/80)


"Progress never was my most important product."


Checking progress has always been the great enemy of progress, for those focused upon making progress can barely bear to slow down, let alone stop, to TakeStock. My old friend Norm Kerth wrote a definitive book about this dilemma, reframing the stock-taking into more of a stock-making, transforming the drudge into celebration, but the connotation was never completely removed. TakingStock does not seem like a productive activity, and to those focused on making progress, it's probably always destined to seem like a relative waste of time. It might mostly be a waste of time.

About every month, I finally get fed up with the lack of space in my freezer and clean out the sucker.

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Fear

fear1
Walter Gramatté: Die Grosse Angst [The Great Fear] (1918)


I Fear Success. I suppose I am not alone in my feelings toward it, even though anyone might argue that Fear hardly qualifies as a rational response to the threat of Success. (Yea, Success seems threatening to me!) Like all feelings, fear was never supposed to follow any rational ideal. Like all emotions, it visits on its own schedule, for its own mysterious reasons, and remains fundamentally non-rational. My job seems to be to figure out how to cope with Fear's appearances.

Success seems as though it might well complicate more than improve.

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AmplifiedReflective

aplifiedreflective
Arnold Böcklin: In the Sea (1883)


"Successful beneficiaries …"


Years ago, The Muse returned from a workshop with a fresh term. I sincerely appreciate The Muse's willingness to subject herself to workshops since that urge helps me acquire fresh perspectives I'd never willingly seek by signing up for a workshop for myself. I gain much vicariously that I steadfastly refuse to receive the old-fashioned way. I used to teach workshops, but I can't imagine a situation where I would agree to submit to one myself. I correctly fear all forms of education, and not only because I tend to test poorly, though I do tend to test very poorly, a condition that a lifetime of training has failed to improve. Altogether too much emphasis exists to prove that students were paying attention and that they've managed to retain what might have never stuck. The purpose of education was never validation, but try telling that to a system trying to justify its existence.

The term The Muse dragged home was AmplifiedReflective, which I instantly recognized as perfectly formed.

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Nuthin

nuthin
Pieter Symonsz Potter: Vanitas Still Life (1646)


"Nuthin' might serve as a perfectly satisfactory purpose …"


Of all that anyone might Successfully achieve, Nuthin' ranks near the top of the Most Difficult List. The difficulty seems to be the doing. Nuthin' requires nothing, and plenty of it, generously spread over time, and something about time naturally repels Nuthin' like oil on water. A few minutes into the effort, the monkey mind takes over and starts casting thoughts out into the ether, where they try to take root. Even that simple, nearly non-action amounts to something, the opposite of the intended Nuthin’. Even if the monkey mind doesn't derail the initiative, boredom might doom the effort by driving the incumbent into something, however well-intended the effort at accomplishing Nuthin'. It's hard work, perhaps the hardest.

The Muse continues healing from her throat cancer, the primary treatment for which she finished three months ago.

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Proximity

proximity
Albrecht Dürer:
The Prodigal Son Amid the Swine (c. 1496)


" … a flow wherein the sense seems to come and go …"


They insist that misery loves company. It might be that every state aches for its similars such that any emotion promotes more of itself; any perspective creates the context for self-preservation and replication. Success seems to crave company, too. Perhaps the best preparation for any Success might come from merely placing one's self in close Proximity to some Success, be that person, place, or thing. Hang out with Successful people, and I might find myself infected with something akin to Success germs, so I might have little choice about whether to feel Successful. It "just" happens. Hang out in a place known as a Success and feel how deep an influence that place seems to exert. Our Successful remodel rendered our modest villa into a relative palace. We live like royalty as a result.

This simple principle justifies a certain discernment and careful judgment when choosing anything.

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SuperBorsolino

superborsolino
Gordon W. Gahan:
Untitled [man in white shirt and fedora] (1965-1968)


" … clearly styling."


Success seems to attract symbols of its presence, none more prominent, I suspect, than wardrobe. We 'dress for success,' as if our manner of dress would quite reasonably attract Success to us, and I suppose that this practice even works, after a fashion. I know I subscribed to 'dress for success' magical thinking during my tenure at The Insurance Company. I'd carefully shop the sale racks at the "better" haberdashers and spend every Sunday evening ironing my week's shirts, heavy on the starch. I arrived at the office each morning in costume and ready to perform the role of an up-and-comer, poised to impress myself, if nobody else. And I suppose those strange attractors worked, more or less, for my fortunes steadily rose there, and that Success could not possibly have been related to any particular talent I possessed. I might as well blame that Success on the vests.

Others possess lucky underpants, socks, and tee shirts; some even carry a "lucky" rabbit's foot on their keychain.

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Askemption

askemption
Isoda Koryusai:
Girl Playing a Prank on a Young Man who is Napping (c. 1769)


"It must have just happened just because."


I do not consider myself incurious, yet I frequently squelch one line of inquiry. I might, with genuine curiosity, ask the usual who?, what?, and when? before squelching on the why?. I do this because I long ago decided that why? serves severely limited utility and mostly fails to rise up to within the range of a necessary question and worse, why? most often proves to be an absolute barrier to resolution. In those rare instances where my personal motivation might come into question and where I'm the one expected to perform the answering, why? seems an entirely unremarkable question, but these conditions rarely reign. More often, the situation involves another's presumed motivation coming into question, or worse, a chain of presumed motivations shared between a string of actors, none of whom seem available for cross-examination. Then, I can only deepen the mystery by asking why? questions. Insisting upon answers from an apparently indifferent universe seems as though it could only ever make matters worse. I try to remember to cease and desist then and grant myself an Askemption.

Success often stands beyond closure.

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Approval

approval
Gabriël Metsu: The Herring-Seller (c. 1661 - 62)


" … rendering the whole system suicidally cynical."


By the end of his second year in office, President Joe Biden could tout one of the most successful administrations in the history of his country. On nearly every scale, he had prevailed in fixing, improving, resolving, and minimizing serious problems and longer-term inequities. Moreover, despite a cruelly opposing Senate majority, he prevailed, probably due to his superior understanding of how his government worked and in no small part due to the utter ineptness of his predecessor, who, in stark contrast with Biden's administration, produced a succession of absolute disasters. Still, Biden's Approval rating hovered around forty percent.

The previous incumbent's Approval had ranged as low as the low twenties.

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Austerity

austerity
Edgar Degas: Breakfast after the Bath (1895/98)


" … only investing in the future could move us there."


Our siblings in Great Britain suffer from decades of foolish leadership, effects we've barely sidestepped ourselves. After Reagan's disastrous economic strategies failed, along with his ally Margaret Thatcher's, a succession of Repuglican politicians continued hammering the same senseless drumbeat, warning of dire consequences for our children and our grandchildren should we not invoke deep spending cuts and agree to subject ourselves to an indefinite period of Austerity. They insisted that we could starve our way to prosperity, an absurd yet strangely popular strategy, albeit one that steadfastly ignored overwhelming evidence to the contrary. We were never in great danger of smothering ourselves with our spending. Quite the opposite! After forty years of dire warnings, our debt service remains a most modest, just under two percent of GDP, the envy of pretty much everybody else in the world.

The chorus continues in even greater earnestness.

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Edgercating

edgercating
Lucian and Mary Brown: Untitled
[children in classroom looking at globe]
(circa 1950)


"I still haunt my own periphery …"


I suspect that we all received a somewhat different than a standard education. I certainly did. Rather than advance directly to college after high school, passing Go and collecting the obligatory two hundred dollars, I entered a kind of Limbo, where for a year or so, I was neither here nor anywhere, really. I enrolled in the local community college, which I called the high school with ashtrays, and set about trying to avoid getting drafted. I never really suspected it at the time, but I was receiving an exquisite education, albeit from around the edges. I would receive no advanced degree in observational methodologies, just one Hell of a lot of practice in the field. I might not have been formally enrolled in one of the finest universities, but I was nonetheless receiving the highest quality instruction, personally curating content as well as instructors.

Within a year, I'd followed the woman who would later become my first wife back to her shared apartment in Seattle's U District, for she was formally enrolled in a genuine University.

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BlowingItUp

blowingitup
Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen: Truth and the Two Soldiers (1891)


"Blowing It Up Better."


I consider it perfectly normal to start off in the wrong direction. We are after all, humans, and humans have always excelled at heading off in some wrong direction, often for the very best of reasons. Anyone, at any time, remains perfectly capable of making just such a mistake. The only question might be how long it will take before one notices and takes corrective action. Any of an array of familiar responses might emerge whenever a human finally notices their error. (A different set appears when we notice someone else in error.) Some will attempt corrective action, just as if the fix should not require any significant course correction. However, if one's headed in the wrong direction, it might require anything up to and including a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree deflection. I usually manage a fix in more like a dozen similarly wrong-headed attempts to fix.

The issue at hand rarely seems to be a question of intent.

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Anticipations

anticipations
Edouard Manet: Le ballon [The Balloon] 1862


"Who's to say my Anticipations don't create my future?"


Success must surely be at least ninety percent Anticipations. We more often see what we believe than believe what we see. We might be incapable of moving cleanly into any future, each future first manifesting in Anticipations of what might be seen. It might be most common for one to anticipate worse rather than better. I know I usually first feel a foreboding when considering what's coming. That seems to be my default setting. It requires great concentration for me to warmly anticipate any future. I'm more apt to consider its potential shortcomings than in any way expect blessings. I suppose that I might most often manifest something worse than I would have otherwise conjured had I merely anticipated better.

Leading up to a meeting I've been invited to facilitate, I anticipate disaster.

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Gatekeeper

gatekeeper1
Waldemar Franz Herman Titzenthaler:
A soldier of the Prussian guard (1903)


" … one must always serve as their own Gatekeeper first …"


I live in conflict with my beliefs. I suspect that everyone does. Yesterday, I wrote a fine story about how I believe that Gatekeepers surround Success and deny entry to any and all not holding
GoldenTickets. As near as I can tell, I've always believed some variant of this story, even though it has rarely held true. While it's true that I have at times benefitted from some Gatekeeper's intervention, it might be equally true that they probably did not command the sole means for my gaining access. Even when a Gatekeeper intervened, I also needed to have intervened on my own behalf at some point. I was never a passive commodity impassively passed but an active entity making my own choices.

It might be true that one must always serve as their own Gatekeeper first, however unlikely this role might seem.

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GoldenTicket

gatekeeper
Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen: A Veteran of the Old Guard (1915)


"If I could just manage to hold onto those golden tickets …"


I imagine Success to be securely defended territory guarded 24/7 and then some by experienced and deadly serious Gatekeepers. These defenders of the status quo seem to know when something different approaches, and they have their game plan down pat to prevent each and any encroachment. Anyone wishing to enter those Elysian Fields must carry an invitation engraved with their personal information, issued by some duly designated authority. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, ever gains entrance by accident or solely by their own volition. Each must have gained and been given explicit permission, for access remains exclusively and forever By Invitation Only, no stragglers, gawkers, or mere do-gooders allowed. Success has always been and intends to remain an exclusive club.

At least, that's how I imagine Success.

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Rarely

rarely
Willem van Mieris: The Raree-show [’t Fraay Curieus] (1718)


" … the sorriest sort of Success."


Something encourages me to distrust anything that continually occurs, especially Successes. Success seems as though it should appear unreliably, Rarely, lest it forfeit its specialness. The magician who reliably delivers flawless performances must travel because no hometown audience would ever tolerate such consistency. No hitter delivers a home run every time they take to the plate. No painter produces endless flawless masterpieces. Flawed production might even be necessary to properly frame the extraordinary. Success seems as though it should be, at best, a rare occurrence.

What of the remaining performances?

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2ndOrderSuccess

2ndordersuccess
Lucas Kilian: Second Vision, from Mirrors of the Microcosm (1613)


" … just seem to take care of themselves."


Back in the sixties—fifty years ago—it seemed that almost every new thing came as a spinoff from President Kennedy's mission to send people to the moon and back by the decade’s end. A raft of space-age products resulted. A powdered orangish juice-like drink said to be part of the astronaut's diet emerged on the market and became wildly popular, even though it was clearly inferior to the genuine article. We began living in the future, "tomorrow today," as one multinational corporation labeled the experience. Life then was much more advanced than it seems today, as we basked in the 2ndOrderSuccess emanating from our sacred national undertaking.

2ndOrderSuccess might be best considered as what one gets as a result of achieving a Success.

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Sexcess

sexcess
Thomas Couture: The Supper after the Masked Ball (1855)


" … the only option for avoiding the addictions …"


In this culture, my culture, anyone can get addicted to absolutely anything. What was once revered as "the land of the free and the home of the brave" today seems to have increasingly become the land of the spree and the home of the enslaved. Those suffering from Success Addition Disorders (SAD) seem to be among the most troubled class, for they turn their colossal successes into abject failures. We see evidence of their influence in the tatters of the present Republican Party, a party once dedicated to promoting equality and now obsessed with just avoiding taxes. As with any negative target, and doubly true with any obsession, focusing upon avoiding anything tends to attract precisely what one seeks to avoid, that, or a deeply ingrained paranoia. Today's Success addicted, those suffering from Sexcess, exhibit all the usual symptoms of any full-blown addiction, with the added affliction that they're the most conspicuous consumers, almost as if they're proud of themselves. Don't let their gyrations confuse you. They're ill and suffering, stinking rich!

Dissatisfied with simply spending their fortunes, they employ themselves in the more dubious professions, focusing upon wealth defenses, primarily through concocting fresh schemes to avoid taxes but also extending into funding hyper-conservative pseudo-political movements.

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Vortices

vortices
Claude Monet: The Departure of the Boats, Étretat (1885)


"Success emerges from such turbulence."


Time moves irregularly. This fundamental law of the universe might have been lost on physicists but not once on the rest of us, for we daily struggle to cope with time's inherent variety. Days, even those that measure of equal length, pass differently, with wide variations apparent if not always precisely measurable. Even calendars remain steadfastly unequal, with January days typically at least forty percent longer than June's or July's.

Attempts to rectify this obvious imbalance have so far resulted in worse, like the French Revolutionary Calendar featuring

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Grasp

grasp
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres:
Studies for "The Martyrdom of Saint Symphorien"
[Saint, Mother, and Proconsul]
(1833)


" … a genuine symbol of that abstract Success."


We humans easily become attracted to abstract concepts, for they seem to be the brightest, shiniest objects distracting our focus. Napoleon insisted that men would only fight to the death for the more abstract concepts if first outfitted with colorful sashes and flashy uniforms. The unscrupulous promote an undefined patriotism and an undefinable faith to attract followers and encourage passionate responses. Only the very highest ideals seem capable of fueling the most degrading engagements. We might claim to want tangible goals, but our behaviors strongly suggest that we really desire the opposite. Running a flag up a flagpole inspires more passion than any dozen well-reasoned treatises.

These strange attractors carry one thing in common.

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Reach

reach
Alexandre Cabanel: Woman Reaching Over a Wall,
study for The Life of Saint Louis, King of France (1878)


"Reaching for the occasional impossible …"


The Muse and I differ in significant ways. I'm by far the more delicate of the two flowers. She's one tough cookie. She's more likely to dream big. Her grasp often seems to exceed her Reach. She often manages to successfully grasp something seemingly beyond her Reach. I do not know how she does this, but neither does she. She apprenticed in a world where her grasp reliably fell far short of her aspirations, where even her own bootstraps seemed to lay beyond her Reach until they just didn't anymore. She ascribes the shift as having had to do with dreaming bigger. I might insist that if you want to reliably Succeed, simply reach for things well within your grasp, while she insists that one must stretch further than that to Successfully achieve an impossible. She should know because she has had the Successes to show this sometimes works. Not every one of even The Muse's dreams falls within her grasp, though.

A class of aspiration exists which stands exclusively beyond any human's Reach or grasp, and these seem poisonous.

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Slippery

slippery
Paul Gauguin: Jean René Gauguin (1881)


"Zealots sure seem to receive the higher quality experience …"


Success seems an especially Slippery substance. It rarely appears to become what it's anticipated to become but arrives in some different guise, often surprisingly different. We pursue it with naive intensity, capable of dedicating ourselves to the merest shadows of understanding what we're actually pursuing. In the heat of such passion, clarifying questions rarely get warmly received. We behave as if further analysis might spoil the possibility for Success, and our concern might well be well advised. It seems as though we can't afford to simultaneously know and pursue, that the pursuit of success requires some profound ignorance of the true nature and the actual potential for what we might actually achieve. Throughout history, chroniclers have wondered what the perpetrators must have been thinking when reconstructing the causal chains of the greatest successes and failures. Mostly they marvel that nobody seemed to be thinking all that deeply. Both Success and failure seem particularly Slippery substances.

In the weeks leading up to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, former Assistant Secretary of the Navy Mitzi Wertheim scoured the Pentagon, asking anyone who would accept her questions about what was supposed to happen once the invading force gained Baghdad.

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PlantingFace

PlantingFace
Albrecht Dürer: St. Christopher Facing to the Right (1521)


" … the impossible nature of the questions asked …"


The holy grail of project management has always been the ability to determine whether an effort is on track to Succeed. It's damnedably difficult to determine, so a raft of artificial methods have sprung up to service this essentially insatiable need. When a method fails, that event merely fuels demand for a newer and improved means, even though there's really no way to determine beforehand whether each newer and supposedly improved means will deliver on its promise. I've sometimes speculated that the whole enterprise, project management as a practice, survives on the promise of delivering on its promises, rather than on actually delivering on them, but then that's the price of living in the future. It's never present.

The present's all we have, even though it's bound to be different than the future.

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Accshleptance

accshleptance
Jozef Israëls: Children of the Sea (1872)

"I pack 'em. I schlep them, too."


Someone wiser and even more sardonic than me once concluded that life's a Schlep. We might start without carry-on, but we quickly accumulate enough of an encumbrance to limit our mobility, then head downhill. Some people seem natively capable of accumulating more than their fair share. However, I will not mention here The Muse, who sometimes must be physically restrained to prevent her from "just stopping and looking" at every estate and garage sale she happens by. Of course, she almost always finds some reason there to add to her burden, and I remain mostly grateful for her discoveries. We try to strictly interpret the You Brought It, You Schlep It Rule. We do not consider helping anybody with their baggage a form of chivalry.

My study of Success has so far resulted in some additional carry-on.

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Modest

modest
Claude Monet: Bordighera (1884)


"Most Success is more modest than it appears."


I blush when I think of saying, "Modest Success." It seems as if I'm promoting underperforming, for everyone knows that Success was supposed to be more unconditional, as if the universe were surrendering to someone's dominion, as if the usual rules of engagement were suspended for a moment.

This idea that Success doesn't seek limits seems deeply ingrained in me, and it’s not that healthy of a perspective.

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Phobe

techterror
William Blake: Dante and Virgil Among the Blasphemers (1824-27)


"We swallow hard and continue humiliating ourselves …"


I firmly believe that we remain in the first technology era, the same one that featured both steam power and plug-board computing. Our more modern user interfaces only appear more advanced, for they remain enmired within the most primitive possible mindset. We have not yet stumbled into more sophisticated orientations, even though we suffer daily under the yoke of our backward understanding. No better example exists than what I might call The State Of The App. My iPhone and my laptop run many different apps. However, they each feature the same shortcoming, that being that I, their primary user, do not in any way understand how to properly use them. That's okay, the apologists explain, because nobody understands the first thing about the least them, not even their designers.

I rest my case there. In a less primitive future world, the typical user of an application would quite naturally understand how to use the damned thing.

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Envy

envy
Matsubara Naoko: Page from Hagoromo [Feathered Robe] (1984-86)


" … the burden of being the wealthiest …"


If I were the wealthiest person in the world, I would be better at it than the present incumbent has been. I would not become a right-wing troll, promote senseless conspiracy theories, or be even the slightest bit stingy. I would gladly give away most of my wealth and freely share my good fortune. I wouldn't own a private jet, but fly commercial coach, asking for the middle seat in the last row, and hope to find a new mother with her cranky baby seated next to me. I would live to surprise my fellow human beings, for I would dedicate myself to being a truly human being. I'd be the most benevolent person anyone ever remembers, a saint, a gem.

As it is, I am not now nor am I ever likely to share the challenges the world's richest person faces.

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Heaven

heaven
Matsubara Naoko: Waterfall (1966)


" … it produces its own perpetual Success …"


I embrace a distinctly
Panglossian philosophy. If this isn't the best of all possible worlds, it seems to be the one I have. It seems to me that I only ever inhabit the place I stand. Past has gone and future remains safely out of hand, out of touch. I can pine after what already left or aspire after some state not yet achieved or I can find satisfaction with what I presently possess, with what presently possesses me. I might be becoming but I am also being, and my being seems more powerful, more present, more dominant than any shit ton of whatever I might one day become. Consequently, where I sit this morning might just as well be Heaven, since it probably amounts to the closest I'm ever likely to see of it, anyway.

Believe me, please, I remain hugely aware of the contradictions inherent within my belief system, within any belief system.

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Limiting

limiting
Matsubara Naoko: Chinese Theatre (1959)


" … probably every damned one of us at first."


Projects more often die from indigestion than starvation. Success more often results from Limiting scope than from expanding it. If, as I proposed yesterday, all Success is Limited Success, the fine art of Limiting stands as an essential ability for anyone seeking Success. No whining, for we are not ultimately judged by how much crap we can cram into any pillowcase but by how well one manages to sleep on what was finally crammed in there. The surest ways to fail seem tied to trying to drag altogether too much stuff across any finish line. It might seem heartless, but it seems essential that we each learn how to abandon so that we might thrive. We might even be best defined by what we managed to leave behind.

I know almost for sure that my first iteration of expectations will prove too rich, altogether too expansive, for me ever to make good on.

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Limited

limited
Matsubara Naoko: Winter Forest I (1967-1968)


"After the game show ends, the taxman cometh."


There's no Success like Limited Success. Without some limiting factor, Success cannot exist. Contrary to the adolescent outlook our cultural myths insist upon, once Success occurs, "all" will not be and never has been resolved. Maybe motivation requires that we inflate the influence Success will wield. Perhaps we just speak in abbreviating shorthand, but we seem unwilling or unable to speak of Success as bringing limited and limiting results, for anything achieved likely means something else foregone, not in anything like a zero-sum outcome featuring both positives and their counterparts. Even great Success usually introduces externalities, unwanted negatives resulting from the otherwise purely positive result.

We might reasonably survey the downside and choose to pursue our outcome anyway, for every decision involves making trade-offs.

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Longuage

longuage
Matsubara Naoko: Quaker Meeting (1967)


" … never the guiding light."


Barely three weeks into writing this series, I still feel like I'm missing language to describe what I'm trying to say. This seems like familiar territory, though, because every time I've tried to introduce a different idea or perspective, I've discovered the same barrier to entry: the language couldn't support the fresh concept. Language contains the commonly understood. It finds no use for anything not yet needing describing, so of course, new concepts will be missing from the choices.

Budding communicators tend to rely upon one of three old reliables when their language proves wanting. They:
1- create new words,
2- create new meanings,
3- create new metaphors and allegories, fresh stories.

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SupposedTo

supposedto
Matsubara Naoko: Weeping Beech Tree (1967)


"I was SupposedTo want what that Success offered, but didn't."


I've always struggled with SupposedTo expectations, the ones that insisted upon one specific response. I couldn't always muster such a reaction, but I also noticed that the very injunction tended to nudge most of my motivation to comply right out of me. I'd start plotting how to avoid satisfying the expectation instead. I became a terrified learner, for instance, strapping myself in for another ordeal the first day of every quarter, certain only that I would shortly feel overwhelmed with expectations with which I'd feel unable to comply. I came of age understanding that I should be self-employed if only I possessed a talent.

Oh, I could work for someone else, but it helped if I could concoct a story that reframed the relationship from me depending upon their job to the job more depending upon me.

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Improbability

improbability
Matsubara Naoko: Funaoka [Pine Tree] (1964)


" … see what that gets you."


Someone eventually wonders after the cause of a success and asks about it, often in the form of, "What were the keys to your success?" just as if success necessarily had keys, whatever those might be. Does it follow, then, that Success originally comes with locks which, absent keys, prevent anyone from achieving it? The usual list of expected suspects emerges, highlighting the rational elements usually associated with any achievement, almost always prominently featuring a few exceptional qualities possessed by good old you-know-who. The net effect should, if properly presented, leave the successful person seeming part wizard and part fortunate, with always a little bit of bloomin' luck wisely attached. The result should be an exceptional story featuring a genuine hero and a happy ending, a pattern that any aspiring might emulate.

Reality, or what generally passes for it here, rarely, if ever, travels so formally and often hitchhikes.

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WayStation

waystation
Matsubara Naoko:
Harvard Yard in Spring (Shōwa era, 1926-1989)


"Success seems to end with concerted continuing. …"


We might be trained to parse our lives in Edwardian fashion, as if experiences had discrete beginnings and endings as if stories came with morals firmly attached. We more likely live in a quantum universe, where experiences can seem either more like waves or like particles, depending upon how we filter them. My expectations seem most calibrated to anticipate cleaner plot lines than usually emerge. In practice, my life seems to need a decent copyeditor to insert the boundaries my experiences tend to ignore. I've reached an end to a story, only to find that particular plot line continuing into one additional unwanted chapter after another. Even this writer understands that a story needs to bring a cleaner ending than living usually provides. The unmistakable hallmark of fiction might be discrete plot lines.

My experiences must be real because they would never make believable fiction.

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Striving

striving
Matsubara Naoko:
Page from Hagoromo [Feathered Robe] (circa 1984-1986)


"I strive to achieve an innocence forever lost."


I missed a deadline this week. I had been hyperaware of its approach yet felt powerless to meet it as it arrived. Sometimes, a responsibility lands on me to find me unprepared, though I've had decades to prepare myself. I remain just as inexperienced as I felt when I was starting before I’d imagined who I might become, back before I'd become anybody. Missing a deadline reminds me how tenuous the balance remains between Striving and arriving, between aspiring and succeeding. Success does not seem to be significantly improved with practice. A dozen does not necessarily render an impending one any less daunting. The pattern of one does not seem to be terribly transferrable to others. Each instance appears fresh and intimidating.

I accumulate my little failures more readily than I ever collect successes.

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Common

common
Matsubara Naoko:
Boston Common (Shōwa era, 1926-1989)


" … a Common sense and an even commoner wisdom …"


A local group, inspired and funded by outside money, fancies itself the store and font of common sense here. They call themselves Common Sense Republicans, which, by their very title, suggests that they're probably about anything but common sense, Republicans having long ago adopted the practice of naming anything they promote the opposite of whatever it might actually be. I feel confident that the members swell with associative pride to think that they've ascended to the altitude where they evoke the spirit of Thomas Paine, a revered founder, whenever they assemble. They appear at city council meetings to protest "despotic" mask mandates, school board meetings to lobby hard against freedom of speech, and in the letters to the editor column of our local newspaper to champion the most uncommon ideals, all under the rubric of common sense. Common bullshit, I might suggest.

Still, it's a part of our common mythos to believe in the sense a commoner quite naturally makes.

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WhatPrice

whatprice?
Félix Edouard Vallotton:
Money, plate five from
Intimacies (1898)


"Be careful what you wish for …"


Who among us isn't prone to insist in moments of extremity that we'd willingly pay any price, bear any cost, to achieve our desired Success? We're each probably occasionally guilty of employing loose talk rather than free speech. We will beseech while praying that the bill collector never comes calling to collect the desperate debt, especially if our sweaty investment has failed to pay off yet. Some bets never pay off in anything but desperation.

I've been watching with train wreck fascination as Kevin McCarthy, the seemingly life-long wannabe Speaker of the House of Representatives, degrades himself and his prospective office, groveling before his obvious inferiors (a term I used hesitantly, if accurately, presuming for a second that it's not more likely that McCarthy enjoys only betters).

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TulsaTime

tulsatime
Georg Pencz: The Triumph of Time,
plate four from The Triumphs of Petrarch
(c. 1539)


" … a halfway decent Country song …"


The Number One Country song of 1987 was written by accident. A well-known songwriter and studio/backup musician found himself out on tour and snowbound in the Sheraton in Tulsa. Snowbound in Tulsa could have been this Number One Country hit, but it wasn't. Instead, our songwriter was toodling around on his guitar, half-bored in his hotel room, the kind of boredom that, songwriters understand, no cable television in the history of this universe ever once thwarted. One toodles around on a guitar in such instances, or one goes out of their mind.

A two-chord lick emerged, as two-chord licks are wont to appear under such circumstances, and our songwriter, experienced as he was, recognized that he'd almost created something.

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CountingChickens

countingchickens
Odilon Redon: The Egg (1885)


" … already become well-introduced to the feeling …"


Much of the Success experience occurs before the Success arrives, in anticipation of the blesséd event. Once the finish line's crossed, the real Success experience begins, but leading up to finishing the race, much might depend upon how the runner believes he's doing. Whether he's ahead or behind, does he still feel as though he has a chance of succeeding? Any hint of impending doom might materially influence his remaining performance. If he senses inevitable defeat, he might not find his feet responding nearly as fluidly as they otherwise might. The story he conjures to describe and explain his present state affects how or even whether he ever finishes this race.

Our lonely long-distance runner probably has no idea about the pattern of his progress or the pattern of a winning trajectory.

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Syccess

syccess
Seaver W. Leslie: Thinking of Other Things (1972)


" … depending upon what I choose."


I might have already established that Success probably doesn't quite qualify as a thing but more likely exists as a feeling. However, we might best recognize it as a set of criteria, which we used to call “ success factors “ in project work.” Success Factors held the criteria upon which, ideally, any objective observer might determine whether the project had delivered upon its promises. These were not precisely the promises but more the outward signs of inward conditions. These criteria often contradict themselves, so some might become mutually exclusive. In those cases, it became a matter of judgment and perhaps even politics as to whether intentions had been satisfied. Success would often, perhaps even always, come down to a generous judgment that "good enough" had resulted. Sometimes, Success would come as an acknowledgment that no amount of continuing effort would likely improve the result enough to prove worth that additional effort. Then, Success might come as acquiescence, however different from original intentions, a divorce with ramifications.

In addition to the feeling aspect of Success assessment, there's often also a systems aspect.

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HollowingOut

hollowingout
Winslow Homer:
A Winter Morning Shoveling Out (published January 14, 1871)


" … reward for my latest Success and precursor to the next."


After New Year's, this world enters into the HollowingOut Season, one destined to continue until Spring. With winter not yet a fortnight old, I feel unaccustomed it its rhythm. I continue cruising on the cadence I adopted toward the end of Autumn, one which helped propel me into a great and glorious Success. That past, the horizon fills with emptiness, at least on those days when the freezing fog lifts enough for some semblance of a horizon to appear. Those days seem rare. I experience Success's everyday companion, the HollowingOut feeling designating the recent absence of something. The question always becomes, following even modest successes: What next? What now? Somehow, achievement's reward always includes a healthy dose of grief. The familiar pursuit's sudden absence leaves a disquieting silence.

I never know better.

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Completition

completition
Jack Gould: Untitled [man standing behind small
boxing ring where two cats are pretending to fight] (1946)


" … nothing we might do in competition would produce more than a failure."

It wasn't until I entered Junior High School, seventh grade, that I encountered any serious experience with Completition, the erosive side of the much-touted competition some say our civilization's founded upon. Survival of the Fittest seems to be a deeply ingrained notion, so firmly and widely held that we feel no compunction when we apply it to contexts within which it might not naturally hold. Darwin proposed it for physical evolution, but it's now routinely applied to social situations as if relations should naturally follow the same paths as physical development. Social Darwinists hold the most fantastical beliefs, prominent among them the notion that competition quite naturally improves those who engage in it, when it might at best improve the winner, but only if he manages not to become a sore winner, a long shot bet in many instances.


I believe competition to be, at root, an evil and, at best, an addiction.

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TheCurse

thecurse
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes:
Be Careful with that Step! (1816/1820)


" … just beneath the end of every rainbow."


New Year's Day brings the usual flurry of best wishes to drown out the flood of remembrances old years leave behind. We do not send good enough wishes, but only the very best. We do not wish ordinary times upon each other, but exclusively extraordinary ones, as if it wouldn't be good enough to wish anybody mere adequacy, only excellence. We command or demand the exceptional whenever we project into the future. Back when I worked with projects, it was rarely the case that the founding vision of any effort proposed producing a good enough result. They insisted instead that they, unlike every other project in the history of this universe before them, would create the most incredible product. It was usually not as though the organization needed an exemplary outcome to survive. They just proposed utopian outcomes, though none ever delivered even one.

This difference between proposed and delivered reliably sparked some controversy.

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Retrospecting

retrospecting
Joseph Keppler: Looking Backward, from Puck (1893)


" ... more infinite and much more significant."


It being New Year's Eve, the last day of this year, I asked myself an innocent question: Have I been successful this year? Innocent or not, this question got me to Retrospecting, reviewing what I'd accomplished, and dreading discovering what I had failed to finish. I could not even remember the names of the four series I'd written through the year; not off the top of my head, I couldn't. I had to look back through the transcripts, the 364 individual installments, to determine what I'd been so focused upon. I spent roughly fifteen hundred hours nurturing my writing habit through the year, yet I could not, near the end of the period, even remember the names of the titles of the four series I'd completed. Have I accomplished anything more than successfully forgetting what I'd created?

I read the first and last installments of each series to get a feeling for what I had been intending and how I'd judged my effort at the moment I completed each.

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Career

career
Cornelis van Poelenburch: The Expulsion from Paradise (after c. 1646)


“Maybe the future will insist that we stay in the garden …”


At nineteen, I was confident about who I wanted to be when I grew up. By the time I hit twenty-five, that certainty had abandoned me as surely as I had abandoned my first and only Career. After that, I wandered this world careerless, without a defined profession, a professional without an explicit portfolio. Had I gone on to pursue a Master's Degree, I might have finally come to adopt a professional identity. Because I hadn't, I became a generalist, a B-school graduate without a specialty. Unsurprisingly, I gravitated toward the work reserved for people like me. I found myself not so much attracted to, but conscripted into the ranks of project workers, matrixed into various roles depending upon the situation, a utility player without a formal position. I later gravitated into project leadership, then project management, but that's no career. It's more of an adjunct association with an organization, existing only for a duration and not forever like a regular role. I became management with a tenaciously small 'm'.

I searched for an association of project people, but when I found it, I refused to join because it didn't seem true to any principle.

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SuccessThink

successthink
Alexander Voet: The Old Fool and His Cat (17th Century)


"Successful might be the very last thing I ever wanted to become."


Just about the time I graduated from business school, I became interested in how I might become successful. I started frequenting the Self-Help section of Powell's Books and accumulated quite the collection of self-proclaimed helpful titles, among them perhaps the most influential Self Help title ever published, Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. T&GR was initially published in the late thirties and came with an enviably attractive backstory. According to the author, he'd interviewed Andrew Carnegie, who had confided the secrets behind his success. Hill characterized himself as merely the messenger, a link in a chain stretching back into ancient eternity. He contended that all rich people subscribed to more or less the same guiding philosophy. According to Hill, the difference between them and me was just a difference in outlook. Adopt his book’s philosophy and practices, and wealth would find me. I was skeptical. (Carnegie's estate found no evidence that Hill ever visited.)

I never quite managed to get clear to the end of that book, though it still stands on my shelf.

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ExplanatoryStory

explanatorystory
Anonymous Germany (Augsburg): The Rich Man
- Scene from the
Story of Jehosophat and Barlaam (1476)


"Sometimes it seems like something entirely different."


Martin E. P. Seligmann was a graduate student when he stumbled upon his Success. He was performing experiments with dogs when he noticed that the dogs seemed to become pessimists under certain conditions and started refusing reinforcement. He hypothesized that dogs could learn pessimism. He wondered, if dogs can learn to become pessimists, could they also be taught to be optimistic, and could humans? Thus began his life's work, which so far, at age eighty, has taken him to the top of the Self-Help (a genre he almost personally invented) bestseller lists and to the head of The American Psychological Society. His book, Learned Helplessness, became the basis for the now burgeoning field of Positive Psychology, and spawned a cool half dozen follow-on books which built upon that original base. Learned Helplessness includes a very clever and attractive chart that lists various tactics for countering Learned Helplessness. We've probably all been subjected to some form of these tactics.

When I was a kid, my mother's go-to tactic for countering sadness was to advise her suffering child to "Turn that frown upside down."

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FeelingsOf

FeelingsOf
Jacob Hoolaart, after Adriaen Brouwer:
Man met een geldzak [Man Holding Moneybag] (1723-89)


"I am not at this moment feeling all that successful."


I feel as though I have been dancing around my subject with these first Success Stories. This might be a reasonable if inconvenient time to confess a misgiving I've carried with me since I started writing this series. I admitted then, in my introduction, that I didn't feel as though I knew very much about Success, given that it had been a rare presence in my life. I speak even now of success as if it were a thing, ascribing the infamous 'it' to it, as if it was ever an 'it.' The thing about 'its' is that they are, by international agreement or something, supposed to at least vaguely refer to some person, place, or thing, an entity. Success seems awfully disembodied to qualify for 'itness,' and fitness for itness might matter. Of what do I speak when I attempt to speak of Success?

As near as my beleaguered brain can ascertain, Success might at best (or worst) qualify as a feeling.

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TheGames

thegames
Charles Samuel Keene: A Game of Cards (1870/91)


"Success comes in many colors …"


What are the success games? There seem to be many. Some long, others shorter, some seemingly competitive, others more solitary. Must one master a wide array of games to become consistently successful, or does a niche strategy more likely succeed? Some seem to inhabit a dog-eat-dog world, while others seem to live in almost blissful ignorance of even a hint of competition. Some become team players while others definite solos. I think it unfortunate that in our culture, we imagine so many kinds of engagements to be at root competitions, which, by definition, spawn winners and losers. Many still subscribe to zero-sum perspectives whereby one's success, by definition, dictates another's failure. Some envision a roiling marketplace of Roman gladiator games where it's kill or be killed, without apologies, just the way the game's played, thank you.

Success might involve personal choice more than might seem obvious.

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TalkingInto

TalkingInto
Jack Gould: Untitled [door to door salesman talking to woman] (1950)


"Success follows many paths home."


My writing work falls into two basic categories: Flow and TalkingInto. The Flow pieces take care of themselves. I start them off, and the writing commences, continuing until they're done. I remain remarkably absent from the process of creating these. They come to me. The TalkingInto pieces remain the rarer of the pair. They come when I'm more self-conscious, often when I feel I have some significant stake in the outcome. They appear when I feel self-important or feel as though I should feel self-important, just as if I have something important to say. My TalkingInto state might be a form of writer's block, an affliction with which I, fortunately, have little personal experience. The TalkingInto pieces become real work before they're finished.

I usually try to flee when discovering I'm engaging with a TalkingInto story.

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The Or Deal

the_or_deal
Master of the Die:
Venus Ordering Psyche to Sort a Heap of Grain (1530/40)


"My annual ritual amounts to a fool's mission …"


Near the end of each of her weekly examinations as The Muse went through her cancer treatment, Erin, the designated keeper of records for the clinical trial, would ask the same question: "Do you want to continue the trial?" To which The Muse would respond with an enthusiastic, "Absolutely!" This ritual reminded me of one common feature of successful engagements, The Or Deal. The option always exists to abandon almost any activity, though one might not necessarily consider this option in the middle of the typical fray. One gets set into a trajectory, and changing it becomes unthinkable. However, the latitude to turn off the engagement almost always exists and remains at least worth considering. Every effort serves as a kind of dedication test, a check to determine if you retain the stomach for the success and the often previously hidden cost of that success, the ordeal. Either you maintain the stomach to continue, or you don’t; that’s The Or Deal.

Looking back on my now long life, I easily recall a few of the more prominent choice points.

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Suckcess

suckcess
Elly Verstijnen: Jongen met pop [Boy With Doll] (c. 1900-1930)


"No one is ever apathetic except when in pursuit of another's objective."
-Folk Wisdom


"I feel unlikely to ever outgrow my worse bad habits."


So far, the most troubling successes of my life have uniformly been the kind I was supposed to want but didn't. These were often promoted as somehow being for my own good and uniformly seemed more for my certain detriment instead. I'd drag my feet because I could not muster enough motivation to manage any other response. In this way, I laid myself open to various criticisms. If only I could exhibit more discipline. If Onlies then seemed to utterly dominate my foreground. I always thought these experiences exemplified the pursuit of mammon and were trying to tell me to shift my focus from chasing something destined to do me in. This kind of wisdom almost always came later in the game, after investing more than I felt I could afford to lose. Veering off onto another, healthier trajectory always proved difficult to impossible.

It might be true that nobody ever knew what they were supposed to do.

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SuccessStory

SuccessStory
Thérèse Schwartze: Portrait of Lizzy Ansingh (1902)


" … reframing what success might mean …"


This story marks the first installment of a new series focused upon Success. I feel distinctly unqualified to write this series. This sense alone might qualify me to at least attempt to write it because I hold a growing belief that those who've been held up as examples of success serve as at best poor examples of it. Certainly the richest, often presumed the default most successful, have well proven just how unqualified for emulation they tend to be. Nobody wants to grow up to be Henry Ford or Elon Musk anymore. We pity them their public frailties. Likewise those examples from most any field one cares to name. Each seemed to be poor exemplars on some level. I might well conclude that one of the better ways to elude Success might arise from attempting to emulate anyone touted as successful. This world hardly needs one Elon Musk. Heaven forbid that it had to suffer through two, even if that second one just happened to be you.

I poke at Mr. Musk since he's widely recognized as the world's richest man.

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Impossibles

impossibles
Paul Gauguin: Soyez amoureuses, vous serez heureuses
[Love, and You Will Be Happy]
, (1899)


"I will not be telling anyone what I didn't intend to tell them again."


By long tradition, the final installment of any story series should at least attempt to summarize, to digest whatever it might have attempted to impart in its prior pieces, to, in the crude vernacular of the professional trainer, "tell them what you told them." There almost always came a time, in my career as a teacher of professional people, when the organizer would start speaking of Training The Trainer. This point signified the impending end of my relationship with that organization and the doom of our inevitably short-lived initiative. Corporations seem to need to frequently change their imperatives, as if to keep fresh whatever impossible they pursue, and they might well be wise to insist upon such shifts, because when dealing with Impossibles, freshness might remain the most important consideration. While it might well be absolutely true that most corporate imperatives represent some sort of impossible intention, one cannot continue perpetually holding the unrequited. It must be "achieved" or abandoned, left without fanfare in favor of some fresh and more enlivening initiative, also inevitably another impossible, eventually facing the same fate.

The Train The Trainer speech gave notice that the client intended to transform their present impossible into standard curriculum, a process which dumbs down its content.

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PerfectEnding

perfectending
Paul Gauguin: Manao tupapau:
(She Thinks of the Ghost or The Ghost Thinks of Her),
from
the Noa Noa Suite (1893/94)


"I'm not quite finished yet."


To speak of a PerfectEnding might be to speak heresy, for the orthodoxy does not usually believe in such things. For them, endings bring opportunities for analysis, for determining what went wrong, to identify root causes, and to inflict judgement, all for the purpose of pursuing the ultimate unachievable objective: continuous improvement. Without such operations, orthodoxies would very quickly go out of business, for without the need for imposing salvation, it's whole operation seems simply fraudulent. If improvement isn't warranted, what's a higher power supposed to do? Could it thrive living in parity with its laity?

In SetTheory, such traditional hierarchies do not hold sway, for they become just another basis for conducting analysis intended to make sense of their presence.

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AfterMath

aftermath
Winslow Homer: After the Hurricane, Bahamas (1899)


"Even happily ever after suggests the storytelling will continue."


After the HouseConcert, what then? What's next? My attention had been so intensely focused through these SetTheory stories that I gave scant concern over what might happen if my dream came true and I somehow, against great odds, managed to perform a set of my songs. Well, the dream came true. The Muse and I stayed up late after the HouseConcert, doing dishes and relishing the receding warmth the evening produced. By the time The Muse went to bed, piles of clean dishes on the kitchen table and my guitar standing in the front window were the only remaining evidence that a gathering had even happened. The following morning, I woke late, feeling deeply satisfied. I had accomplished something.

I had not started studying my curious SetTheory to change the world, for I've always considered notions of changing this world to be sins of self importance.

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HouseConcert

HouseConcert
Adriaen van Ostade: The Concert (1644)


" … another storybook ending."


As unlikely as it seemed for much of the journey there, the long-touted HouseConcert actually happened. It even arrived a little ahead of the schedule requirement, which I'd imagined to be before I'd reached the end of the current seasonal quarter, before the upcoming Solstice. The right people showed up, too, precisely the proper cast which could not have been improved by the concerted efforts of even an army of over-experienced talent scouts. The light supper was very well received. It just seemed such a freedom to invite folks into The Villa, whatever the pretext. Delivering this SetList of songs seemed an embellishment atop what would have qualified as a very decent holiday gathering regardless.

I'd set the stage, such as it was, along the recently refurbished front window seat, directly in front of the massive front window, which The Muse had decorated with multicolored Christmas lights.

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FinishingTouched

finishingtouched
Gaston La Touche: Pardon in Brittany (1896)
A "Pardon" is a Breton form of penitential pilgrimage
conducted at twilight with candles.


"What's inevitably started in innocence
must perhaps necessarily end in gratitude."


Those of us instructed to 'start with the end in mind,' eventually find ourselves going out of our minds since the end always shows up differently than originally imagined. These projections must always originate hopelessly out of that future context, which carries subtleties impossible to imagine beforehand. I suppose this injunction's real intention was never to enable anyone to envision any future, but to serve instead as motivation or inspiration, just to get the imaginer moving toward something, however unlikely that something might be to ever actually manifest. As a result, people often experience endings as bait and switch operations, where what was promised never seems to have been delivered. Success sometimes feels more like a failure.

My almost three month preparation for my house concert carries all the usual vestiges, for it was an initiative no more than normally blessed.

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Patter

patter
Albrecht Dürer: The Monstrous Sow of Landser (1496)


"The breathtaking's almost always worth taking the risk."


If my years as a performer taught me anything, they taught me the necessity of Patter and also of the absurdity of preparing Patter beforehand. Proper Patter, my experience taught me, should be impromptu, off the cuff, unscripted. The Patter of which I speak comes before and between the songs, the introductions and reflections that serve as a sort of stage punctuation in the performance conversation. I know that the old vaudeville performers scripted every second of their stage time. Us veterans of coffeehouse stages and small college venues did not, or learned not to. We sought a more authentic presence on stage and did not seriously consider ourselves to be performing, certainly not acting a part, or so we would have insisted at the time. We all were, of course, trying hard to successfully channel whomever we wished to be like, so that we would be liked. Many were bad Dylans. I, myself, leaned more toward the awful Donovan persona, though I was serious about aspiring for authenticity.

What does the term Authentic Performer even mean?

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Winnowing

winnowings
Willem Witsen: Man die aan het wannen is
[Man Winnowing] (c. 1888)


"Winnowing serves as the final embellishment."


Any efficiency expert—probably even any efficiency apprentice—would tell you that this amounts to perhaps the least efficient means to accomplish anything: Over prepare to under deliver, yet this phrase precisely describes the proper method for producing a set of songs. One defers the LifeboatDrill decisions until very nearly the ending, thereby ensuring that more than twice the number of songs actually performed get rehearsed, and not half-assed rehearsed, either. Each must have been considered a genuine contender and even the more difficult ones should have been painstakingly practiced, even unto and beyond great frustration. The list, too, should have properly been re-ordered several times as if the set might last almost ninety minutes, just as if our earnest performer could last a full ninety minutes, which he probably can't.

But performer capability probably sits beside this point.

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SittingOnTop

sittingontop
Jacob de Wit, after Peter Paul Rubens:
Oude vrouw met kind en vuurtest
[Old woman with Child and Fire Test] (1734)


"There might not be any better feeling …"


I wrote most of my songs in the Key of D, both because chords in D seemed easier to play and also because its notes fell comfortably within my singing voice's range. I've noticed that many songwriter/performers write exclusively within a single key. Our recently departed and dearly beloved Nanci Griffith also wrote and performed everything in D, so I must be in good company. This choice can produce similar songs, ones only narrowly differentiated from each other, as if every one was the same one all over again, producing a Groundhog Day catalogue like Bruce Springsteen or Tommy James and the Shondells. Fans don't care that they're fed the same supper every night. They are rarely gourmets and, like my cats, tend to reject any supper that's not instantly familiar. Still, the performer might notice and try to stage songs so as to minimize this same-old effect; vary a bit.

The venerable old Key of D no longer proves one my singing range can easily reach.

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Convergering

convergering
Artist unknown [Japan], Fukusa [Gift Cover] (circa 1801–1900)


" … The Muse departs those premises for good …"


As we pulled The Schooner into the Cancer Center parking lot, the radio started playing Leroy Anderson's arraignment of Sleigh Ride, the only absolutely essential holiday song, complete with wood block hoof pounding, slapstick, and full orchestration. The Muse commenced to shake and jiggle in the seat beside me. I asked what was happening and she replied that she was channeling when she played percussion with the Groton, SD high school band. "I'm shaking sleigh bells," she said, "and whipping the slapstick." Our reverie resolved into tears, and we held hands there while weeping in recognition that this infusion would be the final one in The Muse's months-long sleigh ride through CancerLand.

The oncologist had little more to offer.

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LifeboatDrill

lifeboatdrill
Stefano della Bella:
Mannen in een reddingsboot [Men In Lifeboat]
(Undated- circa 1620-64)


" … nobody intended or wanted to do anyone any damage …"


As consultants, The Muse and I often employed experiential exercises to help our clients gain insights. These amounted to what appeared to be silly little games, though they usually managed to help the client gain traction against some difficulty. We were extremely careful with our game design, though, as we came to understand that these silly little games could leave lasting, even damaging impressions. We always avoided introducing any game which might resemble what we called LifeBoatDrills, those games where a group was forced to choose to vote one or more of its members "off the island," for these can spark real trauma and produce permanent ill feelings, more harm than good. Curiously, this design seems the most common one employed by what has been strangely labeled "reality television," since reality only very rarely if ever actually delivers these sorts of dilemmas. Those who practice LifeBoatDrills probably practice for conditions they will never encounter in the real world or they produce the sorts of experiences nobody ever really wants, probably both. A master of the LifeBoatDrill seems the sorriest master of all.

My long-anticipated house concert, though, seems to have morphed into somewhat of a LifeBoatDrill.

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Newing

newing
Paul Gauguin: Jean René Gauguin (1881)


"Not a slave to precedent nor an idiot to improvement."


For me, nothing seems sadder than a tribute band, one dedicated to reliving some heyday on stage. I respect original work, but seeing a late middle-aged troubadour replay their pubescent angst on a stage seems just as sad as Lawrence Welk's orchestra seemed in their later days: dated and then some, unappreciable. Their easy mastery no longer resembles talent or skill, but clearly came as the result of ad nauseam repetition. It was always a wonder that those band members could stay awake through the chorus of most of their tunes because they knew their parts too well to produce a credible performance, which must seem like discovery to really work. They seemed to most need some strategy to just let bygones become bygones. Their performances most reminded their audiences of the absolute the necessity of retirement.

I carry vestiges of these feelings about performing my own compositions, though I have not been vainly repeating the same old songs for generations.

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UndressedRehearsals

undressedrehearsals
Unknown Artist, Italian, 17th century:
Juno Commanding Aeolus to Release the Winds (Not dated)


" … all about believing self-deception …"


Practicing slowly morphs into rehearsals as the performance date nears. Practice focused upon bare mechanics while rehearsals include some stagecraft. A performer might scrutinize camera angles, hoping to expose their best profile and, of course, cloak the more unflattering perspectives. Beginnings and endings become more deliberate and the performer actively projects into the ever nearer future. Knowing the performance allows no do-overs, he pushes each tune to conclusion, no longer so quick to stop and repeat a flubbed phrase. He might even gain time consciousness, a terrible addition. What once was timeless becomes time bound as what was once lost slowly gets found again.

The neck of the guitar becomes less restrictive as recent familiarity increases, the product of repetition as well as rediscovery.

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SoundCheck

soundcheck
Jacob van der Heyden:
Sound, plate two from The Five Senses
(Not Dated: Artist's working dates 1593–1645)


" … success finally seemed within reasonable reach!"


Sound became the most difficult element of my effort to prepare for my house concert. I'd managed to dredge up lyrics and mostly even found the voice to sing them, transposing one song into a more workable range, but getting the sound through my microphone and guitar pick-up bedeviled me, increasingly frustrating my efforts. The slow realization that the house concert would need to be in part broadcast only increased processed sound's importance. If it wasn't my microphone troubling me, it was my studio headphones. I swear that I will never grow entirely accustomed to trailing cables behind me. They leave me feeling like a prisoner, restricted to only a scant few feet of movement whenever I'm plugged in.

I was on a Zoom® call with my old friend Franklin yesterday and had decided to plug into my sound board to give it a test with a knowledgable listener on the other end.

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Sequence

sequence
Stuart Davis:
Art Theory Text with Color Sequence Diagram (1951)


"Who's on first? …"


I hold the utterly irrational belief that natural orders exist in both nature and in the works of man, even mine. For instance, I imagine myself ordering the songs in my SetList in such a way as to maximize their impact. I imagine this without for a second having access to what might constitute impact from my perspective or from anyone else's. I might know after I've performed a set, but can only imagine after that natural order beforehand, and even if a song order works, I will have no way of verifying that the order constitutes the natural one or was in any way superior to any other. I must, it seems, create and then manage to believe in a layered fiction which might somehow reinforce itself, bringing resolution. I am today attempting to properly order my SetList songs, a provably impossible undertaking.

Sequence seems like one of those meta conditions not obvious at first glance.

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Invitation

christmasnoise
Antique Christmas Card
from The New York City Public Library's digital collection


" … who would even agree to attend … ?"


This week, I need to send out the invitations for my SetList performance. I've long planned to deliver this performance in The Villa, with me seated before the grand front window with bookshelves on either side. I've imagined my audience arrayed back into the living room, with perhaps a couple of dozen easily fitting into that space with furniture rearranged and extra chairs. A few might choose to stand. I'd keep the SetList short enough so that nobody would get too fidgety before I finished. We'd drink some wine before and more after as well as enjoy a light mobile supper. It would be a celebration as well as the conclusion of this series, my appreciation for the attention I've received through the lengthy preparation. It would also serve as an introduction of sorts, a first exposure for most present to my semi-secret songwriter background, who I once was as well as who I always was beneath my facade, and who I'll also always thereafter be. I planned it as a curious kind of coming out party.

In the two years and nine months since This Damned Pandemic locked us down, we've rarely hosted any of our usual gatherings.

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Seconds

seconds
Edward Penfield:
Will You Help the Women of France? (1917)
Printed by W. F. Powers Company Lithographers
published by United States Food Administration


"We're still praying and waiting …"


Ten days after Thanksgiving, Tetrazzini season settles in for a short visit. The turkey's tailpiece remains, the so-called Bishop's Nose, along with an odd wing and a piece of that greasy meat that once covered ribs; little else besides bone. These pieces, proven poor sandwich material, ache to become stock, their last chance to become anything useful on their way out of this world. Half the leftover meat disappeared over Thanksgiving night at the hands of what I suspect to have been a raccoon sauntering through our walk-out refrigerator, also known as the back deck. I'd used Zip-lock® bags to secure the goodies and the raccoon apparently carried a switchblade—we all know they all do— which made short work of my weak defense. The remaining bag contained the more marginal pieces, greasy and barely edible even when amply disguised with The Muse's housemade cranberry sauce, mayonnaise, and thick slices of Swiss cheese. I, too, was aching to render that meat into stock.

The Muse continues recovering from her radiation treatments.

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Justifying

Justifying
Friedrich Amerling: The Young Eastern Woman (1838)


"The cost/benefit analysis of every artistic endeavor,
SetTheory concludes, produces only The Null Set …"


In my apparent insistence to at least attempt to overthink every damned thing I engage in, I stumbled upon the poisonous question: Why? Why seems naked standing alone. It seems to need a question mark attached to its backside, as if to conceal something, and why(?) probably has much to conceal. Its unceasing attempts to justify come as close to original sin as anything anyone could possibly engage in, primarily because it asks a fundamentally unanswerable question. Nothing anyone might muster in response could possibly satisfy it. It sparks excuses, sure, and often long-winded explanations which ultimately fail to explain to anyone's full satisfaction. It amounts to distraction, focusing attention away from essence and toward insistence, like any "good" advertisement attempts. Its likely purpose seems to be to sidetrack focus, to undermine true inevitably unspeakable purpose, and to encourage a commercial mediocrity upon activities which hardly deserve this. As I said above, Why(?) almost always proves poisonous.

In business school I learned how to concoct cost/benefit analysis, this to guide what was labeled decision-making.

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ClawingForward

clawingforward
Félix Vallotton: The Protest (1893)


"I try to not make a habit of such behavior."


Each setback provides a fresh premise for ClawingForward, a new dedication test trying to determine the depth of commitment behind the pursuit. I can always forfeit whatever I've already invested and walk away, hoping nobody will notice that I surrendered. Honor, or some emotion very much like it, encourages me to continue anyway, to perhaps even courageously overcome whatever barrier I've encountered. My response more often comes from embarrassment than bravery. I cannot quite face what it might mean if I cannot overcome this encumbrance, so I continue the struggle. I sometimes even succeed, even though trying in no way guarantees any outcome. I fancy myself tenacious when I'm probably just stubborn, but hitting a wall usually incites me into action, and often into investigating some new direction, anything to maintain accustomed momentum.

I read the freaking owner's manual, though the submission was, indeed, painful.

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ReSettingBackwards

ReSettingBackwards
Claude Monet: Stack of Wheat (1890/91)


"Wrong-footed, I sprint for the finish line."


After a week of reporting solid progress, my SetTheory efforts finally hit their wall (again.) The first principle of all forward momentum mentions this wall as a certainty, an inevitability, not a possible encounter but an unavoidable one. This wall generally appears early in an effort, as the usual notional initiation notices that its context differs from what was earlier imagined and planned upon. The experience always feel deflating, as if some cruel mistake had been made against the proceedings. Most efforts manage to recover, albeit almost always on different terms than originally imagined. The possible takes over from the original imaginal intentions and the effort resumes, and often in a different direction. Initial notions of end results almost always amount to fantasies. The quality of leadership usually devolves into the acceptance of some closer semblance of reality over the originally motivating fantasy. The Wall reigns eternal, though. One can choose to go over, around, or through it, but ignoring it never works for long.

Ignoring it almost always seems the preferable alternative when it first appears.

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Fining

fining
Hans Weiditz (II) (anonymous:)
Mannen bij een proeverij [Men at a Tasting] (1514-32)


"I paint my face with well-practiced authenticity."


The mirror image of the project-initiating Milling Around Period appears nearer the end of the effort. It amounts to much dusting and polishing, sequencing and clarifying, none of it strictly necessary but all of it nonetheless useful. It might even qualify as meaningless work, but since ninety percent of all work apparently qualifies as meaningless, this classification alone provides no excuse for avoiding engaging in it. Besides, it feels so danged satisfying. Most of the earlier stress and anxiety have by then been leached out. What deadlines remain carry little threat. I feel prepared if not quite prepared enough. I am Fining.

Once a wine or a beer has finished fermenting, it's done for most intents and purposes, save one.

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Transcending

transcending
Charles Sheeler: Amaryllis (1924)


"I can see a transparent shadow of myself …"


Practicing seems like a primitive form of what this performer intends when he picks up his instrument. Initially, I struggle to just remember the progressions and to propel myself to the end of each piece, but later, after some considerable time spent immersing myself into these mysteries, my practice shifts. After, it becomes easier if not precisely easy, more expression than re-creation. I often catch myself improvising then, as if I no longer seek to resurrect or recreate, but to manifest a feeling for which the original words and music were always mere indexes, means to access a sense more than the purpose of practicing or an end unto themselves. This after space I enter amounts to Transcending, I guess. It certainly feels like a religious experience, if that description doesn't put too orthodox a spin on it. I leave refreshed and slightly light-headed, eyes clear and voice phlegm-less for a welcomed change. I feel high, as though I'm floating slightly above my former existence, witness to my experience more than mere actor.

I'm seeing that the purpose of this SetTheory experience was less about resurrecting my songbook than about rediscovering Transcending.

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Spectacular

spectacular
Henri-Edmond Cross: The Pink Cloud (c. 1896)


"Her forbearance might well be remembered …"


The Muse's oncologist reported that her "numbers are Spectacular," an uncharacteristic characterization from any practicing physician. They're professionally more restrained, less effusive. On good days, they might allow themselves to express guarded optimism and, always, unshakable support, but they only rarely enter the unconditional superlative realm. I ask a follow-up question and receive a more sobering perspective in return. I note that her tumor had become invisible on the last scan we saw. He cautioned us to take such visual evidence, however seemingly reassuring, with a grain of salt. He explained that this cancer's cells remain unbelievably tiny, that we can only visually verify their presence when they're present in the billions. A few hundred million of them cannot be seen by even the most sophisticated scanning technology. Visual verification's virtually impossible. We're poking sticks into darkness, he explains.

I thanked him for blunting my enthusiasm, and I meant it.

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FinalPrep

finalprep
Jacques Callot: Camping Place of the Gypsies:
The Preparation of the Feast

(Artist's working dates 1612–1635)


"I figure I can finish FinalPrep in the final fifteen minutes before I take the stage."


The National Weather Service predicted snow by early evening and the sky had already started spitting fine ice by the time I returned from an errand across town. I wanted to finish cleaning up the latest leaf fall before this storm hit, since the weather service also predicted a week of very cold temperatures with intermittent snowfall providing no later opportunity to complete the last of the Autumn chores before an early Winter settled in. I faced the choice of working through the icy rain or just accepting that I would fall short of my aspirations this season. I slipped into my overalls and stepped out into the weather. As usual, once imbedded within it, the drizzle seemed less ominous. I focused upon quickly removing those leaves and soon found myself finished. Then came the piddling around time.

The Muse swears that she can complete a month of unfinished business in the final few hours before she leaves on an extended trip.

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MakingPerfect

makingperfect
Vincent van Gogh: Self-Portrait (1887)


"Will we poison ourselves with critical mediocrity or with generous perfection?"


I ordinarily cannot countenance mention of perfection, for as the owner of both an aging home and body, I see little day-to-day evidence of its existence. I'd come to think of perfection as a poisonous notion. As an objective it seemed to guarantee frustration and failure. As a representation, it seemed falsely overbearing, a transparently misleading characterization. Few experiences greater frustrated me than a shopgirl mindlessly parroting everything I'd mention with a "Perfect!" exclamation. She'd ask me if she could help me with anything. I'd decline her offer and she'd declare our encounter somehow "Perfect!" I'd pray that she might somehow pull her faux enthusiasm to the curb and join the rest of us down here on the surface of the planet Earth rather than continue inhabiting her alien-seeming stratosphere above. I found her realm annoying in the extremis.

But I think I might have groused a tad too much.

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PlayForWork

playforwork
Jan Havicksz. Steen:
Children Teaching a Cat to Dance,
Known as ‘The Dancing Lesson’
(1660 - 1679)


"Maybe mastery makes fun of everything."


Early on, I imprinted on the idea that work really should be play. I sensed that the term work mischaracterized its own possibility, creating a false and disastrous dichotomy. Work might not necessarily be the opposite of play, but the very highest example of it. Mischaracterize that high-order play as work, and people might primarily engage in it to earn time away. Folks might day-dream of retirement rather than reveling in the very embodiment of what they might have been dreaming to achieve. In this way, the carrot became the stick and people started consenting to investing their time in productive but meaningless activities. Some even agreed to become professionals and a few of those consented to become responsible, and before anyone knew it, adulthood had gone to Hell without even the comforting benefit of handbaskets.

When work becomes play, it gets easier to get through the day.

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Begetting

begetting
Hans Weiditz (II) (possibly):
Het produceren van wijn en andere medicinale dranken
(Producing wine and other medicinal drinks) (1620)


"… continued Begetting regardless …"


I felt shocked when The GrandOther, sitting at our Thanksgiving table, was the one insisting that we each express our thanks for something. We're no Norman Rockwell image of any holiday family, not even piss poor Presbyterians when it comes to the iconic rituals of any holiday table, yet there was The Other, the youngest at the table, insisting that tradition be acknowledged and performed. Lord (or somebody) knew that we had plenty to feel thankful for, even though this has been a difficult year. I heard myself insist that the hardest years seem to produce the greater volume of gratitude, and not just that they're over. As a blessings generator, hard times just seem better at Begetting blessings, an apparent paradox often lost on those trudging on their knees through the harder of the hardest times. Like with all religious convictions, I guess, the blessings emerge later as reward or punishment, their eventual existence a matter of faith until they manifest.

The question comes, then, how one might reliably induce gratitudes.

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PlagueWinter

plaguewinter
Arthur Wesley Dow: Marsh Creek (c. 1905)


"The future sure seems lonely."


As we enter the third successive PlagueWinter, I find little evidence that I've fully incorporated any learning from the experience. I still pine and plan as if this disease were little more than a passing inconvenience rather than endemic, as it surely has become. I'm just starting to understand that this disease will most likely haunt my remaining days here, even if I live for decades. Gratefully, neither The Muse nor I have yet contracted this bug, though her son has been through three bouts of it and has been wrestling with long Covid symptoms for two years, since he started recovering from his first bout. A friend just finally tested negative after an eight day run with his second infection this season, and he took Paxlovid just as soon as he tested positive both times, and had just the week before received his latest booster. He said it was like having a bad cold. Of the ten people who attended his ukulele group, two apparently came already infected and six of the remaining eight tested positive the next day. Covid-19 remains alarmingly infectious, though apparently not nearly as deadly as it once was for many.

I've been dreaming of a 'normal' Christmas season, similar to the ones I used to know.

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Knotting

Knotting
Albrecht Dürer: The Fifth Knot (c. 1507)

" … to grow more familiar with my knots …"

It might be most common to think of one's self as an untier of knots, but I'm thinking just how complicating that characterization inevitably becomes. Those of us guitar players who scrupulously maintain closely-cropped fingernails find ourselves at a natural disadvantage if we consider ourselves untyers. Many others hold no particular interest in solving puzzles, merely finding them frustrating and so best avoided. No, I'm growing to appreciate that I'm naturally more of a knot tyer. My legacy, if I ever deign to have one, should probably be comprised of knots neatly tied, suitable for untying should anyone feel so moved, but otherwise perfectly fine unresolved.

Preparing my SetList songs for public performance, I almost fell into the terrible trap of believing that I would necessarily need to resolve each mystery I encountered when resurrecting every song. …

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MakingTheBest

makingthebest
Franz Marc: The Bewitched Mill (1913)

" … once existed forever."



Make The Best

"Make The Best of the curious choices
life brings you.
They won't always rhyme
and they won't always leave a reason behind them,
'cause this is a sloppy opera and a stupid ballet
and if it isn't for the best
at least it is forever."


I always use this song to end my performances.

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Innerfacing

innerfacing
Arthur Wesley Dow: The Clam House (circa 1892)


"This so-far mythical future house concert …"


Much of my effort to resurrect my SetList of songs probably qualifies as inner work. Not to go all nineties on anybody, when the publishing world gorged in The Inner Work of pretty nearly everything, the inner work of performing even my simple tunes proves daunting. The inner world, my inner world, refuses to cleanly translate into outer mediums and contexts. Feelings repeatedly fail to pass the explicit test. Meanings steadfastly remain mysterious. Even hearing what I'm singing proves complicated and seems best amended with microphone, headphones, and a confusing array of software filters.

I've been failing to learn the software through which I filter my voice for twenty-some years and I feel no closer to figuring it out than when I started.

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SurfacePrep

surfaceprep
Arthur Wesley Dow, Pencil Proof (early 20th century)


"Great inconvenience can be tolerated to ease the prep."


Yesterday's SetTheory story,
SurfaceTension, only introduced a topic key to my navigating through to finally produce my performable SetList. New readers should understand that I'm just shy of two months into an effort to resurrect a set of my own compositions into a performable set of songs such that I might perform a house concert around the upcoming Solstice. I've been introducing here the songs I'm considering including and following my process for preparing, which doesn't always seem very much like a process at all. Yesterday's story reported on the barriers to entry I encounter when I attempt to enter the once-familiar singer/songwriter space. The door does not seem wide open. I bump into encumbrances. I recognize these for what they are, completely normal, but I'm feeling a need to more deeply explain what I'm learning about overcoming these.

Upon closer scrutiny, I perceive some commonality between what I'm experiencing resurrecting my songs and what I came to understand about managing projects, back when I worked as a project management consultant.

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SurfaceTension

surfacetension
Vasily Kandinsky: Improvisation No. 30 (Cannons) (1913)


" … results that I still feel certain anyone can see through."


Each fresh task seems to carry a certain SurfaceTension which I must penetrate before I can fully engage. While the act of penetrating that tension might look like I'm engaging, it seems much more tentative than that, as if whatever effort I expend breaking through that barrier doesn't count. Indeed, that work often seems a distraction, an irrelevance. It seems to prevent me from getting started rather than an integral part of starting. I very often find myself stymied by these initiation rituals in precisely the same way that I often cannot determine how to open a package or penetrate the bullet-proof plastic shell covering a new purchase. I cannot open these things with bare hands. Scissors usually prove useless, too. I most often submit these to The Muse for resolution, since she seems to have developed specialized strategies for opening these. I most often prefer to just set them aside as not having been designed for my use. I'm easily discouraged.

I reflect on my academic career, such as it was.

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Excusing

excusing
Martin Schongauer: Saint Sebastian (c. 1480-1490)


" … everything I accomplished will become roughly equivalent to everything I ever wanted."


Two years and eight months into the Covid-19 pandemic, I've grown expert at Excusing. I understand the limitations that this damned pandemic places upon The Muse and I. I probably understand them too well, for while most of my contemporaries, colleagues, and friends seem to have moved on and back into what now passes for ordinary times, I remain steadfastly tied to wearing my mask, anti-social distancing, and, basically, turning down the opportunity to do much of anything. I'm still not eating out. I find disturbing the prospect of ever flying again. Oh, I also have somehow managed to avoid contracting Covid. In short, I live my life immersed in considerable negative space, informed more by what I refuse to permit myself than in what I grant myself permission to engage.

I some days feel as though I've become a master at Excusing.

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Marathons

marathons
Arthur Wesley Dow: Crater Lake (1919)


"We have only inadequacy to accompany us through."


As wearying as sports metaphors can get, I might best represent cancer treatment as a sequential series of Marathons, any one of which might well prove challenging and the sum total of which certainly overwhelms. No shortcuts exist. No respites, either. From the initial discovery through the diagnosis process took The Muse three full months. Once treatment started, which began with little respite from the exhausting diagnosing effort, the insults prove unrelenting. Radiation subtlety sears. Immunotherapy infusions invade. No places to hide emerge. It's one hundred percent exposed, day and night, through the treatment period, which is scheduled from the outset: five weeks of radiation at six treatments per week and six immunotherapy infusions, one every other week for eleven weeks. Next, an indeterminate period of recovery where The Muse's body will work to rediscover all the facilities wounded in healing. It's all grueling.

If food tasted decent.

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InconviencingMyself

inconveniencingmyself
Arthur Wesley Dow:
The Long Road--Argilla Road, Ipswich (1898)


An Inconvenient Time

"
It's An Inconvenient Time to cross a line,
An Inconvenient Time to be opening any new cans of worms
'cause me and my sanity have just settled into familiar scenery
and love is the last thing on my mind:
An Inconvenient Time."


I find myself very near the bottom of my tentative SetList.

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Rest

rest
Arthur Wesley Dow: Boats at Rest (c. 1895)


" … the tacit component of the effort."


Avant Garde composer John Cage famously insisted that silence comprised the essence of music, that the notes only exist to space the silences. It's easy and seductive to focus solely upon the overt pieces of a composition when preparing to perform it, but its silences significantly contribute to whatever presence it might ultimately induce. Likewise with stories. I once published a story which featured no spaces between the words. Using this technique, I was able to present something on the order of 40% more letters on the page, but while it was certainly possible to read the result, the reading felt tedious and unrewarding. The purpose of writing was never intended to see how efficiently it might employ paper. Hoarders never seem to catch on that much of the satisfaction of owning something comes from the ability to stand a few steps away and admire it. An overstuffed closet might just as well contain nothing.

I sat this morning to begin my daily writing ritual and felt for a fleeting moment as if I'd been there before.

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Noughting

noughting
Juan Gris: Nature morte cubiste à la guitarem (1924)


"I find that tension thrilling …"


I'm not just a songwriter, but also somewhat of a guitarist. Not the kind commonly seen accompanying jazz bands, fretting hand all over the neck, fingers impossibly limber, intimately familiar with a hot half-dozen forms for even the most intimidating chords in every key. I use my guitar rather more defensively. It stands between me and my audience, a wooden fence I hide behind. I do okay but aspire to play no better. I accompany myself and I struggle wherever I attempt to get too fancy. I think of myself as primarily a lyricist, certainly much more than a guitarist. I'm a single acoustical act because I'm really not fit to play with anybody else. I keep my own tempos. I play exclusively my own songs. Consequently, I might be the only one who knows how to play along or when I play one wrong.

I became a curious kind of performer, one who'd always much rather not be the center of anyone's attention.

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Prospector

prospector
Marsden Hartley:
Landscape No. 3, Cash Entry Mines, New Mexico (1920)

"I have been the one creating that world."

Jeremiah
"Jeremiah's just as wiry as the sagebrush.
He built his home out on the desert sand.
Just a toothless old fool with a mangy mule beside him,
and a scrap of worthless parchment in his hand.
But Jeremiah says he doesn't mind his neighbors,
'course he's the only living soul for miles around,
With fifty-five years behind him in the Arizona sun,
searchin' out that old Lost Dutchman's claim."


Most of my songs seem autobiographical in that I serve as the obvious protagonist.

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TheWaitingGame

thewaitinggame
Edgar Degas: Waiting (c. 1880–1882)

"My juggling of the spaces in-between …"

Only one essential game exists: TheWaitingGame. This requisite game comes imbedded within every other game, within every occupation, whether it's considered a game or not. The one element of every engagement certain to appear before it's finished, TheWaitingGame seems anything but integral. It seems more like a waste, far worse than fallow, yet it certainly must be something other than mindless idleness. Why else would it appear universally, regardless of culture, regardless of time, age, or intelligence? The stupid receive their ration right along with the smarties. The handsome as well as the ugly, no exceptions granted. No exclusions.

My efforts to resurrect my songs and create a performable SetList feature much annoying idleness.

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ChanceEncounter

chanceencounter
Martin Lewis: Chance Meeting (1940-41)

" … the good kind of double-damned bind."

Chance Encounter

"Let’s hear it for the Chance Encounter,
Let’s sing the praise of unplanned design;
‘Cause she’s always there keepin’ an eye on,
Unlikely you’ll leave her behind.
More unlikely, she’ll leave you behind …"

I fancy myself a great believer in the ChanceEncounter.

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Twenty-fiveDown

twenty-fivedown
George Stubbs: Hay-Makers (1785)


"We've both come close to exceeding our patience, waiting."


"Twenty-fiveDown and five to go," The Muse whispered as she returned to the impossible puzzle on the side table in the radiation waiting room. She swore that she'd finish that puzzle by the time she'd completed her thirty dose radiation therapy, and she was down to the last week. Reduced to whispering now and without losing even an odd ounce of weight, she was entering what both of her oncologists had predicted would be remembered as her Hell week. Well, this week and the next, since the radiation continues cooking her cancer and her system for at least a week after the final application. Throat raw and increasingly exhausted, she still insists that she's feeling much better than she'd expected, and much better than almost any other cancer patient feels at this point in their treatment.

In that waiting room, there are never any exuberant patients or Emotional Support Animal spouses or children.

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Entropying

entropying
Unknown artist-Central Tibet, mid 15th Century:
Tsong Khapa, Founder of the Geluk Order
(c. 1440–1470)


"May I never learn better."


Each season change brings a fresh disorder into focus as the reigning arrangement suited for the receding season falls out of fashion. What served as orderly then, now only appears disorderly and in need of cleaning up. Which of the infinite choices might suffice for order this time? The possible arrangements hardly approach the infinite, and seem limited by practical factors. I have limited time and perhaps even more limited imagination. The disorder seems powerful, for it disables significant portions of my imagination. I acquire a blindness to certain potentials and affinities for the familiar. I am as a result not so much ordering or even re-ordering, but Entropying: aiding and abetting a continuing disorder, rearranging deck chairs, blithely unaware.

I'm realizing that the disorder I found when I started poking into my songbook probably resulted from an inevitable.

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MellowCat

mellowcat
Cornelis Visscher: The Large Cat (1657)


" … I have no idea from precisely where this one came."


Me and My Mellow Cat

"Winter, my life is moving slow.
My dreams have turned into yesterdays
with no place left to go
and so I find myself
on this dark side of the sun,
just tryin' to find the ones I used to be."


I despise my anticipation of winter more than I've ever actually reviled the season in practice.

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Founding

founding
John William North: The Wood Gatherers (1869)


[Herbert Alexander, the artist’s biographer, described the artist’s interpretation of nature as similar to that of a poet, suggesting rather than describing: "In watercolor and oil an effect of intricate detail is found on examination to be quite illusive—multitudinous form is conjured by finding and losing it in endless hide-and-seek till the eye accepts infinity." from The Cleveland Museum's description of this work.]

" … as if my life might really have a purpose."


My songs seem to experience the most remarkable life cycle, for I've lost each after completing them, then found and resurrected some after they've spent some period essentially wandering in wilderness. Many still remain there. Had I not resurrected them, they would have most certainly been lost to the ages, as if they'd never existed, and they might well yet be lost, for this cycle most likely continues well into the future. My legacy, such as it might be, will probably be more determined by chance than by deliberate intent. I'm uncertain, anyway, what form a legacy might take and how I might set about to form one, if I was disposed to even attempt such a feat. My tunes have faded out then back into fashion. This might just be their nature, and mine.

Through the first part of this series, I noticed myself chewing on myself for losing the songs.

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Fretwork

fretwork
Frans Hals: Jester With A Lute (c. 1620 - 1625)


" … only I could ever punch the ticket I was holding …"


Little suggests that I possess my superpower. No spandex® suit, thank heavens. No special badge. Like anyone, I appear unremarkable, just another face in the crowd. Yet I believe that I possess a real gift, but one so subtle and unobservable that even I often overlook its presence. It's taken this concerted effort to produce a SetList and preparing to perform a house concert to surface this gift. Real guitar players culture their fingernails until their picking fingers become fingerpicks, darned near indestructible. Not I. Every guitar player develops calloused fingertips on their fretting hand, and often, as in my case, that hand grows a mite larger than its counterpart from constant stretching through the decades. Other than those fingertips and the outsized hand, nothing suggests that I'm a songwriter, and those aren't definitive tells, since not every guitar player writes original songs.

Songwriting's a presumed skill, one that's really only present in any verifiable form after the work's done and the purveyor becomes one who has written, but even then, the evidence of that ability won't be in evidence, not even to the scrupulous eye.

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Journaling

journaling
Pierre-Auguste Renoir: The Apple Seller (c. 1890)


" … we're each much more complicated than we appear …"


I find myself feeling extremely grateful for the songs I've written over the years. Rediscovered, they seem to represent a curious form of Journaling, diary entries made without the author intending to catalogue his experiences. Yet, replaying each song seems to reliably resurrect the times and places within which it came into being. I have been revisiting those times and those places as I recover these songs. I realize that my experience has been much more diverse than it formerly seemed as though it had been, for I suppose that nobody ever carries many details of where they've been and who they were before. Our memories summarize, favoring brevity and so-called representative snippets. We might remember an encounter without really recalling how it felt, for instance. My songs seem capable of resurrecting feelings to produce a fully emotional remembering experience.

Earlier in my adulthood, I took to Journaling.

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PaintMeAPicture

paintmeapicture
Thomas Cole: Distant View of Niagara Falls (1830)


" … the performer doesn't quite get it yet."


Paint Me A Picture

"I'm workin' my way through,
only two more sets to go and I'll be gone.
And the spotlight sees right through me,
but I don't think it shows, I mean I'm holding on.
'Cause I've been deceiving myself through the worst of it,
just hopin' to make the best of this someday.
Hey, hey!"

I began anticipating the end of my chosen career as a singer/songwriter several years before its actual demise.

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Exemplary

exemplary
Isack Elyas: Merry Company (1629)


"She has not managed to bust out of any of the human condition on her road to recovery …"


The slow-baked yellowfin tuna in cream sauce featuring lobster mushroom and shallot seemed a decent choice for supper. The Muse had, after all, received two terribly reassuring assessments over the preceding week. We could afford to celebrate her headway. Her radiation oncologist had declared her progress through cancer treatment, "Great!" and her other oncologist had just that morning characterized her condition as she passed into halfway through her immunotherapy treatment regimen as "Exemplary!" Her progress could not have been better, but she found that she could not swallow the tuna entree. She fell back to the baked acorn squash with Bosc pear side dish. Even that, she swallowed reluctantly, the radiation treatments culminating in a rough, raw throat wherein her shrinking tumor still resides.

It's Tuesday, the morning when I deliberately set aside the primary focus of this series to update on The Muse's progress through her present bout with cancer.

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Pipes

pipes
Luc-Olivier Merson:
Head of a Boy Singing [Study for Music] (c. 1898)


"I see much whispering to myself through the near future."


My songs might well be eternal, but only conceptually. Actual eternity requires more resources than might seem obvious. That ditty you heard on the radio probably cost thousands of dollars to produce. The simpler the song, the more its production likely cost, with studio time alone costing beaucoup bucks per hour, not to mention engineers, musicians, and backup singers. My songs, as I've explained before, are more like freeze-dried preserved. They need to be reconstituted each time. This requires not only the words, melody, and chords, but also a fresh performance of those, using my voice and accompanying myself on my guitar. Recovering these tunes touches every aspect of every song. I've struggled just to recover the words for some. The melodies and chords were never transcribed into musical notation, which I never mastered and couldn't read in realtime, anyway, so those need recovering from my ever-faulty memory. It was long my dream to record in a real studio, though I only ever managed that feat once. I recorded five songs in the hour I'd reserved, if you don't count the extra time the studio's owner gave without charging me, so I could finish what I'd intended, because he liked what I was doing. Even those need recovering if I ever intend to actually perform them.

So, when I say I'm recovering a set of songs, I mean that I'm actually recreating those performances, or, more accurately, creating them anew again.

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Fingerlings

fingerlings
Anton Mauve:
Aardappelrooiers [Potato Harvesters]
(1848 - 1888)


"I pursue my best with the least promising resources …"


After a few years of relative inactivity, my fingers seem almost as agile as Fingerling potatoes. They've lost their limberness. They feel stiff and inattentive when attempting to play anything the least bit intricate. They transform my guitar's fretboard into an authentically fretful place. I attempt little and achieve worse, cursing under my breath. I face a long recovery, a bare uphill track featuring few useful landmarks. I some days doubt that I will ever recover my former mindlessness, for proper guitar playing requires little if any thought. It's incarnate muscle memory in action, not in any way thoughtful or strategic. Once mastered, it just happens, freeing up consciousness to remember lyrics or control voice and volume. The guitar should properly accompany, not feature, and in order to properly disappear into the background, it must be transcended. No struggling to remember chord order or, heaven forbid, proper fingering. That must follow as a matter of course, without thought or fuss.

Now, it remains mostly thought and fuss, of course, which reliably produces the absolute opposite of reinforcement to practice, which will provide the only viable escape route back to even the appearance of competence.

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SpecialCrazy

specialcrazy
Vincent van Gogh:
Madame Roulin Rocking the Cradle
[La berceuse]
(1889)

" … this song cemented our sanity."


A Special Kind Of Crazy

"It takes a special sort of Fool to write a song for you.
That Special Kind Of Crazy can't help but just shine through,
Other lives and other places
You with yours and my displacements,
We'll integrate or simply leave behind,
'cause I'm crazy of that very special kind."

And so I started what promised to be a really terrific tune.

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Underpants

underpants
Underpants of Hendrik Casimir I: Anonymous
(1630 - 1640)


"Give me superficiality or give me certain death …"


Those who've followed my FaceBook benediction postings after my Friday PureSchmaltz Zoom Chats already know that I favor what're labeled "Novelty" tunes. I take my music seriously, as the pieces I've already introduced doubtless make clear, but I'm never more delighted than when The Muse slips some smart-assed something into the mix. Like many other songwriters, I've never really been in charge of which songs emerge. I've proven myself capable of following inspirations, but never really facile at creating them. Songs more visit me than I create them. They lead, I dutifully follow, and the responsibility does, indeed, feel like a duty to me. Like anyone, I feel enjoined to make my particular sort of noise in this world. Otherwise, why was I even born?

Amid all my more serious works, my self-described Top Fifty Truly Terrible Traveling Tunes stand eternal.

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InvisibleHusband

InvisibleHusband
William Henry Millais: Steps in a Garden (1860)


"This wholly unlikely story is absolutely true."


The Invisible Husband

"It’s late. I’m going to sleep.
You’re still awake in an airplane seat.
I’m here, holding fort,
the cats are tended and the house is dark.
I’ll see you late Friday night,
too late for supper, I’ll keep the bed warm,
let yourself in if I couldn’t keep my eyes open."

If any of my songs have proven emblematic of an era, this one certainly managed to became that.

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Magick

Magick
Corita Kent (Sister Mary Corita):
m is for magick (1968)


"[Magick] might materially misrepresent its eventual impact."


The wheat and the chessboard problem dates from at least the thirteenth century. In it, a king foolishly agrees to pay a mercenary in grain, a single kernel for the first day's effort, two kernels for the second, doubling the amount each successive day until all sixty-four squares on a chessboard are covered. The amount of grain accumulated after the first thirty-two days of effort seems huge, something on the order of 279 tons, but the thirty-third square calls for twice that amount. By the sixty-fourth square, only more than 1,600 times the world's annual grain production will meet the requirement.

I recall this story to describe how cancer treatment works.

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FoolHead

foolhead
Sebald Beham: The Fool and the Foolish Woman
(circa 1531-50)


"What wiser course could any half-wit devise?"


My mother would have said that I was singing my FoolHead off, but I was actually singing it on. Plugged into my studio headphones and finally satisfied with the filtering, I was suspended in an other world, singing while playing my guitar. Once tuned up and with my eyes closed, I had dulled all extraneous senses so that I could focus upon the few of them important to my mission. I was, in the vernacular, practicing, but I was more like focusing. The focusing's much harder, and a necessary precedent if practicing's to satisfy its purpose. The biggest challenge involves overcoming the distractions, and plugging into my sensory depravation system definitely helps. It seems that I can accomplish nothing as long as my full range of senses remain active. I must dismiss some feelings to make either sense or progress. I must put on my FoolHead, not remove it.

Performing seems a necessarily mindless activity.

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TheVoices

thevoices
Jacob Jordaens:
The Conversion of Saul with Horseman and Banner
(c. 1645–47)


"Better if he focuses exclusively upon making a joyful noise."


Performer Leo Kottke famously described his baritone singing voice as sounding like "Geese farts on a muggy day." I've long agreed with him, yet his singing voice seems perfectly appropriate, the perfect accompaniment to his masterful guitar playing. He plays his guitar so skillfully that any accompanying voice couldn't help but mesh well. A long line of less than perfect voices have passed in and out of notoriety in my short lifetime, so many that I marvel at how few really wonderful voices I've ever heard. Clearly, the quality of a voice and the quality of any given performance remain two very separate experiences, with the twain only rarely converging. The quirky seems to have little problem attracting an adequate crowd, and often, much more than a merely adequate one.

An unheard voice, the voice within, always accompanies the one projected over the accompanying music.

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BornToSee

borntosee
Frederic Edwin Church: Twilight in the Wilderness
(1860)


"Another dichotomy bites some dust."


Many of my song lyrics describe apparent contradictions, where opposites might temporarily take the same side. I was always attracted to seeming paradoxes, relations that make no rational sense, but which could be resolved with a little perspective shifting. I have often been fooled when some opposite turned into something much more similar than I'd earlier expected. I might have been making war on dichotomies, trying to demonstrate just how simplistic and self-destructive classifications can become. Many of my lyrics register surprise at discovering another nature lurking behind the obvious one. I believe that this phenomenon represents real learning. When all the innocent and ignorant others disappear into similar forms, enlightenment will have occurred. Until then, good and evil continuously battle to nobody's obvious benefit.

BornToSee The Light

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OneMysteriousDream

onemysteriousdream
Jean Morin, After Jacques Fouquières:
Landscape with a Wheatfield (17th century)


" … it matured to say precisely what needed saying …"


One Mysterious Dream

"I will take to the morning on the first day of my life
and wander through the sparkling dew and sunshine,
and let her icy tingle wipe the sleep out of my soul,
for it seems to me I surely have been dreaming all this time.
But I almost half remember this One Mysterious Dream
that came upon me just before I rose."


Metaphysics might be the one consistent sub-theme running through all my lyrics.

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AFriendOfMine

afriendofmine
Unknown artist: "Pistol-Packing Pirate" still bank
(20th century)


"We're moving targets with static language."



A Friend Of Mine

"Talk about your side streets,
go on and talk about your country roads.
Talk about your alleyways, Daddy
where you're not supposed to go alone.
Sing me a song of the city at dawn
where the neon fades in shame,
and tell me all about your doorways, Daddy,
when you're sleeping' in the rain."


And so began the story of the end of AFriendOfMine.

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AWOL

awol
Albert Emmanuel Bertrand: The Absinthe Drinker
(c. 1890)


"Absence made this heart more insistent."


The Muse insisted that I take that trip, which made me absent for those treatments. The treatments had become routine. The radiation, a mere few seconds. The aftermath, difficult to assess. The oncologists both promised worsening experience over the next months. Still, each day passed without any dramatic changes: a definite but subtle tiredness, a growing willingness to sleep in each morning and to retire ever earlier after supper, but nothing dramatic. We, the patient and her Emotional Support Animal (me), might have grown complacent, continuing a long streak of decent good fortune into a surprisingly welcoming future.

The Muse's cancer treatment occurs as an experiment.

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Estranging

estranging
Maurice Denis:
But It is the Heart That Beats Too Quickly,
plate twelve from Love
(1898)
published 1899 by Ambroise Vollard


"No way could we ever possibly be tempted to say …"


Just To Break A Heart

Half truth, and half promise
like we knew our future from the start.
I told you the truth when I said I loved you,
it came right from my heart.
Then we moved through our lives with confident strides,
just as if we knew love, just as if we controlled our hearts.
Let's just say as we tumble away
that we played Just To Break A Heart.

The yin/yang symbol illustrates how this world might seem equally divided between light and dark, but that the dark also contains a spot of light and the light, a spot of dark.

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Wandering

wandering
Albert-Charles Lebourg: A Miller's Carriage (c. 1895)


The horse-drawn carriage parked at the curb beside the ice cream parlor where families sat at outside tables and watched while other families boarded and unboarded the carriage. The carriage with its driver and passengers would leave, horse walking, before making a left turn a block down the street then continuing on its excursion. A few minutes later would find that same horse and carriage moving regally up the next street over, passengers watching unremarkable storefronts pass before them. People love to take rides. That carriage would take its passengers on a short journey to nowhere, past places they could more conveniently view while walking. What compelled their adventures to no place? What drove their excursions?

The horse threw a shoe as it began a later trip.

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Elbowing

elbowing
Fons Van der Velde:
Koppen in een menigte [Heads in a crowd]
(1880 - 1936)


" … no business expecting any different."


It seems a wonder bordering on a miracle when anything gets accomplished, for setting a definite priority might have always been the surest way to create competing distractions. I might look at my calendar, conclude that I have few upcoming demands, and so take on some fresh obligation. The very moment I set that intention, competing commitments swarm such that I quickly find that I'm Elbowing my way through them to find a few stolen moments to attend to what I'd intended to complete. This simply must be some sort of law of this universe, as inexorable as entropy, because it always, always, always seems to happen to me. Those around me lodge similar complaints. One apparently never actually manages to clear a schedule to thereby exclusively focus, as if that were even possible. No, we swim through diversions or we never manage to get anything done.

The end of a day should bring exhaustion even though we might then wonder just what we managed to accomplish.

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Past-ing

past-ing
Arnold Böcklin: Ruin by the Sea (1881)


" … cast some shadow and light …"


I caught myself attempting to recreate my past, a common enough affliction for anyone touched by nostalgia, but it's an impossible. Not one of those "impossibles" intended to challenge to greatness, but one destined to produce growing frustrations. You see, the past is past and will not be seen again. Oh, I can always change the past by changing my story, by rewriting the history, my history, if I choose, but it will not be resurrected or reanimated or re-present-ed again, but only because it can't be. What I should have been aspiring to accomplish might be better understood as manifesting. I can manifest a SetList inspired and, indeed, informed by my past, but I cannot recreate what once was. Let's say that I left that on a bus back in the late seventies, so long ago that the bus company has already purged their lost and found a few dozen times since then. That past's gone and it's not ever coming back again. Period.

If I care to avoid this mistake, then, I simply must frame this SetList effort as a creating rather than as a recreating one.

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Unconvinced

unconvinced
Gerard van Honthorst: The Merry Fiddler (1623)


Three weeks into this SetTheory experiment, I remain Unconvinced of this effort's viability. I know that I was supposed to be all in as a precondition for beginning, but I believe that such strict entry criteria might do more damage than good. The myth of the necessity of unambivalence persists, though. It haunts me as if my engaging without full conviction might doom the effort from the outset. I'm beyond outset now, though, and this work seems to be unfolding more or less normally. The resulting slight sense of inevitable failure haunts me. I have my good days and my struggling ones. Some mornings I could swear I've been blessed by angels, and others, cursed by them. I wend my way rather than stick to anything very straight or narrow. Progress mostly crawls.

Yet I sense that I'm making real progress.

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Practicings

practicings
Agostino Carracci after Federico Barocci:
Aeneas and His Family Fleeing Troy (1595)


" … all the time remaining in this world to Practice …"


At its best, Practicing renews. Any its worst, it undermines its own intentions. It's never real work. It doesn't even pretend to be productive, to produce anything. It's all preliminary, preparatory, precursor to some future delivery, meaningless without its future looming before it. All that said, it can sometimes feel essential, necessary if not exactly required. It can inspire. It aspires to be more than it will likely deliver and therefore must be grasped with a forgiving hand. It can reward but it's never obligated to payback anything. It might revive or disappoint. It's too easily avoided. It probably qualifies as one of the very few truly good habits.

I become a different person under the influence of my Practicings.

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FirstIteration

firstiteration
Odilon Redon: Evocation (undated)


"I hold raw material now, rather than "half forgotten memories," …"


I realize that I had been actively resisting writing down the FirstIteration of the SetList I've been insisting I've been working to create. I'd taken solace in its absence, comforted by the latitude I could maintain until just after I started nailing down by creating a concrete target. I might have been reveling in theory more than practice, and this response seems typical of one of mine. Maybe it's an example of Hastening Slowly at the beginning, but it eventually came to feel more like active procrastination. This morning, I resorted to pen and paper, and toughed out a FirstIteration SetList. It seems certainly wrong, by which I mean it could not possibly be the FinalIteration, for that should perhaps properly come the evening before the end of this quarter, or the final morning before I'm scheduled to perform. This project just took one giant step toward becoming real.

Reality can be such a drag.

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ValleyOfShadow

valleyofshadow
Odilon Redon: Profile of Shadow (c. 1895)


"I'm left wondering who either of us might end up being …"


It might be that Tuesday mornings become the times when I set aside my SetTheory stories to visit the infinitely more significant background saga presently accompanying The Muse and my days. Consistent readers might recall last Tuesday's story, titled
Consequential, wherein I introduced The Muse's cancer diagnosis and her acceptance into a clinical trial which allowed her to forego the typical poisonous Chemo treatment. This plot twist in the cancer diagnosis that she'd already labeled her Plot Twist, left the both of us feeling extremely fortunate, as if she'd dodged an otherwise inevitable bullet, but the plot twist within this plot twist brought terms and conditions with it. She would still have to submit to radiation therapy, six times each week, for thirty iterations. Yesterday, one week after receiving her first infusion of immunotherapy magic, with no evident side effects, she was scheduled to submit to her first radiation treatment.

I was struggling with side effects from my latest Covid booster, which left me feeling clogged and groggy, but I managed to put myself together so that I could at least chauffeur her to her first radiation therapy appointment.

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Illegitimate

illegitimate
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo:
The Immaculate Conception: 1767–1768


" … some sacred responsibility to hear myself."


My talents, such as they might be, all fall under the general label of Illegitimate, for I came by none of them through proper means. I was never recognized as a prodigy of anything. I did not distinguish myself as a student of any art or science. I was never recognized as an especially inspiring leader or a particularly gifted teacher. What notoriety I have received came in through the bathroom window and was only narrowly appreciated and, even then, often misunderstood. My songwriting therefore grew to become a more private than public thing, something I demonstrated after dinner with a properly lubricated and intimate audience. I didn't so much suffer from imposter syndrome as embody it.

I believe that many, indeed, most, legitimate artists began their careers as Illegitimates.

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PluggingInto

PluggingIn
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec: Miss Loïe Fuller (1893)


"Maybe I'm deep down trying to sabotage my effort …"


I struggle most with the technology, which I believe someone invented with the notion that it might somehow render things overall easier. Under whatever rule has always reigned over technology, though, the best one can ever expect from it might be a slight shifting of some problem, never outright resolution, and each incremental improvement in something inevitably erodes some other aspect, thereby keeping everything more or less even in this universe. Advancement might well cause the cosmos to crash in upon us. Yet each field seems to eventually yield to the ceaseless seduction of a technological improvement never once evident in actual results.

My second career involved helping to upgrade computer systems into alluring futures.

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InMyHead

inmyhead
Giambattista Tiepolo (Giovanni Battista Tiepolo):
The Head of Truth (c. 1744)

" … organizing something that only exists InMyHead."

Eventually, the vague and attractive notion that initiates an undertaking starts wondering where it's going. It has always been one thing to break the inertia of rest and quite another to set a coherent course, and it's entirely normal to get moving before becoming completely clear about proper direction. It usually doesn't much matter at first if one heads off in a wrong direction as long as one gets moving. U-turns are common early on and not unknown even nearer an ending. Job one's always focused upon getting moving. Later, increasingly unsettling questions bring the questionable gift of self-awareness, especially when the adventurer cannot quite imagine how to answer them. What at first seemed if not precisely clear but certainly clear enough, comes to appear opaque. Two weeks out and self doubt enters the frame.

The questioning usually comes in the form of the universally unsettling question: If you had that, what would you have?

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Habituals

habituals
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes:
The Claws of a Cat and the Dress of a Devotee -
similar to Vice is often clothed in Virtue’s habit,
plate nine from Los Proverbios (1815/24)


"The devil deals in Habituals."


It has sadly become common practice that people try to acquire what they consider to be good habits. I guess they figure that if they can set some activity up as automatic, they're more likely to continue engaging in it. I've even heard of some who claim to have managed to set up a mindfulness habit, the thought of which just makes me cringe. Clearly, bad habits exist and seem to be almost impossible to disengage. Ask any smoker to explain why. I've long considered the Habituals a rather cheap shot, and a fundamentally misleading one at that. I doubt that salvation lies in that direction. Most things require more attention than any Habitual reaction allows.

I prefer ritual to Habitual.

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Selfless

selfless
Claude Monet: Caricature of a Man with a Big Cigar (1855/56)


I lose myself sometimes, a most curious and disturbing situation. I do not remember anyone ever tipping me off to even the vaguest possibility that I might at times misplace myself, but I have. I most often lose myself when I engage so deeply in some activity that I forget I'm there, not in any way a disturbing happenstance. I sometimes try to lose myself in the interest of experiencing what some have labeled 'flow,' but trying to lose one's self rarely works. It seems that selves must slip off all by themselves, unnoticed. It might be that one cannot notice the absence of themself while they are missing. Who would be noticing if the self was gone?

My effort to create a SetList might be my attempt to reconnect with a part of myself lost in the process of living my life.

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Dawdling

Dawdling
Pieter van der Heyden, Engraver
[after a drawing by Hans Bol, artist]
Autumnn (1570)


"… my life's work might have only approached accomplishing anything …"


The Romans insisted that one should Hasten Slowly at the beginning, but were mute with advice for ending. I've long proposed hastening even more slowly when approaching an ending, though it's become tragically popular to hasten ever more quickly then. An old saying in the project management community explains that it's "all assholes and elbows" at the end, as everyone rushes to meet some inevitably artificial deadline, rendering it and its products more meaningless in the process. Following a lengthy effort, the end rush seems ignoble, disrespectful of the painstaking effort invested into what quickly degrades with impatience as its ending approaches.

I prefer perpetual motion though I understand that it's physically impossible to achieve.

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Reviving

reviving
Gerard de Lairesse: Bacchus and Ariadne (c. 1680)


"I can sometimes hear my former selves whispering."


Creating this Set List involves reincarnating past work. My work freezes time and place in the same way as might any book or film. I watch old black and white movies expressly for the purpose of Reviving the time and place within which they were created. A Hitchcock film seems forever frozen within its time, and cannot escape into the here and now, no matter how many times I might watch it. It takes me back instead. In this same way, Reviving a song I wrote thirty years ago invokes that place and time, reanimating the me I knew so well then, one I might not have seen since. Of course, I'm older if not necessarily wiser now, so I cannot fully immerse myself into that vessel, but I get a taste, a "snootful", anyway. These excursions might feel delightful or painful, or, more probably, simultaneously both. They prove to be emotional roller coasters.

I remember the dismay I felt when I saw some once-favorite character actor twenty years after they played that role.

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Laziness

lazyman
Félix Edouard Vallotton: Laziness (1896)


"Our catalogues might eternally be narrower than even we expected."


I haven't quite come to fully accept my narrow musicianship. I get by with a few keys and just about as many chord progressions. I might daydream of writing complex Hoagy Carmichael-like melodies, but I've so-far stuck with far simpler structures. Further, assimilating new chords into my tiny repertoire seems unlikely, as my hand turns into a claw whenever attempting a fresh form. I'm reminded, again and again, of Meredith Wilson, who composed the entire The Music Man score employing essentially one melodic structure, every song a slight variation upon the very same theme. His accomplishment reassures me that my apparent Laziness might hold real promise. If it doesn't, I'm probably sunk.

I've pretty much always employed applied Laziness as my primary coping strategy.

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Dredging

dredging
Sakai Basai 酒井 梅齊:
The Sand-Carrying Festival [Sunamochi Matsuri] (1856)


"It's already far too late to have properly filed my history the first time."


Creating this set list involves considerable dredging. Had I properly filed my finished pieces, I might just scroll back through a pre-existing list and choose, but I did not maintain a list of completed works. I have multiple lists of completed works, none complete themselves, and not all even accessible any more due to obsoleted file structures and operating systems. Anything once saved as a WorkPerfect file is perfectly inaccessible now. I have paper backups which have fared little better, since the lists and, indeed, the actual lyric sheets seem spread over a considerable geographical area, some essentially unfindable. Seeking hard evidence of the existence of any specific song becomes a slog slowing filling with self-recriminations. It's already too late to do anything right the first time. Some pieces have been lost to the ages since their inception.

It's no great tragedy when I lose evidence of some past creativity.

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Delving

delving
Societa anonima cooperativa per la fabbricazione delle maioliche (Deruta, Italy):
Display Plate with a Man Striking a Heart on an Anvil (c. 1550)


" … grasped without really understanding what we're choosing …"


This work creating a Set List seems a bit different than the standard purposeful effort. Like you, I was exhorted to Start With The End In Mind, even though whatever end I might initially envision would have to be wanting, given that it was by definition not informed by the effort to determine it. That end, whatever I believed it could or should be, would just have to be different than I first imagined or it could not have been worth pursuing. So, Set Listing (if I might call my current occupation that), doesn't qualify as a standard engineering effort, either. The specs aren't nearly specific enough yet, and might never lend themselves to mechanical drawings. I sense that I am not so much pursuing, but Delving into.

Like all projects, this one began with a bright idea, a big, alluring statement of purpose, utterly vacuous at inception.

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Reassurance

reassurance
Jean-François Millet:
Peasant Returning from the Manure Heap (1855–56)


"I necessarily remain a novice at this work …"


Judging from how I seem to drag my feet into practicing, this creating a set list seems like hard work. Even the hardest work, though, might include some Reassurance, some occasional sense that it's not just hard but also rewarding. My anticipation decides much, and I too often anticipate some worst coming. This set-up leaves me surprised and sometimes even delighted when my effort produces some glimpse of goodness, when some of that old confidence shows, or when I seem to know what I'm doing again. A body of work long left idle awakens fitfully and requires Reassurance to fully awaken. Creating this set list was first just an idea, though I do not mean to demean its source since ideas seem capable of sparking most anything. Beginning again seems more daunting than was the original creation of these songs.

I sat before a small window in a cramped hotel room, guitar in hand.

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Practice

practice
Honoré Victorin Daumier: A zealous student practicing at home,
plate 6 from Les Baigneuses (1847)


"It's the pursuit of premise pursuing purpose …"


The old joke asks how to get to Carnegie Hall before disclosing: Practice, Practice, Practice. Of all human endeavor, certainly Practice stands near the most curious. I expect that we misunderstand it because I'm confident that I misunderstand it, mostly because I can't hardly stand to do it. It seems infused with purposeless, and I suppose that natively, Practice is always separate from purpose. It might be that Practice largely entails mustering a motivating backstory so as to make the effort tolerable if never entirely pleasurable. For me, it reeks of self discipline and self possession, a separation in preparation for making a connection. I often spend my practice time aching to be finished practicing and on to something more sociable and meaningful.

Still, if a musician or even a lowly songwriter ever expects to perform his work, it seems he must prepare somewhere.

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CrimeScenes

crimescenes
Mary Cassatt: Under the Lamp (c. 1882)


" … evidence of criminal conspiracy afoot."


Each song in a thirteen song collection of my original compositions evokes its source when I perform it. The situation, location, and conditions then present flood me, often almost overwhelming me, and sometimes succeeding in absolutely shutting me down. I am not always able to finish a song I've started for it transfers such an emotional load I cannot bear it in some moments, and I just have to stop. Other times, I'll get so distracted by the ginned up context that I'll forget the words. It's helpful, if deeply embarrassing, when The Muse reminds me of the next phrase after sensing that I somehow got lost on such tenaciously home turf. The scene of the original crime reappears each time, if, indeed, the birth of each song constituted a crime. If they were crimes, I could claim that they were innocent crimes of omission rather than of deliberate commission. I never once intended to capture that time, or any time, in any kind of bottle, but writing a song, any song, seems to inadvertently produce just that sort of result.

Room 327 in the La Posada in Alburquerue, originally built by Conrad Hilton, lord knows when, and featuring the most wonderful Spanish tile lobby.

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RealPlay

realplay
John George Brown: Boy Playing a Flute Date (c. 1860)


" … the play seems too real to be too serious."


Anyone raised under The Protestant Work Ethic should find confusing the concept of playing for work. I suppose all entertainers suffer from some of this muddle, with comedians perhaps suffering most, for they slave away in laughter mines more oppressive than South African diamond ones. Musicians, though, too, also deal with material most closely correlated with leisure. Their work is their audience's play. They are even said to "be playing" when they perform their work. They're supposed to at least appear light-hearted and, dare I say (in the most traditional way) gay whenever they're up on stage. Nobody pays good money to watch a morose bluesman perform. His lyrics might describe absolute despondency, but the ethic governing its presentation insists that the performer definitely not be suffering when recounting his humiliation at the hands of some two-timing nobody, his reported "baby." He's supposed to be above actually grieving over the experience and somehow, paradoxically, be absolutely reveling in it. "My baby left me, cha cha cha!"

The songwriter, too, suffers from expectations, or can if not properly disciplined.

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RealWork

RealWork
Paul Gauguin: The Large Tree (1891)


"It was an inconvenient time …"


I look at an old set list and I realize that it represents RealWork that I actually accomplished. Each title manifested the hard way; none came easy, thank heavens, for RealWork must be difficult if it ever hopes to become rewarding. Nor was I ever paid to create even the least or the very best of the songs appearing on that list. I created each as an act, and sometimes an extended act, of something very much like love. Not like love of country or of spouse, but of self, but not narcissistic love, more like the filial kind. I created none of my songs in the hope that I might one day make money off them. Well, I should amend that blanket statement by saying that I wrote precisely one song with the sincere hope of making money off it, at the encouragement of my then agent, who'd insisted that the only way I'd ever make any real money in "the business" would be to write a disco hit, so I set about attempting it. The result was the biggest piece of shit I ever produced. I will not play it for you even if you ask nicely. I won't even play it for myself. It was a blessing of a lesson, one which further solidified an understanding. RealWork's not for pay or for profit, but properly for the ages.

My understanding came slowly, the recognition that I had been training myself in RealWork since I'd started becoming addicted to my instrument, since I wrote that first song.

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DiffsGiftering

diffsgiftering
Jan Harmensz. Muller:
Blind Fortune Distributing Gifts (16th-17th century)


"Nobody ever requests the greatest gift they receive."


The ancients believed that Fortune distributed gifts to The Gods, rendering each unique. In more modern times, Fortune seems no less occupied bestowing gifts upon mere mortals. The Gods having been long ago gifted, Fortune's only alternative might have been long-term unemployment, an intolerable condition in a fundamental force of nature. It seems inarguable that different people seem to have been bestowed with different gifts. Some were seemingly born with the gift of gab while others' superpowers seem to quite naturally stifle them. It seems common enough that some aspire to achieve what for which they were never naturally gifted, with sometimes tragic results. When I attended Junior High, a purgatory between childhood and adulthood that every child must pass through, I was subjected to what was labeled a career assessment instrument. It purported to be capable of questioning a twelve year old kid and, by analyzing his responses, determine his best prospects for a career. I was declared a probable accountant, an appalling assessment I swore to resist with my heart and soul. I could not relate to the black and white photograph of a buzz cut geek in a short-sleeved white shirt and skinny tie, smiling beside a ten key machine. I dedicated myself to growing up to become anything but that!

It might be that such experiences weighed on me to the point that I would never fit into proper society.

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SetTheory

settheory
Stuart Davis: Art Theory Text with Diagrams (c. 1932)


" … employing the magic of SetTheory"


My first career, more than fifty years ago now, was that of a songwriter, an admittedly made-up career choice attractive because it required only informal study. My high school guidance counsellor declared me Not College Material, a designation I later learned actually meant Not High School Material, which cut me off from a common birth family exit. Further, I had declared myself a pacifist in the face of the Vietnam war, so the military didn't offer me an offramp, either. I pursued music, though to be fair, I really should declare that the music pursued me first, and my response was at least half defensive. I, like many in my generation, acquired a guitar addiction while still in grade school. I fell in love with the thing and dreamed in chords and rhythms. I'm convinced that it altered my DNA. Unlike most, I came to write my own songs and, through that high school within which I never belonged, I nurtured my identity performing on a tiny stage in front of an actual brick wall in a church basement coffee house replete with tiny tables and flickering candles. I later even learned to hitchhike.

I encountered my first sets in that basement.

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CodaMysterious

codamysterious
Winslow Homer: Leaping Trout (1889)


" … make way for the next day's fresh blade."


Reviewing my now extensive oeuvre,—an utterly unpronounceable word meaning 'collected works'—I see that I've written this story at least a half dozen times before, probably more. I variously labeled it BegEnding or one of its variants (BegsEnding, etc.), suggesting that an ending often also represents a beginning, perhaps even that endings tend to be infinite rather than definite. They often smear into the next story, to live beyond their pages. This result should not surprise me or my readers, since this operation, my operation, runs on precisely this sort of stuff. Enough never proves to be enough. Doneness doesn't just quit.

It might be that the most valuable element of any of my collections of stories doesn't actually inhabit any individual story or, indeed, any collection, either.

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FinalFullDay

 FinalFullDay
George Hitchcock: The Blessed Mother (1892)


" … trying to find someplace to fit into a finished picture."


What started as an experiment became a practice before changing back into an experiment again: Againing. The once full moon this morning displays only the thinnest sliver of itself, preparing to preside over an equinox, one seemingly delayed a full day beyond its usually 21st of the month appearance, scheduled to show up in this year, 2022, on the twenty-second, thanks, I guess, to the magic of Moon Mathematics. Moon Math can shave as well as add, rendering expected into slightly different forms, recognizable, but never precisely. Expectations come, I suspect, exclusively in regular shapes, while experience tends to slop over edges. We perceive similarities as well as differences, sensing familiar without fully believing when we've found it. Life still seems new, even after so much time spent both on and off the shelf of it. My sense of self still seems unfinished again, Againing.

What did I think I was doing?

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ReMounting

remounting
Henri Toulouse-Lautrec:
The Hangover (Suzanne Valadon) (c. 1888)


" … permanently resolve nothing all over again again."


Months later and I still hadn't finished painting that first side of The Villa. I'd innocently believed when I started that I would have completed painting all three sides I'd planned to repaint this year, but I hadn't. I'd become an intermittent in practice. In theory, I almost always work continuously, diligently laboring until I finish a job. In practice, I lose my spot. This year, I could safely blame the weather. Too much rain early, then way too much heat later. Whatever, I could not maintain the natural rhythm of the work, let alone find it. I relegated myself into a odd-lot contractor, unable to reach scale or maintain cadence. My execution was therefore patchy. Oh, the emerging finished product looks fine, as if produced by continuous process, even if it was not. It took more effort as intermittent work than it could have possibly otherwise taken. As I near completion, I watch myself ReMounting that scaffolding one more time.

That first time climbing to the top resolved nothing.

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Incompatible

incompatible
Attributed to Suzanne Valadon: The Circus (1889)


" … our relationship utterly depends upon us making the most generous possible interpretations …"


The Muse and I acknowledged last week that twenty-five years had passed since we met. Anyone might presume, then, that we're a compatible pair, and I suppose we are compatible, but only up to a point. In many ways, we have always been Incompatible. Our stars were never in complete alignment. We each contribute a fair measure of frustration to the relationship. We each have our ways of accomplishing things. Attempts to partner don't always fall apart, but they also don't always work. I've learned to not take these failings very seriously, for that's the point where Incompatibility begins to matter, where it starts breaking down a relationship, tearing asunder. North of serious, things work. South of there, they absolutely don't, and couldn't.

Both The Muse and I were married before, her once and me, twice.

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CreatingContext

CreatingContext
Hans Sebald Beham:
Adam zittend op boomstronk met appel in zijn hand
[Adam sitting on a tree stump with an apple in his sinning hand] (1519)

" … a seemingly secret path to actually achieving it …"


The Muse had been complaining for months about the trash wood pile on the front porch. The pile, the natural product of last year's Grand Refurbish, needed cleaning up and we both knew that it was my responsibility to clean it up, and yet that job had never risen to the top of my UnfinishedBusiness queue until yesterday. I knew that I'd have to clean up that mess before we could replace the brick pillars around the front porch, but that job had crept into the unlikely category as Summer threatened to turn into Fall. It was supposed to start in Late August. Further, just that morning, Our Carpenter Joel, in his role as prime contractor for the repillering job, had reported that the contractor he'd lined up last Spring had gone incommunicado, apparently communicating by not communicating that he'd decided not to do the job after all. Suddenly, there was even less urgency to clean up that pile.

It's not that I hadn't contributed considerable brain power to considering how to satisfy The Muse's request.

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UnfinishedBusiness

unfinishedbusiness
Stuart Davis: Study for “Unfinished Business” (1962)


" … one stumbles back out of what one stumbles into …"


The end of a season invites in the auditors to assess progress made. Nobody wants a disappointing auditor's report, but some seasons, conditions seem to conspire against success, against progress itself. For me, this result typically happens when I've managed to accumulate more obligations than I can successfully juggle. It never takes much, more like it tends to take no more than an ungainly mix of even small stuff. A single procrastinating act might set off a cascade of small avoidances which quickly accumulate into an overwhelming backlog, one which appears beyond anyone's means to dent, let alone to clear. This accumulation becomes my burden, invisible, perhaps, to everyone else, but front row center prominent for me. It weighs extremely heavily upon me, encumbering everything I attempt, dissuading me from even trying to clear the scales.

The Muse notices but wisely mostly declines to mention.

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WindingDowner

windingdowner
John La Farge: A Rishi Stirring Up a Storm (1897)


" … in preparation for an on-time arrival."


The two most dangerous parts of every airplane flight come at the beginning and at the ending of the flying. The flying itself, once aloft and leveled off at cruising altitude, becomes pretty routine, but both beginning and ending observe what the regulating authorities call Sterile Periods, where, by law, crew must remain focused upon their responsibilities. No chit chat and no playing mumbly-peg in the cockpit. Beginnings and endings remain serious business. Writing's no different, and, I suppose, if I researched any profession, I'd find a traditional respect observed for beginnings and for endings. An innocent oversight before departure can bloom into a crisis once away. In some ways, I suppose that every profession amounts to life or death since none of the time any of us invest proves to be refundable. We hasten slowly when starting and no more quickly when coming back to Earth.

This Againing Series, begun in sublime ignorance almost three months ago, has started making noises like it's just about ready to land at its destination, wherever that might be.

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Adaptigrating

adaptigrating
Thomas Cole: View of Schroon Mountain,
Essex County, New York, After a Storm
(1838)


" … appearing more or less unbidden, wet and fearful …"


Anyone insisting that they grew up in the Good Old Days was not paying attention then. The Old Days I hail from would not nearly pass muster today. It was impossible then to find a decent loaf of bread in wheat country, and even the largest cities lacked a decent cup of coffee. People smoked with impunity and drank Coke® without irony. We might have gone to church each Sunday but we went right back to our same-old secular ways come Sunday evening. We were innocently and ignorantly every -ist in today's playbooks, and damned proud of it, mostly. Say what you might about 'wokeness,' but its precursor amounted to worseness, and we are as a people and as a culture getting better, as they say, with few notable exceptions.

Conservatives thrive on the Good Old Days Myth, though a myth it most certainly remains.

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Smoked

smoked
Salvator Rosa: Philosophy (1641)
Inscription: "Keep silent or say something better than silence".


" … they remind us how blessed we remain once their curse has fled."


The late summer forest fire has become a defining event in the Great American West. If not by the end of August, then certainly by the end of September, an incident will light some woodland on fire and the resulting smoke will set about obscuring sun and sky. For days or weeks, no sunrises or sunsets grace the time. Horizons shrink. Even the foothills a short distance away disappear into thick haze. Latitude for action shrivels, too. Driving comes to seem dangerous, perspectives narrow. After perhaps weeks spent hibernating from extreme heat, the smoke seems to add insult to indignity. I ache then to free myself from this place of my liberation.

It's certainly Heavenly here, or as close to Heavenly as I've yet experienced here on Earth, yet even this Eden hosts its apples and serpents.

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Illness

illness
Félix Vallotton:
La Malade (The Patient): Hélène Chatenay (1892)

"This Illness does not render her any more special than she already was, which was always considerable."


Illness seems different and distinct from mere sickness. Sickness seems an interruption, something contracted then resolved as a matter of course. In most cases, one simply recovers from the flu without long-lingering symptoms. Illnesses seem unique in that recovery's not presumed. They typically do not just take care of themselves. They need treatment. Sometimes, a course of medicine counterbalances the intrusion; often, more extensive interventions: surgery, quarantining, physical therapy, hospitalization, psychological counseling. Some of these responses might continue for the rest of the patient's life while others come in passing. One does not necessarily ever recover from an Illness. The Parkinson's my mom contracted at sixty was still with her when she died at ninety-something, though it had progressed considerably from its beginning as a questionable quivering into a totally debilitating presence. A person might be rendered free of cancer, but they're not considered "cured" until cancer-free for five years.

The Muse found a lump in her throat and to her credit, she followed up on it. I consider this act courageous.

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Backdooring

backdooring
John Singer Sargent:
Entrance of Blue Grotto, Capri (May 21 1869)


"Wider recognition only spoils the intention."


The Muse and I have been trying out new routes between our heres and theres. Most prominent at the moment, a route through Washtucna, a town of little note and far less substance. Access comes via two lane blacktop, up through the very least densely populated portion of our county and into an even more lonely stretch in an adjacent one. The road twists unconscionably, which makes for slow going. Yet we've taken to making our way up the Road To Washtucna wherever we head West, toward Seattle. Faster ways exist, though none shorter. This route features no semi-trucks, the bane of every traveler's adventures. It's a backdoor route, one not obvious to first-time tourists and uninteresting to those who equate freeway driving with freedom. We can toodle our way away and back again without any fear of anyone spotting us getting away or returning. We're Backdooring.

The older I get, the less interested I seem to be with status and notoriety.

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Aspect

aspect
Moon over Stevens Pass 9/11/2022, 3am


" … conspiring to escape my defenses …"


Up in these woods, this weary world seems fresh. A full moon crawls beyond a sixty-foot cedar to stare down unblinking upon my very early morning doings, and finds nothing wanting, nothing awry. All seems perfectly right with this world in this moment, travails intact, problem unsolved. The Aspect here precludes the usual fears. I feel suspended above and safely beyond wanting. All seems calm. All bright.

The Muse announced the presence of her cancer in a brilliant social media post, one which nobody who knows her could have possibly mistaken her not having been its author.

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Offlining

offlining
Salvator Rosa:
Diogenes Casting Away His Bowl (1661–1662)


"I might be someone other than who I pretend to be …"


My great great grandmother, born in the eighteen forties, lived to be almost a hundred. During her life, she experienced in her youth a medieval-quality existence as an immigrant on two great migrations from New York into Florida following Gadson's campaign and then on into Texas. As a young wife, she traveled the Oregon Trail clear to Oregon on horseback. By the time she died, WW2 had ended. People were flying. Just a few years before I was born, this world had already invented most of what we would readily recognize today, but in more primitive forms. Now, all those newspapers and magazines, radios and televisions visit us via a single medium, one we carry access to with machines small enough to comfortably fit into a pocket and powerful enough to utterly distract us from ourselves. My great great grandmother was a life-long pioneer. Her great great grandson, a slave.

I admit my addiction.

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TheReveal

thereveal
Frederic Remington: First and Best Camp of the Trip (1895)


"Each a detective, none a master."


We believe in TheReveal, that whatever mystery harasses us, we will eventually come to understand and thereby resolve it. This seems an inherently naive notion, since this world, this universe, seems more vast than even our imaginations might ever grasp. Still, we entertain and employ ourselves seeking answers, often to the wrong questions. We collect pieces to these puzzles in the belief that we might one day fit them together and release the tension. In Hardy Boy novels, this release came about in TheReveal chapter, where all the story's threads came together to affect resolution. The reader would learn
who done it? and the perpetrator would be carted off to jail. Frank and Joe might receive the heartfelt if slightly surprised appreciation from the police chief or their detective dad, then go on to stumble upon another mystery needing resolution.

I am here to reveal that life does not often work like that.

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RealChange

RealChange
Félix Vallotton: Corn Fields (1900)


"Things will never be the same again."


Change seems the real constant in this world, in this life. Stasis seems impossible, yet we're weaned to wish for difference, not stasis. We genuinely fail to see the essential contradiction in our constant striving for change, RealChange. I doubt that I would recognize the real McCoy if it sat on my face. The real McCoy might look more like nothing different at all. It might seem so familiar as to appear utterly unimportant. Remember when The Damned Pandemic forced us all to take up a sedentary lifestyle, always staying home, rarely roaming anywhere? That was a real and significant change to which many reacted by feeling bored and uninterested. We ached for the same old and called that different. Change seems the constant, constancy the real difference.

The Muse and I are poised upon the cusp of a significant change.

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Becausing

becausing
Attributed to Frans Pourbus, the Younger:
Profile Portrait of a Lady (1569 - 1622)


"Just let that mystery be."


Because belongs to that august class of words which carry no specific meaning. It seems to mostly play the role of placeholder, standing in for some more substantial explanation. It pretends to explain something, but utterly fails, except in omission. It seems to say, "Don't ask. I cannot tell," more of a brush-off, really. In the absence of a root cause, just say, "Because," just because.

Psychologists insist that we become more or less the sum total of our explanatory stories.

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Dazing

dazing
Rembrandt van Rijn: Old Woman Sleeping (c. 1636)


" … done Dazing for this waning season."


At this latitude, summer changes like a supertanker turns, in a wide, almost indiscernible arc. I might be excused for thinking the first hints mere feints, practice moves with no conviction behind them. Slowly, excruciatingly slowly, though, the easy mornings finally give way to presenting high fifty degree temperatures and I gratefully don a sweatshirt and happily bid goodbye to my sweaty pillows. As almost unbearable as the nights have been, the days have been absolutely overwhelming me. If I was not done with my outside chores by eight, at the very latest nine am, I could forget about completing them that morning. I might occasionally squeak in an additional couple near the end of the day, having by then once again grown somewhat accustomed to the insult to the point where I could complete 'em in hundred degree shade. The bulk of my August days were spent Dazing, in hot weather hibernation, idly gazing, almost dozing. It was my final defense.

Let the record show that I didn't completely collapse, however otherwise misleading appearances might have seemed.

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Laboring

Laboring
Winslow Homer: For to Be a Farmer’s Boy (1887)


" … we observe it from a safe distance in the shade."


Labor Day might be the only holiday we do not celebrate. Oh, we observe it, or we certainly try to observe it, but something in the American character steadfastly refuses to celebrate Laboring. Our native Yankee genius has always been attuned to figuring out ways to avoid Laboring instead, and specializes in producing labor saving devices. We secretly consider anyone laboring to either be a convict, sentences to a term at "hard labor," or a fool, too simple to concoct a way to avoid the sweaty stuff.

We paradoxically, though, claim to revere the hard worker.

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Pa

pa
Hercules Seghers: Enclosed Valley (c. 1623–30)


" … I love my overalls …"


Years ago, when my son was barely one year old, my first wife and I bought our first house. It wasn't much. Two bedrooms featuring peeling wallpaper, worn paint, and a basement given over to cobwebs and mouse poop, but we set about fixing it up, though neither of us considered ourselves qualified. The interest rate on the mortgage was fifteen and a half percent, the best we could bargain for under Reagan's grand prosperity strategy, which left us feeling as if we'd landed in the middle of The Great Depression. The old guy we'd bought the place from left a weary pair of overalls on a basement shelf. I washed them up and tried them on, never having previously had the pleasure, and took to wearing them as I labored around the place. As often happens for me, that clothing imparted a new identity to me. I became 'Pa' whenever I wore them, a character loosely based upon an actor in a popular television series at that time, The Waltons.

I guess I needed a role model and imprinted upon him.

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NextChapter

nextchapter
Thomas Birch:
Capture of the Tripoli by the Enterprise (1806/12)


" … I'll still already be gone by then."


My experience of this life so far strongly suggests against the existence of sequential anything. Sequential seems a hypothetical, one possible alternative rarely actually encountered; a theoretical, all things being equal, when things only very rarely end up being very equal. I skip around instead. I might set off in some definite direction, following the simplest of instructions, but soon encounter some distraction, some unexpected abstraction needing fleshing out. The road not taken seemed the very soul of straightforward. The road actually traveled seemed to have meandered.

Oh, plans rely almost entirely upon sequential construction.

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Anti-

anti-
Alfred Stieglitz: Listening to the Crickets (c. 1900)


"Impossible and necessary …"


I this week declared myself Antifa because I consider myself vehemently anti-fascist. Who wouldn't be? An old acquaintance called me out, noting that a shadowy group considered to have been responsible for much anonymous street violence travels under the Antifa label, but then so, too, does a deeply anonymous collective of hackers who have uncovered considerable elite wrong-doing, and so, too, does a loose association of equality-seekers who protest financial elitism, which seems the very soul of fascism. The problem might lie in the Anti- label, what philosophers refer to as the 'negative space' identifier. Yesterday, as my dentist fitted a new cap onto one of my molars, he asked me to try to determine if it fit properly, a state I might recognize because I wouldn't notice any difference when I bite down. A positive space target would have provided an experience from which to judge success rather than the absence of an experience. We worked until I decided that I couldn't feel any difference, but I left with doubts that I'd succeeded in properly reporting success. Negative spaces work like that.

My Anti- feelings toward fascism fail to characterize what I'd consider an adequate replacement for fascism's presence.

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FairWeather

fairweather
Ben Shahn:
Untitled [county fair, central Ohio] (August 1938, printed later)


"Nostalgia seems a much more reliable companion …"


Summer's finished. It just doesn't quite realize it yet. As if to demonstrate its remaining vitality, the temperature pushed a hundred again, but the people long ago grew accustomed to even that extreme. They stream to the Fair, regardless. So do The Muse and I. We come to work the Democrat booth, a fabled responsibility. Occasionally, some delusional Q fan or Trump supporter has been known to wander by and harass whomever's working the booth, so we're wary. Cowboys wander by with smirks on their faces and "Brandon" on their lips, quietly shaking their heads as they pass. Our people stop by carrying their enthusiasm with them, grateful for our presence. It's not paranoia if they're really out to get you. They're really out to get us.

The booth has a grandstand view of the fair's entrance, a broad sidewalk where everyone entering must pass.

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Resettling

Resettling
Paul Gauguin:
Manao tupapau [She Thinks of the Ghost or The Ghost Thinks of Her]
(1894/95)


"The playing field suddenly seems wide open."


I peeked into The Muse's office yesterday and found her desk barren, her large display monitor and high speed printer gone, returned to The National Lab as a sure sign of her retirement. We returned to a different place than we left. Further, we returned different people than the ones who left, too. The cats were the first to notice. We came as ghosts and, once familiar patterns disrupted, neither cat seemed to know what to do with our presence. It took a day for them to switch back, or really attempt to. The house, too, seemed changed. Absent the presence of The Muse's career responsibilities, the place seemed more open, freer. It would take some Resettling to settle back in here, though I wonder if there might not be any real back to begin settling into. This rehabitation might well be an invention.

People our age refer to their forever home.

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HotPillow

hotpillow
Ary de Vois: Jacob’s Dream (1660 - 1680)


" … just as long as I don't have to make a steady habit …"


The Muse admits to being a hotel snob. After all those years spent working for the lab, through which she most months traveled at least a few days, she developed certain standards, certain expectations for what a hotel should and should not provide. Because she stayed at first class hotels when traveling on business (Why not? She received the government rate!), her previous minimum standards shifted upward. Believe me, we've stayed at some marginal digs, the kind author James Elroy referred to as HotPillow joints, implying that their primary business might not be providing places of rest but of salacious exercise. Few experiences prove quite as upsetting as discovering, typically at about three in the morning, that your sleeping room is adjacent to a brothel. This sort of thing rarely happens in your higher class lodgings, but probably only because they feature more effective soundproofing.

Now that The Muse has retired, she loses some of her previous perks, government lodging rates among them.

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Trans-IT-ioning

trans-it-ioning
Caspar David Friedrich:
The Woman with the Spider Web between Bare Trees (1803)


" … deferring arrival into our future together …"


The Muse retired three days ago, but because we haven't arrived back at The Villa Vatta Schmaltz yet, she's still Trans-IT-ioning into whatever she will next become. The traveling days serve as a buffer, allowing us both to try on fresh identities, and I say "us both" because while she's retired, my role changes, too. One cannot change any element within a tightly-bound system without also effecting every other piece, and our relationship's no exception. The Invisible Husband might not have retired, but his role significantly shifted with The Muse's. I think it a significant blessing that we're sort of dawdling our way back home, since it provides an opportunity to stumble across a fresh identity or two and try them on along the way. These things take time.

We visited The Golden Spike National Monument on our way through Utah, perhaps a premise to extend our Trans-IT-ioning, but a worthwhile one.

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TakingTime

takingtime
Weegee (Arthur Fellig): Weegee by Weegee (c. 1953)


"a thief for this day"


The outward trip insisted upon arriving "on time," for we travelled with purpose. The Muse had obligations, presentations to perform, and she could not afford to be tardy, so I drove as if MakingTime. Returning, The Muse freshly retired, urgency seemed to have been bled out of us by then. She lazed around until she was good and ready to get up, and I patiently played along. I felt anxious to get back, as I always am on the return leg of any trip, home calling, but she seemed in no hurry so we began the day's drive with the morning already half gone. Further, I drove passively, not insisting upon even keeping to the speed limit, cruising for something other than progress. We passed through Glenwood Canyon. Any day marked by passage through that timeless portal proves remarkable, whatever else might happen.

We found a mediocre barbecue joint for lunch, where I was served what seemed like a cud of pork and The Muse, an over-done and dry rib, each more satisfying than they had any right to seem.

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ExilesEnd

Exile'sEnd
Gustave Courbet: Panoramic View of the Alps,
Les Dents du Midi
(1877) unfinished work


"We gained a garden at the cost of losing that world …"


When does an exile end? The homecoming just begins the exit, for attachments made out there still hold. The Muse retained her position, so she continued connecting in more or less the same fashion after relocating home. She became a remote worker, just like any other until The Damned Pandemic started lifting. Then, she'd occasionally return, working in borrowed space, back into the workplace she'd inhabited before. Her exile followed her back home, her liberation incomplete until this week when she formally retired, turned in her credentials, and forfeited her computer and phone. Her departure almost seemed like the start of yet another exile as we drove through Golden, a town we'd grown so damned familiar with during the actual exile.

I, too, sensed the continuing connection, my well-practiced role of The Invisible Husband during the exile, continued even after we returned home.

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Morebility

morebility
Charles Laborde: Traffic, Montmartre (1925)


"Mobility has become its opposite."


My mobility will very likely be the death of me, for I cannot seem to deny the primal urge to move. My dissatisfaction with simply sitting invites me into perhaps the most self destructive habit on this planet, driving. The imagined freedom of the road goads many into what I might label Morebility, the morbidity of movement; movement for its own sake, movement as compulsion, movement as self-justifying. In the small city to which The Muse and I have settled, traffic only rarely presents a problem. When the travel time across the whole place takes about eight minutes during the peak of rush hour, such as it is, nobody's really in the business of seriously trying to limit the number of cars on the road. Along the Front Range of Colorado, though, traffic has become much more than a problem. It seems more a disease as each takes their leave and the roads quickly clog, filled to beyond their design capacity for several hours each day. Rush hour moves at a snail's pace. Freedom of movement becomes a parody of itself.

The Gods, of course, absolutely love this stuff.

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AThousandMiles

athousandmiles
Katsushika Hokusai: A Mild Breeze on a Fine Day (Gaifu kaisei),
from the series “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjurokkei)”
(c. 1830/33)


" … enough distance to change the past."


I woke up AThousandMiles away from home, and feeling the distance. I sensed a deep familiarity along with an accompanying alienation, for this place, once the site of our extended exile, no longer belongs to us or us to it. When we owned a home here, I could at least believably imagine that I belonged. Since we left, I'd hardly given it an idle thought. Yet here I am and here it is, confronting each other again. Me, with my muscle memory still so well-tuned to this context that my fingers remember when to change the cruise control speed in perfect anticipation of an upcoming change. I remember which lane sets me up for the turn, just like an old hand.

I notice that this place has not stood still in my absence.

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StoryOuting

storyouting
Unknown Artisan(s)-Netherlands, early 16th century:
Story of Perseus and Andromeda (early 1500s)


"We are stories perhaps never coherently told …"


Faced with the existential crisis a birthday brings, I long ago ceased shopping for relief. I decided that I could not possibly buy myself out of this dilemma brought on by the urgent need to give the very best gift. In the past, I've usually resorted to producing a poem, and there've been plenty in their time. [I excuse The Muse her …, you get the drift.] I've sometimes produced an original song, one of which was the first ever Folk Noir tune and another, which accurately predicted our future. (The Invisible Husband, circa 2011.) This year, The Muse's Day happened when we were away. I attempted to write a poem while creeping around our shared hotel room but the context didn't feel right and the words wouldn't come. Writing a poem, especially one of potential importance, will not just come if beaconed. It must be reckoned with. It comes when it's ready and never entirely due to any sense of urgency, which most often serves to scare off the damned thing, anyway. Birthdays, as I said, produce existential crises.

We had five hundred miles of two lane blacktop looking at us, a day of traveling ahead.

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MakingTime

makingtime
attributed to Mewar Stipple Master:
Prince Amar Singh Drives His Own Elephant (c. 1695)


" … I will have become a system …"


What am I doing while I'm driving? That's a complicated question that gets down on one knee and begs an equally complicated answer; but I'm a simple man, one more prone to simplification than explication. I hold deep suspicions about anyone attempting to definitely answer that question, for too many moving parts get involved, along with human emotion. No, my friend, that's one terribly, terribly complication question.

I, myself, seem barely present when driving.

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LeaveTaking

takingleave
Jean-Léon Gérôme: Leaving the Oasis (1880s)


" … having re-earned our presence by being good and gone."


Folk songwriter John Gorka once insisted that as a traveling performer, he left more often than he ever came back. There was a time when The Muse and I lived like that. We lived as if on a continual grand tour, departing before gravity could catch us, always on the move. The Damned Pandemic slowed our viscosity. We rarely take leave now. A whole other existence lays on the flip side of mobility, a settled life, a more dependable existence. One can come to think of one's self as indispensable by default, since the home place rarely needs to get along without one's presence. Absence becomes unthinkable and the promise of LeaveTaking feels like an existential threat. I spend a few days in growing denial before finally accepting the inevitability less than twenty-four hours before departure time.

In the final hours, The Muse suggests that we might fly instead of drive, and I put down my foot. With This Damned Pandemic, I won't fly.

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TheIrrelevancies

theirrelevencies
William Michael Harnett: Memento Mori, "To This Favour" (1879)


" … inevitably slipping into a growing good twilight."


Mastering TheIrrelevancies might be that true purpose of advancing age, for youth becomes obsessed with establishing the relevance nobody can take to their grave. A younger generation will always be on the heels of any one spawned before it, and they must and will find the flaws in their forebears' arguments if they ever hope to gain prominence for their own. Some try to fight this trend and attempt relevancy until the ultimately bitterer end, an exit inevitably rendered ever more bitter and irrelevant, but irrelevancy by omission turns out to be a much, much different experience than irrelevancy by commission, the former a form of humiliation, the latter holding hope for at least some sort of salvation.

The GrandOther fulfills her part in this grand scheme by purposefully discounting pretty much everything I mention.

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CellAbrate

cellabrate
John Singer Sargent: The Birthday Party (1885)


"Each birthday just reminds me that the lifeday's the thing …"


I can't say how much I appreciate all the birthday greetings I received yesterday. I can declare that I deeply appreciated each and every one and would have written a lengthy response to each had the volume not overwhelmed me. Many insisted that I should take the day off to celebrate, which I did, but probably not in the way any of my well wishers envisioned. There was no cake. In these Damned Pandemic times, no gathering. No party, no favors. No rabble roused, nothing soused. I celebrated as I damned well pleased, as I secretly prefer. I engaged in my usual activities of daily living a tad bit more mindfully than usual, appreciating what I had, not seeking to acquire any more than I already possessed. No presents. No pretenses. I reheated leftovers for supper, fled to bed early, and slept a sleep of angels. Happy, happy birthday, indeed.

I remember when I was about ten, my parents organized a birthday party for me.

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Schrödingers

schroedingers
Giovanni di Paolo:
Saint John the Baptist Entering the Wilderness (1455/60)


"May I prove worthy of my future …"


Each morning, I sit before my keyboard possessing another unstated story. In some ways that story will only degrade from that initial point, for with each finished sentence, its potential further collapses into just whatever it will be. At the moment of inception, it could include anything. By the time I finish writing it, or call it done enough, it will have become a definite and smaller presence. It will have become unique and specific rather than general and infinite. In this way, I seize each day.

I'm coming to acknowledge that first moment as a Schrödinger, in homage to Erwin Schrödinger, who, in 1935, attempted to criticize an interpretation of a quantum condition by explicitly describing a paradox whereby a hypothetical cat may be considered simultaneously both alive and dead as a result of its fate being linked to a random subatomic event that may or may not occur.

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PlotTwisting

PlotTwisting
Edward Burne-Jones: The Garden Court (1870–75)


" … the ability to fall apart into unanticipated constituent bits …"


The standard fairy tales seem anything but standard, for each story prominently features some barely believable PlotTwisting. What might have begun as a straightforward stroll to grandmother's house, invariably turns into something much more interesting and, frankly, barely believable, if believable at all. Wolves do not as a general rule wear a grandmother's clothing, even after swallowing her whole. They rarely consent to crawl into anyone's bed, let alone come inside, even to chide a remarkably innocent and gullible Little Red Ridinghood, who, remarkably, does absolutely no riding in the whole story, though in the story's final scene, she does manage to perform some major surgery—or is that an autopsy?—as she extracts whole and otherwise unharmed, though apparently unmentionably slimy, her previously swallowed grandmother from the wolf's belly. The whole story's allegory, twisting in an uneven wind.

Your story and mine are, if scrutinized, hardly any less believable than the least of Hans Christian Andersen's.

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LivingInTheDark

livinginthedark
Marsden Hartley: The Dark Mountain (1909)


" … blindness seems to help me see some things better."


The more we learn about our universe, the more light seems an alien element. Our Earth, like its moon, naturally produces almost no light, but depends upon light cast by a rather distant sun. We "see" into our universe by means of light, mostly the ultraviolet kind we cannot sense without mechanical assistance. What little light we manage to produce, fleeting and dim, slips through our fingers, gone almost before we sense it and certainly leaving more than ever arriving. In a galactic sense, we LiveInTheDark. Nobody in any distant galaxy has been tracking me by the light we emit because we hardly qualify as even a dim bulb in the firmament, though we still remain eminently capable of sometimes feeling absolutely full of ourselves.

Most, and me included, hug close to our light sources.

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DoggedDays

DoggedDays
Pieter van der Heyden (engraver),
after
Pieter Bruegel (artist):
The Four Seasons: Summer (1570)


" … as if splooting somewhere in the middle of a frozen food aisle."


I abandon my bed just after midnight, wondering if night cooling has finally rid us of the previous day's heat. These Dogg
edDays of summer exhaust me. The Muse does not complain as I disappear to lie in front of a box fan or into the shadows of a lengthy mid-day nap, replete with disturbing dreams. These dreams further exhaust me, refreshment presently beyond my grasp. I hold my compass heading but make little progress. The Muse asks what I have in mind for dinner and I reply with a distracted, "Nothing," before resuming what I wasn't doing before she asked. Friends flee to the beach where fog and cool breezes bring respite. Here, wheat harvest continues and the air fills with chaff and dust and the scent of diesel engines. A flour mill burned down last weekend in Pendleton, victim of a bad bushing and an inattentive watchman. The initial fire was quickly drenched and a watchman posted to monitor for flareups. The watchman was pulled after a few hours and a couple of hours later, that fire flared and nobody was there to report the incident. By the time the brigade returned, the place had burned into a smoking shell, a total loss. Blame the DoggedDays of August.

August rhymes with exhausted.

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Mutualizing

mutualizing
Giuseppe Baldrighi: Lion (1750s)


" … this world is better off, too."


I start most days with a period of interspecies communication, Mutualizing, with Max our cat. He initiates these sessions. I'm uncertain about the details from his perspective, but I suspect that he's showing me appreciation and respect when he ambles into the library to hop up onto my lap and stretch out for a scratch and a purr. We share not even the odd verb, but I sense that we're conversing after a fashion. The chat always starts with some questions and tentative answers. Sometimes, he hesitates but consents to allow me to pick him up by the scruff and plop him onto my lap. Other times, he clambers up onto the chair back and climbs down my shirtfront. He quickly settles in, sometimes for no more than a minute—"Just checking in," he seems to say—and other times, he'd stay for hours if I didn't have business to attend to after an hour. He usually lingers for a half hour, sprawling, completely vulnerable, trusting and peaceful.

I cannot imagine a more reassuring way to start any day than to have a fine cat, who could easily choose sublime independence, decide to share some of his wildness with me, seemingly appreciatively.

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Sloughing

sloughing
Margaret Bourke-White:
World’s Highest Standard of Living [Silver Gelatin Print]
(1937)


"Arbeit macht frei!"


I fail to explain, even to myself, how I came to live this essentially binary existence where I'm either working hard or hardly working, producing something or Sloughing off. There seems to be no middle ground, or none that I've found. Even when I manage to tucker myself out, I have not even then earned a rest. What respite I grant myself, I account for as laziness, pure and simple. What rest I take, I consider sloth rather than rejuvenation, and I allow myself only the barest minimum. Beyond that, I start accumulating guilt about failing to properly apply myself. I consider myself to be a wasting asset, one which degrades, whatever I engage in, for I tend to fall short of full engagement, which would be a state with which I cannot quite relate, but recognize only by its absence. I'm confident that I've never experienced full engagement. I'm just a dabbler, I suspect.

I hear politicians divide our great population into two otherwise undifferentiated parts, the hard workers and the intolerables.

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Relentlessness

relentlessness
Jean Antoine Linck: Study of Weeds (1800-1850)


" … more like who I was when I started …"


I feel most impressed with the utter Relentlessness of this universe, where nothing, it seems, succeeds like excess. Particularly in this season, Summer, where I find myself up most mornings, dragging hoses, watering. Weeds which stand outside the watered perimeter thrive. I have no idea what they survive on, for the ground cracks and presents as distinctly unpromising, yet there's always something adapted to even the most wanting place. Give a patch of clover an inch and it will at least attempt to overgrow the whole lawn, growing stronger, shrugging off weed killer, multiplying before exponentiating with abandon. Each plant, each species, seems to lack a governor and quite naturally, Relentlessly, seeks dominion.

I speak emphatically about community, about giving and sharing, but our role models seem indifferent to such.

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Heap

Heap
Alfred Sisley: The Seine at Port-Marly, Piles of Sand (1875)


" … enriching our historical record …"


Future archeologists should be able to fairly accurately map our rhythm of life at The Villa Vatta Schmaltz, primarily by excavating our noble compost Heap. The Heap holds sequential record of our dining year from which even half-baked archeologists should be able to piece together a decent portrait of our preferences and practices. I noticed yesterday that we'd re-entered the Green Chile part of the year, which has always been squeezed in-between the cherry/apricot/plum Stone Fruit season and the now impending tomato time. We put up produce in turn, producing piles of pits and peels which we dutifully pile on top of The Heap, thereby laying down our gastronomic self portrait.

Very little goes to waste here.

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Unseen

unseen
Jacques Callot:
The Uneven One with a Cane, from
Varie Figure Gobbi (1616)


"I am also the sum total of what remains Unseen …"


The following day, my vision returned with a vengeance, in HDTV-quality as if to remind me of all that I had not been seeing, of all that I had not noticed, of all that had recently gone Unseen. I found it humbling to discover what I never really suspected, a prominent blindness. I gratefully never caught myself incapable of seeing. I never quite suspected the depth of my blindness, and presumed that I was experiencing just a slight reduction, a general fuzziness, but I had for months, perhaps a year or more, lost whole dimensions. The vision I experienced that next morning, following the cataract replacement lens clearing laser procedure, were nothing less than extraordinary. A fresh world presented itself to me, distracting in its detail. Colors brilliant, even the muted ones; the textures, profound.

I suspect that blindness must be one of those states that does not exist in any moment. It exists in reflection, by comparison.

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Seeing

seeing
Reijer Stolk: Gmünder See mit Traunstein (1906 - 1945)


" … no more than an annoying background mumble eliciting a muffled scream."


I might privately admit that over recent months, my vision had gone to shit, but I would never otherwise consider admitting this because vision, Seeing, seems such a personal and private experience. My optometrist commented—in no more than an aside, really—that it appeared to him that the lens installed during my cataract surgeries three years ago were starting to look a little cloudy. Cloudy, I thought? But I believed that the cataract surgery would be the last such insult to my eyes, to my vision, that they wouldn't require additional procedures. So much for belief, for I later learned that pretty much everyone who receives that surgery needs a follow-on procedure a few very short years later. I told my optometrist that I'd get back to him later on the subject, thereby entering that first stage of acceptance, denial.

A few weeks later, I'd grown weary of fuzzy perception.

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Installing

installing
Louise Pithoud:
Male and Female Bacchants Installing a Herm (1792)


"I consider them ours."


Installing comes after design and fabrication, and little of either of those earlier stages really prepares anyone for the final challenges. This is where idea finally meets its context, where imagination finds its anchor. Final boundaries and ultimate limits finally come into play. There was probably no way to fully prepare for this day other than to acknowledge it coming. The ruminating that dominated design matters little now. The overlooked will have their day. Last minute surprise will complicate the whole conception, a final reckoning occurs. Reputations might well be threatened and might be made. Be very afraid. It won't matter.

I warmly anticipated Installing the new front porch stair railing.

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Mac&Pleas

macnpleas_
Miep de Feijter:
Hans en Frans verkleed als Alkmaarse kaasdragers
[Hans and Frans work as
Alklmaase cheese carriers] (
c. 1928 - c. 1941)


" I eat my share warmed over …"


A time will come, because it always has, when I will once again be called upon to make "my" Mac&Cheese, my famous Mac&Cheese. My Mac&Cheese became famous because The GrandOtter liked it, or, more properly, loved! it. I made it for a few dinner parties, too, and many proclaimed it the very best they ever consumed. It thus became famous, though dinner party proclamations tend to be heavily lubricated and contextualized by a generalized camaraderie. Nobody ever openly criticizes dinner party dishes, and some gushing seems common to all of them, still, I had reason to believe that my Mac&Cheese was at least pretty good. I knew it was unusual, for I didn't use milk in my cheese sauce. I used stock, which makes a fine sauce without delivering what usually turns out to be a milk pudding sort of base. My Sauce Velout
é provides a better foundation for the cheese. I also usually avoid using actual macaroni in my Mac&Cheese.

Mac&Cheese is always, really about the cheese.

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IfOnly

IfOnly
Willem Claesz Heda: Still Life with a Gilt Cup (1635)


" … slinked home without salvation …"


The Muse suggested a drive up to the top of The Scenic Loop to show her visiting nephew John a different part of this valley. We soon found ourselves standing beside a dusty road, threshing wheat in our palms, working on creating gluten balls for chewing. It's long been our practice in harvest season to glean a stalk or two from the periphery of a wheat field and wonder at the magic within them. The Muse counts forty-five kernels from one head, recalling how her father could count one head's kernels and fairly accurately project the bushels per acres he'd harvest from his field. The Muse reports word of bumper crops this year, with eighty bushels per acre on dry land and twice that from irrigated fields. Her dad counted forty bushels a bumper crop in his place and time.

We drive on, working that wheat paste as if it were chewing gum, up further into the mountains, since John lives in South Dakota and has rarely seen mountains.

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Periphery

periphery
Gustave Caillebotte:
Les raboteurs de parquet [The Floor Planers] (1875)


"I just live here."


When The Muse holds a gathering, I prefer to work the Periphery. I'll busy myself with some self-appointed responsibility perhaps only distantly related to the proceedings. I'll flit in and back out again and very likely spend the bulk of my time offline, on the back deck, perhaps, grilling something intended for the table later. I might greet a few people at the front door, but rather quickly disappear, only to reappear to lead a brief guided tour of recent home improvements. I'll suggest a beverage and see that it's delivered, stay for a brief conversation, then evaporate again. I'll contribute, but on my own terms.

I found it curious whenever I took to a stage as either a performer or a teacher that I never seriously intended to become anything like the center of anyone's attention.

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Break

break2
Gustave Caillebotte:
Study of a Man with Hands in His Pockets (1893)


"The Break seems beginningless until it doesn't."


Autumn sends a postcard sometime in August to preface the coming season. After a forever hot spell, one morning brings goose flesh or the strong suggestion that it might still exist, a distinct impossibility just the day before. Nothing never ends, not even nothing, not even that seemingly endless heat, the one that had so rudely interrupted Summer. Summer seems three separate seasons now that global warming has imprinted her presence. Early Summer's an extension of Spring, Mid-Summer's an ordeal, and Later Summer's Early Fall, clearly not yet Autumn, but reminiscent of it in the early mornings and later evenings. Later Summer seems a welcome respite, a Break from the frightening Mid-Summer melting point.

Cool eventually intrudes.

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Fittings

fittings
Mary Cassatt: The Fitting (1890–91)


" … we might just as well be satisfied with the process destined to ultimately delight us."


In the house I grew up in, the music room—the room with the piano and also the room where 'us kids' could isolate to practice our band instruments—doubled as the fitting room for my mom's seamstress business. She'd make wedding dresses and ball gowns, and she'd escort a steady stream of society ladies into that room to try on their new creations. Some pieces required multiple Fittings, as completion took on an iterative nature. There are apparently many elements of dress construction which can only be approximated without the person who will wear it present. Custom made clothing demands a great deal of patience. My mom would pin together seams for later sewing. Occasionally, she'd have to pull out the old seam ripper to completely redo something. It all seemed so exacting.

These childhood experiences tipped me off to the fact that complicated constructions do not come in one-and-done forms.

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Reward

reward
Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardine:
The Attributes of the Arts and the Rewards Which Are Accorded Them (1766)


"I'll just have to wait and see …"


I sat in the dentist's chair feeling consigned to enduring my well-deserved penance. I had, after all, avoided dentists for more than a decade while I failed to work through a small trauma, a slight so minor, so seemingly routine, that I might have not even noticed, except I'd noticed and blown it all out of proper proportion, and there I was, collecting my just deserts. Except this work didn't seem all that onerous, especially when compared to how I'd for so long imagined it would be. Compared to my pre-catastrophizing, this was nothing. I imagined the same routine work being undertaken fifty years before under the technology and fumbling hands of my childhood dentist, Himmler Pearson, who always seemed to revel in the discomfort he imposed. More modern practices emphasize patient comfort. I almost expected to be offered a brandy and a Montechristo, but wasn't.

With little left to do but imagine through what once would have been the excruciatingly painful portion of the procedure, I began to consider what, if not punishment, if not penance, was I experiencing?

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Bloggering

bloggering
Edouard Vuillard: Orchard (1897)


"I seem to need to work in stone tablets."


I blog, and therefore, am. Am what? Well, a blogger for starters and by extension I suppose that I become a writer, though blogging isn't precisely what one might call writing, for blogging's pickier than simply writing. It requires considerable classification and codifying in order for the finished product to properly display and organize. I blog in series, relating all my production into quarterly segments, my current Againing Series, an example of this convention in action. Each addition, each fresh post, must satisfy a few qualifications before it can be published by posting. Each must have a unique title, for the blog software goes a little crazy when it encounters two identical titles, even when those titles belong to different series. Title must be unique, so, once I've decided upon a topic, which first often amounts to little more than a proposed title, I search both my blog archives and its Resource file to ensure that the proposed title has never been used before. I often find that I need to adjust what I thought would be the title to work around this uniqueness convention.

Molly or Max, my cats, might show up just about then, seeking breakfast and reassurance, providing distraction.

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Vectoring

vectoring
Jacob van Hulsdonck:
Still Life with Meat, Fish, Vegetables, and Fruit (c.1615–20)


" … a narrowing and no longer terribly elegant Broadway."


When my first wife and I moved to Portland, OR, in December 1975, we arrived as refugees. We marveled at the supermarket produce aisles after surviving two winters living in rural NE Pennsylvania, where produce seemed scarce off season. In Portland, all things still seemed possible. We took a main floor apartment on a bus route—by which I mean, the Belmont bus actually passed through our living room four times each hour— and we set about creating our future. Our future, like all futures always have, would get cobbled together by means of Vectoring, a process by which billions of possibilities get winnowed down to a single manifestation. Nobody actually understands how this process works because it has altogether too many moving parts and nobody stands positioned to monitor or even sense the presence of all of them, or even of most of them. We attend, instead, to the few within our purview and project what we expect to result.

The result famously manifests as something other than what we expected, and we might, as I did this weekend, consider how it was that Portland's present manifested out of its past.

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BagPoem

bagpoem
Yamada Hōgyoku: Dog with Bag Over its Head (1830s)


" … there could be worse fates than smothering on tradition."


Who knows where traditions get started? Who knows where they end? Some arise from innocent mistakes. Others seem more tenacious habit than anything resembling the presence of grace. A few seem genuinely sacred, in that neglecting to observe them seems more sin than oversight. Family traditions might hold no known origin, like the old apocryphal story about the preparation of the Easter ham, which had always included the traditional step of cutting one end off the ham. The youngest great-granddaughter asked her mother why she cut off the end of the ham and was told, "Because that's the way my mother prepared it." So the great-granddaughter asked her grandmother the same question and received the same answer. She finally asker her great-grandmother, who had apparently started the tradition way back during the Great Depression. "Because the only pan I owned was too small to hold the ham, Great-grandmother explained. Some traditions seem like metastasized necessities.

In my family, one tradition began as a small shortcoming.

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SynchronicitySwarm

synchronicityswarm
Yi Taek-gyun: Books and Scholars’ Accouterments
책가도 (冊架圖) (late 1800s)
Ten-panel folding screen; ink and color on silk


" … the research librarian remains a doubtful skeptic."


The Muse and I moved down the Portland sidewalk like the old hands we were, for she had just been recalling that I'd brought her to this neighborhood on her first visit, twenty-five years before. She said that she did not miss the bustle of living in a city, though, as we slipped around a clog of people doing jello shots and smoking at a sidewalk bar. The restaurant that used to tout its hundred beer taps now advertises its space for lease and this city seems weary and confused. From our hotel room, high atop an anonymous city center tower, I can look into the upper floors of a marvelous old tile-fronted office building, its upper floors just as empty as any abandoned warehouse, and no more elegant. New development continues, surrounded by vacancies and boarded up storefronts.

I feel enlivened by the variety, though, the juxtapositions attract my eye.

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Blistering

Blistering
Charles Angrand: End of the Harvest (c.1892–1905)


"Nostalgia omits many details …"


As August draws near, the annual counterpoint to deepest, darkest Winter emerges, its opposite to polar, Blistering weather. It, like most opposites, produces a remarkably similar result to its mirror: doors and windows shut tight against the outside, a kind of hibernating happening in. By eight in the morning, it's become uncomfortable out there. We've already drawn the shades and turned up the air conditioning, and set the box fans blowing. The overnight low came just before sunrise and barely fell below eighty degrees Fahrenheit, 26C. It's Blistering.

I set sprinklers in darkness, running them until an hour after sunrise, when evaporation renders them wasteful.

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Absolution

absolution
Noël Nicolas Coypel:
The Miracles of Saint James the Greater (1726)


"I can breathe again!"


Who seeks Absolution by going to the dentist? Who, that is, besides me? I hold a convoluted story about my recent relationship to dentistry, one which I'm uncertain I should share, which explains why I'm choosing to share it, under The One Must Speak What's Not Supposed To Be Spoken About Rule, one of my personal Ethical Responsibilities. That twinge suggesting I should stay mute on a subject too easily becomes an excuse to stifle myself and I'm reasonably certain that my purpose here might never have been to master self-stifling. I'm not struggling to justify disclosing embarrassingly inappropriate details, just something perhaps painfully necessary, a shortcoming and its accompanying redemption. An act of Absolution.

I do not believe that my primary purpose here was ever to pass judgement, either.

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StrongLeader

strongleader
Rembrandt van Rijn:
Man Helping a Rider to Mount a Horse (c. 1640-41)


"Vote for the one not trying to impress you."


Lord, help us, please, resist the StrongLeader's seduction, for we do not need StrongLeaders. We need leaders who can do their freaking job without continually plotting strategies for getting away with breaking the law they swore to uphold. We do not need leaders who just make stuff up as they go along, who act upon their animal urges, who hold eternal grudges. We need leaders capable of leveling with themselves and their followers, ones who eschew the trappings of power, rather than those who seem to need to impress, anyone with mommy or daddy issues. We need clear-eyed adults, ones who've dealt with their stuff, ones who might have crashed and burned before, ones who remember who they are and were. We need magnanimous ones, ones willing to kneel before their followers, in service to their supporters, ones who won't pander to get ahead. Ones with a head on their shoulders and a heart in their chest. Ones for whom good enough is best.

Il Duce, Mussolini, was the prototypical StrongLeader.

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Reverting

reverting
Jacob van Ruisdael:
Landscape with the Ruins of the Castle of Egmond (1650/55)


" … face being all grown up …"


Contrary to how I might appear to any naive observer, I have not quite grown up yet. I experience moments of maturity, sometimes stretching into full afternoons or evenings of it, but I remain capable off Reverting to earlier releases of myself with little provocation. Last evening, chopping garlic for supper, I sliced into a fingertip with the extra sharp chef's knife and instantly reverted back into a five year old child. I yelled for The Muse while rushing into the small bathroom off the kitchen where I grabbed a handful of Kleenex® and whimpered. I became essentially helpless for the balance of the evening. The Muse had to finish prepping the supper I had almost managed to finish preparing, even though it was clearly my evening to assemble supper. The Muse clucked over me, suggesting that I might need stitches, while I switched out tissues and waited for the worst of the bleeding to stop.

I felt inconsolable inside. No amount of care could have erased that error.

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Failure

failure
Paul Cezanne: The Basket of Apples (about 1893)


" … everyone eventually becomes."


There's nothing quite like being greeted at a restaurant's reception desk by the question, "Just you?" Of course the greeter means no insult, but The Muse and I always fein offense and ask, "Just? Are we not enough?" The greeter briefly blushes before going back to more important business, like where to seat these clowns. Our point being that nobody's ever "just" anything. We're much, much more and never simply one thing.

At my age, I can easily claim to have been a Failure, but not "just" a Failure, for I have also at times been a success.

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Recipe

recipe1
Barthélémy d'Eyck:
Still Life with Books in a Niche (1442 - 1445)


" … I will struggle to respond."


I am sometimes asked to recite a recipe for something I've made and I always struggle to respond because I don't usually use recipes. Oh, I might reference one to understand proportions—how much water to how much rice?—but I rarely very slavishly follow any instructions. Recipes seem the very epitome of frozen action, listing stuff as if stuff could be listed, sequencing actions as if sequence mattered. Consequently, I do not bake things because baking is too exacting, demanding slavish adherence to rules which successfully distill action into script. I'm not that kind of cook. For me, cooking seems more discovery than recitation. I'm never quite certain how to cook anything. Even if I've cooked something similar before, I've forgotten precisely how I prepared it and I did not write down my discoveries. I consequently do not cook the same thing once, let alone twice.

I am a man of simple tastes.

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Unintentionals

Unintentionals
Grant W. Pullis (attributed to):
Construction of the New York Subway (1908)


"Might just as well embrace the inevitable."


My early mentors cautioned me about unintended consequences, apparently inescapable side effects of every significant effort. Setting out to change any world will very likely set into motion forces which will certainly change something else, too, and those side effect changes might well become the effort's legacy, like that county sheriff in coastal Oregon who decided to rid the beach of that rotting whale carcass with a little dynamite. He managed to cover a sizable crowd present to witness the transformation, including news cameras from Portland, with a thick patina of rotted blubber. This one act became the entirety of his legacy, thanks to a single unintended consequence.

Other Unintentionals seem possible, though, positive ones.

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SacredDuty

sacredduty
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes:
The Sacred Grove, Beloved of the Arts and the Muses (1884/89)


" … if any of us can still muster any of that within ourselves."


While it might seem unlikely from within anybody's daily routine, I believe that we each labor within an often tacit SacredDuty. It doesn't very much matter our occupation, we each hold a similar obligation, to each other, to ourselves, to our society, however wounded or unjust each might appear to be. We hold this SacredDuty for our own good and for the good of those around us, for the good of the universe, if you will, if I dare mention it. It probably doesn't matter where any individual acquires their sense of duty, their specific marching orders, though it matters much whether an individual received theirs and whether an individual managed to hold theirs sacred, to respect it and to actually attempt to live up to it. However we're each employed, we each report to the same supervisor, the same cruel overseer, and that ruler is us, ultimately our 'I', and no other, though we each might start with a mentor, an exemplar or two who attempt to clue us in to ourselves and our duty, and to our own sacred nature, with varying degrees of success.

The House Select Committee's Public Hearings on the Events of January 6, 2020, reminds me of the presence of such a thing as SacredDuty.

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Nocturnal

nocturnal
James McNeill Whistler:
Nocturne: Blue and Gold—Southampton Water (1872)


" … revel in the respite my predawn time brings."


In the highest summer, I turn Nocturnal. My usual habit of rising early becomes more than habitual but essential to the simple maintenance of life. Oh, the mornings remain mostly tolerable, at least until around ten, then the day degrades into near unbearable brightness and glare. Working out there becomes essentially impossible, for I will not, under any circumstances, wear either short-sleeved shirts or shorts, due to an unfortunate family history with sunlight. I exclusively wear long sleeves with cuffs buttoned against the sun and my usual long' legged jeans. My only concession to the season will likely be sockless feet. I'm not wearing sandals, either. I will also wear a broad-brimmed hat or one of my many havelocks. I'm as tucked up against the summer sun as any burqa wearer might be against temptation and sin. If I'm working, I'm also wearing gloves.

What do I wear when I go to the beach?

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Inducing

inducing
Eugène Carrière: The Contemplator (1901)


" … to thoroughly enjoy not being fully there."


I'm not so much working as actively Inducing, successful to the extent that my actions entrance me into satisfying action. I could not possibly have managed to complete the work I finished yesterday had I been fully present for the festivities. I was up and out early, climbing scaffolding again, finally finishing that busy slice of wall that had long been my dread and fear, my nemesis. I had by then conquered her. I'd even removed all by myself the rubber matting the electric company lineman had wrapped around the formerly terrifying incoming electric wires, an unimaginable act a few long months before. I was for that day, the self-acknowledged master of that stripe of wall. For my final act, I called in the cable company technician to replace the worn and weary-looking cable line coming down from its anchor, and to tuck it in around the conduit pipe and tie it down with fresh zip ties so it looked as nice as the rest of the wall. No outstanding anything after finishing a couple of final touch-up soirées up to the top and back down again. Then, my reward was tearing down that scaffolding to reconstruct it one click to the right.

I was crawling all over that wall like the monkey I am not.

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EverydayMysteries

everydaymysteries
Paul Gauguin: The Call (1902)


"I just let these EverydayMysteries be …"


The older I grow, the less I seem to know for certain. This outcome surprises me, if only because I naively believed nearer the beginning of my life that I would become, if not older and wiser, at least older and more knowledgable, but this has not been my experience, unless I count stuff I've come to know for certain isn't reliably knowable. So the number of mysteries I juggle has greatly expanded while the number I manage to resolve has plummeted. I'm okay with this state of affairs if only because there seems to be nothing I can do about it other than accept and perhaps revel in it. It's just the way it is.

Earlier in my life, I dabbled with becoming somewhat of a detective, for I'd convinced myself that if I just applied myself, I could come to understand pretty much anything.

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Touched

touched
Henry Wolf: The Torn Hat (Date unknown)


"We're here to touch and to be Touched in return."


By the time I've nearly completed repainting another stripe of wall, I've Touched every square centimeter of it several times. Looking at The Villa from down the street, it seems unlikely from that distance that anyone ever touched even once every square centimeter of that looming hulk, let alone touched it several times. The property deed and mortgage papers never mention the unsettling fact that the actual price of owning this place would be the willingness, the patience, to do precisely that, or to hire another to do it for me. I entered into the agreement willingly and ignorantly. I suspect that nobody ever understands such implications in the moment when making such commitments. Those consequences come later, well after the initial thrall disperses. Then, anyone might find reason to accept that they must have been crazy to sign such a contract, then set about making it good, whatever the price.

While I busy myself touching several times every square centimeter of this place, this place is touching back, because Touched seems a two-way arrangement.

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Torn

torn
Jheronimus Bosch (manner of): The Temptation of St Anthony
(c. 1550 - c. 1600)


"… to better appreciate my many shortcomings."

"The requirements for design conflict and cannot be reconciled."

David Pye: The Nature of Design


When I'm painting, I'm also pining, for I shirk other responsibilities while fulfilling my repainting one. The rest of my little overwhelming universe does not freeze until I find time and focus to attend to them. They continue unsupervised, yellow-blooming clover conspiring to overtake my lawn, the annual purslane bloom taking root. The side of the house I'm painting is presently living up to my highest standards of maintenance while the rest of my existence slums it. I only have so much to contribute and, as David Pye reminds, the requirements conflict and cannot be reconciled, always have and always will.

The notion that I should be able to keep up, to not merely juggle all those chainsaws, but to simultaneously operate a hot half dozen of them, that seems to be the source of the problem.

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Clusters

clusters
Floris Claesz van Dijck: Still Life with Cheese (c. 1615)


"For me, it's only sometimes something …"


It would be news to nobody if I reported that things tend to happen in Clusters. Nothing much will happen for the longest time before a single week will bring a flurry of activity. Often, stuff will break down together, as if unrelated stuff were secretly conspiring and dedicated to causing only occasional trouble. Visit one repair department and you'll probably visit a half dozen in quick succession. It might be a law of the universe guiding this sort of thing.

A week ago today, I managed to swipe my watch off my arm by bumping into a crosspiece on the scaffolding.

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NightDrive

NightDrive
Charles François Daubigny: Night Effect (1862)


"Imagine how appreciative The Muse must have been!"


Of all of humankind's truly ingenious inventions, the headlight must certainly rank just below the bottom of the list, for headlights simply do not work for the purpose intended. Some do, indeed, light the way, but only paradoxically, for if they enable me to see, they blind everybody coming toward me, clearly violating the First, Do No Harm Clause of Design and Manufacture. A NightDrive easily turns into a life-threatening experience because of this one piece of so-called safety equipment. How would an automobile designer resolve this grave shortcoming? Maybe by switching to the infrared spectrum? How am I supposed to know? I'm just the victim of this design, not its inventor.

The Muse will insist that my complaint lies with the remnants of that cataract surgery I underwent four years ago this month.

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CuttingIn

cuttingin
Piet Mondrian: Composition (No. 1) Gray-Red (1935)


"The library's a function of the quality of its shelves."


Prepping finished, priming finally done, the time comes for adding color. Up until then, everything's focused upon foundation, the sole purpose being to create a consistent surface: as smooth and uniform as possible. The prime coat serves as a proof of sorts, a test to determine if the surfaces have been sufficiently worked such that they might hold the promise of a decent-looking final finish. Of course it doesn't quite satisfy the discriminating eye, so that prime coating features a little back-sliding, some additional sanding, scraping, and filling. The eye always misses something the first few times through. At the point where color comes into play, the game changes. Before, I'm focused upon the broad plain of the surface. Edges between trim and wall color become meaningless. I work when priming as if there were no edges. Once the colors come out, the whole game becomes one of CuttingIn the fine lines separating the various trims and the base wall color.

Once finished, the eye will fail to register much variation on a properly prepared surface.

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MadMen

madmen
George Wesley Bellows: Dance at Insane Asylum (1907)


"You eventually became just another part of the problem …"


Who has not caught themself working for a crazy boss? Who has not found themself laboring within some crazy-making context? Who has not caught themself questioning their own sanity as a result? That questioning one's own sanity seems to be the one reliably meaningful way for validating one's own sanity, for the truly crazy never seem to question their own context, their own motives. So much seems absolutely presumed without questioning, and those presumptions can carry considerable weight and exert much subtle influence. It properly feels as though you never learned the rules and so seem especially unperceptive to yourself. The guy in charge poisons everyone's facility to properly assess reality. This seems primarily the work that MadMen accomplish. They warp the reality around them.

The challenge for those not actually crazy comes with the resulting crazy-making context.

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FreshInfinity

freshinfinity
NASA on July 11, 2022,
released the first full-color image
from the James Webb Space Telescope.
(NASA/AFP/Getty Images)


The new image is what is known as a “deep field” observation, with the telescope staring at what NASA called a “patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground.” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson as quoted in the July 12, 2022 Washington Post

"Would that our native sense of self-importance were not expanding faster than our universe."

The James Webb Space Telescope might be the largest rear view mirror ever produced. Capable of reflecting thirteen billion year old light, it provides formerly unattainable resolution. It represents just a next step, but one doozy of a step. In my lifetime, infinity has undergone multiple radical expansions, from the planetary outward, every few years, a deeper penetration became possible, and with each further immersion, the scale of my own existence, my problems, fell from the all-consuming into the infinitesimal. If the above image reveals what's visible out there through a grain of sand-sized lens, I understand in a new way just how incomprehensible this universe must be, by which I mean, that it's clear that I understand nothing at all about anything.

I consider this reset necessary and important, for without periodic refreshers on the scale we're actually dealing with, people can and do become subsumed with self-importance.

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Dedicting

dedicting
Jean Lecomte du Nouÿ: A Eunuch's Dream (1874)


"That exquisite poison has no substitutes …"


By my accounting, I stopped ingesting nicotine a year ago. I mention that now because it's only very recently occurred to me that I have been Dedicting ever since, that I have been attempting whatever the opposite of addiction might be. I'm uncertain if I have been successful, for the Dedicting continues. I considered calling this story Dedicted, except I doubt whether I'll ever experience a definitive moment when I no longer feel either that tug or its absence, either of which constitute a sort of continuing relationship with the substance. It might be true that nobody's ever through with any physically addictive stuff, and/or that stuff's never truly through with them, for the attraction seems to go both ways. Tobacco's superpower lies deeper than just in the souls of its admirers, but also in its apparent ability to attract individuals unto itself. It seems to find its most appreciative followers.

It was a special class I once belonged to, the smokers.

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Preparings

preparings
Giovanni Battista Gaulli: Sketch for "The Four Prophets of Israel"
[for Il Gesù
, Rome] (c. 1675-1677)


" … perfect's almost just as relative as done ever was."


Preparing should be considered an exclusively plural term, since preparing rarely seems complete after a first iteration. Much suffering results from a fundamental misunderstanding presuming that preparing or, indeed, preparation, should be completable with any single pass, when few can be; so few that for most every everyday intents or purposes, one should presume preparation's plural nature and think of preparing as a process better thought of as Preparings, presuming multiple iterations. One other catch lurks within this concept, and that relates to its fundamentally asymptotic nature. How many iterations prove necessary to complete Preparations? Think of this as a Fundamentally Unanswerable Question —aka FUQ (implied expletive intended)—because Preparings are rarely ended because they've achieved what might be easily recognized as completion. No, Preparings end only when the preparer decides they're done, a decision which might come at any time and for any of a wide variety of reasons.

Kurt, Our Master Painter, taught me this fundamental principle of painting, or he certainly tried to teach me this.

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ReBeginning

rebeginning
Katsushika Hokusai: The Day Before the Beginning of Spring
(c. 1790) Publisher: Tsutaya Jūzaburōe


" … simply the sum of those restarts."


I imagine this morning that I am beginning, not merely beginning, but beginning again, ReBeginning. I've begun before. I've started way more than I've ever finished and I do not intend to correct that imbalance. Finishing seems way over-rated. The beginning's the thing. I figure that if I could only master beginning, I might be capable of anything, I might even, eventually, complete something, so I practice ReBeginning this morning in the belief —or is that a hope?—that this time, my efforts might finally amount to something.

I have been in the middle of the repainting project for so long that I can no longer remember the initiating premise for the work.

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Exhausting

exhausting
Jean François Raffaëlli: The Exhausted Ragpicker (1880)


" … simply too Exhausting to continue."


I've recently started noticing the weight this continuing Damned Pandemic exerts upon me. It's come to feel considerable, even unreasonable, and the newspaper promises even more of even more of the same, though the upcoming even more will continue becoming ever more highly evolved. It will become more communicable and craftier at evading our defenses, its offensive skills out-pacing our defenses. Since we must respond to defend, we're inevitably lagging competitors. Competing with this virus has been Exhausting, but insidiously so. It's never presented any particular hardship to me personally, for instance, to wear a mask in public or for this introvert to avoid gatherings. I rather enjoy going incognito and often chose not to go out into public places, though the option not to continue defending increasingly seems like a glaring omission. I'm just as free as I've ever been, just a little bit more constrained, yet the constraints, however small, seem increasingly limiting.

The experts label these feelings Pandemic Exhaustion and warn about its insidious influence.

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HamSandwich

hamsandwich
Willem Claesz. Heda: Still Life with Ham and a Roemer (1631-34)


" … the very stuff of despotism."


I will qualify what follows in advance, explaining that while I only rarely delve into what some might classify as political speech—as opposed to my usual more philosophical babble—I remain capable of engaging on the political level. Political talk rarely ages well, though today's story might straddle the political and philosophical, and might thereby consider itself more timeless than merely timely. Its topic seems timely, as this story has been aching for me to tell it. It's been my experience that while I'm avoiding telling a story that deeply desires to be told, whatever else I might produce tends to lack a certain substance. In that sense, it's like talking about what's not supposed to be talked about. Whatever else one attempts to talk about instead of what's not supposed to be talked about tends to miss the point, like an unmentionable elephant in the room sucking all the oxygen out of every alternative. I hope this story will prove to be pointed.

When Our Supreme Court codified the myth of fetal personhood into law, they managed to trivialize both the law and human life.

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Sleep

sleep
Charles Bird King: The Vanity of the Artist's Dream
Former Title: The Anatomy of Art Appreciation
Former Title: Poor Artist's Study
Former Title: Still Life, The Vanity of An Artist's Dream
(1830)


" … only then could the aspiring artist ever come out to play."


Sleep certainly heads the list of all the skills that have eluded me in this life, though I should have had adequate practice with it by now. I early on identified Sleep as an enemy—an alien state—and set about trying to eliminate it from my routine as much as possible. It seemed such a sorry waste of time, time I might spend doing whatever else I might please. The wee hours, downplayed by those who've perhaps never intimately engaged with them, seemed the perfect medium for me to practice as an artist, for a budding artist needs plenty of cave time. My earliest performances were barely fit for my own experience, practice far preceding whatever perfection might later emerge. My writing, too, demanded bounded solitude and could not be produced with any audience hovering nearby and certainly not with anyone even distantly inquisitive about how it was going at any time.

So I routinely stayed up way past my designated bedtime, reading with a flashlight beneath covers, hugging my warm bread loaf-sized radio to my chest, master of my wee hours.

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HolyDays

holydays
John F. Peto: Lights of Other Days (1906)

" … Have A Happy, anyway."


Us moderns do not celebrate HolyDays, we observe holidays instead. A Holiday serves as a secularized HolyDay such that even in the unlikely event that a Holiday started out as a HolyDay, most forms of actual religious observance, of humility, charity, or dignity will have been beaten out of any formal observance. One might succeed in privately genuflecting in the general direction of something genuinely sacred, but only if no spectacle's attempted. The spectacles belong solely to the secularists now, and are often performed with passion and fervor, but only in the general direction of mammon.

It's generally considered proper behavior to wish another "A Happy" on secular HolyDays, even if the greeting grates on one's soul.

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Seasonal

seasonal
Claude Monet: Stacks of Wheat [End of Day, Autumn] (1890/91)


" … it's not usual, whatever that means."


Each season here carries certain markers which seem to suggest and regulate certain behaviors. We've been experiencing some unseasonal weather this year which has thrown off my usual anticipations and responses. I complained plenty this Spring about the rain which kept me off the scaffolding and away from my repainting project, even though we here have been cautioned to never, never, never complain about rain. This semi-arid region can always, always, always use more moisture and last year saw us limping through on much less than usual. Last summer, too little rain. This summer, a little too much so far. The wheat crop, which likes it hot and dry, has contracted rust this year. Crop dusters buzz around the valley trying to rectify that imbalance before harvest. When I step out onto the back deck at four o'clock in the morning to gauge the day's prospects, if the sky spits at me, I feel moved to surrender right then and perhaps just head back to bed. I expected Seasonal weather but received different instead.

I remain fully capable of adapting, but something's clearly missing whenever I'm forced to fallback into adaptation.

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Being

being
Jack Gould: Untitled (party in laundromat, woman being pushed in cart) (1957)


" … the perfect profession for me."


On these midsummer evenings, I like to sit in the garage with the roll-up door open, and watch. The scene before me, freshly painted siding boards poised on two by fours balanced atop old cat litter tubs, my pop-up paint shoppe, various roses and flowers, seems like a microcosm of my life. The Schooner's parked a little further down the driveway, laurel bush out-growing its space, the mock orange that refuses to bloom spreading out behind. The cats will pass through, stop for quick head scratches, then crawl beneath something and give themselves tongue baths. They'll watch, too.

This feels like the apotheosis of my Being.

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Untouchables

untouchables
James McNeill Whistler: Amsterdam Nocturne (1883–1884)


"Just imagine how capable I'll one day feel …"


Now that The Muse and I have been back in The Villa for a year and a quarter, I'm noticing an increasing backlog of undone chores. Some appear to have become permanent and threaten to migrate out of Someday Likely To Get Done status into Untouchables, or apparent ones. These I will just consider to be features rather than problems, finished as they sit, however unsightly and indicting. Some will represent me coming to accept my limitations and others, my fundamentally lazy nature. A very few will permanently seem too daunting to ever seriously consider, bridges too far or too big of britches. However they became Untouchables, I will maintain them in that state with most of the dedication I also reserve for actually completing tasks. They will become as much a part of my identity as any actual accomplishment, that spot I can't see I never shave properly, the lucky shoes which will always look scuffed and worn and yet favorites. Idiot children.

I imagine that one day I might maintain a maintenance schedule as if I meant to maintain it.

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OutOfTheBlue

outoftheblue
James McNeill Whistler: Nocturne: Blue and Gold—Southampton Water (1872)


" … an old acquaintance, an even older friend."


It should not be news to any of my frequent readers that I sometimes suffer through some blue periods. I can get down on myself and feel downright worthless, then spool into despair territory. Nothing all that scary, just part of any normal trajectory. I personally never trusted anyone who could endlessly keep it bright and sunny, optimistic even in the bleakest times. I preferred the more human leader rather than some statue to virtue, and strived to show that I was not made of stone or anything invulnerable. Still, I despise those days when I cannot find my way. I become as if I were three again, small and overwhelmed, unable to figure out how to play the games surrounding me. I often attempt to sleep through these times under the First, Do No Harm Rule. I'm no doctor, but I figure that sleep might just be the all-around best medicine for discouragement and depression.

Then, something happens. It almost doesn't matter what.

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Misplaced

misplaced
The Old Woman Who Lost Her Dumpling:
attributed used to
Suzuki Kason (1902)


"I come to rely upon the understanding of kittens …"


Pardon me, but I seem to have Misplaced my identity. I clearly remember recently having one, though I can't quite recall when it slipped my grasp. I wonder how long this condition might last, with me an apparition of my former self, or is this the new and improved me I'd so long been aspiring to meet? This one might take some getting used to if, indeed, I could ever get used to this me, this great mystery.

We each seem to stand on a spot, a spot where we seem to belong.
Most of us stand there long enough to swear that it belongs to us, our special space, our place. Then we might Misplace that spot. Maybe we're nudged aside or just fail to notice it slipping away until it's too late. Once it's gone, it's lost as sure as any tool we just sat down then could never find again. Lost as certain as the scent of last season's flowers. Lost as certain as the certainties of youth.

A certain confusion should settle in. Where I once just knew, I can no longer quite imagine. Where I once stood ground, I now seem surrounded by insubstantial air. I might have gone anywhere but I seem to have disappeared. I left no trace. I chased after myself until I was no longer clear which direction I was headed. Already lost, I complicated my position. No way back to anywhere from here.

The most curious thing about being might be that it's not constant. Physicists insist that this all resolves to waves, ebbs, flows, pulses, and currents. Things as well as their opposites, with much more dark matter than anything visible. Life has always worked like this, like motion pictures where we mostly don't quite see the tiny spaces also projected between each frame, except sometimes continuity shifts and we're suddenly seeing the spaces instead of the movie, the blanks that always came with the story. Then, it seems as if we've Misplaced something, a key, perhaps, or the story. We were supposed to have remembered something we never quite registered as knowing, being something we always just were before without even trying. Trying then resolves nothing. What manifested without effort cannot, by effort, manifest again.

I swear that almost everything just happens. Our solutions and our intentions and our dedications chase experience, imagining stories that probably never occurred. As long as I can muster a half-decent leaning into, I seem to make progress. It almost seems as if this universe demands no more than compliance. Keep moving and meaning might emerge. Keep standing and vision and perspective might be the reward. Think too much and one might notice their spot Misplaced, some significant unnamable missing. Then this mystery deepens. I come to rely upon the understanding of kittens, who seem to seek me out then, needing some extra attention, which might be the very last thing I have left to give anyone.

©2022 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved








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Concerting

concerting
Edgar Degas: Café-Concert (The Spectators) (1876/77)


"I'd packed two pair, two for each ear …"


I avoid attending concerts. Now, of course, because of the Damned Pandemic, but before, due to the fundamentally uncontrolled nature of the performance and the audience. I never took to being herded around as if I were just another sheep in an unruly flock. I also try to avoid landing wherever crowds congregate, the parking hassles, the turnstile troubles, the behaviors I only ever see when there's a crowd surrounding me. I never learned how to behave in such venues, my reticence a reasonable result of simple lack of practice. The last concert The Muse and I attended, I spent the whole evening curled up in the fetal position, ear plugs ineffectively in, trying to avoid the caterwauling coming off the stage. Everyone else seemed delighted. I, perhaps alone in that audience, felt terrified by it; assaulted.

I think it remarkable as I watch other people show up with the right kind of chair, for only certain types of chairs are allowed into the open air arena.

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MissingMeals

missingmeals
Unknown Japanese: Set of food dishes (mukōzuke)
(early 18th century)


"My work is my reward here …"


I measure engagement by how many meals I miss when working on something. I might just fail to notice when mealtime arrives or I might find myself so focused upon whatever I'm doing that I cannot quite face pulling away, and so meal time just slips by. Other times, I find myself indecisive, unable to imagine anything like a coherent meal arriving. Why bother? Meal breaks sometimes seem like a waste of my day. It's not like I'm in any danger of drying up and blowing away. For me, most meals seem optional. If lunchtime noses past about three-thirty, I'll usually just let it slide, deciding to let supper pick up the slack. Sometimes, I abandon supper, too, usually when I'm just too tuckered to bother. By the following morning, I might regain my appetite or I might find myself focusing in and away again.

Dining out long ago lost its allure.

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Fictions

fictions
Piero di Cosimo: The Misfortunes of Silenus (circa 1500)


"Hell emerges in the absence of Fictions."


The world was going to Hell that Sunday morning, so The Muse and I decided upon a round-about route, one which might offer us a few hours beyond cell range, beyond what passes for civilization over on the West side of the mountains. We wondered if we might so easily escape the thrall. It might have been that after going to all the trouble to take the route less taken, we'd find a caravan of weary flatlanders also following our plan to escape up and out of the heat and crowds, but we were lucky and the roads were lonely. A few odd stragglers quickly passed us, leaving us to move at our own pace, to find our own cadence.

While the world went to Hell, we ascended into a Heaven of sorts.

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Strangering

strangering
Vincent van Gogh: Adeline Ravoux (1890)


"I regain my attention …"


Other than passing through on the freeway, I'd never even thought to stop to see what might welcome me here, so I arrived without preconceptions, as a genuine stranger. This city could have been anywhere. I had no emotional attachments here. The waterfront attracted my eye, but I could not recall, if, indeed, I ever knew, the name of the bay. The city looked worn but worked over, as if considerable effort had been applied to prevent it from simply becoming derelict, with mixed results. This was clearly nobody's Disneyland. Its rough edges seemed prominent. I had never wondered about the history here, how it might have managed to turn out this way. I would be Strangering here within this mystery.

I much prefer to walk when Strangering, for driving moves me too quickly for me to see very much.

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Hoteling

hoteling
Gustave Doré: Liberty (c. 1865–75)


" … we still hold the instinct to survive … hospitality."


After two and a quarter years of housebound isolation, I find myself in a hotel room this weekend. I was once a frequent guest, traveling for business. One year, I managed to stay in more than one hotel room per week on average, and I stayed in a few of those rooms for more than a week, so I must have really been on the move that year. I became accustomed to the patterns and rhythms of modern Hoteling, which seem so different from the Grand Hotel tradition. No longer does one use the lobby as an extended sitting room, for instance, taking to an overstuffed chair to read or simply people watch. Modern hotel lobbies seem reserved only for transitions, for checking in and checking out and nothing else. They usually feature little furniture other than a front desk and a concierge stand. Everything's self service.

Hoteling's a kind of camping experience.

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DashingOff

dashingoff
Fan Qi 樊圻: Album of Miscellaneous Subjects, Leaf 4 山水花鳥圖冊 (early 1650s)


"We all eventually become the genius of ourselves …"


My friend Franklin reported that he'd participated in some online gathering that garnered him more clients than any other single event in his career, over a hundred. He went on to complain that he'd been invited to participate late in the cycle and so had not prepared his presentation as carefully as he most certainly would otherwise have. He's usually more careful than that, painstakingly preparing, often, it seems, almost asymptotically, as in preparing almost to the point of never actually achieving 'prepared.' This time, though, starved of sufficient time, he hacked out a quick almost good enough contribution and was fortunate to garner more paying clients than ever before from a single presentation.

Had he had adequate time, there's really no telling how many more clients he might have found.

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Suddenlied

suddenlied
France, Lyon(?), early 16th century: Time (From Chateau de Chaumont Set) (1512–15)


"… usually expecting the unexpected …"


Occasionally, I'll decide to write about a topic only to discover that I'd already written a piece with that same title. As you doubtless noticed, I make up a fair number of my story titles by fiddling with otherwise serviceable words, trying to better fit them to my purpose. My blog software keeps me honest by disallowing duplicate titles, complicating my life if I inadvertently try to slip one by, requiring some messy searching and deleting to correct the oversight. This morning, I innocently attempted to write a story about
Suddenlies, only to discover that I'd already covered that topic in a post from five years ago. I considered just reporting that story under the Againing banner, given that I've chosen repeating as my overriding notion this quarter. Then I decided that the very fact that this title came up twice might suggest that I'm dealing with a universal experience, a pattern notable for its subtle repetition, that I had just then been Suddenlied again.

As I said in the earlier story, things tend to continue unchanged until some suddenly appears.

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Scaredy

scaredy
William Blake: The Book of Job: Pl. 12,
I am Young and ye are very Old wherefore I was afraid
(1825)


" … some days I even manage to muster an appearance …"


I often feel afraid. It never takes much. The prospect of engaging in even the smallest activity can raise the hairs on the back of my neck, rendering me frozen for a spell. The serial insult of mounting the scaffolding some days drives me into an almost comatose state where I just cannot function. The Muse asks me if I'm alright, and I am alright, just cowering from another phantom. I eventually manage to face whatever dread presented itself and evaporate it by merely moving into it. Once I begin, whatever surface tension prevented my entry seems to disappear and I'm free to go about my activity, certain only that I've sidestepped calamity for then and that it might well return again tomorrow. I slink from place to place, mustering up either courage or foolhardiness in turn, never especially brave or foolish.

When I agreed to serve as a delegate to the state convention, I figured that I'd just attend virtually since the organizers in the party had touted that they'd designed a convention which would not discriminate against those unwilling to mingle inside a superspreader event.

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Againing

againing
Winslow Homer: Boy with Anchor (1873)


" … that must be my manner of living."


For the eighteen hundred and twenty-sixth time in an almost unbroken chain, I sit down this morning to write yet another missive. I hold one intention prominent, the very same one I've held for each of the preceding mornings. I intend this one to be different than all of the others. A different title, a different focus, at least a slightly different perspective. Some insist that each of my postings, each little chapter, sums to pretty much precisely the same thing and that, while not exactly nothing, isn't ever very tightly focused, either. None of them convincingly concludes yet each seems to be up to something. I've explained before that I intend to project here a manner of living, not explaining how to live or even how to live better, but rather merely how it seems to be that I go about my living. I've previously established that I do not hold myself to be in any way an exemplar, an example of how one ought to go about living, going so far as to insist in one collection of stories just how Clueless I've always been. My most prominent purpose seems to be exposition.

That said, I also write my stories to remind myself what it is that I'm doing.

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Sprunged

sprunged
Robert William Vonnoh: Spring in France (1890)


"Some things never leave …"


A short ninety-one days ago, I landed on this shore which, today, starts heading for the door, chased off by overwhelming forces. The Solstice shoves away the powers that brought it about, Spring, which does all the heavy lifting, carrying in the longest day of the year. Spring leaves just before the beginning of the slow decline which, a mere one hundred eighty-two days hence will find us facing the final few days before Christmas from the shortest day of the year. Fear Summer, I say, and Autumn. Winter starts the renewal Spring finishes. The lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer will squander their inheritance, leaving us with less light and ever later sunrises. Spring was always the life-giver, Summer, the taker.

By the day before the Summer Solstice, Spring has sprung and just about Sprunged, an irretrievable state.

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Satisfiction

satisfiction
Kobayashi Kiyochika: Pomegranates and Grapes (1879-1881)


" … I sit each morning in an office window overlooking the center of the universe …"


I trade not in the truth, but in truths, for truths come in such variety that only plurals can properly represent them. I pity the absolutists who seek THE truth and nothing but, for they seem to unnecessarily limit the range of satisfactions possible from their enquiry, whatever it might be seeking. The desire to boil anything down into a single essence just seems to spoil the seeking. A proper conclusion tends toward the ambiguous, at least recognizing the influence differing perspectives might bring to something. Very little of what any of us experience amounts to either science or engineering, and most of what I sense might be best classified as tenaciously unsettled; could be this, might be that, or perhaps it's something else. I must, it seems to me, frame my experiences in some way that works for me to achieve satisfaction. Often, I suppose, this work results in what I might agree amounts to Satisfiction, a flavor of fact that's not above employing fiction to produce satisfaction. I make up stories.

I've long held as an ethical responsibility the need to make the most generous possible interpretations when I lack access to better information.

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ContextShifting

contextshifting
James McNeill Whistler: Man in Plaid Shirt (Not dated)


"Shifting impressions flicker before me …"


It seems perfectly representative of how change works when, with me focusing intently upon whatever I've decided to change, the context within which I labor shifts instead. It might even be that change usually works like this, that the budding change agent always labors under some misconception that whatever he's doing might prove directly useful, when it more often sums to something different than expected. I seem to mostly experience ContextShifting, which changes the meaning of whatever I'd been so intently 'fixing.' It's not so much that I'm powerless, just relatively clueless. It might be that the resulting change was what I would have wanted had I been adequately prescient at the beginning. Change seems more often what we receive rather than what we directly engineer, our job, my job, largely to make up some story that eases acceptance and encourages gratitude toward what I never really intended.

I might focus upon context if I really want more directly influence outcomes, but I question whether I really want that level of control.

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Shift

shift
William Blake: The Pastorals of Virgil, Eclogue I:
The Blasted Tree (1821)


" … There never could have been one best way …"


I began this Reconning Series by declaring myself a Begineer, a skilled purveyor of starts rather than of finishes. I never feel very certain where my beginnings might be heading and I'm almost always absolutely clueless about the ending. When it comes time to draw conclusions, I typically lose my crayon and go still and silent, for I must not be in the transformation business. I might be more an evolutionist, and a slow one at that. I head off in a direction without really knowing where that compass heading might be leading me and with little more than a vague notion in my mind of what kind of an ending might result. Unsurprisingly, then, nearing the end, I sense no great understanding emerging from this particular wandering. The enquiry, rather than any specific conclusion, might have been the purpose of this enquiry, too.

The typical metric measures "Shift," often in something like tectonic units.

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HomeRun

homerun
Harold Edgerton: Child Running [Bob Edgerton] (1939)


"I remember how it was before that flooding …"


It's two hundred and forty-five miles from the Villa to my old neighborhood in Portland, a distance I know better than any distance on this planet. I've driven that distance in every possible weather, in every season, in sickness as well as in health, and stopped at every exit along the long way at least once, probably more than once. Without too much prompting, I can muster up some personal story about every exit along that route, stories of joy and despair, hope and frustration. No other route better illustrates my life, for it represents my HomeRun, my primary route home as well as my primary route away. My home has been on each end at times, sometimes here and other times there, never in-between.

I've crawled that route on glare ice, taking two days to navigate across.

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WellAtEase

wellatease
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec: Elles: The Seated Clown,
Mlle Cha-u-Ka-o (1896)


" … a clear violation of my intention of doing nothing for a change."


I consider my inability to do nothing a serious personal shortcoming. Over the last sixty years or so, I have focused the bulk of my attention upon doing stuff, often toward being up to something, sometimes even to accomplishing shit. My life's properly been all about creating what was not there before my passage, just as if any of that might make a difference. And I understand from reports from the field, that I did manage to make some differences, local, personal, not necessarily global. I studied the lessons in self-discipline and stayed mostly true to those intentions. I never lingered in bed in the morning. I didn't surrender myself to degradation long enough to do any permanent damage. I've come through, but with this little personal shortcoming intact. It seems to me as though I might have managed to learn how to do nothing by now, to not feel so ill at ease when unengaged, but to feel instead a certain WellAtEase sensation, where the world seems well enough without me obsessing about the quality or volume of my current contribution. Just sayin'.

I might have Ill At Ease down pat, though.

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Haunter

haunter
Winslow Homer: Adirondacks Guide (1892)


" … destined to become the eye beholding the beauty …"


Make no mistake, I am here as a representative of the past. While my powers once focused upon my abilities to disrupt and introduce disquieting futures, my sole role now seems to have coalesced into one focused upon representing what once was. Consequently, children and small dogs suspect me, and with good reason, for their remit opposes mine. Both the kids and the smaller puppies should properly be attempting to make some difference, although in the small dog's case, their effort's destined to be fruitless, if only because small dogs seem frivolous and ineffective by design. The children, though, rightfully take umbrage with how it was and with how it's been, and so wade right in with whatever might prove different, and can't seem to help it, while I steadfastly stand with the past.

My memories have not started fading yet.

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Ghosted

ghosted
Paul Gauguin: Manao tupapau [She Thinks of the Ghost
or The Ghost Thinks of Her)] (1894/95)

"I doubt if I'm here this morning."


Returning to the scene of a former life reliably induces the sense that I have become a ghost. I almost remember the details of my daily life there, but not quite. I perceive in general gists, relative positions, though distances seem distinctly different, whether foreshortened or lengthened, funny somehow. I recall how I used to slip down to the corner market to buy a pack of smokes but I cannot for the life of me remember how it felt to be panicking over a needed nicotine fix. My whole life then must have been perpetually suspended upon that knife edge separating a fleeting serenity and a more permanent insecurity. I inhabited what I would one day recall as a heaven on Earth, but had one devil of a time living in it then.

Times were hard. money, scarce, success uncertain, even unlikely.

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Boyk

boyk
Paul Gachet: Six Etchings: Head of a Kitten, Part of a set. (1895)


" … contribute his own gibberish into our conversation."


House cats do not speak English because their owners tend to slip into an irreproducible dialect of the language whenever their "kitten" appears. A stalwart cat becomes a kitten, regardless of its age, and jazz-like variations of its given name start spewing from said owner's yap. I have inexplicably begun calling my own "kitten" Max, Boyk. Perhaps just to get along or maybe because he knows from whence his cat food floweth, he responds as if he recognizes himself in that alien sound. I caught myself holding forth to him on the etymology of his latest Pet Name, as if he would quite naturally understand or be interested when I suspect he's just used to my babbling. He might even find my plumy-toned mumbling reassuring, a familiar sound in the otherwise quiet as a mouse early morning house.

Boyk, for those discerning readers, is a derivative of 'Boy Kitty,' a classification I often catch myself proclaiming when encountering Max in the wild.

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Aaaah

oooh
Suzuki Harunobu: Young Man Reading over a Young Woman’s Shoulder (1765 - 1770)


"Reconning resolves back into itself …"


As I approach the fifth anniversary of the start of my daily writing practice, I also see another impending ending. This series, this Reconning Series, seems to be heading in the very same direction its nineteen siblings met. I began each series on a solstice or equinox and wrote as if attempting to discover something. Each a Hero's Journey, in the full Joseph Campbell sense of that term. I'd depart reluctantly, still attached to the recently completed but not then feeling as though I'd achieved closure. I'd persist, meeting the usual collection of dragons and bugaboos, more or less vanquishing each in turn, before finding myself at the always surprising end of yet another writing season, attempting to celebrate a homecoming of sorts. Each felt more like a combination homecoming and departure again, because each was both, or at least I experienced them as both. Before the carcass of the old series had even cooled, I was off in some new direction.

As I mentioned in yesterday's story, I sustain myself as if a bird of the field, taking advantage of the natural abundance surrounding me.

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Drizzling

drizzle
Utagawa Kunisada: A Man in Nightly Rain (1835 - 1836)


" … in need of some Drizzling to remind me what I was trying to accomplish …"


Yesterday reminded me why I'd planned to finish repainting The Villa's exterior before full summer visited. Working in at best partial shade with an almost fierce sun beating down upon me, I found no escape from my labor. I shifted into one of my many dissociative states, the one my father taught me about long before I turned eight years old. I tucked my head down as if that make me invisible and worked, forcing myself ahead, step by step, insisting that I finish. I can become quite the taskmaster sometimes. My neck turned bright red as the sun found its inexorable way through or around my havelock's shade. I sweated through my overall bib.

Afterwards, I sat in shade rehydrating with beer and wondering what I thought I was doing here.

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Penance

penance
circle of Jean Bourdichon: Leaf from a Book of Hours: King David (c. 1500)


" … if not precisely wiped clean, at least a shade tidier …"


I'm not so much repainting The Villa Vatta Schmaltz as I am performing Penance for past mistakes. When The Muse and I bought this place, I was then a naive homeowner. Indeed, I doubt that I would have agreed to purchase this house had I been even half as experienced in home ownership as I am now, for I was a reluctant student of the dark arts of home ownership and I remain a wary graduate of innumerable hard knock lessons. Not that I'm complaining, for I doubt that I could have even hoped to be half the man I am today had this old place not put me through my paces, serially, often cruelly. I hold no grudges. I count most of those lessons as blessings, several still in considerable disguise. A few, I continue to hold genuine contrition for having committed, though a couple of those sins were clearly more incurred by omission than any personal action I might have taken.

Life collects its toll.

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TheAges

TheAges
Rembrandt van Rijn: Self-portrait (c. 1628)

"TheAges eventually reveal everything …"


How fortunate for me that I inhabit this particular time slice in history. I sit here this morning, surrounded by TheAges, much of their story as yet unwritten. Creation's probably only beginning, precursor very likely hardly hinting at upcoming marvels. I try to remember that much of what I take for granted today was unavailable to even the most powerful people in the world a scant few generations past. I see no reason not to believe that the future, the one within which I might at best aspire to become a small footnote, won't deliver similar wonders. Born neither too late nor too early, I seem to be suspended here. I am in no particular hurry.

Almost five years ago now, I began this portion of my journey.

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SideTracking

sidetracking
Juan Gris: Violin and Glass (1915)


" … I'm just along for the ride."


"I had planned" are the keywords of my efforts this Spring. Whatever I claim to be doing, I'm probably, in any observed moment, very likely to be SideTracking rather than accomplishing whatever "I had planned." I admit that I hold conflicting objectives and that these conflicts cannot be resolved. I figure that this probably amounts to a completely normal condition, such that anyone would be hard pressed to even remember ever inhabiting any other state. We as a species tend to stack our obligations up in messy collections, with one pile inevitably infringing upon another and another upon another, and so on, ad infinitum.

My intentions are never for naught, though they do suffer from considerable buffeting.

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WashingMyPhone

washingmyphone
Lucian and Mary Brown: Untitled
[baby standing next to bath tub] (c. 1950)


" … little wiser for my absence."


Much of the work I engage in around The Villa either induces a trance in me or requires that I induce a trance in myself as a precondition for participating. I cannot seem to retain my wits about myself when I'm attempting to complete some mindless task, but must first become adequately mindless myself. Different tasks require different trances and varying degrees of that magic mindlessness, and it can be a real challenge to shift and then switch back after completion. I can attest that I am not always successful, and frequently find myself stumbling only partly present into whatever comes next.

I will occasionally even embarrass myself like I did last night when I was juggling between starting supper and switching out of my paint scraping overalls.

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ApparentlyMeaningless

appearantlymeaningless
Willian Frazer Garden: Trees and Undergrowth (1885)


"Appearances effectively deceive."


Much of my training focused upon engaging in purposeful work, activities worth my investment, yet I've spent the bulk of my life engaged in ApparentlyMeaningless effort. This experience does not mean that I have largely invested my time in meaningless work, because there's often a huge difference between the ApparentlyMeaningless and the absolutely meaningless, and I might question whether absolutely meaningless even serves as a meaningful category, given how meaningfulness tends to emerge from even the most ApparentlyMeaningless work. The flat ceiling perhaps serves as the epitome of ApparentlyMeaningless effort. Why do we go to the considerable bother of constructing and maintaining flat ceilings when there's absolutely nothing but custom encouraging that effort? Flat is hard, yet we insist upon it.

My stories comprise my most significant body of ApparentlyMeaningless work.

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YetAnotherRainyDay

yetanotherrainyday
Gustave Caillebotte: Paris Street; Rainy Day (1877)


"Cabin fever reigns while rain falls."


The low pressure preceded the rain's arrival, then hung around as it settled in. Yesterday morning dawned sunny. Today's slipped in unnoticed behind a thick cloud veil. I heard the distant dripping through the brief night, downspouts hardly even amused at the trickle coming off the roof. The snowball bushes have almost lost their blossom for this season. They sometimes grace us with a second blooming in the early Fall, but it's not at all clear why. We're moving beyond the damp season now and into the desiccating one. We live by a single principle here, that we never complain about moisture in whatever form it appears. We must at least pretend we're delighted by its presence, however unpleasant its persistence.

My to-do list stretches to new lengths.

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OpenWindows

openwindows
Édouard Vuillard: Landscape:
Window Overlooking the Woods (1899)


For the first June in our twenty-plus year tenancy in The Villa Vatta, all the original double hung windows freely open and close, both top and bottom sash. This might seem like a minor accomplishment, but it precisely represents how us homeowners measure progress toward full possession. It seems entirely unremarkable that this accomplishment required twenty years of intermittent effort, because great things, or, at least, the greatest of things, exclusively manifest via lengthy intermittency. We're busy and our priorities, continually shifting, serve as no definitive determinant of what we might complete or when. We're essentially simultaneously working on everything and so, working on nothing. It's a genuine wonder that anything ever turns up as done. We're well accustomed to works in progress. It remains the normal homeowner's primary lifestyle.

I noticed the windows working because this week, after a lingering March, OpenWindows season seems to have begun with the First of June.
When we first moved in here, this same time of year, not every window would yield to opening. Many had broken window weight cords and a couple had been painted shut, a felony even in friendly courts. I imagined then a future time when I would spend the bulk of my homeowner time reclining within an environment of my own making, where pretty much everything worked and there were no rooms we'd bar from visitors. Kitchen, baths, stairs, and porches would all have been finished and operating as intended. The place might even exude a faint scent of fresh limes. It would be The Muse's and mine and no others'.

The Muse found the first blossom of what will become a very large and spreading climbing rose, which she's planned to take over the pergola over the back deck. When we first moved in, that rose's predecessor dominated that space, scenting the back half of the place in this very season, providing a plenty good enough reason to want to open windows wider than we could force them at that time. I hope to repaint the pergola before that rose takes over, then once that rose covers the back, another of those quiet little metrics of ownership will have manifested. The Muse will sit beneath that rose's essential shade on even the hottest summer days and feel well-covered. Just another outward sign of our inward ownership, each a source of quiet pride.

The massive Refurbish we accomplished last year completed something more than half of the outstanding fixes we'd imagined necessary. The exterior repainting I'm attempting to accomplish between rainstorms this Spring, will, when finished, represent a huge accomplishment, a combination penance and advancement. I keep whispering to myself, with distinctly mixed emotions, that I will never be repainting this place's exterior again, but I know for certain that I will catch myself wandering around the perimeter at some point in the future, marveling at what I completed and how I managed to finish. As of this writing, completion remains a speculation. I'm making slow progress and when asked this week how much longer the work would take, I plead No Contest. It's not at all clear, as, of course it should be unclear, if I will ever manage to finish, what with all the high priority distractions encumbering forward progress and my own failing motivation. It's a genuine wonder anything ever gets done, but when OpenWindows season comes, I'm reminded why I begin.

—————————

I always feel tempted, come another Friday morning, to find some over-riding metaphor to represent the events of the receding week. Something like the local Walgreens might feature in a full page, full color advertisement stuffed into a Sunday supplement, declaring their OpenWindows Week Sale, just as if whatever the heading declared constituted some real reason for celebrating by slashing regular prices. Nothing, apparently, says "Happy!" like a fifteen percent price reduction! It's a continuing seduction for me to produce just such a reduction, the briefest of summaries, to what, precisely, save my loyal readers the trouble of doing what they apparently relish, reading my stories? The stories were what they were and came without forward designs. I did not write any of them so that they might be conveniently digested into composite mush. Such, I guess, is my writer's experience.

I began this writing week reveling in
Slivers. "I search for and maintain my knowledge-bases, but I also often catch myself engaging based upon mere Slivers of intuition, and they're not often wrong. I have no proof, no systemic scientific evidence, but anyone who's ever lived, ever thrived, should already understand that it's not just knowledge that drives their successes."

I next wrote about a bless
éd form of dependence in Helped. "We're not here to isolate. Nobody is. We're here engaged in an essentially communal endeavor, part of the purpose of which simply must be to find premises for engaging together."

I reported from the site of yet another vigil called to remember a fresh set of victims in
Vigiling. "The candles we hold give in to the wind. Some spend the whole time relighting their neighbor then receiving a relight from them. Back and forth and forth and back again."

I engaged in what some might have interpreted as whining about This Damned Continuing Pandemic in
Squelching, the most popular posting this period. "My home is my cloister, I should not want. My own backyard should be green enough pasture, but isn't always."

I reported on what simply seems obvious in
LittleBoy. "I take it as a first principle that every adult male carries a LittleBoy around inside him. Some days, the adult's in charge, but many, he's not."

I next considered the type of effort, exceedingly common, where the ending proves elusive, in
Asymtoting. "I might find myself in one of Virgil's more curious circles of Hell, where I'll just keep working until infinity appears. Or, it could be some undocumented circle of Heaven where I'm destined to pursue my heart's desire without ever once actually possessing it. Almost there, but never quite, Asymtoting to my own delight."

I finished my writing week praising my many
NewBeginnings. "To be indentured to some imminent satisfaction might produce the most satisfying possible experience. Supper savored in advance usually surpasses any one actually swallowed."

What over-arching meaning might I propose for my writing week just passed? It truly does not matter, for whatever I might propose might well conflict with one you'd supposed. Better, most likely, to let those stories lay where they landed. Each, I suspect, contained some Sliver of universal truth, slivers we each sometimes forget. How we're Helped here. How our Vigilings never for naught. How life does, indeed, sometimes seem to insist upon each of us Squelching significant pieces of our story. How we carry a LittleBoy within and how we sometimes seem to be endlessly Asymtoting rather than accomplishing anything, our only redemption coming early each morning like another in a seemingly endless series of NewBeginnings! Thank you so very much for following my ramblings, even if I steadfastly refuse to summarize them for you, though I will, in season, sometimes consent to opening some windows.

©2022 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved







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NewBeginnings

newbeginnings
Marsden Hartley: The Last of New England—The Beginning of New Mexico: (1918–19)


" … with hungry eyes we run into the day."


Depending upon how I parse my life, it's either comprised of endings or beginnings, and probably both. I'd wager that my life, and any life, features many more beginnings than endings, though, again, depending upon what I consider a beginning and an ending. I've grown to think of every morning to at least represent, if not precisely 'be', a NewBeginning, where the slate, if not exactly wiped clean, seems to lose some clutter. My life seems much simpler at three in the morning than it ever does at noon. By sunset, which in early June at this latitude comes ever nearer 9PM, with twilight stretching until well after ten, I'm never certain when the end of any day has finally come. It arrives after I've already headed for bed, where I dream of fewer complications and the promise of a mulligan.

If only each new morning actually brought a NewBeginning, a Dorian Gray Day where history's relegated to an odd attic corner and I have no reputation.

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Asymtoting

asymtoting
William Blake: Colinet’s Journey:
Milestone Marked LXII Miles to London,
from The Pastorals of Virgil (1821)


"Almost there, but never quite …"


Everyone insists that everyone needs at least one overwhelming, almost infinite aspiration in their life. Well, they actually insist that others need that. For the most part, everyone's pretty much satisfied with aspirations that they can wrap their arms around, for those infinite buggers too easily overwhelm. Our whole essentially reductionist understanding of project management utterly depends upon an ability to chunk infinites into more infinitesimal pieces, then assuming that linear strings of finite activities might somehow expand to satisfy some more infinite need. This does not always prove to be the case. In fact, it might be that this is the rarest of all possible cases and that the normal case cannot be covered by standard project management understanding and its dependence upon finites. The more typical case seems to attempt to muster infinites to produce infinites by a process I might call Asymtoting.

Asymtoting seems more like driving a car in which one cannot quite see over the dashboard or reach the pedals.

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LittleBoy

littleboy
Claude Monet: Boy in the Country (1857)


"May I never grow weary of yearning."


I take it as a first principle that every adult male carries a LittleBoy around inside him. Some days, the adult's in charge, but many, he's not. More often than most adult males will admit, their LittleBoy has taken control. No telling what might happen then.

The LittleBoy can be kind or cruel, generous or stingy.

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Squelching

squelching
Günter Fruhtrunk: Cloister Garden (1963)


"My home is my cloister …"


By my own assessment, I've become an expert at sequestering. I maintain no public schedule of appearances other than to manifest at pharmacy or grocery, both on irregular bases. I shun invitations. I do not ever drop in to visit. I keep my own counsel and exclusively mind to my own business. I feel overwhelmed, unable to maintain my own expectations, let alone live up to any others'. I'm behind on my weeding and feeling as though I might never finish the current repainting project. I hold myself hostage but send no ransom notes. I feel reasonably certain that nobody would respond to my ransom demands, regardless.

Two years and two full months into This Damned Pandemic, I might finally be approaching the eigenvalue of my disengagement.

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Vigiling

vigiling
Pierre Guérin: The Vigilant One (1816)


" … keeping the faith after it's been wounded again."


We all know where to go, where one goes when they're intending to show up. Some bring signs, others, candles. We all bring evidence that we have not forgotten and aren't likely to ever forget. We wonder sometimes if anyone besides us listens. We keep repeating our slogans, our mantras, our prayers anyway. We make mournful noises. Even if we're only making symbolic sounds, we figure that we've made our choices. Perhaps we gather solely to reassure ourselves.

There is no man here, nobody really in charge, no one charged with creating change, nobody who's job description includes empathic listening.

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Helped

helpedalong

Martin Schongauer: Shield with a Lion, Held by an Angel (c. 1430/50)


" … I'm good to go again, together."


As the lineman from the power company wrapped the power line running in front of the slice of wall I intended to paint, I caught myself thinking back to my first pass repainting that wall. It was a truly different time and place, before The Muse and I went on exile. Work was scarce so I decided to do something about the most embarrassing wall on the place, the South-facing one that someone in the past had attempted to save by very nearly destroying it. Rather than gently smooth the weathered surface. the perpetrator had liberally smeared silicon caulk all over the hundred year old siding boards, creating a truly terrible mess. Silicon easily fouls sandpaper, possess an extremely high kindling temperature, and a lifespan of something around fifty years. I ultimately had to tease that stuff out of the wood with an extremely anemic heat gun while suspended from a makeshift ladder-supported scaffold of sorts, a mushy old plank I'd borrowed for the purpose. This through the hottest part of a summer. I labored in tortured isolation.

I can honestly say that I made that first pass all by myself.

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Slivers

5:27:2022slivermoon
View of a Sliver Moon
from The Villa's upstairs hall back window,
early morning 5/27/2022

" … when I heeded what I couldn't have known for certain."


It must be clearest to me that I do not really know what I'm doing, though I suspect that my more dedicated readers understand well enough to appreciate the depth of my ignorance, the shallowness of my knowledge. I remain reasonably certain that nobody reads my writing with the intention of learning anything, since I seem to have very little if anything at all to impart. I mostly deal in impressions without drawing all that many conclusions. Any proclaimed certainty from me might be evidence of some fresh delusion. I'm mostly justifiably confident that I do not know all that much.

In our era, knowledge has become perhaps our primary delusion.

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NotAllIn

NotAllIn
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Wrestlers in a Circus (1909)


"He who picks away at things … also makes progress."


I suppose that ambivalence amounts to the greatest sin. When I cannot go All In on something, I seem to fritter away my gifts, however modest. I divide then slowly conquer myself, undermining my best intentions. Still, as I explored during my Authoring series, being AllIn might resolve little all by itself, for it, too, seems to take a toll, though perhaps a tad more decisively. I am realizing that I'm NotAllIn on my current batch of efforts. This Reconning Series seems to lack a certain focus. Repainting The Villa has not proven to feel all that motivating, certainly not as energizing as I'd expected it to seem. This Spring, with the weather definitely not cooperating, I've managed to fall behind on almost everything I've tried initiating. I'm realizing that some significant something's been missing and I'm loathe to understand precisely what. I'm already sorry I brought this up.

I should start listing the standard lame excuses here, explaining how this present condition might not actually be my fault.

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Knots

knots
Akan, Brass: Goldweight [Knot] (19th-20th century)


"I might have arrived too late to ever actually arrive."


I am not yet the man I intended to become. Neither am I the husband I aspired to be, nor the gardener, the songwriter, not the neighbor or the father, either. On this occasion of The Muse and my twentieth wedding anniversary, very little seems to have turned out as we'd so confidently projected back on that unforgettable day in May when we publicly declared our intention to stay together as long as forever might carry us. Those people, us, seem so innocent now, not having yet experienced all we came to know. They didn't know the depths to which I would not become. Neither did I.

That The Muse and I remain together probably amounts to at least a minor miracle.

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MovingScaffolding

movingscaffolding
Katsushika Hokusai 葛飾北斎: Fuji with a Scaffold,
Detatched page from
One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku hyakkei) Vol. 3 (circa 1835-1847)


"The next slice will very likely seem completely different …"


I expect some controversy to continue into the far distant future whenever the question of change enters the conversation, particularly whenever the question of how much shift constitutes a "real" change. I contend that infinitesimal shifts might carry significant impact while others contend that nothing very short of a tectonic event creates much difference. I'm noticing, for instance, just how much difference I experience after I finish MovingScaffolding. I yesterday relocated the tower just two lengths down the wall, a distance of about a dozen feet, yet when I hoisted up the pieces to add the third tier, I felt as though I was standing in absolutely uncharted territory. The sea legs I'd so ably demonstrated atop the prior placement abandoned me and the shaky involuntary twerking motion had moved back into my legs again. I realized that I would have to relearn my whole scaffold repertoire, just like every time before. Twelve feet proved ample shift to qualify as significant.

I began the moving back into ritual, placing a plank across the top support, eying the electric service wire with fresh suspicion.

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MendingMitres

mendingmitres2


" … to square up that which was never square to begin with … "


The Muse holds woodshop fantasies. She dreams of sawing and planing and sanding fine wooden creations into existence. I'm the guy who hopes to never own another power tool and wouldn't use a powered saw if I had one. My sander's plenty of power tool for me. She seems to embrace opportunities to cope with obtuse angles while I seek opportunities to avoid them, yet here I am, facing a stack of mitered corners needing mending.

The Villa might be classified as a foursquare, but it's not precisely square, not rectangular, either.

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TopCoating

topcoating
Vincent van Gogh: The Large Plane Trees
[Road Menders at Saint-Rémy] (1889)


"TopCoating's practice for the FinishCoat's flourish."


I believe our language proves generally inadequate to represent our experience. We adopt labels which, if taken literally, seem to materially misrepresent what they intend to impart, but we've mostly tacitly agreed to let that insufficiency pass, considering no better could possibly be following. To become educated, then, might be to finally be introduced to the real meanings, those which cannot take formal form in words or phrasings. I might say I've been painting without noting or even really intending to suggest that I've said almost nothing about what I've actually been doing, for painting, like everything else, comes in layers, in stages, and it depends upon which stage I've been engaging in, whether I've managed to impart any understanding about what I have actually been doing. I could give a hint, though, that the part of painting I have been engaging in actually involved a brush and paint. This almost makes this stage unique in the various stages of painting. Not all painting involves paint or brushes.

I was engaging in the fine and satisfying art of TopCoating yesterday, this effort distinct from the equally fine and perhaps even more satisfying art of FinishCoating, which I expect to engage in later this morning.

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Transplant

transplant1
Adriaen Coorte: Still Life with Asparagus (1697)


"Most came from somewhere else and grew into this place …"


In this valley, folks give considerable credence to the native born. We use the phrase "born and raised here" to claim that birthright. All others take second place. Though my birth family moved me here when I was eight months old, I cannot rightfully claim the native born title, for I was born elsewhere. I, too, remain a carpet-bagger, like most folks here, not to even mention the forty-some years I did not live here, for I was one of the majority who relocated to someplace with more opportunity than this small city could afford me, and I became one who could not sustain viability after returning, so that I had to go away and reinvent myself all over again a second time before I could try to call this place mine again. I needed a place with a bigger future and a much shorter memory for me to ever outgrow who I'd become known as when growing up here. Like most, I guess, I felt that I sincerely needed to reinvent myself before I could grow into my true self, however self-deluded that might make me seem.

I wonder how the 'born and raised' crowd ever found enough space to properly reinvent themselves for adulthood.

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Respiting

respiting
Camille Pissarro: Rain Effects (1879)


" … a rusty iron fist enclosed in a soggy velvet glove."


I claim to be repainting The Villa, but I've only spent about one in five days painting so far. Almost two months in and I've completed only two stripes of wall, with a third one perhaps a day and a half away from done. Had I been able to work steadily each day, I might be a week away from finishing the job, but instead, I'm suspended somewhere not quite in the middle, in the middle of the first third, with no idea when I might finish, confident that my clever plan to complete the work before the searing summer heat reduces operating hours has become a shambles. Further, I carry a decent start on a sense of guilt for not having realized the progress I'd so confidently predicted before I began. Not only have I proven disappointing in delivery, I predicted poorly, too.

What was it that I did with that tranche of non-refundable time?

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ThinkingAboutThinking

thinkingaboutthinking
James Gillray: Political Mathematician’s, Shaking the Broad Bottom’d Hemispheres (1807)


"There are good reasons I'm not a civil engineer."


Frequent offenders (er, readers) here will have noticed my fractured relationship with most things mathematical. I am nobody's mathematician, not even my own, a condition that baffles about as much as it delights me. I understand that I really should not revel in any utter ignorance, but I get some satisfaction in recognizing this difference. I'm clearly not the standard issue. I recognized early that my MannerOfThinking was apparently insufficient to accumulate the requisite inventory of procedures and rules to support even a modest mathematical practice. Further, one apparently needed to exhibit something like a genuine interest in concepts that, quite frankly, never made much of an impression on me. I could never quite find interesting answering or even asking mathematical questions, ones intended to definitely decide something.

I have sometimes, though, gazed longingly across the chasm, wondering if I might someday and somehow stumble upon some spare proficiency in something mathematical.

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TheObserver

theobserver
Vincent van Gogh:
Terrace and Observation Deck at the Moulin de Blute-Fin, Montmartre (early 1887)


" … to feel as if my presence mattered for something …"


I find repainting The Villa refreshing because it involves me actually doing something. I'm scrambling up and down the scaffolding. I'm caulking cracks. I'm rolling and brushing in lengthy 'Wax On, Wax Off' exercises that leave my arms rubbery and my hair in disarray. I ache by the end of the day and I sleep deeply. This pattern seems very different to me because, I realize, that I've spend most of my life not as a doer, but as TheObserver. I did not plan not to do anything for a living, but I quickly became a supervisor then later a consultant, both occupations that observe in lieu of doing. They produce intangibles, exhaust insidiously, and leave little behind, certainly no physical product, not even anything as ordinary as a finished paint job. I could never at the end of a shift walk around something and marvel that I had made that. Like most holding jobs these day, I provided services, working without actually producing anything, a rather lonely and isolating sort of occupation.

Much of what's written these days appears without internal attribution.

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Paranoiac

paranoiac
Francesco Colonna: Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
-The terrified Poliphilus flying before the dragon (fol. d iii verso) (1499)

" … reassuring us that we're Hell-bound without hand baskets."


I apologize for what follows, for I find what follows extremely disturbing. I only write the following because I notice myself wrestling with how things seem to be. How things seem to be, to my estimation, should come naturally, yet they do not always seem to come naturally, for we inhabit a distinctly Paranoiac culture, and the paranoid cannot seem to ever just let things be. The paranoid feel as though they somehow owe the world salvation and they're always acting, or always saying that they're acting, to save the world, as if the world needed saving, as if they held leverage to save the world, both deeply questionable propositions. The most paranoid behave as if they are on a mission from God, an affectation that I suspect God, should such a being exist, finds deeply disturbing but hardly surprising, for if we were actually made in God's image, God should be intimately familiar with Paranoiac reactions, and so understand the choices presented and selected.

I suspect that paranoia's a choice, a particularly seductive one, and one which starts with a single victim before working outward from that middle to infect others both inadvertently and also on purpose.

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Challenging

challenging
Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas:
Study for "Young Spartan Girls Challenging Boys"
Former Title: Study for "The Young Spartans Exercising"
Alternate Title: Petites Filles Spartiates provoquant des Garcons /
Spartan Girls Provoking the Boys (c. 1860-61)


"I'm just wrestling down another run-of-the-mill conundrum."


From where I stand atop the scaffolding, I cannot quite see into the one valley on my roof that manages to catch every bit of debris that passes by. There's a clog of accumulated leaves, Maple tree whirligigs, and hardened mud rendering the gutter in that corner, the only inside corner along that roofline, essentially inoperable. When it rains, water pours over the gutter and down onto the fiberglass roof of my cold frame, sounding like an arrhythmic timpani behind the rain's otherwise quiet patter. This clog hangs just above the slice of wall I'm currently Challenging myself to repaint.

I was taught that in order to feel fully alive, a person needs at least one great and almost overwhelming Challenging expectation hanging over their life.

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HollowedDays

HollowedDays
Cornelis Huysmans: The Hollow Road (c. 1700)


" … we're resigned …"


Our mostly feral cat Molly supervises the day-to-day operations around The Villa Vatta Schmaltz. She tends to be the first to notice whenever something, anything's changed. She's sniffing scornfully around the difference, just as if to determine who might be to blame for this latest outrage. I'm convinced that she'd rather everything just stay the same from day to week to year. She insists upon regular meal times and comes sniffing around should I somehow miss the deadline. She's capable of moping when she's denied her way. She's loving, in her fashion, which sometimes means she's slashing at a hand that was only trying to reassure her. She trusts no human.

The times when The Muse goes away for a few days upsets Molly most.

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Sleepwalking

sleepwalking
Honoré Daumier: The Hazard of Sleeping on a Journey (1843)


"I could be participating in One Mysterious Dream."


"I will take to the morning on the first day of my life,
and wander through the sparkling dew and sunshine,
and let her icy tingle wipe the sleep out of my soul,
for it seems to me I surely have been dreaming all this time;
but I almost half remember,
this one mysterious dream,
that came upon me just before I rose."

—One Mysterious Dream (A lyric I wrote back in the seventies)

I'm uncertain whether I'm Sleepwalking through this part of my life since I have little with which to compare my present state of mind, state of mind being at best a fleeting sort of experience, and not the sort to hang around to serve as the basis for any comparison, but I feel as though I might have recently been less than fully attentive.

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Forgivenness

forgivenness
Pier Leone Ghezzie: The Prodigal Son (c. 1720–30)


" … looking for some more Forgivenness to replace it."


If anything, age, maturity, further deepens my sense of inadequacy. What might have begun as a quiet stumble has by now established itself as a repeated pattern, a part of my personality, no longer merely transitive information but established definition. I still hold aspirations, though I mostly successfully hold them at bay. I do not wake up most days with any renewed sense that I might outgrow some long ago established shortcoming. I usually wake up accepting who and what I seem to have become, not often aspiring to overcome or get beyond anything. Some days' though, I'm tempted to ignore the preponderance of evidence and believe again, if only for a few fleeting moments, that I might hold different fates, untapped abilities, long hidden skills that might liberate me from some long-standing embarrassing shortcoming. These beliefs almost never deliver on their innocent promises, and leave me nurturing what I might call Forgivenness for myself again.

I think of Forgivenness as the self-bestowed state allowing acceptance of apparent fate.

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Paced

paced
Xiao Yuncong 蕭雲從: Album of Seasonal Landscapes, Leaf G (previous leaf 7) 山水圖冊 (1668)


"Slow and steady sustains a pace."


All activity seems to possess a pace, a rhythm most natural to its motion. This cadence doesn't always immediately disclose itself. It seems common for initial engagement to feature effort sometimes wildly out of synch with this natural one and it's not at all uncommon for the first few results to suffer somewhat from this absent understanding, too rushed or too painstakingly formed. Either can affect the quality of both the result as well as with the experience of producing the result. Initial discomfort often results from some mis-match between the adopted and the natural pace of a piece of work, and diagnosing this difficulty tends to be complicated, in that too many unknowns enter into the equation. A milling around period's often necessary before an appropriate Pace can emerge, often after investing altogether too much effort. One wonders how anyone could maintain a practice until stumbling upon a rhythm and pace that makes it easy in comparison.

I've long preached about the necessity of finding this natural rhythm but I'm realizing with repainting The Villa, that I had and still have no clue about how to induce this understanding.

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Recuperating

Recuperating
Unknown: Twenty-Armed Dancing God Ganesha,
Remover of Obstacles
(10th century, India, Madhya Pradesh)


" … the true meaning of life was presented on a day
when I was tucked up on the couch, Recuperating from something."


In the middle of it, Recuperating feels indistinguishable from slacking. The inactivity seems identical. I struggle to interpret my condition with the generosity it might not wholly deserve, for if I were true to my upbringing, I would have already cleared myself for reengagement and ended this forced idleness, but I am not true to my upbringing. I have been more or less actively rebelling against my upbringing since before I was fully brought up, and I seem unlikely to change my behavior now. It's not that I was raised by wolves. I mostly revere my parents intentions, even though they were sometimes difficult to discern. My most generous interpretation insists that they always meant well even if they weren't always able to do as well as they intended. In that, I was raised to be like them, but a point came where I needed to make my own decisions, my own choices, and beyond that point I needed to become my own parent and, curiously, my own child.

I wounded my knee painting.

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TheMovie

themovie
Charles Sheeler: Church Street El (1920)


" … none of it can ever be usefully interpreted literally …"


I believe that I am immersed within a movie produced especially for my edification and occasional enlightenment. The scenes I witness reflect something about me, always allegorically, and it's always up to me to interpret what they're trying to say. Some days I pay close attention. Other days, I doze. I know for certain that I miss much that might have proven significant had I paid closer attention, but it remains a significant part of the human condition, to which I'm no less subject than you, to not always pay close enough attention such that opportunities to more deeply understand quite naturally slip by. Nobody else can interpret my movie for me and I can never interpret anyone else's movie for them, either, and not just because I cannot quite see their movie from my perspective. Sometimes, a movie appears that was apparently produced for communal consumption. In those cases, more than one might watch and make shared meaning from the experience. This world is a complex multi-plex, with innumerable simultaneous movies running on an almost infinite number of screens.

Very few things are as they first seem.

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DsKnees

dsknees
Unknown Artist from Mexico, Guerrero, Olmec: Kneeling Figure (c. 1200-600 BC)


"Humility might humiliate …"


That part of planning asking the planner to list vulnerabilities always bugged me. Even I knew that the known vulnerabilities posed little threat, if only because one tends to cringe in sympathetic anticipation whenever anything threatens a known vulnerability. The real vulnerabilities prove to be unlistable. It's their very nature. I, for instance, when starting to repaint The Villa's exterior, would never have thought to identify my knees as anything like a vulnerability. Thanks to a persistent insistence to avoid jogging, skiing, and spinning, my knees have never bothered me. I am not now nor do I ever expect to be enqueued for knee replacement surgery, but six weeks into the effort, D'sKnees have become an unanticipated issue.

Perhaps it was those days spent grubbing out the swamp elm roots behind the garage that first prompted the pain.

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Winering

winering
Willem Claesz Heda: Still Life with a Gilt Cup (1635)


" … we already live in a destination now …"


I remember when this valley evoked not a single notion of wine. Decades later, its very identity seems inexorably tied to the stuff. A place once revered for peas became one renowned for wine, with wineries dotting the rural byways and tasting rooms lining Main Street. It's a small city story many aspire to replicate, from backwater to tourist destination, from home town to boom town. I woke from my Rip Van Winkle dream to find myself living in The Napa of the North and I doubt that I will ever successfully adjust to this shift. Cute Crap Shoppes have taken over my once practical central business district. The Goodwill Store's moving out beyond the edge of town, some tourist attraction soon to follow into its space. Barrel Tasting Weekends, periodic seemingly spontaneous celebrations, bring grid lock to downtown and lines of expensively-clad tour bike riders wandering around in circles.

The Villa Vatta Schmaltz still sits on the same three way corner it was built on a hundred and sixteen years ago when this was the edge of civilization and streetcars swept through our streets.

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Affinity

affinity
Leaf from Gratian's Decretum: Table of Affinity
(c. 1270-1300) Italy, probably Naples, 13th century


"almost identical, always unique."


I met Mark and The Muse on the same day, September 14, forever after a holiday, a day for celebrating Affinity, a mysterious attractor, a ceaseless benefactor. I cannot recount or recall how it was that we found ourselves so connected. It seemed quite natural at the time, nothing entirely unexpected yet also something absolutely extraordinary. It seemed as if we could always finish each other's sentences, always understand, always empathize. Now, when Mark visits, old patterns revisit, too. An ease. A conversation cadence more than familiar, so natural as to beg identification. We just are together, picking up wherever we last left off, continuing the narrative where it had always seemed to be headed.

Mark and his wife Rita were the first to visit The Muse and I when we entered into exile.

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SheetMetalScrewed

sheetmetalscrewed
Thomas Hart Benton: Homestead (1934)


" … there's always a trick and … the experts always neglect to mention it …"


It turns out that if I volunteer to serve as my own housepainter, the universe will quite unselfconsciously presume that I am also by extension signing on to become my own sheet metal worker. How this natural expansion occurs remains a mystery, but that it occurs seems indisputable. I set about to paint a slice of south-facing wall, this one with a downspout hanging on it. I ask Kurt, who serves as my painting consultant because he's a real painter, if I really need to take down the downspout to properly paint that face. He reassures me that it's completely optional. I can choose whichever without compromising my highest intentions. I admit that I'm more opposed to the idea of taking down the downspout than actually opposed to the taking down of it, for the idea complicates my simple-minded notion of what I'm supposed to be up to. I signed on to serve as my painter, not, by extension or otherwise, my own sheet metal worker. That downspout was fabricated out of sheet metal and while I know little about painting, I know much less about sheet metal working. I know nothing whatsoever about sheet metal working, so if I were to decide to take down that downspout, I would by extension, again, be agreeing to become my own liability, even more than agreeing to become my own housepainter rendered me. I'd step over that invisible line and crossover into truly clueless territory.

Yea, I ultimately decided that I would have to take down that downspout if I were going to properly paint that wall.

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PaintingMyHead

paintingmyhead
Unknown Artist(s): Busts of Bodhisattvas
[from Mogao Cave 321,
Dunhuang, Gansu province, East Asia, China]
(Tang dynasty, 618-907)


"It's always something."


I first negotiate with myself. The scaffolding always seems impossibly high, higher than it actually stands. It looks modest enough when standing beneath it, but climb up onto the second tier and a primal fear leaks into me. I gaze at that top tier from there and cannot quite imagine myself transported up there. It seems flimsy, however securely assembled. It seems too narrow. There are no railings up there, just a wall face and soffit, not quite six feet above it. I stand transfixed as if any option other than upward existed. I favor my good knee then, pretending that the other hadn't been wounded from too much penitent kneeling on rough concrete and scaffolding. I finally nudge myself upward, having lost or won the negotiating, depending upon how I judge the outcome. In that moment, I feel as though I've lost, but I was burning precious daylight and needed to just get on with the proceedings, wherever they might be leading me. I feel as though I've entered the famed Valley of the Shadow of Death then, and I'm proceeding. Another painting day's begun.

If I could live with myself, I would run in some other direction, but I made myself a promise and I intend to deliver on it, Hell or High Water, maybe both.

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Sprinting

sprinting
Edouard Manet: The Races (1865)


"I might just as well surrender to this feeling."


This Spring, this Reconning Spring, has moved slowly, dragging what passes for her feet every inch of its way. One day, sunny, the next three, raining and cold, some days snowing, other days just blowing, it's been inhospitable if also welcome weather. It's been welcome weather because last year, these rains never arrived. We sat here watching July and August's wheat harvest dehydrate in the fields, expectations for yields steadily plummeting. Conversation out at the Ranch Supply leaned toward catastrophe. Nobody had seen anything very much like it. No end ever came into sight right into August when the worst case descended. Wildfires raged in the mountains and a heat dome hung low over the valley. Every day dawned clear if smoky and the sprinklers ran overtime all summer. The fuchsia didn't make it.

I've admitted to hiding behind this weather, of taking solace that I could too easily justify slow walking into this season, for I was facing a daunting personal challenge. I'd committed myself to repainting the Villa, to repairing the damage I'd caused when last trying to defend it against inexorable aging, but my heart wasn't in it.

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DoubleBound

doublebound
Georges Seurat: Seated Woman with a Parasol
[study for La Grande Jatte]
(1884/85)


" … I hover on the edge of some fresh enlightenment."


I often experience what I internally mischaracterize as some sort of a problem even though no obvious solution occurs to me. These difficulties can remain remarkably persistent, essentially unsolvable for the longest time. Many of them I never resolve even though they might continue to bedevil me. Sometimes, I just conclude that the difficulty out-smarted me. This conclusion does little for my self esteem, but then I already knew that I had little to hold in very high esteem to begin with. I was just confirming facts already more than adequately evident when I failed to solve the problem that might not have been a problem in the first place. Many of these are dilemmas, damned whatever I do choices. A few fully qualify as DoubleBinds, which I might define as difficulties which straddle contexts, existing in more than one place at once, and therefore conventionally unresolvable from within any single context, or so they appear. My life, like yours, overfloweth with DoubleBinds.

It might be helpful if we each had finished at least some Post Doc work in Theoretical Physics, for if we had, we might find ourselves better positioned to cope with these damnable DoubleBinds we're forever discovering invading our lives.

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LilacSeason

lilacseason
Anselmus Boëtius de Boodt: Sering
[Syringa vulgaris] (1596 - 1610)


" … though this news was never once reliably reported anywhere."


I am reliably informed that this world has already gone to Hell. Reliably informed yet still disbelieving, I somehow manage to face each new morning, influenced for certain by Molly our cat and her first thing in the morning enthusiasm. She's tripping me down the dark staircase, often trilling in apparent anticipation, hopping up onto the dining room table as I pass, to mug for a head scratch our even a full length body stroke. She quivers in anticipation of what comes next. Next, she'll race me into the kitchen where she'll vault onto the kitchen table, glancing back to make certain I followed, where she'll position herself for what must serve as a great conformation for her, her first thing in the morning ration of kitty treats, which I pile up on a piece of newspaper before her. She digs in, every bit the trencher I know her to be at heart, submitting to ever more enthusiastic stroking on my part. I pet her in humble and sincere appreciation for her reminder, served that same time every morning, that this world has not necessarily already gone to Hell, nor does it really seem to be headed in that direction. For that moment if for no other, all's right with the world, whatever calamity flashes just over the horizon.

In the same way that Molly's enthusiasm reassures me every morning, when Spring finally arrives after weeks of unconvincing promising, the world around me takes up Molly's morning role and commences to exhibit considerable enthusiasm for life as it just is in that moment.

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Incivility

incivility
José Guadalupe Posada Aguilar: Ballad of the Snail
[Corrido del Caracol] (19th century)


"Damn me to that kind of Hell if you will."


The small pick-up truck parked in front of Popular Donuts featured a tailgate spray painted with the words Fuck Biden. That sight was enough to convince me that I didn't want any donuts that day. I felt deeply disturbed, embarrassed for the pick-up's owner, who, I suspected, had fallen in with a bad crowd. I remembered back to my late grade school days when I first encountered people my age behaving like "adults." I placed adults in quotes there, because even then I recognized that those people were more mimicking their elders than behaving like them, for there seemed a touch of the perverse in a fifth grader dabbling in four letter words and stolen smokes. The effect just embarrassed me and I quickly slipped away from those guys and tried to give them wide berth going forward. I thought them trouble if only due to their decidedly uncivil performance. They didn't so much seem grown up or liberated, as degraded, and they were voluntarily doing that to themselves! I decided that I would choose not to use that sort of language, not even to myself. I still, when I hit my thumb with a hammer, scream "Danged Nab It!" rather than some four letter deep blue facsimile of it. I won't even cuss when it's just me about.

I consider this convention to be a necessary element of civility, and Incivility to be early evidence of rot.

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Unemployable

RP-P-2018-698
Pieter Schenk: Carefree life in Hsin-yang (1702)


"We will never satisfy the formal definition of Hard Working …"

People ask me if I'm retired and I reply that I'm not, just Unemployable. I believe that unemployability has become a common state for people of a certain uncertain age. For some, Unemployability comes early and for others, later, but I dare suggest that it eventually comes for most. This amounts to no tragedy, for employability seems to be a self-liquidating state. The very act of holding a job undermines an incumbent's ability to hold that job. Eventually, this contradiction does in the job or the incumbent or both, often resulting in the incumbent's growing sense that he just can't bear to do that anymore, coupled with a conviction that to continue doing that might well prove terminal. Eventually, no amount of money in this world could properly compensate the afflicted individual. No "opportunity" sufficiently attracts. In other cases, more like my own, an individual simply grows to lack baseline skills necessary to successfuly maintain employment. He becomes a buggy whip in an automobile world. I, for instance, cannot operate a PC or type with more than two and a half fingers, both terminal shortcomings in today's competitive job market.

Unemployability seems distinctly different from obsolescence, for the Unemployable are far from idle.

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Structural

Structural
James Abbott McNeill Whistler: The Unsafe Tenement (1858)


"I'm much more skilled at the consequently superficial …"


I specialize in superficial strategies. I was the one who imagined such a thing as Brief Consulting, a philosophy rooted in the firm if not always fully justified belief that most difficulties might be fairly easily co-opted via clever reframing, that insight might often trump knowing, and that we mostly suffer from varying degrees of The Normals. It was a radical perspective dressed up as conservative approach since it only infrequently insisted upon anyone making any structural changes. It accepted the way things are as the way things are, and didn't often aspire for very much different. It was more about coping than changing, anyway.

I still find little to criticize about Brief Consulting.

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Inistential

inistentiel
Albrecht Dürer: Celestial Map of the Southern Sky
[Imagines coeli meridionalis] (1515)


" … we are the existential threat …"


We seem to inhabit a world beset with existential threats. An existential threat, for those who, unlike me, do not collect lengthy terms like fishermen collect worms, imperils our very existence. In other words, should an existential threat come to fruition, it would destroy us. Polly Pureheart faced an existential threat when Snidely Whiplash tied her to that railroad track, though I never understood why he chose to do that. Had a train come along while she was tied there, it would have been the end of her. Fortunately, Dudley DoRight's horse Nelly noticed something amiss and carried Dudley to the scene of the impending existential threat, where he was able to easily neutralize Snidely's trumped up existential threat on poor Polly, who, as a result, fell in love with Nelly, if my memory serves me correctly. Existential threats, as this story demonstrates, are very serious business.

We might also inhabit a world beset with what I might call Inistential threats, imagined perils we project, which certainly seem to us to qualify as existential threats.

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ThinkingUnder

ThinkingUnder
Attributed to Ignace-Joseph de Claussin, after Jean Jacques de Boissieu: Oude man in denkende houding (1805 - 1844)


"I make progress, then, depending upon how utterly stupid and uninquisitive I can remain …"


I have been accused of over-thinking on many occasions, perhaps because I tend to think as a first defense. It's my default response. Like all default reactions, this one does get over-used if only because it's almost always the one already saddled up and ready to go whenever anything happens. This results in a fair number of false positive reactions, where I apply precisely the wrong leverage in response to some otherwise ordinary perturbation. This amounts to perfectly normal behavior, though it often appears absolutely crazy. I imagine myself producing similar results whatever response I favored. If I tended to burst into tears in response to anything, I would seem well-adapted some percentage of the time, but I'd mostly build a reputation for being weepy. I suspect that most of us favor some pre-loaded reaction and thereby tend to react strangely some of the time. My thinking responses do not really qualify as wholly unreasonable, though thinking can sometimes violate the First, Do No Hard Clause under the standard rules of engagement.

Much work is by nature properly considered mindless.

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FairTrading

fairtrading
Juan Gris: The Painter's Window (1925)


" … the new dog teaches the old dog a new trick or two."


The Repeated Offender reader of these musings will remember Kurt Our Painter, who was a prominent figure during our extended Grand Refurbish last year. Kurt proved an able sidekick, teaching me about the practical application of paint, which turned out to be a surprisingly—shockingly— philosophical endeavor. Kurt carries an easy half century experience as a professional painter, and he's still learning, for painting, like most activities, I suppose, never was a simple matter. Of course, any Jehu can slop the stuff, though sloppy painting does disclose a definite lack of character. Real painters are painstakingly careful, patient even beyond their own belief, and wise. They change the world one mil at a time or less. They refer to accumulating paint in mils, though measuring actual depth proves impossible.

When painting, Kurt taught me that a single mil of paint sufficiently covers any lightly-used surface.

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AgingInSpace

aginginspace
Mayfield Parrish: Painting for cover of 30 Aug 1923 Life magazine


" … enjoying the journey though I knew where it was leading."


I find myself presently engaged in a rare effort, though I suspect that such activities might well become more frequent and more common in upcoming years. I claim to be repainting three sides of The Villa Vatta Schmaltz, an activity I have already in this lifetime engaged in once. What Makes this iteration different? I reasonably and fully expect that this time will be my last time erecting scaffolding around this building. If this work ages as planned, this place will not require another coat of paint in my capable lifetime. It will certainly need repainting in the far distant future, but by then, I do not expect to be physically capable of performing this service, however much I might wish to. It's genuine pain-in-the-butt grunt work, so it wasn't precisely a gift I gave myself when I decided to perform this job, yet I felt gifted.

I imagined myself savoring each brushstroke, immersing my full consciousness into the experience, painstakingly burning the effort into permanent memory, however foreshortened that might prove now.

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PhilosopherWork

philosopherworkman
Maxfield Parrish: The Lantern Bearers (1908)


"The philosopher's wary."


I have my heart set on a blue front door. Kurt Our Philosophical Painter reappears in my stories this week as he returns to finish the door we left undone in deference to Winter as we otherwise completed our Grand Refurbish. I'd intended to replace the rickety front screed door, thereby making it possible to secure the front even with the door removed, and that screen was replaced earlier this month. I peeked out my office window to see a crew of two exit their truck and head for the porch. I opened the door before they'd knocked and welcomed their presence. The new screen was fully installed less than an hour later. I didn't help much because they'd caught me immersed in my PhilosopherWork so I wasn't dressed for workman work. I find myself continually shifting gears between one persona and the other. Which am I really? Neither and both.

The philosopher in me prefers to work in slippers.

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HomingPlace

homimgplace
Marsden Hartley: “Still Life” (1932-1933)


" … our point of real reference."


It may be that there's no place like home, but I'm noticing that there's really no place like the HomingPlace, that place from which one continues the infinite homing search. It seems that search never ends. For me, my old home place is not a place of rest. My Reconning didn't cease when The Muse and I retook possession, but increased both in pace and purpose, for my Reconning finally had a base from which to once again sally forth from again and again and again. I might roost here, but this old place more prominently serves as a point of departure than a place of repose. I'm clearly going somewhere. So's The Muse.

When on exile, our Reconning seemed more like practice than purposeful.

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CaughtUp

caughtup
French (cartoon)/South Netherlandish (woven):
The Unicorn Purifies Water (from the Unicorn Tapestries)
(1495–1505)

"None of us run this race to win it …"


I complain that I'm behind just as if I was ever what even a generous interpretation might consider CaughtUp. As near as I can tell from here, I was born behind and I have been falling ever further behind since. Even when I accomplished something, I recognized that I could have done more had I really applied myself like I know I could have. Whenever I accept a fresh assignment, it lands on top of the pile of unfinished business I already have open and cluttering my desktop. When I finally organize something, a few bits of whatever it is won't quite fit into my new classification scheme, such that a strict judgement of the finished product should be that my product isn't quite finished. I maintain many backlogs, just as if they'd ever become anything else. Finished and done largely seem like acts of abandonment. I graduated from both high school and university with unfinished business. It took me a while to understand and accept that graduation resolved nothing except that I'd never be able to clean the plates I left partially eaten there.

I almost remember a time when I had actually CaughtUp.

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HighApril

highapril
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec: At the Circus: The Spanish Walk
[Au Cirque: Le Pas espagnol]
(1899)


"… maybe saunter over to the neighbor's …"


Both Max and Molly, our cats, were scheduled for their annual vet visit Tuesday morning. Anticipating trouble from Molly, who remains steadfastly standoffish and feral, I dosed her with enough CBD to mollify a moose. Even so, I slipped into my heavy leather yard gloves before attempting to pick her up and tuck her into her carrier. I pulled off that move without a hitch, but Max had witnessed the kitnapping and just to help, Molly began crying most plaintively, which clearly alarmed Max. Wary then and probably remembering his past cat carrier experiences, he bolted. Then we played an extended game of catch or, more properly, failure to catch. I did manage to nab him twice as he passed by, but only because he's so deep down good natured that he likely couldn't quite muster the belief that I intended him harm. I stuffed him into his carrier, or tried to, and he managed to contort himself into a ghost and exit while I shoved him in. After two failures, I gave the game to him and decided that I would just have to explain his absence and seek another appointment, taking Molly in alone, which would probably be better, anyway.

Molly, probably thanks to the CBD, performed beautifully, submitting to touching and probing from a stranger, something she won't usually agree to at home among family, and all was well with the world.

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Interruptus

interruptus
Juan Gris: Portrait of Pablo Picasso (1912)


"Higher education, lower expectation."


The pace of classes at university fascinated me. Assignments came without regard to the size of my plate or any preexisting condition. The fact that some other class featured unrealistic expectations in no way inhibited every other class from having them too. These conflicts could not be resolved. Such was the paradox of higher education. One was chided to become a good student, but not even the best student was really expected to complete every assignment, to read every chapter, to ace every exam. Those who excelled were like The Muse, who was born with the ability to pass any test, even if she'd not studied, because she understands how to ace tests, I guess. I was not so blessed.

My university days were filled with guilt over all I could not complete.

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Finishing

finishing
Juan Gris: The Sunblind (1914)


"Some future unobservant audience will most certainly be impressed …"


I say that I'm refinishing this door, but I do not expect to reach an end. A time will come when I will choose to abandon this effort as either lost or good enough, essentially equivalent conditions, and focus my attention elsewhere, but for now, for today, I focus here. So much of my life seems to carry just this quality, where I'm not actually doing whatever I'm declaring myself doing. I do not intend to misrepresent my actions, for with this kind of work, misrepresentation might be the only possible representation. I say I'm finishing. I might be refinishing, but I do not labor to reach an end. I labor to begin and to properly attend.

This door was once damaged beyond all hope of repair.

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Refelance

refelence
Vincent van Gogh: Self-Portrait or Portrait of Theo van Gogh (Paris, Summer 1887)


"[I] never learned to trust popularity."


I might fairly characterize modern life as a search for relevance. Certainly media, public as well as social, a prominent presence in our Damned Pandemic-separated lives, operates under a strict perversion of the Democratic process, where the number of views/likes/shares/comments determines relevance. I'm uncertain who first proposed simply voting as a means for determining relevance, but majorities have since voted in favor of the most remarkable and remarkably stupid things. It seems rather rare that a number one-rated program comes anywhere near being the best program produced that year. Same with recordings. Same with films. Same, too, with seemingly almost everything. Popularity in the polls has become the new relevance, a condition to which I'll assign a potentially more telling term, Refelance, meaning 'referred relevance.'

How does an artist, a creator, any producer determine relevance?

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Resturrected

resturrection
Raphael: Resurrection of Jesus Christ (1502)


" … already arrived and on the path intended …"


Perhaps the gravest error when Reconning lies in the usually innocent attempts to plot courses to the past. We know the past much better than we know our future, so it seems a smaller stretch of imagination to project that rather than to muster fresh visions, but resurrecting's no less speculative and much more dangerous. This universe, for better or for worse, runs exclusively forward, from past toward future, and any attempt to reverse this sequence should properly create serious consequences, however unintended. That a major world religion was predicated upon resurrection seems curious if also telling, for Jesus' great works all came before the resurrecting rather than after. After, he managed an ascension, which I guess amounted to another separation, with promises, of course, but he seemed just as gone after ascension as he seemed just after crucifixion, leaving an observer to wonder what resurrection accomplished other than to confuse a question. After ascension, the legend remained, plenty powerful and present, same as just after he first departed.

I suppose I speak heresy or disclose my lack of biblical literacy, but on this Easter morning, I find myself considering another sort of celebration than one focusing upon defeating death with resurrection.

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Reprieving

repreiving
Thomas Hart Benton: City Activities with Dancehall
from America
Today mural (detail), 1930–31


" … this universe appears to be self-correcting …"


I imagine this to be a self-correcting universe. I suspect that this notion comes from the inescapable fact that nobody really has the slightest influence over this universe's trajectory and that most of its business occurs on scales which could never have the slightest direct effect on anybody. It's a continuously playing movie which never once repeats but which appears so uniform as to appear familiar. My plans might not always come to fruition, but among the infinite alternative resolutions, at least one workable substitute very reliably seems to show up. Eventually. The net effect seems to be an infinite engagement in which I for some reason choose to involve myself in finite segments, some of which do not work out but for those that don't work out, I receive a Reprieve. An alternative appears to, if not precisely save the day, preserve potential.

That's not to say that I've never been disappointed.

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ExilesReturn

exilesreturn
Thomas Hart Benton: Outreaching Hands from America Today mural (1930–31)


" … to seek dignity rather than desire."


An Exile'sReturn feels no less traumatic than his exit, for both events demand skills not previously in evidence in our hero's experience, however vast. He left only because he could not possibly stay, hardly a proper preparation for anything following. He returned because he'd finally earned passage, but after such a long absence that he would not be returning to from whence he once departed, but into a rather darkening sunrise. In most ways, an Exile'sReturn turns into yet another exile, an extension of the discontinuity begun when he first fled into exile, unaware that he would never, could never, return. It would be, he comes to understand, off-handed adaptation from there on. It would be a great blessing that he returned just as unaware as he departed. Understanding, in probably this world's greatest blessing, always comes later, after confusion and well before wisdom. An Exile'sReturn proves revealing.

After eons of ceding one's heart's desire, one might recognize that hearts know little.

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ThirdYear

thirdyear
Thomas Hart Benton: "America Today" Mural (detail), “Coal” (1930–31)


" … it sure is a good thing that The Muse and I relocated to overlooking The Center of the Universe …"

As the ThirdYear of Our Damned Pandemic began, its prolonged presence seemed to foreshorten our future. That April, our prior years' toodles around Paris and the French countryside seemed almost epic adventures dredged up from prehistoric times, times long past and unlikely to ever return, like an innocence forever lost, like coal once was. The Muse and I have so far dodged the Covid bullet, whether through early and frequent vaccination, obsessive masking, or dumb luck, nobody can say. Certainly people every bit as scrupulous as us fell prey and others who seemed scandalously pass
é stayed safe. Most recovered fully, but not all. A million people just in this country are absent today who wouldn't be gone had Covid-19 not come along. It remains, ebbing and surging, leveraging large number laws, quietly disappointing hopes and dreams.

The routine seemed perfectly sustainable at first, as any fresh experience might.

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AtHardLabor

_hardlabor
Thomas Hart Benton: Steel from America Today mural (detail) (1930–31)

"I know, ironic."


I seem to need to relearn a simple lesson each Spring, just as if each prior Springtime hadn't taught me the same damned thing. I leave my long Winter hibernation with aches and pains I can never remember acquiring. It's not like the season had demanded too much of me. Aside from a few simple snow shovelings and some firewood carrying, I hardly stretch a muscle once the Autumn leaf harvest is in. I still awaken with a grumbly back or something. It's always something. A muscle group complaining without a discernible cause. I limp around and attempt my annual stoicism performance, which fools and entertains nobody, especially me. Eventually, even The Muse catches on that I'm aching. I take my ibuprofen and attempt to carry on, avoiding strenuous activity.

Then I relearn that I need some strenuous activity to iron out Winter's remaining wrinkles.

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Hesitance

hesitance
James Gillray: The cow-pock,
-or-The wonderful effects of the new inoculation!
- Vide - the Publications of ye Anti-Vaccine Society (1802)


"I'm more of an amateur than that."


He who hesitates might be temporarily lost, but not often permanently so. The one who tries to seize the day to appear decisive more easily loses himself, but doesn't seem to notice. I usually opt for Hesitance over decisiveness if only because I only rarely ever seem to possess enough information to justify engaging very quickly. I tend to sidle up to experiences, suspicious of their impact and influence. I do not usually readily volunteer. I am an avowed and proud foot-dragger. I prefer to catch up rather than rush ahead. I'd really rather that you go first. I'm not being polite, just cautious.

Try as I might, I cannot quite manage to characterize my Hesitance as a vice.

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ZenosReality

zenosreality
Pellegrino Tibaldi: Zeno of Elea shows Youths the Doors to Truth and False (Veritas et Falsitas) (C.late 1580s)
Fresco in the Library of El Escorial, Madrid


" … we might never notice ourselves incapable of stepping into the same river once."


It has long been a popular pastime among mathematicians and logicians to poke fun at the humble Zeno of Elea, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who left a memorable, subtle, and profound legacy of observations. He was the one who posited that one can never step into the same river twice and also the guy who cared enough to ask after the barber who shaved only those who didn't shave themselves, and wonder who shaved that barber's chin. Zeno pointed out how no arrow could logically hit any target, since each would subsume its progress by halving remaining distance, which could never logically resolve into any end point. His observations are today usually seen as provocations, interesting if largely irrelevant little insights into the limits of logical reasoning when explaining actual experience.

But we are not merely logical beings.

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SmallWinters

springsnow
Itō Takashi: Spring Snow at Kamikochi (1932)


"My boot lugs still carry soil they picked up last season …"


It's funny, but I don't remember this much variety in prior springs here. Snow spots the backyard this morning where The Muse and I planted her new Mirabelle trees yesterday afternoon. An almost fierce wind kept me off the scaffolding again and the cold will prevent me from painting today, forcing me back inside just after I'd started feeling the rhythm of this season. As if to throw my timing off, it's almost winter this morning, as I was finally prepared for spring. Of course our Colorado springtimes featured full-blown blizzards, but here in these gentler elevations and under Japanese Current influences, I just expected more consistency than this.

If I went back and checked, though, I suspect that the record would show just this slow build of the season, even including some SmallWinters in it.

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Permissions

permissions
Johann Michael Rottmayr: Apollo Granting Phaeton Permission to Drive the Chariot of the Sun (1690/95)


"I remain just as free as I'd ever care to be …"


As a gentleman of a certain age and social position, I suspect that many might suspect me of being free, or of at least feeling free to choose to do whatever I might choose to do, but that second suspicion would be far from the truth about me, a truth that only I could ever properly see. I have this gatekeeper inside me, and he decides for me what I might engage in and how. He's a stingy bastard, protective, and won't allow me to engage in just anything. He'd say that he at least tries to maintain certain "standards," but he administers them inconsistently enough that not even I can always predict what he'll permit and what he'll disallow. He insists that he's protecting my interests as he inhibits my freedom of movement and my liberties, not nearly as free as I might at first appear to be.

Consequently, I maintain a list of things he's frequently denied to me, if only to save myself the humiliation of him having to remind me again what kind of person I'm not.

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AttractingAngels

attractingangels
William Blake: The Angel Appearing to Zacharias (1799–1800)


"None of us ever was an island."


It's long been a matter of contention among theologians just precisely what human actions best serve the intention of AttractingAngels. Some insist that contrition works most reliably. Others vote for humility. Still others stand on the side of righteousness, believing that angels tend to hang with like-minded spirits. I anecdotally believe that angels seem to be attracted to trouble such that if I want to see an angel, all I have to do is get myself into some sort of trouble, even the generally irredeemable kind. If I can keep my eyes open and pay attention then, in my experience, I soon learn that whatever I did, innocent or not, if it resulted in trouble, it probably ended up attracting angels. Even sins tend to be fairly reliable attractors. In my humble experience, the kinds of angels I end up attracting do not seem all that picky about who they help. They're like the Lone Ranger but without the silly costuming. They mostly seem indistinguishable from any regular Jane or Joe. They'll let you know they're there.

Last night, I drove over to a nearby airport to fetch The Muse, who was returning from her first genuine business trip since the start of The Damned Pandemic.

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GrapeHyacinth

grapehyacinth
Publisher William Curtis in The Botanical Magazine, Hand-colored engraving #23727 (1791)


"I am not my name, either …"


In Spring, I channel my spirit flower, the humble, lovely, GrapeHyacinth. He embodies the season like no other bloom, an early riser and also a real eye catcher, he's up and at it before most others have broken ground. He's easily found and effortlessly, endlessly spreads into lawns, always beyond original intentions. He's utterly without pretension, simple, beautiful. He's neither grape nor hyacinth, but GrapeHyacinth, in that curious way that English allows a negation to become an identity. He is precisely not what he's named, but almost entirely something else.

I cannot bear to mow over that piece of lawn into which my sacred GrapeHyacinths have spread.

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Scaffoldingly

scaffoldingly
Shubha Taparia: Crescent (2021)


"I seem to need to expose myself to a certain amount of danger …"


I may have identified the source of my sense of disconnection with the recent changing of the seasons. After a long and lonely enough Winter season, Spring should have welcomed me with open arms and I really should have stepped right in there for a reassuring hug. I became stand-offish instead, as if Spring were trespassing upon my private space. I had become complacent over the final few weeks of that bleakest season, wasting opportunities to engage in this or that project, seemingly satisfied to lean back and let a little time pass by me. That was never satisfying work, but more of a defensive effort. After The Grand Refurbish ended mid-December, I'd retrenched, feeling aimless. The Muse was after me to finish a few projects, but I remained steadfastly disengaged, fitfully napping. Nothing really seemed worth doing after engaging in such a grand and satisfying furbish. Every alternative engagement just seemed to fall tragically short of something. I practiced moping.

Yesterday, Kurt Our Painter brought over his pickup truck to help me fetch scaffolding so that I could start a rather modest repainting of The Villa's outside.

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Ninja

ninja
From Suikoden of Japanese Heroes (Yeiyû Yamato Suikoden,
英雄日本水滸伝)
Publisher: Kujioka-ya Keijirô (c. 1843)
Scene:
Ogata Shuma (later Jiraiya) raising his sword to kill a python attacking a large toad,
Jiraiya is portrayed as being a ninja.


" … more lifestyle than profession."


I'm afraid that I feel compelled to break with a semi-sacred tradition and report that I am a Ninja. Yes, anyone engaging as a Ninja was cautioned in their training to keep their true identity secret, though no clear punishment was associated with violating this warning. I well understand the complications this disclosure might create, for the first and most enduring response to any Ninja disclosing their secret tends to be incredulity. Nobody ever believes it. They treat this confidence as a joke, since no Ninja in the history of this world so far ever looked like they might be a Ninja when they're out of costume, and, indeed, the costuming might well account for ninety percent of a Ninja's magic. Ninja-ing's a cosplay occupation.

I've confided this secret before, though never quite this publicly.

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Pruning

pruning
Kanō Sanraku: Set of sliding doors of Plum tree (early 17th century)


" … the Sum total of all I could not bear to Prune."


With Spring comes the great cutting back, the annual Pruning effort which eliminates unwanted excess while encouraging new growth. Pruning makes space for both new and different. It co-opts default repetition while heading off degradation. Even weeding might be considered a form of Pruning, since it, too, eliminates some life to encourage others.

I have always been a reluctant pruner, hesitating with my hedge trimmers and shy with my clippers.

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Muse-led

muse-led

Charles Meynier: Apollo and the Muses, (late 18th century)
Polyptych, from left to right:
Polyhymnia, Muse of Eloquence
Erato, Muse of Lyrical Poetry
Apollo, God of Light, Eloquence, Poetry and Fine Arts with
Urania, Muse of Astronomy
Clio, Muse of History
Calliope, Muse of Epic Poetry


"Almost anything proves possible given perspective and well-informed choice."


I am not navigating by means of the nearly infamous Ded Reconning, which plays off past positions to imagine future ones. Christopher Columbus was reputed to have been a master Ded Reconner, famous for "finding" North America when he was searching for India. My reconning, the kind I employ here, might be properly referred to as Alive Reconning, for it relies much less upon the fates and intuition than does its Ded Reconning cousin. I might even suggest that I am never entirely alone when I'm navigating, for I firmly believe that my Reconning has always been inspired by muses, Muse-led.

I speak of The Muse when referencing my wife, but I speak now of The Muse
s who guide my trajectory when I'm unable to guide it myself, which is usually.

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Incompleteness

incompleteness
Paul Cézanne: Maisons parmi les arbres (circa 1904-06)


" … never finished, just contributed."


If I were charged with grading my performance so far in my life, I would not assign an immediate 'A', and not a 'B', either; nor a 'C', 'D', or even an 'F', and not only because I have not yet finished performing. I suspect that I still have an act or two left, perhaps even a few more full productions to produce, but I harbor few delusions that any future performance might nudge my grade up into the exemplary range. I am pretty much who I am. I no longer stay up late studying to achieve the next level of anything. Those who love me, love me. Those who do not, don't. I'm not completely uninterested in flipping my critics or in chasing away my fans, but I certainly do not invest much sweat toward achieving either. I am just about who and what I am, no more and little else. So what grade would I assign to my own performance so far? I'd award a big fat Incomplete, the orthogonal judgement, the forgotten achievement. Whether any fat lady's sung or not, my performance ain't quite finished yet.

Famous composers and artists left behind unfinished symphonies and paintings, so do us less famous brethren.

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Scrounging

scrounging
Vincent van Gogh: Shoes (1886)


"Without such provocations, I might never feel truly inconvenienced."


Scrounging tends to be one of the early casualties of prosperity. The dumpster diver becomes a WalMart shopper and a trajectory changes forever. Aging, though, can shift certainties to reintroduce the vagaries one might not have even noticed losing. Proud ones might faunch at the shift, feeling as though they've been assaulted or rendered undignified by it. The lucky ones might notice a certain vitality reentering their lives as what they'd grown accustomed to perceiving as their birthright is formally denied them. Insurance companies seem particularly adept at denying access once considered sacrosanct. For me, after The Muse shifted health insurance companies, the inheriting operation refused to pay for a refill for the only prescription I felt certain actually delivered on its promise. They were, of course, absolutely obtuse about their reasoning, never once actually confirming what they'd done, leaving it up to pharmacy clerks and nurses to attempt to interpret their intention and deliver their message.

As near as any of us could tell, they'd denied the refill request in spite of doctor's orders and expressly because the prescription actually worked.

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Securing

securing
Jean Metzinger: Man with a Pipe (Portrait of an American Smoker) (1911-12)


" … acknowledging this simple fact."


Two full years since my friend Thomas strongly suggested that I install a PastWord security application, I finally invited my tech guy over to install the system for me. I'm nobody's application installer, apt as I am to not quite understand the app's authors' intentions and instructions being inevitably inaccurate and imprecise, I much prefer to hire a professional to perform installations. I quickly felt satisfied with this decision as a fresh and new dizzying array of terms and functions flashed before me. My job was relegated to repeatedly entering a single PastWord as each installation stage progressed. Brian The Tech Guy somehow managed to resurrect long lost PastWords and convert them to new uses, like actually providing access for a change instead of simply serving as barriers to entry. I realized as he installed this package that I had been living incredibly insecurely, my only potentially saving grace being that I'd set up my systems in such a convoluted manner, that nobody could have ever been very likely to crack the codes, though they most prominently kept my systems secure from myself.

I, like everybody, possess a long, shadowy, and largely insecure history with security.

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Narrowing

narrowing
Jean Metzinger: Landscape (Marine, Composition Cubiste) (1912)


" … what I imagine to be their essence."


I've been noticing that the range of my Reconning radar has been Narrowing since The Muse and I returned from exile. On exile, I maintained awareness of more than just my immediate vicinity, but also of the goings on 'back home.' Back home, I do not reciprocate my interest. I doubt that I'll ever return to Colorado's Front Range. I think of it as a place we holed up in for a few years before repatriation. Now home, I've lost interest in that place, which never felt terribly hospitable or home-like, anyway. I never held more than a tactical interest in the local politics since I planned no future or legacy there. It's now become a good riddance for me.

Before exile, The Muse and I roamed a wide area.

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Gettin'

gettin_
Jean Metzinger: At the Cycle-Race Track (Au Vélodrome) (1912)


"I'd just stopped paying such close attention to what I wasn't doing."


I'm Gettin' over the idea that I need to be Gettin' over ideas. I might instead get under, around, or through, or, alternatively, I might simply let a condition be. The idea that I might one day get back to normal might perhaps prove the most poisonous possible aspiration. I seem to too easily imagine that I once experienced conditions I had never actually experienced, my old, fondly remembered, largely fictional Old Normal. Memory's a notoriously unreliable mentor. I try to take things as they come and often fail, falling into one of apparently many cognitive traps. Just day before yesterday, I complained here of feeling
StovedUp, as if that were a treatable condition rather than a statement of simple fact. I've felt StovedUp before and I most probably will feel StovedUp again. I might even find that I'm more frequently feeling StovedUp these days and pine after the time when StovedUp had not become my new normal. I only imagined it as a permanent condition, but, then again, nothing's permanent except perhaps that sense of permanence that sometimes visits.

I toughed out my StovedUp-edness.

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SurpriseSpring

suprisespring
Julian Schnabel: Rose Painting (Near Van Gogh’s Grave) V (2015)


" … just not quite prepared for it this time."


Though I thought I was paying close attention, this Spring successfully snuck up on me. I'm struggling to get into synch with it. Most years, I would have already sorted through seed packets and sliced out at least one nursery visit by now, but I have barely soiled my overall's knees yet. I just cannot seem to find the rhythm of this season. After all those years in exile dreaming of how it would finally be when we were back in The Villa Vatta again, this turn of events seems particularly disappointing, perhaps tragic. It might be a bout of Dream Come True Syndrome, where the object of long affection becomes the opposite once secured, where the true love only lives in anticipation of finding it, and withers as soon as it's actually touched. Or, it might well be something considerably less insidious. How could I possibly tell which?

I've started baby steps.

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StovedUp

stoveup
Egon Schiele: The Family (1918)

"A reckoning might be impending …"


The Muse and I arrived out of exile one year ago today. We found an empty house waiting patiently for our arrival. We set up the inflatable bed in the living room then set about settling in. The Muse's son's family had not quite finished moving out, so I spent the next day helping to relocate their stuff out of the basement in preparation for the moving van arriving the following day. The rest, as they say, is history. Few days would be spent idle until the following winter. We shaped up the yard and repainted the front porch before setting about to refurbish nine rooms, floors, walls, ceilings, windows, and doors. I spent the last day possible to paint outside, finishing painting the exterior trim on the last window before settling into a long-ish idle winter. I'd supposed that I'd earned a break, but three months off have only left me feeling StovedUp for spring.

I have aches and pains the likes of which I never once had when we were on exile.

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TheRoadToWashtucna

roadto
Rolling Hills of Palouse: Wojtek Powiertowski (2016)

"One goes nowhere to unburden."


I long ago noticed that every road in this part of the country seems to go to a little place that’s almost no place at all, Washtucna. Drive along I-90 between Spokane and Seattle and it seems that every exit between Sprague and Ritzville mentions Washtucna. Same story driving US395 between Pasco and Ritzville and US12 between Walla Walla and Lewiston, and WA127 between Colfax and the Pommeroy cutoff, every intersection points the way to Washtucna. It’s the center of the universe surrounding the center of the universe within which I live. It’s actually a very small and shrinking town plunked down in the center of a geographic square maybe seventy miles on a side. Bordered on the West by the mighty Columbia River, the East by the humble Blue Mountains, the North by I-90, and the Oregon border to the South, with the Snake River running its last stretch right through the middle before joining the Columbia. Within that square lies inarguably some of the finest cropland in the world and also some of the worst. Geologists refer to the stuff Washtucna sits on as scabland, basalt scrubbed almost barren by a series of Ice Age floods, leaving a dry Coulee country not quite large enough to qualify as grand, yet still plenty impressive.

Why would anyone willingly choose to take any of the many roads leading to Wadhtucna?

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Stages

stages
Jean Metzinger: Paysage coloré aux oiseaux aquatiques (1907)


" … it's all a series of silly games we play with passionate sincerity."


I began this Reconning Series because I sensed that I had entered a new stage of life. Typical of my species, I suspected that I'd detected this change considerably after the change had already occurred, but I still felt almost compelled to take a little deeper look and consider ramifications. One of the saddest cheap human tricks involves essentially engaging at the wrong logical level, for instance, engaging in age-inappropriate ways which might include wardrobe dysfunctions up to behavioral ones. Few sadder sights assail anyone than a person wearing some follow-on generation's fashions, the sixties grandma wearing Carnaby Street or the once distinguished gentleman in day-glo bell bottoms. These errors transcend mere faux pas to enter the realm of pathology, perhaps even treatable conditions. I suspect that many of these transgressions occur inadvertently and demonstrate more ignorance or personal insensitivity than volition. Few volunteer to appear the fool.

Yet many still manage to appear foolish, if not in their own eyes than pretty much everyone else's.

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MidnightCreep

midnightcreep
Camille Pissarro: Boulevard Montmartre in Paris (1897)

“I wrote it so that I would know what I was thinking.”


My work’s signature element must be that I engage in it almost exclusively in the wee hours. I’m a MidnightCreeper. I might forgive anyone for believing that I’m a little shy about my profession, for I engage in it so damned stealthily. Aside from the fact that I’ve lately, since reinhabiting our Villa Vatta Schmaltz, taken to writing in perhaps the most exposing window in the place, I remain terribly private and secretive about my practice. Few pass by to spot me writing in my wee hours and even then, I most often write in near total darkness, my desk only illuminated by the faint glow my laptop screen makes, my eyes dilated like a lemur’s, my silhouette essentially invisible from out there.

I remain rather embarrassed by my peculiar practice, which I think of more as ablution than actual profession.

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MidnightCreeping

MidnightCreeping
Pierre-Auguste Renoir: Sentier dans le bois (circa 1874-1877)


"I have other habits which overtake me sometimes and drive me to commit equally minor crimes for all the very best reasons."


I would have pleaded passionate excess or perhaps temporary insanity, for had I been arrested in my youth on May Day, I would have most certainly been guilty as charged. No, I had not participated in any violent protest on that day or bumped off a bank. I would have probably been charged with some form of criminal trespass for sneaking into some fortunate soul's yard around midnight for the purpose of liberating a few of his choicer flowers. May Day reminds me of this once perhaps over-proud tradition which I practiced with diligence and without supervision for well over a decade. Before I had my own gardens, I'd one night each year take it upon myself to swipe a few of another's excess blossoms to craft a May Basket for my love. It would be a simple thing, often crafted from a page torn from a notebook or a cut down paper bag, but it would mean something. It would mean that I'd risked my freedom to express my ardor. It would mean that I had not forgotten. It encouraged the sort of domestic tranquility only ever known by hardened criminals who'd made a clean getaway. I'd return to my innocent ways in days following and stay on the proper side of the law until over the night before the next May 1st. I was a studied recidivist.

The Muse and I now count ourselves among the fortunate souls who have a yard overflowing with flowers on May 1st.

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Distantcing

distantcing
N.C. Wyeth: from Robinson Crusoe, Cosmopolitan Book Corporation edition (1920)

" … I feel as though I am still free floating …"


Between my career and our grand exile, I grew accustomed to being away from home. I always felt as though I adapted well to road life, but I see that I will most likely be more tied to one place, our Villa Vatta Schmaltz, in the future. Not even Our Damned Pandemic sequestered me at home at first, for it arrived at the start of our last year of exile, stranding me in our final interim home rather than what The Muse and knew to be our real one. Finally arriving home, I hardly knew how to comport myself. I'd been short-timing myself for so many years by then that I'd become more attached to my shadow than to my actual presence. You see, as a passing entity, one gets excluded from many of the rights and obligations of full citizenship. One votes, of course, in local elections, even if on exile, but one probably does not feel as though they're contributing to any personal future by so doing, since the one certain thing always remains that you will not still be there by then. On exile, one never possesses a local future, only a far away one, and only then if lucky. One forfeits a full present local identity for the duration of exile duty.

Washing up back home felt both enormously relieving yet also deeply disturbing, for I'd grown accustomed to the emotional as well as the physical Distantcing.

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NextSteps

nextsteps
Johannes Vermeer: Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (c. 1657–1659)


"This is how our world progresses."


Beginning might break surface tension but it does little to nothing to determine NextSteps. These seem barely implied by initial movement, uncertain even of the direction taken so far, for little distance was covered and no clear rhythms or end points have yet come into focus. The first few postings of any new series sort of try on identities, hoping something clicks, for the Author aspires to create something capable of making some sort of difference. The significance of his topic choice not yet obvious, similar past beginnings managed to step up to and into their own importance, but there's nothing insisting that this one must or will step up to or into until it does and already has. I mark my time to hold my place in line. NextSteps emerge awkwardly every time.

Breaking surface tension, though, amounts to the first great success of this series for me, for nothing's written, either, insisting that surface tension might be broken this or any time.

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Begineering

beginnering
Claude Monet: The Japanese Footbridge (1899)


"I am a begineer!"


The first full day of Spring and I find myself Begineering. Beginning a fresh series, sure, but also Reconning, investigating this new space I attempt to create. I chose Reconning as the name of this series because it lately occurs to me that I have been either outrunning my past manners of living or am very likely to be out running many of them soon. Like many in my generation, I was able to extend my adolescence far beyond my childhood, and my mere adulthood well into middle age, and my middle age out to beyond its relevant range, leaving me in uncharted and largely unwanted territory. I never aspired to achieve either majority or dotage, but they seem to have almost successfully conspired to overtake me. I could die my hair and seek Botox® injections, or find some semblance of dignity in my eventual downfall. We all know for certain where this path is heading, but not its timetable.

No need to go all morbid about this.

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Whimper

whimper
Johannes Vermeer: The Concert (circa 1664)

"Thanks for coming to my table."

The final essay in my Authoring Series should wrap up my investigation, and I suppose that this piece might manage to do precisely that, though it won't succeed in the way I'd imagined it might when I started this series three months ago. Then, I had the writer's equivalent of visions of sugar plums dancing around in my head, for I, as seems so often the case, began this enquiry under innocently false premises. I'd imagined that Authoring might result in some sort of a publishing contract and a physical book sitting coquettishly on some bookstore shelf somewhere. How nineteen forties, right? We're in the twenty-first century now and you might not remember the last time you set foot inside a bookstore, and online book shopping's different enough to not really qualify as book shopping at all. Further, the book market has been static since 2007 when 400,000 new titles were shoved into it. Today, four million new titles compete for the same shelf space, much of it virtual. My publisher, the one who published my best selling The Blind Men and The Elephant back in 2003, reports that the only books that stand much of a chance in today's cluttered market are ones tied to an existing marketing plan, a subscribed workshop offering or a frequent keynote speaker. That's not my manuscript. It's not my aspiration, either.

It might be that Authoring's no longer as I imagined it might be back when I started this enquiry.

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Patience

patience
Vincent Willem van Gogh: Rain (Saint-Rémy, November 1889)


"Whatever it becomes, comes later."


I don't fear that we'll not get clear through all of Authoring's Stations of the Cross before we run out of time to explore them here, I know for certain that we'll run out of time. Running out of time seems Authoring's common companion, for Authoring as a craft and as a profession turns out to be one of the longer cycled occupations. This seems fitting if only because once published, a manuscript becomes essentially immortal. Even if it joins the ranks of the majority of published works and gets quickly returned for pulping, those three copies submitted to The Library of Congress will account for something, and anything shelved in that permanent collection remains forever retrievable. That said, Authoring's Fifth Station of the Cross simply must be Patience, for Authoring will not be rushed. Even the fast track to publication seems terribly pedantic, with checks and unbalances complicating each and every step. Even then, an error or two might occasionally get chiseled into granite, but the intention of publishing flawless works mostly works. Authoring features innumerable moving parts.

My folly at setting aside a quarter year to consider Authoring says much about the profession.

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Promotion

promotion
Sassetta AKA Stefano di Giovanni: The Agony in the Garden (1437-1444)


"This Fourth Station ain't worth my tarrying over."

And so we come to the Fourth Station of the Authoring Cross, Promotion. I have nothing authoritative to say about Promotion, for I have never mastered it. The real underlying reason I began this enquiry into Authoring had everything to do with Promotion, and, specifically, SelfPromotion, which I've long recognized as my Achilles Heel, as I explained in my earlier Reconsidering series. For someone with a degree in Marketing, I seem a particularly inept marketer. I shudder whenever I'm called to say a few supportive words about my work and either feel as though I'm bragging or underplaying, often both. I had hoped that a more focused considering of Authoring might enable me to find a more comfortable frame within which to place this Fourth Station and its many expectations, but as I watch the calendar moving toward the expected ending of this endeavor, I realize that I'm no closer to feeling any more comfortable with promoting my work than I ever was. I feel as though I've played this game to stymie again after specifically re-engaging again to learn how to play around or beyond stymie. I feel about ready to accept that I actually am me, and that the earlier instances of myself which I thought were perhaps just underdeveloped manifestations might have been instead finished pieces and I've been in denial for decades. This result does not surprise me.

I've been shopping the usual marketplaces.

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FutureFocus

futurefocus
Georges de La Tour: The Fortune-Teller (probably 1630s)

"The universe couldn't care less what you decide."

Much of whatever Authoring entails occurs on the broad plain between writing and publishing. There, the Fundamentally Unanswerable Questions reside, serving as apparent barriers between the writer and his aspiration to become a published Author. These questions also serve as the raw material for utterly transforming the Authoring experience both for the better as well as for the worse. As barriers, they reliably produce what certainly feels like worse experiences, at least until they encourage some breakthrough thinking that transcends the initial trouble. What started as a continuation of the story about writing evolves into a deeper and richer story situated above and slightly to one side of the writing as well as to whatever story the manuscript attempts to tell. This perspective emerges from what seems like overly extended wandering in wilderness, from an abject loneliness and deep isolation, from genuinely not knowing, the sure source of all understanding.

Authoring's Third Station of the Cross might well represent the lion's share of the whole Authoring experience.

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Voce

voce
Orazio Gentileschi: David Contemplating the Head of Goliath (c. 1610)
" … it's absolute magic!"


I'll call the Second Station of the Authoring Cross Você [pronounced Voe Che], because it mostly deals with the Author's manner of speaking. The writer writes while the Author shapes. The writer creates rough approximations in relative isolation, each piece produced in absence of any broader context. Once the writer completes the pieces, the Author can set to aligning those chunks into a more continuous whole. Você becomes primary among the various elements of this aligning process because it's the subtlest piece and also the one most easily noticed as absent. The voice the reader finds speaking out of the page must be recognizable, not different from chapter to chapter, beginning from end. Further, the Você stands above and beside the story and serves as the medium within which whatever story gets told. It's often best when as innocuous as the almost still and silent voice each of us knows as our own internal one, our conscience, if you will. Whatever the Author chooses as the work's Você, aligning and preserving that timbre might be the underlying purpose of the so-called Proofing pass, which superficially seems to mostly focus upon spelling and ridding the draft of dangling participles.

A great editor can preserve and even amplify the Author's voice better than even the Author could.

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TinyShifts

tinyshifts
Coëtivy Master (Henri de Vulcop?): Philosophy Consoling Boethius and Fortune Turning the Wheel (about 1460–1470)


"The greatest significance tends to hide in the tiniest focus."


I yesterday mentioned The Authoring Stations of the Cross, my sense of Authoring's underlying sequence. My sense has shifted since I started this Authoring enquiry, but shifted in unanticipated ways. Like you (I suspect), I focus upon what might make a big difference, figuring I can always fine tune the tiny side stuff, so I set about looking for whatever might make a huge contribution in my understanding of Authoring. As I near the end of the enquiry, I realize that TinyShifts seemed to have made the most significant differences, perhaps a contradiction, though not, upon reflection, a particularly surprising one. If change sometimes seems frustrating to create, it's often due to focus. I'm so intent upon seeing significance that TinyShifts slip right through my diligence. My futures tend to slip in when I'm paying attention to stuff that couldn't possibly make much difference. Authoring's no monolithic practice, but a series of almost insignificances only the experienced appreciate. Authoring's very likely to slip right past even the attentive at first because us attentive ones tend to focus upon the wrong scale, by which I mean, way too large.

I see now that if I shift just a couple of things in my daily practice, I will have much better integrated Authoring into my routine.

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InfiniteObjectives

infiniteobjectives
Artemisia Gentileschi: Danae (c. 1612)


"It's infinite engagement or its meaningless …"


With a scant week left in my scheduled Authoring investigation, I stumble upon an understanding that might have better served me at the beginning. It's really no great tragedy if I prove myself to be too late smart again, but then I wonder how this inquiry might have proven different had I achieved this small enlightenment nearer the beginning of this effort. Looking back, I realize that I might have frittered away quite a lot of time failing to winnow whatever I was up to into a finite form, as project management theory and practice have always counseled. The job of the proper project manager was always said to involve building baffles and defining edges such that the 'process' as well as the product might be thoroughly described in definite language, without hyperbole or abstraction, for the tools and techniques of 'proper' project management each utterly depend upon thorough grounding. No Utopian notions allowed. No notions allowed at all, only tangibles.

I long ago wrote a piece about solving the world hunger problem, which I characterized as an aspiration, not a realizable objective.

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ComFormation

comformation
Artemisia Gentileschi: Judith and Maidservant with Head of Holofernes (1608)

" … just so much spit in an indifferent wind."


Half of the people I'd Bcc-ed on the manuscript submission email found that message in their spam filter, so it seemed a reasonable assumption, a fifty/fifty proposition, that the publisher's spam filter had also snagged my missive. I explained yesterday how hesitant I felt about calling to confirm receipt, wanting to avoid appearing pushy, but after further goading from my supportive community, I took the chance and quickly confirmed that the publisher had, indeed, received the thing and was warmly anticipating reviewing what I'd submitted. In that moment, a line of communication manifested, its first message comforted more than I can describe. The manuscript had survived another passage from source to out there and it had found another interested reader. The publisher, too busy to review the damned thing yet, warmly anticipated reviewing it. He promised to get back to me just as soon as he's finished his perusal. That should be soon. The Blind Men was submitted and accepted in the same week. This one, accepted or rejected, should prove little different.

The often lengthy periods between submission and ComFormation hold no substance.

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StageFright

stagefright
Orazio Gentileschi: The Lute Player (1612)

"I'm just barely learning … ."


Once the manuscript's submitted, a form of StageFright settles upon the budding Author. He wants feedback but dreads it. He wants acceptance without suggestions, especially those damned helpful ones. Part of him hopes his submission just gets lost in the mail. Should the package return, he might file it on an easily overlooked shelf and conveniently forget to open it rather than submit to the judgement of the world out there. It might be a special curse that those who engage in the performing arts—and make no mistake, Authoring qualifies as a performing art—all suffer from some degree of StageFright. We desperately want to share our gift, however modest, with a world that deep down terrifies us with its casually harsh criticisms. Formally trained artists get themselves subjected to toughening up exercises as a part of their studies. They're taught to dish out harshness and also to take it in huge volumes so that they might relegate others' judgements into mere background noise. They learn not to take that shit very personally, to interpret criticism as first about the critic, and to thereby hold their creative space. Even the trained ones, though, experience a kind of StageFright as a form of respect for the performing space, which should rightfully always awe an artist at least a little bit, lest they grow calloused about entering it.

In my youth, my first real career was as a 'single acoustical artist,' as a so-called singer songwriter.

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ReConsidering

ReConsideringAuthoring
Unknown: The Stigmatization of Saint Francis,
and Angel Crowning Saints Cecilia and Valerian, French or Italian (1330s)


"I've done dark wood before."


Three years ago, I spent the whole first quarter of the year Reconsidering. I was then a year and a half into what has now turned out to have been a nearly four and three quarters-year effort, one within which I've dedicated a part of myself to writing and posting a daily essay. I began the exercise to remind myself that I was, or had been at one time, a writer. I suppose that I quickly reassured myself before falling into a rather tender trap, one which insisted that if I really was a writer, I should be writing daily, or, perhaps I'd really need to continue daily writing or lose my identity as a writer. Whichever, I've continued the practice, which you've doubtless noticed. Every morning another reflection arrives. I finished my Reconsidering series on March 20, 2019, while visiting our then rented out home in Walla Walla, the final reflection, reassuring.
[Link here.] Now, that series exists as a book, or, more properly, as a manuscript, as of yet unsubmitted for publication. I've carried the presumption that one day, Reconsidering would certainly reach publication, but my more recent focus upon Authoring finds me reconsidering that earlier presumption for that one and its soon to be nineteen brothers, as well as those two others I've written and should some day get around to properly compiling into submittable form. I do not lack for product.

One of the more useful outcomes of any investigation might be the inevitably different perspective focused perception produces.

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Spent

spent
Lewis W. Hine, photographer: Tony Casale, Newsboy, Hartford, Connecticut (March 1909)
"It might be that his urge toward Authoring was a big mistake."


This announcement will not make headline news. It won't make the back pages, either. After seventy-seven days Pursuing Authoring, our budding Author's feeling Spent, like a spawned out salmon gasping in the shallows of his home stream, wondering what that excursion might have meant. It certainly seemed circular, a round trip, there then back again, but what was gained and what might have been lost? What was that purpose again? What initiated the urge, the one that pushed the fish out of sufficiency into an apparently necessary pursuit. The long and tedious descent to sea level, the lengthy period feeding in the open ocean, the perilous return up fish ladders and over dams, dodging sea lions and gill nets, what was all that drama about? Our fish feels reasonably certain as he watches his once-noble nose turn crooked and rotting that this might not have really been about him, that he was only playing a part in a much wider and longer arc of history, a bit player, an instance. Whatever the purpose or the reason, our fish feels certain he's Spent, done for now, over, finished.

This is the point where the Author steps in to make light of the gravity of that opening paragraph. What? He isn't?

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Serializing

serializing
J. H. Garnsey: A gentleman . . . standing on his head on a footstool,
from Billtry, by
Mary Kyle Dallas (New York: The Merriam Company, 1895).
An illustration from a dime novel.

"Whatever produces Ink, works."

A hundred and fifty years ago, many popular novels were published twice. They were first Serialized in a newspaper or weekly magazine, then later compiled into a book, sometimes in different editions ranging from cheap dime novels to leather bound presentation finishes. By the time a Dickens novel was published, it had already been read by tens of thousands, each novel already a best seller at the point of publication. The blog, I guess, replaces such Serialization in today's publishing world. For an Author, Serializing offers one great benefit over simply publishing books, a more frequent experience of "Ink," the term Authors use to describe what it feels like to see their work in print. We say that we've received ink as if we'd received a blessing or a sacrament or something similar. It might serve as the true purpose of Authoring, to receive a jolt of recognition when spotting one's own writing upon a page.

It doesn't matter to us Authors, either, whether that Ink comes in the form of a Letter To The Editor in a newspaper or a hard bound book

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KnotKnowing

knotknowing
Aurèlia Muñoz: La font de la vida [The Source of Life] (1976)
"David The Rather Mediocre Author But Still Perfectly Normal"


Authoring has thus far offered me an extended experience of not knowing, KnotKnowing, by which I mean coming to discover that I'm tangled up in another Gordian Knot again and again and again. These knots seem to be the kind that cannot be simply untied, though a few have proven vulnerable to a blade. I have, like Alexander The Great (back when he was still widely considered Alexander The Rather Mediocre) just cut the untenable knots in half, thereby untying them after a fashion, but I have proven almost always incapable of conventionally untying them. My inability to succeed at conventional untying first came as a blow to my delicate ego. I felt that if I was really going to ever become worth anything as an Author, I should most certainly be capable of untying most any conventional knot, but I clearly was not. This acknowledgement reverberated down through my spirit to weaken my resolve as well as my self esteem. I felt as though I must have been proving to be a truly terrible Author.

Part of my difficulty arose from my insistence upon attempting to answer the wrong questions.

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AllIn

allin
Gustave Doré: Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1877)
"AllIn and then some … "


When I started this Authoring Series, I went AllIn. Like you, I was reared on the gospel of commitment. If I was going to do something, I should fully engage rather than dabble. I should take my engagements seriously. Consequently, my work has generally become my identity more than my occupation. I understand that when we declare what we do for a living, we say "what we are," this while also insisting that we maintain work/life balance, whatever that might be. For me, my work has usually been my identity, or perhaps I should say that I have largely mistaken my work for my identity. I do seem to become whatever I'm doing. When I throw on my overalls, I become Handyman Dave for the duration of the chore. When I play my guitar, I become David, my single acoustic performing artist self circa 1975, not having aged a minute. When I cook, I cook rather than dabble around the edges. The very minute I started this Authoring Series, I became an author for all intents and purposes. The Refurbisher I'd been the previous quarter disappeared as I focused my attention, heart, soul, body, and spirit on Authoring. Who am I really? Interesting question.

Of course, I was just play acting, for I had few clues then just what Authoring entailed.

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CopingBetter

copebetter
Sir Eduardo Paolozzi: Meet the People (1948)
"What's that latest book about, David?"


Once an insight visits, the real work begins, to interpret and explain it. The initial insight passes quickly. It might linger for less than a minute, perhaps less than a second, a flash of lightning, difficult to believe it was ever there once it leaves. The interpretation relies upon observational memory, the type of observation taken when blinking, uncertain anything was even seen, but fueled by a flush of conviction. Something terribly profound just happened. Let's not let it get away from us, now.

The first impression might serve as little more than an anchor for the receiver of the insight, an index, a reminder.

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Cogitation

cogitation
Léon Spilliaert: Self-Portrait Before the Mirror (1908)
"This Authoring's convoluted business …"


Looking back through my accumulated Authoring stories, I discover that I almost two months ago posted one entitled Cogitating which considered the long contemplative periods Authoring also entails. Today, I want to take the noun form of that same idea and explore where that might lead me, though I already know that, being a noun form, it won't contain much action or acting. As a budding codger as well as an Author, I perform much of my magic via Cogitation, by which I mean by apparently doing nothing. I excuse myself by explaining that I'm considering, thinking, figuring out, though I'm clearly not any sort of action figure while so engaged, if, indeed, I can even fairly describe myself as engaged during those times. I have gratefully not resorted to watching daytime television—how could I live with myself then?—but to any outside observer, (how did YOU get in here, anyway?) I might easily appear to be simply, perhaps profoundly slacking, and I might be slacking. The evidence that my Cogitation might bear fruit remains firmly in the grasp of the future tense during these lengthy periods. Cogitation accomplishes nothing, and without evident elegance, either.

I could probably pass for a retiree, if I would only allow myself to retire, but I remain tenaciously engaged even when, even if, I seem awfully disengaged.

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WrongQuestion

wrongquestions
Franz Marc: Birth of the Wolves [Geburt der Wölf]) (1913)
" … this tactic sometimes even works … "

They always ask the WrongQuestion, probably because there are no completely right and proper ones. The purpose of asking WrongQuestions might vary a bit from what we might innocently consider the purpose of asking a proper question, presuming, of course, that such questions exist. The purpose of asking WrongQuestions might extend no further than a desire to start a conversation, like when someone asks Fundamentally Undecidable Questions, though those might prove both right and proper. The difficulty, or at least a chief difficulty, arises when one presumes that a WrongQuestion is, in fact, a right and proper one, and being right and proper, that it deserves a right and proper answer. Therein begins the trip down into a rabbit hole and into an often inescapable labyrinth.

There are tells, clues that the question offered might prove problematic.

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TimeLagging

timelagging
Gustave Doré: Found in the Street (1872)
" … trust in my experience, even when it seems, at best, half-vast."


The Muse knows that if she wants to understand my perspective, she'll have to ask and then … … wait, for I never seem capable of responding instantly with any status request. Ask me what I think and my first reaction will be to wonder, "Was I supposed to be thinking?" I'll need to sort out some fairly hefty existential baggage before I'll muster a response. Asking me how I feel about something should spark an even lengthier delay, for I do not keep my feelings within easy reach. My mean lag time between intention and engagement tends to be lengthy, too, as I seem to need to consider most things through to some point of leverage before physically starting, so it might well seem as if I had been actively forgetting to follow through rather than spooling up for my opening gambit. I have proven to be a most frustrating partner.

I am a frustrating partner for myself, too.

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ThatVoice

thatvoice
Giorgio de Chirico: The Seer, Winter 1914–15
" … wondering if my Authoring voice might ever gain parity or prominence."


I have a voice in my head. Or is it that a voice in my head has me? Either way, there's a voice up there, though I'm uncertain if that voice belongs to me, if it's mine. Like when I hear my voice on a recording, this voice doesn't very much sound like mine, like the one I hear when I speak out loud to myself or to anyone, so I suppose that the voice in my head could belong to anyone. It chatters. It narrates my life. It tells the stories as they unfold before me, as if it had access to the script. Sometimes it reads ahead. It can fill me with delight or dread. It's my faithful companion. When I startle awake at zero dark thirty in the morning, ThatVoice greets me. As I fall asleep in the evening, it wishes me well, often by replaying that day's greatest hits and misses. It's never far and rarely silent.

Radios were originally installed in cars to prevent ThatVoice from having too much influence over each driver, to promote more uniformity and less daydreaming.

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Spark

spark
Jan Collaert: New Inventions of Modern Times [Nova Reperta],
The Invention of Book Printing, plate 4

(ca. 1600)
"If I can stay in the game and somehow retain my patience, insight eventually visits …"

When I started this Authoring series two full months ago, I suspected that success would require some fundamental understanding to emerge, though I didn't at the time understand just what that understanding might entail. Authoring involves wrestling with so many simultaneous mysteries that they prove impossible to inventory. It seemed that at least one question was hounding me each morning. Through early days, I found it convenient to just let the mysteries be. Later, the unresolved ones seemed to slow then stall my sense of forward progress. I felt tempted to just put my head down and bull through those barriers even though I knew, or believed I knew, that these were the sorts of barriers that nobody ever successfully bulls their way through. I suspected that something would happen, some seriously uncertain something, which would transform the series and at least contribute to turning the resulting book into something more than mere writing, into Authoring.

Many things just seem to require patience.

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Paradigming

paradigming
Giorgio de Chirico: The Painter’s Family (1926)
" … from his future turned dystopian on him, he might caution others to be wary …"


I want to have written a book of unique form rather than just another copy cat derivative work. All books seem very much alike in that they feature a number of pages tucked between covers, called "boards" in the trade, but the old adage that you can't tell a book by its cover also holds true for a book's form. A book is not simply a book in that it also holds the potential to transcend what the term book meant before this one came along. Forever after, history will be divided into two components, before this book and after this book. That book's the one, if I'm honest with myself and with my readers, I want to have written, to be writing. I want to believe that's the book I'm presently creating and also the book I have up in manuscript galleys awaiting publication, a great treasure awaiting discovery. A part of me, the rational, more-or-less sane part, understands that this future probably does not stand before me, yet my hope still springs eternal. The result seems to be a generic Want To, Have To, but Can't Dilemma, in no way exceptional, for it might well be that everybody, every writer, painter, chef, and teacher aspires for just this sort of impact and also that it cannot ever be engineered, no matter what. There are good reasons for this to be the case.

First, such Paradigming can only occur after the fact.

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TimeShifting

TimeShifting
Thomas P. Anshutz: The Tanagra (1909)
"Best if nobody can peek into the workshop while Geppetto's carving."

I write in the wee hours. Everything else in my life, including Authoring, comes after my writing's finished. I try to interface with everyone else's world, but I insist upon at least my writing time each morning, and that sometimes sloughs over. It seems important that my writing occurs early in the morning, under the cover of darkness into dawn. By dawn, I'm almost always finished, cleaning up the mess I always make, completing my final edits, Proofing one or two more times. By seven, I'm free to start thinking about breakfast and to get myself suited up for my day, though the last two years have found me largely suiting up to go nowhere given the Damned Pandemic restrictions, which have suited my lifestyle just fine. By the time The Muse wakes up, I've already put in four or five hours. I live that far ahead of her, I imagine. I'm TimeShifting.

We eat supper together, which might be the only time we see each other all day.

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Authdacity

authdacity
Marcel Duchamp: Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2
[French: Nu descendant un escalier n° 2] (1912)

"To do it properly means that you must seem to be doing it all wrong …"


The Muse engages in project work, which has always been a curious offshoot of what I might call regular work. Project work seems strange because its primary purpose seems to be to do away with itself. A successful project will work itself out of existence, which seems like an odd foundation upon which to build a career. Further, most professions prescribe practices common to all practitioners. Sure, a few outliers always exist, but the mainstream engage with remarkable consistency, so it shouldn't be surprising if project practitioners, too, usually attempt to adhere to a few widely-acknowledged blessed practices. The Project Management Institute even publishes and maintains what they refer to as a Body of Knowledge, an encyclopedic collection of practices they've blessed for broad application. For an engineering project, these practices might generally work, but project work, being unique, often requires some differences in how one engages. The Muse, for instance, often engages in scientific projects, ones intending to discover something. One does not plan, control, or track a scientific engagement as if it were an engineering assembly effort. Or, I should say, that one shouldn't plan, track, or control a scientific engagement that way. Most try to. The Muse doesn't, wherein lies her mastery. She appears to do it wrong.

I'm learning that Authoring, too, seems to demand some different sorts of management than does other kinds of engagement.

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BigChicken

bigchicken2
Melchior de Hondecoeter: A Cock and Two Hens, with Chicks, in a Landscape Setting (1656-95)
"A BigChicken will swallow anything."


My face mask might successfully cloak from the usual observer the fact that I'm a BigChicken. Pin feathers successfully tucked in beneath an over-sized N95, and anyone might mistake me for a man. Inside, behind that mask, lies a deep truth and a continual embarrassment. I tend to move forward by first crouching behind. I will not lift up my head to survey the territory before me for the longest time, choosing to nurture terrifying fantasies rather than getting to the normal business of slaying dragons. I am evidently not brave. Oh, I've accomplished plenty in my time, but not nearly as much as I've fled from or declined engagement with. I first imagine failing, and failing big, before getting over it and proceeding.

What courage I do exhibit tends to be of the counter phobic kind.

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Systemantics

systemantics
Peter Paul Rubens: The Incarnation as Fulfillment of All the Prophecies (1628-29)
" … without having yet achieved any maturity."


My Authoring efforts amount to nothing more than my attempts to master another system. An old systems thinking adage insists that learning one system provides insight into all systems, and having learned many systems in my time, adding Authoring to my vitae should not prove utterly impossible, and yet some days it seems as if Authoring might prove special by proving itself utterly impossible to master. The systems thinkers have this contingency covered, too, for as John Gall, system thinker and author of the sadly entertaining Systemantics- How Systems Work and Especially How They Fail (General Systemantics Press: 1975/78, 1986, 2002), all systems are not only part of larger systems but also comprised of many smaller systems, each of which is infinitely complex. Nested infinite complexity explains a lot of what I see when interacting with and attempting to master Authoring, and also what I experience when attempting to interact with even the more mature systems in my life, the ones I might naively expect to perform predictably.

Last week, I pulled into my pharmacy's "drive thru" window, responding to an automated voice message which alerted me to prescription refills ready for me to fetch.

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Backsliding

backsliding
Hans Sebald Beham: Engraving of the Prodigal Son as a Swineherd (1538)
"Backsliding into my future."

After three weeks of steadily improving Spring-like weather, the temperature started falling yesterday and has plummeted down to twenty degrees Fahrenheit (-7C) this morning, with light snow. I spent a rough half hour this morning finally managing to get past LinkedIn's login gauntlet, failing a half dozen times before mysteriously being allowed in, only then to wonder why I'd bothered. I found messages from three years ago and even older, from before I'd last lost the questionable ability to log into that world. I found an essentially infinite queue of long unanswered messages and no evidence of anything resembling my much-touted network, along with what's still the most bafflingly opaque user interface in an industry where bafflingly opaque user interfaces remain the standard. I still can't tell what LinkedIn does, what it's for, it's purpose. The universe seems to be reminding me this morning that progress, once General Electric's "Most Important Product," does not now nor has it ever moved exclusively forward. Once the very epitome of conglomeration, GE has lately been divesting, retrenching back into once core businesses. Progress was ever thus. Even rivers, if one can quiet their mind long enough to observe rather than project what they see, will exhibit prominent backeddies and backwashes along with what we generally perceive as exclusively forward motion. Progress, seen as it actually manifests, proves confusing, a complicated calculus.

And so it probably should be for Authoring, too. It's both Chutes as well as Ladders out here on the cutting edge.

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BookSale

booksale
Thomas Fleming: Inside the Old Curiosity Shop. Source: Around The Capital with Uncle Hank (1902)
"I wonder what it might have felt like to live in those days …"

The boxes sit everywhere around this town, in front of shops and stores, clearly marked as present for donations to a BookSale. The local chapter of the AAUW (American Association of University Women) sponsors this annual event as its primary fund raiser. For a weekend, they take over a large conference room at the best hotel in town and fill it with donated books, sorted by general topic and kind, and commence to selling them. This always proves to be well attended. Who wouldn't want to browse through piles of musty books on a February weekend?

The inventory includes all of the usual suspects.

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Avant

avant
Oskar Schlemmer: Bauhaus Stairway (1932)
" … wisdom can only come after already expending altogether too much time and energy and effort overthinking these questions."

I don't usually identify myself as an Avant guarde writer, but I've been rethinking that notion since The Muse introduced me to a woman who advertises herself as an Avant Gardener. In most ways, I suppose, she's a traditionalist, but she brings a twist to her focus. Sure, she can spout off Latin plant names, but she imagines them in unusual combinations, in places where no traditionalist would ever consider placing them. In this respect, then, she fully qualifies as an Avant designer, Avant meaning 'combining forms.' In a similar way, I guess, I might qualify as an Avant writer, since, I, too, combine forms to produce a unique result. Reading one of my manuscripts produces different sensations for me than does reading others' work. I thought the differences mere quirks at first and found myself rather embarrassed by them. As I've reflected upon my experience, though, I see a sort of signature emerging. This must be emblematic of David's writing, how he does it. It's not precisely wrong, but different. Whether it produces pleasing sensations might be a different question.

One should always question how to judge the quality of any Avant creation, for comparing it should properly prove problematic.

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Detritus

detritus
Winslow Homer: Sharks; also The Derelict (1885)
"I can please The Muse by finally getting around to cleaning up the last of last season's mess …"


When we replaced five large picture windows last Fall, we created Detritus. We leaned the old glass up against the fence at the back of the formal rose garden, almost out of sight and definitely out of mind. I'd asked our carpenter's wife and business partner if she knew how to advertise the panes on Facebook or somewhere and she said that she'd take care of it. Sure enough, a week or so later, she texted me to report that she'd found an interested party. I'd not seen her text until a couple of days after she'd sent it and the deal never closed. Winter passed with that glass placidly leaning, bothering nobody. Imagine my surprise when I received a message yesterday afternoon that just said, "Almost to town. Where can we meet up about the glass?" Athena send a follow-up text a few minutes later reporting that the glass guy was finally coming to collect his prize. This news delighted me because the glass had become one of the few remaining bits of Detritus from The Great Refurbish, which we'd almost finished two months ago.

I'm still learning that trying to accomplish anything produces encumbrances to further forward progress, also known as Detritus.

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Breakthrough1.0

breakthrough1.0
John Buckland Wright, Freedom (1933)
"Perhaps it was never the problem we convinced ourselves it was."

Today's Authoring Story presents a Breakthrough, what I'll label Breakthrough1.0 in recognition of the high likelihood that this will prove to be the first one of, if not many, then a few upcoming Breakthroughs. They do tend to come in manys following some stuckness. One Breakthrough begets others. A snowball might spawn an avalanche. I realize that this one might well seem out of context, because it's not about Authoring so much as a product of Authoring effort. I'd grown dissatisfied with what I'd earlier written as the preface for my Cluelessness book, the one I've been preparing for publication as part of this Authoring work. What follows serves as a second draft of that preface. I present it without further comment and humbly request that you, dear reader, savage it if you can. This preface, of course, being intended for a book entitled Cluelessness, should exhibit some Cluelessness itself. I wonder if it's understandable, compelling, or seemingly stumbling all over itself? Have at it, please. I promise to be grateful.

———

What sort of person writes a book titled Cluelessness?

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Dolt-Drums

dolt-drums
John Buckland Wright: Title Unknown (date unknown)
" … willing to tolerate anything to end up somewhere else."

A point comes, usually somewhere in the middle more than near the beginning or end, where I lose my way. Whatever forward momentum my original bright idea imparted has, by then, largely dissipated. The objective's attraction, however initially strange or alluring, loses its magnetism and I feel adrift amid considerable flotsam: the odd oar, a life jacket, a leaky ice chest, and an almost refinished manuscript. I've forgotten what I was supposed to be up to. I've lost the vision. Once steady trade winds betray me and my rigging slaps impotently against mast and spar, luffing. So recently filled with inspiration, I feel struck stupid. I lose my course and my purpose. What the ancient mariner referred to as the doldrums, the horse latitude stall, I might just as well call the Dolt-Drums. I'm struck by just how dumb I seem.

What was I thinking? What was I feeling? What, again, did I firmly believe I was pursuing?

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ChangingVenue

changingvenue
Lucian Freud: Reflection with Two Children [Self-portrait] (1965)
" … my perspective suddenly vaster"

This Damned Pandemic has severely limited my mobility. As a writer, I treasure the movability of my craft. I can just as easily write in the backyard gazebo as at my desk. For years, my desk served as the last place where I'd consider tucking into any actual work. Since the shutdown started two years ago, though, my desk has served as, well, my desk. The view overlooking the center of the universe, where we moved my desk eleven months ago, and The Grand Refurbish, finished two short months ago, improved my location if not my variety, for before the sequestering, I maintained a hot half dozen regular alternative places to work. I could just drop in either of a couple of Starbucks or a local coffee shop near the university, or even another up in our mountain village. I could choose from two fine libraries or a breakfast place with outside seating on Main Street. If I felt constrained at home, I could just head out to find some properly bounded isolation my writing seemed to thrive upon. No longer.

With the COVID and her variants, I hardly ever leave the house, let alone go sit in any of my used-to-be usual public places.

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Enhollowing

enhollowing
Theo van Doesburg: Neo-Plasticism: Composition VII [The Three Graces] (1917)
" … my bane as well as my refuge."

My daily Authoring essays have become something of status updates, a widely-abused and misunderstood art form. Back when I managed projects, I thrived or suffocated on the quality of my status reports, so much so that I might have spent the bulk of my time strolling around, visiting with project community members, gathering their impressions of where we were, where our project might be located in space and time. These were Blind Men and the Elephant excursions where each witness testified to often wildly different perspectives. One might be way ahead of where the schedule predicted where they'd be while others reported falling further behind. My job was seemingly to cobble together all these divergent perspectives to report where the effort really sat. These reports were, as a rule, works of fiction intended to keep the sponsoring and managing authorities out of the project's underpants so that we might continue working. Too much of a scent of trouble might incite an inquisition, a review featuring Fundamentally Unanswerable Questions and project managers like me, chartered to provide reassuring answers. Few events were ever more disruptive than helpful inquisitions.

Senior management would issue their own reassurances following the review so that things might return to their smooth-appearing operation again.

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Inging

inging
Flag of Qing dynasty or Manchu dynasty
"It might be that I'll be no different after."

What am I doing? Sitting. Breathing. Thinking. Being. Authoring. Inging. Not just any one of these activities, some of which actually involve movement, but simultaneously all of them. What am I, then? Sitter? Breather? Thinker? Be-er? Author? Ing-er? It seems that I'm most likely an Ing-er. I -ing, and therefore I am. Whatever I'm doing, I'm Inging. Right now, I am writing, but not just writing. At what point did I earn my creds as a writer? I know for certain that under no circumstances will I ever only write, for I must also sit, breath, think, be, author, while also Ing on several concurrent levels. Maybe I'm a perpetual part-timer.

I ask these silly seeming questions because they don't necessarily seem all that silly to me.

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StalkingDream

stalkingdream
Francisco de Goya: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters,
No. 43 from Los Caprichos [The Caprices] (1796-17980)

"Authors of their own meanings …"

My friend Lynn Kincanon writes at least a poem every day. She writes good ones, too, ones not too full of flowery allusion and not so superficial that they don't inspire. I think of her as an every day poet, profound and subtle, accessible and good, often great. She was one year named the poet laureate of Loveland, Colorado, and enjoys a decent Facebook following. Go friend her there. You'll never regret that you did. I introduce you to each other—Lynn, PureSchmaltz member, PureSchmaltz member, Lynn—because today's Authoring story was inspired by something Lynn wrote in the last week or so. She spoke of StalkingDreams, of dreams that seem to come to her on the installment plan, visiting in odd succession, refusing to resolve. They might become close friends, familiar as family, however otherwise unsettling they might remain. It's as if these dreams were movies from an only almost parallel universe, just a touch orthogonal but almost plumb. They're damned persistent, consistently presenting key metaphors and allegories as if insisting that we come to understand their deepest meaning, as if their story really mattered.

I've hosted just such a dream for innumerable sessions over recent seasons, not just a few nights running, but months and quarters.

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TheNarrative

thenarrative
After John Flaxman: Ulysses at the Table of Circe
[The Odyssey of Homer
] (1805)
"Discovering it's a dance."

For most of history, people believed that an actual Homer, author of The Odyssey, existed. In the nineteen twenties, a young anthropologist made a shocking declaration. He claimed to have determined that Homer was most probably a role and not an actual individual historical figure. He based his assertion on observation. He visited Macedonia and listened to traditional tavern singers, who specialized in singing lengthy epic poems, often hours long. He learned that these singers could repeat these poems verbatim, night after night, with virtually no variation, a seemingly inhuman capability, yet each such singer managed it, even when in his cups. This narrative first received much push-back from the field, but over time, the simple logic of the story seemed to supplant the centuries of alternative explanation. It was eventually much easier to believe that generations of storytellers developed and preserved these stories over eons rather than that a single individual lived and chronicled them in a single generation. The story about the story changed.

A fair part of Authoring has nothing to do with the physical manuscript, the apparent story in question, but the story about that story.

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GoodAdvice

goodadvice
Theo van Doesburg: Counter-Composition VI (1925)
"I might ask if another wants the benefit of my experience."

The best advice I ever received arrived just after my friend WayneeBoy asked me if I wanted some advice. He had not begged the question, either. He made an honest offer. If I had not nodded my approval, he would have held his advice to himself, none the poorer, for his advice came on multiple levels. The first bit he communicated by observing an uncommon courtesy, similar to that extended whenever a visiting sailor seeks to board another's vessel. "Permission to come aboard, sir?" Boarding a ship without first asking permission could cause an international incident, so by long tradition, permission gets asked and extended, a small courtesy which somehow seems to sanctify the visit. We, as in you and me and almost everybody, commonly neglect to ask permission to dispense our GoodAdvice before dishing it out. We often sow our seeds without first preparing the soil, without first considering whether the one so obviously needing our GoodAdvice might be in any position to hear, let alone act upon it. We tend, then, to waste an awful lot of effort.

I know that it seems, in that pregnant moment, that I might be able to help another avoid an error or perhaps recover more easily, if only, if only. If only, indeed!

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Slideways

slideways
El Greco, View of Toledo, c. 1596–1600


"I'm sliding Slideways …"

How might I describe my writing? Probably not in the same fashion that I usually write, for a description seems of a different order than an observation or worse, an inference. It seems one thing to state that the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog and quite another to explain why. The explanation seems necessary because who could possibly conclude the intention without some sideways explanation, one posed at a slightly higher and sideways orientation, perhaps looking down upon the commotion? I'd say that no one's very likely to jump to an accurate interpretation without some outside orientation, without the author of the expression disclosing his intentions, whether those seem at all transparent or even present in his silly sentence. Explaining that the sentence in question serves as an English-language pangram—a sentence that contains all of the letters of the English alphabet—the deeper meaning comes clear. The sentence still seems queer, but more understandably so.

I face the same challenge but on a much broader scale.

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AnSight

ansight
Attributed to Jacques Le Boucq: Posthumous Portrait of Hieronymus Bosch (1550)


"The Purpose of Mathematical Programming Is Insight, Not Numbers"
Arthur M. Geoffrion

"Authoring might at essence be nothing more than discovering how to usefully think about Authoring …"


I suspect that the often frantic search for answers amounts to little more than a typical stupid human trick, one of those traps into which we as a species seem to too easily stumble. When a question stumps me, I usually seek an answer to that question, when answer rarely serves as an initial stage of resolution. An answer tends to be something more like the final stage resolution, the end of attempts to resolve, not the go-to first step, yet we persist in first seeking answers. What might we seek instead? Experience alone might have long ago suggested that we'd be much better off seeking insights instead of answers, for, like management professor Arthur M. Geoffrion proposed in his 1976 essay of the same name, The Purpose of Mathematical Programming is Insight, Not Answers. Likewise, the first purpose of resolving questions might well be to somehow stumble upon some useful insight rather than to expect to somehow cobble together some resolving answer from the outset. An insight might lead to resolution while a search for a resolving answer most often produces little more than a frustrating stymie.

As with many things, the long way seems to be the shortcut when attempting to resolve some burning question.

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Doubting

doubting
The Creation and the Expulsion from the Paradise: Giovanni di Paolo [Giovanni di Paolo di Grazia] (ca. 1438–44)
"I'm gonna take a couple of pills and call myself in the morning."


Following several focused weeks of compiling and Proofing manuscripts, a point came where Doubting kicked in. My Authoring effort, a faith-based initiative if ever one existed, finds its faith sorely tested as its nose slips past the skepticism point on the spectrum to slide into definite Doubting range. Doubting seems a touch deeper than skepticism. While the skeptic holds a possibility, those Doubting carry a conviction which can only be turned by some disconfirming personal experience. Remember the Doubting Apostle Thomas, who refused to believe in the resurrection until he could personally touch Jesus' wounds? The very presence of Jesus might have convinced any skeptic. So much for the often touted benefit of Doubting. Doubting seems more of a hanging judge type of curse than a blessing.

And I would this morning hang the whole Authoring effort from the highest yardarm, if only we had yardarms anymore.

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SecondGuessing

secondguessing
Paul Cézanne: The Large Bathers [Les grandes baigneuses] (c. 1894–1906)
"I'll feel grateful for any future acceptance and unsurprised by any upcoming rejections …"


Rather than reassuring myself, Proofing my manuscripts encourages me into SecondGuessing what I thought I was accomplishing when I wrote them. I try to read each cleanly, as if I was just any old reader, but I know my voice too well to avoid jumping ahead. I also know my thinking too well to enter or exit very innocently. I might not remember precisely what I said, but I well understand how I tend to say stuff, and my logic sometimes seems entirely too predictable and precious. I sense the next glibness coming and almost cringe watching it arrive. I've seen my stand-up routine too often to find my jokes funny or insightful anymore.

I wonder what utility my Proofing brings, but I already know the answer.

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Circuitous

circuitous
Isamu Noguchi: Slide Mantra (1986)
" … one dare not ever engage in that kind of work anymore."

In this culture, we possess highly evolved methods for streamlining, for 'making efficient.' These tactics underpin what we refer to as Process Improvement, presuming that one improves processes by trimming them down to bare minimums. We prefer methods requiring less time, fewer resources, smaller investments. We're all in for quick and easy, and even feel uneasy when something doesn't seem quick or easy enough, for it seems broken then and in need of 'improvement.' Some activities, however, do not. by their nature, lend themselves to such streamlining. I wrestle with these jobs because efficiency mantras reverberate in my head when I engage in them, telling me that something's wrong, a false positive warning when working with Circuitous processes like Authoring.

I have not yet found the straight or the narrow paths through my Authoring effort.

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Enantiodromia

enantiodromia
Eduard Tomek: Sea (1971)
"The ancients understood what we forgot."

I don't usually write about whatever we talk about during my weekly Friday PureSchmaltz Zoom Chat. Like all dialogues, one simply must be present in the room, immersed within the context, for the content to make any sense, and attempts to explain what happened to anyone absent from the primary experience seems simply doomed from the outset. Think inarticulate explanation of a movie plot, but I heard myself say something in the thick of yesterday's chat that I think might prove noteworthy, and even germane to my Authoring initiative. I heard myself say that every project ultimately turns into something other than its originating intention before it can be completed. I'd never heard myself (or anyone) state this obvious truth before. Instead, I, like everyone, I suppose, has hung onto the notion that the originating objective accurately represents a project's real purpose, that guiding the effort through to achieve that originating purpose amounted to state-of-the-art 'project management,' when experience might have convinced anyone otherwise. Certainly, many projects have been characterized as failures because they produced something other than their originally expected results, but it might prove useful to wonder if any project of any real complexity had ever succeeded under that strict metric. I doubt it.

The standard practice to counteract this perhaps common phenomena— that projects produce something other than originally intended—has been the final stage politicking typical to every effort of any size, wherein original intentions get reframed to fit within the size shoes the elves managed to produce this time.

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AnEmbarrassment

anembarrassment
Artemisia Gentileschi - Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy (1620s)


"Everything I hold dear will have become as a rusty spoon, leaving little of substance …"

By the time I finish compiling and Proofing my eighteen finished PureSchmaltz Stories manuscripts, I calculate that I'll have accumulated something like six thousand double-sided double-spaced pages, or six reams of printed material. That does not count the two or three or four other odd uncollated manuscripts I have hanging around even further backstage. It also doesn't count the material I continue producing each morning which, by the end of each quarter, adds another three hundred plus pages and yet another "finished" manuscript. Believe me, please, I am not bragging here, but sitting on the edge of a kind of ecstatic despair. Over the forty-five days since I started this Authoring effort, I've compiled five manuscripts and Proofed three, leaving two compiled but not yet proofed and six more to compile and Proof to resolve my current backlog. Try as I might, I cannot seem to proof more than one manuscript per week, for I find that work rather like reading poetry. One cannot speed-read poetry. Proofing my prose induces bouts of ecstatic despair, for the slowly shrinking pile of paper seems an authentic source of both pride and embarrassment for me, one of incalculable wealth.

I had not intended to do this to myself.

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Honing

honing
Massimiliano Soldani: The Knife Grinder (c.1700), Albertinum, Dresden
" … sharpening a skill."

Many mysteries have been resolving themselves as I continue my Authoring efforts. I've gotten to the point where I feel as though I can almost make my compiling software do my bidding, though I declare this while keeping the fingers of my right hand crossed and secreted behind my back. No use tempting fate. I feel about as proficient as a novice driver who only drops one in three shifts; more skilled but hardly a master yet. Let's say I'm getting by, and as I begin to get by, my collating effort seems less insurmountable; still at root impossible, but now, surprisingly, less so; a smaller infinity. And with this improvement, the grey cloud which had taken up residence just over my head has begun dispersing, like the fog bank hiding horizons here since Christmas. It's not Spring yet, but the brutal part of the Winter's finished. I sense the brutal part of my Authoring's behind me, too, but behind me like my right hand's behind me, with crossed fingers. Let's say that I've been Honing my craft.

Honing seems an interesting activity because it sits in the often neglected middle ground beyond beginning but before ending.

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RipVanSchmaltz

ripvanschmaltz
Albertis del Orient Browere: Rip Van Winkle (1833)
"What an overlong and awfully strange nap it's been."

Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle slept for twenty-five years, at least a third of a lifetime, to awaken into an unrecognizable world where children had become adults and adults, elderly or dead. He, himself, had grown a long white beard and moved with unaccustomed difficulty. I can speak anecdotally, from my own experience, to report that one need not doze for twenty-five years to experience a Rip Van Winkle effect. I'm convinced that no wakefulness exists that's powerful enough to stave off this result, for this world seems in constant flux and moves indifferent to us. Focusing upon any piece of it will leave one out of synch with other parts, and there exists altogether too many parts for any one of us to ever even hope to keep up with their fluxes. The Muse and I went on a thirteen year exile only to return to a place essentially unrecognizable, then we set about refurbishing, which further erased many formerly reliable context markers. We returned to a place we'd never before inhabited to carry on a life that had been more than merely disrupted.

The first few years of our exile, we were able to easily maintain the dream, by which I guess I mean that we were already sleeping.

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SpurtyWork

spurty
Artemisia Gentileschi:
Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (1638–39)
"I hope to stumble upon some insight …"

I might classify work as belonging to two general classes: steady work and SpurtyWork. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors avoided steady work, but in more modern times it has become the dominant form, usually dispatched in shifts, often extending over many contiguous hours, days, weeks, months, years, and careers. SpurtyWork exclusively occurs in bursts, often separated by lengthy idle or distracted periods, time spent away from focusing upon the effort. Steady workers and SpurtyWorkers have always held contentious, often contemptuous opinions of each other. To the dedicated steady worker, SpurtyWorkers seem frivolous and lacking in any primary focus. To SpurtyWorkers, the steady workers seem like wage slaves, masochistically mortgaging their lives to the unforgiving time clock and unrelenting seasons. Steady workers might reasonably aspire to efficient performances that could not possibly even compute when considered from within a SpurtyWork context. Steady workers might experience flow. SpurtyWorkers produce in fits, starts, and stalls, with apparently heavy focus upon stalling, idling. Farmers traditionally complained about hunter-gatherers' lax habits, thinking them lazy, though a hunter-gather could typically satisfy their needs working many fewer hours and so adopted lifestyles dominated by leisure rather than labor. Steady workers are Puritans, SpurtyWorkers, Bacchanalian, at least in each others' opinion.

Authoring's inescapably SpurtyWork.

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ShelfConfidence

shelfconfidence
Vincent van Gogh: Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat [obverse: The Potato Peeler] (1887)
"Here I come!"


Writing might be the very most introverted activity ever devised. Authoring, a staging and performing of the writer's product, seems the opposite. As a writer, I've long wondered who I thought I was writing for, with various responses, though I mostly seem to be writing to and for myself, as insular and recursive as that might seem. Authoring's queuing up that internal stuff for more public distribution and consumption, from the perspective of the writer's solipsistic whispering, an audacious act. Posting my pieces began as tiny outrageous acts, duck and cover operations, as if I was chucking each one over a sturdy wall to splat down near unnamed targets. As I attracted an audience, the possibility of becoming an adviser arose, but I've mostly chosen to share the echoing I witness happening within my head. Any advice I might give tends to come obliquely, by example, the transcribed dialogue between me, myself, and I. I lack the self confidence to otherwise promote my internal dialogues. I've mostly just chucked them over walls like unguided missiles, hopeful that they won't do too much damage or spark too awfully many complaints.

Authoring drags that self-effacing operation out of its closet, or seems to threaten to.

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DreadLines

dreadlines
Rembrandt van Rijn: Abraham's Sacrifice (1655)
"Some days, I manage to walk through walls."


I deeply dislike the term
Deadline when used to denote a point where an assignment's supposed to be completed. It connotes something almost never evident, that the date represents a drop dead point, that somebody will die should that expectation not be satisfied. This is so rarely the case, that Deadline amounts to hyperbole, intended, perhaps, to rile up the more existential instincts. I've seen project teams go insane in the shadow of an impending Deadline, though I've yet to see anybody actually die when the Deadline wasn't met. They're mostly never met. A trumped up threat might serve as the very last thing most project teams seem to need to motivate them to perform.

I've proposed calling them
Stay Awake Dates, points of special awareness well short of existential dread.

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OtherWorlds

otherworlds
Norman Rockwell: General Electric Promotional Poster
"What a Protection Electric Light Is." (1925)

"We must be blind to enter OtherWorlds …"


Authoring intrudes upon OtherWorlds. Even when producing a work of current affairs, currency quickly slips into the recent past before further immersing itself into even foggier history. Our current world quickly shifts into OtherWorlds, too, its literature—fiction, non-fiction, reference—probably irrelevant for its original intentions. Even our current world, slippery though it might seem, favors certain orders. It wants originality but not unfamiliarity. It wants inventive similarity, not precisely a copy, for that might border on plagiarism or worse, produce a derivative work. It wants an urgency, as if a work should carry a critical message such that receiving it might stave off some catastrophe. It might seek the avant garde but rarely the weird. Beatniks without beards. Hippies with clean hair and pressed jeans. A reassuring future.

Any author seeking sanity should probably consider changing careers or just stop listening to what anyone insists that they want them to produce.

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Ambivalence

ambivalence
Head of Medusa, originally attributed to Leonardo Da Vinci.
This painting was later believed to have been created by a Flemish painter in the late 16th or early 17th century.

"Authoring seems to want its own pace …"


Nearly forty days into my Authoring effort, I notice a few snakes in my head. I know, like you know, that a genuine Hero's Journey should feature a steadfast and stalwart hero, someone holding unwavering dedication, not someone questioning his charter or purpose, yet this hero has been holding a few questions. I've found through decades of engagements, that at some point—it doesn't really matter if that point comes nearer the beginning, middle, or end—it can prove useful to apply some focused ambivalence upon an imperative effort. Especially if it seemed as if it absolutely has to get finished … or else, that there exists no reasonable alternative to successfully navigating the course, no matter how harrowing, that not succeeding would be tantamount to failure, it's especially important to reconsider again just how essential the effort might have not become. Is the race still worth running? Or else what?

I store this tactic in my Anything But That! drawer, one I only rarely ever open.

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TheFortunateFew

oneofthefortunatefew
Self-portrait of Nicolas Régnier painting a portrait of Vincenzo Giustiniani (1623-24)
" … my steadily eroding naiveté sipping bitter coffee."

As details of my Authoring initiative have come into focus, I realize that these have most often appeared as fresh insults to my originating naiveté, disappointments and difficulties. Some have valiantly attempted to reassure me that I'm probably not as crazy as I seem to feel, given my testimony, and I sincerely appreciate these attempts, for I am probably not as crazy as I sometimes feel. All told, or enough told to find a coherent thread, I remain one of TheFortunateFew. I am pursuing some ends larger than my original footprints. I'm testing edges. I'm making discoveries. I might even be making a difference, though that assessment must wait until I'm through this gauntlet. I believe that any worthwhile initiative must necessarily start as a sincere expression of the protagonist's innocence. His naiveté. However experienced he might have been then, his prior experience will have to become irrelevant in light of what this latest adventure manifests. The process by which naiveté wises up, that's the means by which the worthwhile emerges here. It was never different.

Each discovery which disqualifies some element of the initiating naiveté can seem brutal if not necessarily vicious.

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HollowingDays

hollowingdays
A cross-sectional drawing of the planet Earth
showing the "Interior World" of Atvatabar,
from
William R. Bradshaw's 1892 science-fiction novel
The Goddess of Atvatabar
"This, too, should ultimately pass."

Much of what constitutes Authoring amounts to isolated effort. From ideation through writing, collating through editing, everything could occur in solitary confinement, and does, or might just as well. Especially during This Damned Pandemic, alternative activities seem few and ever further between. When even heading out for a haircut gives pause, and should, this author most often chooses to simply anti-socially distance. The cats have come to know me too well, they sense my intentions better than I do myself. I live at their beck and call since I'm always nearby, never gone, but increasingly absent for myself here, too, as January degrades into HollowingDays.

The outside temperature has not varied more than three degrees in weeks, freezing plus or minus two. Chilling.

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GrandDelusion

granddelusion
GOYA: Entierro de la Sardina [The Burial of the Sardine] (1812-14)
" … how often they come true."

In my first year of junior high school, I began to get stomach aches. My mom took me to the doctor who concluded that my stomachaches were all in my head, not caused by any physical difficulty, but an emotional one. I was at the time struggling with a French class in which I'd enrolled under the delusion that I might one day be college bound. Enrollment in colleges in those days required two years of foreign language study. I abandoned my GrandDelusion of one day attending college the day I decided to follow my doctor's advice and drop the French class. My stomachaches abandoned me shortly thereafter, but I found myself lacking a GrandDelusion in my life and feeling its absence. You see, I subscribe to the school of thought that believes in the absolute necessity of maintaining a GrandDelusion in one's life. Without one, I'm sunk.

With one, I'm sort of sunk, too, but sunk of a different order.

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Cœurage

Cœurage
Claude Monet: La Grenouillère (1869)
"We're bred as critics …"

Authoring requires more heart than I can muster some days. Draft manuscripts simply must be reviewed with empathy or they'd all be reduced to red pen scratchouts the first time through. Only a wide open heart can prevent cringe-caused muscle cramps. One simply must, or I simply must, read with a sympathetic eye, which might render me my most worthless editor. My work could not survive without generous initial interpretations. If I wanted to discredit it, I could sink the whole damned enterprise in seconds. I cannot seem to write with a vengeance or author with one, either. I engage with disturbingly transparent skin, as if my spirit suffered from circulation problems. I wear a sweater and thick socks, protecting myself from the often shocking encounter with the real world and her expectations. I must write from my heart and author from there as well. This simply seems fundamental.

I am taken by the root from which courage sprung, the Latin cor (meaning heart) and the French
Cœur (also meaning heart.)

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TimeOff

timeoff
Henri Matisse: Le Rideau Jaune [The Yellow Curtain] (1915)
" … a man scribbling his living."

For me, writing and even Authoring serve as professions which do not come with TimeOff. I work weekends, holidays, even days of holy obligation, for writing and Authoring seem more lifestyle than job. Every morning seems to bring a superior personal obligation for me to engage, however holy or otherwise. If one works as a writer, one works as a writer, always practicing, never finished. Authoring so far seems no different. One does not remove one's writing boots, kick back, and forget the latest engagement. Writing doesn't finish. It's never done. Just as soon as I finish my daily essay, I'm copyediting the thing. I usually read it through about a half dozen times before I'm satisfied that I've caught all the errors I inadvertently imbedded in it, but even then, I'm apt to return again later to find a fresh couple needing correction. It's not uncommon for my Friday review of my week's writing to uncover yet another few lurking shortcomings needing fixing. The writing work's truly never done.

Authoring, too, seems fundamentally insurmountable.

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a clean, well-lighted place

a_clean__well-lighted_place
Vincent van Gogh: Le Café de Nuit [The Night Café] (1888)
" … I'm seeking immortality …"

Visiting Portland after a long winter and Damned Pandemic-induced absence feels as refreshing as a visit to Paris or Rome. Compared to our home near the center of the universe, it's a major metropolis. Further, due to the efforts of an inept surveyor, Portland's city blocks are tiny when compared with any other American city's, lending a human-scale aspect to the place. Even further, Portland features those exemplars of civilization, clean, well-lighted places for books. Portland's many bookstores encouraged me to pursue my literary leanings, for the very best future I could imagine featured me on one of those well-organized bookshelves in the old Beaver on Hawthorne or the original Powells, or even A Clean, Well-lighted Place For Books in San Francisco. I imagined myself shelved among masters, the E. B. Whites and James Thurbers, the John O'Haras and Eliot Pauls, and so I eventually was, but rather too near the end of the reign of the great American bookstore.

It's been half a generation now since the bookstore first felt the hand of internet commerce.

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SenseMaking

sensemaking
The Frolicking Animals scroll (Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga) from Heian Japan (mid-12th century)
" … SenseMaking, not necessarily about making sense …"

I've been trying for two months to schedule a Scheduled Maintenance appointment for The Schooner. I'd been really good at keeping each prescribed appointment since we bought the car, though it was easier when the dealer was just down the hill from us and I could just stop in to schedule a visit in person. Now that we've moved out toward the end of every known distribution channel, the closest dealership's fifty miles away. I considered just having my favorite local mechanic take over the maintenance, but he maintains a steady three month waiting list for appointments, so The Schooner's odometer would be at 55,000 miles before we could complete the 52,000 mile service. I'm now trying to negotiate away the 52,000 mile service in favor of just performing the 60,000 mile service early because I've lost faith that I can schedule the appointment much before the old odometer clicks over 60K.

The dealership's website features a futuristic scheduling application which was apparently intended to handle all appointment scheduling.

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InsideOut

insideout
Banksy: Shop Until You Drop [Street art, Mayfair, London] (2011)
"I wonder if there's much of a market for that."

As my Authoring effort has focused my attention on the product of my writing, I've been spending afternoon hours actually reading what I've written. I finally submit to this work—and it genuinely feels like work to me—after procrastinating on significantly less important activities. I hesitate before reentering the Proofing space, and I consider this reluctance to be part of the experience. It's information. I'm not merely proofreading, of course, but also for the first time experiencing what it's like to be one of my readers. I sit in the chair across the room from myself and observe with great curiosity and almost equal dread. It seems somehow unnatural for someone to so closely observe himself. I sense that I might be toying with one of the inviolable boundaries like a space/time continuum. I feel concerned that I might alter an earlier self or glimpse from perspectives that I was never supposed to suspect, let alone perceive. I'm only wondering how I might describe this manuscript. Is it Little Red Riding Hood or The Boy Who Cried Wolf? What makes this different from its many siblings?

I sense that I'm dabbling in an InsideOut, for my writing seems to echo my ongoing internal narrative.

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InCompetences

incompetencies
Francis Picabia: Première Recontre [First Meeting] (1925)
"If competence were a defining attribute, this world would have long ago crumbled. "

For me, writing seems an extended experiment intended to answer a simple question. Am I a competent writer? After a half century of experimentation, I've accumulated no conclusive evidence either way. I have seen evidence that I was, at times, at least bordering on competent, like when I learned that my Blind Men and The Elephant had become a bestseller, but that proved to be a lagging indicator, suggesting that I had at one time in the past been competent enough to pen a popular title, but it could neither suggest nor prove whether that gift had persisted into then present times or whether it might extend even beyond present time into any future. My experimentation continues. I each day manage to muster enough foolhardiness or courage to face the blank screen and begin again. Some days, like yesterday, for instance, I managed to feel competent as I wrote, a rare enough occurrence for me to make a note in my lab book. Further, I felt that the result, the surviving essay, proved to be top notch. I impressed myself. Then I went on to the other activities involved in my budding Authoring practice and fell on my face. I'd encountered yet another in my deep inventory of InCompetences.

I do not feel completely incompetent.

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Mindlessnessing

mindlessnessing
Charles S. Reinhart: The Face-maker . . . becomes the Village Idiot (1876)
"Hardly an ounce of mindfulness required."

Mindfulness has become a topic of popular conversation. People offer training to increase and improve one's mindfulness, and by all reports, that sector of the economy has been booming, this in spite of the contrary trend that most work remains at least ninety percent mindless effort, and growing. I see nobody—absolutely nobody—offering the mindlessness training so sorely needed in this post-industrial economy. The late nineteenth century industrial boom utterly depended upon the efforts of a few committed engineering types who dedicated themselves, their lives, to redesigning manufacturing from the sole purview of skilled artisans into steps so simple and fundamental that a well-behaved village idiot could excel in essentially any trade. The mindfulness necessary to produce virtually every consumer good plummeted between 1850 and 1920, such that mindlessness became the hottest commodity in the overheated job market. Millions of ignorant immigrants, some of your and my forebears among them, were welcomed to our shores and into jobs designed to make the average person stupid and the exceptional, insane. Each successive automation wave, up to and including computers and smart phones, left ever fewer jobs requiring mindfulness and ever more requiring an increasing proportion of Mindlessnessing. And here we are today.

It should not be the surprise it seems, then, for me to discover that even Authoring has become a victim to modernizing Mindlessnessing.

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RevisitingPurpose

revisitingpurpose
Guercino: Allegory of Painting and Sculpture (1637)
"I answer another question entirely …"

As I "finish" manuscripts, preparing them for sharing on into the world, I catch myself asking the inevitable question. "Are these works living up to my original intention for creating them?" The answer might prove unimportant for judging their quality as writing or even as literature, but I have not been occupied these past four and a half years just writing or merely producing literature, I have been—or intended myself to have been—fulfilling an original purpose. It might prove to be a fair question to consider whether I seem to have spent my time focused or if I became victim to some distraction. Lord knows I have encountered plenty of distractions.

That I even need to ask myself the question might suggest something about my writing practice.

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SecondOrderStorytelling

secondorderstorytelling
Unknown: Replica of paintings in the Chauvet Cave (Aurignacian Era—32,000 to 30,000 years ago)
"Authoring's also like this."

As I finished reading another draft manuscript, having proofed and corrected it, and for the very first time experienced it as a complete work, I remembered what came next. Now that I'd told the story, I would be called upon to tell the story about the story, to commence with a period of SecondOrderStorytelling. If writing a book's challenging, and, believe me, it is, writing the book about the book proves even more difficult for this humble and often humbled scribbler. I imagine a promoter of the ancient artists who created the work found in France's Chauvet Cave directing those artists to explain their work, pointing out that future generations, to whom the work would inevitably belong, might struggle to understand the purpose and significance of the artwork without a crib sheet interpreting it for them. The artists, skilled in the visual arts, might well have struggled to satisfy this perfectly reasonable request, them not possessing a written language yet and all. The same fate befalls the modern writer aspiring to authorhood, for he, too, feels as though he lacks a written language adequate to explain what he readily admits might prove difficult to sell if he cannot find a way to tell the essence of his story without forcing his potential audience to actually read the manuscript and draw their own conclusions. He's called to explain himself.

I can imagine Melville mumbling that his book's about a whale.

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Rhythmia

rhythmia
歌川国芳 (Utagawa Kuniyoshi, 1798 - 1861): Cats suggested as The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō
" … the effort hardly feels like working …"

Each new beginning seems to induce an arrhythmia of sorts, a break in the accustomed cadence and flow. The new pace might be sought, even insisted upon, but the first few clicks will lack some essential, though I'm unlikely to be able to describe what. Something will be missing and my world will feel off kilter. I won't know precisely what's wrong or what to do about the apparent imbalance, other than to simply soldier through it. Then, of course, I'm soldiering rather than performing and even I notice that difference. I get to wondering what happened to my once relatively effortless performance and why every damned thing I touch requires almost superhuman effort. I know, of course, but knowing, if anything, just makes the situation seem worse because if I can diagnose, why can't I resolve? I know I've lost my rhythm, my Rhythmia, but never really knew how I'd found it before. I'm tempted to suggest that I never once before ever found it, but that it exclusively found me. I wonder if it might ever find me again or if I've somehow stepped off the world I'd always known, doomed now to move without a backbeat, without a cadence.

Then one afternoon, the Rhthmia returns, at first unnoticed.

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Cogitating

cogitating
Robert Rauschenberg: Postcard Self-Portrait, Black Mountain (I) (1952)
"I ain't no action figure."

I do not behave like a standard action hero might. I decide, then slip into a period of concerted Cogitating before acting. It might even appear to the inexperienced that I do nothing at all in response to deciding, that I'm not living up to my commitment. It might even appear that way to me. I could get moody until I give myself over to accepting what seems to be my usual response to deciding something. I flee to my head, deep within my head, and commence to Cogitating. I might insist that I'm thinking then, except I cannot be certain whether I'm thinking or not. I remain uncertain what thinking entails so I cannot tell if I'm engaging in that. Cogitating might be more a meditative than a thinking state, meditation being an immersive but not necessarily an analyzing or deconstructing one. I tend to float away from key choice points having chosen but not yet ready for action. I tell myself that my Cogitating prepares me to take right action without wasting effort with hasty reactions. I tell myself this story without really knowing if I'm telling myself the truth.

The truth might be that I have no good reason, no clear justification for slipping into Cogitating inaction following making a decision.

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Gatekeepers

gatekeepers
A gatekeeper at the Srivaikuntanathan Permual Temple
"The Gatekeeper administers the first test."

I feel as if I might have wrestled the content piece of Authoring to a rough ground over the past week. The publishing software finally gave up her secrets and I assembled a second manuscript and commenced to reading into if not yet through it. I maintain a queue of future compilings and a rough process by which to achieve them. I feel a little bored, which suggests that it might probably be time for me to open another front in this Authoring effort, the front where I commence to contacting Gatekeepers.

Gatekeepers terrify me. Always have.

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Author-itative

author-itative
Forged self-portrait of Albrecht Dürer.
" … never muttered another word thereafter."

We've long known that giving a guitar to a twelve year old dramatically increases the risk that said twelve year old will start crafting verse and become, at least in their own mind, uncommonly wise, and then start dispensing advice and spouting "folk wisdom." We understand less well a similar effect resulting from teaching someone to write. The risks might be tiny, but nonetheless exist, that the budding writer might discover urges to become an author. If so, it seems a short stroll down a fairly well-trod path before said writer comes to take them self seriously, perhaps all-too seriously, and steps over that line where ever after they think of themselves as authorities and so come to speak almost exclusively in the curious dialect favored by the Author-itative. They become bores and/or whores, assuming any of scores of similarly degrading roles in society. Extreme cases might be seen guest spotting on CNN, MSNBC, or, shudder, Fox. They might even sell a lot of books.

I have personally seen how this gift of writing can evolve into the curse of Author-itative prose.

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Haunts

haunts
Utagawa Kuniyoshi: The Ghost of Asakura Togo (undated)


"Exclamation Point! Period."

If I possessed the power to give advice that might be heeded rather than mocked by people younger than I, I would find some way to convince those folks that they author their own stories. Because of this one fundamental fact, we might be incapable of victimization without our own active collusion. Plot twists notwithstanding, if we're each authoring, then we get to decide where to place the final piece of punctuation that designates the end of one of our stories, nobody else. An adage much older than I insisted that no story ever need end up a tragedy if its author simply waits until an uptick before calling the story quits. An uptick always seems to emerge, however modest. I won't argue that this world does not host true tragedies, absolute calamities, but I will insist that these are never necessarily the whole or essence of any story, and that it does everybody some good if the soul of a mangled body gets reported as transported to heaven after its fall. That's what Authoring contributes, and it's fundamental.

Not everyone—or even most—take the Authoring notion as far as actually writing anything down, but we all seem to collect our stories.

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Authorthentic

authoringthentic
Julian Schnabel: May (2017)
"I will be rewarded with a blank page …"

I admit to feeling self-conscious about how I write. This likely stems from my never having received formal training in how to write, so I suspect that I do not write properly, or right, and never have. When I say that I feel self-conscious about how I write, I mean that I usually go unconscious when writing so that I won't be thinking about what an imposter I'm being while engaging. There's a deep shame there, too, as if my act of writing should necessarily seem offensive to you and that I really should, if I were in any way thoughtful, gift this world by not further polluting it with my misbegotten work products. I do not overstate my premise here. I want to be clear about my experience. I might choose to write in what passes, for almost everybody, as the middle of the night because my practice, my actual Authoring, probably wouldn't pass muster in the fuller light of any actual day. This part of my life seems best lived surreptitiously. Once the Authoring's finished, I feel free enough to post the result without often mentioning the process by which it manifested, a process which might well be shared by every author in the history of this world so far, though not often mentioned to their readers.

Maybe cost accountants perform a similar dance when they create capital asset pricing models. They probably should.

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OpServing

opserving
Antoine Le Nain: Les Village Pipeaux [The Village Piper] (1642)
"I'm some days tempted …"

I'm taken by the differences between the life I described two years ago and the life I live today. This continuing Damned Pandemic has completely if subtly changed how I live. On my better days, I imagine myself on a mission, serving my country by observing strict protocols so as to do my part to inhibit the transmission of the virus and all of its variants. I duly upgrade my mask as suggested by the CDC. I mostly, and some days most excruciatingly, just stay home and look out my window, an OpServer more than an active actor in this world anymore. I've become a subvocalizing scold when I do venture out, pissed at all the maskless freeloaders dogpiling upon society, extending our travails, cynically shirking their civic responsibility. It would be easy, too easy, to acquiesce to the general ignorance displayed and just play along, give up, expose my position and volunteer to become a lab experiment that could quite easily kill me forever. Instead, The Muse and I keep driving, deciding when we see the overflowing maskless crowd overfilling our local tavern, to go find some more abandoned-looking business from which to order some supper to go. We even eat out at home now.

As a writer and a budding author, I some days struggle to feel as though I describe a world shared by anyone else.

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Colluding

colluding
Robert Lawson: original etching, titled “the connoisseurs,” (undated)
"
A conspiracy's gaining steam."

While writing tends toward an isolated and, indeed, isolating endeavor, Authoring becomes necessarily more social. It might take a village to bring any work to publication and distribute it beyond its author's orbit. Even in this age of viral transmission, those lowly-seeming individual producers usually have a community contributing and supporting their efforts, colluding in dozens of different little ways to make a real difference. In some ways, these helpers find their own way inside the author's circle, even when they're invited in, for these endeavors rarely seem terribly promising at the outset. Invitations get sent without great expectations that they'll be be warmly received, without knowing who might insist upon taking a lead. The resulting community expands organically, fueled by each member's own interests. In this sense, the Colluding seems inherently beneficial, occurring only because there's really no other way to get such things going. This describes what I've long referred to as a ProjectCommunity, a benevolently Colluding conspiracy of dunces intent upon becoming geniuses. Screw projects, we'd much rather collude and conspire.

As a writer untrained by formal writers' workshop orientation, I most fear the critics.

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Dedication

dedication
John Singer Sargent: Gassed (1919)
"The universe has seemed dedicated to thwarting my forward momentum …"

It seems simply axiomatic that any attempt to accomplish anything novel attracts imps, so I should not feel in the least bit surprised that every attempt to delve more deeply into Authoring has encountered frustrating complications. Trusted software fails, or seems to, then mysteriously seems to heal itself after stalling progress for a couple of days. The mere act of plugging in a faster printer, borrowed from The Muse's office, appears to have uncovered a malware infestation which then mysteriously disappeared. Small steps seem more like stumbling blocks and every damned thing I attempt to initiate becomes either another damned thing or the same damned thing all over again. I recognize these experiences as standard Dedication tests, apparently necessary encumbrances intended to test mettle and stomach. If I cannot swallow these tangles, I might consider aborting my mission now, because worse will very likely be coming, and worse in ways that would certainly prove intolerable today, but following some initial conditioning, might well prove to be less than overwhelming. I've been building up immunity to terminal disappointment by seemingly serially disappointing myself.

It seems a wonder I've made any progress, given that I feel as though I've mostly been encumbered from moving very far forward.

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Timelessnessing

timelessnessing
Francis Picabia: Force Comique (1913–14)
"Time's a jealous one …"

Authoring, like writing, can be time consuming. I might spend three hours crafting a single thousand word essay and exhaust a few days assembling a quarter's accumulation of posted pieces into a draft manuscript, then a few days proofing that manuscript, a few hours correcting the master manuscript, all that before releasing the semi-finished work to broader review and critique. The process, if, indeed, it qualifies as a process, seems interminable and I suspect that it's actually impossible to maintain much enthusiasm for a work that takes so damned much effort to produce. There's just something about working hard that encourages moving beyond the effort and into well-earned leisure, but writers and authors do not work for the purpose of not working any more, or they sure don't seem to. They seem to work for the purpose of continuing to work, for properly engaged in, their, our, work might be better labeled play. What do I do for work? I play, but only when I remember that I can make it that way.
Any time-consuming anything tends to weigh heavily upon the one engaging, for time, a concept apparently without physical substance, weighs more than any other material.

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Learnering

learnering
Francis Picabia: Machine Turn Quickly (1916–1918)
" … even more humiliation before me …"

I know of no more pitiful state than that of a learner. The learner hangs suspended between two states: ignorance and understanding, where the presence of the former becomes ever more prominent and the absence of the latter becomes ever more apparent. No resolution resides within the learner's space. Were there a process by which one might gauge progress toward understanding, the experience might feel different for the learner, but, alas, no such process exists, though competing theories about what that process might be continually add to the irresolution. The learner's experience tends toward the chaotic with resolution uncertain. It's a genuine wonder to me why anybody ever volunteers to learn anything. Ignorance being bliss seems a damned good argument against all forms of learning, and I mean this.

Once the learning's completed, one might hold some chance of being recognized as being learned, at which point the fresh scholar might lord their superior understandings over others, thereby earning their eternal enmity.

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Relearning

relearning
Francis Picabia: La Source [The Spring] (1912)
"This Authoring crap ain't for wimps"

It might be a feature of modern times that I seem to have only fragmentary understanding of how most things work. I know enough about automobiles, for instance, to drive them, or many of them (not Buicks), but not enough to fix them should they break. I tried at one point in my life to learn enough to be able to perform simple periodic maintenance on my vehicles, but vehicles have changed since then, and even then, I was prone to making mistakes when taking care of my cars. It's genuinely difficult to clean up a four quart oil spill in a driveway after discovering that you forgot to replace the drain plug before attempting to refill the crankcase. Difficult and embarrassing.

Most of the software that I use, I understand no better than I understand automobile maintenance.

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Howsing

howsing
Pieter Bruegel the Elder: The Wedding Dance (1566)
" … new worlds emerge."

I caught myself, while proofing that latest manuscript, reading for something other than story. It's usual for me, when picking up a book, to read for content. Style might enter into my perusal, but never most prominently. I'm following the story, hoping that the author's word and phrasing choices won't unduly encumber my effort. Ideally, when reading, the style should remain essentially invisible, like a neutral wall color, there to frame the content never to overshadow it. But proofing my own writing, I already know the story. I'm learning that the story pretty much takes care of itself. This time through the work, I'm looking a little deeper than story at the technique, the style, the manner of describing I employed. Does it exhibit the necessary consistency? Does it encumber the story? Does it adequately hold the space?

I guess that the style of writing sets a context, and context tends to deeply influence everything around it.

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OpeningShop

openingshop
Robert Lawson: The March of Progress (circa 1930-1931)
" … further tedious justification …"

I discovered what I always discover when I finally finished circling the spot and settled into reading the next of my "finished manuscripts." The first few pages proved awkward reading, but before I hit the fiftieth, I'd settled into the rhythm of the writing and caught myself almost enjoying the experience. The autobiographical element proved very attractive for me, for it enabled me to relive past experiences. The pieces were spare sketches but lifelike enough for me to recognize myself, or a part of myself, passing by before my eyes. Short of a mirror to peer into, what could possibly prove more diverting and interesting? The flow of the work, which I'd anticipated might prove choppy, wasn't. It seemed to pretty much work, though I'd need a book designer's eye to confirm this impression. I expected to find further excuses for not finishing the work, but I stuck to it instead, which left me feeling as though I'd opened up another department in my book producing operation. I was OpeningShop.

I have spoken here before about how I tend to catastrophize upcoming effort.

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Show&Tell

show_tell
Robert Lawson: Little Elf by Big Shoe (not dated)
" … hopefully not Arithmetic."

I have a lot of material, much of it uncatalogued. Twenty years ago, I had several file boxes filled with pieces I'd written. I still have those, unopened in the interim, and several times more volume, newer stuff, less accessibly filed. I figure that most of all of that stuff was practice, warm up pitches honing my approach. I was preparing for the day when I might be called upon to commercially create, in the bigs, but that call never came. I remember the shame I felt when I first considered submitting pieces to journals only to find that my inventory was thin. I set about trying to fill it in and may have gone a little overboard. I feel like a hoarder now, squeezing between piles of finished material so randomly organized that little within it could ever be located. It's a random access filing system where the product of every search can only be randomly selected.

I created perhaps a quarter of the material in now obsolete apps, ones for which nobody seems to make translators anymore.

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TwistingPlots

twistingplot
Robert Lawson, Pegasus (not dated)
" … Unbelievable …"

The plot twist might qualify as the most over-used literary conceit. Plot twists should appear only when absolutely necessary and should generally be less dynamic than most authors seem to presume. One need not necessarily rip the wings off the plane to affect a serviceable change of course. A wing-shedding turn might most properly be reserved for a once in a lifetime event, and even then, will very likely seem overplayed.

The general rule for believable fiction differs from the same rule for non-fiction, or what's posing as non-fiction.

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InnerAuthor

author
Robert Lawson: "Uncle Phineas was wrapped up most comfortably, smoking his pipe..." (1945)
[Perhaps a self portrait of the Author/Illustrator]
"The leather elbow patches make the real difference."

Though I have authored several manuscripts, I do not very often feel very much like an author. What does an author feel like? I thought that I might poke at that question this morning, for I seem to have an InnerAuthor inhabiting if not my body, then my spirit. When I can sense his presence, I catch myself behaving more authoritatively, more like the InnerAuthor I hope I embody. At other times, I feel far separated from that sense of that particular self, and I wallow rather hopelessly. My InnerAuthor represents my exemplar, the guy I aspire to become, my spirit guide. Every writer ever published seems to have believed that a multitude inhabits each person's psyche, each personality passing for 'me' for a time, all true yet none definitive. My InnerAuthor fits right into that characterization. He exists for the purpose of inspiration, not definition. When I'm channeling his presence, the label of Author just seems to fit. When not, it doesn't.

My InnerAuthor most closely resembles Robert Lawson, an author and illustrator who published through the first half of the twentieth century.

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Proofing

proofing
Carl Moon: Women Baking Bread (ca. 1937-1943)
" … wrapped up as a manuscript."

It feels more ritual than purposeful, that first reading of the first printing of the pieces rendered into book form. I avoid this work like I avoid Covid, though I'm unsure why. I eventually manage to get over my aversion to reading my own writing and settle into the work, though it feels like hard work. I hold my red pen ready to highlight the errors I will most certainly spot, and dog-ear each corrected page for easier reference when I go back to update the mother manuscript. It's a long process. I measure it in ten page increments. something more than one hundred fifty pages. I anticipate a slog.

It's rare that I lose myself when reading my own writing.

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Fallowing

fallowing
Ohara Koson; Reclining Tiger (Ca. 1910s)
" … up to perform my daily writing ritual …"

I am occasionally accused of appearing to be productive. I sincerely apologize for this appearance, but I assure you that the productivity seems to reside in the eye of the beholder. I consider myself a first-class slacker, rarely if ever doing very much of anything, though I might occasionally tag along on some adventure, but almost always strictly as an observer. The recently completed Grand Refurbish serves as just the most recent example of just such a misrepresentation, for I contributed little on that one and feel as though I mostly received credit for effort my hired crew performed. I added a few grace notes but little of any substance.

Still, that said, I also very rarely allow myself a day off.

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AlreadyBeenDone

alreadybeendone
Pablo Picasso: Le Peintre et Son Modèle (1970)
"I do not want somebody different greeting me now."

Picasso had what some might have considered a very bad habit. He insisted upon producing paintings that had AlreadyBeenDone, often by painters judged far superior to him. Who could count how many 'painter with his model' canvasses he produced? Certainly scores if not hundreds, each one replicating a pattern at least as old and done as any subject he could have imagined. Authors do this, too, I'm moved to reflect. Someone once postulated that there were no more than six original plots in existence. Six plots to cover the entirety of human history in every language. The likelihood that my book or yours will introduce that long-elusive seventh plot seems unlikely, if not utterly impossible. It's common for an aspiring author, though, to notice that he's not been totally original and perhaps borrowed a few features from another author, one he's in awe of or jealous of. What constitutes an original work and where might plagiarism begin or end?

We're all, it seems, standing upon each others shoulders.

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Juggling

juggling
Fritz Beinke: Der Jongleur [The Juggler: A Village Fair] (1873)
" … some soul-crushing effort."

Juggling separates writing from Authoring. Writing can occur within a variety of mediums. One need not know how to use Microsoft Word to write, as I daily demonstrate. Indeed, some of our most celebrated writers employ pencil and paper to craft their works, but since published works almost never simply photocopy an author's scribblings, some transformation from the original must occur and this does not happen without expending considerable energy, either the author's or someone else's. Indeed, each transformation, each shift of medium, also demands a proofreading pass, this usually requiring a higher skill level than the one performing the migration between mediums. Even moving writing between one software application and another introduces considerable complication into manuscript creation, since different apps tend to interpret the same intentions differently, producing formatting nightmares. I have yet to discover a single application that satisfies all the different demands a single manuscript must satisfy to pass muster, so the writer, or his staff, must engage in considerable and prolonged Juggling to produce a passable manuscript.

Writers as a class despise Juggling their work product.

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Deadlining

deadlining
William Blake: The Tiger from Songs of Experience (1794)
" … right on time, in a photo finish … "

As a writer, I mostly work without the distraction deadlines bring. I have no publication date looming, no external expectations goosing me forward other than the rather tacit and largely unknowable desire my readers might have to receive my latest posting. I quite frankly don't think about that very much. The question of whom I'm writing for rarely comes up and my response rarely changes. I'm usually writing for myself and for future generations, neither constituencies terribly demanding. But once each year, I write on deadline, Deadlining, if you will. My Christmas Poem Cycle, twelve big fat juicy ones which must, according to the constraints I've constructed around the effort, emerge between Solstice and Christmas Morning. It's Christmas Morning as I write this essay, and the scent of Deadlining still clings to me.

I notice these last few days have felt different than my usual routine, though I've tried to maintain my regular routine underneath my Deadlining effort.

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BreakingRhythm

breakingrhythm
Rene Magritte - Golconda (1953)
"I might break my stride or bust a rhyme and improve the quality of my experience."

In June 2000, London's Millennium Bridge opened to flooding crowds. Unpredicted by anyone associated with bridge design or construction, the mechanical resonance of the crowd's movement set up a small swaying within the structure. This movement further encouraged a kind of sympathetic resonance within the crowd, whereby people began walking in lockstep, further amplifying the bridge's swaying. Nothing came of this event, other than that the bridge was shut down for inconclusive investigations for the month following its opening. Way back in the 1840s, some soldiers marching across a Scottish suspension bridge, brought down the structure and ended up in the water below when their marching's mechanical resonance, much like that Millennium Bridge's crowd's, matched and amplified the bridge's. Soldier now commonly break stride when crossing a bridge to prevent such occurrences.

Writer's, too, maintain a cadence in their production.

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Ledda2duhEduhduh

ledda2duheduhduh
Anton Graff: Selbstbildnis mit Augenschirm [Self-Portrait with Eye-shade] (1813)
" … actual ink on actual newsprint."

The easiest ink this author ever gets comes from having a letter published in the local paper. It doesn't amount to much of an accomplishment, but I admit that I take great personal pride in it, reading the result over and over again as if marveled by its very presence. It seems precious to me there as I stare down at the same old page made wondrous by my letter's presence.

The local paper will publish almost anything submitted by any reader, and about a quarter of those they do publish appear have to been submitted written in fat primary crayon, probably with the 'r's transcribed backwards.

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InauspiciousBeginning

inauspiciousbeginnings
Werner, E. T. C.: The Eight Immortals Crossing The Sea,
(1922) [excerpted from Myths & Legends of China. New York: George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd]

" … a thousand lenses absorbing orthogonal perspectives, sending mixed messages."

I'm nobody's soothsayer. I cannot foresee anybody's future, much less my own. Furthermore, I don't really want to know what's coming next. Maybe I want to be ill-prepared when my future finally shows up. Maybe I just don't care, but I've organized my life more around the here and now than any there or then. I have aspired to little more than to do my work and be with my family and friends, though our Damned Pandemic has been straining ties to family and friends. I made that call day before yesterday to acknowledge that we would not be congregating for this upcoming holiday, either. The Muse and I are long distance grandparents, even after we managed to move back home.

As those of you who have followed my postings already understand, I fancy myself a writer.

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ColdLight

coldlight
Ohara Koson: Bush Warbler in Winter (Ca. 1900-1910s)

"The brightest light on the darkest night of the year …"

Six months ago, light came wrapped in heat. We prayed for sunset, when the hostilities might hesitate overnight, but only to reassert themselves shortly after the following first light. We cowered from light then, when only darkness brought respite and light just seemed punishing. Between sunscreen and sunglasses, we'd suit up whenever we headed outside, long sleeves, long pants, and broad-brimmed hats. We'd rush between places, limiting the time we'd spend outside of our air conditioned spaces, constantly consuming cold beverages. The summer solstice brought more light than we wanted and more heat than we could handle.

Six months later, the light comes with cold in the form of snow which seems to emanate bright.

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ExtraordinaryTimes

extraordinarytimes
Ohara Koson: Goose and Reeds (Ca. 1910)
"I'll have to wait and see …"

Our Grand Refurbish fully qualified as an ExtraordinaryTime. I extended myself special dispensation for its duration because I really felt as though I was engaging in something truly special, unique, and valuable. The effort at times felt overwhelming, but I mostly stood up to the challenges. Now I face a more daunting prospect, the utterly ordinary one of returning back into ordinary time. ExtraordinaryTimes offer easy excuses. Nobody really expects you to maintain regular hours if you're busy changing the universe. No one harshly judges anyone nobly engaged. End such an effort, though, and mundane duties and obligations rush in to fill the resulting void. There will be no citations for keeping up with the dusting and dishes. There will be few appreciations awarded for achieving nothing in particular.

For a time, I might reasonably expect to rest upon my laurels.

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StartingAtOne

startingatone
Seated Male Deity Supporting a Vajra on His Finger (last quarter of 10th–first half of 11th century)
Indonesia (Java, Ngandjuk)

" … a meditation on sanity, vanity, and satisfaction …"

Prolific author and psychotherapist Sheldon Kopp told the story of how he learned to meditate. He checked into a Zen center where a master directed him to sit quietly in a corner and count to ten. Though this seemed an inauspicious beginning, he did as instructed. He quickly found that though counting to ten had never before posed a serious challenge, he found himself losing his place when sitting there by himself trying to count to ten, so he returned to the master and reported his difficulty. The master instructed that if he were to lose his place again, he was to just go back to one and begin anew. Kopp reported that it was the longest time before he realized that meditating was not about getting to ten but going back to one.

I imagine that I'm feeling a similar sensation as I set about attempting to live post-Grand Refurbish.

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PackingUp

packingup
Christo: Package on Radio Flyer Wagon, Project (1993)
" … before telling me what he intended to do for me that day."

"Are we done?" Our Carpenter Joel asked the question, which seemed to come out of nowhere. Done? So quickly? It had been four full months since he'd first showed up, ostensibly to just lay some vinyl planking and complete a few other chores. Those few other chores had grown to include quite a few more than a few other chores, including installing five large windows, refinishing a large staircase, and rebuilding a wall of shelves from scratch. His chop saw had become a seemingly permanent fixture in the middle of our living room since the weather had turned and his periodic saw dust injections had become a part of our accepted atmosphere. He'd just come out from under his rebuilt wall of bookshelves, having anchored their stanchions with fresh long screws, and he was out of work and ready to load up. He was moving out, PackingUp his van and heading home. I could not respond to his question. Though I had been anticipating an impending ending, I had not prepared myself to recognize it when it finally appeared. I found one tiny final task before releasing him from further obligation.

Kurt Our Painter would remain for another day, touching up and cutting in, finishing the final painting, always a lagging indicator of progress

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Crowning

crowning
Bartolomeo Cavarozzi: Virgin And Child With Angels (circa 1620)
" … wrong crown, its Crowning achievement."

When the future asks after the Crowning achievement of Our Grand Refurbish, I'll retell this story, for it stands as at least emblematic of the entire venture. The Muse had insisted from our earliest conversations that we would finish the three main downstairs rooms with period-appropriate crown moulding. I was fine with leaving the crowns as they were but she was adamant. I know when to avoid doing battle, so I quickly conceded. Period-appropriate crown moulding it would be, then. We torn down the existing stuff and I donated it to the recycled house parts operation out at the old airbase. The replacement proved inconvenient to deal with since it came in sixteen foot lengths, so long that our carpenter had to fetch his other truck with the long overhead rack to transport it. We painted it before cutting and mounting it, but it was too long to store anywhere, so we had to work quickly. Kurt Our Painter spray painted the first batch, but that proved to be a big hassle. Two hours of prep and clean up for about three minutes of painting. It used a lot of paint, too, so we rolled then brushed the rest of the stuff, ending up inside after the weather turned, boards stretching between the two living rooms and creating a serious navigational hazard.

The lumber yard didn't quite know how to handle crown.

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Tractoring

tractoring

Gulls Following a Farmer on his Tractor, State Historical Society of Iowa (Date Unknown)
" … what else have we got to amuse ourselves with?"

The final few furlongs of Our Grand Refurbish seem to condense all the effort into a few remaining tasks, with each taking on the weight and importance of the sum of all the prior pieces. The final coat of paint goes on in Jovian gravity, heavy and dense. The last screw set seems to pierce stone rather than wood, the driver groans under the strain. Minutes no longer slip by, but crawl. The day seems too small to contain our aspirations for it and for ourselves. Kurt Our Painter puts his head down for a day of dedicated Tractoring, him seeming to possess a hydrostatic transmission with an amazingly low gear, capable of shoving his way through anything. His usual slow-motion Kabuki dance becomes, if anything, even more intense. He appears relentless, but effortlessly so. If the past few days have been short and slow, these next couple will might well turn endless.

A force propels us now, more pulling than pushing.

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Muddling

muddling
Vincent van Gogh: Sunflowers (1887)
" … which, of course, we ain't."

Let's consider looking at the Covid-19 pandemic as if it were one of those psychological instruments intended to provide feedback about who we really are. I know, those instruments might be the most widely misused and misinterpreted forms of self-discovery, but even this fact might better qualify them for this purpose, for this use. We don't usually read the instructions, anyway, but figure we might just as well muddle through. Muddling might be our primary means of engaging. Even when we have access to concise and accurate information, we tend to ignore that in favor of gut feel or intuition. We can consequently be fairly certain that those with their fingers on nuclear triggers have also not really read the instructions, justifying that decision with a belief that they'd never need to pull it. I mean, how hard could it be to destroy all humanity? Nobody's gonna be left to write that history.

We seem fatalistic, as if learning better might actually kill us or be more dangerous than remaining uninformed or becoming ill.

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Plumb

plumb
Jasper Johns: [title not known] (1967–9)
"Long live our illusions …"

In this house, Plumb amounts to a fictional concept intended to be interpreted rather loosely. It never refers to anything like absolute verticality, which does not exist here, but to orthogonality relative to level or flat, which also does not exist in this fine home. Every surface might play off the general concept of level and Plumb, but never actual exhibit either. Our new library shelves, the last installation in Our Grand Refurbish, are taking longer to install than expected, though we might have reasonably expected complications. The left adjacent wall, upon close scrutiny, turns out to be roughly dish shaped and canted a degree or two off Plumb. It abuts into the freshly refinished window seat, which slopes ever so slightly back to front, perhaps designed that way to keep marbles from accumulating along its top. The right adjacent wall slopes slightly away from the vertical, necessitating much ciphering and trimming in order to yield more or less level shelf surfaces and also to properly fool the observing eye, which might otherwise discern just how out of Plumb the whole construction turned out to be. Properly constructed and painted, the eye will be fooled and satisfied, for it will conclude that this little corner of the world actually appears to be Plumb, a rarity and a fiction.

We seem to prefer our fictions and even conspire to preserve them against opposing evidence.

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TinySignificances

tinysignificances
Suleiman at Wasserburg on the River Inn, in a woodcut by Michael Minck dated 24 January 1552.
"We might need gruel work."

Through The Grand Refurbish, a few tiny annoyances remained out of scope but never out of mind. We'd focused our attention on specific portions of the place and chose—at first deliberately, then out of habit—to just let anything else slip by for that time, for we could have nattered away the opportunity by attempting to attend to everything at once. It just seemed prudent to narrow our scope of interest. There would always be a tomorrow. But nearing the end of The Grand Refurbish, few improvements need my personal attention. Our carpenter and our painter cannot quite muster full shifts between them now, we're down to one room, and almost down to a final wall. Those tiny annoyances began calling again or, more properly stated, those TinySignificances continued wielding their power. I finally gave in.

The bathroom door had come to scrape on the floor beneath it.

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ThePaintPotPrinciple

thepaintpotprinciple
Henri Matisse: Blue Pot and Lemon (1897)
" … precisely what it always was and then some."

The Muse and I hired a professional painter for Our Grand Refurbish, both an expensive proposition and a priceless one. We'd never been ones to hire done our painting, figuring that we might just as well do that work ourselves and retain the wages we would have laid out. We never would have known what we would have foregone had we chosen to go that route, for one cannot notice what one does not experience. Following Kurt around has provided an education for me, exposure to much I never knew or understood about the fine art of house painting. It turns out to be every bit as exacting as anything Matisse ever produced, requiring deep skills in color, technique, and much more. For someone like me, a surface is a surface is a surface, but to Kurt, each one's a little different, demanding a unique approach. We've used a half dozen different primers alone on this job, each formulated for slightly different conditions, ones only an experienced eye might ever discern. After five months of learning, I'm catching on to much I still need to learn. I can't now imagine ever painting anything again without first at least seeking Kurt's wise advice and counsel, if not his paint brush. Oh, and I'm officially no slouch with a brush and a roller, myself.

I've been noticing how our master performs, though, like any first grader might notice in his first teacher.

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TheSecondOrderSolution

ThePenny


"I pray that I will find a ready penny when my comeuppance comes …"

Our home, The Villa Vatta Schmaltz, might be best described as the sum of its kludges. The midnight fixes that were never formalized the following morning. The interventions completed by unqualified technicians. The misunderstood instructions. The leftover parts. I might be slightly less than fully-qualified to even own a home, let alone expect myself to maintain it, but I have not always found myself in a position where I might contract with a qualified technician, so I'm forced to perform some fixes myself. I wander around the Ranch Supply or The Home Despot, every bit the homeless waif, for my home stands in that moment broken and I've been called to fix it. I might hold a notion about the source of the problem but I don't know the nomenclature, so I attempt an explanation to a hostilely disinterested clerk. I might as well be speaking Ukrainian for all the good my describing does. I'm very likely to be led to a dreaded part of the store, a part filled with tools and materials I've truly never seen or even imagined before, and abandoned there, much worse off than I was before, when I just didn't have a clue.

I call my preferred method of fixing everything TheSecondOrderSolution.

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Phinishing

phinishing
Camille Pissarro: Bois de châtaigniers à Louveciennes (1872)
"We're improvising our exit scene …"

As Our Grand Refurbish neared its end, progress became erratic. Crew called in sick or excused themselves for appointments. Expectations smeared. I feared that we might never finish, that we'd become one of those good ideas that never quite coalesced and remained permanently undone, and this outcome could happen to anyone. We tend to envision an end state but not the last furlong of the race. We seem to expect some sort of grace to nudge us over that last hump, when finishing, Phinishing, might be a unique and separate art, like the kind a closing pitcher practices, almost but not entirely unlike the skills that formerly produced the start and progress. The production mindset seems in need of disruption to finish, otherwise it might just continue to replicate itself into never-endingness. We need the opposite of that now, and it seems likely that we'll have to violate some deeply ingrained habits to pull that off. Phinishing's not just stopping work, it seems a serious disassembling process. Rather than building, we're set to take away now.

The inertia of motion argues against ever stopping.

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SpoolingUp

spoolingup
Claude Monet: Snow Effect at Argenteuil [Effet de neige à Argenteuil] (1875)
"nobody ever knows if they even exist … until they manifest on the page."

While I felt myself WindingDownish yesterday, this morning, I sense myself SpoolingUp. WindingDownish mostly involves reflecting while SpoolingUp focuses upon projecting, anticipating, preparing. It's a head-in-the-clouds experience where the future overshadows both present and past. I see the end of Our Grand Refurbish coming, but more compelling, I've started hearing my annual Holiday Poem Cycle calling. The Muse, often ahead, began baking her holiday breads last weekend. I'm just waking up, realizing that I have a dozen or more new poems to write between now and Christmas morning, and that I have not yet started stockpiling possible illustrations to serve as inspirations.

I began this tradition twenty years ago when I became disgusted with the sense of obligation this season wrought in me.

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WindingDownish

windingdownish
André Masson: Battle of Fishes (1926)
"I left a few once-shiny screws which I intended to use to hold impermanence together."

Time seems to slow as this year moves closer to its ending. The days grow shorter but feel longer, some days seeming interminable in their passage. I swim through thick molasses on my way toward New Years. This year has been like no other, for this year, I lost my darling daughter, which opened a wound that could never heal and hasn't. It was also a year overflowing with hopefulness, the year The Muse and I undertook The Grand Refurbish, an effort deliberately imbedded with much needed promise. We ended our exile and moved back home but delayed moving in until we'd fixed up the place for our entrance. Here but not yet present, either, we spent the final three-quarters of the year suspended in place, no longer there and not yet here. Now time itself has lost its usual cadence, passing in slow motion if, indeed, it's passing at all. Some days, lately, time just seems stalled.

My notions of progress conflict with my understanding of entropy, this universe's governing quantity.

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TechnicalProblems

technicalproblem
Ohara Koson: Monkey and Moon (Ca. 1900 - 20)
A long armed monkey is trying to catch the reflection of the full moon on the water surface.

"I sometimes, briefly, become the destroyer of my own world …"

I have been using the same blog software for fifteen years but I just barely understand how to use it. It sometimes gives me fits, crashing or otherwise inhibiting my simple demands for it. I chose it over the more popular alternatives because it's a native Mac application and so it works more intuitively, or so I tell myself. It mostly works without me having to know how it works. I'm confident that I only know about 1% of its features, but I almost never need to know any more than that. When I get into trouble, a User Forum provides a channel to connect with users who know one heck of a lot more than 1% of the system's operation. When the User Forum's stumped, I can resort to the developers' help desk, which, being located in Brighton, England, usually takes until the next day to get back to me. It might be every app user's dream to be the one to uncover some fatal flaw in their chosen application, to report it to the developers, and to have them heap praise on the one user who helped them avert absolute disaster. No, that's never happened for me, either. We usually find that my ISP has been messing with me or that I've inexplicably gotten tangled up in my own underpants. I tend to be the source of almost all of my so-called TechnicalProblems.

I complain about the technology, but I increasingly understand that I'm actually complaining about myself.

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YardWork

yardwork
Paul Cézanne: The House with the Cracked Walls (1892–1894)
"My bushes rely upon my heartlessness …"

With the Refurbishment winding down, I found some time on my hands and YardWork needing doing. The winter rains were predicted to begin, after which whatever leaf litter I'd left would become a sodden mess, so I set to play. I do not consider YardWork to belong to the same activity class as labor, or if it does, it falls well within the boundaries of labor of love. It's play, a matter of rearranging orders whether pruning or weeding, it seems to be all about balancing. The weed I do not stoop to pull this time through will remind me what I didn't do the next time I pass through, and will continue to remind me until I decide to do something about it. I keep mental notes about which parts have been begging for some attention. The Refurbish rendered me unavailable to come out to play for months and months. It's reassuring to me that my absence didn't seem to inflict any permanent damage. The yard abides.

I hide my messes behind the garage, around the composter, which is an active mess in continual process.

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FestivalOfLights

paradeoflights
Paul Cézanne: Antoine Dominique Sauveur Aubert, the Artist's Uncle, as a Monk
(1866)
"The nights are dark but our hearth feels warm."

Because nothing says Happy Holidays like a big, huge bucket truck festooned with lights. Festooned, being one of those words essentially reserved solely for use during December, serves as a big tell as to what's going on. The Muse and I are watching our small city's annual holiday parade, the FestivalOfLights. Main Street, holiday lights off, stands lined with people on both sides as a long line of clearly Homemade floats passes by us. As near as I can tell, the opportunity for families and strangers to wave at each other might serve as the primary purpose of the whole charade. It's equally absurd and endearing. A guy rides by astride a sway-backed Appaloosa playing We Wish You A Merry Christmas on a battered trumpet. No explanation offered or demanded. The crowd applauds. Another big, huge bucket truck rumbles by, lights manically flashing, its advertising unreadable, rider waving, smiling, and greeting. I'm moved to tears.

It had been years since The Muse and I attended a hometown parade.

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Monkish

monkish
Peter Paul Rubens [1577-1640]: Portrait of a Monk, date unknown
"I mumble my vespers to myself …"

I seem to go through periods, like Picasso's Blue Period, where I maintain most of my focus upon a very narrow range of interests. These periods can last from a few weeks to decades, and I find them both enormously satisfying and ultimately a bit suffocating. Nearer the beginning of these phases, I immerse myself in discovery. A novice then, I hunger for ever more information. Later, I might seem a tad compulsive as I erect and defend strict boundaries around my discipline, my concerns. I might seem heartless to others' perspectives, seriously disinterested, even dismissive of what others might find compelling. Later in these chapters, I might grow restless, feeling as though I might have just about sucked all the goody out that that particular popsicle. I might even grow bored and go AWOL, leaving cohorts in a lurch. Obsession has phases, just like anything else. There's no happily forever after anywhere.

Our Grand Refurbishment has been such a period.

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TouchingUp

touchingup
Detail of the preparatory design by Gustav Klimt for the mosaic friezes of the main dining room of the Stoclet Palace
(Museum für angewandte Kunst, Vienna) (circa 1903)
"The final act of every improvement TouchesUp."

Almost nothing finishes like a horse race does, with successes and failures neatly lined up in decisive conclusion. It's gone in an instant. Most activities end with more of a smear on their lens, approaching finished but never quite there yet, a spin away from conclusion. Eventually, the crowd disperses and the stadium quiets, then one might reasonably deduce that something happened but clearly, if not decisively, ended. An absence replaces a presence and we call that negative space a done. Before drawing that conclusion, though, picky little endings need tidying up. The effort might be largely concluded but not yet minutely finished. In Our Grand Refurbish, cast brass window locks sit atop sashes but have not yet been attached. Several doors remain to be hung and adorned, at least one needing some serious sanding on top in order to fit back into its frame. Little bits of painting remains, too, final coats and ragged edges, a few nail holes still need filling and final dressing, Touching Up. It's like a final accounting before the crew departs the building. The list of needed TouchingUps shrinks but seems essentially bottomless.

I like the idea that the last activities are classified as touching, for much of the Refurbish work seemed a whole lot more brutal, crushing blows and smashing throes, cutting carpeting, extracting tiny staples, floating walls and ceilings, burying past mistakes, hiding unfortunate legacies.

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Swarming

swarming
Nikolai Bogatov: Beekeeper (1875)
"They leave little footprints in the dust …"

A swarm of activity erupts from Our Grand Refurbish as we near completion. Completion still seems like absolute fiction. I cannot yet quite imagine our living room unlined with cardboard and not filled with saw horses, paint smells, and an enormous chop saw. Joel Our Carpenter pulled up to the front in his van yesterday to disgorge yet another load of fine-grained boards destined to become sills and trim for the final fresh window. I was poised on a tall ladder painting highlight trim around the last new window while Kurt Our Painter treated library shelves with conditioner in preparation for staining them. Never before in the long months this effort has dominated, has such a variety of activity bloomed at once. I cannot keep up to supervise. Fortunately, any effort as mature as this one shouldn't need much supervision. It manages itself.

It might be that we could not have possibly kept up had this variety appeared any earlier.

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Overalls

overalls
Thomas Hart Benton: Cotton Pickers (1931)
"I can carry a hammer anywhere now!"

Our GrandOther Kylie has taken to engaging in cosplay, wherein she dresses up in the costume of some Manga or Nintendo character for the apparent purpose of becoming that character for a while. Her evident pride and satisfaction as she explains her character's particular proclivities speak to the efficacy of the practice. I, never having heard of these characters before, sort of fuzz over at her explanations because I really cannot relate to them, but I engage in my own curious cosplay behavior which might well baffle anyone else. Just this week, for instance, I started test driving a pair of Overalls I'd purchased online on a whim. I saw them there, on sale, and decided in that moment that they might serve me well, or, better than my then current handyman garb. Through Our Grand Refurbish, I'd ruined three pairs of otherwise perfectly respectable jeans, wearing out the knees on two of them and slopping another pair with so much paint that they're unusable for anything but painting. Further, those jeans lacked the pockets I needed, and their cantilevered construction meant that I spent a considerable part of my day "hiking" them up. They were always sagging.

Something about that photograph of those Overalls caught my attention and in that moment, I'd nabbed the pair.

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LineADucks

lineaducks
Ohara Koson: Two Mallard Ducks and the Moon (Early 20th century)
"Faith is not unsupported belief but the belief in uncanny experience …"

I recognize that Our Grand Refurbish has elbowed its way into perhaps more stories than warranted or wanted through this series. In explanation if not apology, Our Grand Refurbish has subsumed most of my foreground and background focus for many months. I've recently been bemoaning absences, primarily of closure, for this party's extended beyond celebration and nudged into a wicked form of self-punishment. What began with enthusiasm, albeit naive, evolved into frustration as the end game refused to coherently line up. Each attempt to decisively end the effort found only a fresh barrier preventing further forward movement. Reliable suppliers failed us. Sick days stalled us. Weather drove us inside. We could see what still needed doing but we could not quite manage to get there from here. I knew that something important was missing but I could not clearly state what that something might have been. That absence was not prescriptive.

I recognize that this was always how endings emerge but I'd somehow lost accessibility to that knowledge.

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RushTheExit

rushtheexit
Ohara Koson: Geese and the Moon (Early 20th century)
"Hasten home slowly. This ending's just begun."

I suspect a cultural imperative if not an innate human tendency at work, the one encouraging people who paid fifty bucks a ticket to leave the game in the middle of the seventh inning to, as they might claim, "beat the traffic." One might beat the traffic better by lingering until well after the game ends, until the parking lot's emptier, but that tactic seems to violate that imperative or tendency. Even at big games and popular concerts, where tickets cost hundreds, even thousands of dollars, one sees some percentage of the audience RushTheExit before the event even ends. We might become lemmings, ready to follow others' leads to our own demise whenever an ending threatens. The end will come but we seem to want our endings on our own terms and so we rush them. Our Grand Refurbish has been threatening to end for a fortnight now, but once it started throwing off serious intimations, progress stalled. Joel Our Carpenter came down with something that kept him off the job for a week after supply issues added a few days to our imaginary timeline, both conspiring to add tension to the conclusion. What operated as a relatively care free enterprise for months has become a pain in the butt to live with and I feel more than ready to simply wash my hands of whatever's left. I ache for doneness.

Such conditions might breed disaster, for they erode the patience which has thus far fueled our forward progress.

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Pastiche

Pastiche
Das Leben ist schön: sculpture by "Leonardo Rossi", a fake name often used for plagiarized bronzes
" … respectfully mimicking itself in mom jeans."

As a lifelong member of the once highly-touted Baby Boomer generation, I regret to report that I'm apparently no longer a member of any demographic any retailer cares about. That mantle has passed to those who came of age after us. I'm wise to shop for clothes in vintage consignment shops. Few people now write books with my sensibilities in mind. Food has swerved toward both the bio-deplorable and the chemically-enhanced. I swear someone wants caffeine added to everything so they can call the result an energy source, that and bull pee, which has seeped into more than just the terribly regrettable Red Bull®, more an addiction than a beverage. Members of the generation just behind me are struggling to kick habits nobody had even invented yet when I was in my prime. Finding halfway decent jeans that fit without looking like they were tailored for mom has become essentially impossible. A tee shirt without either a brand name or some meaningless meme printed all over it might no longer exist. Do they even make clothes in innocuous colors anymore?

We have become a
Pastiche society, one dedicated to emulating rather than creating, copying rather than originating.

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Hinges&Doors

Hinges&Doors
Edward Hopper: Rooms by the Sea (1951)
" … blind man coping as the pinnacle of engaging."

Our Grand Refurbish has depended upon many contributions. Our workers, who serve more as artisans, and whom we have fairly compensated, still contributed their non-refundable time to help us realize our fuzzy intentions. They gave away their care and attention. Reassembling the place after transformation depends upon tiny things, most prominently, Hinges&Doors. The doors, dedicated readers will recall, filled my playbook during the early to middle Refurbishment periods. I scraped and sanded each face before repainting it. They seemed finished works of art then, merely needing hanging, until hanging proved to be the most difficult part of the operation, with no merely in it. Hinges, you see, complicate everything. Hanging a door on its hinges becomes a two-man operation, with a third hand handy, involving grunting, hammering, and cursing. A few doors slip right onto their anchors, but most require a little adjustment, a little manual reasoning before they'll fit. Once mounted, the door might not quite sit squarely within its frame and require further hinge adjustment or a little frenzied sanding or planing along its top or leading edges. It seems wondrous when any of them work. I hold lingering doubts that all of them ever will.

One disassembles and one takes chances that something might not so seamlessly reassemble again.

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NormalImpossible

NormalImpossible
Ohara Koson: A Crow on a Snow Covered Tree Stump (circa 1930s)
" … that sense that you're on the verge of being found out to be a fraud and mustered out of the club."

I so routinely engage in impossibilities that they hardly register anymore. Much of what I initiate might beforehand be much more easily proven impossible than likely, yet I proceed, often in sublime ignorance of the utter impossibility I'm initiating. I've usually convinced myself that I'm starting something rather normal, and I often am, but NormalImpossible, not any of the infinite other varieties of normal available. We might benefit from a quick declaration of definition here so that we might share a common meaning, if that's even possible. I declare the NormalImpossible to feature so much exploding variance as to render it finitely unplannable, untrackable, and uncontrollable. An exploding variance shifts due to more than a few [let's say, three] influences, moves unexpectedly or stealthily, and contains many mutually distracting moving parts. To focus upon any part of a NormalImpossibility is to render the observer essentially blind to the rest of the mechanism, producing a blind observer effect where one observer proves insufficient and more than one cannot agree upon what they've seen, producing a Blind Men and the Elephant situation, all perfectly normal in my experience engaging in NormalImpossibles.

One of the more prominent features of the NormalImpossible situation has always been the apparently normal human tendency to perceive them as much simpler than one could possibly prove to be.

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Evocations

Evocations
Ohara Koson: Autumn Grass (1900-30)
"My feelings live close to the surface here …"

The Villa smells of pumpkin custard this early morning because The Muse was baking Thanksgiving pies last night. A pecan job rests beside the pumpkin on the kitchen counter. A extremely large-breasted turkey rests, air-drying in the garage refrigerator. A low ceiling hangs over this valley. A crane-shaped airplane, the morning flight to Seattle, just roared overhead. I suspect that it was filled with people heading off to spend this holiday with family, though I don't know that for a fact. I know little for a fact, though I seem to sense plenty and make sense that way. I mostly make meaning not by knowing but by feeling. I read Evocations emanating from things and those vibes serve to inform me. Were it not for this sensory capacity, I would seem just as ignorant as I truly am. It's not a sixth sense, either, but the judicious application of the first five.

This town evokes memories from me. It plays me like a cheap guitar.

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FallingsForward

Setbacks
Ohara Koson: Hunting for Insects (1900-10)
"All progress seems to come from FallingsForward."

Years ago, a client asked me to review a project management course book he'd hired a BIG three consultant to create for his firm. The manual began by recounting many "failed" projects, adopting a backdoor don't-be strategy for teaching its subject. I found this approach odd, especially since the "failed" projects had all also been widely recognized as wild successes. The Sidney Opera House was mentioned, a notoriously failed scope and budget containment process that produced perhaps the world's most beautiful building, which was quite a trade-off. Would the world long remember the cost overage or might it move on to enjoy the remarkable fruits of its curious labor? And so the book continued.

I mention this experience because Our Grand Refurbishment, largely a blessed endeavor, has started experiencing setbacks.

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NewFashioned

NewFashioned
Ohara Koson: Kingfisher (1935)
" … new traditions never intended to become our future imperatives."

I understand just as well as any next person the sacred obligations each holiday lays upon us. We are each enjoined to at least attempt to recreate some utterly mythical, paradoxical ideal scenario in homage to some past that never actually happened, the purpose of which always gets promised as contributing to the net volume of joy in this world or gratitude or something. It's always something. We go as crazy as an ant hill on fire to achieve the understood ideal. Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) often results, and understandably so, for given an absolutely unachievable necessity, you'd have to be crazy not to be driven insane by trying to pursue it. Still, when Thanksgiving comes around, we're inevitably dusting off the old Pilgrim hat, often unconsciously, while envisioning ourselves in a Normal Rockwell illustration of the mythical grandma and gramps laying an impossibly huge and perfectly roasted turkey on an already over-laden table. The thought of achieving anything less should depress you. When it comes to holiday celebration, it's damned whatever you do when recreating. We hold OldFashioned as our standard. Might NewFashioned hold some promise?

I was reminded of the delight accompanying NewFashioned when looking at our newly-fashioned window and door trim, which our carpenter fashioned to suggest a heritage they clearly never held.

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HomeAwayFrom

HomeAwayFromHome
Ohara Koson: Cat and Bowl of Goldfish (1933)
"We didn't find home lurking there, either …"

Though I lived almost half of my life in this SouthEast Portland, Oregon neighborhood, I always felt afraid here. When my first wife and I arrived in late 1975, fresh from a couple of years living in a small city in Northeastern Pennsylvania, Portland seemed huge and threatening. We found a small apartment on a major thoroughfare, just across the street from a massage parlor and on a major bus route, and settled in as if surrounded by an unseen but ever-present enemy. My wife's parents had lived in a tiny garden apartment just around the corner when they were first starting out, so I suppose that we might have found some sense of home here, but we never did. It didn't help that my wife had taken a job in a hospital that she didn't like or that I was trying to break into an unfamiliar music scene. I then still fancied myself a single acoustic performing artist. I was good at what I did, but disco threatened. I was teetering on the decision to enroll in the local state university and get out of the business, working casual labor jobs in the warehouses surrounding our apartment. I let go of a defining dream in this neighborhood.

I return now because my son and grandkids live in essentially the same neighborhood, a dozen or so blocks from that first apartment, in an apartment of their own.

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Humpty

Humpty
Ohara Koson: Two White Geese (Japanese, Meiji era, beginning of 20th century)
" … stripping out soft brass screw heads and struggling with heavy things."

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the kings horses and all the kings men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.

-Traditional Nursery Rhyme


The Villa Vatta Schmaltz seems to be experiencing a bout of Humpty as The Muse and I try to put The Villa back together again.

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CatchingShadows

CatchingShadows
Ohara Koson: Six Geese and Shadows (1926)
"Slowing down and showing up …"

I seemed somehow primed to anticipate that The Law of Unintended Consequences would tend toward rolling snake eyes, the worst possible outcomes, but Our Grand Refurbish has produced more counter examples than supportive ones. On samples, The Muse's choice of color seemed unremarkable, perhaps bordering on regrettable, being a shade of grey, for cripes sake, but in practice, it became a chameleon color, capable of surprising variations depending upon even small changes in light and shadow. Rather than drab grey walls, The Villa now has vibrant technicolor ones, each corner marking at least a subtle shift in color or texture, each angle shifting the nature of each room. It's all more than a little bit overwhelming, for the rooms seem to be in continual motion. Leave a room and it will have changed by the time you return. Step into a room and some subtle or significant shift might imprint. The place seems to have grown at least one additional dimension.

I'm most impressed with the Villa's new proclivity for CatchingShadows.

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GooseChasing

GooseChasing
Ohara Koson: Two white geese swimming by reeds (1928)
"I'd chase more geese any time it's possible."

Near the end, usually, an opportunity appears to turn tedious ladders into rapidly accelerating chutes, an apparent shortcut appears. Of course, by long tradition, most anyone would grab this opportunity like the lure it most certainly seems, rubber worm and all. Even I, experienced refurbisher now, fell prey to this call. Our carpenter had located the material he needed to refurbish the long window seat and shelves in our soon-to-be showcase library. Those boards were in Portland, 245 miles away, and the supplier couldn't say if FexEx® would even consent to ship the stuff. I volunteered to drive over and back to collect the boards, insisting that they be no longer than five feet so that they'd fit into The Schooner. Joel Our Carpenter missed the confirming call and by the time he'd caught up to it, the outlet had closed for the day. That was Wednesday.

We parted that evening with the understanding that Joel would call me just as soon as he'd confirmed that the order was ready.

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Adopting

Adopting
Robert Delaunay: Simultaneous Contrasts: Sun and Moon (1912–13)
" … will we regale them of stories of what was once there but is there no longer?"

The Muse and my relationship with our beloved Villa Vatta Schmaltz does not very much resemble a marriage, marked as it has been by extended absences. Nor does it look very much like a birth family deal. We do not share DNA. Our life here more closely favors Adopting, for we've taken this place into our family and, or so it also seems, this place has been steadily Adopting us. It's a curious relationship in that The Muse and I have been largely focused upon improving this place since we first moved in, and pursuing improvements might be hints that we're criticizing our adopted family member. I think my second wife and I got hitched on the prospect of who we might become together, but the differences between what we were and what we might improve into got us before we could arrive at our destination together. There's something genuinely poisonous about focusing upon achieving future improvements. Nothing turns off the present and no future directly influences anything before it, though the sense that we're not quite there yet can tear asunder even the truer loves. We are always here yet and never quite there yet.

That said, we love this place as if it were family.

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Spurt

Spurt
Reflection in freshly-installed front window in The Villa Vatta Schmaltz
"I'm inhabiting what was then just aspiration …"

Wasn't it just yesterday morning that I complained about The Grand Refurbish moving forward in slow motion? By noon, I found myself struggling to keep up with a pace I had not anticipated reappearing. This experience served as another reminder that time, contrary to popular misconceptions, does not move in any consistently regular fashion. It moves by Spurt and stall, by fits and starts. Clocks apparently more or less accurately track an average rate of time's expansion, a smoothed representation of a much more chaotic phenomenon. Clocks inexorably misrepresent actual experience and easily influence anticipation. When time seems to move slowly, which it sometimes does, it seems as though it might forever thereafter continue so moving, never any faster. When time whizzes by, as it also sometimes seems to, who takes the time to consider that the apparent velocity of time probably amounts to an illusion? You could be sitting right beside me and we could be experiencing time completely differently without ever noticing how our individual experiences differed.

It should be no surprise that Our Grand Refurbish still carries a surprise or two inside her.

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Disarray

Disarray
Robert Delaunay: Champs de Mars: La Tour Rouge (1911)
"We might never finish, but we're real close to done …"

I can tell that The Grand Refurbish nears completion because the house seems in ever greater Disarray. I'd imagined that as we finished rooms and even started re-inhabiting them, that the clutter might recede. Certainly, the second floor now holds only traces of the messes that dominated there for weeks and weeks, but as the effort has concentrated on the final two rooms, the materiel necessary to affect the remaining changes have been crammed into an even smaller space. I'm forever tripping over something and have taken to avoiding the workrooms unless its before or after the work day. The painter needs his space as does the carpenter, and I can do whatever I need to do in there off hours, though most of what I do in there amounts to tripping over something or tidying up, even though I know for certain that the surest way to increase the net sense of disarray involves somebody tidying up for somebody else, especially if its done without first seeking advice, counsel, or permission. The living room and library are currently in such disarray that they disturb me. I feel moved to nap through the balance of this effort. Wake me when the clutter's gone. I have no stomach for it.

Last week, The Muse cleaned up a mess I'd made by creating one of her own.

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Taping

Taping
Robert Delaunay: Paysage au disque (1906–07)
" … a final fit of preparation before the legacy begins."

I noticed as I was finishing applying the first coat of paint on our newly installed living room window's exterior, that I had spent more time preparing to paint the window than I had spent painting the window. This tends to be the case with most home improvement activities, yet I don't usually focus very much attention on the preparation, more often perceiving it as a distraction from the real operation rather than the lion's share of it. Like many, I suspect, I don't have much stomach for prep work. It often seems tedious. It produces little lasting effect, its chief benefit being what it lends to the final result, but it leaves few if any footprints. It's enduring value falls under The Dog That Didn't Bark category and gets lost in rounding.

Yesterday, i was Taping the window trim I was intending to paint, this to reduce the likelihood that I'd slop the paint color where I didn't want it.

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NotNoing

NotNoingLeger
Fernand Léger: Contrast of Forms (Contraste de formes) (1913)
"
I'm uncertain if anyone can ever outgrow that stance."

I want to speak this morning about an increasingly common situation, a form of deliberate misapprehension wherein people seek, often with considerable passion, information they might otherwise reasonably suspect isn't true, either due to its source or its form. This information often seems overly convenient, perfectly satisfying an expectation long accustomed to disappointment. It might come from a source long-acknowledged as unreliable or partisan, someone with the reputation of saying anything that might rile someone. The effect of such a transmission, deliberate misapprehension in and self-destruction out, seems perfectly represented in the vaccine deniers proudly standing up for their superior understanding and patriotism. Their position doesn't quite seem stupid, but more intentional than that. It mostly appears belligerent but without clear purpose. The self-satisfied expressions these possessors of negative knowledge display leaves me feeling 'sore afraid.'

This position seems the sole of Homemade.

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Hearth

Hearth
Fernand Léger: Les Fumeurs [The Smokers] (1911–1912)
" … a naked Hearth can no more stand than can a naked heart."

Determining the center of anything can pose a difficult dilemma. Like determining best, insufficient information often exists to declare any definitive answer.—(Huh? How could insufficient information exist? Sufficient information doesn't exist. A surfeit of insufficient information couldn't exist, but then it's a negative quantity, so I guess it gets counted differently.)—Further, one might declare centers for a variety of attributes or elements. An emotional center need not resemble a physical or intellectual one. At some level, I suspect that every element might be reasonably declared the center of something, if only a temporary center of attention before consideration passes. I bring up this question because it's come up within our Grand Refurbishment. Our color palette first held central attention. Then, door and window trims. The banister rightfully held that space for a spell. So did the stairs. Now, the living room windows and the cleverly designed library wall, but each foci in turn slipped back into an other than central position as the refurbishing machine rolled on. As it nears its destination, one glaring element remains unaddressed, though not unconsidered: The Hearth.

If any element of any house can rightfully be considered its center, I suspect that the Hearth usually holds that position, if only due to the sense that Hearth IS home and thereby irreplaceable.

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Removals

Removals
Robert Delaunay: Rhythm, Joie de vivre (1930)
" … indistinguishable from madness and joy."

I believe that we've already established that destroying's more entertaining than creating and that some work seems better suited for kids, or at least the kid inside. While Refurbishing might seem a net creative act, one must sort of blank the palette before painting, and much of the prep work comes in the inherently satisfying Making Waste category, by way of Removals. None have proven half as satisfying as removing wallpaper, though, for wallpaper mostly exists as a criminal enterprise. Often hung in lieu of fixing the underlying wall, it hides deep dark secrets, albeit poorly, thereby keeping them alive. The one who chose the wall covering might have once upon a time been satisfied with their choice, but they long ago passed on, leaving their handiwork behind which aged just as poorly as they did, yet it's still on display. In our old place, some mid-seventies remodel, we figure, left the music room/library bordered with a gilded paisley burgundy specimen, the garish out-of-placeness of which, we once sort of reveled in. The time had come to take that down.

I tried reasoning with the stuff, spraying it with warmish water and adding patience, but it would not release its grasp.

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Odds&Infinities

Odds&Infinities
Robert Delaunay: La ville no. 2 (1910–11)
"I leave muddy footprints wherever I walk."

The Grand Refurbish has resolved itself into two contiguous rooms. The upstairs will be complete later this morning, save for a few what might be called odds and ends but which I suspect some of which will very likely become Odds&Infinities, as we'll likely never fully resolve them. I've got that rebuilt door with the odd latch inset which could use some additional carving out but seems too thin for chisel work. The Muse's desk, the base of which I broke when disassembling it and needs rebuilt, blocks reinhabiting that whole room and threatens to become an infinity of its own. Our Carpenter Joel breaks new ground but leaves a few small relatively insignificant undone bits in his wake. Nothing huge or noteworthy, small infinities which don't threaten to break anything or anybody, but still sort of wear on me.

My life includes many, many Odds&Infinities.

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KindWind

Kindwind
Unattributed photo of tree pruning crew, late 1800s
"… all things seem possible."

By mid-November, Autumn color's had its day. The enormous Maple takes to sporting an embarrassing combover, the crabapples have gone bald, and the sacred apricot has yet to lose a single golden leaf. The snowball bushes and the hydrangeas seem unaffected and the dogwood's apparently indifferent, still almost fully populated with scarlet leaves. The side yard's a shuffler's heaven, and I choose to leave those leaves where they've fallen, the better to overwinter whatever lies beneath them. I was once a fussy gardener, but no more. I pull no production-quality clean-up performance like some of our neighbors put on, like I used to, seemingly chasing down each freshly fallen before it hits the ground. My lawn will sport bare spots whether covered with leaves or not and besides, I've got a secret weapon. If history can still be counted upon, a Kindwind will soon descend and effectively put an end to the autumn leaf problem, which was more of a feature than a problem, anyway.

The Kindwind blows in off the Northern Pacific, bringing strong winds for this valley, sustaining at around twenty-five with greater gusts.

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UnBoxing

Unboxing
Unattributed photo of stacks within old Main Branch of the New York City Public Library, pre-1955, now demolished.
" … by the grace of something …"

I had not noticed. How many could provide the same testimony? They hadn't noticed. An absence does not always or even often make itself felt. The hole, having no content, doesn't seem to exist. Empty often defies definition. Name the dog that didn't bark.

I put my books into boxes eight months ago, and there they sat as The Muse and I moved a third of the way across the country.

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Scarin'Myself

Scarin'Myself
Gosta Adrian-Nilsson: TJURFÄKTNINGS SCEN [Bullfighting Scene] (1934)
" … at least in my own mind …"

I hold the firm belief that it's inherently healthy for me to occasionally scare myself. This amounts to a philosophical position, however, and does not always or even usually translate into me frequently so engaging. I remain a ninny at heart and am apt to fuss over any operation near any edge and that's double for heights, so when I challenged myself to take down the long-standing and little-used scaffolding, it amounted to a big and rare event. I went looking for The Muse to help, but she was impenetrably occupied on a call, so after re-re-re-re-re-thinking one final time, I climbed to the top and started disassembling.

Were it not for the height, scaffolding could be simple, but altitude makes all the difference.

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StartingInto

StartingIn
Gosta Adrian-Nilsson: Shadows, twilight (1929)
" … finally coming back into focus."

The Muse insisted upon cleaning up what would become my office. After refurbishing, it was shrouded with a thick patina of dust, first from my removing the ancient wall-to-wall carpeting, then from sanding woodwork, wall, and ceiling patches. The room, before refurbishing and just after, had served as a warehouse for displaced stuff from every other room on the floor, so even the fresh flooring was spattered with spots of spackle, sawdust, and paint. She bravely waded into the mess and I disappeared myself down into the kitchen to set a pot roast braising. I gave her a good hour, perhaps a little less, until after I'd heard both vacuums start and stop and a long silent period probably signifying mopping up. She'd cleared that table I'd used as a catchall during the work and seemed ready for some help shifting stuff. Bookshelves, which I'd stacked on their backs in the middle of the room to facilitate crown moulding and baseboard installation, needed dusting and fresh felt feet. The carpets they laid upon needed rolling and the rest of the room wanted vacuuming, sweeping, and mopping, too. I helped arrange stuff then played scarce again.

I realized that I was not so much moving in to this room, but StartingInto it.

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Kittening

Kittening
Gosta Adrian-Nilsson: Figurer I Trappa (1923)
"I suppose that their feral beginnings serve them well."

Two years ago this week, Max came to live with us. Max was at the time a six month old feral kitten who had been captured, separated from his family, neutered, nurtured through a few common feral diseases, and held in a cage until we arrived to liberate him. He was mildly appreciative, not openly hostile, but very wary. I learned later from the shelter that the man who had captured Max resembled me, so I probably looked like the enemy to him. I set about disconfirming his initial impression of me. He became curious.

A few weeks later, we brought Max's sister Molly home from the same shelter.

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OpeningCans

OpeningCans
Andy Warhol: Campbell's Soup Cans (1962)
"A pantry in name only."

It occurs to me, finally, that This Grand Refurbish never was about demonstrating any particular wizardry, but about OpeningCans. A can serves as perfect camouflage for whatever's inside it, each uniform and seemingly holding the same contents. One must rely upon faith in labeling or blind habit to determine the contents before opening. The contents never seem quite like I've anticipated. Tuna might show up as a fine filet or as a slurry. Soup definitely needs warming. Peas just need throwing away. What was I thinking? I think OpeningCans serves as an everyday courageous act, one asserting ability, putting something on the line. OpeningCans screams that I've accepted full responsibility for dealing with the contents, whether they be worms or just what I'd imagined.

Our Grand Refurbish has opened so danged many cans that our little crew seems to have at least mastered that act.

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Seized

Seize
Gosta Adrian-Nilsson: Soldat (1917)
" … identifying now-or-never opportunities that will most certainly extend our efforts even further …"

Our Grand Refurbishment has become an audacious act. Before we began to understand the magnitude of the effort, back when we still held trivializing notions of what it might mean to 'slap on a coat of paint,' the effort seemed only reasonable, and barely that. The place desperately needed patching and painting, and what better opportunity then when we first re-inhabit the place? Then it slowly transformed into a series of 'If Not Now, When? decisions, where, as our understanding improved and expanded, we noticed wasting opportunities presenting themselves. We understood that once the patient was closed up again, she would likely not easily consent to another operation, so, under The As Long As We Have The Hood Open Rule, we expanded the original scope. Kurt Our Painter, who was confident of completing work on the master bedroom this week, instead spent the bulk of his week re-floating two overly patched walls. The result will be rather smoother walls than in any other room, but on perhaps the two least noticeable walls in the place.

We have Seized opportunities as they presented themselves but have also felt Seized by circumstances.

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Divisible

Divisible
Man Ray: Dust Breeding (1920, printed ca. 1967)
" … we're eminently Divisible and we know it!"

Joel Our Carpenter and I were hanging crown moulding when he noticed that his brad nailer was running low on brads. He remarked that he'd left a refill package on a window sill somewhere and wondered if I'd happened upon it. I hadn't. I directed him to the parts table, a now hopelessly overloaded card table I set up out of the way back in the early days of our Great Refurbish, back before it had become a great anything. That card table groans beneath its burden now. It holds every odd otherwise unclassifiable anything that needed a landing place. Paint rollers wrapped in plastic hang from its strut supports, and attempt to trip anyone passing. It's now located on the mainline between the above the front porch deck and the rest of the upstairs, a primary migration route for long crown moulding boards and baseboards headed for remounting. It's an eye of the needle passage and I suppose that every job site needs one of those, a common ground generally abused, reviled and revered in more or less equal measure. A place where we might come together, if only there was room, given the clutter.

Joel could not find his brad magazine on the impenetrable table, so I volunteered to go find him that ammo.

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BackTogetherAgain

BackTogetherAgain
Lee Krasner: NIGHT WATCH (1960)
"Life's open-ended."

Overall, I'd testify that taking stuff apart tends to be much more satisfying than putting stuff BackTogetherAgain. Tearing down satisfies the little boy in me since it hints at destruction. I guess a part of every little boy secretly wants to be The Incredible Hulk and trash the place without recrimination or remorse. Reassembling can be exacting and challenge even the very patient since it holds out the promise of perfection or something like it. It seems too easy to presume an outcome unlikely to be achieved then blame myself for falling short. Taking apart's successful when entropy peaks. BackTogetherAgain might never be achievable.

I say that BackTogetherAgain "might never be achievable" when I know for certain that it's almost always absolutely unachievable, and at all other times, only relatively so.

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Schlepping

Schlepping
Leon Bibel: Red Hot Franks (1938)
"I sound like a steam locomotive coming."

My hand truck must be the most useful tool I own. I bought it back when I often found myself Schlepping shipping boxes to the post office in preparation for another workshop but I've found uses for it far beyond Schlepping shipping boxes. I use it in the yard, for instance, instead of a wheelbarrow. This move that might never end has daily benefitted from my hand truck's presence, for This Grand Refurbishment might just as easily be called The Grand Schlep, since we seem to have moved everything we own several times since it started and we have not yet seen the end of it. With my hand truck, though, I don't have to lift much to tote a lot, something my back sincerely appreciates. Just yesterday, I moved all my books again, for something like the fourth time since we "moved in" last March. I'll move them at least once more before I'm finally ably to unbox and display them, each move made easier by my ever-present hand truck.

Everything's a Schlep.

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Proficiency

Proficiency
Judith Leyster: Self-portrait (c. 1630)
" Whatever we do, there we are."

Grand Refurbishments serve as test beds, breeding grounds for new skills. One begins a Refurbish with hopeful optimism and little knowledge of what might be required to complete the effort. One might, upon later reflection, recognize that the work couldn't help but challenge. It could not have possibly been a walk-through exercise. It would prove to be a crawl-through sometimes. Perhaps such experiences build character. I know from my own experience that in a typical year, I might gain a single fresh proficiency. In this Grand Refurbishment year, I've acquired several. This cluster has provided me with a rare opportunity to more closely observe how I learn and how I adopt lessons to become proficient.

I'm learning that it might be best for me if I can presume that I don't really know very much of anything.

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Stalled

Stalled
Paula Rego: Geppetto Washing Pinocchio (1996)
"It will be a wonder if we're ever finished."

We tend to insure against big events, even though small occurrences seem to be the more likely to do us in. Through this Grand Refurbish, I've kept my eye on our paint inventory, understanding that availability could stall our forward progress. If anything, I've over-bought paint, figuring that I could always use any extra. Just yesterday, while recounting what I imagined to be our inventory of ceiling paint, I caught myself over-estimating remaining stocks. I immediately called the paint store and ordered two more gallons. Better to have too much than to discover that we have none when we need it. The whole affair seems in delicate and unlikely balance. We never sat down and imagined together what might be coming. We adopted instead the hunter/gatherer's ethic, which more resembles the old and often surprisingly reliable hunt and peck method. We've successfully poked at progress so far.

But small things have been our bane, or at least mine.

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Flurry

Flurry
Lee Krasner: Self-Portrait, ca. 1928
"Flurries produce closure …"

This last week in October falls in a Flurry time. When we lived along Colorado's Front Range, we'd reliably see snow flurries this week. Down here in this lovely valley, flurries of leaves visit long before snow. This year of The Great Refurbish, the Flurry comes with an impending end to the effort, and it seems true with all effort, that the final push tends to become hectic. We've become lemmings now, not precisely anxious to make that final leap, but somehow compelled to jump en mass. Tiny tails remain from many of the individual tasks and these, alone, would naturally distill into a clog of activity. I've been struggling for a week to mount the first of a dozen lock sets on refurbished doors, a task I'd earlier presumed would naturally prove trivial. In practice it became non-trivial and necessitated a whole new thread, disrupting flow as I'd earlier imagined it. Window locks, which were on back order when I submitted the order three months ago, remain undelivered. Installing them will doubtless become a Flurry once they arrive and they will most certainly arrive at an inconvenient time, a point where my time's already spoken for and I cannot fit another blessed thing into my schedule. These remain perfectly normal aspects of an impending ending, an inevitable swirl, a Flurry.

We wisely planned on proceeding through this refurbish at if not a leisurely pace, then at least at a reasonable one. ,

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StabWounds

StabWounds
The Wound Man from Hans von Gersdorff's Feldbuch der Wundarznei (1530)
"We were walking wounded when we began this effort."

I had finally decided that I had studied enough. I had either learned what I needed to understand to mount the new door lockset or I had not, but I would never confirm whether I had or hadn't without trying to mount it. I was deepening the edge plate's inset when the chisel slipped and found my finger, producing a clean stab wound that bled profusely. Two things can be done profusely, I figure, cursing and bleeding. I rushed as best I could through the buzzing Refurbishment activity to the main floor bathroom where I had presciently packed in a supply of bandages. The Muse, up from her basement Zoom Lair for a bite of lunch, offered to help me stick on the bandage. I decided that I needed a lunch break then, too, so I moped around feeling stupid for a half hour before resuming my interrupted attempt at mounting that new lockset. Nothing I'd found in my search for examples of how to accomplish this task had prepared me for StabWounds. I had let down my guard and gone without gloves, a sure sign of my inexperience. I was learning, though, as evidenced by the fresh bandage on one of my two and a half typing fingers. I'm finding it difficult to type this story as a result.

I always was a noisy learner.

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Novitiate

Novitiate
Giuseppe Arcimboldo: Vertumnus (1591)
"The house remains in charge. I, it's vassal."

When my to-become first wife and I were living together on the unheated sleeping porch of her shared apartment on 19th in Seattle's U District, a pane in one of the windows which comprised most of three walls of her room somehow broke. I don't remember the circumstances under which the damage occurred and that detail's probably not important. I took it upon myself to fix the damage, me an eighteen year old with absolutely no experience fixing broken window panes and no tools. I would not have even qualified as an apprentice, but someone of slightly less position on the grand hierarchy pecking order. I was a Novitiate, one interested in dedicating myself to successfully fulfilling the assignment but without sufficient understanding to even begin understanding what that effort might entail. I also lacked even an apprentice's supervision. I had yet to discover if I had the necessary stuff for even becoming an apprentice, which requires a certain attentive interest along with an acquiescing spirit. Headstrong novitiates need not apply, neither should haughty apprentices. I was merely aspiring to become capable of completing that self-assigned commitment and didn't even know that.

I'd watched my dad fix broken window panes, including one I'd created with one over-heavy Thursday morning Oregonian through one of my customer's windows.

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Production

Production
François Boucher: The Triumph of Venus (1740)
"The value we actually bring is always a solo contribution …"

In the very late sixties, I was fortunate to attend Donovan's Seattle performance of his Gift From A Flower To A Garden Tour. Set in the voluminous, boxy Seattle Center Arena, the venue was better suited for basketball than for a folk concert, but there I was, sitting up near the nosebleed section almost as far as I could have possibly been from the stage, waiting for my favorite recording artist to take the surprisingly sparse set. It was decorated with a very large pillow and a microphone boom surrounded by fresh flowers. Nothing else. In an age now where even individual performers travel with a fleet of semis carrying their stage set, such an arrangement seems unthinkable. Now, a proper performance stage seems to require huge video screens and probably parabolic projection equipment to show movies on the ground fog produced by silently whispering machines just off stage. Further, risers must also be provided to elevate the drum sections and the horns, not to mention the space for the piano, bass, and multiple accompanying guitar players. No, the simple pillow surrounded by cut flowers just would not do today.

That was the best danged concert!

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HomeBitterHome

HomeBitterHome
Winslow Homer: Home, Sweet Home (1863)
" … I didn't think I could survive the flush of emotions involved."

My son sent me an Air B&B link to a place for rent in our old Portland neighborhood. It took me a minute or more to realize that this was our old home place, the home in which my son spent his first formative years, the one secured with my own blood, sweat, and tears, hopes and dreams, struggles and deep disappointments. Homes become the backdrop for life's dramas, where the intricate effort rarely seen and even more rarely disclosed occurs. It is the place of private fears and even more private tears, of humbling embarrassment and occasional pride. It's what you settled for and what you earned and what you couldn't quite afford all in one. It's a wonder to me that anyone, especially me, even has a home, for the rules for owning a home have always been murky, and I suspect murky for good reasons. Should anyone ever get to the bottom of the pyramid scheme, they'd very likely find that there's no foundation underneath. Imagining supports it. Home is a fiction capable of fooling almost anyone into believing it exists, especially with people like Stephen Foster writing sentimental songs about it. "Be it ever so humble … There's no place like home." Truer words might have never been spoken or more widely misinterpreted.

Needless to say, that link transported me to those years when I struggled to provide a home.

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SacredContext

SacredContext1
Titian: The Death of Actaeon (1559-75)
"It exists to change us"

Mythology tells the sorry story of the hunter Actaeon, who besides having the misfortune of possessing a name with an imbedded digraph, once stumbled upon Diana and her nymphs bathing in the forest. Diana dealt rather harshly with Actaeon's blunder, however innocent, turning him into a stag which his own dogs then hunted down and killed. I sometimes get confused about the moral this allegory intends to impart. Does it caution about blundering into nymphs or something else? I choose to interpret it as referring to what I'll call SacredContext. Every blessed and damned thing possesses SacredContext, for it is the very nature, the subtle essence, of each thing. It appears in different guise depending upon the underlying nature of each thing, and cannot be adequately anticipated. It must be discovered, often blundered into, and when violated, responds in heartlessly harsh ways. To violate a SacredContext is to violate the universe and the universe seems to possess no leniency or sense of humor where such violations exist.

I believe, if only to reassure myself, that most violations of SacredContext occur innocently, like poor Actaeon's must have.

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Bivouac

Bivouac
René Richard: Bivouac (date unknown)
"I've probably survived worse before."

The Great Refurbishment turned what might have been our home into a Bivouac, more of an encampment than a dwelling, a transitional place. We're still not hardly moved in after seven long months of pseudo-habitation with boxes being our primary companion. I long ago stopped wondering where my possessions were, trading in a level of frustration for a ration of faith that they're there somewhere and that we'll one day—not today and probably not tomorrow, but someday—be reunited. Until then, I've taken to living with the subset of my possessions that I have thus far uncovered and stopped fretting about the others. They belong to the great mystery, a constant companion but nothing really worth fussing after. The Muse and I are, in the mean time (which some days seems heartlessly mean) "making do." I would not wish our transitional lifestyle upon anyone. It's brutal.

I'm from a family that had to put everything in order before we could leave for longer than a day.

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Thises&Thatsesses

Thises&Thatsesses
Domenico Remps: Cabinet of Curiosities (1690s)
"I should very soon move back to my desk
and stop writing while hunched over this piano bench like I have been for the last few weeks."

For most of The Grand Refurbish, we focused upon single activities. We were either engaged in this or that, but after fifteen full weeks of effort, we've pretty much concluded the big stuff. Kurt Our Painter continues to motor through rooms, now in well-practiced order. He no longer need enter first with an act of discovery. He's learned what to expect and he's not lacking in necessary judgement. One crack's pretty much like every other. He enters and sets to work, fixing cracks and prepping windows and trim while his fillings set. He tapes himself off for a day to run his sander before laying down the same sequence of finishes: primer, first coat, then TopCoat. The closet gets the economy service because nobody ever needs a finely finished closet. The rest of the room he works to immaculate. Then on to the next.

The Planking finished, the leftovers either stored in the basement or carted off as trash.

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Transitioning

Transitioning
Frans Francken The Younger: The Witches' Kitchen (1606)
" … Transitioning back into the more significant but more humbling role of human again."

With The Hunter's Moon came a breath of a Pacific storm, a contradiction in terms no less welcome for its identity confusion. The leading edge of the storm brought down the maple's helicopters to litter the property and leave me with gardening as my growing priority. I'd been absent, absent in that way that only focused presence can ever produce. The Grand Refurbish had nudged most of the rest of my life to the edge of the path and left me missing dimensions. My single focus had rendered me blind to much of my usual oversight. I'd become erratic and careless and filled with the very most effective excuses. My limited time was pre-focused upon the primary project at hand. I'd become a narrow and uninteresting man, always bringing every conversation back to some arcane appreciation for some previously unacknowledged aspect of door refinishing or something equally captivating.

I realized as I moped around the place yesterday that I might be Transitioning out of that laser-focused phase, one which always so satisfyingly takes away the mind for a time.

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Leavings

Leavings
Frans Francken the Younger, Chamber of Art and Curiosities (1636)
"Every human activity produces leftovers …"

Every human activity produces Leavings, leftovers. We installed a new screen door and ended up with a few parts leftover, not because we didn't follow the installation directions, but because we did. The door as delivered was capable of being installed in several different ways depending upon specific conditions. Almost everything's like that now, which means that installing anything will surely increase at least the net inventory of odd bolts or screws, and probably leave a single use, tin whistle piece of metal I won't be able to justify discarding, so I'll retain it Just In Case. Of course I have a storage problem in my basement, just like everyone else does. I've retained so very many Leavings that I cannot for the life of me remember what I have retained. I also can never find an odd screw or bolt when I need one, though I imagine that I certainly must have at least one of every kind known to man. If I do, I cannot find where I set them aside.

Years ago, a friend gave me a dozen old wooden Coca-Cola cases which I set along the wall edge of my massive workbench to produce an instant warren of little cubby holes, a genuine Curiosity Cabinet useful, I thought, for holding my Leavings, and it has been useful, though with 144 little cubbies, there are far too many for me to remember what and where.

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GrowningUp

GroaningUp
Herkules nimmt Atlas die Last ab und trägt den Kosmos
[Hercules relieves atlas of the burden and carries the cosmos]
In the style of
Heinrich Aldegrever (1550)
"The time spent completing the task lost forever. The result, eternal …"

I looked at the final batch of baseboards, which I had uncomfortably stacked inside the garage, and I felt overwhelmed. Most of the remaining boards were long: ten, twelve, even fourteen feet, and though I'd already sanded them smooth and glued the ones that had shattered when we removed them, I could not quite face touching them again. Painting would insist that I touch each several more times, shuttling them between a painting station and drying racks, then back for each top coat. Each coat takes an hour or more for the batch and demands great focus, no breaks allowed, especially once I start applying the final TopCoat. These boards have demanded much, not the least of which has been extended detachment. I know, it might seem as though refinishing a board would be all about engagement, but it's the sort of engagement that insists upon a detachment in order to complete. One may not maintain mindfulness and manage their way through the effort. One must go at least semi-conscious if not completely unconscious or he's sunk before he's finished. One can dabble in removing baseboards, and even when mending them, but once the refinishing starts, expect long hours of demanding toil. Sanding each bare might take an hour per, or more, not to mention sweeping off the sanding dust and washing them then stacking them away out of the weather again, then unstacking and sorting and painting, I never felt completely up to any of it. I just did it anyway because I'm the grown up, GroaningUp to it's more like it.

My father taught me not to whine about my assignments but to buckle down and just complete them.

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Shortages

Shortages

Rembrandt: Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem (1630)
"Freedom might first seem like the liberty to purchase …"

I stopped in the paint store last week and found some shelves holding cans of what I might have easily mistaken for paint. I asked Luis at the counter what was going on because it almost looked as if he had some product to sell. He replied that some product had apparently accidentally trickled in, though nothing in volume. I've been fortunate through our Grand Refurbishment, since I've not had to shut down progress due to an inability to procure paint. I have had to buy better grades of paint than I might have otherwise purchased, and I have had to wait an odd day or two for an order to come through, but progress has not been stalled due to a lack of supply. My neighbor's son owns a painting company and he's had thousands of dollars worth of paint on backorder through the entirety of this year's painting season, a devastating situation with no end in sight. What we once imagined as our birthright, unlimited supplies of goods provided by a benevolent market, has now become the exception as that same market struggles to keep up with demand.

I almost expect our local newspaper to start a Shortage Of The Week column except it would probably only encourage panic buying by exploding demand for whatever it reported.

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TopCoat

TopCoat
Dorothea Tanning: Philosophie en plein air [Fresh-air Philosophy] (1969)
" … become essentially invisible while standing there in plain sight."

The rules seem clear enough, but impossible to follow. If I had infinite inside space, I might be able to lay down a perfect TopCoat, but I don't. I have baseboards balanced atop everything in the Pop-up Paint Shoppe, garbage cans, empty cat litter tubs, the table, even saw horses. It took an hour or longer to lay the prime coat on, a little less for the first TopCoat. The second, and typically the last TopCoat, should take a little longer because it gets the most meticulous preparation. It's the absolutely last chance to amend the record posterity will record. There will be some sanding and filling involved. What passed muster after priming and didn't quite cause a fluster after the first TopCoat, will find my puritan heart and demand reform before heading on. My sanding block will find some work. So will my putty knife.

Painting forces a painter into numerous poses, for there's just no applying paint while standing straight upright.

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Milage

Milage
Dorothea Tanning: The Truth About Comets (1945)
"That last millionth of an inch makes all of the difference …"

A difficulty arises when considering how to measure progress of a refurbishment, which might reasonably involve many simultaneous activities. How might one measure doneness? Horizontally comes to mind for those of us poisoned by formal training and practical experience managing projects, but viewing refurbishments, like, indeed, viewing most projects as horizontal series of activities seems sort of like artificially propping up a body so that it looks more life-like. Refurbishments live mysterious lives and seem downright discontinuous in practice, with tasks started and stalled for tenuously unpredictable reasons. There is literally no predefinable path to conclusion, so any suggestion that one knows, for instance, how much effort remains at any point in time embraces an illusion, a better portrait of the projector's presumptions than anything really likely to happen. Progress might be better measured in the tiniest measurement available, one difficult to imagine, in Mils and Microns, and along a vertical axis, in depths.


You see, the most dramatic effect any refurbishment produces likely results from painting.

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Cahnge

Cahnge
Dorothea Tanning: Concerning Wishes (1942)
"Maybe we can achieve that change with balance."

I signed on to work with a boutique consulting firm in Silicon Valley but I refused to move there. I commuted from Portland, an hour and a half flight, which left me with a shorter commute than some of my partners who lived there. The firm, like all firms must, sported a mysterious name, a made-up Sanskrit word which we claimed meant "Moving to the next level with balance." I didn't know this fictional part at first but learned it from a native Sanskrit speaker who attended one of our workshops. We were in the change business, and business boomed for us for a while, for everyone in Silicon Valley's in the change business and every firm seemed to be seeking some way to move to the next level with balance. Of course the concept was fatally flawed since moving to any new level remains an inherently unbalancing experience and nobody ever pulls off balanced transformation. It's inevitably different on the other side, and different in unanticipated ways. It properly takes a while to get used to any significant new status quo. Believing otherwise doesn't help anything, but makes things worse.

I know for myself that whatever I'm chasing will certainly turn out differently than expected.

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Compleadings

ComPleadings
Dorothea Tanning: Door 84 (1984) (oil on canvas with found door)
"I want to remain a permanent work in progress …"

Twelve weeks into our Grand Refurbishing and one might think that I'm aching for completion. After all, it's so far been three month of fine dust and irresolution. Wouldn't a spot of done do wonders right about now? My honest answer to that question would have to be a steadfast, "No!" I'm not feeling ready to let go of this pursuit, even if the original pursuit has caught up to original intentions. We're still a little shy of crossing the done, done, and done finish line, but intimations have been swarming, threatening our little operation. While the titular purpose of all this fuss and all those feathers was certainly a refurbished Villa, as always happens, a superior purpose appeared while we were on our way to finishing. A manner of living emerged, one submerged in personal aspiration and mystery, striving, disappointment, as well as genuine accomplishment. For a time here, we felt as though we could accomplish anything we set our minds to accomplishing and we daily set ourselves to experiencing that most marvelous process. We've largely succeeded, which propels me into a dance I've experienced many, many, many times before. Let's say that I'm Compleading rather than simply completing. I'm feeling like I don't want to let go of this adventure yet. Closure seems like a form of death more than a sign of success.

It was the same for me when I attended university.

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Imp-Erfection

Imp-Erfection
Pablo Picasso: Femme dans un fauteuil (Dora Maar) (1942)
" … which might have been the purpose of our pursuing all along."

Whatever I order at the butcher shop, the young woman behind the counter responds by saying, "Perfect!," in a genuinely delighted tone. I know and I suspect that she knows, too, that there's really nothing perfect about my asking for a beef cheek or a couple of duck legs, but I haven't called her on her characterization yet. I figure she's fallen in with a bad linguistic crowd and can't really help herself, like those who feel compelled to end their every sentence as if they were asking a question rather than making a statement? Some language usages seem more afflictions than conventions, and they tend to infect some generations, not others, bringing us older folks to wonder whether evolution produces better or just glaringly different. The now widespread adoption of the Perfect! response seems unlikely to improve anyone's chances for long term survival.

The longer I live, the less I feel attracted to perfection.

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Inadvertencies

Inadvertencies
Dorothea Tanning: Lumiere du Foyer (The Light of the Fireplace), 1952
"I do not have a process by which to formally disagree with their assertion …"

I have wrestled with 'process people' all my professional life, for professions tend to be dependent upon defined processes. Definite procedures exist for practicing dentistry and accountancy, and making it up as you go along is strictly forbidden if one intends to serve as an airplane pilot or a brain surgeon, but my profession belonged to that class of activities largely dependent upon Inadvertencies. To manage a project is in many ways to be managed BY that project. While many insist that there exists a right and proper procedure for managing projects, actual evidence strongly suggests otherwise. Still, I felt challenged to define what I did, to teach others how to do it, and to pretend that this profession wasn't different. I'd usually wait until the hiring executive had left the room to level with my students and collude with them to do what we could to prevent the Change Prevention Specialists in Human Resources from glimpsing the truth, hiring executives and HR professionals being notoriously thin-skinned when defending the existence of processes. It had always seemed to me that my work was better suited for birds of the field who never sowed, reaped, or stored but managed to find sustenance anyway.

I was reflecting last night, after spending the last half of my Sunday afternoon in the Pop-up Paint Shop ridding baseboards of their paint, that I had not known how to perform that operation when I'd started.

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MusicalRooms

MusicalRooms
Dorothea Tanning: Musical Chairs (1951)
"I retain faith that we'll eventually find a way to finally move in."

While The Muse and I enthusiastically initiated The Grand Refurbishment, it brings certain externalities which we cannot properly characterize as anything but inconvenient. Six months after returning to The Villa for the first time all over again, we're still not moved in. We're not moved out, but also not unboxed. Our living room looks like a stage set for some post modern melodrama or undergraduate living, perhaps both. Carpets rolled up and not quite invisibly stored behind a couch suspiciously canted to provide for additional hiding space that doesn't really hide anything. Whole rooms still stacked high with boxes, most prominently, boxes of books. We live in a suspended tile puzzle, its solution not eluding us but still pending.

We've proven better at waiting and tolerating than we earlier suspected.

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Debasement

Debasement
Henry Moore: SHELTERERS (c,1940-41)
"Masterpieces disappearing …"

I volunteered innocently, not knowing what I was agreeing to deliver. It was the first day of our Grand Refurbishment, the smoke hardly dispersing from the starting gun when Kurt Our Painter commented that we'd certainly need to remove the front hall baseboards to install the flooring. It would also, he insisted, be much easier to refinish that trim on saw horses than when it was nailed to the bottom of the walls. He set about separating those boards from their plaster-bound anchors. I followed along behind, pulling finishing nails two sizes to large out by their tails by means of the BIG F-ing Pliers. I explicitly agreed to take charge of those boards. I dutifully carted them out to the newly installed Pop-up Paint Shop in front of the garage and set to work refinishing them. That was the first batch.

Every room would have to lose their baseboards as part of their transformation.

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LosingNews

LosingNews
Henri-Edmond Cross: L'air du soir (c. 1893)
" … we're all better than continuous commotion."

I was once a news junkie. I'd wake to NPR or the BBC blaring the latest headlines at me. I'd continue throughout the day, listening in whenever I found myself on the way somewhere. It was the soundtrack of my life. I rarely missed the evening summary of the day's events and felt deficient if I hadn't received the latest dispatch. It was as if I might close the difference between ignorance and well-informed by simply tuning in and being told things. I rarely watched television news, which seemed so sixties and suburban to me, not so much like reality as was the radio broadcast version. When on exile in Colorado, I grew to depend upon the ten o'clock local television news for the latest weather, which was often threatening and usually entertaining. Since we've returned here into a much smaller market, I haven't even bothered to figure out how to watch local television channels. The radio features better graphics and brighter colors. Audio books, even better.

Kurt Our Painter listens to a locally-produced hate radio station most days.

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BrassMonkey

BrassMonkey
Henri-Edmond Cross: La ferme, soir (1893)
" … monkey business satisfactions."

I become different people as I engage in different kinds of work. My painter persona seems wholly different than my gardening one, and even my gardening one varies depending upon whether I'm digging or mowing, pruning or watering. Each chore demands a different uniform or at least a few different accessories. If I'm carpentering (shudder), I'll be wearing my tool belt. If I'm sanding, I'll sport ear plugs and a face mask. I'm no man of a thousand faces, but I manage at least a dozen different ones. Lately, I've by necessity taken up the temporary role of BrassMonkey on our Grand Refurbishing effort. As BrassMonkey, I've taken it upon myself to rid our venerable door hardware of a century's accumulated paint. It's a nasty bit of business involving toxic chemicals and awful smells, but I knew no other way to erase those errors.

My job was somewhat simplified by the decision that we would wholesale replace the knobs, which were mostly midcentury mediocre, cheap-looking tin.

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ButtoningUp

ButtoningUp
Henri-Edmond Cross: La Ferme, matin (1893)
"We'll be obeying rules now."

Throw a ball up into the air and it will fall back to Earth. In very much the same way, start a project and it will eventually turn back on itself and come to closure. Each effort encounters a point where progress no longer depends upon the initial push, but upon some force more like gravity which pulls the project to completion. Before that point, the job's all about opening fresh cans of worms and dealing with their contents. After, it's finishing touches and closing down, ButtoningUp. The project's not anywhere near over, plenty of work remains, but the nature of that work shifts. No longer exploring uncharted territory, we can reasonably foresee what's remaining. We're experienced, we've found our cadence and move to it. We're no longer poking sticks into darkness, but moving through light. We expect only modest surprises because we've already opened everything up. Now comes the closing down.

The critical component of our massive refurbishing had always been the arrival of the planking, the date of which was still very much in contention yesterday morning.

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Winderz

Winderz
Henri Matisse: Open Window, Collioure (1905)
"Master of my windows, maybe, finally, more master of myself."

Windows are not passive elements of any house. They live and they breath. They breathe light, carrying the essence of outside into the house, giving life to more than the houseplants, but to the other inhabitants of the place, the cats and the people. Windows also open up, sacrificing their essential selves, their role as barrier, to become a portal both into and out of. They frame changing portraits of the seasons, same old views with always different components. Windows are magical openings. They are consummate performers.

Yesterday, I prepped the windows I'd removed for reintroduction to their frames.

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Ache-ers

Ache-ers
Berthe Morisot: Young Woman Watering a Shrub (1883)
"I might even adopt a hobby that doesn't leave me limping."

I move like Quasimodo in the morning and like a zombie by evening. Whatever else I have been making these past ten weeks since we started The Grand Refurbishment, I have also produced Homemade aches and pains, ache-ers. My right wrist still feels the impact of my fall two or three weeks ago in the Pop-up Paint Tent. My lower back saddle feels tight with intermittent pain radiating down to my right knee. Who knows what produced that? I some days sense that I'm just actively crippling myself engaging in all this Homework. Most days, I appreciate the stretching. I sense that I might otherwise turn stationary and still and slip back to living exclusively in my head again. My body finds it interesting and entertaining to be involved again, though each new engagement seems to leave me limping away from it.

The Muse flees to the quackopractor or massage therapist at what seems to me the hint of a drop of a hat.

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DI(T)Y

DI(T)Y
Johannes Verspronck: Boy Sleeping in a High Chair (1654)
"The ultimate DIY effort seems to be cleaning up those earlier, innocently ignorant DI(T)Y efforts."

I must maintain a certain vigilance to avoid Doing It (To) Myself whenever Doing It Myself. A fine line separates these two proximate states, and even the very best of intentions cannot guarantee that an innocent one won't become a guilty other. For me, trouble seems to start with some simple-seeming misconception. I believe I know then act upon that presumed knowledge only to later learn that I didn't know at all, for how might anyone confirm something as slippery as knowledge without some actual experience to disconfirm it? I stripped to bare wood then painted The Villa's exterior under a delusion of care which later essentially undid everything I was attempting to do. In attempting to preserve the siding by slathering linseed oil on it before painting, I ruined the paint's adhesion. The sun later heated the underlying linseed oil causing it to crack the paint. Now, I'm looking at re-stripping back to bare wood again, an enormous and necessary effort made even more onerous by the fact that I Did It (To) Myself. I produced a DI(T)Y.

We have a Homemade pandemic now thanks to tens of thousands of people dutifully Doing It (To) Themselves.

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SelfDestructions

SelfDestructions
"The Americanese wall - as Congressman [John Lawson] Burnett would build it," (25 March 1916)
" … but that hope still springs eternal."

A vast part of the Homemade universe contains stuff not so much made at home as assembled there. These items arrive swathed in cardboard, often with cryptic messages imprinted on them. EZ Assembly. Assembles Itself! These come-ons invariably prove to be lies, usually damned lies. They amount to a curious kind of literary test, assessing one's ability to interpret a wholly unique literary form. Part cartoon and part text, they tend toward the disorienting and invariably assume knowledge and orientation rarely present in any homemaker, homesteader, or non-engineer. They hint at more than they declare. They've numbered pieces and prepared schematics, producing what are called exploding graphics intended to introduce the assembler to the product. They first successfully achieve in producing an overwhelming sense of disorientation. What seemed simple enough suddenly seems terribly complicated. It holds more parts and connections than anyone can successfully hold in their head at once. If the purchaser could fit the damned thing back into the box at that point, he'd return it post haste, but he cannot. Just opening the box allowed Pandora to escape along with, as will soon be revealed, three apparently essential screws which seem to have disappeared from the small, unopenable parts bag.

I call these instruction which fail to successfully instruct anyone to do anything SelfDestructions after my friend Wayne's habit of calling all instructions Destructions, as I recounted in a piece called
Destructions, which I wrote over five years ago.

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Buttling

Buttling
David Allan: An Italian Footman (about 1780)
"We are each in service to our possessions …"

I should make it clear that I am not personally completing very much of our Grand Refurbishment. The Muse and I hired out almost all of the actual work. I've accepted minor roles as a peripheral workman, refinishing doors, windows, and baseboards, primarily to avoid distracting our actual paid workmen from their primary assignments. I'm stripping and polishing brass, for instance, work nobody would pay an experienced carpenter or professional painter to perform. I think of myself as more of the butler of the effort and Buttling as my primary focus. I'm the guy who sees that the garbage cans get emptied and fresh contractor bags are available. I run to the hardware or paint store when we're running out of something. I'm offering a cold beverage mid scorching afternoon. I'm the one remembering to thank the workers for their help at the end of each workday. I never forget that I'm not the one doing very much. I'm just filling in around the edges.

I suppose that I'm filling the role of servant leader on the endeavor.

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MindReading

MindReading1
El Greco: The Opening of the Fifth Seal, The Vision of Saint John (1608–1614)
" … the source of endless unwanted entertainment."

I've learned that The Villa has eccentric windows, homemade double hungs with cords and weights dangling in the walls. They have proven themselves mysterious in almost my every encounter with them. They are not of standard design, but apparently Homemade. I've learned most of their tricks, but they still prove capable of confusing and confounding me. Earlier this week, I noticed an original pane in the lower frame of the big four foot wide window in front of my desk, the very window I usually look out through when writing, had somehow developed a crack. Kurt Our Painter and I quickly removed the stop holding the frame in place and i removed the cords. I took the frame to the glass shop for a pane replacement, retrieving it the next morning. By the end of the day yesterday, I'd finished repainting the frame and Kurt and I set about setting it back into the window, usually a trivial chore.

It didn't fit.

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SalesPitch

SalesPitch
Jan Sanders van Hemessen: The Extraction of the Stone of Madness (c. 1550)
"I'm intrigued by any sales pitch which focuses upon all I will not get if I choose them for a relationship."

Those of us who create Homemade stuff, which I guess includes pretty much all of us, maintain relationships with our reliable suppliers, and we swear by the ones we adopt. My mom might have contended that "everything comes out of the same spigot before they put different labels on it," but I firmly believe (by which I mean I believe merely as a matter of conviction) that I use the absolutely best available brand of paint, for instance. I feel secretly shocked when I learn of someone favoring a different supplier, for I see that choice as clear evidence of their poor judgement. I might not attempt to convince them of their error, but only because I understand that nobody's likely to ever convince me that I have not discerned the very best paint supplier in the world, I have considerable treasure and effort invested in that choice. Others probably do in their's, too.

I've been visiting my paint store several times each week as we've worked through this Grand Refurbishing

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OnMyKnees

OnMyKnees
Andrew Wyeth: On Her Knees, Helga (1975)
"Self reliance has little to do with standing on one's two feet …"

Almost everything used to be Homemade. Now, only exceptions are. The transition, largely accomplished over the last century and a half, proved traumatic as well as transformative. Our GrandOther wants nothing to do with learning how to sew, for instance, once considered an essential skill. The Muse dedicates a whole room as her sewing room and even fabricated a tailor's dummy of her own body to enable her to design her own patterns and better fit her creations. Almost nobody does that anymore.

I spent yesterday afternoon on my knees sanding the margins of our grand staircase.

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Crapsmanship

Crapsmanship
Abraham Mignon: The Overturned Bouquet (1660-79) -
This work is widely regarded as a truly terrible painting.

"That I can even discern the difference … suggests that I've already come far."

Removing master bedroom baseboards, I came upon one which almost defied removal. It was an odd section. While the other walls featured long single boards, this one was a short extension for a longer one. This wall's base had been broken into two sections. The Muse later noticed the outline of a prehistoric doorway just above this section, an entry into what we've imagined might have been a screened sleeping porch back before internal bathrooms were necessary. The board had been secured with four very large headed nails while the rest of the baseboard had been more properly anchored in with countersunk finishing nails. I had to destroy that board to remove it. It needed refabricating, anyway. I'd encountered a bit of shoddy workmanship again. Not my first encounter and probably not my last on this refurbishing effort. I thought back to an earlier story about our Colorado place which I titled Crapmanship and reminded myself that Crapsmanship is universal. Every house features some of it, regardless of how able a craftsman owned it then or now.

Not every fix measures up to the highest standards, and it probably makes sense that the shoddier work will need reattending to soonest.

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Plumps

Plumps
Edouard Manet: Plums (circa 1875-1885)
"[We] count ourselves wealthy and fortunate, and plump …"

When The Muse's son was small, he called plums "Plumps," in a typical childhood misunderstanding, a false cognate accomplished using only one language. My daughter referred to discussions as "disgustings" in a similar and similarly accurate misunderstanding. Plums are plump and might have been better named plumps from the outset. Of course, they are called plumps around The Villa and forever will be. Every home breeds its own dialect featuring words and interpretations unique to the people there, a Family Language. In the early Fall, The Muse's thoughts turn toward Plumps. She buys volumes of them fresh, even though most of the dried plumps from last year are still here with us, reposing in the basement larder.

The sole use for plumps in this house has been in dressing with which to stuff the Christmas goose.

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Deceiving

Deceiving

Pere Borrell del Caso: Escaping Criticism (1874)
"I hardly ever catch myself Deceiving myself anymore …"

Deceiving might be the primary skill underlying every Homemade everything. Nobody starts off competent to make very much of anything at home or elsewhere, and considerable experience might well be required to get any better at making something fit. Criticism seems the very last thing any budding maker needs. Each rather needs the opposite of that. To accomplish this, Deceiving will be required, with self deception heading the list of those targeted with this gift, but it's wise to stay out of eyeshot of well-intended neighbors and the highly skilled, for they can never do any budding maker any good and often inadvertently inflict wounds grievous enough to convince anyone not to continue attempting. Competence requires considerable attempting, best done some distance from criticism.

One learns from their mistakes but not if they cannot escape them.

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LastOne

Clabboration
Paul Gauguin: Vision after the Sermon (1888)
" … after gaining all the experience of fixing its eleven brothers."

The first one tends to be difficult for me to complete. I'm not even learning yet. I'm at best orienting myself, but I might be more accurately described as misleading myself, for I've gone off half cocked, without really understanding either the context or the possible solutions. I'm very likely a little frustrated and just attempting to dispatch this distraction, not yet having noticed a certain pattern to both this problem and to my default solution. The second one's usually much better. In terms of net improvement one over the other, the second probably represents the greatest improvement of the whole batch. Even if I do a dozen, no two will likely show as much improvement as the second from the first. The following ones will feature minor variations. That second one will likely prove to be a revelation representing the pattern for how I'll think that's done. I could still be wrong, but I'm feeling productive.

I know how to do very little and rely upon the stuff I fix to teach me how to fix them.

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Homemade?

Homemade?
John Ruskin: Zermatt (1844)
"Done once, well enough, and never to be replicated."

By the end of each afternoon, my arms covered with a fine patina of sanding dust, I'm finished with my HomeMaking for the day and ready to make something for supper, something Homemade. As you already know if you've been following my stories, The Muse and I have been attempting to move into our home, The Villa Vatta Schmaltz, for six months, but have not yet managed to move completely in. We've been Refurbishing the place before setting deep roots, still living out of boxes and with dust, primitives as we attempt to elevate this house into our home again. There are no repeat performances. We once lived here, now we live here again. We are not back, but here, again for the very first time. This is our home now, though not yet fully finished. This is how Homemade works, wholes made out of somewhat unfinisheds.

Over the past three months, I wrote my daily stories under the heading of HomeMaking.

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Headswarming

Headswarm
Pieter Bruegel the Elder: The Tower of Babel (1563)
"I already know what I want for Christmas."

When I was a kid, summertime featured plenty of boredom. As an adult, boredom's been more difficult to come by. As a budding HomeMaker, it's been essentially impossible to find. This summer, passing now into Fall, featured days filled to capacity with meaningful activity, perhaps the most dangerous possible condition for anyone aspiring to become an interesting or a creative person. I have lived this season in dread fear that I might become uninteresting after spending so many days refinishing doors. What could possibly be more boring than a man going on about the finer points of door refinishing? Any infinite work queue will do, though, to turn a decent fellow into a drudge. It's not the All Work and No Play Clause kicking in, but the lesser appreciated All Activity and No Boredom one. Boredom is probably an essential human experience. Those who fail to experience it seem doomed to an overly kinetic existence, a blur of a presence.

One must not only have leisure, but know how to use it.

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LastFullDay

LastFullDay
Joan Miró: The Farm (1921-1922)
"I never want to say goodbye …"

The end of anything tends to elicit a sense of loss, however much might have been gained from the departing experience. For me, endings introduce a beginning-over rather than a continuing-into sensation. Summer does not mature into Autumn, but falls down into it. The salad season where The Muse could and would mosey out to the overgrown tomato forest to bring back supper's salad seems to be ending with no adequate replacement. Tomatoes will soon taste of cardboard again and we will leave them lying in their false promises on produce aisle shelves. We'll resort to stews and braises and less frequently grill. I'm already noticing that the morning sun no longer blinds me at breakfast. Time has taken, over the last few weeks, to moving inexorably again, dragging me along unwillingly, insisting. And I've held full days as my final defense. As long as full days stood in the way of this latest inevitable, I felt safe. Today will be the LastFullDay and will leave me with only a flimsy half day of summer remaining tomorrow. I should expend this LastFullDay extremely carefully, though it will abandon me either way.

I experience what I've not accomplished more deeply than whatever I've achieved.

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Hash

Hash
The building of the palace of Khavarnaq, from Nizami's Khamsah.
Painting attributed to the master-painter
Bihzad. Herat, late 15th century
"HomeMaking might just be home."

Homemaking's iffy work. Always attempted 'on spec', it follows no fixed path. Largely driven by intentions, no guarantees accompany its effort. One scratches at the Earth without knowing beforehand what might sprout and grow from the effort. Each instance seems distinct enough to cloak expected results. Two months and change into our Grand Refurbishment, our home seems distinctly less homey than it did when we started our work. Of course our work's not yet completed and we do not know what percent complete we are today, as if that was saying anything. Percent Complete has always been one of those bullshit concepts which seem perfectly uncontroversial, yet it presumes as knowable innumerable aspects of a pursuit, rendering any response to the question, "What Percent Complete are you?" not worth the breath expended expressing it. Nobody ever knows. I do know for certain, though, that I've made a Hash of this HomeMaking so far. While some chance remains that we might one day finally realize the home we've so long aspired to own, it's probably more likely that we'll still be aspiring when we die, never having realized what we pursued with such earnestness.

Conservative columnist George Will concluded his Washington Post column this morning by saying, "For Americans, the pursuit of happiness is happiness.'

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SecondSleep

SecondSleep
Salvador Dali:
Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second before Waking (1944)
"On weekends I dream my Second Sleep dreams with Max The Monster Cat kneading on my shoulder."

In centuries before industrialization and time regulation, when darkness and fire dominated every evening, people allocated their time differently than we do today. Then, most were, indeed, up with the chickens and down shortly after supper, but most maintained a second period of which they also made productive use. Most did not sleep twelve hours each night. They'd rouse in what we'd refer to as the middle of their night, get dressed, maybe snack or even go visiting neighbors. After two or three stolen hours, they'd tumble back into bed and catch a few last zzzzzzs before rising again with the chickens. They called that second snooze 'SecondSleep', and it's something we lost when we domesticated ourselves into nine-to-fives separated by commutes, when we abandoned the sun standard for time, and when we began staying up to watch the late news before bed.

That period between first and second sleep was more private than daytime wakefulness.

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Tolls

Tolls
Henri Rousseau: Toll Gate (circa 1888-1892)
"The price of progress might not be my soul …"

If there's no such thing as a free lunch—and I'm not fully prepared to accept this premise—then it might follow that all human activity exacts some sort of toll or tax on the human engaging in it. Repetitive motion injuries have been widely recognized and humbly acknowledged. It seems as if half of the more common syndromes carry a professional designation: Coal Miner's Lung, Cyclist's Knee. The most dedicated come to wear their self-inflicted infirmity as a badge of honor designating their self discipline. The less fervent might use their wound as an excuse or a cautionary example, whining rather more than seems strictly proper or necessary. I, myself, maintain a growing list of physical complaints which seem to stem from our Grand Refurbishment work. Some hold no obvious connection, by which I mean that I cannot point to a specific event or action which resulted in the affliction, but each fresh wound appeared during the period in which I was engaged in Refurbishing work, so I classify it by association. I see them as a result of my engaging whether or not they actually were. I consider these damages as representing the Tolls of Refurbishing. I feel equally honored and embarrassed by their presence.

I noticed that my fingerprint no longer works as a security check when awakening my phone.

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Woikin'

Woikin'
Ugo Mulas: James Rosenquist, New York (1964)
"I inhabit a perfect market featuring infinite supply and no demand."
I have been gainfully unemployed for so long that I no longer remember the sensation of 'having a job.' I have my work, of course. Who doesn't? But an actual job? I might have become functionally unemployable. I do not know why. It just seems that at some point, there was no demand for whatever I did. Nobody ever said anything about it. No dissatisfied customer ever protested my performance. I was just no longer working. Not retired. Not laid off. Not so much out of work, but more like employment abandoned me, leaving me to pursue my own work. When a form asks for my employer, I write in 'Self,' though I'm not actually my employer. My work employs me, but not because it pays me for my time. My work employs me because it holds my attention. Maybe next time I encounter that question on a form, I'll fill in 'my work' and see what happens.

I took a survey this week and encountered all of my questionnaire pet peeves.

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Mindering

Mindering
Paul Klee: Red Balloon [Roter Ballon] (1922)
"I've become my own DJ and audience."

When I'm painting, I can listen to an audio book, but painting's only a tiny portion of any painting project. Much more time goes to prepping, which tends to be noisy work, too noisy to allow listening to any audio input. Of course I could just finally cave in and buy a noise cancelling headset as I've threatened for years, but I'm learning to appreciate the selective availability of external entertainment and, much more importantly, I seem to be gaining a fresh appreciation for where my mind goes when denied distraction. I'll call that state Mindering. My mind wanders to the most curious places. A tune might dominate for a while, one selected from an impressive list, no justification given. Chattanooga Choo Choo accompanied me through two full Pop-Up Paint Shoppe days this week. I compose impressive essays while sanding door fronts. I relive scenes from my past and pre-live a few from my future. I engage in lengthy internal dialogues. My mind never stops chattering.

Those who engage in relatively menial activities seem to have the greatest opportunity to enjoy the joys of Mindering.

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CodeTalkin'

codetalkin0027


Photograph by Edward S. Curtis: Cañon de Chelly, Arizona (ca. 1904)
" … probably won't ever come out and declare that he never did have a clue …"

During both WWI and WWII, the US Army signal corps employed speakers of Native American languages as so-called Code Talkers, for radio chatter conducted in their native tongues was absolutely untranslatable code for German, Italian, and Japanese code breakers. Code Talker transmissions were never compromised. Now, it seems each profession maintains a native dialect, the purpose of which might mirror the original Code Talkers', to transmit sensitive information without fear of translation. Painters, plumbers, carpenters, and carpet layers each employ certain distinct patterns of speech to cloak their underlying meaning. Good often means mediocre. Awful might mean excellent, but don't let that judgement go to your head. Our flooring supplier uses standard project weasel language which I recognize from decades hanging with Project People.

Project People maintain many deeply encoded language patterns which fall under the general category of Schedule Chicken.

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MonkeyBars

MonkeyBar
William Holbrook Beard: For What Was I Created? (ca. 1886)
"Imagine how fortunate we feel …"

As the sun set last night, I called down into The Muse's Zoom® Lair to ask if she'd climbed up to the second floor yet. She hadn't. I implored her to get out there before she had to try it in the dark. She responded with the warmth of someone who'd been insulted by a suggestion. You see, we'd reached that point in our Grand Refurbishment when we could no longer just use the stairs to reach the second floor, where bedroom, full bathrooms, and showers reside. I'd erected scaffolding in anticipation of this time. Our Painter Kurt kindly donated his plank to the project. I used clamps and leftover trim wood to stabilize that plank between the flat front porch roof and the scaffolding, creating a pathway of sorts between the main floor-level front porch and the little door off the front porch roof deck into the second floor. It seemed plenty precarious so I'd practiced my ingress and egress a few times before the sun set, but The Muse hadn't. Yet.

She easily clambered up, puzzled at what my concern had been about.

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Dooring

Dooring
Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps:
Le singe peintre, aussi dit Intérieur d'atelier
[The Monkey Painter, also called Workshop Interior.]
(ca. 1833)
" I will miss this work once I'm finished."

Six weeks ago, I posted what might now qualify as an introduction to the fine art of Dooring with a piece I called Doorable. In that story, I explained how I believe that the world is always trying to teach me and that I'm a reluctant learner. Kurt Our Painter and the doors themselves have been dutifully teaching me how to paint doors over the last month and a half. Nearing the end of this part of my contribution to our Refurbishing effort, I might have a few learnings to share. I'm not yet in any way an expert doorer, or whatever a door refurbisher might answer to, but I have finished, or, more properly, refinished, nineteen door fronts now, with only four remaining, and I've been noticing a certain facility emerging in my practice. I have a method of sorts in that I seem to be following more or less the same steps with each door front I face. I work much more quickly and decisively now, with few unforeseen discouraging events, which seemed common at first. I have my tools and techniques sorted, ready to hand. By the time I finish this work, I might never refurbish another door, for only five will remain unrefurbished in the whole place.

These doors have been teaching me.

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'FraidSo

'FraidSo
Okumura Masanobu: An Impossible Feat by Imaginary Men, no. 8 from a series of 12 prints (1708)
"If you meet a fearless being on the road, run for the hills in fear."

I find HomeMaking terrifying, which isn't really saying that much, since I find life generally terrifying, so it should naturally follow that I would find HomeMaking, being an integral part of my life, terrifying. I noticed again this morning as I walked along the upstairs hall, feeling my way through pre-dawn darkness, I heard myself whisper to myself, "I am afraid." It's not an uncommon comment for me to catch myself whispering, though I usually only intend this comment for my own ears. I no longer interpret this statement as an excuse to get out of doing something, for I usually feel my fear and choose to proceed anyway, a response I've grown to invoke, if only because it enables me to do things. If I avoided engaging in activities that terrified me, I'd be hiding in the basement, though basements, too, kinda fill me with dread.

Years ago, I stumbled upon a fine little book called Art and Fear (Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking By: David Bayles; Ted Orland, 2001).

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FirstRain

FirstRain
Francis Danby: The Deluge (1840)
" … find good reason to look back longingly …"

We hadn't seen any real rain—really, no rain at all—since we'd returned to The Villa Vatta Schmaltz in late March. We'd seen what might have passed as a passing shower had it done more than briefly dampen the pavement before quickly evaporating off. One hundred and seventy days of extreme drought, also one hundred and seventy days of SettlingInto and HomeMaking, more than half a year. I'm tempted to call that period an era, because it seems as though it was. One rainy day seems to have broken a persistent spell, one during which I could not tell where its edge might lie. Those days seem to have been suspended in time and place, framing our return to this most extraordinary space, like an extended overture setting the stage for whatever follows. It seemed endless from within it, sometimes interminable. During the hottest summer days, we seemed especially cursed, but mostly it seemed as if we had been especially blessed. I knew it could not last but I didn't want it to end then, or ever. It's over now.

Oh, I expect an extended Indian Summer to work on scaffolding, tidying up a few surfaces and windows.

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UnderDoing

UnderDoing
Edgar Degas: The Ballet from "Robert le Diable" (1871)
"I seem to work just to disappoint myself."

We've been working late this week, our little crew usually still here after six most evenings. This might have been a natural reaction to having taken Monday off for the Labor Day holiday, or maybe we sense a major milestone and pivot point approaching. Maybe neither or maybe both. Effect does not require a discrete cause, but seems to beg for one. Our downstairs, main floor work will soon be finished. The planking for the second floor is supposed to be here next week, but has not yet arrived. Joel Our Carpenter reported that he has a few days' fill-in work if our progress stalls. Kurt Our Painter has plenty to keep him occupied, his work necessarily trailing behind. Joel's the finish carpenter, but Kurt actually finishes what Joel just gets started. Kurt says he's used to that.

I wake up at my usual obscenely early hour, but with a difference of late.

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Intos

Intos
Jules Bastien-Lepage: Joan of Arc (1879)
"I glance up and just notice, then, that I've turned Into someone else."

I feel humbled as our grand refurbish finally starts turning into something more than aspirations. Today marks seven weeks since Kurt Our Painter first appeared here and we began poking around the edges together, working toward a largely undefined center. The Muse and I had just settled on paint color as if that amounted to much, which it did but also did not. Paint color served as the starting point and will become one lasting effect of having done this work, but repainting was not ever the purpose of this refurbish. It served as more of a premise, a story capable of holding many conflicting elements, and in many ways repainting has served as a false premise. Yes, every square inch of much of this house will have been repainted by the time we're finished. Considerable unpainting will have been completed to accomplish finished, too, and more time will have been spent prepping than painting. The labels we give our work materially misrepresent it. Our aspirations still seem vague from today's perspective, so much closer to done than when we started. Much fuzziness remains, though we're not panicking, hoping to become more certain. We seem to have become more comfortable with not precisely knowing and letting results emerge.

The most dramatic results thus far have also been the most subtle, as Intos tend to emerge quietly, without much fanfare.

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DustToDust

DustTo
Scott Wade: Girl With A Pearl Earring, the famous Vermeer’s painting, rendered in car window dust (circa 2016)
" … one cannot successfully repaint anyplace while suspended within a blizzard of swirling dust."

Refurbishing remains first and foremost a dusty undertaking. The act of buffing up removes tarnish, which I think of as metastasized dust. Removing carpet, as I've previously mentioned, reveals a layer of fine dust more resembling talcum powder than dirt. Further, the whole house gets covered in a fine fresh layer of the stuff, even the HVAC system and its ducts. Countertops gain a slick surface as if lightly oiled, but that's dust lubricating. Even my body carries a fine layer of it. My fingertips slide over my thumb top as if they were teflon coated. We've sworn to just live with it until the project's finished. There never was any point to trying to keep up. The vacuum fills up until its tank weighs as much as a five pound bag of sugar but the floors and walls remain just as slick with it as they were before we began. We tell ourselves that we'll clean from top to bottom as the last act of this project and that might even happen.

Both The Muse and I grew up in places prone to dust storms.

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LongWayHome

LongWayHome
J. Alden Weir: The Stone Bridge (ca. 1887-1893)
"Anything to delay arrival …"

Two hundred and forty-four miles separate these two worlds, the one I was raised in and the one I came of age in. All my life, I've traveled between these two points more than between any two other. Even those years where I commuted weekly to work in Silicon Valley barely dented this enduring trajectory. Even leaving the area, moving back east, and spending years away didn't change how I related to my world. Home came in two flavors. There was home and then there was back home, each authentic, neither sufficient all alone. One home held my stuff, the other, my roots. Neither place made any sense without the other. I suppose that it's this way for anyone who moves away to make their life. One can move out but not permanently away, or at least I never found a way to permanently stay away. I was always headed home, either to where my heart was or to where my stuff resided. The two states rarely coincided, or didn't until The Muse and I decided to move "back" to my hometown and we bought The Villa. Even then, my son and grandkids came to live at precisely the two hundred and forty-four mile marker from our new home, with home taking on a fresh double meaning: where my heart resides and where my progeny lives.

We migrate between these two homes about once a month for now, taking a long weekend to visit family and perhaps a friend. It's a predictable route.

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Justing

Justing
Gaetano Gandolfi: Allegory of Justice (1760s)
" … present and damned well worth counting."

The word occasionally appears within the normal flow of conversation and to my ear, suspends the show for a moment. Back in the days when I could still eat in restaurants, I might show up at a hostess stand seeking a table, and be greeted with one of the most discouraging words in the language. "Is it just you, then?" No, I'd reply, it's not just me, it's ME in all my glory! "Just" just sounds so disappointed! Sorry to ruin your day. It's just me today.

We each engage as judge and jury over our proceedings, passing judgements over what we encounter.

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OffDays

OffDays
Gustave Courbet: Young Ladies by the River Seine (1857)
"HomeMaking, like breathing, doesn't come with time off for good behavior."

Unlike gainful employment, HomeMaking does not come with days off. It's a twenty-four/seven sort of occupation, with adequate responsibilities to entertain any three individuals for just as many hours as they'd care to contribute. Further, these are not appreciative hours but largely anonymous ones, where if one's properly engaged, no one will notice. Still, occasionally, some respite seems necessary if never wholly justified. Rather than taking a day off, I experience an OffDay. An OffDay begins like any other, though perhaps gravity might work a little better than usual when the alarm clock rings. I'm up and moving, completing my morning rituals, writing. I'll be done about the time The Muse's alarm wakes her. My breakfast will have been warming. I set right to it, shave and shower, then slow down a bit. I might lay down, I tell myself, to digest my breakfast, then doze. An hour later, I still haven't gone anywhere and am still feeling dozy. I allow myself another half hour until those short cycles accumulate into taking the whole morning.

I won't usually allow myself a whole day off when an OffDay comes calling.

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UnrelentingDecency

UnrelentingDecency
Heinrich Aldegrever: Temperance. From: The Virtues Production (1552)
" … gritting our teeth in utter embarrassment for them."

The Muse returned deeply upset from her Friday Exceptional Women breakfast. She'd heard stories of incivility at the Democrat's Fair Booth. Apparently, Republican-associated rabble had taken the opportunity to unleash venom at their presumably evil opponents there. The Muse was justifiably worried. If some people felt comfortable verbally assaulting without provocation their presumed opposition, how could we possibly avoid a civil war, or an uncivil one? She brought this question to my Friday Zoom Chat, and we mumbled over it.

It's an old question. If the opposition seems unconstrained, should we mirror their lack of discipline in order to win or must we hold ourselves to higher standards?

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SandMan

Sandman
Michael Taylor: Boy with Apple, a faux painting made for the 2014 film The Grand Budapest Hotel.
" … a substance expressly designed to undo the past with an unskilled hand."

As I finished sanding the last baseboard to bare wood, I caught myself having insisted upon the lowliest role again. In the grand pecking order I've constructed within my head, our painter Kurt and our carpenter Joel both hold lofty positions due to the experience and skill they bring to the effort. Even The Muse, who mostly engages in abstentia while working remotely in her Basement Zoom® Lair, holds a loftier position than mine, for she's the designer and vision keeper. She's the one everyone else waits on before they proceed. Me? I'm the guy who semi-reliably removes nails and mostly successfully tries to keep track of doorknobs. I also empty garbage and sand. I've been sanding a lot lately. Once we realized that we'd need to reclaim and alter all the existing door and window trim to satisfy The Muse's vision for them, it became necessary to sand all those boards to bare, to rid them of every trace of a hundred and fifteen years of accumulated past. Five coats for some pieces.

Rather than divert paid assistance toward such a lowly assignment, I volunteered.

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TheGrip

TheGrip
Vincent van Gogh: Two Hands (1884 - 85)
"I must be overreaching or I don't feel as if I'm living at all."

I become a sawyer when I'm sanding a board clean of paint. Sawyers stood in deep ditches and worked their long saws up into logs laid across, their partner sawing down, showering them in sawdust. Each one seven feet in length and smeared with a variety of coats, I challenge myself to clear one in a single pass without turning off the sander or loosening my grip. Forty-five minutes later, I drop a freshly cleaned board onto my padded saw horses and I loosen my grip, TheGrip. My hand lost feeling long ago under the incessant vibration of the humming little machine I held in my palm. I'm liberally covered with fine saw and paint dust the consistency of talcum powder. I sweep off the finished board, a hundred and fifteen years old and fine-grained, looking freshly milled, and add it to the finished pile. I have at least a half dozen more to finish today to avoid holding up forward progress installing window and door trim. I hold a worthy purpose in my life at the moment. I hold it with TheGrip.

It's not every day or every time when worthy purpose visits.

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Changeling

Changeling
Henry Fuseli: Der Wechselbalg (1781)
"She owns her choice …"

Granddaughters have by long tradition been the most troubling of relatives. Grandsons can reliably become meatheads without surprising anybody, but granddaughters seem mercurial, capable of material changes without any warning. Our GrandOther proves no exception. The Muse and I had noticed since we returned from exile that The Other had changed, with less energy focused upon sugar, spice, an everything nice and much more on puppy dog tails and worse. She seemed much more capable of morose and mouthy, often without apparent regard to who her words might wound. She seemed defensively haughty. We figured it might just be evidence of a phase or something. Aren't eleven year olds allowed phases? My duck feathers mostly shed her venom without it wounding me much. About the fiftieth time a granddaughter proclaims that she'd rather be dead than be with me, though, the story gets to feeling old.

And so it was that I agreed to pick her up after the second day of the new school year and transport her to The Villa where she could wait for her dad to get off work and fetch her home.

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Walker

Walker
Paul Gavarni: Man Walking (circa 1852-1866)
" … winning non-existent races, going places."

Back in the seventies when I began my second career, I still believed in the predictive powers of assessment surveys. Often advertised as psychological tests, whatever that might have been (which they weren't), they claimed to be capable of assessing what sort of a person you might be, for purposes of matching natural inclination to specific job situations. An employer, for instance, would not want an egghead in a meathead job because the egghead might over-think everything rather than mindlessly comply with directions. A popular "tool", as they were referred to, designated some individuals as Ds, or Drivers. My primitive conception of leadership at the time encouraged me to think of the Drivers as the real leaders and the others, the nurturers and philosophers and analysts as somehow further down the pecking order and therefore not really leading. I found that if I answered the survey questions not as I knew myself to be but as I aspired to become, I could easily score as a nearly perfect Driver and thereby reinforce my primitive notions of leadership while also satisfying myself. I reported to a wiley boss who saw right through my ruse without challenging me on it. She figured, I guess, that I'd best teach myself different if I was ever going to amount to much.

And so I fancied myself a Driver.

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Jerry

Jerry
Rembrandt's stolen masterpiece: The Storm on the Sea of Galilee (1633)
" … a long lost friend forever."

I received last night the news of the death of a long lost friend. Jerry was lost when we first met and to my mind never really managed to find himself, though he would have doubtless disagreed with that assessment. I considered him for a time a dear friend before he became a feared one, and his story might serve as both cautionary and explanatory, for it carried a not uncommon theme of the time. His story speaks to the deeper cost of war and a paradox of justice, where punishment sometimes proves more punishing than any original crime warranted.

When Jerry was seventeen, still in high school, he was charged with stealing some records from a local drug store.

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Roostering

Roostering
Winslow Homer: The Rooster (1876)
" … my Roostering's finished just before The Muse's day begins."

The neighbor's rooster starts crowing two hours before dawn, every blessed morning. I'm almost always already up by then, anticipating my day, finishing my writing. Both that rooster and I seem to possess an active anticipation, he, an internal clock, and me, a sense that I cannot quite grok. His kind served as the original alarm clock. My kind just woke up earlier than almost anybody and set to work. It might be that the work I do cannot be performed in the full light of day, but can only emerge in faint light or anticipating light, only out of near darkness. Some might insist that the rooster's cursed to never enjoy a full night's sleep, but I suspect that the rooster would disagree, as would I, for enjoying sleep seems to require having finished working and never entails avoiding it. One might fitfully attempt to sleep with unfinished work, but probably won't enjoy it.

Lately, as my life's focus has shifted from the etherial into the more practical, my early morning ritual has seemed less important, less urgent.

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DIY

DIY
Mihály Munkácsy: Yawning Apprentice (1869)
"We're none of us islands of skill …"

The Muse, who serves as the grand designer of our great refurbishing effort, makes most of the decisions because she holds the vision. I'm not just trailing behind doing her bidding, but I'm careful what I initiate, to make sure that I've communicated what I'm attempting. It's genuinely shocking how often I find that we have not reached agreement or that my notion was somehow unconscionable once I mentioned it. She chose the color after I'd set up and painted the boxes to demonstrate how they played together. I'm learning how to become indifferent to many details. Color's not my remit. Neither is style. I contribute my part without trying to take much in the way of credit, either, for I'm not doing very much by myself or even for myself. I think of myself as bringing a certain flare, a studied style of execution, often so subtle that nobody should ever notice its presence. My doors can't rival those Kurt Our Painter finishes, but they're good enough not to stand out as amateur productions. Even Kurt consults with me, as I continually consult with him, both of us serving as if not servants, then apprentices to some larger context, one only The Muse understands.

That's not to say that she's not persuadable.

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GreatGoodFortune

GreatGoodFortune
Li Gonglin: The Classic of Filial Piety (circa 1085)
" … had we been as prescient as the venerable I Ching or a decent Tarot reading, but we weren't."

Earlier in my careers, I was forever trying to foresee what was coming next. I consulted The I Ching and various forms of Tarot, each of which use language unique to them. The I Ching, for instance, was forever speaking of GreatGoodFortune when indicators suggested a likely positive result. Eventually, though, foreseeing came to feel like taking a blood pressure reading in that it doesn't work if taken too frequently and might be accurate only to the degree that it's rarely taken. One can live in the future and miss the present just like one can lose their present in their past. In times of peril or uncertainty, I'm still not above or beyond trying to sneak a peek through the veil, but I most days proceed forward without attempting to peer around upcoming corners.

All that said, I'm presently experiencing a prolonged period of extremely GreatGoodFortune, one ingredient never ascribable to talent or skill.

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Consequent

Consequent
Diego Rivera: The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City (1931)
"If we can't make this fun, they won't find it worthy."

The early effort seemed unfocused for it sought first to figure out what needed doing and in what particular order. I contend that there never was any orderly way to determine order. It's inherently messy business. One dabbles at first, poking here and prodding there until a rough order emerges. Some rework usually results, with luck, little, without, perhaps much. We have been inordinately fortunate on this refurbishment effort, which I take as a sign that we're engaged in a right and proper undertaking. It seems to me that if I'm engaging in right work, good fortune naturally accompanies me. Great good fortune, which characterizes what we've been experiencing, seems as if a blessing from The Gods or something. Little has discouraged us so far. It's been Kurt Our Painter and I, with me struggling to keep up with even our modest initial pace. Once Joel Our Floor Guy (he's actually a finish carpenter) arrived, our previously languorous pace exploded.

I'd noticed this same effect on many of the projects with which I'd once led and consulted.

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MannerOfWorking

MannerOfWorking
Percy Frederick Horton: Blind Workers in a Birmingham Factory (Circa 1940s)
"What approach am I deploying as if it was essential?"

Five weeks into the Villa's refurbishment and I've started questioning my MannerOfWorking. Early on, I could engage productively and mindlessly, an easy feat since I was inexperienced doing most of the work my assignments entailed. I was just learning to pull nails from the bottom of boards so I didn't yet know enough to consider embellishments on the standard brute force. Kurt Our Painter introduced me to what he believes to be one of the absolutely essential tools in his considerable arsenal, The Big Fucking Pliers. The BFPs are not for fiddling with nuts and bolts. They bring a measure of brute force to a task. Cast forged steel, they weigh heavy in the hand and prove handy in a hundred ways, one of those being pulling countersunk nails from baseboards. One could choose to pound out those babies and remove them with a crowbar or hammer, but why bother with messing up the board face when it's possible to just remove those nails by the tail, preserving the smooth board face and limiting the damage to century-old fine-grained trim wood? After a few sessions of nail removing, I began to notice different possibilities. Then I began to remove nails more easily. I'd become a more experienced hand.

The story's the same with refinishing doors.

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BackOrdered

MindReading
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec: At the Moulin Rouge (1892–95)
"I have been an unworthy beneficiary …"

I told The Muse that her birthday poem was back ordered, probably on a container ship held offshore at Long Beach until a dock opens up and then dependent upon a driver being available to transport it from there to here. Who knows when it might appear? It's been a queer year, and especially odd for refurbishing this old place, since supplies have been in historically short supply. The glass guy reports shortages of glass, for instance. The paint store had six gallons of the base I needed when they should have had hundreds, here in the middle of high painting season, and even then I'd had to upgrade to a more premium version. The doors and windows we ordered in April might not arrive here this year. If they arrive earlier, the installers are over-scheduled and unavailable at any price. Everything's in short supply. I bought three preemptive gallons of trim paint I didn't quite need yet to prevent running out in the future and shutting down our refurbishing efforts until who knows when. Nobody knows. We're all torn apart here and cannot wait long to achieve complete enough to close up for fall and winter. Closure's also back ordered.

My creative spark seems on back order, too.

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Sublimating

Sublimation
Wojciech Siudmak: Door (1999)
" … probably something even better!"

When I was in my early twenties, I took a job as a pot washer, the lowliest job in the kitchen. My work station was in the grimy basement beneath where the chefs reigned, adjacent to the service elevator which brought me a continuous stream of freshly-ruined pots and pans. I had not taken the job with the aspiration of advancement. I was at the time convinced that I was a songwriter. I took the job to support my songwriting, which I firmly believed would eventually bring me fame and fortune. That job served as a medium and not as an end unto itself. It turned out that I had a penchant for the work. I declared myself The Pot Wizard and challenged all comers to try to dirty a pot in a way I could not conquer. Nobody ever did.

I learned more while washing pots than I learned at university.

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Changing

Changing
François Boucher: The Interrupted Sleep (1750)
"I don't need a world or a home that doesn't seem to need changing …"

While painting yet another door front yesterday, I started thinking about all the changes The Muse and I have visited upon this old place over the twenty years we've owned it. Once we complete this current refurbishment, we will have changed flooring in every room except the basement's, every room's wall and trim color, removed and refinished or replaced every window, rebuilt the back porch, stripped the exterior to bare wood and repainted it, torn off four layers of roofing and replaced sheathing as well as roofing and gutters, repointed the chimney, replaced the front steps and entry walk, replaced half of the front retaining wall, replaced the heating system and added central air conditioning, repainted the surrounding fence, and extensively reworked every garden. We will still have a list remaining of future changes to make. As near as I could see from my pop-up paint shop, we had been Changing only superficial surfaces, not the house. It would look like a falling down wreck had we not completed those efforts, but they changed little. It seemed to me while leaning over that door that we had been more putting the place back into order than changing anything. Time had attempted to change it, maybe entropy got involved, and we just restored it to some state closer to its original condition if not precisely into the same configuration.

When removing the regrettable wall-to-wall carpeting, I found the place's bones lurking underneath.

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Eldering

Eldering
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn: Bust of an Old Man with a Beard (circa 1630)
" … mending doors might teach me all I need to know …"

I went from being a man of modest middle age to an elder in a single day, the day I turned seventy, a day which might well have lived in infamy as long as it lived, which was the usual brief twenty-four hours. How should I have responded? I very cleverly pretended that nothing had changed, but only because nothing had changed. I didn't need to pretend because I couldn't see any difference between who I'd been the night before and who I found in my skin the next morning. Yet there I was, clearly within elder territory but without a clue about what I was supposed to do to fulfill my new role's responsibilities, which, I note, were foisted upon me without my consent, just like middle age's had been foisted upon me, and fatherhood's, and adulthood's, even teen-age's. I know how this works. It starts with no discernible difference and ends in denial of even the more obvious changes, a slow fading forward, a one-way road toward oblivion.

The older, the more precarious the balance, the more conservative one becomes.

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Easy

Easy
Raphael: Detail of Pythagoras with a tablet of ratios, from The School of Athens. Vatican Palace, Rome (1509)
"I'm not working myself to death here, but working myself to life."

Since I started working on this latest refurbishing project, I've received many well-meant messages asking me to not work too hard, wondering when or if I was planning on taking a few days off. I've mostly left those messages unanswered, as if their questions had been rhetorical, because I had no idea how to even begin answering them. For me, days off usually come as the result of some injury or infirmity and not for the purposes of recreation. I look through my garage and notice that I own none of the usual recreational equipment common to a fellow of my age and social class. No golf clubs, heaven forbid. No tennis racquet, thank heavens. No basketball. There's an old baseball mitt in there somewhere in the unlikely event that I find someone interested in playing catch. That hasn't happened in twenty years or so. All those years in Colorado, I never once felt in any way interested in skiing or fly fishing or mountain biking or white water rafting or parasailing, or any of the innumerable other ways people engage in recreation there. I don't have hobbies, either.

I do have my work, which has long been my life.

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Outventory

Outventory
Unknown, Cauldron (mid-15th century)
" … both my product and my reward."

I've lately been seeing a lot of writing about the downsides of openness and transparency, both long touted as unconditional goods. Nobody really needs to know most of the picky details about any other. I do not, for instance, care to know what you really think about anything. I much prefer polite pseudo conversation to full disclosure confession. I'm fine with the persistent illusion that you're fine, just like you say when I ask you. I'm good if you think me a generally decent fellow, not given to unruly excess or extremist ideologies. You can think whatever you care to think about me as long as you do not expect me to live up to your fantasies about who I am. I have been mistaken for many things in my life. I have likewise been recognized for precisely who and what I am on multiple occasions, each surprises. We seem to so easily slot ourselves into some role or persona that we might not notice when our halos slip sideways a little. We rarely seek to set any record straight. This morning, though, it being the morning of my seventieth birthday, I intend to attempt to take a little public inventory of what I've managed to make of myself, with, of course, The Muse's generous help.

I eat beans for breakfast.

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Achings

Aching
Benjamin West: The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise (1791)
"I've lately been spending my days making fresh Achings …"

I measure progress in aches and pains. A fresh and novel twinge in my back means that I must have done something different yesterday, something to engage a part of my body my earlier activities had not. Through the carpet removal period, a reliable set of complaints followed each day's work. Some of them evaporated beneath a shower, but most hung around at least long enough to see what we were having for supper that night, and a few would spend the night, cuddling right up close as I fell into my early bedtime. A few of my oldest friends wake with me each morning and remind me that I'm still not quite as young as I used to be, thank heavens. I remember times when I could lift and toil all day without carrying away even the tiniest little infirmity. Now, I barely need to think about engaging and my lower back knots up a little in anticipation. I tell myself that I'm alive and alive feels like twinging, it's eventually a welcome and unresolvable Aching, equal parts longing and savoring.

This refurbishing effort has been teaching me to revere my Achings.

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Tiling

Tiling
"The Good Shepherd" mosaic in Galla Placidia mausoleum.
UNESCO World heritage site. Ravenna, Italy. 5th century A.D.

" … one blank space which allowed shifting those tiles into any order."

We refurbish a mosaic featuring movable tiles. We shift our possessions, which serve as our mosaic's tiles, from place to place, room to room, as we prepare each space for what will have to pass for transformation this time around. We emptied the entry hall first, a modest push even with the piano. Everything easily shifted stage right into the front portion of the living room, the once and future music room, currently storage only frequented by the cats, who've found nests among the warren of boxes. That room's along the only remaining passage through the house, a narrow bridge between kitchen and front door. It might soon be easier to just go around the house outside.

The upstairs hall went next, stripped of carpet and baseboards, light fixtures dropped, doors removed from frames, then each room in turn, five in all up there, four of which have been repurposed into either fallow space awaiting baseboard removal or storage space holding everything from other rooms.

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ToldYa

ToldYa
Coloured lithograph by R. Carrick after Lieutenant James Rattray:
Men in the decorated palace of Shah Shujah Ool Moolk, Afghanistan (c. 1847)

"Maybe I was only trying to tell myself but couldn't listen."

As of this writing, we have entered the ToldYa Phase of the nearly two decades-long conflict in Afghanistan, a discretionary conflict we chose to begin then lost from the outset. We fed this conflict for longer than any other war in the history of this country, which says something about dedication and commitment, though little about reasoned judgement. One could speculate that this outcome—the country overrun by Taliban forces we and our allies were only ever able to keep at tenuous bay and us humiliated, was the originally intended outcome of the conflict, and that creating the conditions which led us and our allies to invade that country were the true purpose of the infamous 9/11 attacks. It wouldn't have taken a genius to predict that our response to that insult might easily encourage us into some of our historically infamous self-destructive behavior. We'd done it before in Vietnam, Panama, and Granada and would do it to ourselves again in Iraq, even while still in the middle of our "adventure" in Afghanistan, even though The Soviet Union and The British Expeditionary Forces might have already successfully demonstrated our likely folly in engaging in what we euphemistically referred to as "nation building" there. We produced an occupation, never a nation.

I'm not suggesting that had the conditions been different, we might have managed to encourage more permanent good, but the world was never different than it had always been, regardless of the insistences of people who probably knew better but could find no more convincing argument to engage.

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SceneQuesting

SceneQuencing
John R. Armstrong: At Your Service (1940s)
"I only know for certain what I haven't found for certain yet."

I catch myself fussing over more than contributing to our refurbishing effort. I seem to need to play through alternative scenarios before choosing if not the best of them, at least a less-worse one. To us unlearned and unwashed, the natural sequence of tasks seems at first mysterious. I might be able to envision a task as how it should appear when completed, but that end in mind does not define the sequence of actions necessary to produce that end state, and there seem to be an infinite number of alternatives from which to choose. I feel fairly certain that if I can only imagine one way to skin any particular cat, that my narrow imagination probably means that I have no business skinning that cat yet. I might grant myself permission to start skinning only after considering a few alternative scenarios for sequencing the work and choosing if not The Best, at least a less worse-seeming alternative. Refinishing one door, the sequencing hardly matters. Plan on refinishing a dozen, and a process emerges. Queues appear: untouched, prepped, primed, finish coat one, and finish coat two. The need for storage space and its availability limits possibilities. So do the number of pairs of saw horses and wait time between drying coats of paint. A complex set of choices quickly emerges. These choices comprise the bulk of what I fuss over in lieu of actually contributing to our refurbishing effort.

I suppose that my fussing might eventually add some value, though if I was drawing a paycheck from this work, I'd expect my employer to be bothered by how much effort I seem to expend while laying down with my eyes closed.

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MartianLight

MartianLight
Edvard Munch: The Scream (ca. 1910)
"I'm seeing with my hands …"

In ordinary times, The Muse and I would have plotted a day trip up into The Blues to pick wild black currents which grow in profusion along icy streams which feed into the Tucannon River. This year, that whole area has been cordoned off due to extreme fire danger. That country's on fire. The trail we walked back in March just after we arrived "back" home, searching for morels that were not there due to record drought, might have burned over again. It had burned a few years back. Down in town, smoke obscures even the rumor of sky, even threatening the concept of up. Horizons fade into similar nothingness. The usual view of the foothills from our back windows overlooks nothing but haze, with no hint of any proximate elevation. The heat which has been sitting on our faces for six weeks continues undeterred and perhaps encouraged by the poor ventilation.

My door and window refurbishing shop, set up in the driveway beneath a pop-up canopy, swelters after ten o'clock.

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Repurposing

Repurposing

George Julius Poulett Scrope: Artist's impression of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, depicting what that eruption may have looked like. Lightning is depicted around the rising column of ash and gas. This eruption produced massive volumes of pumice.(1822)

"We could always use the wishes coming true."

We are not so much remodeling the Villa Vatta, but Repurposing it. I learned from a note scribbled on the back of some wall-to-wall carpet I removed that the middle upstairs bedroom had at one time been referred to as "the girls' room." Carpet replaced with vinyl planking, that room will proceed to fulfill another role in our lives. The kitchen, once a testament to misplaced mid-century modern design seems more timeless since we repurposed it three years ago. The dining room will remain the dining room after repainting, reflooring, and replacing light fixture and crown moulding, but it should appear a bit more formal than it did when carpeted. Along the way, various items find new purposes. A door, for instance, is no longer just the door it was, once I've contributed a little sweat equity into refinishing it. It becomes a work of art, an expression of adoration, infused with fresh meaning for me and this little rag tag family.

Kurt Our Painter mentioned earlier on that in the old days—he's a living bridge between the way it used to be and how its become, just like everyone our age—painters refinishing doors and anything with small mouldings used a piece of pumice to sand those fine surfaces smooth.

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Insignificants

Insignificants
Jules Bastien-Lepage: Study for “Les Foins” (Haymaking) (1878)
"It's a stretch to show The Muse that we're making progress."

Reviewing progress on our grand revamping of The Villa Vatta Schmaltz, I feel struck most by the utter insignificance of most of what we've accomplished. Our progress has manifested exclusively via insignificant increments, tiny steps rather than big bold moves. Not even our brush strokes have qualified as broad, but narrow, tight, and tiny. This army marches forward on its fingers. The skill in this work does not come from grand planning but modest execution, from keeping the scope simple and easily grasped, from finding satisfaction in taking baby steps and delaying gratification. Should we break our discipline and attempt to accomplish something big, I suspect that we'd break the trance that's held us steady and the whole project would digress into irrelevance. Relevance must also come in Insignificants.

I disappear when Kurt Our Painter invites me to contribute anything bordering on the relatively meaningful.

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Haunting

Haunting
Jan Steen: Soo voer gesongen, soo na gepepen ["As the Old Sing, So Pipe the Young"] (c.1668–1670)
"When I vacuum Fairy Dust, much of its magic remains."

Refurbishing a hundred plus year old home immerses me in The Great Mystery. We know bare details about who built this place and almost nothing about who remodeled it over time and why. Motive seems particularly unclear where original intent seems to have been circumvented with little apparent benefit. Why narrow doorways and trim? Why Georgian crown moulding in an Arts and Craft room? We think the less of whomever undertook these efforts and set about attempting to undo them, presuming that we somehow better understand the original owner's intentions, though we certainly have no clue what they thought they were doing. Building this home must have been an enormous undertaking. Certain shortcuts were most probably taken. We're taking a few ourselves.

One piece of one of the venerable double hung windows had gotten wet, swollen, and needs replacement.

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OtherSide

OtherSide
John F. Peto: Lights of Other Days (1906)
" … something I'd never anticipated appearing …"

I realized mid-afternoon yesterday that my head had stopped screaming. As if a gale had ceased, I first noticed the glaring absence, the disarming silence. I took this change to mean that I had popped through to the OtherSide, that I might have weaned myself off both nicotine and the drug that was supposed to help wean me off it, the second challenge the greater of the two. That drug had hijacked my brain. It screamed in response, producing a distracting background sound almost dominating the foreground as well. It was, as passages go, more tedious than difficult. I came to appreciate how The Gods staged this one, though, recalling the drug so no fallback prescription could be filled, so the addiction could not continue beyond the reach of that final half dose. I first felt betrayed, then cheated, before finally feeling blessed that fate had left me no recourse. If it was left entirely up to me, I doubt that I would ever change anything. Oh, I'd talk big but eventually backslide in secret, thickening my story and widening the gap between my public and my secret selves. Sometimes, though, circumstances align such that some genuine change slips through my defenses. I never know how to behave then, after finding myself standing on some OtherSide.

I recognize that I serve as my very own best personal change prevention specialist.

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Experteazing

Experteazing
Winslow Homer: Saved (1889)
"I guess I want the mystery to persist beyond my intervention …"

Back when I still considered myself a consultant, I promoted myself by saying that I was "an expert at not being an expert." What skill was I hawking? My colleagues held impressive curricula vitae. I did not, yet my colleagues found my presence helpful in spite of or, perhaps, because of my lack of impressive formal orientation. Maybe I'd gained street smarts or perhaps, because of my lack of formal training, I just parsed the same old problems in unique ways. Maybe I was more of an expert than I sensed.

I never managed to codify what I knew or had experienced.

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Blowin'ItUp

Blowin'ItUp
Henri-Lucien Cheffer: Soldiers and a Cannon (1915)
"'Twas always thus and still is."

Friday morning, 2am, I'd taken that remaining last half pill of the prescription I'd been given to help me break my nicotine addiction. I felt reasonably confident that I'd gotten past the worst of this withdrawal, eased by my patience, my common sense, and that prescription. I'd responded poorly to the drug at first, for it seemed to make my difficult situation worse, so I suspended taking it for a few weeks there in the middle, but as I began to feel more confident that I was successfully edging myself off the addiction, I reintroduced that medication into the mix. It hadn't made me feel so crazy that second round. I was down to just the drug, no secret supplemental placating the addiction. I'd ditched the source and had wisely left myself just this one recourse. When I reached the end of the prescription, I'd be done.

Halfway through that last day, though, I noticed myself sort of floating. My head was screaming something at me but my ears were fuzzy and I couldn't quite comprehend.

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AttentionSpanning

AttentionSpanning
Vincent van Gogh: First Steps, after Millet (1890)
" … spanning a great chasm with my bottomless inattention."

Contemplating introducing direct dial service to the phone system, Bell Labs in the 50s sponsored a study to determine how long a phone number could be. People tend to have rather narrow memories. They might reliably remember five things consigned to memory but lose a few entries from a twenty item list. How long could a phone number become before most could no longer reliably remember it? The answer, one of the more famous and consequential answers in the annals of social science, turned out to be 'seven, plus or minus two.' This means that a phone number could be as long as nine digits without most people finding it impossible to remember. Better if it could be held to five digits, but still outward bound acceptable at nine. How long are phone numbers now? Ten digits, but ten made a little easier. Area codes almost don't count, since they tend to cluster around any individual location. Many people almost never dial another area code than their own, and many more restrict their calling to two or three adjacent ones, so the effective length of most phone numbers anchors at seven, perfectly within what the study suggested most would remember.

Some of us are more like dedicated threes on Bell Lab's scale, possessing well below average-sized iconic memories.

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Paint

Paint
Johannes Vermeer: The Art of Painting (1666–1668)
"It's apparently never too late to try again to get closer to the ideal you'll never achieve."

HomeMakers struggle with no substance like they struggle with paint. Paint's different. It's permanent. Paint something, anything, and you produce a self portrait. Slopping it on produces a sorry legacy, indeed. It WILL outlive you. Mistreat it and it will mistreat you worse. One careless moment might haunt a HomeMaker forever. One fortunate experience might delight for just as long. A perfect cut between wall and moulding can appear every bit as exquisite as an Old Master's painting, and just a rare. No other substance offers so many ways to utterly fail when employing it. No other substance seems to somehow, at some time, end up in the hands of pretty much everyone. Who has not, poisoned by some slick promotional photo, decided to repaint some possession only to produce a regrettable result? Paint color cannot be reliably represented via photography. It varies by a thousand factors. It seems a subjective experience colored by context and preexisting preferences more than anything else. Paint remains a mystery to almost everybody.

Paint and I have history.

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TheLastDay

TheLastDay
John Armstrong: Icarus (1940)
"Time to cut that old transition loose."

Today doesn't so much seem very much like the first day of the rest of my life, but more like TheLastDay of some soon-to-be former one. Refurbishing The Villa seems to have exacerbated this sense, for Our Painter Curt and I destroy something daily, each act subtly changing this context. It will never be the same again, again and again, such that I'm unsure just where The Muse and I are living right now. The end of our labor has not come anywhere near to being in sight. Nor can we really remember how it was just three very long weeks ago when we began this phase in earnest. We're suspended, former status quo shredded before us, stumbling forward, each day TheLastDay for something. No day a new day for anything yet, but a continuation of the perturbation, here to finish up what yesterday started and to destroy something forever again.

Many of the tasks I'm performing, largely little supporting roles beside Curt's star turn, are new to me.

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Phublishing

Phublishing
Winslow Homer: The Herring Net (1885)
" … maybe it was just meant to be precisely like this."

No news to anyone for me to declare that trolls live out there. A whole industry exists just to take advantage of others. The numbers of people engaged in this nefarious work seems to have increased through my lifetime, or maybe I've just grown more vulnerable as I've acquired possessions worth swindling. There are contractors who gleefully accept deposits then never show up to do the work. There are no shortages of deals that seem too good to be true, and are. Used cars. Lumber. Anything sold in the frozen food aisle. None of us are strangers to the charlatans circling our doors. Lies, damned lies, and statistics. Television advertising. Much of what passes as email these days represents phishing expeditions, others trying to harvest data you aren't aware you possess that someone, somewhere has figured out how to make an odd buck off of swiping. I willingly post to Facebook every morning, even knowing that they're plotting to do me in. I'm apparently being conditioned to cooperate in my own demise.

It should have been no surprise when that Phublishing company that recently contacted me out of the blue turned out to be untrustworthy.

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CompleatIdiot

CompleatIdiot
Illustration of a village idiot from The Firebird and the Fox: Russian Culture Under Tsars and Bolsheviks,
Freedom and the Fool (Chapter 1), Cambridge University Press, 2019 (Late 19th Century Russian)

"I remain grateful for how few brains are required to live the good life here."

Contrary to a popular misconception, I have not yet achieved the lofty label of CompleatIdiot. Oh, if only I could advance to that pinnacle, but I'm unlikely to ever get there, regardless of how diligently I pursue that goal. I settle for a more modest and fitting general idiot standing instead, one which serves most of the purposes of the CompleatIdiot status, anyway. I say that I'm not a CompleatIdiot without in any way intending to denigrate the native honor associated with the idiot designation, but to rather proudly include myself as a member in decent standing of this uniquely useful class comprised of the idiots of this world. Before I'd come to terms with just what an idiot I tend to be much of the time—not all of the time, mind you, for the ability to perform continuous idioting belongs only to CompleatIdiots—I'd try to hide my little secret as if it was really a secret to anyone watching me perform. An utterly fruitless effort, but one I still felt compelled to engage in, for I imagined that if others knew the truth about my native deep down idiocy, they might think less of me. My sense of inadequacy bloomed, anyway, for no-one successfully fools those in the presence of a genuine idiot. Only after I came to accept this secret as already public knowledge, did I start discovering its power.

The idiot holds advantage in innumerable ways.

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Oftening

Oftening
Anonymous: from New Impression: Children at Play, woodblock print book (ca. 1875)
" … maybe it's just me who's overseeing …"

Repeat any activity an uncertain number of times and besides acquiring a habit, you might discover boredom. We work hard to develop routines before setting out to revile them. Vacations have long been held as an antidote to too much sameness, though through This Damned Pandemic, vacations have proven chancy and easily foregone. We've escaped a few times in recent months to see my sons and grandkids, observing strict guidelines: wearing masks, waiting forever for the hotel elevator so only us two would be on it, eating take-out, avoiding crowds. The protocols seem just as tedious when away from home as they've become at home, and there's really no escaping them as another unsurprising surge overtakes us, this one apparently more virulent than any previous. Only one of my face masks remain intact after a year and a half of continual use. The other two have started splitting, an Oftening effect, no doubt, suffering from too much of what they were designed to do. There are apparently limits.

My weekend routine has been changing since we started remodeling in earnest.

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Promoting

Promoting
`
Hanabusa Itchô. : "Blind monks examining an elephant" from Itchô's Freestyle Album (Itchô kyôga shû).
Niigata: Meguro Jûrô (1888) Woodblock-printed book.

"Is it my vanity that so soundly rejects seduction from the vanity penny press?"

A week ago, I missed an incoming call. I uncharacteristically called back to find myself trapped in a conversation I had not anticipated and in fact had been avoiding. The woman on the other end had been trying to contact me about republishing my best selling book under her company's imprint, though my The Blind Men and the Elephant (Berrett-Koehler 2003) remains in print. As she prattled on about the many benefits her operation offered, I recognized that she represented what's referred to as a vanity press, one where the author pays for publication of an edition destined to never sell. This one relies upon remarkably low prices—ninety-nine cents a copy—to entice people who might not ever read a book to buy it. Why not? A network of self-selected book reviewers each receive a free copy in the probable delusion that they might value that gift enough to write a glowing review of it. Tens of thousands of frequent ebook readers are likewise offered special give-aways and deals in an attempt to inflate readership into the noteworthy range. As I listened, I wondered how she'd gotten ahold of my phone number. I was on the phone with a junk caller.

I mentioned that I write four books each year and that comment seemed to perk up her ears.

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Floating

Floating
Ichiyûsai Kuniyoshi: famous heroes of the kabuki stage--played by frogs (circa 1850-1860)
" … dreaming to make that dream come true …"

The upstairs hall ceiling had troubled our painter Curt from the beginning of his work. He wisely set aside his concerns through the first two weeks of preparation work. By then, he'd painstakingly sanded out and primed the bannister and knocked the high points off the walls, pulled baseboards in the entry hall and fixed every ding between the front door and the stair top. Then, our series of muted conversations about the ceiling came to something. He confessed that he could see no way around Floating the damned thing, a comment of which I didn't quite know its meaning, but I nodded gravely, as if discussing a sick child. Curt listed the alternatives, each of which seemed filled with shortcomings, but he wanted this to be my decision. HomeMakers sometimes find themselves in this position, as if a wise parent or something, called to decide about something they have no clue about. I asked him to describe what Floating might entail.

It would, as Curt described, require three sets of probably two hour stretches, poised atop his four footer, smearing goop over the present ceiling covering.

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Cleanering

Cleanering
Jan Neumann: Monument to the Janitor (St Petersburg, 2007)
"Nobody later will notice."

Curt our painter and I try to run a tidy operation. We attempt to clean up the unavoidable messes renovating quite naturally produces. We keep a broom and a vacuum handy, even though we both know that we're fighting an inevitably losing battle. How ever much sanding dust we might manage to capture, at least that much remains even after we've finished cleaning. I've taken to dust mopping the walls after Curt spends a day sanding off the high points of an unfortunate gritty top coat some prior owner smeared over some of the plaster walls, leaving unsightly swirls. We're trying to render those walls minimally presentable, understanding that nothing short of replacing them with drywall could ever render them perfectly plumb again and The Muse and I want the age of this place to show through the new paint. We're not erasing history, just taming it a bit. Taming history's messy business with some new form of detritus appearing daily. Each presents a challenge we cannot completely mitigate, but we attempt to keep up with cleaning up lest we accidentally overwhelm ourselves.

Such Cleanering belongs to that special class of apparently meaningless work, effort that will either make no apparent difference or be shortly erased, but which absolutely must be accomplished.

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ColdFooting

ColdFooting
Jan Gossart: Christ on the Cold Stone (1527)
"I'll be contributing by ColdFooting every damned inch of the way."

It all seemed like a great idea at first, last March, before we'd attempted to move back into The Villa Vatta Schmaltz after a twelve year absence. We mustered an I Know, We Could Put On A Show!-quality bright idea and set our expectations on refinishing 3/4 of the floors and repainting even more of the walls. We tried to be prudent with our move-in, leaving many boxes packed and many in areas not slated for renovation, but still, we unpacked plenty that will need relocating as our renovating proceeds at a pace considerably faster than the average snail's, but of course more slowly than we'd earlier imagined. What might have been slight inconvenience appears likely to become our lifestyle until we're in the shadow of Christmas. I'm guardedly confident that I might finally unpack my books by the new year, which will almost mark a year since I started boxing them up for that big, final move. The year's been spent somewhere between there and here.

The floor contractor came yesterday to survey the upcoming job. He entered a foyer partially prepared for painting to the smell of prime coat finally spreading on the long-sanded bannister.

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Doorable

Doorable
René Magritte: La Victoire (1939)
"I sign my name on the bottom of the ones I've finished just as if I was some famous artist or something …"

On my better days, I believe that everything in this world is here to serve as my teacher. On my best days, I actually catch myself practicing this foolishness. It's not mere foolishness, though, but one of those beliefs that to hold it makes it come true, which makes it a very special sort of belief, indeed. With a run-of-the-mill belief, both ideation and execution lie in the believer and perhaps a few fellow followers. It's a baby bubble operation that only works with considerable delusion. My belief about everything being my teacher requires no delusion and no more than a mustard seed of faith because it's really more about my acceptance of my role as student than about any teacher or lesson plan. One never knows what might become the subject of the next lesson or what might appear in the role of teacher, but only the willing student gains the benefit.

I am not universally recognized as a willing student.

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Rhythming

Rhythming
Paul Klee: New Harmony (1936)
" … just as if I might one day somehow qualify to be a professional myself."

The first week or so, I just sort of followed Curt The Painter around. I'd assigned myself as his dog'sbody, available to stoop, carry, fetch, and clean up. Since I was also The Client, this self assignment might have made things feel awkward, but Curt and I are old friends and I made my role explicit. I directed some work, like removing windows, while also assuming responsibility for some work, like refinishing windows, doors, and baseboards. By the start of the second week of work, though, my role had matured into a growing independence. I had my pop-up paint shop out in the driveway and Curt had the entry, stairway, and upstairs hall to prep. He didn't need very much help from me and I became distracted feeling my way into fulfilling my responsibilities. Curt was directing me, at my continuing insistence, for I wanted my contributions to pass muster, as if a real professional had completed them, so I sought continuing direction. I didn't always understand. I'd finished the final coat on the baseboards yesterday when Curt noted that we'd had a slight miscommunication. I'll be sanding some of the final coat off those boards today to properly reapply that last coat. I'm still Rhythming.

Rhythming provides cadence until the real backbeat kicks in.

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BeatenPaths

BeatenPaths
Paul Klee: Highway and byways (1929)
" … as if to try to compensate for what was sacrificed to become somebody else."

Four months after arriving back in the old hometown, The Muse and I conclude that there is no decent pizza to be had here. We add this to a growing list of unavailables and proceed. She compensated for the lack of pizza by making her own Pizza Bianca which easily bested anything we've ever gotten from any takeout and rivaled even New York City street pizza for texture.

One aspect of modern life baffles me.

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Quittering

Quittering
Paul Klee: Death for the Idea [Original Title: Der Tod für die Idee] (1915)
"The exit routes me through negative space toward an apparent vacuum."

Just over a month ago from now, as I was nearing the end of my SettlingInto Stories, I posted a story about being a quitter. In that story, I had started quitting the inconvenient habit of ingesting nicotine, a hyperactive nerve agent and mild sedative. I was doing battle by means of a counterbalancing hyperactive nerve agent, a psychoactive drug, apparently designed to make me temporarily crazy. The drug was working better than the quitting, though I had as the more dedicated addicts always say, "Virtually" quit. First by no longer carrying, then by no longer purchasing, while continuing crawling further and further out onto an ever-narrowing limb. I had not envisioned that limb's limits. Some days it seemed like I was crawling toward oblivion, which, I understand, amounts to a perfectly respectable and even an expected reaction when quitting. But quitting connotes a definite direction, like building up or winding down, not what now seems like perpetual around and around and around. I don't yet see an end in sight, when the recent hostilities might reasonably conclude and I get to go on enjoying what's left of my life.

The difficulty with doing without might be that it amounts to negative doing. It creates a vacuum.

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Middling

Middling
Paul Klee: Twittering Machine [Original Title: Die Zwitscher-Maschine] (1922)
" … it's all about minding chickens."

There seem to be rather well-developed rules for starting and finishing things, but less distinct directions for what to do when in the middle of something. Perhaps those who create instructions consider middles more or less steady states requiring no description. I woke this morning to find myself in the middle of summer and felt myself startle at the recognition. Beyond the aspirations of spring and the easy appreciations of early summer, days have slipped into a routine, as if they were never different. The brown spots in the yard have definitively proven themselves incapable of greening, so I've stopped aspiring for them to green up. They'll rejoin the living after autumn returns. The garden's no longer becoming, but full-blown become now. It needs little tending and even less nurturing. The Muse reports an outbreak of squash beetles requiring complicated intervention involving diatomaceous earth and soapy dishwater. I'll let her handle that one. I'm busy Middling. Watering's found its schedule and hardly seems disruptive anymore. Days dawn and set with little variation. It's that part of the year when the melody suspends and the rhythm section tends to maintain the cadence; nothing's beginning and nothing's finishing, either.

I find myself in the middle of more than this season.

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Fridaying

Fridaying
Paul Klee: Senecio [The Portrait of a Man Going Senile] (1922)
"I close one book so that I might open another."

I end my work week on Thursday. I work from Friday to Thursday with no days off. I take no days off because my work is my life and nobody takes days off from living until they take all subsequent days off, and I'm unprepared to do that yet, much less on a regular basis. Friday mornings bring a special responsibility. That's when I collate the passing week's production, reread every piece, and create a summary of where I've been. I post this summary along with a fresh piece, next week's first product. I work exclusively in circles.

Even on Fridays, I wake with little idea about what I might write.

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Knowletch

Knowletch
Artemisia Gentileschi: Samson and Delilah, c. 1630–1638
"Experience doesn't come from cramming for the exam …"

Our painter Curt mixed the primer, thinning it as well as adding something to improve its viscosity to make brush marks less likely. I had prepped the entry hall baseboards, completely removing the rubber-based paint and sanding them smooth. I knew how to prep and paint, but under Curt's tutelage, I felt like an amateur. I asked if one of my old reliable brushes would work and he frowned before trundling out to his truck to fetch a more proper one. He did everything but tie my shoes for me as he handed me my paint bucket and a handful of rags. In any other context, I would have just painted those boards without thinking very much about technique or even outcome. I mean, I was just painting, no big anything for anyone. I knew how to paint. Or did I? Curt's fifty years of professional painting far surpassed my amateur experience. He even understood the underlying science behind every step in the prepping and repainting process. It wasn't just a hobby for him, as it had always been for me. I realized that my innocent ignorance far exceeded my knowledge about this subject, and so I quietly acquiesced to Curt's superior understanding.

I hesitated before applying that first brush stroke.

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Solituding

Solituding
Leonardo da Vinci: Saint Jerome in the Wilderness (c. 1480–1490) Unfinished
"We leave slug trails of surreptitious accomplishments behind us …"

Most HomeMaking happens alone, not precisely in isolation, but certainly in solitude. Attempts to soften the resulting loneliness mostly fail. The Mower's too loud to allow listening to the ball game. So's the sander. Painting might prove too exacting to be done while in any way distracted. My ear buds sit largely unused in the bottom of the right front pocket of my Handyman Dave jeans. Most of my chores seem best done alone. Barn raising's a once in a lifetime situation. Few tasks need cooperation and many seem so mindless that they might threaten sanity if over-engaged in. One must ration efforts lest they steal a dimension from you. Long days doing the same damned thing does not produce anything very interesting to talk about over supper. What's new? Nothing.

All that said, I find HomeMaking's necessary Solituding reassuring.

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Destructing

Destructing
Raphael Montañez Ortiz: 'De-Struction Ritual, Henny-Penny-Piano-Sacrifice-Concert', 1967, performance
" … a true craftsman, self-improving my self-destructing, almost machine, marvelously more human."

I never feel closer to The Villa Vatta Schmaltz then I do when I'm Destructing something here. Our painter Curt and I pulled out a couple of double hung windows and I felt like I really owned this place. Removing doors empowers me, but cutting away wall-to-wall carpeting and pulling up the underlying tack strip, that work liberated me. There will be no reinstalling that carpeting I cut, no attempt to put any Humpty Dumpty back together again. I could have and might have just uninstalled that carpet except I wanted to keep a soft-padded walkway during as long of the repainting effort as possible, so I just cut back a few inches of the edges, enough to gain access for prepping and painting trim. The flooring contractor has not yet been by to advise, anyway, so I hold my ultimate Destructing skills at bay for now. For now, but not forever. I so carefully preserve so much here, but given half a chance to utterly destroy something, I feel even more the successful steward. Maybe homes, like fruit trees, need steady pruning, removing some portion of whatever's accumulating on some regular basis. Scorch a corner of this earth and it seems to become more alive, to thrive, an apparent paradox of HomeMaking.

Weeding the garden carries a similar remit.

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ReImprinting

ReImprint
The Planet Mercury as a Doctor on Horseback,
Miscellany: Anatomical-Physiological Description of Men;
Liber Synonimorum; Descriptions of Planets, Zodiac, and Comets;
Treatises on Divination from Names, etc., German (shortly after 1464, Ms. Ludwig XII 8)
" … apparently finished ReImprinting upon our new home."

Portland's not my town anymore. Oh, I still know my way around the East side, but now only as a vaguely interested visitor rather than as a resident booster. I began as a booster. I found it quaint, more accessible than Seattle had been, more a large rather than a full-blown BIG city. I limited my experience of it to immediate necessity, only very rarely leaving the downtown and Central East Side, bounded by Lloyd Center and Sellwood, the West Hills and Mt. Tabor. Most of the West side of the place never existed for me and I scrupulously avoided it as confusing. I worked downtown. I lived just across the river. I never in nearly thirty years there, ever commuted by car. I proudly rode the bus. I treasured the libraries and the bookstores. I casually shopped the big downtown department stores as if they were mine. I had come from a much smaller city, but I'd ReImprinted upon that larger one. I'd retreat back to my hometown some weekends, but without seriously considering moving back there where opportunity seemed to have passed it by. Maybe a great place to retire or to have come from, but no place for a career.

Sunday afternoons, I'd head back to West of the Mountains without very often checking my rear view mirror.

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HisStory

HisStory
Columnar-blocky jointing basalt, Frenchman Coulee, west-central Columbia Plateau, Washington (photograph by Terry Tolan)
" … homesteading beneath this grass."

The morning reached out and enveloped me. We were toodling, our first real diversion from our regular routes since returning from our exile. We could conspire to tend ancestor graves, a chore that went begging during our absence. One corner of my mother's family arrived late to claim their section under The Homestead Act. Their piece of Oregon was not located anywhere near the Eden portion of the end of the Oregon Trail, but short of The Cascade range in rimrock country. Even today, that country is more sparsely populated than it was before the European settlers like my ancestors came. They came to claim their part of the American Dream, which must have seemed more like a nightmare to them at times. Evan and his lovely wife Sarah (nee Jackson) Wallace, who was the spitting image of my mother in her later decades, came west not by wagon train but by the Northern Pacific and stagecoach. They waited out their homesteading claim working for a family who'd already improved theirs, living in a tent on the property through their first Western winter. They lost two sons to diphtheria, leaving my great grandfather as their oldest heir.

We drove what must have been the trail Evan and Sarah took up to finally perfect their claim.

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Ordersing

Ordersing
Bertha Mary Garnett: A Corner of The Turner Room in the National Gallery (1883)
"I'm learning to consider in what order of work I am engaging."

Change comes in several guises or 'orders,' typically referred to as first through fourth order change. First Order Change involves little more than planning and execution. Second Order does First Order one better by considering, for instance, how one might improve the means of planning or executing. Third Order Change might consider the problem as the solution to the difficulty, like when after failing to counsel a teenager, the parent concedes and 'lets them have their way,' figuring they might better learn through headstrong doing than by even emphatic supervision. Fourth Order Change might revise the rules under which change gets attempted. Running around with scissors might come to be recognized as a perfectly normal activity for some, rather than a certain pathology needing definite fixing. It matters how one perceives their problem space. First Order Change strategies have little effect in situations where fundamental assumptions underly an undesirable situation. Installing new linoleum cannot resolve most marriage difficulties, regardless of what the Sunday Supplement advertisement might claim.

I mention this Ordersing here because a similar framework probably influences HomeMaking, too.

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UnSeeing

UnSeeing
Thomas Fearnley: (Joseph Mallord William) Turner Varnishing [Norweigan-Turner Fernisserer] (1837)
" … the impression might seem have been rendered by a three year old with a broken crayon."

As our painter Curt and I disassembled The Villa's entry hall for repainting, I began noticing features I swear I'd never before seen. Curt found a hook screwed into a ceiling corner I'd walked under at least ten thousand times without once noticing its presence. I might have just been seeing that same old space in a new light because we had taken down that horrid chandelier The Muse had always loved to hate. I puzzled over how the ceiling interfaced with the second floor and which spaces were foreground and which trim, a question that had never occurred to me to ask until then, poised like Christopher Robin sitting not quite half way up or down the stairway. The thing about seeing, I started thinking, seems to be that it involves an awful lot of projecting. Initially, perhaps, I might quickly see before categorizing and classifying whatever appears before me, in this instance, "Stairs." I then start UnSeeing details as they become unseen again, framed but essentially invisible. This facility generally works just fine for me. It allows me to wander all around The Villa in predawn darkness without needing to turn on any lights. It also seems to inhibit my ability to foresee, though, to envision future difference, for how can I expect to repaint surfaces I cannot actually see? Repainting seems to insist upon a fairly tight interface with whatever's really before me. My shorthand classifying manner of seeing serves me poorly then, for it seems to actually be a dandy way of UnSeeing.

The thing about drawing, insisted Betty Edwards, author of the fantastic Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain (Tarcher, 1979) and host of the
DrawRight website exploring its insights, it depends upon seeing.

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MythedInformation

MythedInformation
Rembrandt: Judas Returning the Thirty Silver Pieces (1629)
"Those who seem most righteous might just be those most infected."

As we today begin prepping interior walls for painting, I remember a time nine years ago when, filled with MythedInformation, I set about stripping and repainting The Villa's exterior. I'd given myself a month and figured that I'd probably work alone. I had researched, or searched, what I might need to succeed, but I'd consulted with no expert in the field. I'd found and tried to purchase a used Silent Paint Remover®, a six hundred dollar implement which was reputed to ease paint removal. When I arrived at the seller's place, a lovely Northern Maryland horse farm worthy of Kentucky Bluegrass Country, the seller reported that she could not get the thing to work and decided to just give me the damned thing. She could not bear to sell something that wasn't operating. Later, my step-son and son-in-law repaired the electrical switch with an eighty-nine cent replacement bought at the local Ranch Supply. The paint remover worked better with two involved and my brother generously volunteered to help. Then his wife appeared along with his step-son, and a friend drove down from Spokane to help construct scaffolding around the gazebo. My mythical, independent, one-man project became a memorable communal effort. No man ever was an island, and not even a half-decent isthmus.

I'd also gotten the notion that the siding needed remoisturizing.

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ADoorInc

ADoorInc
Patrick William Adam: Interior Morning (1918)
"I intend to paint in humble adoration, invisible masterpieces for the ages."

Like any old place, The Villa Vatta Schmaltz has a lot of doors, twenty, depending upon how I count them. A few must be original to the place for they're exercises in mortise and tenon joining, their heritage obvious by looking at their edges. Most seem of more modern heritage, but still solid five-panel doors, none of those hollow core abominations. Two appear irreparable. The rest need differing degrees of restoration ranging from simple painting to full strip, sand, prime, and finish. All need hardware stripped and probably replaced with brass. The painter visited yesterday and we roughly laid out the work before us. He approved our color palette and I took responsibility for the doors and two of the windows. I removed the first door last night, signaling the start of a significant side chapter in our overall restoration effort. I cleaned out the garage to make way for my door factory wherein I will refinish a dozen doors over the upcoming weeks. I'll erect a pop-up tent over a tarp, move in my saw horses and a work table, then tuck down my head and start refinishing. I'm calling this operation ADoorInc, though it's incorporated in spirit only and strictly not for profit, quite the opposite. It will certainly serve as a significant expense in terms of both money and aggravation, but I loves me doors. I imagine that I'm not merely refinishing them, but adoring them: ADoorInc. Get it?

I suspect that by the time I'm halfway through this pile of doors, I might no longer or ever again adore doors.

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Sorting

Sorting
Henri Rousseau, “Tropical Forest with Monkeys” (1910)
"Organization achieved by endless sorting seems the very soul of HomeMaking."

HomeMaking seems about 90% Sorting. I'm forever shuffling something from here over to there then back again. I might explain painting as a Sorting of sorts, whereby I sort a can's contents. I could go on with analogies, but you've probably already gotten my point. HomeMaking is Sorting most all of the way down, like Ghandi's elephants and Prachett's tortoise. Moving In Day, the movers seemed incapable of following The Muse and my conflicting directions, resulting in stuff smeared all over Christmas and back. We're still Sorting the result. I yesterday sorted out the garage, a chore I accomplished by first sorting out the spaces behind the garage. There, a few hundred assorted bricks, pavers, and concrete blocks needed relocating out of my Cadillac Composter to somewhere else, hopefully a place where they would not be constantly in the way, or underfoot, as they say. I decided to hide most of the bricks beside the garage, a space that has needed Sorting for ages, the place where I store my ladders. I pulled everything out of that creepy space, spiders, possum poop, and all, and swept off the resulting mess before tidily stacking everything off to the side. Then I had to sweep up the mess, which included broken fluorescent light tubes someone had tossed in there. Then I began ferrying bricks with my Muck Bucket Cart, about twenty a load. I laid the bricks, five or six across, to roughly pave that space, sorting bricks by size, color, and condition. My judgement was fine-tuning as I sorted, noticing variation where formerly none had existed. By the time I'd finished, several hours later, I had gained a deep sensitivity to the subtler features of bricks. No longer merely leftovers, I'd taken full possession of them by then. They were mine!

My neighbor Larry peeked in to comment on the proceedings, but I didn't really hear what Larry said because I had fallen into a first class Sorting trance.

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TheHandyman'sDilemma

TheHandyman'sDilemma
Frans Francken the Younger: Mankind's Eternal Dilemma – The Choice Between Virtue and Vice (1633)
"TheHandyman'sDilemma seems, in this light, utterly normal."

As a HomeMaker, I fancy myself a Handyman. I ironically refer to myself as HandyMan Dave because I'm neither a handyman nor a Dave, Dave being what people call me who attempt to affect that they know me well, but don't. I am exclusively David to myself and to my intimates, and nobody's handyman, not really. I recognize the paradox within which this title places me. This label both materially misrepresents me and my capabilities, yet I still don what I just as ironically refer to as my HandyMan Dave uniform—worn, paint-stained jeans now open at one knee and a shirt featuring smears of every color of paint I've handled while wearing it over the past decade. I crown this suit with my trusty Muse-made havelock which is equally as stained as my shirt. When so garbed, I experience a fundamental mindset shift. No longer the philosopher, I become a simple laborer. I cease fretting over making meaning of my actions, and dedicate myself to acting, and most often to acting rather mindlessly. I pride myself on my discipline then. I put my head down and simply engage. I feel most like some sort of monk then, not precisely Zen-like, but similar except absent evident wisdom.

I maintain a cast of characters within me.

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KittenMaking

KittenMaking
Albrecht Dürer: Sleeping Lioness. (circa 1520s)
Notes: Owned by the Print room of the Warsaw University Library.
Burned deliberately by the Germans in October 1944 during the Planned destruction of Warsaw.

"The smallest things seem to matter most."

The Muse and I identify as confirmed cat people and have been since before we were married, when we were still living in that apartment complex overlooking the Willamette River south of Portland, where a ginger cat with a crumpled ear adopted us. I christened him Crash and he moved right in, in clear consensual violation of our renter's agreement's prohibition against pets. Crash didn't need us to domesticate him. He domesticated us, but I suspect his primary purpose was to encourage us to provide a safe place for him to become a kitten again. As a feral or abandoned or whatever he had been before he found us, he'd had to maintain a certain street toughness. He'd had to nurture his inner lion to live. With a home, he could let down his guard, sit in a lap, and become a kitten. I think of home in the same way now. If families exist to make people, homes exist to make kittens.

I keep telling Molly, our formerly feral female, that I'm turning her into a kitten.

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Sidling

Silding
Pieter Breughel the Younger: Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery (circa 1600)
When he meets the Adulteress, Jesus writes: "He that is without sin".
Based on a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, in the Courtauld Institute Galleries, London (The Princes Gate Collection, 9), 1565, grisaille
"HomeMaking's not a solo occupation …"

I recognize myself as indecisive. I only very rarely directly confront any challenge, but choose, either by habit or nature, to obliquely approach sideways. This tactic doubtless leaves me looking indecisive, but I sense that I'm more deciding than choosing not to decide. I take my time. I'll take your time, too, without first asking. I seem to need some space to make up my disordered mind. I consider from several angles. I play likely scenarios. Exhausting those, I run through a few of the more prominent unlikely ones before finally engaging. I tell myself that I am not procrastinating, though any observer might feel fully justified in questioning my assertion. I take almost forever to get started, but once started, I tend to be all in until I'm finished. I do not give up my heart on whims. Once I agree, once I engage, I'm dependable and make my commitment. I just do not commit lightly.

I consequently shove a considerable bow wave before me.

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AnOtherSummer

AnOtherSummer
Maxfield Parrish: Study for Janion's Maple (Under Summer Skies) (circa 1956)
"Part of what we visited no longer existed but we could still see it and share it …"

By the second week of July, it's finally sinking in that it's summer again. Another Summer. AnOtherSummer this time. I was impressed into service as daycare for The GrandOther this week, a role I had been secretly hoping I'd be drafted into. I'm not the greatest grandfather ever devised, but I'm also not the worst. At first, I thought of myself as more of an uncle than a gramps, but that was fifteen years and more ago when TheGrandOtter spent summers with The Muse and I. The Otter's grown and gone now and only her little sister stands between her dad and step-mom becoming empty nesters themselves, like The Muse and I once were when we pressed for annual summer GrandOtter visits. Now it's TheGrandOther's turn to receive the treatment.

The treatment. I speak of it as if it is a thing when its' not.

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BeingPrepared

BeingPrepared

J. C. Leyendecker: A boy holding a sword labeled "Be Prepared." Another person wearing a flag holds a shield behind the boy. The poster advertises USA Bonds and the Third Liberty Loan Campaign by the Boy Scouts of America. Liberty Loans and Liberty Bonds were used by the US Government to fund World War I. (1917)

" … they found that there was probably no adequate replacement for a sincere lack of preparation."

Despite a century of exhorting people to Be Prepared, The Boy Scouts, whether or not they survive as an organization, will be remembered as having been wholly unprepared to face the scandal that laid them low. They might have just as usefully insisted that people should Be Prepared To Feel Unprepared, since BeingPrepared most often amounts to simply acknowledging that one can never be adequately prepared. Build that Maginot Line only to later find that it defended against a past threat rather than a present one. The careful, almost ruinous preparations became more encumbrance than asset in the moment that mattered. I won't argue against preparation, just against over-relying upon preparation as an iron-clad defense, especially when iron cladding limits mobility to respond to the unanticipated. The German's Zeigfried Line defended no better than the Maginot did for the French. The ruins of both still stand as silent testaments to the paradox not even The Boy Scouts could avoid. Preparation might well prove necessary but only rarely sufficient. Some undeterminable portion of defensive energy might be better focused upon mobility in some utterly unforeseeable future moment.

Our best laid plans have been starting to show their vulnerabilities.

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FatEhGue

FatEhGue
Maxfield Parrish: Cadmus Sowing the Dragon's Teeth (1908), created for Collier's
" … she asks me how it was out there. Miserable, I declare …"

I read a lot of comic books in my youth. My paper route left me rather affluent for a ten year old, so I could afford a few Baby Huey or Sad Sack comics, not to mention most every edition of MAD Magazine during its heydays. When I ran into a word I didn't know, I usually made up both a pronunciation as well as a meaning, and just continued reading as if I'd understood. Some words defy any eye's naive interpretation, the term for San Sack's uniform prominent among them for me. He wore fatigues, or FatEhGues, as I sub-vocally pronounced them to myself. I was uncertain what the term referred to. Perhaps Sad Sack's attitude, which he wore more prominently than he wore his uniform. It didn't matter. I always figured that whatever peg-legged interpretation I made when reading sufficed and might even prove superior to disrupting my reading flow to reference the real pronunciation and meaning. I still hesitate when I encounter that word, though, reverting to my first parsing before snapping back into my more mature understanding.

I've been noticing just how exhausting living beneath our current heat dome has become.

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Fourth

Fourth
Claude Monet: Impression, soleil levant (1872)
" … a nation ruled by laws we steadfastly refuse to obey on the Fourth of July."

I baffled myself imagining how I might explain July the Fourth to anyone not native to the United States of America. I cannot quite explain it to myself. It tends to contain more mixed metaphors and mixed up factoids than all other holidays combined, yet it does not really count as in any way holy. It stands as our annual contradiction, a serial misrepresentation of our own history, familiar yet fuzzy, clear but curiously alien. Stand downwind of the business end of the typical July Fourth celebration and one might find themselves mistaken that we were celebrating some battle or something, so thick seems the smoke and smell of ozone and gunpowder, but history records no great victory or defeat on this date, just the founding of our country, which came as more of a whimper than an explosion. I might be committing the equivalent of Critical Race Theory here because I'm poking at the myth, looking for substance, a well-recognized crime against common decency.

I'll make no excuses. I've never liked how we celebrate our founding.

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BigNSmall

BigNSmall

A Mughal Miniature, Composition by Basawan, painting by Chitra for the left side of the illustration.Right side composition by Basawan, painting by Chetar:
Akbar riding the elephant Hawa'I pursuing another elephant (Ran Bagha) across a collapsing bridge of boats, 1561
from the Akbarnama. (circa 1590 -95)

" … that's how this world was supposed to work."

As empty nesters, The Muse and I mostly inhabit a world scaled for people who stand between five and six feet tall. At this scale, door handles seem perfectly positioned, toilets properly elevated, and mirrors more or less appropriately positioned. A city block's no kind of a walk, and a dozen easily bend to our will if we want. Either of two cars remain an option if we're in a hurry, even a bike. We live in a world scaled for us, a remarkable privilege, though we each remember when our world was not thus, back when it seemed to have been scaled for people much larger than us, a world which sometimes seemed hostile to our very presence. We persevered, matured, and more or less outgrew that humbling beginning.

I revel in nothing more than I revel in the presence of small people, adults still in waiting, the following generation, up and still coming.

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MidSummerEvening

MidSummerEvening
N. C. Wyeth: Jim, Long John Silver and his Parrot from the 1911 edition of Treasure Island
"The young ones now face even greater challenges …"

Poets and entranced travel writers have had their way with the MidSummerEvening until anyone might be easily excused for expecting them to seem romantic. I blame too many stars in way too many eyes and a gullible public, and also a distinct shortage of children in recent generations. Though I know I might well sound like the geezer I am when I insist that MidSummerEvenings remain the exclusive domain of kids, I will insist away anyway. Grown-ups, or purported ones, might find reason to sip some beer and shoot off a few illegal fireworks to celebrate a freedom they've unaccountably lost all track of, but kids, especially those not yet outgrown their age in favor of nihilistic pursuits like zombie movies and TicToc threads, own this space and always have. After supper's dispatched, which was a brief distraction at best, the kids take to the yard again as shadows start creeping in. It's still uncommonly though seasonably warm, and anything can happen within a kid enjoying the high that comes from a little too much hot dog chased with ice cream smothered in strawberries. They turn into pirates then and rampage through the long twilight hours. The best any grown-up can do is watch in wonder while perhaps helping to set up the tent in the backyard for the later sleep out.

It helps if the house has a circular yard, one which allows for unimpeded circumnavigation around the house, for as my wise niece noted, when (not if) that hose manages to soak you, running two or three trips around the world, and you're almost completely dried off.

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Cut

Cut
Giovanni Francesco Romanelli: LivioAndronico [Ceiling in the Louvre Palace] (circa 1650)
"Our home's no masterpiece to anyone but us …"

When The Muse asked if I'd like her to paint the Cut in the basement stairwell, I gratefully accepted her offer. I'd been dreading that part of the job, since I'm basically a slob when painting and I usually only manage to create fine lines by using tape. I had not wanted to tape the freshly painted ceiling. I couldn't quite reach every inch of of the line and my ladder, which I could not open all the way on the narrow landing, left me feeling like I was balancing on the head of an unstable pin. She gamely scurried off to change her clothes, grateful for some activity not involving Zoom®.

A Cut line separating wall from ceiling seems the most bedeviling element of painting.

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Permanence

Permanence
Henri Matisse: Self-Portrait (1937)

"Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence." Henri Matisse


"I paint over inevitables."

I speak of Permanence without apparent irony, though I might be one of the most temporary entities around. My mailbox could outlive me, yet I undertake what I must clearly mistake to be permanent changes as part of my HomeMaking efforts. I contribute much impermanence, too. My lawn mowing undoes itself over the course of a week. Weeding might sustain for a month or longer. Watering, depending, might last for a day or two, seemingly always needing redoing. I rarely build anything permanent. I don't personally pour concrete, though I have directed others to do that to benefit this home, HomeMaking by replacing crumbling original replacements, which were intended as permanent replacements of the original pavement, which is long gone now. The house, subjected to one hundred and fourteen years of successive HomeMaking has proven more permanent than most of its parts. Inside, I doubt that the original owners and builders would today recognize what they'd wrought. The current front porch appears to have been built atop the original. Not even the original paint remains on the outside shell since I stripped it to bare wood, that and a few original windows.

Painting's about as Permanent as I get.

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Turnings

Turnings
Pablo Picasso: Le Rêve (1932)
"It's never too late yet."

Neither a straight nor particularly narrow road, HomeMaking follows a meandering path. The past quickly fades after another seemingly inevitable turn and the way ahead remains largely obscured until just before the next future emerges. It's continuing surprise and anyone wandering there might easily lose heart, given the continuing lack of positive reinforcement. The sweetness in HomeMaking seems retroactive, occurring well after the bulk of the effort's concluded. For the duration of the excursion, aspirations fuel the engagement. Visions of imagined futures motivate continuing. It seems at root, faith-based by nature. Human nature might well prefer more tangible encouragements which remain only sporadically present. Discouragement seems most likely and might well prove deadly. Many abandon their dreams along the way. It seems extraordinary when anyone ultimately finds their way home, either again or originally. But then there are these turnings. Always the Turnings

I spent the first few days of this latest HomeMaking excursion in extremis.

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Distinguishing

Distinguishing
Auguste Rodin: The Fallen Caryatid Carrying Her Stone (Modeled 1881–82, cast 1902/24)
"HomeMaking is first about making the HomeMaker, then about making a home."

I'm unaccustomed to thinking of HomeMaking as a distinguished occupation, but like every occupation, HomeMaking involves making distinctions, Distinguishing. Considerable judgement also seems a necessary element of the effort, for a HomeMaker must do more than distinguish difference, but also determine if any intervention seems necessary and if so, how much. I imagine a huge chart denoting forms and degrees of engagement, something like:
If rough, smooth.
If smooth, texture.
And also listing the ten thousand primary elements of HomeMaking, but the pattern would quickly emerge as simple, and as fundamental as evolution:
If not right, fix or tolerate
If right, preserve or improve.
I catch myself in endless judgement of my surroundings, the better, I presume, to render them more properly like home. Not into Home but into more Home-like, an analogy. I perform this service by means of my Distinguishing. I exercise my judgement by first distinguishing. The quality of any resulting engagement feeds my judgement engine which might improve my Distinguishing. It all starts by noticing something. HomeMaking, like everything, utterly depends somebody first observing something.

There might only be five fundamental HomeMaking Distinguishing Elements: Context, Condition, Size, Shape, and Color.

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Synapsing

Synapsing
Joos de Momper: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (circa 1620s)
" … as if Icarus had managed to fly around rather than a tad too close to the sun."

I feel as though I've flown a tad too close to the sun. Rather than tumble out of the sky like Icarus, though, I'm tumbling down through ether, imaginary space but always real enough before now. How would it be if one day you discovered that you could no longer access your intuition? No dumber than you ever were, but apparently lacking an essential connection that always reliably animated your processing before. Until then. You'd probably wonder if you'd ever recover that modest superpower again. Mine left under the influence of a certain prescription, one of those, increasingly common, which fiddles with Synapsing to fool some sense into changing. I suppose the drug's designer believed that it was just a switch, turned on or off, permanent effects unlikely. Fewer than .1% ever experience bradyphrenia, a "moderate" cognitive impairment, and I might or might not be experiencing it now. I just know that something's different. I can't even think crooked. Writing this small paragraph has taken several hours and not a second of that time seemed like writing.

I'm uncertain what to do.

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Castling

Castling
Frédéric Bazille: Queen's Gate at Aigues (1867)
" … to let some inside out and some outside back inside again."

A man's home, long reputed to be his castle, stops feeling very much like home as soon as he starts using it as if it were a castle. I know, paradoxical. The problem seems to lie in the fundamental difference between home and castle. Castles exist first and foremost as defensive barriers, as fortresses rather than as commons, while homes, it seems to me, need to be open to mean anything. Closing up a home transforms it into a mausoleum, the sort of place only tell-tale hearts might ever inhabit. Whether in response to a heat wave or a snow storm, when a HomeMaker has to hunker in, his home becomes his castle and doesn't feel all that much like home for the duration of the defensive action. Castling ain't HomeMaking.

The Home-As-Castle analogy might apply to a whole class of human responses when exercising liberties or freedoms.

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Dabbling

Dabbling
Andrea del Verrocchio: Baptism of Christ (1475) -- with an angel painted by Leonardo on the left
"Satisfied HomeMaking sometimes means Dabbling along behind."

I dabble in my duties as a HomeMaker. HomeMaking seems to be one of those occupations that do not quite qualify as an occupation and so cannot be properly considered a profession, and therefore cannot be mastered. No Master HomeMaker Designation could exist, if only because it would demand mastery of far too many elements. My first wife's mother held a master's degree in home economics, and not even she could take on every thing necessary to make a home, let alone to keep it humming. For wiring, she'd hire an electrician. She even retained the services of a professional housekeeper. A HomeMaker might be most properly characterized as a sort of chief contractor who coordinates the efforts without mastering many him/her self, except, perhaps, mastering the fine art of managing masters, though I suspect few ever approach even that level of skill. It's most likely, usually, amateurs attempting to coordinate the efforts of Journeymen, Masters, and other Rank Amateurs. Mastering that mess might be most of HomeMaking.

HomeMaking mostly involves Dabbling in a little off this and a little more of that other thing,

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Perdiction

Prediction
Edvard Munch: At the Roulette Table in Monte Carlo (1892)
" … underdelivering by means of over threatening myself again."

The weather forecast reads like a sentence passed down by a vengeful judge. I can't stop looking for the train wreck coming. I probably imagine it being much worse than it's likely to end up becoming. I remember a hundred and fourteen from when I was a kid. My mom laid out blankets on the front room rug and invited us all to camp out there instead of heading outside. We quickly fell asleep, waking after the fiercest part was over. As if that time created a precedent for future ones, grave predictions of soaring temperatures send me to ground. I hunker down and let the worst of it blow around me, or so I imagine. I focus my outside efforts to early morning or just before sunset and I hole up through the blazing afternoon. Before air conditioning, I'd flee to the basement. Even with the heat pump, lower floors seem preferable.

I wondered if the weather forecast was even accurate.

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Flimability

Flimability
Abraham Mignon: The Overturned Bouquet (1660-79)
Reputed to be Mignon's worst painting.

" … seeing through and not just looking."

HomeMakers possess the oddest ability to see through certain imperfections in their home. Perhaps this results from a certain love blindness, the sort that automatically excuses a grandchild's unfortunate nose or a favorite movie star's indiscretions. We see right through some faults. When we first moved into this would-be home, both the basement stairs and the half bath and hallway off the kitchen were painted in the most awful electrocuted green color with garnish green striped wallpaper highlighting. While we were moving in, that same day, I removed that wallpaper and painted over (two coats) that offense to my senses in the hallway and half bath. The basement stairway, decorated the same, remained unchanged for twenty years. Yesterday, in under two hours, I removed every miserable shred of that wallpaper and purchased the paint to cover the electrocuted green wall color. While ridding this world of that abomination, I was moved to wonder how it was that I managed to cohabitate for two decades with what I could not tolerate even until the end of the first day living here? Explaining this as a form of blindness makes sense. Its presence had apparently not been registering all those years.

I seem terribly skilled at pulling wool over my own eyes.

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Denizen

weesmall
Edward Hopper: Stairway at 48 rue de Lille, Paris (1906)
"I often find myself wandering around the place apparently lost …"

I consider myself more Denizen than citizen. I know myself to be a Denizen of the small hours, for instance. For me, this home seems most homey between two and six each morning. By evening, I can barely relate to the place. Through the afternoon, I'm ready to run errands, nap, or read, escapist activities, but in the early morning, I'm present and accountable.

It seems that our homes make us Denizens of them.

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BitRot

BitRot
Abraham Mignon: Still life with rotting fruit and nuts on a stone ledge (c. 1670)
"It demands patience precisely when frustration might be peaking."

Software engineers hold that a program, left alone and never touched, will eventually exhibit some evidence of failure. They refer to this common phenomenon as BitRot, an exceedingly handy term and concept, since it describes the otherwise inexplicable. It serves as a placeholder for understanding and also as a reminder that an explanation does not always prove necessary to fix an error. BitRot serves as acceptance that a problem exists without ascribing specific blame for its emergence. Sometimes, things just fall apart without a discernible cause. Blame entropy if you must, but accept the difficulty and fix it if you can.

HomeMaking encounters plenty of BitRot in its normal routine.

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CanningWorms

CanningWorms
Georges Braque: "La Table de Cuisine" (1942)
"We're never through and we leave behind messes and we start new stuff before finishing the last …"

HomeMaking does not seem to qualify as a continuous process, for it features too many flow/stall cycles. Still, it seems continual. Many initiatives get started just fine but get stalled before completion, often for the most trivial reasons. A single missing screw has delayed completion of an otherwise trivial gazebo repair for two months. I'd been to the hardware store many times since and reliably forgot to get that screw. Last week, I bought a box of those screws, just to be sure I had enough, but haven't gotten around to actually using them. If I can find that box when the stars line up, I'll be in business. Until then, I'm backed up.

Each day brings a fresh batch of interruptions as well as new restarting opportunities.

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StaleStart

StaleStart
Rembrandt van Rijn: The Artist In His Studio (c. 1628)
" … delight, its deeper purpose."

We speak of fresh starts as if there could ever be such a thing. We speak of restarting, though these more accurately represent a discontinuous resumption with history trailing. I start a fresh series understanding that, by now, for me, any new series will seem at least somewhat stale. You see, I've done this before. Familiarity need not necessarily breed contempt, but it might well encourage wariness, especially with writing. That fresh-faced feeling a beginning brings probably won't last out the morning, and on this morning after summer solstice, the day promises sweat before midday and even more sweat through the afternoon. Still, I begin again, though I'm unable to muster that innocence I once just naturally brought to my game.

The art, if there is one, entails crafting a fresh supper from stale parts, like Tuscan Bread Soup, which combines fresh ingredients with stale bread to produce a delightful dish.

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SettlingUpon

SettlingUpon
Honoré Daumier: The Third-Class Carriage (c. 1856–1858)
"Everything matters unless it doesn't."

SettlingInto eventually becomes a matter of SettlingUpon. The Muse has not quite settled upon the color palette she wants and the repainting cannot commence until then. I remain unsettled about several possible undertakings, so they're not started yet. As our SettlingInto has continued, the volume of SettlingUpons has grown. Dozens of little decisions define our way forward from here. We've successfully landed here but have yet to fully find our land legs. We're still a little wobbly, our way of living still emerging. Much remains unsettled and, indeed, unsettling so far. The SettlingInto might never end, but its infinity will most certainly be punctuated with a series of SettlingUpons. One day—not today, probably not tomorrow, but some day—these projects we've been envisioning forever will be over. Then we will have settled upon much. While our imaginations might have envisioned first class accommodations, we'll very likely settle for third-class passage and even manage to feel smug about our fortune, largely because we will have chosen, which makes a definite difference.

Deciding, though, proves challenging. I've long contended that choice serves as my chief superpower, if only because when I'm stymied, I can always at least choose again.

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Quitting

Quitting
Benjamin West: The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise (1791)
"Let him forever after be known as a quitter …"

I know myself to be a quitter, but a relatively inept one. In this culture, my culture, we revere starters, especially self starters, but look down through our glasses at quitters, with perhaps one exception. Those who've quit a dependence upon some reviled substance—demon rum, evil narcotics, or that devil tobacco—are held in some esteem for what those who've never been addicted imagine a certain depth of character. Of course it's that brand of character that came after a fall and was apparently inadequate to prevent the fall in the first place, but it's generally deemed worthy of a place near if not precisely in the hearts of the nation. Those who continue their abuse of substances sometimes get sent to treatment, which sometimes works. Others enroll themselves into twelve step programs which teach abstinence, acceptance, and forbearance in roughly equal measures, and consider addiction a life-long issue from which one might be recovering but from which nobody ever recovers. People who haven't had a drink in decades still consider themselves drunks and those who stopped using heroin continue recognizing themselves as junkies.

Addiction only somewhat involves a substance.

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Routining

Routining
Giovanni Paolo Panini: Modern Rome (1757)
" … suggestively licking their lips when I forget to call them to table."

SettlingInto wasn't accomplished in a day. It might well never end, depending upon what The Muse and I choose to settle for. Settled, however achieved, seems mostly an emergent property and not a planned, predefined one. One arrives and only then decides, partly out of necessity, who they become. The context influences almost everything and the context didn't exist until we moved into it. We moved back in, but in name only. We actually found ourselves SettlingInto alien territory with only slight resemblances to what we remembered. Some better, some worse, some simply incomparably different. I've noticed parts of my old self reassembling here, parts I hadn't seen in action for years. Other aspects, ones I'd acquired or amplified while in exile, left me puzzling about just who has returned from exile. We have been, over the past three months, slowly and unsurely establishing routine. We've been Routining.

I'd forgotten how the former dreaded routine first came into being.

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WisingUp

WisingUp
Michelangelo: The Libyan Sibyl (1508-12) from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel
"A grain of insight seems worth the investment."

I seem to be getting no wiser as I age. The old adage about older and wiser seems to pair near strangers rather than inevitable partners. For me, aging, like learning, has proven to be more humbling than enlightening. Rather than great mysteries resolving themselves, they seem to grow ever more mysterious, ever less likely to ever come into sharp focus. By the time I've figured out something, I'm usually catching shadows. That thing's time has past, never to return. I might possess fresh knowledge, but almost always of an arcane variety, out-dated, the kind that would have been useful had I known it sometime in the past, but relatively useless in any imaginable future. My understanding of how this world works has accumulated much clutter and become less ordered than it was before I began acquiring knowledge. I seem to be on a glide path to die much dumber than I was born, and no wiser.

That opening declaration represents the extent of my accumulated wisdom thus far.

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DownhillBothWays

DownhillBothWays
M. C. Escher: Waterfall (1961)
"I seem to be SettlingInto a place that's actually DownhillBothWays …"

I finally found a wrinkle in my schedule a couple of weeks ago and engaged in a few minutes of recreation. I pumped up the tires on my old coaster bike and took it out for a spin. I'd found an original front wheel bushing while on exile, so the nearly sixty year-old thing runs smoother than silk. I coasted down three blocks to the park, hung a downhill right which, three blocks, later left me at the big park. I hung a reluctant left onto what was once a road but is now a path and circumnavigated the central band stand before taking backstreets back to The Villa, a short and very sweet ride. The Muse asked how it was and I reported that it was DownhillBothWays. She wouldn't buy my story, but it was true to my experience. Riding these streets on this same model bike I rode as a kid, I remember torturous uphill stretches, usually encountered on the way back home after a particularly lengthy ride. Now, the city seems essentially flat, with no street steep enough to warrant any but my ride's single speed.

I might have gained some perspective and experience while on exile. …

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MythConceptions

MythInformation
Alexandre Cabanel: The Birth of Venus (1863)
"It's not that the facts don't matter, but that stories overshadow."

We mistakenly believe that the ancient Greeks and Romans maintained the mythiest societies in history, but ours might far surpass theirs. No, we no longer believe in cloud-based gods, but the underpinnings of much of what passes for knowledge, even science, amounts to metaphors and analogies every bit as allegorical as any embraced by the ancients. Physicists searching for quantum gravity follow paths paved with stories, for little of what they seek can be observed with any of our senses, even those enhanced by machines. They twiddle concepts and conclude by means of logic and reason, their allegories growing simpler as they sense they're nearing their goal. Even science has become a faith-based initiative, easily discounted by those holding different MythConceptions and subscribing to orthogonal myth information. It's not that we don't share a serviceable language, but that we don't always share the same metaphors, the underlying stories which stand in as explanations of phenomena. No, atoms do not really resemble marbles, but they can be usefully thought of that way. The danger comes when we mistake our allegories for immutable realities rather than clever analogies, confirmation of what's proper to believe. Atoms couldn't care less what anyone believes about them.

I acknowledge that a significant portion of my admittedly meager understanding stands upon mythical shoulders.

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SettlingUp

SettlingUp
Jacopo Bassano: The Miraculous Draught of Fishes (1545)
"Whatever we own, owns us back better, such that we owe it forever."

The porch needed painting but not nearly as much as I needed to paint the porch. That porch needed paint when we slinked out of here twelve years ago, evidence of a certain dereliction of responsibility on my part. I was ashamed of that porch but not as ashamed as I was in myself. SettlingInto involves facing up to some past shortcomings and SettlingUp with them. I feel both humbled and fortunate to find myself in this position. Had we simply moved on without returning, these blemishes would have been permanent or, worse, someone else would have had to do my penance for me, like we did penance for the clown that sometime in the past expanded the kitchen. It was my sincere aspiration when we first took ownership of this place that I might prove to become a worthy steward of its heritage. That's meant considerable undoing of past violations of that heritage and also plenty of doing forward, improvements congruent to its bones. There are books, I imagine, keeping record of my stewardship's debits and credits. I hold myself responsible for repaying those debts, mostly in sweat labor.

Refinishing the porch repaid a long-outstanding debt, including considerable accumulated interest, a reason for genuine celebration.

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Conspiracist

AConspiracist
"French revolution: before and after: satirical drawing by French draftsman Caran d'Ache, 1898, in the middle of the Dreyfus affair and the foundation of Action Française. Although the Ancien Régime is not shown as idyllic, the contemporary situation is shown as an increase of oppression, which technical improvements (notice the plowshare) don't lighten, and to which financial capitalism (the banker with his top hat and his wallet), the Freemason (with his set square and plumb bob) and the Jew (with a curved nose) are contributors." (Wikipedia)
" … they, too, know not what in the Hell they're doing. Neither do I."

My neighbor Larry, a perfectly lovely family man with Bible verses posted on his front door, also has a dirty little secret he's a little too enthusiastic to share. We might be quietly conversing about his RV, which he uses maybe four times a year and has never felt competent to drive, and with which he's managed to a) back into a telephone pole, b) back into the door panel of a parked pickup, and c) pull the rear bumper off of after catching it on a gas station's concrete pillar, when his secret comes out. He keeps the RV because twice each year his family, now numbering thirty-five counting great grand kids, decamps to camp somewhere for a week and he and his wife need a place to sleep then. A man needs a certain amount of aggravation in his life, and for me, that RV might fully satisfy my minimum daily requirement, but Larry's little secret compounds his despair. You see, he's also a Conspiracist.

He might be dropping off a couple of dozen eggs, which he delivers gratis, from his chickens, and the topic springs up from nowhere. "If you just read the mainstream news, you'd never know that anything was going on, but they're trying to make us socialist. …

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AMusing

AMusing
Nicolas Poussin: Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun (1658)
"Musing's almost never about actually discussing anything."

The Muse's frequent lengthy absences best typified our exile years. When we lived outside of DC, she'd spend at least a week each month in Colorado. When we relocated to Colorado, she'd spend about the same time away in DC. This left me out there on my own for what seemed like lengthy periods, often eons, fending for myself, batching it. I always somewhat reveled in that freedom. There I was all alone save for the cats, and out of view from anyone who might care what I did. I could sneak a cigar thinking that I'd likely recover before The Muse returned. I'd been domesticated so long that I would find myself out of practice and default to grown up status rather than revert back into adolescence in her absence. Those days seemed long and hollow, though, reinforcing my notion that good living demands that one somehow must be in service to another and not just to themselves. I'd reheat the bottomless pot of beans for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and never think of concocting anything more complicated or nourishing. I'd hold dialogues with the cats, bouncing ideas off them, continually asking them how they were doing in lieu of anyone asking me that question. That was a Museless existence, hollow and unsatisfying, rendering me The Invisible Husband.

She'd call, of course, more or less daily during her absences, usually on her way, a few minutes late, for her first morning meeting and/or in the final few minutes before falling asleep after an overlong day of briefings and a late sociable supper.

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Asymptosis

Asymptosis
Paul Cézanne: (unfinished) Portrait of Gustave Geffroy (1895)
" … moments savored in the moment then forgotten forever."

I haven't accomplished much in this life, largely by design. I seem to possess a strong aversion to doneness, preferring to leave good enough unhassled by finishing touches. I tend to take things up to edges, but rarely over them. I much prefer starting new projects over gaining closure on any current one, so I usually abandon an effort in favor of an alluring opportunity, which I will also leave somewhat unfinished once it's close enough but rarely actually finished. I do not suffer from some curable illness or even an incurable one, for I consider my aversion to doneness a feature of my existence and in no way an encumbrance to it. It needs no treatment, though it does have a name. Perhaps it's just a syndrome, a special purpose capability reserved for an exceptional few, which, surprisingly, seems to include me. I'm not its victim and I do not suffer, but I seem to have Asymptosis, or it has me.

Always arriving without ever having arrived. Moving towards without actually crossing any finish line.

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Withouting

Withouting
Annibale Carracci, The Choice of Hercules (1596)
" … a fonder heart and a sometimes smarter response."

He who dies with the most toys loses whatever it might have been that toys couldn't satisfy. The toys might have successfully distracted the dedicated toy collector to the point where he never missed what he might have chosen to do without, though unfulfilled wishes might have provided bitter tastes of them. If he was true to type, he considered these shortages to represent problems that future acquisition might solve, though the desire in the dedicated toy collector never wanes for long after successfully adding another to his collection. He might miss a subtle point, one argued over for millennia, back probably further than recorded history can take us. My parents raised me a proper stoic, I guess, for I firmly believe that character might be best expressed by what one chooses to do without rather than by how much one manages to acquire.

Limited availability was one of the great attractions this small city offered. …

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GrowingDown

GrowingDown
Salvator Rosa: Diogenes Casting away his Cup (1650s)
"GrowingDown seems a just reward after failing to fully grow up."

I have been growing up for most of my life so far. I've tried to put down roots but with mixed results. Between attempts, I felt as if I was living in a planter, free to grow up, but restricted in how far down I could sink roots. I've experienced at least my share of transplantings, each traumatic, a few promising. My eyes were mostly on the sky, though, more concerned with seeing where I was going then delving into where I was growing. Aspiration can transport almost as thoroughly as physical relocation. Eyes on the prize do not see the present and one can live much of a life somewhere else, head if not actually in clouds, focused there. Trajectory seems calculated up to but not actually into any destination. Careers, marriages, aspirations easily focus upon advancement rather than placement. Where am I? seems less interesting than Where I am going, intentions too easily supplant presence. I'm intending to go nowhere now. I'm SettlingInto here, finally GrowingDown.

Growing up seemed a succession of passing throughs, each pause more of a layover than an arrival.

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ClutchYerChange

Asymptosis
Paul Cézanne: (unfinished) Portrait of Gustave Geffroy (1895)
" … moments savored in the moment then forgotten forever."

I haven't accomplished much in this life, largely by design. I seem to possess a strong aversion to doneness, preferring to leave good enough unhassled by finishing touches. I tend to take things up to edges, but rarely over them. I much prefer starting new projects over gaining closure on any current one, so I usually abandon an effort in favor of an alluring opportunity, which I will also leave somewhat unfinished once it's close enough but rarely actually finished. I do not suffer from some curable illness or even an incurable one, for I consider my aversion to doneness a feature of my existence and in no way an encumbrance to it. It needs no treatment, though it does have a name. Perhaps it's just a syndrome, a special purpose capability reserved for an exceptional few, which, surprisingly, seems to include me. I'm not its victim and I do not suffer, but I seem to have Asymptosis, or it has me.

Always arriving without ever having arrived. Moving towards without actually crossing any finish line. …

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Infinities

Infinities
Franz de Paula Ferg: The Building of Noah's Ark (ca. 1730)
"I might most become myself there where my usual controls and inhibitions hold little currency."

After eons of prep work, The Porch stands ready to accept paint this morning. By day's end, if I'm lucky and diligent, I might replace the hanging fuchsia baskets, move the geezer rockers up from the gazebo (geezerabo?) and get on with fresh Infinities. This job, so simple-seeming at the start, turned complicated as soon as I set my hands on it. Ain't that the way of this world? Even small distances mislead both eye and imagination and large distances mislead even more. From exile, I easily imagined myself cutting through one SettlingInto job after another, like the proverbial hot knife through soft butter, but up close and intensely personal, gravity influences more deeply. Physics asserts her immutable laws and a perfectly acceptable naive notion turns into another Infinity. Infinities appear when it starts becoming clear just what an effort might actually entail. Some grand complication comes into focus and the timeline goes to Hell. I suddenly don't quite know how to accomplish what I'd set out to finish and I've already started. No way to turn around and not start then. I'm committed to what first seemed like a finite effort but which now seems infinite. The Infinities have found me.

My father, who, if anything, was a most dedicated worker, taught me how to deal with Infinities.

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SlideEffects

SlideEffects
Jackson Pollock: Untitled. (1953-54)
"Sometimes SlideEffects trump everything else."

Back when we still watched television, I found amusing the many adds for various prescription drugs. Some government agency still vaguely interested in truth in advertising—a concept so long considered not worth considering that I found these ads quaint—insisted that each ad list prominent side effects, which tended toward the shocking. Who wouldn't agree to take a medication likely to effectively treat some skin condition even though it might also cause permanent paralysis or one of the more dreadful forms of cancer? The tradeoffs never seemed to make sense, the side effects just too bizarre to accept the risk, however slight, since slight risks apply to large populations, not to the individual who experiences them. My mom, bless her dear departed heart, gained the reputation of only exhibiting side effects and not usually the primary intended effect of any medication. Her doctor prescribed using a form of Reverse Polish logic to achieve intended outcomes.

Economists call them externalities, the sideshows that tend to pop up around any primary intention.

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Evening

Evening
JAN BRUEGHEL THE YOUNGER: The Garden of Eden (1635)
"We're shadows glowing within this forest."

First week of June, Evening arrives as an actual breath of fresh air after another blistering afternoon. The house, closed up since late morning, suffocates by then and supper seems unappealing enough to just cancel it. The heat exhausts me without my having to exert anything and leaves me feeling worthless, hoping for morning. The Muse suggests a walk out into the Evening air, and I cannot concoct an excuse to refuse her invitation. I check to find Molly ready to come in from the back deck, I don my walk-in' shoes, and we depart into gathering darkness. The evening feels like velvet on my face. The sidewalks still hold traces of heat and the shadowy yards still show off, in silhouette rather than in full glorious color. The difference leaves them seeming magical. Flowers appear first by scent then by outline. Even without evident color, they seem strangely intact and instantly recognizable. Whomever left their hose stretched out across the sidewalk overnight deserves a stern talking to.

We're all alone, save for one gentleman out watering his roses and a young woman walking her dog.

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Kickin'

Kickin'
Late 19th-century photograph of a yamabushi fully robed and equipped, armed with a naginata and tachi.
K. Ogawa: from KAZUMASA OGAWA - Military Costumes in Old Japan,
Photographed Under the Direction of Chitora Kawasaki of Ko-yu-kai (Tokyo Fine Art School), Tokyo, 1895 (Meiji 28)
" … while we're still alive and Kickin', we're all in."

Ask me how I'm doing and I'm likely to respond by saying that I'm still alive and kickin', kickin' apparently being an inseparable part of living. We unquestionably inhabit an addicted society. It might be that once adopting the language of addiction, we began noticing just how attached we'd been, or maybe we are all just addicted to something, whichever, we do seem to be continually occupied with trying (and often failing) to get over or along without something that's insidiously worked its way into our lives. We imagine ourselves free and clear but struggle to find a path between here and there. We aspire more than succeed, it seems, and so consequently well-understand what losing feels like. In our insistence upon winning, we perhaps most often set ourselves up to lose, which gives us almost endless opportunities to forgive ourselves for turning out to be human, albeit more human than we ever intended to become.

I might work just as hard to create my habits as I do to break them once they become bothersome, maybe even harder, for there's a certain satisfaction, a genuine sense of mastery, when teaching myself to master a fresh dependency, with little sense that it might one day grow to master me.

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Porching

Porching
Anonymous: “Bracketed Veranda from the inside,” in A. J. Downing, The Architecture of Country Houses (1850), 122, fig. 45
[A typical picture of a porch, which includes almost no porch and almost all view.]

"A porch could do a whole lot worse than get repainted."

A man could do worse than paint his porch. It's picky work, under-appreciated effort, invisible to all but the man who could do a whole lot worse than paint his porch. It's knee work. Not an ounce of any standing in it. It's demanding work of the sort that seems to goad a man into taking shortcuts and calling not quite right good enough. A man could do worse than ignore those seductions. A man begins by convincing himself that the finish just needs a little feathering but does not finish until he's scraped and sanded some boards back to their original state. Nobody will notice and nobody should. It's a covenant between this man, who could do a lot worse, and his porch, who knows it doesn't deserve it. He'll epoxy that rotted spot where the railing once anchored. Once painted, nobody knows except the man who could do worse and the appreciative porch, until some other man, who could do worse, sets about to paint his porch again.

Our porch is about 90% perch and 10% entryway.

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Mournings

Mournings
Peter Paul Rubens: The Lamentation (1614)
" … forever rooted in our forebears' and lost daughter's."

Mornings here taste as sweet and cool as a freshly-picked strawberry. However blistering the sun promises to become later, he starts the day with a cool head, in no apparent hurry to prove any point. The yard always finds dew overnight and releases it slowly to create a lush sense of enoughness. The roses bloom with ferocious intensity, colors screaming passionately. …Is a rose, indeed. Names inevitably understate identity. None of us were ever what we were called. In the town cemetery, the stones hold more than mere names and dates. They hold stories, unchanging through decades, varying only in tiny emerging details. My great great grandmother will always be the fifteen year old whose guardian aunt granted permission for her to marry that hapless ex-Union soldier who had been mustered out on a medical discharge after missing his first and only battle. Born in the eighteen forties, she would see the nineteen forties before departing, a lifetime spanning antebellum to anti-aircraft guns, The Oregon Trail well into the Age of the Automobile. Her story's stabile, though her stone's almost unreadable now.

SettlingInto allows us to visit our forebears.

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Tidying

Tidying
Margaret Bourke-White: "Atomic Number Thirteen" (1939)⁠

⁠"No longer simply SettlingInto, but here, home at last."

Nine weeks into this SettlingInto saga and we're still beset with boxes. Each week, we make a little headway, but after the earliest days, unpacking has remained an intermittent element of our lives here. I chose to leave my library in boxes until after repainting and flooring work's completed. I didn't relish restocking shelves just to have to tear them down again in a few weeks or even a few months. Consequently, we've developed blind spots. One opened box has stayed in the same place, half unpacked, since the early days, so long that its presence has become normal and therefore invisible. No urge to finish the job overtakes either of us. We hold higher priorities. The Muse invited a couple over for supper and insisted that we tidy up the place in preparation. I sensed a fierceness behind her request for a little help, knowing that I would be in for something. She jumped in before breakfast, focused. I joined in later, but since I was cooking and she, alone, held the grand intention, I got off easier, just vacuuming and cleaning my bathroom. Nine rooms and a grand staircase later, I felt less like a slacker. The only way I could imagine cleaning the shower was to take off my clothes and clean while showering, a semi-humiliating resolution.

The Muse reorganized the kitchen (again) while cleaning it. I found space to more permanently place clutter thriving on our inattention.

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Tending

Tending
Édouard Manet: The Monet Family in Their Garden at Argenteuil (1874)
"I'm now blessed with the sacred obligation to tend what we built …"

I think of myself as a caretaker. Now that The Muse and I have largely reclaimed the yard, which really needed very little real work to reclaim, now that Planting's pretty much concluded, Tending time arrives. Sure, odd corners still remain enqueued for my attention, but a proper garden retains some wild uncultivated and uncultured space, for balance if for nothing else, a touch of Wabi-Sabi in the mix. The Muse disagrees with me on this point, not necessarily philosophically, but practically. The wild corner could get out of hand, but then a caretaker like myself understands this, too, and keeps a watchful eye. I hold no grand plan for Tending our garden and I've yet to solidify any routine, other than to remember to water the front porch fuchsias and the kitchen garden. Everything else might be capable of taking care of itself, or so I tell myself lest I feel overwhelmed by my budding obligations. Nobody else in this world is capable of Tending this particular garden, and truth told, not even The Muse knows the rhythm of this place as well as I, for I accomplished more than designing it. I scraped and scratched and schlepped this yard into creation. The yard taught me how to tend it as I worked it.

Ten thousand little cues only hinted at what this garden needed, and I'm still learning how to read the cues remaining.

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Lightening...s

Lightenings
El Greco: Allegory: Boy Lighting Candle in Company of Ape and Fool (1589-1592)
"I feel delighted just being here!"

The light never leaves for long this time of year. By four in the morning, the eastern horizon already stands clearly backlit with promise. Darkness has not yet overtaken the yard when I stumble out to close the garage door after supper, after nine. Days last nearly an hour longer here then did Front Range and DC days, and nights barely settle in before roused and on their way again. Late afternoon light grows fierce and we flee to the shady backside of the place once we've fetched the afternoon paper. I sit beneath the sacred apricot to relish the softening evening arriving. The cats follow the sun through the day, usually choosing the sunniest spot to warm their rapidly shedding fur and wait for The Grand Other's after school arrival and afternoon treat time. Light keeps about the same hours I keep here and throughout our exile, I never adapted to more southern latitudes' spring and summer days, hot, humid, short, and stingy with light. I suppose the lightning bugs were compensation, charming yet inadequate.

My readers have commented that my writing has taken on a lightening since I started SettlingInto here.

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StumpThe

StumpThe
Wassily Kandinsky: Composition X (1939)
"The checker might come to recognize us coming and feel the compelling need to take a break just when we're ready to check out."

I know myself to be a mystery to myself. Not a complete mystery, but enough of one to occasionally leave the detective puzzled, a real head-scratcher. I often wonder in vain, resolving nothing before deciding to just move on to the next thing in line. I work diligently, like a bee, but with little sustaining purpose. I don't, for instance, write four books each year to sell four books each year, but apparently for no ultimate reason at all. I often engage as a simple matter of form or custom. I'm unsure why I decide to mow my lawn just so, it just seems proper to do so, and so I dedicate a part of myself to replicating that pattern. Routines stick in my head and if I don't wake up dead, I'm engaging with them before the sun starts showing each morning. I flop down into fallow hours, too, apparently without good reason. The Muse might find me not exactly napping mid-morning and ask if I'm feeling okay, and I am but something's taken over my mind and I feel compelled to noodle it to ground. I'm unsure why. I frequently stump myself. I could be both the guest and the panel on What's My Line? and feel just fine about that. I'd guess correctly about the same percentage of the time as the real panel might, and wrong often enough to keep the proceedings entertaining.

The Muse and I play a game when we're shopping, one in which we enlist the hapless checker without asking.

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Whinering

Whinering
Randolph Caldecott: Illustration for "The House that Jack Built", from The Complete Collection of Pictures & Songs (1887)
"I'm not sorry for this understanding."

I have a confession to make and an apology to offer my loyal readers. I confess to being an inveterate, though largely closeted, whiner. I'm apt to whine like a petulant five-year old when stymied or otherwise overwhelmed. I'm an embarrassment to myself, especially when my whining slips out in public, such as here, yesterday, when I described my Sequencing challenges. I sincerely apologize for my unseemly behavior. A man my age should be able to hold his water with more dignity than I displayed. In way of explanation, not in any way trying to excuse my outburst, I might explain what my insolence seems to be teaching me. You see, later that day, after letting my frustration fly, I set about organizing the very workbench I'd earlier maligned. I might ascribe my sudden turnaround from stuck to productive as an accidental convergence, though I'm seeing more of a pattern than an isolated incident emerging. It seems to me that my Whinering might have been if not causative, perhaps a pivotal piece of my sudden turnaround. It might have been that once I'd so improperly expressed my frustration, even proclaiming it a normal and perhaps necessary element of any half-decent SettlingInto, my stuckness spell seemed broken and I could proceed less encumbered. My growing self-disgust with my stuckness grew until the stuckness could no longer support itself. My petulance paid off.

I might have found a less publicly humiliating way to chase away my frustration. I usually do,

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Sequencing

Sequencing
Followers of Hieronymous Bosch: The Vision of Tundale (circa. 1520–30)
"I am eating my own dog food."

Back when I taught my Mastering Projects Workshop, I was taken by how casually project sponsors tossed around their project's "vision." I came to call them All Ya Gotta Do Injunctions because they inevitably misrepresented underlying complexity, as if merely spreading wings enabled flight. I tried to prepare project workers for the types of tangles they'd likely encounter when (never if) they tried to nail down these flippant notions into some achievable form. The Muse called these "visions" dormatives, after Gregory Bateson's word for vacuous terms, those dripping with only apparent meaning but lacking any practical interpretation. One can tie one's self up for ever or longer trying to achieve best or deliver to a dormative request. It always becomes an act equivalent to poking a stick into a hornet's nest when trying to transform any visionary demand into something physically possible to produce and, generally speaking, a fool's mission to intend to satisfy its author with any result. Delivering any vision always turns into somewhat of a nightmare, and one of my intentions when creating Mastering Projects had been to help prepare participants to face this simple fact. Project work ain't no bed of roses.

It's one thing to know for certain what always happens but quite another to experience this predicted effect. In fact, forewarned serves as little protection against effects in execution.

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Anvernursery

Anvernursery
Randolph Caldecott: "And the Dish Ran Away with the Spoon",
from Hey Diddle Diddle and Bye, Baby Bunting. London:
George Routledge and Sons. (1882)
"Pups, not Big Dogs."

The Muse and I were married on this day nineteen years ago. This day lives in the opposite of infamy for both us and our families. We remember it as having been a perfect celebration, one of those gatherings where everything fell perfectly into place. More important than our logistics working out, albeit with considerable improvisation, we'd designed the ceremony as an act of community, not merely a presentation. Rather than simply inflict our wedding on anybody, we invited everyone accepting our invitation to find something to contribute, some means to engage such that they might feel as though they were more a part of the business than mere witness to it. I'll never forget The Muse's aged Aunt Lillian cleaning up the ferns alongside the gazebo or the last minute run Rich and I made to a local nursery to buy some mulch, for cripes sake, to clean up the pond border. We'd invited our friend James to fly over from Seattle to chef the festivities and The Muse's sisters, each accomplished in the kitchen, pitched in, though if I remember correctly, James in his role of chef at times took that big knife he held a little too literally.

We bought whole Copper River Sockeye Salmon and flats of local strawberries and about a ton of fresh asparagus and spinach, all sourced that very morning from local growers and suppliers, the menu as representative of the season in this valley as was ever devised.

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Dreading

Dreading
William Blake: The Casting of the Rebel Angels into Hell -
illustration to Milton's 'Paradise Lost' (1808, pen and watercolour on paper)

"One day I might come to behave as I know I should."

Dreading serves as the primary moderating force in my life here. Were it not for Dreading, I might run rather roughshod into every opportunity, and only fools ever run into opportunities or burning buildings. I tell myself that I'm "considering" or "planning", though I'm really quite actively procrastinating, albeit in a decidedly passive-aggressive manner.

I did not really want to replant those tulip bulbs I'd removed when weeding out the front walk garden beds, the work just needed doing by someone.

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PuttingUp

PuttingUp
Wassily Kandinski: Various Actions (1941)
" … partly just reward and partly well-deserved punishment …"

Any half-decent exile includes much hopeful longing, many if-onlies. "If only the damned deer weren't everywhere, we could have a real garden instead of this make-shift deck one." If-onlies provide a valuable service. They keep open active aspiration, which proves incredibly nourishing to any soul feeling stranded on a seeming desert island. Some exile years utterly depend upon longing to remain survivable. Dreams predominated some months, delusions, others, but overall, we experienced exile as a sort of out-of-body experience. We compensated by perhaps over-inhabiting our future and under-appreciating our present. Now that we're back and SettlingInto, we no longer have the option of living so far ahead of ourselves. We've entered a stage where the primary barriers to our dreams coming truer lie in our hands and not just an indistinct future's. We've entered the Put Up or Shut Up stage of dreaming. Nothing's any longer sufficiently resolved by talking about what we intend to do, but only by accomplishing something. Sure, excuses still cling and linger. After a dozen years gone, even those newer habits seem hard-ish to break, but it's now our job to take those reins and ride for all we're worth. We're in The PuttingUp Stage.

It seems fundamentally unfair to criticize any action I was not directly involved in, not that, like anyone, I haven't frequently engaged in this.

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Plantings

Plantings
Pacino di Buonaguida: Illuminated manuscript detail of a miniature of a garden or flowery field referring to 'Prato' in Tuscany. (circa 1302-1343)
" … fresh beginnings rather than an irreparable ends."

SettlingInto roughly divides into stages which only become distinct later. In the moment, I find myself focusing upon the body of my present effort without very much considering whatever comes next. We created no grand master plan, not even a sketchy one, preferring to follow feelings or intuition or something to produce an emergent garden. God creating Eden was probably no different. This strategy leads to what might have been predictable blockages in the flow, encouraging certain discontinuities which appear as surprises which might delight or frustrate. A few days seem inevitably lost to gear switching, simple confusion, or natural hesitancy. I tend to get lost sometimes, and not just garden variety lost but the second-order kind where I'm not only lost but also lost to the fact that I'm lost. This past week, the tracks have been throwing off a few sparks as if my smooth running train might jump its rails. Soil preparation, the digging portion of the production, essentially done, it came time for planting and I caught myself hesitating, even procrastinating in the face of this fresh phase. We consequently find a backlog of plant purchases piling up beneath the apricot tree awaiting placement and, as usual, this situation seems to be all on me.

I suppose that a skilled therapist might find my hesitancy's root cause.

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Hoops

Hoops
Wassily Kandinsky: Squares with Concentric Circles (1913)
"
I'll retell the story often and bore everyone but myself with it."

The Bakery closes at three pm on Saturday and does not open again until 8am Wednesday. It's worth the wait, but its eccentric schedule makes it impossible for me to get fresh bread on a whim. I need to plan ahead. Similar story with the butcher, who closes Sundays and Mondays. The greengrocer closes at six on Fridays, opening again at 7:30 Sunday morning. I can always head for one of the godless supermarkets where I have to settle for something mass produced, but I'd rather support the local operations worth frequenting, so I maintain an ever-increasing number of special calendars. The nursery's open Sunday in season, but closed both Monday and Tuesday. The other nursery's closed on Saturday but otherwise open every day. County offices close at 4pm. Nobody keeps regular hours anymore.

SettlingInto demands some jumping through such Hoops.

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StrangeAttractings

StrangeAttractings
Wassily Kandinsky, Painting with Green Center (1913)


"That whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent." Ludwig Wittgenstein

" … all influence, no substance."

Were I to follow Wittgenstein's advice, I wouldn't say much. Many might argue that this outcome would seem far superior to the present alternative, myself included some mornings. I have felt moved, however, to attempt to consider some StrangeAttractings SettlingInto sparks, though I hold no clear description or cogent explanation, for their presence seems real enough to attract me, though the particulars continue to escape me. I suspect that I'm engaging with some sort of field here, that the strong sense of an abiding absence during exile, even though I continued to remain just as present there as I ever had been anywhere, just in a different location, was the result of mysterious forces or perhaps a field. I came to feel at home-ish even there, but never felt precisely home. Each place felt more like a rented room encased in finite time, temporary and impermanent. I only ever laid down shallow roots there, though the soils eventually became familiar, as if they were mine, but only for a season. I felt the transplant there, able to survive but not to thrive. Equatorial summers and arctic winters reminded me that I never would become a native. Here feels different and always has, but I cannot explain that difference, not even to myself. I say, half in jest, that gravity just works right here, though I remain dead serious about that statement.

I think it both hilarious and ironic that the field of physics, the study of physical properties, has increasingly become a field of philosophy.

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Doctoring

Doctoring
Herbert Ploberger: Self-Portrait with Opthalmological Models [Selbstbildnis mit Opthamologischen Lehrmodellen] (1928-1930)
"I'll hope for continuing good fortune …"

I'm the guy on which insurance companies make their money, for I have been blessed with generally good health. I exhibit no chronic conditions. My joints remain serviceable. I stopped smoking before it got me, so far at least. I ascribe my condition to a raft of very likely mythical causes. I avoid sodas and always have. I decaffeinated myself at 35, figuring I had better things to do with my body than rev up its engine. I avoid fad diets and acknowledge no allergies other than a recently encroaching one to cats, which I generally deny to myself. I have my faults and hold them close, figuring that they're nobody's business. I'm probably mentally unstable, but what sane person isn't, these days?

That said, I have generally avoided visiting doctors.

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ConnectingInto

ConnectingIn
François Boucher: La Pêche à la Ligne (1757)
" …something deeper and somehow more permanent than just another pedestrian passing."

Shortly before we left our exile in Colorado, I searched for someone to remove a tree on our property. Not personally knowing anyone in the tree removal business I resorted to a Google search which connected me to a service which reminded me what I despised about exile. Without even clicking any links, I had apparently been spotted searching. Within minutes, I received three calls from tree removers volunteering to stop by and provide a free quote for completing the work. I agreed to one fellow's offer and a few minutes later, it couldn't have been more than a half hour, he was in my yard inspecting my tree. Shortly after he left, another guy drove by and, seeing me in my yard, stopped to introduce himself as an expert tree remover. I asked how he found me and he clued me in. He subscribed to a referral service called HomeAdvisor® which provided him leads, at twenty-five bucks a pop. I replied that I'd not requested any service, that he was the second tree remover to just show up. This pissed off the tree guy since he was out twenty-five bucks for a false lead. I promised to call someone to complain for him, but when I called, I connected with just another victim of the pyramid scheme, who worked innocently following leads from he didn't know where. He received a cut of something for each lead he passed on. The whole system seemed astoundingly anonymous and bloodless, relationships without all the bother of relating to or with anyone else, hands-free handshakes.

I decided not to remove the tree.

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Catpanions

Catpanions
Jean Siméon Chardin: The Ray (1725–1726)
"They always greet our returns like delighted children …"

Our cats Max and Molly received the worst of the move. While The Muse and I just had to drive familiar cars for two days, the cats had little car traveling experience and much less predilection to enjoy it. I drugged them with kitty CBD, a cannabis derivative advertised as a mild sedative. It worked, perhaps too well, for they both experienced zombie passages, hardly themselves, with Max crashing hard and Molly uncharacteristically cuddling close with her head in my lap. Both refused breakfast, even kitty treats, after our Ogden overnight, and Molly fought like Hell to avoid returning to her carrier for the walk back to the car. Both survived the trip.

I imagine that for them, our arrival must have seemed like landing in Oz.

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Plumbering

Plumbering
Marcel Duchamp: Fountain (1917)
photograph by Alfred Stieglitz at 291 art gallery following the 1917 Society of Independent Artists exhibit.

"How terribly innovative!"

The First General Rule of Innovation states that the more convenience any innovation delivers, the more difficult that innovation must be to fix should it break. Innovations always eventually break and when they break, they exhibit enantiodromia, the tenacious tendency for things to turn into their opposite. Great convenience becomes even greater inconvenience. Years of steadfast duty erases in an instant, replaced by dread and frustration. Once revered, twice feared and forever thereafter reviled, for the user sees behind the curtain and begins to understand that the innovation only amounted to some well-disguised sleight of hand trick and not really a marvel of modern technology at all. Underneath, it's generally nothing more sophisticated than two sticks rubbing together, and often much, much less. I present our shower faucet as Exhibit A in my argument.

Of all innovations, innovative plumbing tends to fail most spectacularly.

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ScalingInto

ScalingInto
A study of Hygrophorus puniceus, one of the many watercolours of mushrooms created by Beatrix Potter (Circa 1897)
" … only ever really experienced by accident when actively not finding whatever you were seeking."

We tell people that we're going up to hunt morels or pick wild blackcurrants, but we're really ScalingInto. The forests here have not made anyone's top ten lists, thank heavens. As Western forests go, they first appear rather pedestrian, neither imposing nor particularly vast, trees of a uniformly modest size. Fires have ravaged but left lots, little of any of it virgin. Peaks tend toward softly rounded rather than starkly spired and by mid-May, few remain snow-covered. There's a softness to the place not immediately apparent. These woods come into focus from ground level, not any overlook. Down there and inside, it's magical.

I sense in the spring here that I've been plopped into a Beatrix Potter painting.

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Puttering

AmendingCommandment
Umberto Boccioni: The Street Pavers (1914)
" … a place to celebrate recent accomplishments while my next grand obsession lurks in waiting."

I caught myself Puttering yesterday afternoon, after I'd finished screening those long two cubic yards of compost and working it into the soil. That composting effort had consumed two full weeks, since I was also breaking up planting beds, which required much weeding and digging. I felt as though I'd really accomplished something but felt at loose ends. I couldn't quite bring myself to just surrender to sloth upon finishing. I mended a troublesome hose connection and read the installation instructions for that fancy hose caddy, though I concluded that the hose caddy probably constituted a full project and not a proper focus for Puttering. I watered the garden and got the little fountain there working. I hammered an old length of rebar into a rose garden corner to prevent the hose from dragging through the bushes, then I sat and watered some more. It had been a six week sprint since we arrived here, a race against an overly enthusiastic springtime determined to out pace planting season. I had spent most days in the yard, weeding or reconfiguring, and it occurred to me as I folded up the tarp and swept the driveway that the digging portion of our SettlingInto was ending. Time for a little Puttering.

Puttering's not hardly work.

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TheLittlestLie

TheLittlestLie
Alice Rahon: La Conjuration des Antilopes (1943)
"Whatever we decide might well rely upon TheLittlestLie to survive."

I consider self deception a high and necessary art. I doubt that I could start even a little project without believing that better-than-likely would result. I tend to jump in with both feet first rather than taking tentative steps, the better to indenture myself to outcomes. I focus upon my lost investment and force my way forward thanks to my little self deceptions. Before I'm finished, though, I usually face some reckoning, a point beyond which even TheLittlestLie can't crawl forward. I negotiate myself back into some semblance of the truth again before I can continue across the finish line, or so I tell myself. The testimony of anyone as practiced at lying as I've become should properly be thoroughly questioned. My whole life might be rooted within successful self deceptions.

In truth, I've been lucky.

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TheNuclearOption

TheNuclearOption
Elizabeth Jane Gardner Bouguereau: The Shepherd David Triumphant (circa 1895)
"The lion won this round."

I think of myself as shepherding our garden. I suspect that a shepherd's primary talent lies in his patience. Sheep won't hurry. They can be influenced but not through hysterics, same as gardens. Nothing replaces slow and steady when digging dirt or herding sheep. I spend most of my gardening time on my knees in penitent service to the soil which, after all, I am trying to coax into doing my bidding for the season and hopefully longer. I go after the cheatgrass first, removing every trace of rhizome however deep it might run. I loosen the soil before adding compost, peat, and perlite, then I work that in as if I'm mixing cake batter. I might work each bed three or even four times before I'm satisfied enough to water in the result to confirm proper drainage. It's slow work best attempted at a steady pace. I tend to lose full awareness of my immediate surroundings when I'm in my gardening trance. Time loses meaning. I'm in no particular hurry then.

Occasionally a shepherd encounters a mortal enemy to his flock.

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UntanglingWeb

UntanglingWeb
Lancelot Speed: Thick Spider’s Web, Woodcut Illustration from The Red Fairy Book by Andrew Lang (1890)
" … clear evidence that I'm successfully SettlingInto here."

I had just finished soaping myself from head to foot and stepping into the full spray to wash myself off when I spotted something on the shower floor. A spider! One of those fat jumping jobs, crouching between my feet. I thought I might have been transported into the middle of a thought experiment or one of those psychological tests intended to assess character, performed on grad students. "You're soaped up and standing in a shower stall when you notice a spider between your feet. How do you react?" I tried to protect it, but didn't turn off the water. Employing the curious logic common to those in the middle of showers, I did not for a second consider turning off the taps. I felt extremely vulnerable. The shortest distance between there and able to offer assistance seemed to run through at least showering off first and not past immediately turning off the taps before offering assistance, so I tried to stand between the shower head and the spider. The spider, for her part, had crouched down in the classic horror movie cowering position, legs protecting body from the threatening comet. I quickly washed off the soap then turned off the water.

I could not tell while drying myself off whether that spider had survived her ordeal, nor could I quite accept that I had, albeit inadvertently, caused the accident.

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ImposingRhythm

ImposingRhythm
Alice Rahon: Gato Nocturno (circa 1941)
"Whatever I seek also seeks my presence."

Moving in induces temporary anarchy which might well become permanent. The things I cannot find seem to rule my mind, displacing fluid motion. I move around rather than through, so much of living seems a detour. Halfway anywhere and trajectory changes, lengthening each excursion and decimating schedules. Much just happens when it happens or simply fails to occur at all. Lunches missed, suppers delayed, alarm clocks wake randomly or fail to ring at all. Catchup serves as the default condiment and dominant occupation. Hurrider going, slowing progress, with occasional glimpses of limited successes. The remaining unpacking rooms appear to be trending toward permanent mess. Some stuff seems destined for cordoning off, boxes of unmentionables and unthinkables better left for Pandora to sort through. Early days limp by.

Later, shards of schedules emerge to suggest nascent rhythms, different tempos for different tasks, but with an increasing sense of fitness for purpose.

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DejaRue

DejaRue
Enrico Scuri: Euridice recedes into the Underworld (19th century)
"The Muse and I continue SettlingInto our fresh Eden At The End Of One Curious Oregon Trail."

The Muse and I spent the day seeking without finding much reassurance. We were visiting Portland, the city we'd left twenty years before, after we'd realized that we'd very likely never be able to buy a Villa Vatta Schmaltz there. My folks were aging and I imagined that moving close might be of some help to them and also reconnect me to my broader family. Whatever the excuse, we found a suitable house and our meager offer was accepted. We'd purchased our very own money pit and home, one we'd come to love both in spite of itself and because of what we'd done to it. Though we'd be exiled from actually living in it for twelve long dog years—a lifetime, really—we'd one day return to attempt SettlingInto again. Not so with Portland, for we'd abandoned the place as essentially unlivable for us, but we still relied on it as a source of supply and occasional reassurance. Portland had died for us, but we'd still return and try to resurrect it for a long weekend and to visit grandkids, my son and daughter, and old friends and suppliers. Saturday morning had always shown Portland well and left me feeling proud to be a part of it, but with This Damned Pandemic and last year's riots, it stands as hardly a shell of its once energizing former self. I felt every bit like Orpheus attempting to revive Eurydice, and every bit as successful.

The old reliables either exist no more or are closed pending recovery.

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MonauralTyping

MonauralTyping
Vincent Van Gogh: Self-portrait-with bandaged ear (1889)
"I pray we could all be so lucky."

A well-weathered Truck Repair sign appeared on our left as we entered the tiny crossroads town of Biggs, Oregon, dragging what was left of Elizabeth's (our SecondCar) front engine splash guard, which had been rudely torn loose by a traffic cone thrown up by the semi-truck traveling just ahead of us forty miles back. That splash guard, a PVC plate intended to protect delicate under engine parts from road splash, had finally broken loose with a disturbing clatter ten miles earlier. We'd pulled onto the freeway verge to find the guard hanging my a single connector. The Muse suggested that if we just kept driving, it might fall off all by itself, and after considering our location, we agreed to slowly continue our journey. We were nearly ten miles from the tinier town of Rufus, which might have a mechanic. At slowed freeway speed with fourways flashing, the plate seemed capable of floating above the road surface so we rattled into Rufus, but found no mechanic waiting. I took this opportunity to limp down one of the few remaining sections of the original Columbia River Highway toward Biggs, where, I reasoned, a mechanic might await our arrival, since, as the name implies, it was Biggs, small but bigger. As we entered the town, that sign appeared.

I slowed and turned off onto a rough gravel side road, dragging that plate once it lost lift as we slowed our speed.

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Lyzdexic

Lyzdexic
Leonardo da Vinci, Annunciation (1472)
"I'd honestly rather be nobody else but me, even if I cannot always reliably remember how to spell anything."

I had a few spare minutes, so I decided to stop by the library and register for a library card. I'd read the prior week that our little library had finally opened again after more than a year closed to visitors and it sits only a few blocks from The Villa, so, why not? I found a parking place in the shade and walked up the hosta-lined path to the back door just as if I was family. I found the door locked. I studied the Covid-19 compliance sign several times, each reading leaving me baffled. The sign clearly stated that the library was open between nine and seven and it was twelve fifteen. I tried prying open the doors, certain some mechanical failure had just locked me out. I read the sign again, reaching the same conclusion. Then, a woman opened the door from inside and asked if she could help me. I told her that I just wanted to register for a library card and she replied that the library was presently closed, but that I could come back after 1pm and fill out the form then or I could complete it online anytime. I told her that I would fill out the online form, though I already knew that I would not be able to complete it. I looked at the sign again and that time, it clearly announced the open hours of one to seven, not nine to seven. It seemed as though gremlins had just played a trick on me. Later, attempting to complete the online registration form left me stymied, just like most online forms leave me. I'd have to register in person later.

I bought a new lawn mower this week.

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Haircuts

Haircuts
“You have much gold upon your head,”
They answer’d all together:
“Buy from us with a golden curl.”
She clipp’d a precious golden lock,
She dropp’d a tear more rare than pearl,
Then suck’d their fruit globes fair or red:

From
Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti
Illustration by
Arthur Rackham for 1933 edition
"Now they want to sell me product."

I feel fortunate to have been raised in the fifties. Yes, I remain painfully aware of how down right backward we were then, but we still had barber shops. Now, we might be waking up, but we seem surrounded by salons and stylists rather than barbers. For many, this evolutionary shift seems welcome. I, myself, have preferred the more artistic hand of a competent stylist over the clipper-wielding barbaric barber, but things have gotten out of hand. Finding a competent stylist remains a daunting challenge and once found, definite loyalties take over. As with many trades, the best have full schedules and only reluctantly accept new clients, though wannabes appear in legions. One cannot tell upon first encounter whether he's lucked into a skilled one or a pretender, though certain tells suggest. SettlingInto demands that I find a competent stylist, but nobody can push the sort of happy accident this entails. It's at best a random walk at first.

I should explain that I do not like getting haircuts.

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Worlds

Worlds
Godefridus Schalcken: Young Boy, Dressed in a Blue Robe, Holding a Lighted Torch (1692)
" … I return to my world, which I never left, to dream my own dreams by myself …"

E Pluribus Unum—out of many, one—the motto of these so-called united states, has always seemed a troublesome notion to me. I see great and often glorious variety and wonder what benefit homogeny might bestow. I take some pride in remaining unclassifiable, a lone wolf, a member of no uniform group, unwilling to become a member, as Groucho famously grumbled, of any group inviting him to join. Further, it seems to me that we do not, as widely insisted, share a world, but that we each inhabit a world, indeed a universe, unique to us. I admit to considerable overlap, swarming recursions of Venn diagrams, but that for each, the resulting world seems unique to each, and not nearly as shared as might be naively presumed. The difficulties of life shift if we presume great difference rather than essential similarity. No One Best Way could possibly prevail. Charity might spring from understanding that we're each inescapably isolated and not part of some presumed larger whole, and never could be. We might have motive to come together if we understand that we're inescapably apart and isolated. Out of many, regardless. We inhabit Worlds together, not a single place.

My history seems different from yours.

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DiastolicDays

DiastolicDays
Jackson Pollock: Autumn Rhythm (1950)
"It took me more than I took it."

Every once in a while I rediscover that I was not born a machine. Each rediscovery seems original, like this essential dichotomy had never before occurred to me. Following each revelation, I quickly slip back into another flowish state, only to later be rudely awakened from it again. I progress in such fits and starts, as if I had not quite mastered my clutch pedal. I haven't mastered much. I might reach out with enthusiasm, but I tend to eventually overreach, never certain when enough amounts to enough. I prefer to exceed my own expectations, or try to. I make optimistic plans, which might be the best way to disappoint myself in actual execution. I have never been a reasonable person.

I know I've exceeded my design capabilities only after exceeding them, and the cues usually fool me.

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MuckingUp

MuckingUp
Frédéric Bazille - The Little Gardener (1866-1867)
"I feel most myself when I'm immersed within that alluring somewhere else."

I emit a sound very similar to that expelled by an Olympic weightlifter pressing five hundred pounds whenever I stand up after a long day gardening. This groan does not accompany any particular discomfort. I'm not in pain. I feel a little stiffness in my back, sure, but I feel more grateful for than regretful about this sensation. It means something. My muscles, too long accustomed to exile's idleness, seem to be waking up and they ache with satisfaction. I cannot seem to help myself. My right hand, the one that wields my hand plow, goes a little numb sometimes, but quickly regains sensation. It has yet to hamper my two and a half typing fingers. Normal neuropathy. I filled the enormous yard waste two-wheeler about a half hour after last week's collection and I have at least a half bin already backed up for next week's load. I'm dumping some yard waste in with the regular garbage just to rid myself of it. I some days prey for a pickup.

I fancy myself an old fashioned gardener, my one more recent concession having been an electric mower which I've been borrowing. I remain still frozen at the prospect of actually owning one.

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ByThePeople

ByThePeople
Mark Rothko: Street Scene, (1937)
"Who said I don't need to?"

Marble staircases soft as butter underfoot reveal a modest interior. Modest yet massive, as the stone lends its cold gravitas to this public place. Delicate glass shades gilded fixtures. Our county courthouse was built by public subscription. Individuals pledged personal funds to erect it back when boosterism amounted to expressing personal pride of place, of ownership, and a confidence that this corner of the state really would become something someday, that, however otherwise unlikely, we'd eventually grow into feeling worthy of this space. I'm still working on that last part. Before it became popular to perceive a government created by we, the people, as a nefarious other—a self-revulsion difficult to contemplate—we sought to unite us, however ineptly, and sometimes succeeded, this wedding cake building stands as a monument to hopeful optimism.

The Muse and I are registering to vote.

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LittleThings

LittleThings
Behzād: Yusuf and Zulaikha [Joseph chased by Potiphar's wife] (1488)
A Persian Miniature- A LittleThing
"The lovely Beaux Arts theater stands empty but still as beautiful as it ever was."

No Colossus of Rhodes guards our harbor. Heck, we don't even have a harbor. At night, the first evidence that you're approaching a small city tends to be the lights glaring up from the penitentiary, which produce a false sunrise on the eastern horizon all night long. During daylight, a vast debris field of derelict train cars surrounds two long-abandoned grain elevators. A single tall-ish tower of a building looks out of place beside blocks of much shorter structures, some dating back much more than a hundred years, but many evidence that the fifties and sixties passed through here and set down roots. A few motels flank the few exits from our short miles of four lane designed to route traffic around rather than into here. The welcome seems less hostile than indifferent. Few cues immediately suggest that this place is different from any other dusty western city. The differences lie deeper, within LittleThings.

A local college whose sports teams were until recently called The Missionaries maintains the obligatory Gothic architecture section of town.

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ComingTrue

ComingTrue
Jean-Honoré Fragonard: The Swing [French: L'Escarpolette],
original title The Happy Accidents of the Swing
[French: Les Hasards heureux de l'escarpolette]. (c. 1767)

"I hope that I never successfully catch up to anything but continuing pursuit."

Few experiences seem so damning as a decent blessing. Give me a dream ComingTrue and a raft of childhood training kicks in, lessons cautioning about hatching chickens, gift horses, and turning worms. The subtext of all of them seemed to focus on the inevitable fickleness of fate. Good luck prefaces bad. Success breeds failure. Lucky streaks end. Eventually, we're all damned. My parents were no pessimists, but they'd lived through The Great Depression, experiencing how wishing doesn't always make things so and just how cruel life can sometimes feel. They'd counsel us kids to never prop our hopes up too high. I guess they were lovingly trying to prevent us from injuring ourselves when (not if!) we fell. The lesson I took away told me to stay low to the ground, not precisely crawling everywhere on my belly, but by all means, staying off high horses. It probably didn't help that when I was five, a neighbor invited me to ride her enormous horse, which I promptly fell off of. We ultimately teach ourselves life's lessons, often by misconstruction.

I should not feel at all surprised if I instinctively duck when I experience good luck.

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MistInformation

MistInformation
Caspar David Friedrich: Mountain Landscape
[Felsenlandschaft im Elbsandsteingebirge] (1822-1823)

"Our truths seem no more self evident than they were ever the truth."

I reckon that about half of what I believe might well prove false over time. My reckoning does not resolve the underlying errors. It just keeps me watchful. At any time, new information might undermine one of my more fundamental beliefs. I release these with little evident elegance, usually by means of mentally kicking and screaming in denial before relenting. I do not always relent. Consequently, I live beneath a true patchwork of notions, some fact-based and most perhaps firmly rooted in emotions. I hold my convictions, some more lightly than others, but my belief system, probably like yours, stands like a teetering house of cards. My cognition, the order-making part of my orientation, rarely questions the basis behind any of my beliefs. Most might well be little more than mist, but they still work for most intents and purposes. I'm prejudiced and I know it, though I only rarely ever feel anything like a brunt of its effects. I'm no scientist, no professional skeptic, no cynic, neither. I hold my truths as self-evident, even and perhaps especially the ones which never really qualified as truths and whose self-evidence only works when I'm not trying to explain them to anyone, even myself. I probably base about half of my of understanding of this world on MistInformation, perhaps much more.

I do not feel especially cursed by my condition, but mostly more blessed because of it.

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Pariahing

Pariahing
Henry Fuseli: The Night-Hag visiting the Lapland Witches (1796)
" … we'll show them and harm ourselves."

An appalling ineptitude has taken over the delicate art of Pariahing, the practice of fulfilling the many duties and responsibilities pariahs have been called to practice throughout the ages. I write this morning to clarify these expectations by enumerating the many shortcomings I've been noticing of late. Our recently unseated President, who might have better exemplified pure pariah had he been better informed in the details of his chosen profession, stands as perhaps the prominent example of how Pariahing's not to be done in practice, for he blundered his golden opportunity and encouraged a raft of fresh but sadly inept pretenders into this delicate profession. A decent pariah remains first and foremost unaware of his designation. One cannot simply mimic and expect to get away with the performance. I cannot over-stress the ultimate importance of obliviousness, for this one element seems key. One must never suspect that they are the pariah everyone's whispering about. Deliberate Pariahing's an oxymoron. Still, even the oblivious seem in need of a little coaching and I will attempt that task here, though I understand from this outset that it's very unlikely to do any good and might render me into the pariah I'm coaching.

My heartfelt reaction to the recognition that some held me as a pariah was, as it properly should have been, denial and deflection, for I could not bring myself to believe it.

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SoapOperaing

SoapOperaing
Henry Fuseli: Oedipus Cursing His Son, Polynices (1786)
"I try to remember that they're just as actively making up stories about me …"

When we were in exile, The Muse and I received periodic updates on the ongoing soap opera back home, though we were only rarely cast in any direct role in the performance. We could watch, amused or critical, from our distance and tisk or cheer as each summary inspired us. We lived, I guess, as relative gods there in that we could do little more than sit on our cloud and watch the play unfold beneath us, and we experienced a distinct beneath down there, for we were above those freys. Not that we were any better than any of the direct performers, but we could watch with unavoidable detachment. Of course we imagined that had we been there to exert influence, some of the more tragic outcomes might have been avoided, but we dared not dwell on the guilt we might have felt at missing the performances without sacrificing our already tenuous sanity. Being away's hard. Harboring begrudgement about it, only worse.

Returning, though, we're immediately cast into more active roles in the ongoing passion play.

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FortuneTelling

FortuneTelling
E
ugène Delacroix - Lycurgus Consulting the Pythia (Circa 1835-45)
"I'm reaping precisely what I've sown."

Moving injects mystery back into a life. Like shuffling a deck of cards, the mere act of boxing up possessions transforms them into both more and different from whatever they previously seemed. Perhaps the act of boxing increases their potential which, through continual proximity, had before grown narrow and familiar. The labeling helps amplify the mystery. In a packing frenzy, we did not provide the most descriptive possible labeling, choosing to broadly classify contents and likely target room within which they belonged. Quite a few of the boxes contained contraband which could not quite qualify as kosher according to a stricter reading of our agreement with the movers. Prominent among those were the contents of the many, many boxes simply labeled Basement Pantry, for they largely contained home-canned jars of various provisions: Our precious tomatoes and their variants, roasted, nectar, and juice; My sacred stocks: goose, chicken, veal, and beef; The Muse's jams and jellies: Mirabella, apricot, apple, and apple butter; along with various and sundry leftovers from my over-large batches of beans and stews: pease porridge, pork and beans, green chile chicken stew, and quite a few never properly labeled quarts which appear to contain barf.

These boxes sat for a month moping outside our basement pantry, an unheated corner of the venerable basement featuring crooked wooden shelves, crumbling concrete walls, and a perfect year-round wine cellar temperature.

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Reclamating

Reclamating
Wassily Kandinsky: Picture II, Gnomus.
(Stage set for
Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition in Friedrich Theater, Dessau) (1928)
" … we're encased within this richer story …"

I say nothing profound when I reflect that we came to reclaim a home that was no longer here. We'd helped make it disappear over our long exile years. I'd returned one spring to strip the exterior to bare wood and repaint, with considerable help from my brother, his now deceased wife, and several other family members and friends. We replaced the clunky old furnace in abstentia, long distance, and by all appearances, were somewhat taken advantage of by the contractor, though our air conditioner could probably cool a typical open air baseball stadium. We replaced the roof and relocated gutters and removed and repoured front sidewalks and steps. We returned to "help" remodel the kitchen, six weeks of surprise and discovery resulting in a uniquely satisfying space. Amy's son Graig completed a thousand improvements, sometimes in lieu of paying rent and sometimes because he just could not bear not to do it. He replaced living room floors with lovely vinyl planking leftover from our venerable local hotel's remodeling. His partner Shar painted walls and worked the gardens into something far more sustainable than what we'd left. Though we're undoing some of their changes, the bones of the place are different. I keep bumping into remnants of the former place as we reinhabit what's left of it.

My legs remember the cadence of the stairways, the basement set completely different from the grand set sweeping up to the second floor bedrooms and offices.

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Eatin'Grass

Eatin'Grass
Wassily Kandinski: Mild Process (1928)
"Ah, progress!"

I feel proud to report that I have become a master at another immature technology. Immature technologies seem to find me and I reliably imprint upon them, losing any prior ability to get along without them. I come to depend upon them in symbiotic ardor though they never mature beyond the point where they work in any way reliably. I won't mention the most prominent of these, our ever-humbling internet, for its become too ubiquitous to warrant even a passing mention. Today, I want to explain my relationship with the ever-humiliating weed eater, a garden implement of sorts which has never once so far in its surprisingly long history, lived up to its promise or its promotion. It was a brilliant idea which was apparently never destined to grow into a viable product yet still somehow managed to become ubiquitously popular. Everyone's got one and everyone figures that they're the only one who never quite figured out how to use it. Mastery of such machinery can be tricky because it does not translate into the usual fluid use of it, but demands a more Zen-like acceptance of its inherent limitations. Mastery means accepting such technology for what it is, not what it could never become, and humbly continuing to engage with it anyway.

The weed eater, one of the very few powered tools I allow in my garage, seems simple enough on the surface.

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Momenting

Momenting
Attributed to Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio: Allegory (circa 1498)
"What's left seems immediately lightened, but only because it is."

Back when I was still trying to teach people how to manage projects, interested clients often asked if my work scaled. They'd seen it work with a small team, but they hoped that it might be distributed more broadly. One prospective client proudly proclaimed that he had 33,000 people who desperately needed whatever it was I was offering. "Does it scale?" he asked, without even the barest hint of irony. I clearly recall how much I wanted to reply with a sanguine, "Of course," but, of course, I could not. I'd never attempted to mass distribute whatever I dealt in. It had not occurred to me even though I'd been exposed in business school to the cherished notion of mass production. I was not dealing with widgets, but more personal stuff. Some clients wanted me to train their trainers to broaden exposure to my ideas, but the trainers they presented for training carried medieval notions of their role, most firmly believing that they would be passing knowledge rather than encouraging individuals who probably already knew much better than any trainer ever could just what they needed to succeed. Mass distribution works best when filling empty boxes. I ultimately came to accept that my only ethical response to the scale question was some variant of, "Of course not."

Science, too, struggles with questions of scale.

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WeeHours

WeeHours
Henry Fuseli: Titania and Bottom (Circa 1790)
"A single white feather floats down into the yard …"

I follow my cell phone's light down the stairs, careful that I don't disturb The Muse with glaring or trip over one of the cats, who appear like phantoms, hopeful for treats. My day has started. I reset the furnace and put on a coat, for this old place grows chilly overnight and it takes a while to warm back up. I distribute kitty treats, usually on top of the kitchen table. A bad habit, The Muse insists, but one I feel no urgency to break. I find a seat by the tall front window looking out into the street and the T-shaped intersection that violates every possible feng shui principle. There's never any traffic. The street light sheds more light into my eyes than down onto the road surface. The cats will shortly join me staring out into the not yet morning. Two or three hours stretch before me, time before The Muse gets up when I am the undisputed master of this small universe. I read through the papers in response.

An hour later, sun still not even hinting at ever returning, I set aside my papers.

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Thwartal

Thwartal
Illustration from Agostino Ramelli’s Theatre of Machines (1588)
"A moment of reverent silence in homage, please."

Thanks to recent advancements in technology, I yesterday renewed a prescription in a mere three and a half hours. The process fully respected my need for privacy and also afforded me the opportunity to catch up on some reading, as I spent much of the time waiting, on hold. A so-called portal stands as the centerpiece of this marvelous system, for it serves as the sole access point for contacting my primary care physician. Should I need to send my nurse practitioner a message, for instance, I need not simply send her a message but rather I'm directed to log into the portal and send it from within there, where editing software apparently lifted from an early prototype of an actual online text editing system circa 1993, awaits my request. From there, my message, theoretically, will be easily routed to the practitioner's queue for review and response. The whole deal depends upon my logging into the portal. The sole design flaw seems to be that the portal makes it impossible for me to log into it due to technical limitations like it just does not work. I usually just call and explain that the danged portal denied me access again and attempt to leave an actual message with the practitioner, and this tactic sometimes even works, though not always. It does work considerably more reliably than does the portal, which I appreciatively refer to as The Thwartal.

The Thwartal exists for the apparent purpose of denying users access to it.

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HomeComings

HomeComings
Winslow Homer: The Dinner Horn (Blowing the Horn at Seaside), 1870
"The rest of that return trip flowed like liquid chocolate …"

The first arrival, that homecoming accompanied, if only in my head, by a small parade and speeches, sure seemed like the true arriving. A Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock sort of moment, but reflect for a second on just where those pilgrims landed. Not in a familiar neighborhood, but on a rocky and unpromising, utterly alien shoreline which they only intended to call their home. It was certainly not their home yet. They hadn't earned any right to claim ownership except for the fact that its then current inhabitants didn't believe in ownership. They were into stewardship instead, and generations of their people had earned the right to call it home by dint of more than their presence there. I imagine that later, ten years on, a pilgrim left to conduct some business back with the backers in England and, upon returning, experienced more of a homecoming, the first of a likely succession of them replayed wherever leaving then returning again. Homecoming sort of requires a home to come into, and cannot be rightfully claimed or experienced until returning after an absence.

And so it came to pass, that after three weeks of SettlingInto, The Muse and I left to visit family over the weekend.

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Hotel

Hotel
Edward Hopper: Hotel by a Railroad (1952)
"Hostility demands so very little of us other than that we swallow hard, bear it, and tip it a fiver."

Though I've stayed scores of nights in dozens of hotels, I retain romantic notions about them. They're largely unrequited. I've spent sleepless nights in spare flophouses and also in four star suites and have found their similarities more prominent than their differences. Some rooms barely qualified as closets and others had the bathroom down the hall, but all seemed more similar than different, each of a common class. Hotels proclaim themselves The Hospitality Industry, but they might more truthfully advertise themselves as comprising The Hostility Industry, for a certain disdain for guests seems common from marbled lobby operations to caged-in cashier joints. I suppose this result eventually just comes with the territory. Prolonged proximity to humanity can sour optimism with a seemingly well-earned cynicism, I suspect. Everything has a price and that price tends to be set at about two and a half times the going rate elsewhere, due to unavoidable hospitality charges and largely well-founded preemptive presumptions that the typical guest holds no reasonable recourse, not to mention municipal fees and taxes. Dollars and fivers exchange hands in surreptitious silence as bags are carried and taxis called. They "Sir" me an obsequious lot. This leaves me feeling more suspicious than welcomed.

For those who strive to inhabit a pedestal, I suppose hotel living's a dream come true.

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Patriarching

Patriarching
Umberto Boccioni: Synthèse du dynamisme humain [Synthesis of Human Dynamism] (1913)
"Agelessly aging."

No formal course of study prepared me to fulfill this role, though a lifetime of distracted observation seems to have at least prepared me to recognize myself cast to perform in it, however otherwise unprepared I might feel. The prior generation gone, I remain the last male standing. Father and father-in-law passed, I'm now the one who drives to Portland in an old person's car to see his offspring and his children. I'm the one staying in that hotel. I'm the one charged with imperfectly remembering when. It's my head shaking when noticing that another something's gone to Hell. I'm the one bemoaning the incessant gentrifying that chased away the innocent city that once used to be but stands no longer. I insist that an actual shark, teeth gleaming, was driving that shark car to utterly disbelieving but secretly appreciating grandchildren. I'm the guy who's funny but seems sort of unreliable. I speak of far away places nobody else can really relate to. I've earned a certain respect, I suppose, if only by dint of my longevity. I speak with an expected hollow authority. I drive like a hayseed.

But Patriarching's no insignificant thing.

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FutureTension

FutureTension
Umberto Boccioni: The City Rises (1910)
" … such issues get "disgusted," a pitch perfect description of the human condition."

A subscription to the local paper seems essential to life in this small city. I've long written letters to the editor, engaging in a decades-long arm's-length conversation with my fellow citizens, some of whom complained when they published my letters sent from Takoma Park, Maryland or Golden, Colorado, but the editor explained that I am a hometown boy. The letters run from apparently originally scribbled in fat crayon by someone unfamiliar with the difference between more and fewer to third person twice-removed scolds from retired college professors. All letters are welcomed and almost all published, though they rejected my back-handed ode to Gerard Manley Hopkins "I Think That I Will Never Know Anything As Lovely As A Light Pole" written to complain about the power company savaging our lovely trees. I rewrote it as rhyming prose and in it went. I probably qualify as a frequent offender and feel damned proud of my contribution to civil discourse and exasperation. I take particular pride, like many submitters apparently do, poking at the other side, though I prefer a certain subtlety when I chide. The outright attack shows little tact and probably fails to impress or convince anyone it's actually aimed at. I prefer a certain humbly-professed ignorance as if I didn't actually know best, though I usually believe that I do know better than the fat crayon folks.

Most days, the paper features three or four fresh letters.

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Filament

Filament
Santiago Ramón y Cajal: Sphenoidal cortex in a 25-day old infant (circa 1929)
" … it probably well-serves us if we can supplant our desire to know for certain with at least a little continuing faith."

In a perhaps apocryphal account of Edison's search for a workable Filament for his envisioned light bulb, his research team investigated around 6,000 substances, many of them carbonized, ranging from bamboo into complex metal alloys. His research involved engaging in an almost infinite search destined to almost always disappoint. I suppose faith in his envisioned outcome kept him going, that and a certain hubris he was well known to possess. Our SettlingInto has taken on similar proportions as we try on various alternative arrangements of our same old possessions, none of which seem immediately correct. Our faith—in turns flagging and surging—in ever finding that perfect combination fuels us forward. All infinite searches must be faith-based initiatives. The old advice about simply envisioning a future then moving toward it guided by mysterious Laws of Attraction amounts to aging New Age claptrap and probably hurts much more than it helps. Infinite searches, those engaged in within innumerable emerging parameters, cannot be successfully concluded by either hope or rigorous method, but probably only by means of Happy Accident, like Edison's Filament discovery most likely was.

Happy Accidents seem invulnerable to engineering discipline and rigorous process.

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Staying@HomeSyndrome

Staying@HomeSyndrome
William Crozier: Rainbow's End (1965-70)
"I'm taking my mask and hand sanitizer along for reassurance."

In April 1952 in Asheboro, NC, John Phillips, an eighteen year old black man, was arrested on sexual assault charges. Sent to the state mental hospital, he was classified as a "moron" with the mind of a seven year-old child. His lawyer entered a guilty plea and a judge sentenced him to life imprisonment. By 1991, Philips had become the state's longest serving prisoner and his family and inmate rights' groups were lobbying for his release. Interviewed more recently in prison, Philips insisted, "I ain't going nowhere. Too many fools out there." He had become that rarest of rare exceptions, a prisoner who refused his own freedom. I relate to him this morning.

Today's the day I've waited for since fourteen months ago when I first entered sequestration from This Damned Pandemic.

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OverDoing

OverDoing
Ugo Mulas: James Rosenquist, New York (1964)
"What other choice have I got if I want to develop good judgement?"

My enthusiasm easily overwhelms my ability. I imagine a task completed and, thanks to decades of training and experience, I hold the self-discipline to see that task through to completion without noticing that I might have been OverDoing. I'm rewarded by an aching back and an unwanted slack day as I recover from the self-inflicted injury. Nothing serious, just the usual products of excess: achy back, swollen hand, gripy knees. So much demands doing and I've been aching for years to engage, though a man my age might not expect to immediately bounce back as he used to. It daily becomes clearer that I have yet to develop adequate judgement to determine what's reasonable to expect of myself. I cannot quite find the rhythm of this place yet, but it's only been a couple of short weeks in unusual circumstances since we started SettlingInto. A rhythm might emerge over longer time, once I've addressed initial imperatives. Once in maintenance mode, I should be up to the challenges, or so I tell myself. I can't know yet.

An old adage insists that three instances of bad judgement produce an accident, and that the only reliable way to produce good judgement comes from surviving a few accidents.

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Unmirroring

Unmirroring
Jan van Eyck: The Arnolfini Portrait (Giovanni Arnolfini (?) and his Wife) (1434)
"Even absent mirrors reflect something."

In modern America, place has come to hold little meaning, for technology allows us to mirror many perspectives. I'm not tied to the view out my window as my forebears were, but I can choose to peek into a seemingly infinite variety of world views, though I mostly choose only a narrow array of them. Between television and the (damned) internet, I hold access to innumerable alternative realities. I might not have access to actually experience Springtime In Paris this year, but I can certainly get glimpses of the place anytime I want. Our houses sometimes seem like containment vessels more than dwellings, with mirrors and screens standing in for actually first-hand seeing anything. Fortunately, back in 1907, the designers of The Villa Vatta Schmaltz were shortsighted enough to fail to build a room fit for television, so we're still undecided where to place ours. We have not even connected the (damned) thing yet and do not miss its distracting presence. Mirrors, at the current stage of moving into, still sit in their boxes, so, consequently, I can't even gawk at my own reflected image as I move around the place. I spend considerable time looking out windows absorbing an actual sense of place, these days, a rare form of grace.

I realize that I've spent much of my life mirroring.

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FutureClash

FutureClash
Umberto Boccioni: Visioni Simultanee [Simultaneous Visions] (1912)
" … I'll settle for what the present offers and keep dreaming forward."

Future spends most of its existence anticipating, though a few significant events find present and future encountering each other. These meetings sometimes produce sparks, for I expend little energy moderating my visions. I tend to spawn them in almost exclusively expansive forms, suspending those physical laws reserved for presents and pasts. In my future, anything might happen, and I cast even uncertainty as less of a barrier than I should probably expect it to be. I can revel there, suspended within my Utopian projections, and usually believe that my imagined future waits impatiently for my arrival. Reality, the traditional buzz-kill of dedicated dreamers, steps in somewhere to throw some cold water on the dreamer, though not even a freezing Bucket-Challenge intervention tends to blunt the more alluring imaginings.

In this culture, we learn early to firmly believe in The Future, for it seems to hold our destiny, our ultimate achievements.

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StuffSettling

StuffSettling
M.C. ESCHER: Still Life and Street (1937)
" … we inherit the puzzles we probably need."

The Muse and I might have forgotten that SettlingInto requires negotiating settlements, not only between us, but the stuff insists upon participating, too. This creates the most curious collaboration, for regardless of how much The Muse or I might prefer a particular placement, the stuff retains a voice, and one likely to trump our best collective judgement. This process leaves many boxes in extended suspension and negotiations continuing ad nauseam and beyond. Even should we manage to quickly place something, the stuff retains the right to re-open negotiation, making for a several stage process for some items. Many boxes represent certain contention and so are set aside to open later or never. The idea that we might quickly empty boxes and just get on with a settled life here now clearly seems out of any question. We'll be living in extended suspension as a necessary condition for ultimately SettlingInto, as our StuffSettling ultimately dominates the production.

The Muse has been installing shelf paper, by tradition her obsession when arranging a kitchen.

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Stymie

Stymie
Maurits Cornelis Escher: Convex and Concave (1955)
" … fresh stories can successfully reframe even old and entrenched expectations."

The peeing boy fountain in the backyard pond, reminiscent of the famous one in Brussels, this week started exhibiting symptoms of possible prostate problems. His flow, recently manic, had slowed to an unrespectable trickle. I called The Muse's son, who had replumbed the guy during his tenancy here, and he drove over to 'splain the pipes. He introduced me to his very clever ramrod contraption and demonstrated disassembly and deployment, but the trickle persisted. Yesterday, I decided to conduct a more thorough exam, pulling the pump and subjecting all hoses to the high pressure water treatment. Each hose in turn produced more than adequate volume. I scrubbed off the slimy pump, then, in a sudden sleet storm, hooked all the parts back together. Hardly a trickle. Realizing that I'd just entered The Stymie Zone, I turned off the pump and retreated to someplace warm to dry off and consider my situation.

This was not an unfamiliar experience here, where chores roughly separate into two broad categories: those which can eventually be successfully completed and those that never will.

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LastWeek

LastWeek
Max Klinger: The Release of Prometheus (late 19th–early 20th century)
"I wonder who I will have turned out to be after I lift my veil."

Thirteen months ago this week, I half-heartedly decided to lock myself down for the recommended two weeks as my patriotic contribution to combating The Damned Pandemic. I figured, if unenthusiastically, that it might be the least I could do and still feel as though I'd contributed to the betterment of humanity. I would not be performing any heroic open heart surgeries or volunteering to scrub ventilators in any hospital, and it would only be for a fortnight, just long enough to break the thread of infection, then we'd be back to normal. Thirteen months later, I'm still sequestering, which means I stay mostly at home, going out only when absolutely necessary or to take a sanity-promoting drive to nowhere. I've become quite the hermit since, each week extending my original two week commitment to contribute my little bit toward the continuation of our society. This might well prove to be my LastWeek under such quarantine.

I say "might well prove to be my LastWeek" because I hold the same level of certainty about the ready cessation of these hostilities as I unknowingly held thirteen months ago.

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PreCycling

PreCycling
Louis Maurer: View of Forty-third Street West of Ninth Avenue (circa 1883)
"Convenience seems SO over-rated."

More than a decade ago, this small city stopped recycling glass. They first tried smashing it up to mix with asphalt to produce so-called glassphalt for paving roads, but immature technology and the incoming stream quickly overwhelmed that strategy. Now it just gets dumped into the landfill where it should retain much of its original character for centuries because it's just too expensive to ship it off to Portland's glass foundry to be melted for reuse. Couldn't each user pay a recycling tax or something to balance the market price? Since Trump bungled a trade deal with China, the plastic we used to export there for recycling and reuse has likewise been routed directly to your local landfill where it will also retain much of its original character far into the unforeseeable future. The Petroleum Institute spends millions advertising how their plastic products are 100% recyclable, but most of this nation maintains no facilities for actually recycling any of it. That plastic bottle of imported water should outlive your great great grandchildren. The primary benefit from all this landfilling might eventually become the ease with which future generations should be able to research our profligately shortsighted nature. We inhabit an out-of-sight-out-of-mind society yet continue to believe ourselves somehow enlightened.

Since relocating here with the intention of SettlingInto the place, I've caught myself changing what I purchase.

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ContextKeeper

Perpetuity
A scene (AZUMA YA: East Wing) of Illustrated scroll of Tale of Genji (written by MURASAKI SHIKIBU (11th cent.). The multi-panel curtain at the center bottom of the image is a kichō. The decorated sliding door panels at the top of the image are fusuma. The scroll was made in about ca. 1130 ACE and is in the Tokugawa Museum in Nagoya, Japan.
"Most look high into the heavens for his presence …"

In my grade school they were called custodians and wore beige mufti outfits. They manned the mops and brooms and kept the furnace fed. They kept the place waxed and spotless. They mowed the lawn and repaired broken windows. They seemed invisible, beside the point of the place, which was satisfying the solemn responsibility of educating future generations, and yet without their contributions, satisfying that goal would have proven impossible. They were the ContextKeepers, and every building, every institution depends upon them. They empty the garbage and clean the toilets and carry the keychain providing access to every square inch of the place. Not even the Senior Executive Director carries that much authority. I secretly aspired to grow up to become one of them, managing a loading dock all my own, a benevolent invisible man, utterly dependable.

SettlingInto this old house, I catch myself slipping into my role as ContextKeeper here.

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GoodGrief

GoodGrief
Benjamin West - The Pilgrim Mourning His Dead Ass (1800)
"I prefer to believe that it might ultimately contribute to a half-decent cheese sandwich or something."

When exasperated, Charles Shultz' cartoon character Charlie Brown would resort to his signature, "Good Grief" in response. I interpreted his comment as a mildly updated form of the classic, "Danged Nab-it," suitable for readers of all persuasions and ages, but I've more recently come to consider GoodGrief in its more literal sense. Perhaps grief, universally associated with the worst experiences, exists as an unsuspected good. There's often a huge difference between doing well and feeling good about a result, between tasting good and actually being good for you, so it seems not an outlandish stretch to wonder if grief, too, might somehow carry considerable goodness within it. If so, what distinguishes good grief from bad? How might I reap the benefits of GoodGrief and limit the damage from bad?

Grieving's personal business and, to my mind, not really open for public dissection.

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Resurrection

Resurrection
Giovanni di Paolo (Giovanni di Paolo di Grazia): Paradise (1445)
"Resurrection seems unnecessary to bring forth any presence still living within our hearts."

From one perspective we might seem to be resurrecting the old Villa Vatta Schmaltz so that we can set about Settling (back) Into it, but we ain't doing that. The Villa of the past still resides there, I guess, but The Villa of the present only distantly resembles its forebear. Its former self was more tumbledown than the present instantiation, and desperately needed painting. The current version still wants considerable work, but we've made progress over time, not to restore it to what it once must have been but to reclaim it from the otherwise inexorable clutches of time. Houses and especially homes seem especially subject to what are known as The Ravages Of Time, but they also face The Ravages of past, present, as well as future. Earlier stewards of this place attempted updates that aged poorly. We're taking it slowly and trying to more thoughtfully stabilize this place's presence into the future. We are not now and never have been in the Resurrection business here.

We might be occupied introducing this place and ourselves to our future together.

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Dirty

Dirty
Jean-François Millet: Garden Scene (1854)
"Today seems like the day to finally get up and Dirty."

During exile, the dirt I encountered amplified my sense of displacement. My home valley was blessed with remarkable soil, Loess, the likes of which only a small handful of places in this world enjoy. Deposited here by wind over millennia, it features few rocks and little organic matter. I can pull a long-tailed button weed free from it with its foot-long delicate root intact. Water slips right through it. Improved with peat or compost, it becomes perfectly friable, an extremely fine planting medium. Elsewhere, I encountered what seemed like imposters of soil, clays and hardpan scrabbles, gumbos and shallow gravels, all exhausting, unrewarding stuff with which to even attempt to work. SettlingInto seems to insist that I sink to my knees and get Dirty for a change. In the Rockies' Foothills, I came to dread working what passed for soil. In the DC suburbs, I mixed crushed leaves with the clay to create something workable, after bending my turning fork just turning over dirt more suitable for pottery than planting. I longed for better every Spring.

Now the opportunity presents itself in spades.

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Done&Done-r

DoneDone-r
Thomas Wright: A Finite View of Infinity (1750)
"I feel reasonably confident that a fresh infinity hides in there, ready to spring itself upon me."

Both packing and unpacking fall into a unique class of human activity in that they seem to have no concluding point. A naive packer might look at a house and quite reasonably presume that packing should simply entail putting every thing within that place into a box, though that notion will prove impossible to satisfy in practice. Some items seem to have been specifically designed to not fit into any box, for instance, and others turn infinite, filling just as many boxes as one throws at them, with always a few more outstanding, ad infinitum. Flower pots pack like this. So do the contents of any typical garage. One must eventually come to some sort of accommodation with these items and acknowledge a state nestled somewhere between Done&Done-r. Insanity seems the only reasonable alternative.

Unpacking reverses while amplifying these conditions.

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Fool'sMission

Fool'sDay
BARTOLOMÉ ESTEBAN MURILLO: Two Women at a Window (c. 1655/1660)
"Only idiots attempt to find themselves by mimicking another."

Baseball season begins on April Fool's Day without a shred of intentional irony. I sit in the same window I was displaced from twelve years ago, renewing my plotting against the streetlight outside. The house now filled with boxes, many holding promise and a few holding long past, utterly unresurrectable lives as Easter nears and Passover passes us by. Life sometimes seems a Fool'sMission offering nothing so much as endless opportunities for me and everybody else to make absolute fools of ourselves, just as if we already hadn't. We undertake great missions brimming over with glowing possibilities and sometimes even succeed at achieving them. Glory comes and goes like tidal action, especially success, a more demanding mistress than failure ever was, for she demands more than an odd ounce of flesh, and takes it. We're animated dust still wondering what all the fuss was about.

My darling daughter Heidi was born on this very day thirty-nine years ago today.

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TransPlantings

TransPlantings
Pierre-Antoine Poiteau: Plate 8, "Arancio di Genova", from l’Histoire Naturelle des Orangers (circa 1818)
"It's been a long time since yesterday's lunch."

Psychologist Paul Watzlawick told the story of the Stalin-era Ukrainian collective farm ordered by the Moscow central planning bureau to grow oranges. When the farmers complained that Ukraine's climate was not right for orange cultivation, the planning bureau criticized their counter-revolutionary attitude. Relenting, the farmers planted orange trees, which froze the first winter. The farmers were sent to Siberia for sabotaging The Five Year Plan. Context always matters yet plans can only be crafted out of the context within which they will be expected to execute. Planners largely presume away the differences because anticipating them either proves to be impossible in practice or implausible to overseers. We tend to create fictions, the best-laid of which initially prove most satisfying. Later, the weather will do what she always does and prove somebody foolish. Caution's rarely rewarded.

One just never knows until arriving precisely what climate they'll be encountering.

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ReadinessOrNot

readiness
Jean Francois Raffaelli: Le Chiffonier [The Rag Picker] (1879)
" … the very nature of Readiness: Or Not."

"Ready or not, here I come," has proven the most valuable phrase I learned playing childhood games. It seems to encapsulate a critically important understanding about engaging in this world, that when time comes, it does not presume readiness. Indeed, it scoffs at it with utter indifference. Through my life so far, if I'm honest in my assessment, I might insist that I've never once felt as though I was completely prepared for anything, and yet I've more or less thrived, often sitting on the edge of my seat or cowering near some corner, but I've thrived. When a teacher handed out test papers, he might as well have spoken that fateful phrase, "Ready or not …", because test time had come. Further preparation had just become beside the point. Whatever might have come before matters not at all. 'What next' matters then.

I carry a vestigial notion that I really should be ready, though.

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TimelightZone

TimelightZone
YVES KLEIN (1928–1962) IN COLLABORATION WITH HARRY SHUNK (1924–2006) & JÀNOS KENDER (1937–2009),
LE SAUT DANS LE VIDE [THE JUMP INTO THE VACUUM] (1960)
"Annonymous no more. SettlingInto."

Along Interstate 80W, just west of Ontario, Oregon, a roadside sign announces entry into a radically different space than any place east of there. I call it God's Own Time Zone, probably because I was born within its boundaries, which always amounted to pure fiction blended with both geographical science and politics, which tends to guarantee very strange bedfellows, indeed. The most conservative will wistfully recall that before The Gilded Age, these United States featured just one time zone, or, perhaps more accurately, an infinite number of them. When the sun reached its apex, noon appeared. This standard worked precisely the same everywhere on Earth, always had and presumably, always should. God's will. Ten miles further down the tracks, noon arrived a minute or so later. The emergence of land travel moving on average faster than a walking horse finally did in the old man's time, sparking a decades' long debate which was more like an international argument, culminating in the most outrageous encroachment upon human freedom and liberty in human history, the adoption of Greenwich as the prime meridian and calculating all local times relative to that baseline; mean time The French, of course objected but still adopted the standard, though declaring their prime meridian Paris Mean Time, retarded from Greenwich by 9 minutes and 21 seconds. God must love the French!

Part of Oregon protrudes into The so-called Mountain Time Zone.

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OneWayRoad

OneWayTrip
Hieronymus Bosch: The Healing of Madness (Circa 1494 or later)
"We were always traveling a OneWayRoad."

This drive felt really different. Prior trips, The Muse and I carefully planned both legs, there and back again, before we departed. Then, part of my brain never lost awareness that we would soon be leaving again, that our exile would be restored after that brief respite. This time, we left with no intention of ever returning. Even Wyoming seemed welcoming without the threat that we would soon be going backwards crossing it again. Even beleaguered old Denver looked less threatening without the certainty that it would soon have us in her clutches again. Even the barren Early Spring Prairie seemed forgivable, for we were out of there forever. In the future, we will be in and out of everywhere but where we're intending to be SettlingInto. Future excursions, rather than home then back into exile again, might be no less circular, but they should center on our center rather than upon some remote-seeming periphery.

There are only OneWayRoads.

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Untethering

Untethering
Sir Francis Bernard Dicksee: The Funeral of a Viking (1893)
" … that familiar haunting ignorance that comes from not even caring anymore what's lurking behind that door."

Untethering must be one of the earlier stages of SettlingInto anything new. The past must be rendered irrevocably past to make room for the next story's future. Certain rituals must be observed, prominent among them refrigeratoricide, where one must, with deliberate purpose, let go of everything that had been cluttering the family refrigerator since just after the last ice age. Every damned half pint of sweet gherkins must go. So must almost everything left, except, of course, The Muse's precious jar of Maraschinos. The disposal should rightly start smoking in response. The separation of garbage and recyclable must leave you wondering what tractor beam trance had insisted upon this curious inventory. Try to save the cheese if you can, but heartlessness demonstrates dedication to The Plan. Are you deeply invested in SettlingInto something new? First trash whatever's remaining within your blackhole refrigerator first.

Our fridge had evolved to that point where nothing ever put into there could ever be found again.

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CopingAgain

CopingAgain
Caspar David Friedrich: Frau am Fenster [Woman at a Window] (1822)
"The past weighs more that any future can counterbalance …"

I consider Coping to be the great under-appreciated superpower and the skill underlying most of my success, such as it was. Most of what has happened to me just happened. I didn't ask for very much and yet usually received more than I imagined receiving, both good and bad. Once whatever happened, I found myself basically powerless to undo it, since the experience resided in the past by then. I used to try and inevitably fail to fix my past and never once succeeded, though the attraction to try to undo my past continues. I figure that it's an innate urge, probably a standard stupid human trick, one which almost always aches for attention but which no-one ever masters. Not for lack of trying, though. Throughout history so far, much human folly as well as tragedy seems to have been the direct result of failing to fix the past, with Getting Even and Settling Scores ranking near the top of the list of perennial failures, to the point where they fully qualify for the long list of Things That Just Do Not Work, However Dedicated The Attempt.

Coping comes in both useful and useless forms, healthy as well as self-destructive kinds.

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Converging

Converging
Still Life with Peaches and Water Jar (left),
Still Life with a Silver Tray with Prunes, Dried figs, Dates and Glass of Wine (center),
and Still Life with Branch of Peaches,
Fourth Style wall painting from Herculaneum, Italy, c. 62-69 AD

"Nobody knows what might unfold …"

Times come when events commence to Converging. Common near the ending of any effort, multiple threads resolve as if by magic. A sudden flurry of activity sees synchronicity show her usually shy self and pure magic invades. Nobody complains, for we see these events as justifying our earlier efforts. What formerly might have seemed disjointed and arrhythmic finally finds its pace as well as its justification. Little things can spark this sense that the world has started coming together rather than continuing to fall apart. I notice things. Just after the moving van left stuffed full of all of our stuff perfectly squared off into a perfect cubic rectangle, I poured the last bit of my single malt and invited The Muse to join me in a toast. She very quickly concocted a Manhattan, squeezing the last drops out of her Basil Hayden. How could it have been that both bottles exhausted themselves at precisely that minute? We experienced a small Converging. Cheers!

We're heading home later this morning and I 'm up preparing myself for a day of Converging.

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DisappearingAct

DisappearingAct
Detail of a mosaic from the Maison de la Nouvelle Chasse, Bulla Regia, Tunisia
"Nothing ever actually disappears but just changes places …"

The Muse and I have been a long time going but then we intend to be an even longer time gone. Sleep has insisted upon chasing us around the Master Bedroom until we're exhausted each evening but hasn't been staying around long enough to encourage us to wake refreshed. We move like zombies but only because we feel more undead than alive. Only the promise of someday SettlingInto seems to keep us moving ever nearer the edge of leaving, though we have not yet toppled over any precipices. Perhaps today brings respite. Maybe tomorrow, instead.

Nothing ever actually ends in a flash or flourish.

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Imposition

Imposing
Artist unknown (Roman): Mosaic with mask of Silenus (1st century A.D.)
" … all thanks to the mysterious power of Imposition."

Just about this time yesterday morning, I confidently predicted that I would never again find myself writing from this desk while looking out into a familiar backyard cast in predawn darkness, yet here I am, feeling like a living testament to the folly of feeling certain about anything in the future. Still, I cannot quite conceive of fully embracing uncertainty as a useful manner of living. My life so far has certainly proved to reinforce the innate folly involved in executing according to plans, but it seems schizophrenic in this respect, too, for sometimes careful planning seemed to deeply influence manifesting expected outcomes. I might not have ever been able to predetermine which plan might succeed or fail, but I also never managed to become quite cynical enough to reject the possibility that some planning might prove beneficial. Unlike a few of my forebears, I cannot believe that my future was pre-determined by either a loving or a vengeful god. I ain't no Job or Midas! I also question the absolute authority of my, or anybody's, free will, which might just be a useful fiction, but useful nonetheless.

Yesterday's plan of action governing the great move-out, the grand precondition for later moving in, itself a precondition for finally, eventually, SettlingInto, fell apart with whimpers.

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Lasting

Lasting
Gypsy Girl Mosaic, Gaziantep, Turkey (circa 0)
" … a little richer for my Lasting."

For me, last impressions stay with me longer than first ones. My first impressions tend to get fogged by my native inattention, more distractions than information. There's just so much to see when first encountering something that I'm rarely certain upon what I should be focusing my attention. I'm the type who, when visiting The Grand Canyon, leaves with the deepest impression of some otherwise trivial something that somehow seemed special in that context, like the bathroom configuration. I remember exits, though, especially those informed by a lengthy stay. When leaving, I know what's special about a place and if it impressed me, I press my face up against the glass and attempt to peer into it, as if to capture some essence of it, just as if I could. As The Muse and my departure date approaches, I catch myself Lasting, performing that peering trick just as if it might allow me to take the best of this place with me once I leave. Yesterday, we took the last drive down Lookout Mountain Road, my go-to secret passage narrow two-lane switchback backdoor route down into Golden. It was often more convenient and doubtless the most scenic. Eighteen minutes down to the flats. I'll very likely never be back again. Goodbye, old friend. You left a Lasting impression, or maybe I was the one who captured it peering into your window.

Lastings seem the most fleeting experiences.

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Unsettling

Unsettling
Francisco de Goya y Lucientes: Witches Sabbath (1797-1798)
As losers have long been known to sing, "Look away, look away, look away, Dixieland."

Before SettlingInto can commence, it's considered traditional if not strictly essential for prospective settlers to first survive some sort of ordeal. The old, overdone trial by fire holds little popularity in a modern world seemingly ruled by microwaves, but some humiliating experience, some sort of Unsettling, seems necessary to set a proper context for eventually SettlingInto. Our Unsettling has been manifesting in most of the usual ways, which is to say we've been showing off what we tend to do when we don't really know what in the heck to do, on steroids. What usually tend to be no more than small surface imperfections seem amplified under Unsettling conditions. I swear, The Muse can lose anything she lays her mitts on, Sharpies and tape gun most prominently, though only very rarely permanently. To lose the last Sharpie in the universe while in the midst of a genuine packing frenzy might seem like high comedy to any distant observer, but personally experiencing it feels like the lowest form of tragedy known to man. Likewise, without the tape gun, everything, and I mean every DAMNED thing, just stops working. A certain fruitless frenzy replaces forward momentum. Forward momentum becomes the whole purpose for living whenever attempting to get through any Unsettling.

I might overstate my case in favor of not losing the tape gun, since tape guns only ever work at best sporadically.

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SettlingInto

SettlingInto
Thomas Cole: "A View of the Mountain Pass Called the Notch of the White Mountains" (1839)
"SettlingInto brings our souls and spirits into play."

Few human acts manage to feel as unsettling as settling. It seems inevitably disruptive. My own ancestors arrived on this continent in the 1620s, having bartered their seventeenth century lifestyle for something more closely resembling one common to the Dark Ages. A wattle hut, very likely hastily constructed from roughly-gathered forest scrub, probably sufficed for shelter through that first Connecticut winter or two. We now think of these people as valiant and brave, and they may have managed to become both, but they began their SettlingInto as essentially economic resources indentured to some land speculators rather than as simple, peace-loving Pilgrims. Religious liberties aside, they held deeper obligations to produce returns for rich shareholders or face ruin. They might have been seeking liberty, but only as a longer-term possibility. In the short term, they became essentially debt slaves as a precondition for their eventual freedom, so they first SettledInto fulfilling obligations, not enjoying newly-found freedoms. These duties sometimes conflicted with their high ideals, and relations with the locals only degraded over succeeding decades. Pilgrims were genuine sons of bitches when they felt that they needed to be to fulfill their financial obligations to gain their own freedoms. Little has changed over following centuries.

Taking alien country as if it was your own, even if you presumed it to belonged to God and, by divine right, was passed down to you as his agent, seems one of the more audacious forms of liberty.

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SettlingOut

SettlingOut
Paul Gauguin: Ia Orana Maria (Hail Mary) (1891)
"I doubt that I could have not accomplished it without your presence."

Had I been watching the calendar over the last week, I could have prepared for today being the last day of Winter, but I was not watching. Distraction seems a great and glorious gift capable of producing pure magic. In those rare moments when I lift my head up from my work, I might catch glimpses of myself, but I've been spending the bulk of my days somewhere else. Our life here now seems as though it was holding us in suspension, as if we became an emulsion from which a SettlingOut seemed both inevitable and unlikely. Ten thousand and more elements had found their place here and we over time grew accustomed to the flavor. It started distinctly bitter but later turned sweet, then sour, never really settling on any one dominant profile. Now it turns savory, as the pieces which survived the over-long aging process finally start SettlingOut.

At the end of a meal, one settles up. Once arriving, one starts settling in.

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HOAed

HOAed
The Bauhaus emblem, designed by Oskar Schlemmer (adopted 1921)
"I'd prefer to inhabit The People's Republic Of These United States …"

The place we're exiting was built as a sort of latter-day attempt at Utopian development. Its developers sought to combine several conflicting conditions. Paradoxically, they intended to maintain original land use by leaving large swaths permanently open so that the buildings would not displace the native elk herd from its historical habitat. The developers also intended to build houses people could actually afford, so they built graded sizes, from condos to what we now call McMansions. The county and state land use laws never intended to govern such enterprises, Colorado having historically leaned toward the presumed right for any landowner to do whatever they damned well pleased on their property. The company adopted certain covenants and insisted that all inhabitants agree to abide by these as a condition of buying in. Later, a management company took over responsibility for collecting fees, maintaining public spaces, and assessing fines. These private agreements supplement the public law in this neighborhood, presumably for the common good, but as generations of decent people had already proven, no law ever adequately compensated for any absence of decency.

I have been free, for instance, to paint this house any of a half-dozen approved colors.

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HollowingIn

HollowingIn
Edward Hopper: Night in the Park, etching (1921)
"… this dance should properly continue into an eminently unforeseeable future."

When The Muse and I first stepped into this house, it was as spare and bare as a newborn baby, a blank canvas of a place devoid of distinguishing character. After weeks and weeks of stepping into places, some also blank canvasses and others over-crowded with leftover stories and others' possessions, this house seemed a welcome respite. It held nothing but potential then, other than its native dimensions, and even those seemed alien since we'd never lived in a house this new, for it was fewer than twenty years old. Our home place was nearly a hundred and ten by then, and we carried that certain distain for more modern construction. My eye caught the shoddy work mass production produces, the many shortcuts and compromises anyone building for profit incorporates into their latter-day masterpieces, yet the angles and high ceilings intrigued me. We might just be able to tolerate the shortcomings, which seemed slight after so very many deeply disappointing and genuinely disturbing viewings of places that clearly held no future for us. I'd about given up, suggesting that we might eke out an end of this exile existence in that tin can trailer park near her job. With an acquiescent sigh, I confided to The Muse that I could imagine myself living here, and she began negotiating.

Unthinkable now, in the current market, The Muse bid the owner down to precisely the price she wanted, the highest one we could possibly afford then, and to even the realtor's surprise, her bid was accepted.

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GettingRealer

GettingRealer
"A City on a Rock, long attributed to Goya, is now thought to have been painted by 19th-century artist Eugenio Lucas Velázquez. Elements of the painting appear to have been copied from autographed works by Goya, and the painting is therefore classified as a pastiche." Wikipedia
"About half of this stuff could evaporate without either of us ever missing it."

Things start GettingRealer when I put them into boxes. I classify—however temporally, however temporarily—creating definite descriptions, however actually misleading. I'm creating a Periodic Table of our Possessions, curious box fellows only intended to last through a brief transition, though I know for certain some of these items will never again see the light of any day. Apples and oranges easily fit into boxes intended for neither, my purpose more focused upon clearing shelves than in preserving any implicate order. In so doing, I disrupt what was once a definite order which eroded into a mild chaos over time. An expedient extraction or a hasty addition, The Muse respecting her notion of preserving coherence while walking all over mine, a thousand small diversions resulting in the mess I'm packing. About half of it disgusts me, kept in the pantry more so nobody could see it then because it carried any particular meaning or value. It's ours, we own it, and we can't quite bear to part with it during this time when we seem to be losing so very much. We'll drag that curious implement we never use lest we lose it in the transition. I imagine that I'll more easily part with it once I'm on the other side of HeadingHomeward. Real change, GettingRealer, demands much delusion.

Previous moves, the ones where The Muse's work picked up the tab, professional packers loaded our boxes.

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Achilles'Finger

Donato_Creti,_The_Education_of_Achilles_by_Chiron
Donato Creti: The Education of Achilles by Chiron (1714)
"Older, yes, but still spitting."

I have to keep reminding myself that I'm not quite as young as I used to be, even though I never once have been younger than I used to be. Older than's a permanent condition. It connotes diminishing capability, though my present state finds me in much more able condition to engage in some activities than my younger self ever was. I remember a writer friend confiding some purported wisdom when we were both in our early twenties. He said that somebody insisted that no writer's worth a pint of warm spit until after they turn forty. We both silently set about to prove that proverb wrong and in the process, I guess, proved it to be correct. Nobody ever correctly anticipates how much better they might become and many, perhaps most, think themselves competent long before their mastery manifests. At my age, I really should have come to understand this principle, now that I'm well north of forty, but I probably haven't. I still engage as if I knew, when tomorrow will most likely disclose to me that I hadn't but that I might have mastered then. Mostly, a spiraling cycle of pseudo-certainly motivates me. I hope to never outgrow this capacity.

On Saturday, I engaged in an almost frenzied bout of dedicated packing. I went berserker on the chore.

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Nowish

Nowish
Wassily Kandinsky: Winter Landscape (1909)
"I swear I live unconscious …"

Packing, I feel least connected to the so-called here and now. Both here and now seem slippery, now that my focus has shifted toward HeadingHomeward. Now and here seem preternaturally tiny and unusually thin. Rooms fill with freshly filled boxes, leaving narrow aisles for navigation. The cats explore the ever-changing configuration, furry brows furrowing with apparent concern. The Muse still cannot quite believe that we'll be able to securely transport them for two driving days and an overnight, though we've begun researching feline face pheromones as a potential tranquilizer, anything to help ease the transition. The Muse and I seem to have mostly already arrived there, as if home was an app with a progress bar slowly moving left to right, revealing that we're about 80% loaded. Once we're there, we'll inhabit no more than moments, just like we always have here.

I'm the guy who was never certain what was happening around him.

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CultYourWars

CultYou're
Wassily Kandinsky: Entwurf 2 zu Komposition VI (1913)
"You matter more than any us or them ever could have mattered."

The days are gone when culture amounted to holding eccentric skills like demonstrating the one true and proper way to cantilever a little finger when holding a fine china cup of Darjeeling. The only canting done these days involves twisting the common language out of shape for the purpose of demonstrating how ignorant another obviously is, each word purposefully loaded, each phrase most likely cast into meaning its opposite and said with a knowing sneer. We seem incapable of assuming the best of each other and so opt for presuming the worst. Another's not just wrong, but evil. I'm not just right, but righteous. Without my presence, this whole operation would have long ago gone to Hell without the benefit of hand baskets. I consider myself Heaven's Handmaiden, as you consider yourself, too, except your Heaven seems more like Hell, as mine must also seem to you. You're more than welcome to yours! I might be the only one left standing who actually qualifies to consider myself upstanding, everyone else, mere wannabes degrading civil society. Not even civility seems to be what it used to be, now seemingly more interested in trying to prove some essentially unprovable something than in letting anything or anyone simply be. Even culture itself seems to have gone to Hell.

Now we engage in wars about it, and not civil wars, either, but the most unimaginably uncivil ones.

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Stalking

Stalking
Gerrit van Honthorst: The Matchmaker (1625)
"How utterly unsurprising these continuing surprises seem."

My future takes care of itself in ordinary times, but this time seems somehow extraordinary. It's not every day, for instance, that I contemplate HeadwardHomeward in any way that might seriously threaten any present status quo. I've daily dreamed about heading in that direction for longer than the past decade without buying any packing boxes, until now. Now, I seem to have set into motion some irreversible actions very likely to propel The Muse and I somewhere different, somewhere familiar, and the forces seem increasingly inexorable. I won't be napping through this one. From one perspective, I have been actively stalking this very future for years, but from another perspective it seems more likely that this future has been Stalking me and has finally found me. This feels haunting, extra-volitional, as if it were happening to me more than that I might have been making this happen. The time has apparently come.

To complicate our exit, a Spring blizzard has been stalking us all week.

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LastTripToKansas

LastTripToKansas
R. Farrington Elwell: Untitled [Prairie Fire] (1935)
" … the threat of revisiting the wrong side of the tracks will leave right along with us."

Every city features two sides of the railroad tracks bisecting it, one side considered the right side of the tracks and the other, the wrong one. Denver's no different in this respect. Like most prairie towns, even those that never outgrew their founding footprint, railroad tracks slice right through the middle of the place. Denver's unique, though, in that the main body of the city's located on the wrong side of those tracks, at least from my perspective. I refer to that side of the city as Kansas, and I've made it my business to avoid it. It features most of what passes for culture here, which says something, and also hosts the state capitol, Union Station, and Rockies Stadium, but we became exurban once we'd moved into The Foothills. Kansas might have been only a half hour away by car, but between traffic and general inertia, we'd only rarely visit. We'd feel like we were Just Visiting, price tags still dangling from our hat brims as we attempted to navigate its ill-maintained streets. In January every year, they run a herd of Longhorns down through the business district to mark the opening of The Western Stock Show, the city's biggest cultural event. Need I say more?

As disappointing as urban Denver seems, the sprawling suburbia to the East seems several degrees worse.

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Small_Distinctions

Small_Distinctions
Max Ernst: Ubu Imperator (1923)
"Only a SmallDistinction separated their two identities …"

Despite, or perhaps because of, general exhortations for me to see the Big Picture, I usually focus upon making SmallDistinctions. Shades of grey seem to dominate most disagreements, not stark differences, as if a squint divided great armies to insist upon great tragedies. The easily perceived differences don't amount to much. The subtler ones seem to encourage deeper disagreements. Sons of Abraham became mortal enemies while birds and bees peacefully co-existed. BIG changes only seem the most significant, and some observers convincingly argue that BIG changes rarely, if ever, actually stick. People might take to wearing different jerseys but rarely shift far from wherever they started. One never successfully outgrows their roots, their infinitesimals growing up seem infinitely more significant. Blossoms might even emerge from those same gnarly, unpromising roots.

HeadingHomeward reduces into a series of small moments, none of them seemingly large enough to sum to anything wondrous or huge.

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BoxingIn

BoxingIn
Max Ernst: The Elephant Celebes (1921)
"A point comes within every transformation …"

Two and a half weeks out, The Muse and I finally find a date certain for our departure, BoxingIn any possible escape. Procrastination no longer spins comforting yarns. With a suspected Monster snowstorm creeping in upon us, outside preparations should have already been completed and inside work might face a final bout of cabin fever before we can break camp and head into the sunset like they did in cowboy movies. My tendency to circle several times before boxing something can no longer sustain itself. I'm cornered and I can't deny what comes next. Where we formerly lived out of boxes, we're facing living within them, our lives suspended until after the move, and very likely for several weeks after we arrive.

Old Status Quos tend to hang onto themselves until just after the final responsible moment.

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FreeShit

FreeShit
Salvador Dalí: The Temptation of St. Anthony (1946)
" … the sales price prominently displayed: Free."

The first place The Muse and I rented when we started our exile, sat on a street with a 25 degree slope. Too steep for the moving van to park there, so the driver parked on a flat spot a couple of blocks away and ferried stuff down to the house in a smaller van. One crew of movers would leave furniture and boxes on the sidewalk and another crew carried them inside, but the van crew moved much faster than the ground crew could, which left a pile of temporarily excess inventory on the sidewalk. Anyone who's lived in any American city could have predicted what happened next. I stepped out of the garage to find a car stopped next to the cache of boxes and someone pouring through one of them looking for FreeShit. The FreeShit Market remains an under-recognized portion of our much-vaunted free market system. In any city, anything left curbside becomes a free good. In Manhattan, for instance, the cost of moving furniture easily exceeds the fair market value of that furniture, so it's common practice to simply move that old couch out to the curb where it will be quickly scavenged or eventually hauled away as genuine trash. Most get snagged before garbage day. Finding these treasures tends to make someone's day.

The Muse and I have benefitted greatly from the FreeShit Market over the years and have come to understand FreeShit as somehow sacred.

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LettingGo

LettingGo
Part of the Illustrated Sutra of Cause and Effect Handscroll (Emakimono) (E_NGA_KYO) (8th century)
" … LettingGo feels like giving up something."

LettingGo seems infinitely more difficult than acquiring, perhaps because the bulk of my training and experience has focused upon acquisition. I associate LettingGo with losing something rather than as an act of liberation. HeadingHomeward can seem, if I don't have my head screwed on straight enough, like dissension more than ascension, a falling into more than a rising up. I hail from The Never Can Say Goodbye Family, the one who, when stopping to visit, might linger longer than either party initially intended, stories lengthening into supper or bed time, seemingly unable to part, endlessly offering just one more story. Leaving subsequently seemed asymptotic more than specific, smearing along the leading edge, as if any leaving might somehow prove permanent, more terminal than temporary. My folks were kind of hoarders, holding on to keepsakes until they filled whole floors of their house. I was called to clean out the resulting mess after they'd spent their lifetimes failing to learn the gentle art of LettingGo. I learned everything and also nothing from them.

The New Agers insist that one must let go to let come, attempting to reframe the experience of losing into one of potential new acquisition, a making of space for different, perhaps even better.

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FeelingLikeHome

FeelingLikeHome
The Villa Vatta Schmaltz, October 2019, the tenth year of exile
" … where it's best to just let that mystery be."

George asked, "What does FeelingLikeHome feel like?" I thought he'd either asked a brilliant or a snarky question. Doesn't everyone know what FeelingLikeHome feels like? Others on that Friday PureSchmaltz Zoom Chat amplified the question's brilliance. They didn't know either. Curious responses followed, ones, as someone—I think it was Steven or Cynthia—noted that FeelingLikeHome might belong to the same class of feelings as does falling in love, which I interpreted as meaning universally indescribable. I had always assumed that pretty much everyone naturally held a deep nostalgia for some physical place, a definite home base around which their life revolved, either there or away, a binary place in a world of stunning diversity, but I was about to learn better, "better" being disconcerting in this specific case. George opined that he held no particular sentiment about where he'd grown up. Steven said that he felt attached to the people in his home, not the physical place at all. Our dialogue turned curiouser and curiouser.

I tried, enlisting my situationally velvet tongue, thinking that I, if anyone, might provide a crisp description of the FeelingLikeHome feeling.

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MultipleHomeTheory

Multip[leHomeTheory
Joaquín Torres García: "Constructivo en Gris y Negro con Centro Rojo"
"We exist beyond belief and confirmation …"

As a dedicated non-physicist, I feel great attraction to string theory, a perspective proposing that vibrating strings comprise the fundamental building blocks of this universe. As I understand it, which likely represents a material misunderstanding, under string theory, multiple simultaneous dimensions exist. I'm informed that the math supporting this perspective more or less works, though physical observation, long the gold standard of scientific investigation, cannot confirm it. I feel warmly attracted to this non-confirmation aspect of it because my experience seems to dwell simultaneously in multiple dimensions, and while my sensations fully support the existence of these swirling existences, physical confirmation remains beyond me. I can swear today without misrepresenting my experience that I continue to live in every home I ever inhabited, though I know that I physically left all but one of them behind me, or attempted to. This world would be even more of a mess if I could maintain multiple simultaneously active mailing addresses and the physical sciences would have to reject my MultipleHomeTheory or undermine its whole philosophy. In string theory, the math works. In mine, only personal sensations confirm it.

As we pack to leave this place, I face an impossible choice.

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Snakes&Ladders

Snakes&Ladders
Bernardo Strozzi: St. Lawrence Distributing the Treasures of the Church (circa 1625)
" … maybe—just maybe—The Muse was counting cards again."

Board Games bore me. Trivial Pursuit seems aptly-enough named and begs a big "Why?" from my corner of the room. Sorry, likewise, seems properly, even preemptively labeled. Card games might show off some player's memory and observational talents, skills that seem to hold little relevance for me in my world. Though Fundamentalists might strongly disagree, I firmly believe that this universe operates quite skillfully by employing simple randomness, though I freely admit that this belief fails to produce the most compelling explanatory stories. Being human, most of us can concoct some fable revealing an underlying strategy or a subtle conspiracy holding everything together. Anything's better than the same old tale of random molecules disinterestingly bumping into each other, though the more exquisite stories insist that some God or other attends to even this tiniest level of detail. Bored Games, like religions, seem like attempts to fool ourselves for our own amusement.

Even the ancients found reason to amuse themselves by drawing clever conclusions based upon the results of rolling dice, a stunning paradox many might have missed.

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ShortTiming

ShortTiming
Joaqu’n Torres-Garc’a: Artists’ Ball: Pierrot and Figures Standing (1921)
" … grace seems so very far beyond knowing."

By our calculations, we're within a month of departing, that point where we actually begin HeadingHomeward rather than simply preparing for the passage. The actual Heading part of the endeavor will have shrunk into pinpoint significance by the time I finish this series, so much anticipating and so very little heading. We've slipped into the ShortTiming part of the program now. Long lead times, once the prominent feature, have shriveled into remarkably narrow ones. Everything seems to need to be done tomorrow, though something tends to delay everything in turn. I could be packing, but packing produces boxes which need storing. The clutter has metastasized into unseen annoyance which leaves me feeling itchy. The staging specialist, scheduled to show up at noon today, will doubtless further complicate the effort, probably insisting that even more schlepping seems indicated before we show the place to prospective buyers. The outside painters finished their work in under two days, a blinding speed when compared with my velocity. I'm moving at the approximate speed of a stunned horse.

ShortTiming sparks some superpowers, though. In sight of an end, many mysteries have resolved themselves.

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Sleighted

Sleighted
Odilon Redon: The spider, she smiles, her eyes look up (1881)
"Poison can displace purpose in any life."

I'm a sucker for spiders. Were I a fly, I'd have long ago been wrapped in web, sucked dry, and displayed like a trophy. I'm fortunately no fly, but I still seem to try to get along with the spiders in my life. Most, I just leave behind. Considering them trolls, I unfriend them and abandon any further attempt to tame or relate with them. Others, I cannot so blithely dispense with. They're dear friends of dear friends or, shudder, ex-spouses. These manage to corner me unaware, though I could argue that I should never let down my watchfulness when they're near. They must be out to get me because they always seem to catch me. I might enter an encounter hoping for better, but they dispense their worst, which they seemed to have been saving up just to bushwhack me with again. I've tried hardening my heart, holding deep suspicions as if they were reasoned conclusions, but I never seem able to maintain that stance. I let down my guard and they commence to have at me again, leaving me stunned and confused. Lucys snooker Charlie Browns again and again and again. I might be a Charlie Brown.

I come to learn that I committed a sin so grievous that it could never be forgiven.

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Purging

Purge
Franz Marc: Yellow Cow (1911)
"I rid myself of my more troublesome priests …"

About a quarter of my worldly possessions probably qualify as junk. Precisely which items make up that quarter remains in shifting contention. HeadingHomeward brings a forced choice reckoning where I get to reconsider every blessed thing I own. I maintain my corners, shady spots I rarely peek into, places where I store my more embarrassing possessions. Many amount to regrettable purchases which I can explain to myself but to nobody else. I keep those well hidden, even from myself, because I cannot really justify their presence to anybody else, much less to myself. I'm embarrassed to own them but curiously have never gotten around to Purging them. I avert my eyes when in their presence, figuring that I might deserve to own them. They come to own me instead. HeadingHomeward calls a most curious sort of court into session. I get to fill the role of hanging judge.

I finally find the courage to engage in Purging.

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SoftHearted

SoftHearted
Hmayak Artsatpanyan, Sick Child (1900)
"I'm still pondering the present he left behind."

I think of myself as a Soft-Hearted SOB. This characteristic usually manifests as a tenacious unoffendableness, which means that I don't often say if you've offended me. I'll widen the gap between us instead. If you've royally pissed me off, you might never hear from me again, but I rarely say anything as I exit. Perhaps my response springs from my begrudging understanding that I'm nobody's reformer. I live and let live without trying too awfully hard to get everything to line up according to my sense of order. I notice but stay mute.

I rarely witness my temper boiling over.

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MistMeals

MistMeals
George Frederic Watts: Love and Death (c.1885–7)
"HeadingHomeward seems an extended trance …"

Many activities carry some specific marker which somehow signifies their presence. These markers vary widely and often revolve around a specific food served as a part of some celebration, though many everyday activities carry markers, too. In The South, for instance, a simmering pot of Hoppin' John, a vile concoction served for good luck, screams New Years. Some families invite ham to their Thanksgiving table while others observe the day with turkey, refusing any substitutes. "It just wouldn't seem like Thanksgiving without a bird." A lunchbox packed on the kitchen counter served as one sure marker that my father was heading to work that morning. Bag lunches served as a similar indicator that us kids would be heading for school. Some activities, though, carry no such marker, and I speak of those this morning.

The Muse and I tend to find ourselves so deeply engaged in some classes of activities that we quite literally forget to eat.

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Reprospective

Reprospective
Thomas Cole: The Voyage of Life: Manhood (1842)
"I'm not even my own exemplar of how I should be living."

My life moves both too slowly and too quickly for me to in any way accurately experience it. In any moment, I'm very likely too present to perceive deeper meanings. Later, tearing myself away from focusing upon any present moment will likely distract me from perceiving whatever's going on around me then. I inhabit an endless swirl of impressions struggling to impart their significance. I live superficially by default, apparently incapable of fully inhabiting any fleeting moment and also struggling to wrest any deeper meaning in retrospect. I live Reprospectively, repossessing past experiences with my writing, with the expressed purpose that I might thereby more adequately prepare myself for what might be coming next. I seek patterns in my otherwise apparently random experiencing, hopeful that useful, maybe soothing stories might emerge, hopeful that I might have been there in lieu of ever actually being anywhere in any moment. I do not fancy that my experience differs very much from anyone else's. My meanings only ever emerge well after any fact and my facts remain at best questionable. My life might have been completely fictional. I cannot tell.

I employ my Friday mornings to focus myself upon attempting to make sense of each receding week's writing.

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JabberWonky

JabErWonky
E.-E. Hillemacher: Edward Jenner vaccinating a boy. (1884)
" … what an overlong and terribly strange trip it had been."

Certain lines—queues, really—induce a deep sense of belonging, of being a member in good standing of a clearly upstanding society. For me, my first memory of standing in such a line came circa nineteen fifty-something when my whole birth family queued up to receive the Salk vaccine against polio. The whole Pioneer Junior High School Gymnasium crawled with organized humanity. We must have looked like refugees or something, fleeing from some catastrophe, and maybe we were precisely that. Everyone knew someone touched by polio and all were eager to see that they weren't victim to that tragedy, so everyone, even five or six-year old me, enthusiastically lined up and swallowed the proffered over-sweet Kool-aid shot. We had been background afraid forever and this sugar water offered hope for genuine salvation. Further, I felt even then that I was committing an authentically patriotic act, not just for my country or some ethereal God, but for humanity. I for the first time felt a sense of what I'd later learn to call solidarity in my chest, very near my heart, a first-class member of my community at last!

I've had similar twinges since when enqueued for voting or when openly protesting against some injustice our government had been committing, but that was my first taste of that kind of freedom, the liberty only felt when freely volunteering to become one of many like minds coming together to accomplish something stunning.

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ResidentAlien

ResidentAlien
Paul Klee: Cold City (1921)
"I only ever knew for sure that I didn't seem to really belong there."

Having spent the bulk of my life living as a ResidentAlien, the prospect of HeadingHomeward unsettles me. You see, as a ResidentAlien, I enjoyed certain freedoms open to nobody native born, though most of these freedoms amounted to Get Out Of Jail Free passes exempting their holder from feeling obligated to engage in what I might call civic life. Because the ResidentAlien holds no history to their adopted home, many local interests hold little attraction. Routine celebrations—fairs, parades, various galas— seem tightly focused upon parochial perspectives. Those holding Just Visiting status couldn't care less about the local founding fathers. Here in Golden, Colorado, for instance, Buffalo Bill Cody's memory remains revered in spite of his checkered career as a mass murderer of buffalo and a film flam man extraordinaire. The Muse and I have managed to miss the city's annual celebration in his honor, though we did out of curiosity once visit his grave which overlooks the region from atop the first tier of foothills. We were not moved by the experience.

Over the past twelve years, The Muse and I have been inhabiting more than living, for we've stayed in places where we almost never ran into anyone we knew when we went to the grocery story.

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Plausabling

Plausabling
Egon Schiele: Portrait of Wally (1912)
"Opportunity rarely knocks. It generally slips in unseen …"

Managing—even participating—in any project seems like a process continually wrestling with plausibility, but these efforts at best qualify as processes in name only, only distantly authentic. Certainly, one produces plans and lists of activities, but neither of these end up executing precisely as projected. Stuff happens and participants adapt. They then engage in a sort of self-deception to prevent an overwhelming sense of chaos from overtaking. Many of these self-deceptions amount to post-hoc explanations of how whatever happened improved the presumed process. Others describe how fate or something had apparently taken the effort under its wing to provide unrequested guidance and often even far greater wisdom than the original plans had provided. Most of this explaining occurs preconsciously, the conclusions seeming obvious to anyone watching. The auditors typically expect somewhat more detailed justification for swaying away from original projections, and their insistences encourage the production of some of the greatest fictions ever produced about anything.

Projects, you see, remain in a continual state of Plausabling, taking advantage of a curious human capability to ever more fully justify almost anything.

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Lye-ing

Lye-ing
Andrew Wyeth, Trodden Weed (1951)
Oh, what a tangled web we weave,/ When first we practise to deceive! - Sir Walter Scott: Marmion, Canto 6, stanza 17
"Am I dreaming?"

I no more speak in absolute truths than I speak in iambic pentameter. I ain't no Shakespeare but I retain a voice and I use it. I work hard to avoid abusing my voice. I attempt to approximate truths I cannot absolutely prove while avoiding passing on misrepresentations, even when these acts might threaten my position, whatever that is. I ain't no politician, either. I studied advertising in school, and that exposure convinced me against choosing a career in the since-burgeoning propaganda industry. I still struggle to promote myself, firmly believing that my good intentions might chase out others' bad. I'm consequently a lousy competitor. I'm not anybody's 'better than sliced bread' innovator. Commercial bluster attempts to balance information and persuasion to convince skeptical buyers to let down their guard for a minute, but once the meme enters, there's never any effective means for undoing it. I might seem naive, but I, most days, manage to bear living with myself. Some substances effectively replace the benign with the poisonous such that one grows to lose their ability to live without their poison, and lying works precisely like this. Once a false premise gains dominance, it costs Hell's own expense to escape. Some barking damages far worse than most bites.

The society we inhabit has swallowed plenty of rubber worms, often without obvious remorse.

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Unexceptionalism

Unexceptionalism
Caravaggio: Saint Jerome Writing (1608)
" … seek not dominion but authentic communion."

The most exceptional aspect of being human seems to be just how Unexceptional each individual seems. Many of us seem convinced that we're somehow exempt from the messier elements of The Human Condition while none of us ever actually prove to be. We each seem prey to curious vanities but also victim to puzzling inanities. We might think we're special and also feel easily wounded by even casual, uninformed criticism. The best and brightest among us seem especially cursed while the average guy, as if such a creature exists, avoids much controversy and seems to cruise through life. The price of notoriety seems to be a focused infamy as every vanity seems destined to be brought to light and eventually vilified. Most saints were martyred. Many innocents get slaughtered. The great face precisely the same fate as everyone else. Posthumous statuary settles nothing.

I wonder whether I'm good enough and no proof ever seems adequate to decide my question.

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Okaying

Okaying
Portrait of Saint Peter Claver in the museum Palace of Inquisition, Cartagena, Colombia
"What else could there possibly be to say?"

It's common practice in this culture, following the death of another's close family member, to ask a fundamentally unanswerable question as both an acknowledgement of another's loss and to serve as comforting solace. "How ya doin'?" seems the most common fundamentally unanswerable question offered at these times. The bereaved, then, either through prior practice or by common example almost always responds with the universally acceptable answer, by which I mean they offer a meek, "Okay." Of course, the bereaved does not usually feel anything in any way like Okay, but the response serves greater purpose than an accurate status update, for Okay works as few responses ever could. Delivered under this condition, it induces a trance which allows the receiver to translate it into whatever meaning they'd hoped their inquiry might elicit, thereby satisfying both the bereaved as well as the inquisitor. This exchange works like magic every time and proves much more reliable than any so-called more accurate response.

The asker didn't really want to know how the griever felt.

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Vacating

Vacating
Trek: George Pemba (1975)
" … the grace to forgive ourselves for what we knew not what we did."

HeadingHomeward, unsurprisingly, turns out to be a process, and a prolonged one comprised of semi-sequential stages: Aspiring, Planning, Refurbishing, Packing, and today's focus, Vacating. Vacating features both a long nose and an even longer tail. It begins way back in the Aspiring stage when we struggle to envision the place without our presence, an utter impossibility we innocently assumed responsibility for achieving. Of course we failed to satisfy that expectation, it requiring us to see into negative space, but we seemingly had to exert some effort toward accomplishing it, if only for form's sake. I aspire to achieve a clean exit even though I suspects that nobody ever actually achieves this. Still, stewardship insists that we at least attempt to make peace with our eventual absence. Yes, we conclude, this place might just be able to exist without our presence, though we can never quite imagine how. Each stage of HeadingHomeward seems destined to further humble us into acceptance.

I suspect, based upon prior experience, that Vacating here will turn out to be a prolonged affair, probably an eternal one.

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RoughingIt

RoughingIt
Thomas Cole: Romantic Landscape with Ruined Tower (1832–36)
" … what we call suffering, they would have experienced as pure luxury."

My Five Times Great Grandfather and his new bride headed West in an oxcart for what was then the Iowa Territory from what is now Southeast Ohio, circa 1810. He lost his bride when she fell off a ferry crossing an ice-choked Mississippi River. He arrived alone in his adopted home. I can't compare our situations. We've just lost use of the kitchen for a few days, but I admit to deeply feeling the inconvenience. I just finished clearing a path through about a foot of powdery snow to access the grill, where I set a pot of water on to boil for The Muse's morning coffee. Last night, I heated a pot of beans on that grill while swirling snow speckled my hair. I figure it's an adventure not requiring us to venture from home, though the box-cluttered interior seems almost entirely unlike home right now. We might have unconsciously set about undermining our sense of place when we conspired to change locations, the repainting just a part of a wiser puzzle. More indignities lie ahead, I'm sure, just as sure that I'll faunch at experiencing each and every one of them. I miss my space.

My boots seem too large for my feet, for I keep catching them on errant clutter whenever I attempt to navigate this newly-constricted space.

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DistRaction

DistRaction
Pablo Picasso: Weeping Woman (1937)
"I most fear any sense that I might prove myself the master of this experience rather than its unwilling apprentice"

Say what you will about focus, but I come today to sing the praises of DistRaction as one of the more under appreciated treatments for serious distress. They might insist that one must eventually face trauma head on and fully integrate its lessons, but reckoning need not occur immediately or necessarily permanently. It's not chicken shit to sit a spell with an upset, nor does it necessarily qualify as dysfunctional to defer dealing with it until some seemingly more convenient time. Some integrations seem to need some aging before they can be savored. Others come without handles and simply cannot be grasped at first. Under these and many other conditions, a decent DistRaction becomes a godsend. The form of DistRaction probably doesn't matter, at least not at first. A binge-watch equals a good book, a previously-scheduled commitment serves just as well as sudden snow squall, anything at all capable of drawing away full attention for a while might work.

The Muse and I and her visiting sister Donna are living out of boxes this week.

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WhiteElephants

WhiteElephants
The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company advertisement, featuring P. T. Barnum's WhiteElephant Toung Taloung. (Circa 1885)
" … probable salvation to certain damnation in an instant of sober consideration."

While packing up the contents of her two towering china cabinets, The Muse was not surprised to find a few WhiteElephants hiding within them. Each WhiteElephant was once considered a unique and somewhat sacred beast but had somehow lost its context over the time since acquisition, to become a glaringly unique item in an increasingly homogenous collection. Each no longer seemed to belong. What she might have originally acquired as a unique, one-of-a-kind item, she would dispose of for essentially the same reason. The thrill attending original discovery dispersed over the intervening centuries to produce a genuine oddity no longer belonging within our zoo. How each came to this ignoble end seems unimportant, but as we pack up for HeadingHomeward, we're throwing off a surprising volume of once semi-sacred stuff.

I returned from my yesterday morning's run to the Goodwill Donation Center to report a casualty.

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AbSensation

AbSensation
Unattributed: Fog On The Golden Gate Bridge (Free public download image)
"AbSensations might be the means by which one adjusts to absences."

Which of the five primary senses seems most powerful to you? Sight? Hearing? Taste? Smell? Touch? Many of us feel attracted to one over the others. I know myself to prefer auditory input, though I cannot stand to attend loud concerts which seem to abuse the privilege sound imparts. The Muse seems much more visually sensitive than I. She's likely to see stuff I pass by without noticing. I used to, when teaching workshops, sit in the back of the room with my eyes closed so that I could better 'see' what was happening during exercises. I mostly see with my ears, it seems. The Muse can taste flavors I cannot register. Senses serve as definite discriminators, better determining differences than almost any other measurement. For my money, though, I've concluded that the AbSensation proves the most dependably powerful.

The AbSensation, that sensation allowing us to sense an absence, seems most present, though it seems as though it exclusively trades in stuff none of the five primary senses can touch.

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DisAssemblage

DisAssemblage
Auguste Rodin: ASSEMBLAGE: MASK OF CAMILLE CLAUDEL AND LEFT HAND OF PIERRE DE WISSANT (Circa 1895)
"I will first view her art in the moment of its destruction …"

The Muse spent the day wrapping and packing 'her' dishes, emptying the two towering china cabinets, disassembling, engaging in an art form perhaps properly called DisAssemblage. Much dissembling accompanied her work, for it demanded that she at least act grown up and dedicate herself to creating an inevitably short-lived result. A few short weeks from now, she'll be disassembling her DisAssemblage to repopulate her two towering china cabinets, flattening sheets of packing paper to be passed on for someone else's DisAssemblage effort. Still, she dedicated herself to proper technique, trusting no one else's eye to protect her treasures, each piece lovingly placed within sealed boxes, an unseen result nonetheless steadfastly produced. We will pray for careful movers and safe storage for these treasured pieces of unseen artwork.

There are unwritten rules for creating such fleetingly-seen artworks.

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Inalienable

Alienating
Paul Cézanne: The Large Bathers (1898–1905)
"I … prefer to avoid the sure and certain knowledge that I was the one who lost it."

I don't much care about my formal so-called Inalienable rights. The right to bear arms seems about as useful as a right to wear mismatched socks, nothing that won't disclose more than anyone really wants to know about me should I exercise it. The freedom of religion seems less useful than might a freedom from religion, evangelism being one of the more prominent banes of civil society. Nobody needs to save me. The Inalienable rights I care about seem more fundamental than political, more personal than social. I mostly enjoy the Inalienable right to move around my home without having to think very much about what I'm doing. I revere the ready-to-hand, the quirky semi-secret storage spot where I keep my rubber band supply and the place where the toothpicks hide. My world features thousands of such secure stocks to which only I hold the map. Packing disrupts every one of these.

It might seem a simple matter to clean out a closet.

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JourneyManning

Journeyman
WPA Federal Art Project, 1935–1943: Lithographer at Work (1938)
"Dreams come true not by merely dreaming but by finally waking up."

Begin by going out of your mind. Leave all sense-making behind. Imagine a point in space and time, then focus attention there until the present and all the distance between now and then including the here and now seems to disappear. NowHere becomes nowhere. ThereThen becomes The New Beginning, and everything before, preamble. Arriving there becomes The Purpose; the journey, mere annoyance. 'Are we there yet?' becomes the mantra for existence, one you might just as well be absent from since you're living for a future divorced from this past, your present. Clearly not yet having mastered living, you're still striving beyond your reach instead. What poisonous thoughts have invaded your head that you imagine you might master anything in absentia? Mastering anything seems to demand mostly JourneyManning, which, with luck, might result in producing just an instant of apparent mastery near the end. It was not the master of any future who crafted those results, but the tedious JourneyManning all along the way. Later, after the world no longer holds any need for a more alluring future, then a master might emerge for recognition and appreciation. Until then, it's all local navigation, grunt work, and aggravation. One must master feeling put-upon first. Rest and laurels might follow later.

I used to teach a course I titled Mastering Projects Workshop. I should have called it JourneyManning Projects Workshop

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Displacement

Displacement
A 16th century woodcut of Archimedes' eureka moment.
"I hope we'll find some of our selves imbedded within whatever emerges next."

When I say I'm HeadingHomeward, I put myself in danger of misrepresenting my movement, as if I was passing through passively empty space when I might more properly speak of Displacement. We exit having visited disruption upon our accustomed routines and threatening worse on the other end, for this world, our world, remains tightly connected and any change anywhere transmits shockwaves and worse throughout the system. There are no innocent or isolated actions except through willful inattention, and even that wears thin and insubstantial. A realtor innocently suggested that we update the interior color of The Villa before we leave, which set up a grand Displacement well before we'd actually be Heading anywhere else. Rooms emptied of evidence of our long occupation have been hollowing out what remains of our existence, rendering some days unbearable, or nearly. Privacy has become a premium commodity with the second floor swarming with painters, their tools, and supplies. We're masked to pass through our own house and we sleep surrounded by tarps and paint smells.

Molly and Maximum, our trusty cats, maintain the rhythm of this place, or try to.

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Wounding

Wounded
Thomas Cole: Prometheus Bound (1847)
"Be fierce in your acceptance to learn intended lessons."

Wounds seem delicate but also intelligent. They mostly heal themselves for if they cannot, they might well prove fatal. They usually need acknowledgement more than they need treatment, lest they inadvertently be left to fester. They often need isolation, a quarantine, if only a bandage, and a bandage infrequently checked. Constant scrutiny becomes the enemy of recovery. Time cannot heal all wounds, but the ones that do heal always require patience, often more than the aptly-named patient feels capable of providing. Some distraction helps, anything capable of directing the worrying mind away from attending, because wounds need little attention. Nattering over them never encourages healing, though most do not benefit from neglect. They might demand respect, acceptance that you're ailing without insisting upon becoming permanently disabled. They heal or they don't, but the world will not snap back to the way it was beforehand. Better to project a progression than fall into abject depression about the change. Shit happens and then we heal. Well is a relative state.

Wounds seem wiser than any patient suspects, and even doctors and nurses learn to respect their inherent wisdom.

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Schlep

Schlep
Titian: Sisyphus (Circa 1547-48)

"In Greek mythology Sisyphus or Sisyphos was the king of Ephyra. He was punished for his self-aggrandizing craftiness and deceitfulness by being forced to roll an immense boulder up a hill only for it to roll down every time it neared the top, repeating this action for eternity." Wikipedia

"I slept like a little angel."

I suspect that along about the third century of his indenture, Sisyphus started growing accustomed to his fate, identifying not as the king he had once been, but as the Schlep he had become. While psychologists caution against over-identifying with our professions, few speak of the benefits emanating from this imprinting. Never a conflict between identity and activity, I imagine that one might finally come to feel authentically at one, without contradictions haunting. Those who feel as though they work beneath their station might grow grudgy, and those who have risen above their talents might feel the imposter, but no such conflicts hound the ones who do just what they know themselves to be, and it might be the very font of wisdom to come to accept that what I do accurately reflects just who I am. In this light, no work ever becomes beneath me and nothing I do should qualify as a stretch. I'm not faking it but making it with my own two hands.

Some have wondered how I managed to come by the surname Schmaltz, suspecting, I suspect, that I might have just made it up, it perhaps being a little embarrassing to carry, for literally translated, it means
rendered fat.

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Unmooring

Unmooring
William Halsall: Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor (1882)
"Each sanity first extracts an Unmooring."

There are no discrete events. HeadingHomeward upsets ten thousand tenuous balances regardless of the plan's coherency. During more normal times, most everything naturally maintains its place relative to almost everything else. Things, once finding place, naturally resist displacement, even intended improvement. Tearing apart that first piece unleashes a particularly unpredictable form of chaos, the kind destined to make fools out of especially the most diligent planners. Unmooring begins and seems unlikely to end, even into the suddenly unforeseeable future. We will be many months disassembled and probably many years reassembling Humpty Dumpty again, if ever.

All change begins in utter innocence, the most benign kind of ignorance, fueled by reassurances of experience, for we insist that we've done something very much like this several times before. We haven't.

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Hollowdays

Hollowdays
Pablo Picasso: Nu à la serviette (1907)
" … even my heart takes a rest beat for every working one."

Not all days are created equal. Some seem rich and full, others, quite naturally hollow. My forebears, none of whom included a Southern belle subject to periodic bouts of 'the vapors,' seemed to live fuller days, many of them life-long seven day each week workers never once declaring a mental health day. Rain or shine, as they say, they were up scrabbling, often for bare survival. Whatever emotional life they might have lived was not enjoyed or very sincerely respected, for feelings offered no good excuse. Work trumped everything, or so I imagine. My mom prescribed 'turning that frown upside down' as the sure-fire cure for every ill, well, that and, later in life, a medicine cabinet overflowing prescriptions, each duly supplied by a doctor intent upon keeping her days just as full as inhumanly possible. Reading the record, though, I notice a concerning frequency of what we now recognize as repression-related illnesses in my forebears' later lives. They might have practiced stuffing, but eventually flooded their systems with unacknowledged emotions.

Each generation considers their successors wimpy and spoiled, a curiously personal indictment on their own parenting skills.

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CONfiguring

CONfiguring
Talbot Master: the 'Talbot Shrewsbury book' -Alexander's knights killing elephants with spears (1444-1445)
"I poke out my work on my reliable old paving stone and showcase my eisenglass."

Modern times were predicated upon the ever-wider spread of and growing uncritical belief in serious misconceptions. We daily see clear evidence of this unsettling truth, as things do not quite seem to ever work precisely as anticipated. We discount some shortcomings as close enough for government work, and many, we seem to grow accustomed to and cease caring about. Streakless window cleaner leaves streaks. Seamless transactions demand contortions. Every point of sale interface operates a little differently such that each demands careful scrutiny from the clerk for whom it was supposed to lighten their workload. The crude little cheat sheet taped to the side reminds the customer that they'll need to slide their card in some utterly non-intuitive way, and few can translate the illustration into successful action, leaving the customer feeling like an idiot and the clerk present as if only to confirm each customer's self-assessment. We're adaptive, though, and remarkably forgiving. In pre-modern times the least of these insults would result in someone getting skewered on another's sword or at the very least, produce a heated exchange of discouraging words. But moderns expect inconvenience as the just reward of advanced civilization.

My new computer, gold-plated and light as eisenglass, underperforms my much older machine, which weighs as much as a paving stone and runs much slower, because I can't quite figure out how to properly configure it. Nobody can.

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Grrratitude

Grrratitude
Alfred Stieglitz: The Steerage (1907)
" … wiser than we ever expected to become for the passage."

I feel most gratified and also most mystified by the means by which attitude transforms into gratitude, usually, it seems, by way of rage and resentment. The rage seems well-deserved, and even resentment might initially seem justifiably permanent, for in our tribal past, I suspect that deep grudges might have served some positive evolutionary purpose and not become merely self-destructive, as our much longer lifespans have rendered them. For we firmly believe in endless second chances, recovery, and mulligans, each experience potentially a learning one capable of eventual appreciation. What arrives as a shock might moderate into calmer focus. Since none of us seem capable of fully appreciating any moment, reflection often brings deeper understanding, which might morph into genuine appreciating even for the initially apparently worst of them.

I've been reassured that it does not ever get any worse than what befell us this week, though I didn't experience the worst of the event.

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Mouving

Mouving
Giovanni Battista Bracelli: Bizzarie di Varie Figure (1624)
" … never more present than just after leaving."

We claim to move in, through, under, and on, but I suspect that we don't, not really, not nearly. Our apparent motion misleads both eye and understanding, for our momentum isn't as smooth and separate as it superficially seems, but sticky. We need nudges. We leave traces—of both our presences and our passings—much more permanent than contrails dissipating upon appearance. I think of myself as Mouving around with the sort of motion requiring a little shoving and a little mourning to get started, some elbowing to proceed, and considerable sloughing off along the way. I leave much behind me and unwittingly (inevitably?) carry much forward. I remain where I was, perhaps forever, and wherever I relocate holds traces from wherever I came. I seem to smear from there to here and onto my next appearance. I imagine myself moving through walls sometimes, and have even succeeded, but only when I accepted the irreparable damage my moving through them inflicted, to both the wall and myself. My lapels tended to be permanently dusted from those antics.

When The Muse and I were still consulting, we'd often encounter those we labeled The Complainants. Many of them had been sentenced by some superior—for "their own good"—to work with us, and most held at least a little grudge at the forced inconvenience.

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SayingNothing

SayingNothing
Emil Brack: The Picture Book (1900)
"We must have said everything worth saying … "

They say that there's no fixing stupid, but I believe that smart often proves even less fixable. There's never any real advantage for being the smartest person in the room, for instance, because everyone else will struggle to comprehend what the smarter one's getting on about. Out thinking others earns few appreciations, and that sort of reputation can leave one carrying disadvantaging expectations. Many will sit watchful, waiting for the so-called smart one to embarrass himself with seemingly irrelevant insights. Further, the really smart ones often find that their best contributions come from SayingNothing, from squelching their brilliance lest others find it off-putting. I confess that I don't know any of this from personal experience, since I'm rarely accused of personal brilliance, but I've noticed and I've known some smart people who didn't mind confessing their sins and shortcomings. 

I once had a daughter whose story I might submit as prima facie evidence in my case. She died yesterday at the age of thirty eight, untimely, after a lifetime struggling to fit in.

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TheSecondCar

TwoCarEffect
Spanish cartoonist Pedro de Rojas: Don Quixote is driven to his village, from a series of chromolithograph postcards reimagining the adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza for the twentieth century. (Circa 1905)
"That SecondCar might have represented a sort of vanity, standing squarely between here and a finer sort of sanity."

For most of our time together, The Muse and I have been a one car family. The first decade together, we owned two cars between us, a condition that both complicated parking and left one of the two cars idle while we used the other one together. We almost always headed out together. When we left the original Villa Vatta Schmaltz to move to DC, I sold my vehicle to my grand nephew for a quarter because we figured that it would make no sense to straddle ourselves with two cars in a big city. This move proved prescient, for in the six years we lived there, The Muse drove to work exactly twice. She much preferred to hop the much more convenient Metro down to The Mall where she worked. Even that one car mostly sat idle except for my foraging forays and the occasional toodle into surrounding countryside. Cities seem distinctly hostile to cars, which overwhelm them. For a while, we tried going carless, using busses and ZipCars when transportation seemed necessary, but this complicated beer runs—nobody needs anybody transporting half cases of beer on a public bus—so we after a month, bought a bit of a beater to better balance those scales.

Last year, visiting old friends in Tucson, we learned that they were retiring their old Lexus.

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Bearding

Bearding1
Rembrandt: A Bust of an Old Man with Flowing Beard: the Head Inclined Three-Quarters Right (1630)
"I might even find deeper meaning in my life hiding behind a beard."

I think of myself as being in the meaning business. True, it doesn't pay much, but it's my manner of living. I can't accept face value. I believe that everything holds deeper meaning and that appearances prove misleadingly superficial. We can't tell books by their covers because book covers aren't books, but then neither are their contents. Books might be experiences never found very well represented within any of their components, of which personal reflection perhaps ranks highest. Books seem to be interactions, their meanings emergent, their significance widely varying between individual readers. A single book might hold as many meanings as readers, and perhaps many more than that, for deeper meanings exhibit great ambiguity, shifting as one plumbs deeper. As near as I can tell, meaning continues expanding as long as attention holds.

All of my adult life, I've maintained a cleanly-shaven face, with the exception of my once rebellious and since tamed mustache.

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Drauma

Drauma
A 1596 sketch of a rehearsal in progress on the thrust stage of The Swan, a typical circular Elizabethan open-roof playhouse
"We somehow seem to stumble into happy accidents, anyway."

Any change, even HeadingHomeward, will most likely introduce both some drama and at least a little trauma into a life: Drauma. My father forever wondered why people could not just leave well enough alone, for he'd come up through a Draumatic childhood. Then he married my mother who, though perhaps not at first a fully fledged drama queen, at the very least certainly qualified as a drama princess. Full queenship followed. He never escaped the sturm und drang, however much he might have preferred an alternate experience. There was always, always, always something threatening domestic tranquility, though, gratefully, usually little more than minor soap opera productions. He'd just be settling in for the evening, kids finally on the way to bed, when my mom's cousin would stop by to see his favorite cousin BonBon, upset the stabile force field, and maybe fall off the front porch in the process. My dad despised upsets though he never managed to shake their intrusion.

I'm little different. I much prefer the old status quo which, if only because of its aging status can never hold on for nearly long enough to fully satisfy me.

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Carping

Carping
A Song dynasty painting attributed to Liu Cai: Fish Swimming Amid Falling Flowers (circa 1080–1120)
"No need to affect superior airs, for those suspend nothing really worth caring about."

Criticism seems to have overtaken plagiarism to become the latest sincerest form of flattery. In a world obsessed with attracting clicks, with drawing attention to itself for fun and profit, Carping has grown to become the primary export of each of this world's key economies. Once renowned for our wheat exports, The United States now primarily trades in agricultural-grade Tweets reeking of primitive fertilizer, each year producing formerly unthinkable volumes. Other than complaining while ignoring underlying difficulties, we've forfeited our farm economy to attend to the one activity certain to inflict the greatest harm on ourselves, we point out each others' shortcomings in lieu of tolerating or lending a hand. We deal exclusively in picking at low-hanging fruit, for why bother with hauling out ladders and stretching if we might might more conveniently savage whatever's already ready to hand? We discount each other better than even the biggest discount retailer slashes product prices. Once proud peoples have become simply whiny.

It's always, obviously, the wrong frickin' glass, whether half empty or half full.

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GrowingInto

GrowingInto
Kermit Allison: `The Entrepreneur’’
This sculpture depicts a blindfolded man chiseling himself out of a stone block. I wonder how he managed to chisel his hands into existence.


"It's exhausting, but it's a living."

Whatever else I might characterize myself as, unfinished properly summarizes my progress so far. I don't remember starting. I apparently awakened sometime later, my forward momentum already inexorable by then. I carried this marvelous property. I could sense space beyond me and propel myself toward it. This ability left me seemingly trailing a little behind myself, attempting to catch up. By the time I arrived there, though, another attraction had arisen in the distance and I would be heading off in that direction for a change, always changing. I grew to sense that I never quite arrived, with each arrival quickly becoming a fresh departure. I eventually abandoned any sense that I might eventually catch up to myself, accepting that I might well always find myself lagging a little behind. I can't quite capture the motion or the presence due to some delay in my capturing mechanism. I chronicle where I was, never where I am, because I'm never quite wherever I might be at any moment. I'm still GrowingInto.

Acknowledging this apparently essential disconnect seems fundamental to maintaining some semblance of sanity.

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Changered

Changered
Marinus van Reymerswaele: The Moneychanger and His Wife (1539)
"Life might only make sense if it's surprising us."

Change arrives like a thief in the night. However well-planned anyone thought they'd "made" it, actual change always comes on its own terms. It will surprise regardless of anyone's beforehand anticipation. I think of this apparently inevitable effect as Changered, using the form it shares with conjured and snookered. It's always essentially a change-up following a carefully crafted series of ascending fastballs. It sets up the batter to fool himself, the wounded yelp following the umpire's call just further evidence, just as if we needed any, that difference respects nobody's patterns, nobody's model. We might eventually enjoy Changered's benefits, but initially it will seem to have taken mean advantage of us.

Remember when our recently formered President first took office? The shift jarred.

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Won'ts

Won't
Roy Lichtenstein: Reverie (from the portfolio 'Eleven Pop Artists, vol. II') (1965)
" … nearer the center of MY universe where gravity just works right …"

I suspect that even a moderately skilled artist could create a near perfect portrait of me by merely portraying all I won't do, the image created out of essentially negative space. In my inhibited early youth, I maintained a long list of won'ts, and I didn't even consider myself to be that picky of an eater. Later, I set about relaxing my code and for a time became somewhat of a permissive libertine, agreeing to engage in some things apparently just to learn why I shouldn't. I learned better. Now, I've settled into what I consider to be a balanced existence, comfortable in my convictions buttressed behind strong defensive walls, My Won'ts serve as my castle, complete with parapets and banners. Mark Twain posited that the primary difference between a human and a jackass is that there are some things a jackass just won't do; they're stubborn. I think of myself as living toward the jackass end of the species spectrum, stubborn after a fashion, for I scrupulously maintain my Won'ts as both moral and ethical imperatives.

Moral imperatives include all those things others told me that I should not want.

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Lightenings

lightening1
Jules Tavernier: 'Sunrise Over Diamond Head' (1888)
"Life sure seems foggy this morning."

Some days I seem incapable of accomplishing anything. The following day, I might notice a definite Lightening as whatever weight encumbered me evaporates. I suppose that this most curious property isn't exclusive to me. Perhaps it's tied to some circadian emotional thing. Lincoln recalled that some days a black dog would visit him and lay him low, then a certain Lightening would overwhelm the gloom to reopen possibilities denied him just the day before. These visits remained unpredictable, never foreseen. On any given day he might be fully capable or essentially incapacitated, he never knew beforehand. Him being famous and all, I guess that his swings might carry more weight than mine, but I'm similarly unreliable. Back when I was charged with estimating project efforts, I wondered how I might account for this perhaps most human of qualities, for elements other than raw skill entered into accurately foretelling. The best contributor on a bad day couldn't quite compete with the worst on a good day, but I never found a way to pre-determine when any rhythm might overtake anyone. I stuck with an imaginary average instead, figuring everything would probably even out in the end, which it almost never did.

Yesterday, a Lightening visited.

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BigBaby

BigBaby
Fernando BoteroMona Lisa, Age Twelve (1959)
"Look, I tied my own shoes this morning!"

Adulthood brings more opportunities for me to behave like a BigBaby than I ever enjoyed as an actual infant. Strict parents continually encouraged me to act more maturely than my age, so I figure that I used up some of my grown up behavior well before I reached puberty, which left adequate untapped reserve to keep me in decent stead through to the very edge of my dotage. Unfettered by hovering parents, my inner BigBaby has increasingly flourished, gaining what I consider to be near master status in my sixties. Never much of a fit pitcher, I rarely rage, but I excel in the slow walk procrastination competition and my petulance has never been better formed. With all humility, I sense real mastery in my performance of the always irksome disappearance routine. With my well-developed adult intuition, I can almost always sense when a quest for assistance begins and I cleverly seem to disappear just before it finds me. I've also worked on my sorry face for later, when I learn that if only I had been available, I could have proved useful. Cruel fate, huh?

I might shine most brightly when undermining myself.

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AlienatingAffections

AlienatingAffections
Jackson Pollock: Going West (1934-35)
"Let the record show that I came to genuinely love this place …"

HeadingHomeward induces a perhaps necessary hardening of the heart toward this place I'm leaving, even though my relationship with this place has always been a forced marriage. It was not anything like the sort of place in which I'd ever imagined living. My first impression caught me wondering if I'd actually been reduced to living in something like this. It was way too new for me, stylistically strange and curiously laid out; ceilings too high and yard too narrow. The views seemed fine, even extravagant, though one does not inhabit views, or so I told myself. I told The Muse that I could see myself living here, though I really couldn't. Not then, but we'd been searching for someplace to live for six discouraging weeks, we'd only seen variations on worse, mostly much, much worse. I was ready to be finished searching and in light of then present conditions, this place seemed good enough. I told myself that our commitment wouldn't be forever. We both knew we'd be moving on in five years or so, so we settled. Forever.

Settling involves accumulating small affections.

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Asymptoting

Asymptoting
Jean Boulogne [Giambologna]: Allegory of Architecture (ca. 1580; Cast: 18th century)
"Our future must remain in the future tense to make any sense at all."

I claim to be HeadingHomeward while I might more descriptively insist that I'm Asymptoting there, but Asymptoting sounds like another one of my made up words, one of those requiring further explanation. I won't mind explaining if you can bear to listen to my blathering. You see, Heading connotes a more definite direction and a more certain destination than my present adventure wants. I hold a general direction in my head, but it's really little more than an intention yet. Likewise, my destination seems tenaciously uncertain. Oh, I have a specific address in mind, but mere location hardly a destination makes. Aspiration might better describe the direction I'm heading, more feeling than anything, so I consider myself Asymptoting, after that geometric concept of a trajectory unlikely to ever find its target. An asymptote, as you doubtless already know and which I'll explain just to remind myself, is a not necessarily straight line destined to move ever closer to its destination as it lengthens, but often an arc or curve certain to never actually arrive there. Over time, it might well manage to move close enough for most intents and purposes, but it will most certainly never actually arrive.

Why be so picky about making this distinction? I'll explain by referencing Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman philosopher, who insisted that only fundamentally unachievable objectives ever manage to become transformational.

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Betterings

Betterings
JR, the Parisian artist, made the iconic Louvre pyramid disappear 2016, but only for a weekend installation.
"I learned again, but I doubt that I'll remember."

I'm not tumbling into cynicism when I suggest that every attempted step forward tends to first feel like a step backward. Improvements, however aggressively pursued, seem to require some time to manifest, however urgently desired. It might even be true that greater urgency tends to slow down a desired manifestation, often first producing frustration instead. Once envisioned, a novel objective appears much closer than it ever turns out to be. Foresight transports the mind but not the body, unfortunately. I too easily over-inflate my expectations. I reach for some alluring star before gravity steps right up to remind me who and where I are. Dammit!

I might imagine that I would eventually outgrow these childish expectations about Betterings, but this old dog continues to tumble into his oldest trick, which suggests I will probably not be maturing very much beyond where I started on this issue.

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Lielessness

Lielessness
Jean-Baptiste Oudry: Ragotin lie par les parents du fou (1727)
"I feel as though I’ve just come home after an overly-extended absence."

I suspect that everyone knows the experience of living a lie. For me, a deep longing accompanies these times as I watch others apparently living their truths seem so damned free. Unencumbered by any haunting sense that someone's going to catch on to them, they seem untroubled even when engaging with difficulties, while I carry considerably more overhead. The lie's like a colicky baby, always fussy and rarely at rest, demanding that I attend to it. I nurture it because I simply must. It eats half my lunch and the world seems cruel and unjust. I render myself a second- or third-class citizen, relegated to entering and exiting like a sneak thief always attempting to get away with something that rightfully belongs to someone else. I, myself, feel like I'm someone else beside myself.

Liberation might come but only ever at the price of doing an utterly unthinkable, something more likely, it seems, to do me in rather than resolve anything.

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LooseTalk

LooseTalk
Allart van Everdingen: The Bear Distracted with Talk of Honey, (c. 1645-1656)
"Some adults never grow up."

In my youth, I was prone to embellish my stories. I won't deny that vestiges of this tendency remain, but I prefer to think that I've learned something in the interim. I monitor my talk more closely now, and though The Muse will certainly attest to the fact that I'm not above the occasional whopper, I tend to launch them in jest rather than in pre-emptive self-defense. My experiences, I'm slowly becoming convinced, might just be good enough as they sit. I'm more apt these days to play down my role than headline it.

As a direct consequence of my earlier embellishments, I've suffered considerable embarrassment, which I prefer to believe has justifiably humbled me a bit.

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Migration

Migration1
JEAN LOUIS THÉODORE GÉRICAULT - La Balsa de la Medusa (1818-19)
"Migrations seem mostly uphill …"

I expected to post no new HeadingHomeward Story today because I'm migrating between machines. After 15 hours in migration so far, I finally received feedback about expected remaining duration: 3.5 more hours. I cannot predict how or whether this attempt (4 or 5, I've lost count) will work. I'm assuming that it will stall like the prior attempts have stalled without providing any information about progress achieved. Based upon experience so far with Apple's automated Migration Assistant and a painful perusal of the destructions for affecting a "clean install", I'm not hopeful about ever successfully completing this migration. (The "clean install" instructions are incoherent and uninterpretable.) I dare not update my blog before completing the full migration, since that would put myself out of synch with one of my alternate selves, which would produce further complications including another identity crisis. Further complications or identity crises I do not need.

Rest assured that Apple continues to live in blissful ignorance of how their computers are actually used while continuing to make them ever more similar to their dreaded old adversary the meager PC.

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Cornspiracy

Cornspiracy
Honoré Daumier: Mélodrame (circa 1856-1860)
"We reap whatever we plant."

The media almost exclusively refers to them as theories, though there's almost nothing theoretical about most of them. Few seem structured following any framework even distantly borrowed from proper theory form, which, I guess suggests that whomever came up with them was not studied in the sciences or liberal arts, probably not very studied at all other than, perhaps, in persuasive rhetoric. No harm or foul for that infraction, though they tend as a result to make little sense, except to those for whom they apparently don't need to make sense to gain their acceptance, those who parse for attraction rather than cogency. These—I'll call them Cornspiracies—might be only what their followers want to believe, their crafters caring little about any underlying coherence or factual basis. Millions have apparently scrambled in line behind them, armies of True Believers following fallacious facts, utterly convinced of their righteousness. Many seem to have taken up arms to overthrow oppressors who never were and never could have been. What do we do with them?

They say that they find it particularly annoying when non-believers talk down to them as if they were stupid.

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Walled

Walled
Jean Fouquet: The Conquest of Jericho. Illumination, dated c. 1470-1475
"Until there's juice, it's just no use. One good excuse's enough."

I titled the third chapter of my best-selling The Blind Men and the Elephant (Berrett-Koehler 2003) The Wall, but apparently half a lifetime studying and teaching about The Wall didn't predispose me to recognize its presence when I encountered it again. In my book, I explained that every undertaking encounters The Wall at some point, and The Wall seems to swipe motivation for engaging. A physical barrier isn't usually the source of this difficulty, so it can prove tricky to diagnose and resolve the blockage. I suggested in the text that purpose might be flagging and in need of some renewal to produce a juicier sense of anticipation. For me, a new opportunity most often manifests as an almost (or even actually) overwhelming string of impending obligations, and that, if I chase after the result, I'm suddenly conscripted to fulfill every damned one of them. I see a stream of exhausting efforts rather than my heart's desire manifesting before me. Most adventures look more like chores than opportunities once the initial Utopian conceiving's dissipated, and sometimes, reimagining purpose can cause that emotional barrier to crumble.

As with most information, knowing about The Wall doesn't inoculate anyone against encountering it and also contributes little to helping anyone recognize when they're in the presence of it.

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Cynic-ism

Cynic-ism
Salvator Rosa: Diogenes searching for an honest man (mid-17th century)
"The cynic unerringly sees what's missing and misses what's right there awaiting recognition."

I have long held as a personal ethical responsibility the obligation to know enough to justify cynicism while steadfastly choosing not to become cynical. Maintaining this balance seems increasingly difficult, as the older I become, the more familiar I've become with entropy in action. In my relative youth, entropy seemed more theoretical than practical. The 1950s seemed far more futuristic and fresh than its shopworn post-millennium counterpart seems today. Twenty years into this once new century, the future seems considerably less promising and our mistakes much more encumbering. I suppose innocence started abandoning me in earnest after I crossed fifty. The experience haphazardly replacing innocence seems less sturdy and hopeful. I admit to knowing ever more of what might reasonably render me cynical, yet I persist in my insistence that I avoid becoming a cynic. I'm no cynic yet.

Yet I admit to peering out into this world with an increasingly skeptical eye.

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BetterAngels

BetterAngels
Ignacio de Ries: Saint Michael the Archangel (1640s)
"I intended better than I will likely receive."

Everyone carries one act on their shoulders forever, one irrevocable fart they innocently let which pretty much misdefines their legacy forever. For our widely-esteemed sixteenth President Abraham Lincoln, I suspect that his act invoking "better angels" into his first inaugural speech might justifiably forever generate his remorse for having brought that phrase prominence, though he apparently swiped it from Shakespeare's Othello. I imagine him blushing whenever it's invoked, wherever he is. Note that he made this comment innocently. He could not have been aware in that moment that he'd just birthed his legacy, forever after remembered. He'd, you'll no doubt recall, surreptitiously sneaked into Washington to deliver that speech, dogged by threats of assassination from angry southern white supremacists, the Proud Boys of his time. His losing opponent was one of those self-promotive personalities prone to do little in office who had aligned himself with a party too distracted by self destruction to garner a majority in the election. Since, venomous politicians have invoked Lincoln to encourage their political foes to find reason and come over to their dark side, often appending mumbles referencing "malice toward none" and likewise. The phrase "better angels" has become a not very subtle tell of some worser angels working overtime behind the scene, an invocation meaning pretty much the opposite of what it seems, more taunt than invitation.

I'm uncertain if I subscribe to the whole medieval notion of better and worser angels.

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Wending

Wending
Ercole de’ Roberti: The Miracles of St Vincent Ferrer (1473)
"… We might just be setting ourselves up …"

The pathway between any two places never runs in anything even vaguely resembling a straight line, yet in my mind, when I envision a journey, I seem only capable of imagining straight-ish lines. My experiences, then, diverge from my plans, continually surprising me. This result probably has most to do with a personal limitation, not precisely a lack of imagination, but a limited one, and the inherent difficulty of plotting curves using only straightedges. I thought I'd long ago immunized myself against shock or surprise when encountering these divergences, but I apparently had not. They get me pretty much every time.

My "discovery" that nobody ever appreciates an accurate plan marked a huge leap in my maturing as a project manager.

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LongDivision

LongDivision
Raphael: The School of Athens fresco, Cropped Image of Pythagoras (1509)
"… our well-being might more depend upon how well we divide."

The Muse and I tried listening to the radio as we drove back home following the 9/11 attacks. We'd been setting up for another workshop at The Los Alamos National Laboratory when the news started filtering in. The participants at first opted to continue with the session, since we could do nothing about those distant events, but shortly thereafter, armored Humvees with mounted fifty caliber machine guns began circulating through the streets and orders came down for everyone to evacuate the mesa. We cowered overnight with friends before the rental car agency extended an offer for us to just drop off the car at the airport we'd flown out from a few days previous, waving the usual drop charges. The radio, sometimes a useful distraction on long drives, proved discouraging then. In lieu of the news we'd hoped to receive, only propaganda spewed, the most vile and vindictive speech, saber-rattling on steroids. We quite understandably wondered what country we were passing through.

That evening, we overnighted in Mt. Crested Butte, Colorado, the town where The Muse and I first met.

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TrueBeliefers

TrueBeliefers
Michelangelo: Libyan Sibyl (circa 1511)-from the Sistine Chapel ceiling
"I know almost for certain that greater belief won't resolve this one."

I've been reading (finally) Eric Hoffer's The True Believers, a remarkable read that has sat on my dustier library shelf for thirty or more years. I'd occasionally take it down to search for some quip which I intended to use to bolster some argument, but had never sat myself down to plow through the actual content from cover to age-stiffened cover. The front cover detached itself when I opened it, so I've been using it as my bookmark, for I've been pausing frequently, since the prose seems the rough equivalent of heavy cream. One might be well-advised not to chug anything with the consistency of heavy cream, but to swallow it following demure sips, savoring it, and letting it slowly sink in. The author was a San Francisco longshoreman and was in his time a much-revered everyman philosopher, though he hardly qualified as an everyman. Between age five and fifteen, he was blind, an affliction that came and eventually went without explanation or diagnosed cause. He therefore missed his primary education. Shortly after regaining his sight, he lost both parents and set out on his own, wisely choosing to leave New York for California, where he figured at least the weather might suit him. He worked as a migrant farm laborer, being uneducated and all, though he carried a pocketful of library cards he'd collected as he moved between crops. Longshoring amounted to upward mobility, for he could settle down and engage in his heart's passions, studying and writing, when he wasn't laboring.

The True Believer reads as if it was penned by a self-educated man, with wide references to ancient texts few colleges delved into even then.

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Rumurmuring

Rumurmuring
Artemisia Gentileschi: Susanna and the Elders (1622)
"It's eye for an eye and spy vs spy …"

Rumors constitute the primary product of every home town. Whatever it might have grown famous for producing—onions in the case of my hometown—the principal occupation of every living soul seems to be the production and distribution of unsubstantiated murmurings, RuMurmurings. So-and-so always seems to be up to her old shenanigans. You-know-who just did it again, twice! The "real" story, preserved for the select few, always seethes just beneath whatever formal business might be conducted. Everyone carries a reputation and a well-acknowledged-but-never-mentioned-in-public label, be it 'slut', 'drunk', 'bastard', or 'saint.' Nobody long escapes somebody's sharp-tongued critique, and little of the Rumurmuring seems generous at heart. It sometimes seems as if everyone's actively working to bring everyone else down a peg, to set straight some crooked story, to highlight everyone else's clay feet. There are no secrets, many, almost factual..

I sometimes think we must be crazy to aspire to move back there where everyone lives in wavy glass houses whose windows feature bubbles, waves, inclusions, and varying thicknesses, producing a funhouse transparency.

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SmallTalk

SmallTalk
Johannes Vermeer: Christ in the House of Martha and Mary (About 1654 - 1656)
"Hey! Nice shoes! Howya doin?" …"

I'd visited the discount pet supply store because I'd failed in an earlier attempt at the anonymous Kroger's to buy the only kind of cat food Max and Molly agree to eat. I'd learned in a SmallTalk exchange a few weeks before that this particular brand had been suffering distribution issues, with my favored jumbo family-sized packages no more than sporadically available. I'd picked up the wrong kind a couple of times only to find that they'd try to bury it before they consent to swallow it, those batches donated to the magpies or the cat shelter. They're picky eaters. As I was checking out, separated from the checker by a plexiglas partition and our masks, the checker attempted to maintain some semblance of normality by initiating a little SmallTalk, the very foundation of every commercial interaction. I honestly thought that she'd, for some reason, asked to see some picture ID. I figured there was a new directive from Homeland Security, so I struggled to remove my driver's license from my wallet, "No," she said, "I asked if you had anything exciting planned for the rest of the day." Embarrassed, I replied with a curt, "Probably not," collected my cat food, and left thinking that This Damned Pandemic might have killed SmallTalk.

SmallTalk has always been the glue of human interaction.

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TheSoaps

TheSoaps
1930s Lux Soap advertisement


"As long as self-worth is tied up in someone else or something else, the stage is set for rage." Virginia Satir

" … sanity might only exist in strict isolation."

My paternal grandmother was addicted to TheSoaps. Whatever else she might have been engaged in, when the time came for 'her shows,' us kids would get kicked outside for the duration. I'm certain that she loved us, in her fashion, but I'm even more certain that she loved 'her shows' much, much more. How could she not? 'Her shows' offered access to the glamour and sleaze her actual life sorely lacked. She'd already out-lived three husbands and had neither aspirations nor prospects, so she apparently opted to live vicariously. Who could blame her? She'd sit rapt and speak to the TV set, offering sage advice to the racy divorcee on the screen, probably from her own vast experience entangled within various love triangles. I only ever saw her exhibit fits of genuine rage when Lance or whatever his name was stepped out on his wife again. In those days, three or four full middle-of-each-weekday hours were reserved for goings on along The Edge Of Night, and she'd never miss an episode. She even subscribed to Soap Opera Digest so she could pour over prior plots and engage in speculations over where those stories—her extended family, really—might next turn. Even then, I thought TheSoaps a sad surrogate for what we'd later label A Life.

I, too, spend many hours each day with headset in place, tuned into some more pleasingly distracting alternate universe.

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patRIOT

patRIOT
John Singleton Copley: Paul Revere (1768)
"One can inevitably only ever pretend to be an actual patriot."

I do not consider myself a patriot, so I might have no standing to suggest that something seems incongruous about anyone declaring him or her self a patriot. Patriot seems like one of those designations properly bestowed posthumously upon a humble contributor by a grateful community, not something anyone might print on their own business card. That seems a presumptive designation. I also struggle to understand the -RIOT segment of the modern usage of the term, which was not previously rendered in CAPS, but in more demure equality with the first syllable in lowercase type. We witnessed this week, though, both great presumption and a resulting RIOT, which might have permanently perverted the once honorable designation. We see patRIOTs now, citizens not taking up arms against some degrading foreign power but, as near as I can tell, against themselves and nobody else. They've themed themselves to become their own nightmarish worst enemies. Other than my stiff opposition to wearing ridiculous slogans on my clothing, I see little physical distinction between the typical patRIOT and myself. Their actions, though, seem to set the patRIOTs apart. They wear their grievances proudly, a fashion faux pas bordering on humiliating. Humiliating one's self serves as no adequate surrogate for genuine humility. One's patriotism seems properly rendered only in the eye of a beholder, never in the mind of any pretender. One can inevitably only ever pretend to be an actual patriot.

We increasingly engage in political cosplay.

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WakeUps

WakeUps
Jan Matejko: Stańczyk during a ball at the court of Queen Bona in the face of the loss of Smolensk (1862)
"The Amish were right, we're too late Schmart."

The morning headlines label it an unprecedented coup-attempt, an insurrection, sedition, and it might well qualify for all three of these labels. It also represented the most common of human outcomes. Oh, I understand that thwarted self-proclaimed patriots vowed to return in the morning with muskets, but that threat hardly matters and can't quite qualify as a concern. I thought the Capitol Police brilliant in their defense of the institution, though it might have appeared to more naive observers that they'd been too easily out-flanked by the mob. They denied that mob the martyrs they might have aspired to produce, instead, ceding that long-offensive car to the yapping dog's jaws. We watched as the pride seemed to drain right out of those boys once they'd achieved their long aspired-for goal. What did they do with their freshly-gained authority? Well, I guess they planted a couple of amateurish pipe bombs. Other than that, they seemed quickly bored with their achievement, posting a little graffiti and lounging in chairs of the long-reviled powerful, looking a little surprised that those seats transferred no enlivening power into them. They dispersed with nothing gained, their purpose drained as a direct result of having achieved it, an overall disappointingly amateurish theater production. Utterly ordinary.

Revolutions usually work this way because their leaders tend to be tenaciously short-sighted, largely because their loyal followers insist upon short-sightedness as a condition of their fealty.

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Natterer

Natterer
Cassius Marcellus Coolidge: Dogs Playing Poker (1894)
"Action's highly over-rated."

I acknowledge myself to be a dedicated Natterer. I consider most interventions worth deep consideration before engaging in. I'm that old dog that just seems to have to circle the spot where he always lays down before actually plopping down there. I look around before leaping, and might choose not to leap at all after considering. I seem to need to construct a mental model before I begin. I construct a mental model TO begin, for I almost always start my actions that way. Yes, these things take time. Everything seems to take time, so more time doesn't seem to matter to me just as long as I'm productively engaged in some nattering. A small chore, fully considered, might take me until the middle of next week to appear to even start, though I've very likely started nattering about it long before anyone notices any actual action out of me. I might explain that I'm thinking, though I know deep inside me that I'm actually actively nattering instead.

Once I became a world-class Natterer, I found that I'd developed an entire vocabulary to explain myself to any witness to my proceedings, or, more usually, my lack of proceeding.

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Smarter

Smarter
Chen Hongshou: painting of Tao_Yuanming (Ming Dynasty)
"Everyone's Smarter than everyone else."

I used to help facilitate experiential leadership workshops where I'd invite participants to engage in a variety of what I referred to as Silly Little Games. Those games were anything but silly, though they certainly often appeared absurd, at least at first. I'd often ask after an exercise ended, when reflecting upon what had just happened, "How did you exhibit leadership during that exercise?" It became quickly apparent to me by the shocked looks on people's faces when I asked that question that many had not thought they'd exhibited much in the way of leadership during the exercise, and some would readily admit that they'd missed an opportunity to exhibit it, since I had not declared that the purpose of it was to provide a medium for each person to demonstrate leadership. Though we were in the middle of what had been advertised as a leadership workshop, I'd felt no pressing need to re-remind every participant of the workshop's advertised purpose. Besides, I figured individuals could use the experiences for whatever purpose they wanted and I didn't want to hold them hostage to satisfying my needs for them. With a little subsequent prodding, though, almost everyone came to recognize that they'd somehow exhibited leadership however they'd engaged, even the wallflowers, even those who'd taken a bio-break rather than actually engage. We came to rediscover that leadership, whatever that might entail, comes in at least ten thousand different guises and can often only be recognized by the one engaging in it, and then, only if that one's rather generously observing themselves. Influence extends far beyond anyone's senses.

I was thinking about that exercise as I entered a BIG box hardware store yesterday, on a mission to find a tool which I could not describe to myself, much less to any clerk, in the unlikely event that I might encounter a clerk there.

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Worser

Worser
Edvard Munch: Ashes (1895)
"Our fundamental decency some days seems wasted on the wrong people."

The December 28, 2020 issue of The New Yorker features a thirty-five page essay by Lawrence Wright titled The Plague Year. This reporting should be required reading, for it represents a first draft of a history that seems destined to define our times, like John Hersey's 1946 New Yorker piece, which took up the whole issue, exploring how six survivors experienced the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Hersey co-opted then current reporting norms by focusing not upon the usual abstractions, but upon the human experiences of six so-called survivors who would never recover. Wright takes a similar tack with Our Damned Pandemic, focusing upon the experiences of a few within the dizzying swirl of unfolding current events. A general sense of impotence emerges as actual experts find their perspectives discounted and discarded in favor of fairy tale public pronouncements and innocents falling prey. Following the nuclear bombing of Japan, a whitewashing occurred, largely by tacit agreement. Correspondents long accustomed to minimizing the horrors they'd witnessed under the firm belief that their readers would not appreciate absolute authenticity, easily accepted often unspoken sanctions against submitting genuinely ugly stories describing truly awful events. Those responsible for informing those not witnessing wore rose-colored glasses when reporting. They'd get the numbers right, more or less, but they figured, I suspect, that depicting the depths of the actual depravity involved wouldn't win them many appreciations. In any society, one at least attempts to uphold a baseline of civility, even when—and probably especially when—unthinkable degradation occurs. Wright avoids this convention.

The Muse's sister, an emeritus professor who taught biology and statistics, has been posting daily updates on This Damned Pandemic since last March, today's update number 315 in an uninterrupted stream attempting to explain whatever was happening and extract meaning from those events.

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Coruge

Coruge
Pieter Lastman: Odysseus and Nausicaa (1619)
"A country that cannot distinguish between Courage and Coruge can only corrupt its purpose."

The Plague Year now passed if not nearly over provided many opportunities for mere mortals to demonstrate extraordinary courage, by which I mean, of course, the perfectly ordinary kind. One doctor, when recounting her first encounters with the COVID-19 virus, explained the dilemma she faced. If she didn't touch the suffocating patient, he would surely die, and he might die anyway. If she did touch him, she might die. She touched him. She and her staff completed their wills and set to work. That's courage. I describe her act so that I might clearly distinguish it from another side-effect of this plague still ravaging us: Coruge. While courage seems fundamentally generous, Coruge seems merely self-important. It takes no courage to refuse to wear the most effective defense against this plague, a mask, it only requires a stubborn self-importance, as if that, in any larger scheme of anything, qualified as in any way important at all. I would call Coruge foolhardiness, but it hardly seems quite hardy enough to qualify. It's merely foolish, a form of arrogance acting out, the insistence of exception to a well-established rule. It's an extension of the more primitive notions of freedom running around these days, the ones that its adherents insist amount to God-given rights to assert whatever they believe to be a right as received wisdom, superior to every other.

I hold no great insight into the nature of Coruge, other than to say that from the distance I maintain, it seems rather pointless and stupid.

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Distributing

Distributing
Albert Bierstadt: The Oregon Trail (1869)
"Whatever else we're intending when Distributing anything, we're Distributing our own naive experience first."

My forebears crossed the much-vaunted Oregon Trail, and try as I might, I cannot quite imagine it as being anything other than a primitive sort of Interstate Freeway. Eye-witness accounts reported a ragged line of discarded furniture, broken wagons, and garbage, alongside an open sewer ditch, with grave markers a frequent sight. Nothing about the trip proved to be nearly as romantic as the paintings of it suggested. Migrants were said to have felt deep disappointment when they saw that their trail would not route them through the Eden the brochures had promised. Even today, we tend to glaze over logistical complications. That pre-pandemic trip to France included an ordeal of airplane connections and discomfiting boredom no entertainment system built into the seat back in front of you could possibly blunt. One arrives half dead in Paris, and spends the first day or two recovering. It's no different for anything we blithely ship. The couple of dozen Christmas packages we mailed took surprising trips, with one pair, addressed to locations less that two miles from each other, arriving four days different. I've had, like you've had, packages routed across the country multiple times and take two weeks to accomplish a standard two-day delivery, with me amusedly tracking 'progress' all the way. Them's the breaks, even with a mature, well-broken-in distribution system. Inefficiency's built right into every one of them.

Wartime's much worse.

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Losting

Losting
Titian: Diana and Actaeon (1556–1559)
"I'm coming to understand that the purpose of Losting, of learning, is not to get found but to get better at coping with feeling lost."

Feeling lost seems the most reliable indicator that I'm learning. I learned or presumed early that I should avoid feeling lost. I felt embarrassed when introduced to some new concept in school, and attempted, often unsuccessfully, to appear that I immediately understood it. Then, I'd feel ashamed as well as lost. Much later, I came to understand that I'd utterly misunderstood the purpose of school. I'd naively believed that it was about knowing, about demonstrating knowledge, when it was properly understood as being about learning, which might often induce deep feelings of being lost, Losting. Up until about the seventh grade, learning only occasionally induced a sense of Losting in me, for I was a bright lad with strong intuition. Beyond elementary education, though, intuition fails to anticipate much of what's presented, as increasingly complex concepts insist upon deriving answers by employing specific processes. Few intuit algebra. Even fewer accurately anticipate history. These require rather more memory than instinct, and forms of discipline demanding considerable Losting before assimilation occurs. If one favors avoiding experiencing Losting, one loses opportunities for learning many things. Once learned, the Losting diminishes, and I suppose that folks can just lean back on their laurels and cruise. Repeatedly avoid Losting leaves one in a nasty lurch.

A New Year appears and I suspect that I really should be making resolutions as if I was not Losting into it.

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Appreciatings

Appreciatings
Charles Deas: Long Jakes, "The Rocky Mountain Man" (1844)
"Thank you for helping to make my old year happier!"

I had to be taught to appreciate. I was not born with the skill. It wasn't until I was in my thirties that I learned the first thing about how to congruently accomplish appreciating, and I still feel at a disadvantage when challenged, as I am this morning, to extend some genuine Appreciatings. This being the last day of this year, I've decided to attempt the opposite of what Auld Lang Sine asks. Should old acquaintance be forgot? I suggest that old acquaintances should properly be warmly recognized with Appreciations on the last day of the year. Every pundit known to man and beast has already submitted their regrets for the year now passing, for it was a remarkably disappointing year in many respects—most, maybe, but hardly entirely. For me it was a year of tremendous personal growth influenced by my encouraging audience, the majority of whom distinguished themselves as repeat offenders, showing up and even coming back again and again and again. What gives?

I started PureSchmaltz as a form of giving.

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HealthScare

HealthScary
Ernest Board: Albucasis blistering a patient in the hospital at Cordova. (Circa 1900).
"It's just there, best avoided, forever poised ready to serve somebody else."

I called in sick yesterday, a rare occurrence. Like anyone, I tend to work right through sensations of illness, never knowing if I'm sick or just tired, or both. My basic strategy for treating any apparent anomaly amounts to giving it a day or two to see if it gets any worse and if it gets any worse, to give it another day or two to see if my condition further degrades, the upshot being that I almost never reach a point where I seriously consider consulting with anyone other than The Muse, who maintains her own superstitions and folk remedies. A doctor's visit requires the rough equivalent of an act of a divided Congress to schedule and these generally amount to me failing to describe and the doctor blindly prescribing, with me reporting side effects resulting from the last round of prescriptions. I tend to spend much of my doctor face time trying to convince the nurse practitioner why I'm not a good candidate for her current pet treatment. Even if I have sleep apnea, a condition I've yet to muster a belief in, I would never consent to wearing an electric muzzle to bed. A man must somehow maintain his dignity. I contend that I'm not sick, a condition modern medicine struggles to cope with.

Still, I do have my days when whatever ails me actually ails me.

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ThePetulances

ThePetulence
Paul Delaroche: Napoléon abdicating in Fontainebleau, 1845
"Nobody ever rides anywhere worth going to on the back of grudges fueled by ThePetulences."

We're each and all heading in the same direction. Lowly and highborn, professional and gig, smart and stupid, born equal and perhaps steadily heading downhill thereafter. If circumstances don't get us, time certainly will. The devout contend that we're heading for a better life following this one, sure and certain of ample reward for whatever humiliation life heaps upon them. All will be humbled, though the humiliation part seems entirely optional. Some become powerful, after a fashion, though none ever powerful enough to make good on any delusion about what that power might purchase. Most learn that power carries a counterbalancing powerlessness, with only ThePetulences ever bringing the two into balance. One might pretend so convincingly as to convince them self, less frequently someone else, rarely a majority. The positioning matters, since the nonbelievers can natter even noble intentions to shreds. It generally behooves anyone wielding power to handle it with greater care than their charter implies they might, for asserted might naturally translates into neither right nor acceptable. Power either humbles or humiliates. An absent humility guarantees eventual humiliation.

Not everyone gifted with authority seems to understand the humility it demands of them, or prove capable of providing it.

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Disposaling

Disposaling
Eugene Berman, Italienne Symphony II (1940)
"The cats receive an hour's free entertainment …"

I received perhaps the greatest gift ever when my email inboxes disappeared from my iPhone on Christmas Eve. Long a point of continuing frustration, their sudden absence felt freeing. I know, I'm supposed to grieve the loss of 3500 messages I had never been able to keep up with, but I could never keep up with them, and though I retain a sense that something important must have been hidden in there somewhere, besides an irregular seli-annual purge of the contents, I never found in there anything like A Publisher's Clearinghouse announcement that I'd become an instant millionaire. Mostly, detritus resulting from some fleeting past association that had produced sometimes daily updates from which I'd never figured out how to unsubscribe and trivial updates from the homeowner's association announcing that some member or another had received approval to install new windows, I only felt oppressed by their presence. My occasional review of the inboxes, never a regular part of my regimen, left me more skilled at deleting without reading them, hundreds each day, it seemed, hardly a skill much prized in anyone's marketplace. I found some retained on my laptop, but felt free that my iPhone would no longer present this overwhelming doodlebug hole of a challenge. Praise be, indeed!

Little of the garbage I generate so easily and permanently disappears.

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AlternateUniverses

AlternateUniverses
Elihu Vedder: Mural, Lobby to Main Reading Room, Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, Washington, D.C.
Main figure is seated atop a pedestal saying "CORRUPT LEGISLATION".
"I might have always been more potential than being."

None of my life makes any sense without accepting the likelihood that AlternateUniverses exist. I might instead attempt to follow a thread I presume to connect the disparate portions of my existence so far, but that story, one attempting to relate each piece to every other, strains credulity more than the AlternateUniverses alternative; it would not make believable fiction. I'm not arguing in favor of wildly divergent spaces, but subtly different ones, at least for the most part. I've thrived in places I formerly considered uninhabitable and found almost uninhabitable places touted as the best Earth has to offer. I feel fortunate to have experienced such tremendous difference. I've struggled with pretty much every transition, for within each I first searched for stuff that could not be found there because it didn't exist there, but I eventually adapted after some fashion and found myself settling in, usually in spite of initial instinctively unhelpful adaptation attempts. I found that I had to let go of some expectations to appreciate each place. What appeared, for instance, on my first visit to New Mexico, as a culture full of crappy gardeners later came to seem one which had adapted well to the local terrain. There are no English Country Gardens thriving in parched high desert country.

I feel proud to report that I spent considerable time over several years writing and reading in the Main Reading Room of The Jefferson Building of DC's Library of Congress, by far the most complete library ever assembled.

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Done-d

done-d
Caravaggio: Saint Jerome in Meditation (1606)
"Doneness, a negotiated settlement."

Back when I consulted with projects, I noticed the curious relationship every project seemed to have with doneness. Similar to each project's initial charter, none managed to muster a very complete description of their destination. "What will 'done' look like," I'd ask, as if that constituted a reasonable question. And most accepted the question with a tinge of guilt, just as if they'd known that they really should have answered that question as a precedent before beginning. None had very clearly described their requisite initial conditions, either, which might just be a polite way to say that their project had gone off half-cocked. They'd garnered permission to start, even received funding, with hardly a half-assed notion of what they would be doing. I came to understand this state as a necessary one, and in no way evidence of the least bit of aberrance. Everyone did it this way for the simple reason that no alternative existed or could be accessed in real or any other time. Sure, each effort could improve by better defining its identity and its objective, but no project ever successfully satisfied their aspiration to have actually done either. Done, I came to understand, was not a state, though one might negotiate into an acceptance that they had achieved some good-enough state of description, but only after having achieved that state, never in anticipation or at the moment of arrival. Done is a reflection, a tardy recognition, not a discernible or definable place. Stuff gets Done-d, never done.

Done-d usually feels like an abandonment to me.

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GraveMisgivings

GraveMisgivings
Daniel Maclise: Othello, Desdemona and Emilia (1867)
" I will continually eliminate intrusions and remulch familiar dirt …"

As near as I can tell, and I'm the only one who could possibly know, I felt fairly well suited to this world through the spring of 1963. Since then, things have maintained a steady downward trajectory. By the fall of that year, I registered my first failing grade, an outcome I felt certain was coming before completing the transfer into Junior High, a clear impending disaster against which I possessed no defenses. Junior High attempted to demonstrate that one could successfully educate kids by removing the center of their existence and replacing it with something euphemistically labeled Home Room. There never was anything even the least bit homey about Home Room. It seemed an utterly alien environment, a place where people who would never very well know each other gathered at the beginning of each school day for the purpose of taking role and listening to threatening screeds the Principal broadcast over the school-wide PA system. It set a distinctly prison camp tone, one which unavoidably soured the rest of each day's experience. I started majoring in hiding out, a field of study in which I came to excel. I would have preferred that they offered a letter in that endeavor, but, alas, they did not.

I matriculated into High School, which was Junior High on steroids.

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Routine

Routine
M. C. Escher: Relativity (1953)
"I might find myself more present then but also much less here …"

I refer to my Routine as sacred. I work hard to keep it as sacred as it feels, though it's almost entirely composed of distinctly secular activities. I'm no monk, but I do spend the majority of my time alone. Early mornings, I've grown accustomed to padding around this place in darkness, for I have no need to turn on lights. I've traversed these rooms enough that my muscle memory mostly sees my pathways for me, no real need to supplement that sixth sense. The cats see fine in near total darkness, so they seem unimpressed with my prowess. I guess I impress myself, though. I exhibit evidence that I'm a townie here, I have enough history to seem prescient to myself. I know which drawer holds whatever kitchen utensil I might need. I might even inhabit what some would deride as a rut, but it's MY rut and I find living in it pleasing.

The impending HeadingHomeward will exchange this reliable old milk cow of a Routine for the equivalent of unproven magic beans.

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Sh!t

Sh!t
Utagawa Kuniyoshi: Takiyasha the Witch and the Skeleton Spectre (circa 1844)
"Assets to assets, dust to dust."

Most possessions more possess their owner than are possessed by any owner. Possession might remain nine-tenths of the law, but it buys little, though it does occupy space. The more possessions one has, the more space one needs to contain them, and the vast majority of that stuff just sits, never referenced, never touched. My folks' place, the house within which I grew up, eventually became a museum dedicated simply to containing an amazing inventory of long-unused stuff. In their final few years, neither my mom nor my dad could get to either the basement or the second floor, so those parts of the place, fully two-thirds of it, simply collected dust. After my dad died and my mom finally begrudgingly accepted the necessity of moving into an assisted living facility, the family quickly cleared out the place we'd long-imaged a repository of long-forgotten treasures. We found a few treasures, but we mostly uncovered tombs to long-ago summers. A set of long-illegal lethal lawn darts. Canned plums from the summer of 1965, still apparently good after more than forty years spent on a shelf in a far back corner of the basement. Most of the imagined treasures had turned to Sh!t by the time we started exorcizing them along with their demons.

That's the thing about possessions, they need to maintain at least a modest velocity or they inevitably degrade.

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Heading

Heading
Elihu Vedder: The Questioner of the Sphinx (1863)
"One must drag a past into their dreams or they never have a chance of coming true."

If someone was manning the helm on this heap and I was its captain, I might feel moved to command that a course for home be set. "Give me the heading for home," I'd bark, and we we'd be on our way. Nobody's at the helm of this heap, though. The Muse and I do what we can, but neither of us have ever shown any particular penchant for navigation. Vectoring chased me off. Too much complicated math. The Muse almost exclusively employs persistence. She tends to get wherever she's going, but rarely by any expedient course. Her path meanders and leverages happenstance, and she'd very likely have it no other way. We're not really into efficiency here, but into collecting the stories our adventures are likely to tell us. The less predictable, the better.

We've gone and done it now, as my mother once might have derisively said.

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BegendingAgain

BegendingAgain
Gustave Doré: Don Quixote amid his fantasies of chivalric romance, the frontispiece to the 1863 Paris Hachette edition of Don Quixote.


"
The Pilgrim travels to find himself. He was lost when he left and hoped to be found by fleeing into something greater than he ever was or ever hopes to become. A reckoning occurs along the way, a reconciling, shell with self, restoring something somehow formerly lost along the way. It never matters why." From Pilgrimage, the first WhatNext Posting, 9/21/2020

"Is it ending as I intended?"


I never seem to know how to begin or end anything. I prefer continuums, endless loops, Ouroboroses forever nibbling their own tails. I don't spring cleanly out of any starting blocks. I likewise tend to miss the moment when I cross the finish line, continuing races longer than strictly necessary for them to end. I behave like Wylie Coyote, forever hatching half-again too clever plans and overrunning my mesa top again and again and again. I label this tendency Begending, a blending of both beginning and ending, neither, really, and also both. I deeply respect the inherent ambiguity experience brings, lessons not so much learned as still learning, without convincing conclusions. Impressions remain, mixed in with much inert material. I might wonder forever without ever concluding what any of anything "really" means. As my dear departed friend Jamie used to insist, it was just what it was and, forever, is just what it is, whatever that was and is. The purpose of any Pilgrimage might not be finding the purpose of any pilgrimage.

The purpose of WhatNext might have been its creation, not its conclusion.

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Blecknology

Blechnology
Elihu Vedder: Soul in Bondage (1891-92)
" … I wondered what might become of me next."

As I was driving by a tiny one bedroom cinder block ranchette, I saw through the front window a flat screen television so enormous that anyone watching it would have to stand in the yard across the street to gain adequate focal distance to see the action on it. Technology possess this sort of strange attraction. It seems as if the specs outweigh utility. We presume that bigger (or tinier) must be better and higher definition, superior, though in practice, beyond a rather modest level of clarity, television becomes increasingly unbelievable, like those old 'shot on video' movies where everything seemed in shockingly sharper focus but lacked a proper patina. When color began replacing black and white in film, the purpose of the medium flipped. It's no real trick to recognize anything represented in black and white, and many details irrelevant to the purpose of the production become much more prominent with color representation. The story usually suffers, becoming more spectacle than substance. The purpose was never perfect representation, but performance and meaning. There's little entertainment value in being able to pick out nose hairs on the bad guy's horses as they race by on the screen, or so it might seem. Meaningless prevailed.

Once that focal point shifts from the purpose of the performance toward higher-definition superficialities, more than an essential subtlety gets lost.

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EmptyNexting

EmptyNexting
Symbolist painter Elihu Vedder: The Pleiades (1885)
" … not yet at the end of my hopefulness, either."

Change, Family Therapist Virginia Satir insisted, rests upon the clear, albeit temporary acceptance of the way things are. I might anticipate, even project futures, but I will be wise to consider that whatever differences might emerge next will have extended from whatever came before them. Though life sometimes seems terribly disjointed, connections remain no matter how disruptively any future seems to manifest. One probably never successfully escapes one's roots, nor need to. Still, I live a considerable portion of my life in anticipation, warm or chilling, and rarely solely within any moment. With three short days—the shortest days of this year so far—remaining in my WhatNext Series of writing (this waning quarter's focus of my writing), I'm still anticipating what might come next. I deliberately avoided originally posing my WhatNext as a question, but as a purposefully ambiguous statement which might, in certain light, certainly seem like a question, but in others a benign label or even an exasperation. Notice how it's lacking punctuation. WhatNext has certainly proven to represent each of those sentiments and more.

This time has seemed a period which rendered prediction not necessarily impossible, but at least unbelievable, or perhaps simply difficult to believe.

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ProHibitions

Prohibitions
Lord Nicolas the German (Donnus Nicholas Germanus), cartographer
Johann the Blockcutter of Armsheim (Johannes Schnitzer or Johannes de Armssheim), engraver:
The world map from Leinhart Holle's 1482 edition of Nicolaus Germanus's emendations to Jacobus Angelus's 1406 Latin translation of Maximus Planudes's late-13th century rediscovered Greek manuscripts of Ptolemy's 2nd-century Geography.
"I preemptively infringe upon my own freedoms so nobody else has to."

By the time someone gets to my advancing age, they've probably produced a long list of personal ProHibitions. Some came from well-intended professionals' advice, but most evolved into being, based upon emerging convictions and experiences. I learned at seventeen that there's nothing much worth discovering at the bottom of any bottle of Southern Comfort, the most misleadingly named beverage in the history of human civilization. I learned how to smoke before I learned how not to. Learning not to proved way harder, as it seems for many things. Bad habits are first good habits, or, if not necessarily good habits, they universally seem like good ideas at the time. They show their insidious side later, after they've weakened your resolve. They might do it that way for the sheer entertainment of it.

I've been collecting cautionary experiences since I started experiencing.

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Ease

Ease
Pieter Brueghel the Elder: Dulle Griet [Mad Meg] (1563)
"If it's really important, I ask The Muse to run the gauntlet …"

Much has been made of the Ease of online shopping. I cannot validate this claim because online shopping still seems to me the very antithesis of Ease. This Damned Pandemic Lockdown reinvigorated my online shopping curiosity, though, so I've recently been reengaging to learn if anyone has engineered any Ease into their interfaces. I'm the guy who, when checking out at Whole Foods® explains that he has not (yet) figured out the Amazon One-Click® app yet. They either take my word that I'm a member, the person in line behind me loans me their identity, or I just take along The Muse, who just seems to know how those sorts of things operate. Amazon has long held my admiration for the absolute hostility of their user interface, which seems more hazard to commerce than intelligent assistant. Their design became the burgeoning online shopping industry's standard for online commerce, effectively disqualifying me from participating. I'm usually beyond caring.

The vacuum died last weekend, so I went online shopping for a replacement.

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HesitantLede

Hesitantlede
Moses: Woodcut from a single-sheet print by the Memmingen printing company Kunne (15th century)
"I'm cheering for some serious foot dragging next."

Most accounts characterize Moses as a distinctly hesitant leader. He was forever fleeing into his meeting tent to confer with The Almighty, continuously uncertain about his next move, his people endlessly complaining about his leadership. He seemed to fake it a lot. Some translations report that he remained unaware that his face exhibited a certain radiance obvious to anyone who met him, but apparently not reflected in any mirrored surface. He doubtless led his people and even survived a face-to-face audience with God, but he comes across as an inveterate foot dragger. How else could it have possibly taken forty and more years to cross the freaking Sinai, which is just over two hundred klicks wide? Baby steps? Yea, baby steps.

When the word leader comes up in polite conversation, though, it seems most likely that one might attach a different connotation.

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TheEnemyWithin

Enemy1
Peter Paul Rubens: Massacre of the Innocents (1611–12)
" … getting even only leads to slaughtering innocents …"

They goad. They spout gibberish. They firmly believe in flimsy fictions and claim to be prepared to lay down their lives to defend them. I imagine that they performed poorly in school and so felt demeaned there. The elites who harshly judged them in class became evidence of an upper class to which they would be forever denied access. They took menial jobs, ones which only almost paid the bills. They did the heavy lifting whenever an elite got a bug up his ass. They actually fought the wars without purpose. They witnessed their comrades' deaths. Perhaps they acquired a first class case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder which just added another layer onto an ever-growing grudge. They believed that owning guns was both an honor and a right, a little something to equalize what had always been an unfair fight. They vowed to fight. They exclusively slaughter innocents, innocence.

They goad to take the upper hand.

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TheNarrator

TheNarrator
Anonymous: Diogenes brings a plucked chicken to Plato. (19th century)

According to Diogenes Laërtius’ third-century Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers, Plato was applauded for his definition of man as a featherless biped, so Diogenes the Cynic “plucked the feathers from a cock, brought it to Plato’s school, and said, ‘Here is Plato’s man.’ ” When asked about the origin of his epithet, cynic deriving from the Greek word for dog, Diogenes replied that it was given to him because he “fawns upon those who give him anything and barks at those who give him nothing.” From Lapham's Quarterly

"I might need some serious slowing down after this."

It's long been considered wise counsel to understand who's whispering into one's counsellor's ear, for those people narrate that counsellor's experience, often without the counsellor acknowledging the influence. The much-touted still, silent voice, which originates inside, actively interprets, while TheNarrator represent a world pre-interpreted for easy absorption. This Damned Pandemic has rendered my library inconvenient to visit so I've been supplementing my Wreading with audio books. I've been noticing that I listen less critically than I read, as if intaking through my ears bypasses some gatekeeper in my brain. I find fiction even more believable when listening. I find non-fiction much more convincing, though I understand that as a "consumer" of literature, I hold a responsibility to be sorting whatever I'm attempting to absorb. Listening seems to bypass my sorting mechanism.

I find distasteful any medium that does not provide me the means for easily skipping ahead or flipping back.

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FatteningGeese

GooseFattening
Baldassare de Caro: A hunting still life with a goose, ducks, pigeons, songbirds and a dog in a landscape (Early 18th Century)
"On even the darkest evenings, I light a fresh candle."

The olde carol reports that Christmas is coming and the goose is getting fat. Hardly headline news, that. Feed a goose a freaking dandelion and it will turn that weed into the finest, silkiest Schmaltz. The carol might have more usefully proclaimed that Christmas is coming and you're getting fat, for a human's metabolism seems to shift into goose mode as the winter's holidays approach. Truth told, few of us even try to subsist upon a diet of dandelion buds in any season. As snow falls, we, instead, commence to buying heavy whipping cream by the quart and butters and sugars we haven't bought since this time last year. We refer to our excesses as cheer, which beats drowning them in remorseful tears. We can save our remorse for Lent, wherein we can regret what might seem, there on the cusp of spring, a serious personal shortcoming visiting around Solstice past. In this moment, hearts sing without the slightest sensation of any impending smothering. We have no interest in balancing anything. Let church bells ring, we're celebrating!

Our genome remembers those times before the advent of central heating, when survival required defensive fat layering.

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AgingInPlace

AgingInPlace
Seated figure from Mali, Djenné peoples, 13th century
"Can anyone hope to outrun their fate when AgingInPlace?"

Americans seem a mobile people. Born to migrate, we've always been quick to ditch. We once referred to this tendency as our manifest destiny, which roughly translated into a firm belief that we can only manifest our true selves if we're somewhere else. We identify our sense of place as 'there', definitely not here or even the Old Home Place, and, no, we're still not there yet. We grow up and move away, relocate for professional advancement, even pull up roots at retirement to make another in a seemingly infinite series of attempts to finally locate our ultimate Promised Land. Arriving, though, we find dissatisfaction co-locating again, so we spend about a quarter of each year traveling to see somewhere else, anywhere else, really. We maintain bucket lists of our bucket lists, the purpose of which seems to be to fuel our pleasing dissatisfactions. Here has always seemed more distraction than destination. We ache to be on the road again.

So when This Damned Pandemic came calling and our well-intended public servants started recommending just staying home, a collective, mournful moan arose from at least half of our populous.

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MakingHistory

MakingHistory
Victor Arnautoff: "City Life" mural, Coit Tower, San Francisco (1934)
"The pointy end trails a very long tail which will never become any different."

Maybe it's an effect of This Damned Pandemic, but I've been catching myself daydreaming lately, frequently. I'll find myself floating in the hallway of my elementary school, surrounded by everything that seemed so unexceptional then. It all seems golden now. The absence of a normal routine might have been forcing me into reliving past ones which all seem like history from here. I do not know how they made that transition into golden past because at ground level, the whole show seemed continuous, flawless. Everyone and everything fulfilled their role perfectly, each precisely as they eventually would become, each act somehow frozen in time yet still convincingly fluid. I remember considering attempting to capture on film the place and time where I came of age, but I never found the time to take those pictures when I was still imbedded within that familiar frame. What seemed normal, even banal then has since become the stuff of barely believable legend. Almost nothing survived intact—I know that I certainly didn't—yet my daydreams seem so crisp and clear that when I finally snap out of one, I can't quite believe that I'm here and not there. I might be both.

I conclude that we're each MakingHistory every blessed second.

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SliverBullets

sliverbullet
Joseph Wright: An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768)
"If we can maintain faith in infinitesimals, we stand some chance."

Invite a halfway decent project manager to a project meeting or an otherwise innocent pandemic and things tend to quickly seem more complicated. While a team or a society easily focus their energy upon some essentially mythical closure, the project manager's having none of that. She'll start asking "and if you achieved that, where would you be?" in long meandering series intended to get people thinking less superficially. You see, most of us firmly believe in silver bullets, even though experts in every field agree that there's really no such thing. Nothing ends like things end on TV, prominently featuring unambiguously good guys, white horses, or native sidekicks. Silver bullets prove impractical for reasons beyond their obvious expense. Lead's almost twice as heavy as silver, its mass much better suited for bullets. Silver bullets would struggle to accurately hit any target, regardless of the skill of the shooter involved. We each suffer somewhat from a form of Fairy Tale Poisoning, and this toxin serves us very poorly.

We've, for the duration of This Damned Pandemic, maintained a reassuring belief in the eventual emergence of a blunting vaccine which would quickly neutralize the threat.

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Shimbolism

Shimbolism
Joseph Wright: The Alchemist in Search of the Philosopher's Stone (1771)
" … not even a cigar is any longer ever simply a smoke."

I admit to no longer being anyone's exemplar of fashion. Few of my garments feature a manufacturer's label, and I did not purchase those to publicly promote my good taste, for I consider any visible manufacturer's label in extremely poor taste, the most primitive form of self promotion by back-handed association, as if Ralph Lauren were somehow personally vouching for me because I'm impractical enough to pay an inflated price for a shirt with a prominent logo in lieu of a front pocket. I'm unable to successfully translate the seemingly subtle cues which, I'm certain, were supposed to clue me in as to with whom I'm having the pleasure of meeting, a form of qualification. My eye can discern a well-cut worsted from a polyester wannabe, and I admit to projecting significant meaning upon each, but most of the rest of the code seems as alien as any avian mating ritual, mere flash and feather. I do understand that it's become somewhat of an imperative now for one to suit up for public display. The message on a hat might make a real difference to some, but I never swallowed the notion that wearing a hat might make anything great the first time, let alone over again.

My usual wardrobe amounts to the same damned thing worn over and over and over again, with no underlying meaning ever intended, other than that it's clean and somewhat well-fitted.

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Workarounds

Workaround1
Coloured etching by J. Collier after himself:
A sadistic tooth-drawer frightening his patient with a hot coal causing him to pull away violently and extract a tooth. (1810)
"Not all Workarounds are created equal."

Anything retained long enough becomes the sum of its sustaining Workarounds. Older cars have lost several of their factory-installed features, replaced by alternative parts, some of which might have even been designed to serve the purpose for which they're employed. Exact replacements cannot always be located, so an inventive or desperate mechanic or DIY owner jury-rigs something and calls it good enough. These fixes proliferate as something ages. Houses accumulate a variety of sins to their original design, often under the aegis of "home improvement." Some actually improve something, though many more likely simply prolong a desired utility without much regard for aesthetics. Remodeling, in addition to adding a few new ones, inevitably becomes a revisiting of many prior sins, many of them, I've always suspected, concocted late some Sunday evening when something critical failed. Few come back Monday morning to improve any quick fix. A remodeler repeatedly wonders, "What were they thinking?"

The chances seem good that they were not thinking at all, but reacting.

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SecretLife

SecretLife
Maria Louise Kirk: Cover Illustration for the 1911 American edition of Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden.
" … mostly redactions in any transcript."

I live three simultaneous lives: a public, a private, and a secret one. I might refer to my public life as my nine-to-five life. It entails my out-there encounters. My private life's the one I primarily live at home; me and my family're privy to this one, along with my very closest friends. My SecretLife includes all my activities I mention to nobody, ever. It includes more than nose-picking, and entails much of what I find embarrassing to tell. We each maintain all three of these lives, in varying proportions and degrees. A mid-career professional might allocate much more than half their time to maintaining their public presence. Newlyweds slip into full time private time when they depart on their honeymoon, then, over time, allocate a much smaller proportion to engaging in their relationship. Through it all, we each maintain at least a small part of every day to our secret activities, if only for the sake of maintenance. Nobody ever gets to watch me shave. I understand that some families (shudder) maintain an open door bathroom policy which both my privacy life and my secrecy life abhor. I'm a dedicated bathroom door closer, myself.

During normal times, a rhythm emerges and seems to maintain itself, with public, private, and secret times seeming to balance themselves.

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NewNormalScene

NewNormalScene
A shower of cards in Alice in Wonderland from the color illustrated Nursery Alice published in 1890 with illustrations by John Tenniel
" Coping must mean that I'm still noticing differences without taking them as necessarily definitive."

If there's an art to adapting, it's for certain a dark one not taught in any higher learning institution. It seems a low sort of learning, imposed rather than chosen, and however much I might crow about my own resilience, I can assure you that it's all bullshit. There never were any masters of resilience and not only because there never could have been. You see, mastery demands an object exhibiting certain replicabilities, patterns emerging at least somewhat regularly, where practice might prove possible. Nobody ever improves their innate ability to predict what random number might emerge next. Likewise, each emerging NewNormalScene will likely never seem completely normal. Nostalgia taints assimilation. One cannot help comparing and finding the new thing wanting. These days never seem very much like the good old ones.

Saturday morning comes and I still feel a reassuring compulsion to head over to Davey's Diner for a platter of loaded hash browns.

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Complaintant

Complaintant
Anders Zorn: Our Daily Bread (1886)
" … I'm just blowing off stink."

I try not to whine, which under the Negative Objective Rule, means that I catch myself complaining more than I care to openly admit. Just between us, then, I admit to having a hyperactive internal complaint department operating 24/7. It never closes. I occasionally more publicly disclose its workings, but I usually just keep my complaints to myself, if only to demonstrate that I might have been raised right. I learned in my birth family, which featured five kids, just how necessary accommodation tends to be. One complainer can spoil every shared experience for everybody, perhaps most prominently for the complainer. Keep it up, and the belt might come off, encouraged by my mom and administered by my reluctant father, who always preferred to spare the rod, however warranted a punishment might seem. So I graduated into what passed for my adulthood with an advanced degree in stifling, a skill with a spotty record of producing real benefit.

The Damned Pandemic Lockdown has been teaching me complaining's hidden benefit, though.

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Widsom

Widsom
Johannes Moreelse, Vanity (17th Century)
"I might have always been somebody else instead."

If you don't feel crazy sometimes, you're probably insane. The truly insane often feel perfectly sane while the sane only occasionally do. Truth often seems much stranger than fiction and fiction the more readily believable truth. There is no vast world-wide conspiracy trying to convince you that a vast world-wide conspiracy's trying to convince you that a vast world-wide conspiracy's trying to convince you. Nobody's capable of coordinating even a half-vast world-wide conspiracy in a world where most cannot consistently make it to the supper table on time. They're not actually out to get you, though they're very likely to get you, anyway. It's still paranoia, even when nobody's out to get you. Most cannot step into the same river once. Nobody can do it twice. Uncommon wisdom is everywhere, common sense, uncommon. Wisdom is never common. It only comes in the uncommon variety. If you're not confused, you might not be paying close enough attention.

Whoever said that the world should make sense never closely observed this world, for it overflows with absolute nonsense.

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Leftovering

Leftovers1
Johannes Moreelse: Heraclitus (1630)
"By Epiphany, we will have somehow survived a second surge of Leftovering here."

Was it really just a week ago when I went to bed with my head filled with visions of an impending Thanksgiving dinner? The Muse and I had trundled out to fetch our fresh bird and returned to The Villa feeling supremely well prepared. The Muse had roasted off that little sugar pumpkin, anticipating some pie-making. We tussled a little over whether we should dry or wet brine the bird, a decision I ceded to The Muse, since she would be cooking. We were both salivating in warm anticipation, but that was then. Heraclitus, the so-called weeping philosopher, reveled in pointing out human foibles. He observed much human behavior that clearly couldn't qualify as rational. He noted that the same thing seems completely different from different perspectives while remaining otherwise precisely the same. He might have been foretelling the story of our Thanksgiving, which did, indeed, come the following morning but left a long, long tail behind. Turkey on day six seems a completely different commodity than it did on day one.

Most mornings, when filling the cats' food dish, I wonder if they might prefer a tad more variety in their diet.

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Boss

Boss
Johannes Moreelse: Democritus (c. 1630)
"If nobody's Boss, it works better."

Anyone who's ever had a Boss has experienced what it's like to work for a complete idiot. This principle counts double for anyone who's ever worked for them self. The hierarchy wobbles top-heavy. If an organization has a cadre of best and brightest, why position them on the head of the pin rather than on the business end, the foundation? A Boss attempts to fulfill a Utopian mission, one rooted in directing others' actions, one doomed to endless short-coming. Nobody told this twenty-five year old budding business executive upon accepting his first supervisory assignment that he would most probably never get the hang of it, that he'd instantly become the most clueless one in the whole damned organization and that he dare not admit it, even to himself. He'd hang in there, pantomiming his own performance while writing performance reviews for people who's contribution he could not have possibly replicated or very deeply appreciated. The more successful subordinates were insubordinate and managed him.

And so it's been through all of my professional life.

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Eternals

Eternals
Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (circa 1490-1510)
"I feel a deep responsibility to maintain a sense of my own eternity."

As near as I can tell from here, we're each immortal until we're not. We each live infinite lives, lives within lives seemingly ad infinitum, right up to the moment when we don't anymore. To understand Eternals, it seems as though one must consider a slightly different from usual interpretation of infinity. Mathematics presumes infinity to be a collection of uncountable things, most often imagined as an overwhelmingly enormous set. They admit that some infinities extend further than others, giving rise to both smaller and larger enormities, but each extends further than anyone can imagine. Eternals last forever but emerge from moments. They hold realized potential and cannot ever be undone. That falling leaf embodies an eternal event which might have happened in many different ways, but didn't. It occurred just as it did and could thereafter never be undone. No do-overs, no mulligans. Each event happens precisely once, eternally.

You and I exist on the leading edge of an ever-changing eternity, for we each hold potentials destined to become Eternals.

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Fallowtimes

FallowTimes
Altichiero da Verona: Portrait of Francesco Petrarch, from a 1379 copy of the latter's De viris illustribus
"I've been cultivating dreams while inhabiting Fallowtimes since."

After giving and receiving the traditional Thanksgiving gratitudes, Fallowtimes settle in for an unimaginable duration. I might speak then in vague abstractions about last summer or a coming spring, but neither concept really settles in as likely or even distantly possible. A chrysalis too-securely covers my senses. My gardens, past and future, dominate my dreams and even some of my waking times then, for of all my friends, my gardens have seemed both the most dependent as well as the most dependable. Some I feel certain will never return. A few might resurrect, though likely in different forms, but I remember the placements, where the Bleeding Hearts sprouted each spring and where the buttonweeds grew the fiercest. I came to deeply understand each habit and habitat, each frustrating tendency and each payout. I freely submitted myself to their well-being, even when doing so would take too much out of me, for they represented a greater good, an association within which I could feel genuinely proud without ever experiencing a threatening pridefulness. I merely dug dirt.

The dilemma Fallowtimes present centers around to what I might satisfyingly relent, for an existence must, in my estimation, submit to something.

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Transpacities

Transpacities
Johannes Moreelse: Clio: Muse of History, c. 1634
" … we recognize who fooled who, and recoil."

I feel fortunate to be able to report that I've only been taken mean advantage of a few times in my life so far. I might have avoided each instance, I later reflected, had I paid closer attention not to the villain but to myself, for I came to realize that I'd known I'd been offered a rubber worm before I'd decided to sink my teeth into it. I was probably just needer than I had suspected and so too easily ignored the clear and present felt sense that the villain was not to be trusted. I had successfully fooled myself, for my mountebanks had each very clearly exhibited Transpacities, those cues that a phony transparency's before me, in everything they'd said and done. They couldn't help it. They'd each offered some form of instant intimacy, an authentic impossibility, but in my then present state of neediness, I'd ignored the cue. We're each capable of doing this to ourselves.

Some believe that people are always trying to cloak who they really are and what they're really up to.

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Beyond

Beyond
Edvard Munch: "Selvportrett" (1886)
"We'll likely look back with both nostalgia and regret."

I suspect that my many years interacting with computers have entrained me into certain preconscious habits. My computer, however outwardly benevolent, operates strictly within a very narrow range of permissible patterns. I must, for instance, open, edit, save, and recover according to certain procedures, some of which initially baffled me but which later became second nature. I've found several applications unusable because they seemed to expect me to think and react in ways I could not intuit or consistently remember. Some applications, I need to relearn each time I use them. I have many which I tried to use once and then never went back, finding nothing compelling in them after my initial investigation. A friend posted one of her grandmother's recipes and I felt shaken for just how un-Boolean it was. It violated what I've come to understand constitutes normal. One had to read it clear through at least once to understand that, for instance, it was not written in the preparation sequence, a gross violation of more thoroughly-ingrained modern practice. I began considering what forms of structure might lie Beyond the ones we have grown to use today.

It wasn't until the 1930s that anybody had developed a logical structure simple, spare, yet complete enough to support anything like a consistent machine language, one capable of mechanically replicating complex calculations.

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ThanksReceiving

ThanksReceiving
David Vinckboons: Distribution of Loaves to the Poor (first half of 17th century)
"I suspect that most of us could use some practice."

It might be a law of the universe that for every thanks given, one must be received, and while on Thanksgiving Day, one might sincerely offer many thanks, few ever mention the target receivers of these thanks. In this culture, most of us receive instruction in the practice of ThanksGiving, which seems a central tenet of human decency here, few receive much training in the congruent reception of those thanks. Was it Jesus who insisted that it's better to give than receive? We might have taken that directive a little too close to heart, for it's certainly not, then, damning to receive rather than to give, though many of us seem to respond to an act of giving as if it was somehow shameful to receive. We might blush and find ourselves suddenly tongue-tied, and simply nod as if to dismiss this backend of the ritual. A giver, appreciated for providing, might even catch himself mumbling, "It was nothing," thereby boogering up an otherwise uplifting exchange. But where to go to receive this essential training in ThanksReceiving?

This practice might belong to that class of practices one can only ever teach them self.

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badream

badream
Antonio de Pereda: The Knight's Dream (ca. 1650-1670)
On the banner: Aeterne pungit, cito volat et occidit.
"Eternally it stings, swiftly it flies and it kills."

" … not ever what they're not actually saying."

I dream in allegory, not coherent narrative. When The Muse asks what I dreamed, I'm speechless because I cannot translate them into words. They mostly seem absurd, haphazardly combining metaphors. I think of them as badreams (pronounced BAdreams) because they unsettle me and chase me away from sleep. Several times each week, I find myself awake, hesitant to close my eyes again, feeling not quite finished with sleep but effectively barred from reentering it. Each badream brings some message but these might just as well have been sealed within a bottle within a box and sunk deeply beneath the sea for all the coherence they seem to carry. They communicate anyway, beyond words, beyond any coherent in this world. Meanings seem to seep in and they often refuse to go away. Perhaps they carry significant information or maybe they're just distractions, synapses firing randomly to produce profound sensations signifying nothing. How could I know?

They often seem to carry warnings.

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SecularHolidays

SecularHolidays
J.C Leyendecker: "Thanksgiving" [American Weekly cover art] (1940)
"SecularHolidays seem to be all about the food and remembering to say grace."

The founding American principle separating church and state might have quite naturally necessitated the creation and observance of not higher holy days, but secular ones. Visit Italy and you're likely to feel surprised when you find a bank closed on a Monday to observe some obscure, previously unknown to you, holy day of obligation. No worry about that happening here, except by rather accidental coincidence. Christmas, probably the pre-eminent SecularHoliday in the Ewww Ess of A, happens to share a day with several prominent sporting events and a rather mammon-rich exchange of what are referred to as gifts but often amount to payoffs, vigorish in a vigorous competition. On Ash Wednesday, Catholics can be spotted walking around wearing ashy crosses smeared on their foreheads, and that might turn a head or two, but on Halloween, otherwise respectable supermarket checkers show up for work decked out in the most outrageously ghoulish get-ups, and nobody turns a head. It's understood that it's a SecularHoliday, and everybody gets a pass.

Thanksgiving seems the most curious one, a SecularHoliday dedicated to gorging and recreating family trances.

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PersonalResponsibility

PersonalResponsibility
Vincent van Gogh: Pair of Shoes (1895)
"We'll be a very long time absorbing this lesson and recovering."

PersonalResponsibility will ultimately prove to have been the greatest failure during This Damned Pandemic. Governors, mayors, and other well-intended authority figures deflected pleas to take firm stands by directing The Public to wear masks, avoid clustering, and simply stay at home. Some insisted that it was these public figures' duty to mandate certain behaviors in order to stem the flood of infections. The more conservative responded by rejecting these assertions that their duty lay in implementing what they insisted were fundamentally unenforceable rules, insisting that individuals rightly held the PersonalResponsibility to, as they repeatedly said, "do the right thing," whatever that might become. As a result, several interpretations of right thing emerged, each presumed true by whomever held it. Some refused to mask themselves, for a variety of curious reasons, potential suffocation a common if utterly spurious explanation. Some even became militant at the suggestion that their PersonalResponsibility might extend any further than their own, apparently holy, me, me, and me. The result, of course, became a rather shameful and utterly ineffective act of Collective Irresponsibility, as each adhered to their own conscience rather than what might prove collectively effective. We produced together a large-scale Tragedy of the Commons, where what's individually perceived as best for me, inevitably becomes the very worst for everybody.

History might perceive this troubling paradox, and even a majority see it in real time, but unless everybody buys into mitigation, the outcome's inexorable, for stemming this infection was not merely a matter of PersonalResponsibility, but a collective one.

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ThreateningToFester

ThreateningToFester
Pieter Aertsen: A Meat Stall with the Holy Family Giving Alms (1551)
" … something different will most certainly be ThreateningToFester in my curious larder."

I overstate my case, but only by a little, when I say that I use the same recipe for everything I make in the kitchen. I use a variety of ingredients, not the same ones again and again, but the ingredients for my best stuff share a common state in that they're all ThreateningToFester. I'm not above scraping off a bloom of non-intrusive mold, but most components haven't degraded quite that far yet, though they could easily pass over within the next couple of days. I maintain what I think of as a deep larder. It features plenty of variety and I refresh it more or less continuously. I preserve compulsively, always pressure canning something for later use. We tend to over-buy fresh veg and fruit. Mangoes tend to get away from us and need some surgery before using. Lettuces might turn a little brown, or even inky black around the edges before their turn comes up in rotation. I trim the worst, saving those trimmings in the freezer for a later stock pot, and all's right with our world again. Cilantro almost always manages to completely go to the dark side before I find it as an inky mess in the bottom of the Black Hole veg drawer, but that's an inconsequential loss.

My best suppers combine in some unexpected way leftovers from three or four previous suppers.

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GroanUpAgain

GroanUp2
Paul Gauguin: Self-Portrait (1885)
"They left me behind to carry on something."

As near as I can tell from here, I'm still growing up. I doubt that I'll ever finish or even make all that much headway. It might have been youthful fancy that once convinced me that I might one day mature, and that it might prove to be a cure for what plagued me in my youth. I imagined that my native indecisiveness might one day grow into clear convictions, but that hasn't happened yet. I'd thought that experience might buy me a certain tranquility in the face of fierce uncertainty, but I'm still struggling with that koan. The very notion that evolution might apply to my own little micro-climate now seems absurd, for while I'm not precisely who I started out as, I'm remarkably unchanged after passing through this veil, perhaps myself now, only more so. Somehow, everyone else seems matured. My classmates became beyond middle age to more closely resemble their parents, I still feel exempted, except when my mirror lies to me, which it conspires to do daily. I know more but feel no smarter. I've many times been there and back again, but retain a similar curiosity as I held at the beginning, as if those excursions hadn't quite taken. Each morning seems new all over again, undiscovered like a familiar toy I'd lost then found, certain to lose again.

I accept just how ineptly I've overcome my challenges and yet I still managed to overcome them.

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WillingSuspension

WillingSuspension
John Steuart Curry: John Brown (1939)
" … maybe we won't miss much of what we edit out for the purpose of improving the quality of our experience here."

The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge is said to have coined the term WillingSuspension of Disbelief when trying (and probably failing) to explain how a reader should approach his work. Poetry's like a joke. If you have to explain it, it didn't work. I believe that he probably meant that The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner should be read as a figurative rather than literal work; he didn't intend it to mean what it said but what it invoked. Most literature seems improved by reading with a fuzzy eye, not parsing it for too many facts, but perhaps for insights instead. Facts piled upon each other quickly become almost as interesting to read as a standard dictionary, plot line uninspiring. Theater, film, even television fail if perceived through any overly-critical eyes, for they rely upon a kind of conspiring with their audience, a tacit understanding that they won't mention the odd shadow the stage set casts or the obvious fact that no Martian would ever actually say THAT. We're pretending for some larger purpose, often, our own amusement. Of course the kids' improvisational after-dinner performance is lame. Parse for cuteness instead.

Following up on my yesterday's story, Disbelief, I spent my post-writing day considering Disbelief's accomplice, WillingSuspension.

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DisBelieving

DisBelief
Dorothea Tanning: Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (1943)


I was never a believer in The War on Terror. Its premise seemed fatally flawed from the beginning. While it's true that in every war so far, neither side had the slightest idea what it was doing, The War On Terror lacked even a tangible identity for any enemy combatant. It was as it was conceived to be, a Whack A Mole® undertaking destined to string us along for an eternity or longer. The only possible way to win such a war entailed refusing to engage in it. Once deployed, no exit could possibly present itself, except to just withdraw from it, though such a retreat would necessarily bring into sharp relief the underlying fallacies behind it. We stay engaged to save face, I guess, further sullying our reputation for the purpose of preserving our self-esteem.

When I was a kid, I often wondered what it would have been like to live through a war.

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AbSense

AbSense
Caspar David Friedrich: Two Men Contemplating the Moon (Circa 1825-30)
"I'd graduated from and into my self …"

If absence makes the heart grow fonder, I must have the fondest heart. Much of my life (so far) has prominently featured absences, usually, my own. Making sense of these distances presents a challenge, since sense-making seems sort of a team sport. Solo sense-making lacks a requisite variety and tends to reverberate more than reveal. Most of my professional life, emphasis has been placed upon teaming, with little notice of its necessary individual component, where work's actually accomplished, in AbSense of everyone else. Few things seem sorrier than team members struggling to find their identity together, when each might have brought their own personally-crafted identity from home to hook up with each other's. That homework easily gets shirked in favor of some diversion, something (ANYTHING!) to pull the disquieting attention away from self. I remain uncertain what sort of training might prove useful for developing a deepening sense of that self, the one unavoidably separated from everyone else. Maybe training couldn't help. Perhaps it's just the kind of swimming that requires innocents falling in over their heads and then figuring it out by themselves.

Separated from the mothership at birth, the separations continued afterward.

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ReNial

ReNial
Diego Rivera: El Hombre in Cruce de Caminos (1934)
"What are we supposed to do with this?"

If denial remains the first stage of acceptance, ReNial attempts to infinitely extend irresolution. It's a cognitive state probably intended to keep the true believer safe, though it eventually backfires in practice to insist upon ever-increasing personal peril. When one falls into ReNial, no evidence qualifies as sufficient to counter any initial misconception. First impressions metastasize into permanent, ever more strongly defended, convictions. Those in ReNial seem to perceive admission of even a small mistake as an irreversible negation of self, a forfeiture of some essential part of their own identity. They persist in believing even obviously self-destructive falsehoods long after what most consider reasonable. They come to not simply resist acknowledging some obvious something, but eventually identify themselves as resistance itself. They thereby back into assuming a negative identity defined by what it denies. Negative identities tend to reliably produce the opposite of whatever they want.

Society long ago adopted forms of logic intended to help us prevent falling into ReNial.

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Wreading

GreatWreading
Berthe Morisot - Reading [La Lecture] (1888)
"Nobody needs to care where my writing comes from except for me."

Writers Wread much more than they write. We do not merely read, but Wread, which is the specialized kind of reading in which writers engage. We Wread compulsively, like we might breathe if on the edge of suffocation, a necessity much more than a choice. UnWread books sit like spare oxygen tanks on my side table. My piles of New Yorkers, emergency secret stashes should my books fail me. I won't read just anything, at least not to conclusion. I'm likely to try anything. I hold high but unexplainable standards for what constitutes Wreadable, and quickly discard anything striking me as incoherent. I'm particular because, like many writers, my writing seems to echo whatever I'm Wreading, echoes not being true reproductions, but similar resonances. I do not aspire to write like anyone else. Should I start Wreading something that does not sing to me, I dare not absorb its discordance, lest it leak back out in my writing and into my reader's ear.

I Wread for joy, to immerse myself in a writer's voice, to revel in clear and clever usage.

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PandemicPete

PandemicPete2
This illustration appeared in 1909 in The New York American
"Go ahead, just shoot the messenger and try hard to avoid hitting your own left foot in the process …"

Nobody felt more wrongly accused than Mary Mallon, Immigrant Irish Cook for a wealthy New York banker's family vacationing in Oyster Bay. She felt fine and refused to cooperate with the investigator trying to track down the source of an unusual typhoid outbreak among the elite. Typhoid most often appeared in slums. Typhoid Mary was eventually quarantined for the rest of her life and felt wrongly persecuted for every minute of that time. Now infamous, we might imagine that Mary deserved her infamy, that she was particularly cavalier or callously cynical, but she was neither, just unaware, in the modern vernacular: merely clueless. SARS-CoV-2, The virus that causes COVID-19 infections, cannot be properly characterized as cavalier or cynical, either, neither can those who spread it unaware, a designation which might reasonably include anyone and everyone, since SARS-CoV-2 seems to primarily spread using Typhoid Mary's insidious method, via the asymptomatically infected. The Pandemic Petes exclusively responsible for spreading This Damned Pandemic might have each done what Mary did, unsuccessfully sue the health department for quarantining them, but might reasonably feel wrongly accused of what they do, what they each did in turn. They didn't know. I write this piece so that we might come to know together.

We have a long and overly proud tradition of shooting messengers, blaming informants for delivering unsettling content.

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WhyIAmNotACapitalist

WhyIAmNotACapitalist
Pieter Aertsen: Market Scene (1550)
"It might be that only those unable to play gain anything."

I considered myself a non-combatant in the great twentieth century dichotomy between capitalism and communism. I chose Neither Of The Above, because I thought the distinction phony. This choice probably complicated my life. I was born into a self-proclaimed capitalist nation and I didn't profess fealty to the national religion. I wasn't so much opposed to others practicing it, within reasonable limits—nobody likes a glutton—, I just couldn't find traction for myself within it. Becoming a capitalist required that I accumulate some capital, or borrow some, in order to participate, and I never figured out how to satisfy this fundamental qualification. Some seemed to find employment that paid them more than they needed to live, but I never did, so capitalism held zero attraction. Capitalism always seemed like something other people did. Oh, I've purchased stock a couple of times in my life, but I always quickly disposed of it, feeling exposed as long as I held it. I'm more of a sock-drawer sort of investor.

I prefer to hold cash and advance myself by not spending it.

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SelfEvidence

Self_Evidence
Gilbert Stuart: George Washington [The Athenaeum Portrait] (April 12, 1796)
"Maybe SelfEvidence inevitably insists upon regulation."

The Father of Our Country, George Washington, never fathered a child. I suppose that he was too busy fathering the country to get around to attending to his wife's procreation needs, or he might have been one of those futuristic types who could not quite justify contributing to eventual population explosion. The country he fathered was the only one predicated upon SelfEvidence. Also, his most recognizable portrait was never finished. These two facts might be related. The Declaration of Independence, a rather petulant document, insisted upon Self Evident Rights, ones requiring no independent evidence to prove their existence, a then unprecedented proposition. It left the infant country in a curious position, independent in unproven ways and decidedly headstrong, for it had created a conjured foundation, one lacking confirmation within the then-existing common law governing any nation. How might one go about translating this notion into practical governance, if mere propositions underpin the nation? This would prove to become the underlying question for the maturing country. It fueled truly terrible teen years which rent it in two, and a difficult early adulthood which went to its head. It encouraged diversity while endlessly punishing its presence. I think I can say without much fear of contradiction, that the nation, so constituted, became a skitzy mess.

I ascribe the resulting chaos to that founding principle of SelfEvidence, which encourages a certain Know It When I See It sense, which often manages to make little sense at all to someone else.

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TroubleBubbles

TroubleBubble
Jean-Michel Basquiat: Flexible (1984)
"Oh, the stories they'll tell later!"

My friend Franklin's son Bodie is a freshman in high school this plague year. Bodie's a smart kid, so I'm convinced he'll experience only the normal academic encumbrances, but I wonder how he'll manage to become an adult without the freedom to experience adolescence's usual and necessary dalliances. Playing hooky's probably out of the question. How will he be able to develop even a half-decent addiction to anything he'll later have to recover from if he's not out and about unrestricted by lockdowns? Will he even have access to the usual reprobates every kid tries to relate to for a time? How will he disappoint his mother if he's just home in bed every blessed night after supper? Will Franklin have to serve as his sole bad influence? I believe that nobody gets to become an adult without making more than a scant few serious mistakes, some potentially life-threatening. Teens live intensely and learn rather begrudgingly before building their lives on top of the catastrophe they construct for themselves. How can they accomplish this critical work if they're home with their family each night?

Dates seem impossible while every possible venue's in lockdown.

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Airgknowrance

Airgknowrance
Mr. Toad, Illustration by E.H. Shepard from The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908)
" … every action seems somehow destined to produce some greater wisdom if we can only pay attention."

Have you noticed how arrogance always seems to accompany ignorance? The most insistent seem to turn out to be the most consistently wrong. The soft-spoken, ain't jokin', while bluster seems to be trying to muster more acceptance as if it could not possibly stand on its own. It almost never can, and the bluster rarely helps longer term. A tangible humility accompanies most truth, for it seems to have nothing further to prove. It walks both softly and without carrying around any over-sized stick. In spite of this fact, some always seem to attempt to successfully argue at annoying volume, perhaps compensating for an absence of veracity with distracting noise, as if few would notice the naked emperor before them. Besides rendering themselves annoying, they quickly become boring and eminently ignorable, just so much irrelevant static. They can, however, attract teeming legions of the ignorant, people perfectly willing to, for instance, take up arms to defend utterly fictional rights and privileges. These people seem genuinely dangerous.

Napoleon noticed that if he gave any decent man a red banner and a uniform, he would quickly become a soldier, and willingly die for abstract concepts like God or country, liberty or fraternity, without ever asking for supporting definitions.

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SnowDaying

SnowDaying
Adriaen Brouwer: Youth Making a Face (c1632/1635)
" … holding me closer than I care to be held."

The cats remain small children, approaching eight or nine human years old, only a year and a half in cat years. They remain the centers of their worlds with whole universes existing solely to service their whims. They haven't yet heard about manners. Max wants outside when he wants to go outside, and denying his demand leaves him mournfully yowling. It's cold outside this morning, though, and he has not yet learned to respect the cold. I suspect that he imagines his late summer predawn awaiting him. He looks as if I've betrayed him when the door opens to snowing. He steps out as if into water, slinking off into shadows. He quickly returns, complaining as he enters, seemingly pleading for me to restore regular order. Molly seems more mature in that she might no more than step out into it before appreciatively returning inside, resigned. Neither seem to want to be inside through the morning. They take to their corners to dream, I suspect, of the mice they expected to be hunting. This day will continue forever.

Nothing like weather to spark the unrequitable urge to go somewhere, anywhere.

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FiguringOut

FiguringOut
Edvard Munch: Dance Of Life (1899 - 1900)
"May I never finally figure it out."

I write because I'm still FiguringOut how to write. I cannot remember the elementary school lesson that disclosed this apparently fundamental aspect of living, that one might learn without ever finally resolving learning, the tenaciously asymptotic aspect of life. I can't remember that lesson because I never received it. Each learning iteration might well advance the cause without resolving the struggle. Another deficit always emerges to render the learning incomplete. It might be that mastery emerges only after this understanding overtakes more naive notions, when the trajectory finally becomes clear. Nobody ever actually arrives there, though the pursuit remains worth engaging, just as one remains worthy of engaging by continuing. The purpose of FiguringOut must not be to finally figure out, for FiguringOut only exists in irresolution. Should anyone finally figure out anything, they should properly cease further learning. Then what? Become some font of knowing, a cold stone artifact of known? The world seems to continue changing, indifferent to such presumed achievements.

Maybe simple entropy explains this feature, where each advancement furthers without resolving.

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InFLUencing

Influencing
David Teniers the Younger: Guardroom with the Deliverance of Saint Peter (ca. 1645–47)
"Why would I chose to live any other way?"

The Lord reportedly works in mysterious ways, but no more mysteriously than any of the rest of us. I, for instance, rarely sense that I might be inFLUencing anyone, though I suspect that my inFLUence extends much further than I comprehend. It might be that every action, every thought, spreads virally, or virus-like, which is to say insidiously and invisibly. My casual aside might arrive like a missing puzzle piece for some anonymous anyone barely within ear shot, utterly unbeknownst to me. I feel nothing when another receives something I've sent unawares. They feel nothing when they've inFluenced me. We play a Blind Man's Bluff without deliberately bluffing, for this seems to be the stuff of human interaction. We're each incapable of inaction, for we seem to be continually InFLUencing whatever we do, even we firmly believe that we're doing nothing at all.

Know that whenever you show up and however you appear, you're actually InFLUencing there.

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Grudgy

Grudgy
Jan van Noordt: Juno confiding Io to Argus (circa 1660-1670
"The Grudgy seem dedicated to continually unflushing toilets, a service nobody really wants or needs."

Grudgy lies near the top of the heap of the more unseemly human responses. Sore losers seem most like losers to their core, boring drinking buddies, and terrible neighbors. They cannot seem to do anything but remember that sleight, that indignity, that otherwise minor loss more properly relegated to humbling forgetfulness. It becomes their oeuvre instead, their sole identifying trait. They're the ones who never forgate and forevermore shoved their sorriest episode before them to announce their presence. Most wisely slip aside to hide until they pass by. The few friends they end up with feed like carrion birds on this sorry story they've heard so many times, in all its many variations, that they could recite it backwards. They seem to need an opponent, someone eternally out to get them, to feel complete. They shamelessly bleat.

I'm not above the occasional dabble in pouting.

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Can'ticipation

canticipation
Francisco Goya: (Átropos/Las Parcas), Atropos (The Fates), 1819–1823
"A Can'ticipated catastrophe seems somewhat averted."

Election night brought a waking nightmare, a scare effectively warding off sleep and leaving a rare but familiar sense of foreboding, as if The Fates had found me and were in the process of stealing any remaining self-determination still available to me. I might have set myself up, knowing that I'd optimistically entered the election, what any pessimist would agree might certainly poison any expectation. I watched myself cycle through the three stages of despair: Want To, Need To, But Can't, a condition I might label Can'ticipation. The resulting sense of desperation seems absolutely inescapable, and tends to arrive at what certainly feels like the most inconvenient possible time. I felt utterly unprepared for a fresh round of coping and felt that I even deserved some sort of reward, or at least some recognition, for my the hopefulness and dedication I'd exhibited through an overlong campaign season during The Damned Pandemic. I felt very near the end of anybody's rope and could not afford to imagine that I might have to muster even greater coping skills than I could remember ever mustering before. I spent that long night terrified of the apparently inevitable.

I swore off all news coverage, not wanting to know what I already so deeply felt.

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Domesticity

Domesticity
Isabelle Pinson: The Fly Catcher (1808)
"We're learning that Molly's actually in charge …"

Molly The Kitten arrived here a year ago, just over six months old, after we'd successfully shanghaied her from the cat shelter. I had taken responsibility for interviewing her to determine suitability. We knew she was Max's sister, and we would have taken her when we'd nabbed Max a few weeks before, except she was still recovering from several diseases common to ferals, so we'd decided to wait until she'd recovered. They'd given her the humiliating name Parfait, I suppose because her coat features swirls of contrasting color. She was not then anybody's cuddly sort of kitty. She cowered in the corner of her cage and flew into a shredding rage when I tried to scratch her head. I finally managed to pick her up and sort of sit her on my lap by wrapping her in a towel, fresh gouges weeping blood from my offending hand. She glowered in the absolute antithesis of appreciation. She seemed like she might eventually tame just fine, though that sense might have been my arrogance talking. She came home with us and began what would become a year-long keep away game. She's still only somewhat tame.

In the last week, she's finally consenting to allowing me to touch her without me first bribing her with treats.

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Liedentity

Liedentity
Norman Rockwell: Girl at Mirror (1954)
"If you really want to know my identity, just get in line behind me."

Excuse me, please, for even bringing up this topic, but I seem to be experiencing an identity crisis. I, perhaps naively, believed that my identity was mine, a deeply personal characteristic I shared with nobody else. It might seem similar to others' without mapping one to one, a one-of-a-kind. I'm coming to recognize that discovering my underlying identity might serve as a pillar of personal enlightenment. Describing it might prove impossible but attempting to describe it might prove a useful medium for actual self expression, and a necessary one. I might achieve nothing more than rough approximations of descriptions and still satisfy myself, even others, that I was coming to really know myself: who I was, who I am. But recently, identity seems to have turned into something else, a perspective almost exclusively turned away from self and toward somebody else. Identify might have become the replacement meaning of identity, where I exclusively seek myself in somebody else.

Identity Politics seems founded upon the principle that self belongs to collective associations, that the source of identity just might reside within relations with others.

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TimeBubbles

TimeBubbles
Jacob Lawrence, Street to Mbari (1964)
" …by then it will have become irreparably past."

Einstein concluded that time moved inexorably forward, never backward, though its substance eluded him. Unlike other elements of his physics, time stood off to one side, never discretely discernible, but also essential. His calculations couldn't work without its shadowy presence. Clocks from sundials to mechanicals seem to materially misrepresent time's nature, for while it doubtless does only move forward, it does so less regularly than popularly represented. It seems to move in fits and starts, seemingly sticking some places for periods ranging from hours to decades. The basic unit of measure for the human experience of time's passing might be labeled The Period, in homage to both its tenacious indeterminacy and also for its inevitable termanancy. Periods last for 'a while,' and tend to end with often shocking banality. Once they're over, they're over forever.

I think of time as existing in TimeBubbles.

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MillionDollarDream

MillionDollarDream
François Boucher: Sleeping Shepherd (Circa 1750)
"Whether that dream ever attracts a million bucks could never have been the point …"

Though a million bucks certainly ain't what it used to be, it remains a considerable chunk of change, and while I've never possessed that magnitude of personal wealth, I have been the beneficiary of several MillionDollarDreams. The absolute magic of a MillionDollarDream seems to be that it need not produce a million actual dollars to manifest its true purpose. Some who pursue their MillionDollarDreams do, indeed, attract significant financial gain, but even those whose pursuits never realize financial profit, still benefit enormously from their engagement, for a MillionDollarDream seems to impart a kind of gold plating to whomever maintains them. Each MillionDollarDream starts as a rather wild idea, one with perhaps no obvious chance of ever coming to any sort of actual fruition, like the notion that you and a few friends might, in a scant week's time, transform a dusty old barn into a successful summer stock theater and produce a hit show capable of launching everyone involved into stardom. The resulting flurry of activity might be best characterized as absolute parody, but for those involved, it likely becomes a peak life experience worth at least a million bucks. That's a MillionDollarDream!

My MillionDollarDreams were each capable of goading me into investing a million dollars into them, though I at no time ever held that kind of line of credit.

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Voicing

Voice
Leopoldo Metlicovitz, poster for Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi (1919)
"It might be that every authentic Voice sounds phony to itself …"

The first time I heard a recording of my voice, I felt embarrassed. I feared that the abomination I'd just heard had been a faithful reproduction of the tone and timbre everyone had always heard emanating from my pie hole. I felt appalled that I might have, completely unbeknownst to me, always sounded like … like … like THAT! And so I received my first great injection of self-consciousness, a virus, I suspect, and one from which I might never recover. From there emerged an inhibiting shyness on stages I formerly simply possessed. I could not hear that queerness when speaking or singing to myself, for some acoustical quirk spoiled fidelity, though my Voice sounded much better to me than that recording had sounded. I took to practicing in tightly enclosed spaces, bathrooms and closets, in hopes of better hearing how I actually sounded. I never lost that unwelcome awareness that I had never known how others heard my Voice.

I don't sing so much anymore.

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PeopleWatching

PeopleWatching
Crispijn de Passe the Elder: Noah leaving the ark with his family and animals: at left Noah's family carries supplies, at right animals descend on a ramp from the ark, above birds fly from the ark, from a series of engravings for the 'Liber Genesis' (1612)
" … even if your quarter horse provides none of the entertainment."

I've always been a sucker for a parade. Few anticipations excite me more than the one that comes when I'm on my way to watch a parade, even when I know for certain that most of the 'units' will be lame. I love waving at people floating by in spotless mid-century convertibles and I'm stirred by every marching band. When we lived in Takoma Park, Maryland, which sponsors a Cracker Jack 4th of July parade, theirs included a yoga drill team which would march for half a block, then stop to perform poses. The 911 Truthers always fielded a provocative float, and one year, neighborhood dads organized a Grill Team, which performed synchronized marching while pushing gas grills in front of them. The best of the best have always been the happened-upon ones, like that year we came up from a Manhattan Flatiron neighborhood subway station to find ourselves experiencing the annual gay pride parade cruising by, with Cyndi Lauper on the back of some fire station's flatbed float belting out Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, surrounded by dancing shirtless hunky firefighters wearing spangly hot pants and bright red fireman helmets. That experience could change anyone's life!

Covid Shutdowns limit the opportunities for attending parades, but the real attraction of them was always the PeopleWatching opportunities they afforded.

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Psycholitics

psycholitics
An artistic depiction of a group of rhinos in the Chauvet Cave (30,000 to 32,000 years ago)
"We are much older and more experienced than Our Founding Fathers ever became."

The United States is not the only sovereign nation where serious psychological problems have been codified into the law of the land. However brilliant and breath-taking Our Revered Founding Fathers' work might have been, it also served as psychological self-portraiture, partly aspiration and partly indictable by modern standards. It codified prejudices intolerable in our more enlightened times, just as our entitlements will over time inexorably seem insufferable conceits to those we leave behind us. For instance, our treasured Second Amendment, as presently interpreted, encourages self-destructive reactions to paranoid delusions, so people buy guns to protect themselves from people who buy guns, which further encourages people to more buy guns to protect themselves from people who more buy guns. It's become a recursively runaway psychological social disorder guaranteed by our Constitution: Psycholitics. Each successive generation is more experienced than its predecessor. All carping aside about society's evolutionary entropy, there's ample observable evidence that we're, as a people, actually maturing over time; better coping. Behaviors accepted as representing righteousness have over time become intolerable evidence of racism, classism, misogyny, grand larceny, and murder in the first degree. Conservatives seem determined to preserve some sorry legacies in the interest of decency, a calculation that understandably drives progressives crazy. Of course, contravening historical precedent drives the originalists insane. The result seems to be a Body Psycholitic, a society undergoing particularly difficult ongoing therapy with the goal of ultimately getting over itself. It's also a fairly accurate portrait of Hell, an under-appreciated price of self-governance.

Psychologist and counsellor Eugene Kennedy suggested, "The things about me that drive you crazy are the things that keep me sane."

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Scholarshit

Scholarshit
Gustave Courbet: The Painter's Studio: A real allegory summing up seven years of my artistic and moral life (L'Atelier du peintre) (1855)
" … just a form of confirmation I was then too naive to accept."

No amount of even the most diligent study would have ever turned me into an astronaut, a result which blesses more than curses us all. From my now lofty perspective, poised as I now am upon the tail end of my existence here, it's becoming ever clearer to me that there might have been some curious pre-destiny involved in determining who and what I would become, that it was never, even for a moment, an open book or a matter of studious diligence. The writing might have seemed much clearer had I understood how very near I had always been to whatever I might become. I was apparently never destined to become President, even though that possibility was early on promised me as a birthright American baby, where anyone might become whatever they muster the will to imagine themselves becoming. I knew early on that I would never become one of those gas station mechanics with an embroidered Dave on my shirtfront, or a cop, or an electrical engineer. It was never nearly as clear who I might become as it was who I never would end up being.

My studies, such as they were, disclosed whispers. I knew what could hold my attention and what induced a coma, though my teachers ascribed a lack of dedication to my more obvious shortcomings, as if an additional ounce or two of diligence might make a real difference.

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SecondOrderFatigue

SecondOrderFatigue
The Tired Dancer: John Reinhard Weguelin (1879)
"I live right up close to that edge."

I've been dog tired before, and bone weary, and sick and tired plenty of times, but I confess to feeling even more exhausted this time. I've put my time in on the factory line, twelve endless hours performing the most mindlessly repetitive motions, but that was nothing in comparison to this subtle sickening feeling. This endless evening in isolation might do the infamous Chinese Water Torture proud for how it cows and humiliates me. Born into a land firmly believing itself to be both proud and free, we're forcibly humbled before an utterly invisible enemy which steadfastly refuses to show itself. Many have already come to believe that this was always an imaginary foe, and every countermeasure an humiliating over-reaction, like fleeing from shadows vaguely flickering on our cave's moist wall. Before each fall came a clear call insisting all was well after all, that we had little to fear beyond an evidently irrational foreboding, and we set to no longer flee from that. Once contracted, there would be no fleeing backwards, back into the SecondOrderFatigue which so convincingly misleads each to presume an invulnerability never evident beforehand. Once infected, we'd experience fatigue for a wholly different reason.

I try each day to reinforce what I fancy to be my protective reasoning, for, like Robinson Crusoe's Man Friday, I feel as though I've been stranded three years, alone on some desert island and subsisting on goats.

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Re-Ality

Re-Ality
Willem van Haecht: Collection of Cornelis de Geest with Paracelsus (1630s)
" … the real one this time."

I find myself exhausted by the seemingly endless arrays of alternate realities offered to me each day. My choices overwhelm me. Which reality should I engage with today? The one just outside my window might have once been sufficient, but the many within just our modest Villa seem to dwarf and upstage it. Skimming my many books, each presenting a different perspective, could consume several lifetimes. TV, radio, podcasts, and things Internet each present slightly different representations of Re-Ality, each a little different, each somehow also the same. They each seem to try to characterize a separate reality in various degrees of believability. I consider my reality palate somewhat refined. I won't agree to swallow just anything. Sci-Fi, for instance, never qualified as either believable or entertaining to me. Reality TV seems far removed from any form of reality I've ever even imagined. I was blissfully unaware that such a character as a bachelorette even existed, for instance, until I was subjected to such a presence on a so-called reality TV show. But what do I know?

I once believed myself to be my own arbiter of reality, as if I got to choose which version I subscribed to, but I fear that I've somehow lost that ability, surrounded as I seem to be with so many perspectives seemingly far superior to my own.

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Schmaltzing

Schmaltzing
George Frederic Watts: Hope (1885)
"My first and most prominent occupation has always been Schmaltzing."

When I look down from near the top of my family tree, I see the antecedents of what would one day result in me. Though they hardly lived in the manner to which I've grown accustomed, I imagine that their existences somehow informed mine, though I knew only the barest few of them and even those barely spoke of such things. My father's side of the operation seemed the most convoluted and diverse. The Muse managed to trace my father's mother's family clear back to Roman times in Gaul, where the patriarch was a Prefect, and his progeny became the crowned heads of Europe. My later line ultimately sprang from some later-born princess. My paternal grandfather's heritage seems much less diverse, simple Alsatian farmers, perhaps Jews coerced into Catholicism displaced by centuries of unrest, a sort of diaspora unto itself. From them, I inherited my Schmaltziness, a certain endearing cloying sentimentality I consider my primary defining characteristic. Though I know I'm genetically half my mother's Scotch/Irish heritage, I consider my Schmaltzing my emotional center, my underlying superpower.

It might be socially incorrect to consider genetics germane to anything, a form of phrenology about as defining as bumps on a head, a superstitious sort of social racism born of misbegotten understandings, and it might have been an accident that I was born with a surname that so accurately represents what I've always felt.

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ForkAssed

ForkAssTing
Pietro della Vecchia: A fortune-teller reading the palm of a soldier (circa 1626-1678)
"I fear that I'm way too dependent upon what my forebears just adapted to in moments of sometimes overwhelming extremis."

According to the weather ForkAssed five nights ago, we would be experiencing much colder weather and snow this morning, so I spent the following five days anticipating its arrival, certain of my near future. This certainty encouraged me to thoroughly prepare, to tear down the summer garden, drain the hoses, stack the pots, and rake up the fallen pine needles. The Muse and I put away stores that might have serviced Admiral Perry's Antarctic Expedition. I switched out the screen door for the solid glass one. I spent yesterday's late afternoon swishing a broom over the front porch before just sitting there because I knew for certain I'd be sitting inside for the foreseeable future. Even the cats seemed to sense an impending end to just slipping up the hill to stalk field mice. Neither of them seemed to really want to come in, not even to extraordinary enticements. I empathized with their sentiments.

Once in, with the fireplace throwing heat, it's impossible to beat the cozy snowed-in feeling.

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Badministration

Badministration
The Cube Farm
"An ounce of appreciation seemed to power the whole operation."

My first job out of business school found me supervising the Automatic Bank Check Unit of the Individual Insurance Administration Department of what I came to call The Best Of All Possible Mutual Life Insurance Companies In The Greater Portland Metropolitan Area, Bar None. It was the only mutual life insurance company in that area, but it still provided a truly terrific medium for learning about administration, the actual lifeblood of every organization. We learn to think of Business and Industry, even Government, as producing products and services, and they certainly do that, but each expends more effort administering that production, accounting for every damned thing, billing and collecting, and litigating disagreements. Whatever product a corporation claims to create, it's expending the bulk of its energies administering, administrating. The first rule of administration says, "Thou shalt remain steadfastly invisible," for prominence essentially renders administration useless. If every back office ministration means another runaround, it won't matter that you're selling the secret to eternal life, quickly, nobody will feel terribly moved to buy any. The key to effective administration has always been invisibility.

We speak today of 'seamless' transactions, the latest manifestation of a trend evident since people bartered with stones.

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Cyclings

cyclings
Laufrad des Freiherrn von Drais: "Draisine" or Dandy Horse, 1817 design
" … not the disrupters they first appear to be, but the unlikely connecters between what is and what might be …"

Each week seems to follow a similar pattern, enough the same as to encourage a sense of familiarity without necessarily reducing to completely numbing sameness; each different while also quite the same. For me, each week delivers some unanticipated failure which I so far seem to have always managed to overcome, as if each week had been served up to remind me that even I'm capable of recovery. This week, my blog server stopped serving me and the Customer Support Team suddenly stopped invisibly supporting me to become the obvious source of an apparently intractable difficulty. At first, as usual, I had no obvious alternative to continue delivering my accustomed daily production, and the seduction to simply crumble washed up and over me. Eventually, by which I mean by no means immediately, I came to understand that alternatives might surround me, and I set about choosing a viable one. By no means did this transfer occur smoothly, for I seemed to need to work my way back through the usual universal stages of acceptance. I experienced in succession: fear, anger, discouragement, reckoning, and then an only partially acceptable sort of acceptance. I experienced an amputation then came to acknowledge that the initially begrudged peg-leg replacement might suffice for now. I retain a sense of loss along with a lessening urgency to return to the way it was. I suspect that the longer this work-around extends, the more it will become what I'd always unknowingly intended what it replaced to become.

I make no shocking pronouncement when I insist that things do not work as advertised.

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Undoing

Undoing
Thomas Degeorge: Death of Archimedes (1815)
" … even eternity seems an endlessly moving target."

The sure and certain sign of Fall's victory over the Summer season comes when I finally accept that it's time to disassemble the deck garden. Lovingly created over a long June weekend, it can only last so long before every pot and planter will need emptying or risk shattering in the impending cold. Shelves return to the master bedroom to hold part of The Muse's extensive African Violet collection, their usual over-winter occupation. Lingering petunias pulled and packaged as garbage. Dahlia bulbs recovered for storage in a paper bag with peat until next Spring. Everything's got to go. Snow's predicted a few days from now and so it seems a great Undoing's required, though undoing implies more of a cycle than the effort actually entails. There will be no resurrection of either these plants or this garden, for next year, next Spring, we'll be cultivating different soil in a different place, so I do not need to carefully preserve the potting soil for reuse next year. We will not pack and ship the soil along with us, so I refresh the beleaguered flower beds with it. The yard looks fresh and ready for more than the six month snow bank soon to overtake it.

Hope always springs for me each autumn that there might actually be an Undoing, though there's only even a moving on involved.

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RespectableAgain

RespectfulAgain
Franz Marc: Träumendes Pferd [Dreaming Horse] (1913)
" … as decency becomes RespectableAgain, finally!"

I decided early this morning to afford myself a little hopeful anticipation. With two weeks remaining before this election, it seems increasingly likely that decency will shortly become RespectableAgain. Through the current occupation, the man elected to perform the role of leader of the free world seemed incapable of showing respect toward anyone, including himself, and like any member in good standing of what my folks used to refer to as "the bad crowd," he encouraged a general debasement of the traditional rules of comportment. He seemed to work awfully hard to turn everything upside down and backwards, and only because he believed he could, and many—way too many—seemed to follow his lead just as if he was seducing freshmen into a previously inaccessible underworld. He tried to teach them to drink and smoke and avoid curfew violations, just as if not getting caught amounted to genuine freedom. A few seemed to flip entirely to the dark side. Others dabbled, but could not shake their inherited decency, their own unshakable paranoia sending them back into their families. Most of us looked on feeling horrified.

So this sense that some big changes are coming feels enormously reassuring.

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EncroachingParadoxes

EncroachingParadox
Ludwig Passini: Roman Fish Market at Sant'Angelo in Pescheria (1863)
"EncroachingParadoxes: experiences that make absolutely no sense at first …"

Beyond the senses, we each possess layers of additional sense-like resources such as reasoning, emoting, intuiting, and others. We employ these additional "senses" to make sense of experience, though this label might misrepresent our sense-making efforts. We probably over-rely upon reasoning as the ultimate gold standard method for sense-making, though reason, innocently applied, can't always produce understanding. Even scientists claim to rely upon sixth-sensing to noodle their way into and back out of complicated analysis. Pure reason, if it exists, might not reliably produce the most believable results. Rejecting reasoning probably makes analysis worse, so we seem stuck with paradoxes whichever methods we might choose. Intuiting lacks replicable rigor and emoting seems too mercurial, though both can add insight to an inquiry.

It might be that each technique cannot avoid the critique that it lacks some essential something.

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HumanNature

HumanNature
Franz Marc: Tierschicksale [Fate of the Animals] (1913)
"When it's already too late to learn better, we might finally start personally relating our own innate HumanNature …"

When The Plague hit Florence in the 1340s, people reacted similarly to how we've reacted to This Damned Pandemic today. I've long questioned just what it might mean to know something, for knowledge does not tightly correlate with behavior. Knowing something doesn't necessarily change anything I do. I suspect that this reaction stems from what I might characterize as an abiding Personal Sense Of Exemption, that even what I know for certain seems more likely to apply to others, but not directly to me. Speed limits seem to reinforce this proposition, since even when it seems clearly in everyone's benefit to obey them, a herd-like mentality seems to override caution, and almost everyone exceeds the limit, perhaps sensing that everyone else is getting away with something and that they don't want to feel cheated, especially that they might be cheating themselves. Personal imperiling to avoid feeling cheated might be HumanNature incarnate. We might just as well have dinner in that restaurant. Everyone else seems to be going and we wouldn't want to feel left out.

Describing HumanNature seems eerily similar to relying upon a fish to explain water, a fish so intrinsically immersed within the stuff that it might prove utterly invisible to any fishy observer.

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StumpTheChecker

StumpTheChecker
Franz Marc: Fuchse [Foxes], (1913)
"The odd, the British insist, are nearer to God."

Our Saturday larder-stocking excursions have continued in greater earnest since the Damned Pandemic lockdown orders kicked in. These represent the sole opportunity for The Muse to get out into the world, and though we cannot properly call these shopping trips, they provide some sense of possibility beyond talking to a basement wall, her usual occupation through the week. I usually make a couple of trips out to pick up odds and ends, but always alone and inevitably mission-focused, hardly recreational. The Saturday outings serve as our sole socialization, so we've continued them, albeit under extreme caution: Masks, a handy bottle of hand sanitizer, little lingering or investigating involved. We're pretty much in and back out again, following our Stations Of The Cross sequence from butcher to green grocer to supermarket to liquor store to fish monger, then home. Even this small variety in the numbing sameness can approach boring, so we've adopted a few diverting amusements which we incorporate into these days. We might listen to the latest Radio Deluxe podcast between stops because The American Songbook's always a welcome companion. We continue our infinite Slugbug competition, which seems friendly to a point nearing absurdity. We humbly genuflect when in the presence of Parking Karma, when The Gods provide a parking place nearest a store's front door. We most enjoy our ongoing game of Stump The Checker, though.

For those not already engaging in this competition, it's another one of those so-called friendly competitions where gaining actual points is never the point.

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SchlockWare

SchlockWare
Franz Marc: The Tower of Blue Horses (1913, missing since 1945)
"Our virtual existence seems remarkably similar to our actual one."

Our Damned Pandemic has driven those of us not formerly living virtual lives into ever deeper virtuality, a rough mock-up analogue of what previously passed for reality. I meet weekly with a group of friends, few of which I've met face-to-face, employing Zoom, currently the most popular interface. I convene the gathering, but understand only the barest trace of how to operate it. I hunt and peck and generally succeed, learning a little more about it each week. I will never flawlessly invoke the screen share feature, probably because it was not designed for seamless invocation. I apologize in advance, then clumsily manage to share my screen after a couple of stumbles in between. We're all forgiving, for none of us have mastered the application, just like every piece of SchlockWare we've grown to rely upon. Not even superuser status would protect us from collectively stumbling when employing it, for I doubt that even its designers have fully mastered it, in the unlikely event that designers were even involved creating it.

Each 'app' seems to have outgrown its founding charter, intended for one purpose then serially upgraded to cover functions never imagined in its initial instantiation.

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Bettering

Bettering
Franz Marc: Blue Horse I, 1911
"Onward, not necessarily always upward!"

I understand that I'm supposed to be Bettering myself, but I struggle with sustaining even the barest semblance of my current status quo. It's not that I'm not Absolutely Dedicated To Achieving Excellence, it's more that I sense that I might just have already managed to mostly achieve good enough—if not for government work, then perhaps for mine. I've been told of the necessity for continuous improvement but doubt the proposition that every damned instance begs for Bettering. Could good enough never be … good enough? I understand that I could be better than I are, swinging on some star and all that, but the consequent paranoia seems a poor reward. If I'm not endlessly Bettering, will I never get no satisfaction? And if I am endlessly Bettering, does that not strongly suggest that I'm not yet worthy of achieving any satisfying anything? Where's the satisfaction in that endless Bettering? Continuous Bettering seems roughly equivalent to simply giving up, acquiescing to endless short-comings, never really done. How fun does that sound?

We say that we're a striving society, but we seem more of an exhausted one, or, maybe, simply fed up.

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Openness

Openness
Illustration taken from the illuminated manuscript Der Naturen Bloeme: The Flower of Nature produced in Utrecht or Flanders (ca. 1350)
"I wish that Computer Scientists understood what computers were for."

There's probably nothing wrong with computing that fewer computer scientists couldn't help. An insurgency favoring Openness has grumbled within that field since its inception, with few signs of its imminent success. Propriety has ruled instead, with OpenSource taking its place as just another proprietary platform as far as most users are concerned. Earlier, the Macs battled the PCs without a conclusive decision. I sided with the Macs, though by making that decision, I'd chosen to have to translate everything I created into Klingon if I expected anyone without access to my more open (to me) propriety, and that I would have to translate from Klingon anything they sent to me. Yesterday, a friend sent me a file formatted as a .odt file, pure Klingon to me, unreadable in a whole new way. It came complete with imbedded HTML in the unlikely event that I felt like reading between the lines of code to unwrap the cryptic message within. So much for Openness.

I figure that Openness always qualified as a Utopian aspiration, anyway, for nothing in the natural world seems all that wide open to me or to anybody.

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MediaDerangementSyndrome

MediaDerangementSyndrome
Ludwig Passini: Artist in Caffè Greco in Rome (1856)
"Sometimes I amaze myself, usually when I'm in the middle of debasing myself again."

I imagine that Cafe Society served as the social media of its time. Gentlemen would congregate around a table to share gossip and show off for each other. Women preferred tea. There were certain rules of comportment, depending upon the participants' social class. The more lowly barroom observed different customs than might a cafe, though each served similar purposes. We're social animals and we seem to need to bump shoulders if not heads to maintain our sanity. Church, too, served up socialization as much as religion, the congregating serving as perhaps its primary purpose, an antidote to stultifying isolation. Even then, a few reliably disrupted the regular order. When I was a kid, a piano left unattended in the corner of the church's multipurpose room would eventually attract some show-off aching to play Chopsticks, or that small portion of it requiring only two fingers to perform. The resulting disruption demonstrated neither mastery nor erudition, and should have properly embarrassed the aspiring performer, though it never seemed to wound his self-esteem, for he was suffering from a simple form of MediaDerangementSyndrome (MDS), a social disease which compels some to abuse whatever media they encounter. Give 'em a newspaper and it becomes a flyswatter, even when no flies seem present. Leave a microphone unattended and they'll feel compelled to yell into it, saying, "testing, testing," while hysterically giggling, but this condition's no joke.

In our more modern times, we've outsourced many of the old-time social venues to social media.

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Queryering

Querying
Unknown miniaturist: Jean Miélot at his desk (2nd half 15th century)
"Nothing noteworthy ever comes into being without first erecting some scaffolding."

The smoke alarm on the twelve foot master bedroom ceiling started squealing at two thirty this morning, producing a piercing chirp every thirty seconds or so, a particularly cruel wake-up call. I failed to successfully ignore the alarm, though I felt shy about waking The Muse to ask if she'd mind terribly if I crawled up there to replace the battery, for she seemed to have been successfully sleeping through the intrusion. I fled downstairs, it being close enough to my usual wake up time, but even from there, the chirpy chiming proved distracting. I knew that quieting it would force an ordeal. I'd have to fetch the long collapsable ladder from the garage, wrestle it inside and upstairs, then perform the reverse origami unfolding in a tightly constricted space, the kind of operation best performed without critical eyes observing. I finally but reluctantly accepted the challenge, roused The Muse to ask her permission, then set about wrestling the ungainly ladder into place.

As expected, I delivered a performance without evident grace, even managing to scratch the wall in a place which might be next to impossible to repaint, in the unlikely event that we have some of that color of paint leftover in the basement.

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FreedomOfScreech

freedom-of-speech-1943.jpg!Large
Norman Rockwell: Freedom of Speech (1943)
© by Norman Rockwell under Fair Use
"I ain't buying anything promoted with screeches."

Maybe The Founders intended elections to deeply upset the public, lest we grow lax in our responsibilities as citizens. During election season, our much-vaunted freedom of speech seems to expand into what I might more reasonably insist seems more like FreedomOfScreech. The most fantastic fictions masquerade as facts while facts cower in corners until after ballots get counted. We claim that voting amounts to our sacred right, though we treat it with little reverence. The SOB who never once seemed interested in representing you or me suddenly seems redeemed, clothed in whatever raiment seems most appropriate to appeal to a divided electorate, while deliberately further dividing that electorate. My mute button gets overworked as the same misrepresentations appear as gospel. I wonder why that local television station agrees to carry that advertisement and they respond with vague references to civic duty, which seems more of an indenture to me. At least election season serves to dramatically reduce my television viewing.

I apparently inhabit a backwater of political discourse since I've seen blessed few of the ads.

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TinyTyranny

TinyTyranny
Mir Sayyid Ali: Persian Miniature Complex Palace Scene (1539–1543)
"I might have been more right than I knew."

Most of us sense the significance of anything larger than us. Big might not necessarily be better, but it's sure a whole lot more noticeable. We learn early not to sweat small stuff, for small doesn't usually represent any obvious threat. Dedicated to making some significant difference, we focus upon the bigger chunks, ones where, if we can influence them, we'll probably get noticed. Appearances aside, this bias for the big might imperil us most, for small changes, those which go unnoticed, seem to more readily replicate than the huge gallumping kind which quickly raise our defenses. An almost indiscernible one percent change, if persisted over time, can leave us wondering why in a radically different place. A spark becomes a blaze. A drip grows into a flood. We see ample evidence that tiny can become tyrannical, yet a TinyTyranny usually slips right through our defenses.

Innumeracy explains some of this condition.

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Homering

Homering
Giorgio de Chirico: The Nostalgia of the Infinite (1911)
"I might, finally, at last, accept that my future's fully back in my hands now."

As I noted yesterday, I caught myself feeling lost in the perhaps necessarily disorienting transition between then and WhatNext. I must have expected my world to crisply snap back into some poorly-remembered before state after The GrandOtter departed for her next adventure, but except for the suddenly empty guest bedroom and bath, the place remained disappointingly the same, essentially unchanged save for a notable absence of a persistent background hum. Every displaced routine remained disrupted and seemed reluctant to snap back into what I imagined to be its former place. Worse, I felt a deep reluctance to simply pick up the former pace, to fill the suddenly empty spaces with fresh ambition and activity. I sheltered more or less in place, staring at a too familiar face. Home would refuse to meet me halfway. I'd have to engage in some dedicated Homering.

Homering refers to a complicated process by which an imagined outcome becomes an actual one leached of nostalgia and Utopian expectations.

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Hollowing

Hollowing
Giorgio de Chirico: The Disquieting Muses (1947)
" … a replacement obsessive purpose might shine through."

All my life so far, I've heard stories about the sweetness of success. These were fairy stories, apparently, for every one of my greatest victories have so-far most prominently produced a disorienting Hollowing instead. I might have gone absolutely all in to achieve something, only to feel upon completion the way Wylie Coyote must feel after overrunning his latest mesa top. A hollow hum replaces the rush and feathers expended in pursuit. I'm suddenly out of work, without clear purpose, suspended near the cusp of dread. I never seem to know WhatNext then, when my recent past has just slipped out of my grasp. My reward seems to be that I get to start reinventing myself all over again, this time, again, without much of an inkling of what I might want to become enough to eventually become obsessed with it. I grew up then blew up just to have to grow up all over again. Completion doesn't carry a taste, bitter or sweet. It comes to carry away accustomed engagement and leave that disquieting Hollowing behind.

Why do I always feel surprised when I fall into this limbo again? I probably shouldn't.

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Lame

Lame
Pieter Brueghel the Elder: The Beggars (1568)
"We're all each others' metaphors here."

Max, our erstwhile kitten now budding house cat, turned up lame evening before last. He and his sister Molly had (as usual) accidentally escaped after I left the slider open and stood on the deck imploring them to come outside, and I noticed Max walking with three legs, just like the three-legged dog on my childhood paper route. That dog chased me like every other dog on that route, seemingly unperturbed over his missing leg. Max held his left front paw immobile and hesitated before heading down the long, steep deck stairs to his favorite flower bed out back. I coaxed him over with a few kitty treats and investigated for obvious damage, but I couldn't see anything troubling in the fading light. I carried him back inside while he complained.

The next morning, he was still avoiding any use of that leg, so I scheduled a visit to the Vet.

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Nexting

Nexting
Mary Cassatt: Children Playing on the Beach (1884)
" … I eventually stick my head up and into the clouds."

The GrandOtter rented a POS truck to shuttle herself and her stuff into the next iteration of her life. Balding tires, weary interior, frightening play in the steering wheel, that truck represented everything it should have represented to properly convey her into her next chapter. My right thumb powered my first escape across a hundred miles of scabland and up and over the great Cascades, my possessions contained in a small knapsack and a flimsy guitar case. The conveyance should rightly seem inadequate, for it's not about any present, but whatever comes next. In that moment of separation, the present has already receded seemingly to break trail for its protagonist to follow. These transitions drip with potential and require nothing but the barest shell of conventional support. Another great adventure, a Nexting, commences.

When I arrived on the other side, I discovered that I had been wholly unprepared to properly inhabit the place.

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Lasts

Lasts
Leonardo da Vinci: The Last Supper (1498)
"Long gone. Never lost."

As a departure nears, before my thoughts shift to whatever might come next, they scan around for Lasts. The last supper. The last breakfast. That last nuzzle from one of those cats who imprinted on me during my stay. I might be here today, but I will most certainly be gone by this time tomorrow, so I try to absorb just as much of the atmosphere here before forfeiting it in favor of fresh adventure. I feel loss most intensely just before the countdown finally concludes. I feel deep tinges. In one of those moments, I swear that I'd abandon every thought of actually departing if that act might freeze everything precisely where it seems to be in that moment. Adventure seems a false promise right then, a down trade. I'd easily barter back my newly-acquired handful of magic beans to recover my reliable old cow.

Time tangles then, for Lasts more properly reside in faulty memory.

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EmptyNestoring

emptynestoring
Francis Flora Bond Palmer: Across the Continent:
"Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way", 1868
[James Merritt Ives (printer), Currier and Ives (publisher)]

"We revere New Beginnings, for only they can turn our fears into our dreams come true."

The grandparent birds seem almost amused at just how confused the exit seems, for they've, between them, done this at least a hundred times. They possess a rhythm between them that would surely guide their wings, but there's no known way to ever transfer that sort of experience. So the fledglings flap and flop their way, first close, then progressively further. None simply fly away. What might have taken a day with experienced wings will likely take a few while learning, remembering what a short time ago flying amounted to simply mounting the edge without ever actually departing before settling back in for another brought-in supper. Chicks grow exclusively exponentially, though, and nesting space eventually disappears. Somebody's finally got to leave, and the nest always was the grandparent birds' place, never theirs. Birth places, even re-birth places, only ever come in the form of future departure points, and one of those points eventually arrives.

"At least they're heading West," you say, since East somehow seems so retrograde.

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GhosTown

GhosTown
Jan van Eyck: Saint Barbara (1437)
"I am the ghost haunting this GhosTown."

For many, myself included, errand-running had become our only socialization. We'd either be alone at home or out to the shops. We acknowledged that this form of interaction lacked intimacy, as we only rarely knew those we encountered, but they nonetheless performed a valuable service for us. Their presence proved reassuring that we might not actually be quite as lonely as we usually felt. We could exchange pleasantries with somebody more sociable than a cat while temporarily feeling part of a bustle. Since The Damned Pandemic descended, though, those Main Streets and town centers have ceased attracting. We're more likely to slink around the edges of them rather than attempting anything like our former full immersions. Our social lives have retreated into suspension. We might still warmly anticipate a post office visit if only to revel in the long-familiar context of it, clerks always chatty from standing so very near the center of the universe. One does not very often visit the post office.

I shop as if I were deep sea diving now, checking my gear before entering, and lingering no longer than absolutely necessary.

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Dyeignosis

Dyeignosis
Vincent van Gogh: Sorrowing Old Man (At Eternity's Gate) (1890)
"I am my Dyeignosis, which I acknowledge has been the death of my former self."

I have lived most of my life Dyeignosis-free. This state left me with what many might consider a thin identity, for I found myself unable to sort myself into any of the more popular categories. Allergic to nothing that I knew of, I roamed free of imposed restrictions, enthusiastically joining the Gluten Appreciation Society. I freely consumed peanuts at will. True, through the eighties, during the height of the now-infamous cholesterol terror, I subsisted on skinless chicken breasts and oat groats, but before and after I put most omnivores to shame. I avoided soda pop and fast food, not due to any externally-mandated restrictions, but thanks to what I imagined to have been a refined palate and uncommon sense. While diagnosed with high cholesterol, my identity changed. I became a pre-avenging angel, steadfastly refusing pork and beef, charged with protecting my sacred health. My cholesterol numbers never wavered, regardless of my prescription or exercise routine, and when that life-preserving prescription was recalled as a danger to my health, my doctor and I decided to rescind the earlier dire diagnosis. I slowly re-entered the general population without further restrictions. Once that Dyeignosis devolved back into a recognition of a personal eccentricity, that miserly portion of me withered and disappeared, opening twenty-five years of near perfect health and serenity.

Later, The Muse encouraged me, as only The Muse can encourage anyone, to submit to fresh dyeignoses.

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BreakingPoint

BreakingPoint
Henry Fuseli: The Nightmare (1781)
"It's a long, hard road."

Every day carries a hint of irrecoverability, each one new and subtly different from every day before it. A very few days arrive carrying the clear threat of a radical BreakingPoint with the past, a clear sense that forever after, no day will likely seem terribly similar again. A death or a divorce brings a dismemberment along with the dread certainty that no subsequent surgery will ever reattach whatever was torn asunder. One wonders What Next? without mustering anything like a reassuring impression of what that might entail. These discontinuities might seem curiously reassuring, marking an end to what had become for almost everyone, an increasingly intolerable situation, but also inject a shit ton of uncertainty into the proceedings. A deeply disturbing unknowing settles in to wait for a fresh opening in the storyline. Above all, everything seems anything but fine in that moment. One proceeds, anyway.

I have been scampering along the eroding cliff edge of just such a BreakingPoint for the last few weeks, terrified over where this story might next take me and those I care about most in this world.

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ExitStrategy

ExitStrategy
Carlos Schwabe: La mort du fossoyeur (Death of the gravedigger) (1895)
"Just imagine the depth of character I'm creating."

Fifty years ago, I was one autumn twilight driving my mother's '63 VW Beetle, which we lovingly referred to as The Helicopter because it sounded like a helicopter, up onto Washington State's Snoqualmie Pass and into a snow storm. An old friend who was riding along dispensed some advice which has since become one of my guiding homilies of life. He said, "Tuck in behind a truck and keep one foot in the ditch." His logic seemed flawless. A commercial truck driver very likely had much more experience than I driving through snow in the dark, and his vehicle was likely much more susceptible to sliding than mine, so a leading truck could serve as my early warning system when the road turned slippery. I should maintain an ExitStrategy anyway, by keeping one foot in the ditch, by remaining prepared to drive myself off to the side should the situation turn truly perilous. I continue this general strategy today, even when it's not snowy. I try to follow someone more experienced than I and I also try to maintain a fallback plan should my pathfinder fail me. I think of this strategy as a form of double indemnity, a compounded form of safety. While everyone else seems most interested in passing every slow-moving truck, I'm more likely to tuck myself in behind so that I can leverage the driver's superior experience.

I try to apply this guideline wherever I'm feeling imperiled, but this Damned Pandemic has foiled my attempts.

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HidingOut

HidingOut
Johannes Vermeer - Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window (circa 1657–59)



Hiding

I'm hiding, I'm hiding
And no one knows where;
For all they can see is my
Toes and my hair

And I just heard my father
Say to my mother -
"But, darling, he must be
Somewhere or other;

Have you looked in the inkwell?"
And Mother said, "Where?"
"In the INKWELL?"said Father. But
I was not there.

Then "Wait!" cried my mother —
"I think that I see
Him under the carpet." But
It was not me.

"Inside the mirror's
A pretty good place."
Said Father and looked, but saw
Only his face.

"We've hunted," sighed Mother,
"As hard as we could
And I am so afraid that we've
Lost him for good."

Then I laughed out aloud
And I wiggled my toes
And Father said —"Look, dear,
I wonder if those

Toes could be Benny's?
There are ten of them, see?"
And they WERE so surprised to find
Out it was me!

Dorothy Keeley Aldis


"They mostly don't seem to notice, anyhow."


By the time I graduated from Junior High, I had become a near master at HidingOut. The normal social pressures there had easily convinced me that I was eminently vulnerable, and I quickly learned the costs of too prominently standing out. My identity had been emerging through my tenure there, and I'd tried on innumerable different personas, quickly discovering which I could get away with and which I could not. Mistakes would receive quick and shockingly viscous peckings back into place, as if angry ducks ruled that roost. I learned to go slightly unconscious, to simply not notice much of the brutality surrounding me, for I could not imagine surviving otherwise. Each morning I performed another act of rather sublime courage, arriving on time and taking my seat just as if I was not entering a grand inquisition. I worked hard to remain unsuspicious, since suspicion alone usually served as adequate evidence that some punishment should resume. Teachers were no less unforgiving than the least of the students, for they were charged with creating future citizens from such continually unpromising material. The principal daily announced another threat over the Stalag-quality PA system, insisting that his was "a promise, not a threat." Everyone knew a threat when they heard one.

I went on to do post-graduate work in high school and beyond, and by the time I'd finished high school (or it had finished with me), I had attained a depth of transparency such that I could see right through myself, the ego had been pretty much beaten out of me.

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Shirker

Shirker
Grant Wood: Fall Plowing (1931)
"I get away with nothing."

I know myself to be, above all else, a Shirker. In my time, I've left many more jobs undone than I ever completed. I'm apt to spend a day when I should be engaging in my equivalent of Fall Plowing, plowing my way through a novel in lieu of attempting to outrun the first snow outside. I tend to leave a lot on the table. I think of myself as being more able than I ever actually deliver. I shrink in the face of even modest challenges, and I feel myself defeated at the merest rumor of conflict. I contend that I am not lazy, however, for the lazy never seem to notice the work they shirk, but fail to catch the cues that inform then that they really should be doing something. Mine's a more sophisticated sort of slothfulness, one ridden with essential guilt and built upon a solid foundation of dedicated precedent. I can usually tell when I first sense a deadline whether or not I'll ever manage to get around to actually attempting to accomplish it, but I retain the expectation on my books, never writing off the obligation. Ever! I might have become most masterful at managing the resulting residue of guilt, my constant companion and, curiously, my primary inspiration.

I sense time on my tail and I know for sure that I will ultimately lose this race.

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Factsation

Factsation
RAPHAEL: The Sacrifice at Lystra c.1515-6
"How low can your bottom line go?"

The Muse recalls her mom insisting that fare is what one pays to ride the bus. This glib insight almost explains how the much-maligned US Tax Code works in practice, except that fair, tax-wise, means that those least able to pay, always pay the most as a percentage of their income. A day laborer, lacking the 'tax advantages' of owning a private jet, might pay the full fare. No billionaire ever does, nor need to, because he can take advantage of receiving certain advantages not extended to the laborer. Billionaires complain about the price, but never, ever, under any circumstance, ever pay the full fare. It's as if the rich receive special dispensation for the otherwise insufferable burden of wealth. They write off with abandon, carrying forward losses to offset any unfortunate future profits. Lose a billion early in a career, and you're golden for the next couple of decades worth of tax years. Walk away from a failing enterprise, even one you ruined through gross incompetence, and your government will richly reward you. Should the laborer walk away from a job, he'll be denied subsistence support under the presumption that he must be lazy. Real welfare queens live in luxury on the Upper East Side.

Our President, he whose name I've sworn to avoid saying, reportedly deducted $70,000 in a single year for hair styling expenses, since his gravity-defying cantilevered combover is apparently a part of his brand rather than simply a translucent inability to accept encroaching baldness.

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QuantiCategorization

QuantiCategorization
Rosa Bonheur: The Horse Fair (1855)
"I am not now nor have I ever actually been my demographic."

To produce sketches for her mid-nineteenth century painting The Horse Fair, artist Rosa Bonheur sought and received permission to dress as a man while observing dealers selling horses at the horse market held on the Boulevard de l'Hôpital in Paris. She explained that when earlier sketching at a slaughterhouse, her appearance as a woman had complicated her ability to observe regular goings on, and so she wanted to dress in the iconic smock and britches favored by male painters of the period, for she considered herself first an artist. Whatever else she might have been ranked a distant second to her presence as an artist in that context. How others perceive us can deeply affect our ability to engage in whatever we do, so most of us take care to project a persona congruent with our intentions, lest we unduly complicate our own efforts.

We live in perhaps the most prejudicial time in the history of human existence.

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MountainTime

MountainTime
Giovanni Segantini: The Punishment of Lust (AKA The Punishment of Luxury) (1891)
" … my soul will most certainly feel more at home there."

Though I might use the same clockworks to measure time wherever in the world I might find myself, time behaves differently in different places. It moves much more slowly some places than in others, the effect influencing clocks such that they fail to register any difference. I do. Perhaps you do, too. A minute is clearly not a minute everywhere. In cities, time naturally moves more quickly, though much of it seems wasted in transit between two inevitably distant points (across town) via crowded passageways. One waits much of their time away in cities. On the prairie, time moves most regularly, with little difference from day to day to day. I figure that the featureless topography influences it, as if there's nothing for it to bounce off of as it passes through. MountainTime seems most mysterious and therefore most special. Long, deep shadows render sundials essentially useless, and twilight, both morning and evening, stretches far beyond expectations, smearing each sunrise and sunset into curiously extended events.

I consider the Pacific Time Zone to be God's Own Time Zone, probably because I gestated and was born there, and inhabited that geographical space through my formative years.

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ThinAir

ThinAir
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres: The Dream of Ossian (Ossians' Traum) (1813)

"Maybe this place exists solely as refuge …"


The atmosphere has seemed memorably thick over the last few weeks. Wildfires raging across The West pushed smoke around the world, blocking some people's sun through the end of summer and into an uneasy autumn. Our horizons have flamed through successive sunrises and sunsets while every exposed surface accumulated an ashy grit. Politics, too, have densified our social atmosphere, with fear sweat creating a persistent ground fog of dread as a mortally weakened President throws distracting tantrums, spewing idle threats. The Damned Pandemic continued playing off our tenacious innumeracy, a flickering flame quietly spreading through virgin timbre, our ears deafened by disbelief. This time will be recorded as neither the best nor the worst of times, but it might well be remembered as a crime wave, with thieves weakening every institution and corruption seemingly corroding everything it touches, and touching pretty nearly everything. The future from here appears cloudy with the certainty of torrential rains, a threatening Old Testament scenario.

The Muse and I feel fortunate to have found Pilgrimage calling us up and out of our metastasizing daily routines into ThinAir, where we can't figure out how to make the television work.

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MisDisInformation

MisDisInformation
Joseph Wright: The Corinthian Maid (1782-1784)

[Josiah Wedgwood, the pioneer of pottery manufacturing, commissioned this mythological scene that illustrates the invention of the art of modeling bas-relief sculpture. Wedgwood’s own fired-clay vessels, decorated with low reliefs, would have been seen by an eighteenth-century audience as the aesthetic descendants of this ancient Greek maiden’s attempt to preserve her beloved’s profile.

The girl was the daughter of a potter in Corinth. Her boyfriend was about to embark on a perilous journey to foreign lands, taking only his spear and dog. As a memento, she traced her sleeping lover’s silhouette onto the wall. Her father then used the drawing to model a clay relief, which he baked in his kiln to create a ceramic keepsake.] NGA.gov

"The silhouette was never the lover …"

When the fabled Corinthian Maid traced her lover's silhouette, she had no intention of accurately representing him, but of hopefully capturing some significant, representative part of his presence. She understood that the small subset of his many dimensions she traced on that wall would fall far short of replacing him in his absence, but hoped the resulting bas relief might serve as enough reminder to spark some deeper sense of him than mere memory might provide. She produced information about him, but without the expectation that this information might adequately replace him. Her work produced a placeholder for his presence, information without definition.

We've been wrestling to make this distinction ever since, and probably well before that Corinthian Maid scribbled her lover's outline on that wall.

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Pilgrimage

Pilgrimage
Francisco de Goya y Lucientes - A Pilgrimage to San Isidro (between 1820 and 1823)
[The theme of the loss of identity in crowds in this painting can be seen as a precursor to expressionist painting (en.wikipedia.org)]
"Having left as someone else, he returns with his freshly blessed self again."

It might be a curiosity unique to the criminal mind to believe in the concept of a clean getaway, for there are none. One might wish there were such a thing, and even deeply believe that they have pulled one off, but once fleeing, the possibility of getting caught remains until you're arrested, and until then, you're haunted by the prospect of being found out, more refugee than free. I suppose the more dedicated sociopaths can convince themselves that they got away Scott-free, but even they are actually fleeing, even if they don't acknowledge this fact. If only they could leave themselves behind like they left the scene of the crime, they might actually escape. The fundamental problem with getaways lies in trying to flee one's self, but that one cannot be left behind. The old life might be readily abandoned, but the old self insists upon tagging along, and the old self, however unwanted by the prospective escapee, shows up on wanted posters and the gunman cannot help but drop into old haunts. Somebody will sooner or later spot them there.

Contrary to every airline advertisement ever written, there are no getaways, not really.

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Viewing

Waxing&Waning
Samuel Dirksz van Hoogstraten: View of a Corridor (1662)
"Let the record show that on this last day of summer, I started leaning in again."

The Muse and I live near the top of a minor mountain in a region filled with more significant ones. Ours hardly merits mentioning, but still our elevation often leaves us feeling as if we're floating above much of the rest of creation, like Greek gods or something. We nevertheless choose to live humbly here, something I believe we'd do whatever our circumstance, and we've actually lived even more humbly before, accepting waning as another part of an apparently never-ending cycle of increase and decrease, like respiration. 'As I live and breathe' translates into 'sometimes we give and sometimes we receive', with net increase or decrease more a matter of accounting periods than of any superiority or shortcoming. We do our work, grateful for having it, and too often temporarily forget the sublime beneficence of both possessing it as well as often feeling utterly possessed by it, for it fails to consume us, but seems instead insistently intent upon continually enriching us, even when it makes us no money. Living without purpose could only be worse for everybody.

That said, we're both feeling bled dry here on this final partial day of summer.

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BegendingsAgain

BegendingsAgain
Samuel van Hoogstraten: View of an Interior, or The Slippers (Between 1654 and 1662)
"I clutch my innate cowardliness along with my pearls and move into."

I consider myself to be a change chicken, especially whenever encountering some inevitable. I could offer a master class in the fine art of denial. My feet naturally drag, providing a superpower resistance few very deeply appreciate. I can defend any late status quo state until long after any foreign element's completely overtaken it. I sometimes seem to be living in the past, still taking my cues from some long ago code of comportment. I live conservatively—not politically conservatively, for that philosophy always seemed far too radical for me—but intellectually conservatively, and also culturally. I rightfully consider most improvements to be degradations and most new beginnings to be primarily shrouded in endings. My glass is neither half empty nor half full, but still overflowing with potential. I'm the one most likely to order another one just like the one before.

I have been inhabiting the NowHere for an entire quarter now, or almost.

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DateNight

DateNight
Jan Miense Molenaer: The Denial of Saint Peter (1636)
[Molenaer depicted biblical stories in his own time and surroundings,
such as representing this scene from Peter's Gospel set in a Dutch Tavern.]

" … settling in with The Maximum Cat to dream about different days …"

Denver's not so much a food desert as a food prairie. Restaurants tend toward the predictable and steady, and seem few and far between. Little mystery lurks within any of them. Reservations, not usually necessary, unless, of course, you really want to get in at a specific time without waiting. Noise, like an incessant prairie wind, seems built in, and any visit tends toward the buffeting. Our damned pandemic has slowed the usual progression of people in and out, with most preferring an outside table, but even then, overcrowding seems a prominent feature of those few more choice options still open, especially those not featuring a drive-in window. The Muse and I have simply foregone any kind of eating out other than the very occasional take-out pizza, a prominent feature of the region's flat restaurant topography, anyway. But last Friday night, we really needed to get the heck out of our same old place after months of in-house suppers, crafted by our very own hands and inspired by flattening imaginations in precisely the same space. We behaved like the cats, screaming to be let out but with no destination imagined other than Not Here.

With no specific place in mind, not exactly the recipe for certain satisfaction, though back in the day, we could usually happen upon some semblance of a satisfactory place.

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Impendings

Impendings
Sir Peter Paul Rubens The Reconciliation of Jacob and Esau About 1625 - 1628
"I left only NowHeres behind."

Summer has been eroding since early July, wasting away in place. The Dog Days came and went, replaced by a succession of cat days, warm enough that the cats preferred to stay out unsupervised all night and started turning feral again. Max, The Maximum Cat, disappeared for two successive nights before suddenly appearing without an explanation, hungry. I, of apparently little faith, had already started imagining how I might cope with such a loss, here in this ass end of a sweet season, with so many competing Impendings already scheduled. The end of summer enters with stealth exceeding even that of the littlest cat's feet. It leaves no footprints at all and manages to surprise no matter how closely I watch my clocks and calendars. Perhaps especially this year, where so much has managed to maintain so much sameness backdropped by so danged much simply staying home. The Muse and I have been aching for a road trip, but circumstances or entropy have so far successfully stymied every attempt. Big change is coming, though. I know this because I feel unusually blind to the Impendings.

The first day of fall has been scheduled to appear on a Tuesday this year, slipped into midweek as if to discourage any leading or trailing long weekend celebration.

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-finity

-finity
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich (1818)
" … hope apparently actually does spring eternal…"

I have never considered myself an atheist, but then, I wouldn't call myself anti-theist, either. I believe in plenty and can recognize the utility embodied in the whole mythology, liturgy and all. I was raised attending a mid-century conservative Christian denomination, demons and all, and learned early of which I was better off not speaking about at all. I could not quite muster up even a half-decent belief in an old testament God, the one that looks like Moses' scowling uncle wearing a swaddling suit of so-called clothes reminiscent of nothing more than a onesie diaper ensemble with sandals; thank God, no socks. Always the sandals. The relationships between God as father and Jesus as the son of God and me as the apparent son of a mild-mannered postal worker and his I Love Lucy wife were about as clear as my father's family tree, swelling with halves and steps and even more baffling progeny. The idea of lord, let alone as savior, escaped me, and not just because I didn't believe, but because I simply could not, since I had not been raised in feudal times, understand the meaning of the terms. Still, I never really felt as if I was entirely on my own, for I always possessed an inner hopefulness, even in my most discouraging times.

I believe that hopefulness might represent what some more devout and comprehending mean when they speak of big 'G' God.

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Stewing

stewing
A group of peasants sharing a simple meal of bread and drink;
Livre du roi Modus et de la reine Ratio, 14th century.

"My country used to be …"

They are a proud people, overly so. They expend their energies defending themselves, for they seem to attract enemies, foreign as well as domestic, and they insist that these enemies primarily target their 'Way of Life,' which they seem to hold as sacred without ever very finely defining what it entails other than to declare it containing inalienable rights, not necessarily privileges, responsibilities, or obligations, and 'traditional values.' They seem to firmly believe that owning a semi-automatic rifle and a handgun will protect them from tyranny, if not necessarily from each other. They insist that registering or licensing those weapons amounts to the tyranny from which those weapons were supposed to protect them. They distrust governments, which they firmly believe to be the primary author of the tyranny they oppose. They proudly proclaim that they refuse to expose themselves to mainstream media, which they believe engages in an ongoing conspiracy to misrepresent what's actually going on. They believe themselves to be authentic representatives of The People, The REAL People, not those hangers-on and Johnny-come-lately folks diluting the gene pool. They receive their information almost exclusively via gossip and rumor, and once they get an idea in their heads, they blithely deflect any conflicting information. Point them at a fact checker and they will proclaim, without evidence, that fact checkers have been proven unreliable. They live within an echo chamber.

They seem a stupid people but believe themselves cleverer, more insightful, wiser.

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PinchOfSalt

Salt
Antonio del Pollaiolo: Battle of the Naked/Nudes, 1470
" … just when we really needed to be tipped over again."

I was blessed with little taste for salt. My lead palate cannot discern whether a dish needs salt before serving, so The Muse performs that service in the event that we have company for supper and this detail even matters. The Muse keeps the salt cellar handy at table to make up whatever deficit I deliver for dinner. I try, as the cookbooks show, to let salt start to breakdown proteins before cooking, but I work by direction rather than by taste or instinct, because I possess no salt sense. I'm aware that a man of my advancing age should limit my salt intake, but I find no reason to monitor it since I'm most likely to just forget about it altogether. I take it, though, that some find an extra pinch of salt necessary, though I have resigned myself to never understanding why. The Muse also possesses a superior taste for wine and can sense the presence of corking I cannot perceive. I sometimes doubt whether we're the same species, as divergent as our sensibilities seem.

Last week, The Muse leaned over and salted the GrandOtter's already plated supper after suddenly realizing that she'd forgotten to salt it in preparation.

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Patruns

Patruns
US Army Corps of Engineers geologist and cartographer Harold Fisk: Meander Map of the Mississippi River (1944)
"Give the Patrun a silly name and see where that leads."

Us consultants types often speak about organizational patterns of behavior, just as if an organization could behave. Often (as in always), a consultant type like me will stroll around a workplace simply observing. We might linger to chat with folks as we meander around, but any observer observing this observer might readily conclude that we're aimlessly wandering. We're actually aimlessly collecting clues to what the people working within this place do when they aren't aware of doing much of anything at all. The consultant was invited in, usually under false initial pretenses, because someone's experiencing a difficulty. Successive improvements have typically failed to completely reverse disappointing results, so the consultant's engaged in a late-stage attempt to finally get a handle on it (or resolution's described in one of an infinite array of hackneyed non-descriptive phrases, each of which essentially screams, "We have no clue what to do.) Neither do the consultants, at least not at first. A walk-about might provide a few clues, though, as certain patterns might come into sharper focus. Later, sitting with the client, the consultant will engage in another "Did you notice?" conversation, where some scales might start falling from over the client's eyes.

Though organizations, not being people, are incapable of behaving, certain patterns of engagement or outcome strongly suggest the presence of some underlying behaviors.

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MisFunction

Misfunction
Engraving of a "portable" camera obscura in Athanasius Kircher's Ars Magna Lucis Et Umbrae (1645)


"Camera obscura (plural camerae obscurae or camera obscuras, from Latin camera obscūra, “dark chamber”), also referred to as pinhole image, is the natural optical phenomenon that occurs when an image of a scene at the other side of a screen (or, for instance, a wall) is projected through a small hole in that screen as a reversed and inverted image (left to right and upside down) on a surface opposite to the opening." Wikipedia

"Who's to say?"

Historians have recently concluded that seventeenth century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer sort of cheated when he painted. Rather than merely observing his subjects, they speculate that he most probably employed a Camera Obscura which projected a full color image upside down on his canvas, thereby presenting a paint-by-number sort of template for him to simply fill in with color. This revelation suggests that he might have been more draftsman than artist, though his shortcut did nothing to infringe upon the sheer beauty of his work, which capture light in truly remarkable ways. But every art has its supposed-to-bes, it's hallowed, gentrified traditions, and mere photographic replication was never acknowledged as the point of either art or artistry. A master artist was supposed to possess a certain transcendent magical sense allowing production without resorting to what purists might consider cheap mechanical tricks. Yet what is the eye but a camera obscura, with the brain righting and coloring in inverted images? We see as we do due to a considerably more complex mechanism than any simple hole in a wall, and it's a genuine wonder any of us could make any sense of anything we ever saw, let alone, agree upon proportion, color, or placement.

MisFunction seems common in all sensory processing: vision, hearing, you name it.

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TheRhodeIsland

TheRhodeIsland
Alonzo Chappel: The Landing of Roger Williams in 1636 (1857)
"As tiny as that measure might seem, it's far too large to calculate any human affect …"

The standard calibration for natural disasters in the United States has long been TheRhodeIsland. Whether measuring hurricane or hail damage, government agencies as well as our print and broadcast media exclusively employ TheRhodeIsland as the universal unit of measure of size. True devastation rarely affects less than a single Rhode Island-sized area, and seems to often spread into dozens, occasionally scores. To clarify, TheRhodeIsland represents an area equivalent to the square mileage encompassed by our former colony and tiniest state, which roughly equals the size of a typical ex-urban McMansion estate, or, one Ponderosa, that fictional ranch featured in the sixties western television series, though both The McMansion and The Ponderosa feature far less distinct boundaries than TheRhodeIsland. In spite of this state enjoying the representation of two US Senators, it features fewer bathrooms than the typical McMansion. Fun Fact: It was also the birthplace of the most radical concept in governance ever to visit this continent, or, indeed, the world: Tolerance, a practice now long fallen into regrettable disuse.

Oregon ignites, and the resulting wildfire consumes several Rhode Islands overnight.

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Revelations

Revelations
William Blake: Angel of the Revelation, ca. 1803–5
"I'm continuously moved to reflect just how unlike expectations Revelations always seem."

I seem to be living through a time where another shoe's always just waiting to drop, plots infinitely thickening, where every blessed thing I think I understand today might just be turned on its head tomorrow. I cannot honesty testify that my experience was ever different from this before, for I remember, like you remember, strings of surprising Revelations accompanying me from my earliest days, but it seems, reflecting, that the velocity just might have been steadily, subtly increasing over time, combining to produce a now dizzying result. Every damned thing seems swathed in speculation, with little probability that I'll readily recognize the upcoming outcome, which seems very likely to spawn just another interim and not any final resolution. We say that things are "up in the air," but this air seems thin and smoky, not necessarily fresh or health-giving, but sometimes more bordering upon the absolutely smothering. It probably doesn't help that we're living with a presidency produced like one of those shoddy "reality" television series, where each commercial break (and there suddenly seems to be endlessly infinite breaks for commercials) follows a fresh take on Keep-Away, almost revealing, but then, once again reporting that we'll just have to wait. They promise a brief break, but each invariably takes longer than any average attention span. I've lost focus by the time the program resumes, and the promised revelation usually turns out to be another come-on, prolonging what becomes deeply dissatisfying enough to leave me wondering after the higher purpose of my existence; hardly satisfying entertainment. I've been losing my desire to even turn on the damned television or read the Times to discover the latest "Revelations.".

The relationship between Revelations and resolutions seems disrupted right now, and this situation seems to insist upon me adopting some different expectations.

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Burning

Burning
Camille Corot: The Burning of Sodom (formerly "The Destruction of Sodom"),1843 and 1857
" … one pair of boots I'm sure grateful I remembered to grab before I left."

Around the time I first moved to Portland in the mid-seventies, the Feds changed their policy regarding their Northwest forest land. They'd previously subsidized a vast rural economy. Cut-rate logging leases encouraged an extractive industry that funded schools, roads, and other government services along with high-paying rural jobs. The locals complained that the damned EPA regulations suddenly protecting small owls and tinier fish caused it, the downfall of entire regions. People were understandably pissed when forced to move into cities or settle into lives as the suddenly working poor. They remembered their grandparents' stories about being poor back before The Dust Bowl had brought them here to the promised land. It had been every bit as good as promised to them up until then. Proud traditions were summarily disrupted and the victims usually blamed for their shifting fortunes. They'd age into a bitter conservatism still remembering when and their children would join a local underground militia, fomenting for similar to their own disruption at the top. The same sorry game played out on the other side of the country in the rust belt, as over the following third of a century, jobs evaporated with little recourse. We'd entered a deliberately disruptive time. Now, of course, Oregon's known as The Silicon Forest, though few ex-loggers work in high tech. Many remain up to their necks in debt from barely surviving and still live in once-thriving but ever-shrinking small towns that hardly seem like towns anymore; slightly wider spots along the road over to Bend or K-Falls.

The surrounding woodland was always good to these people, a genuine wonderland of scenery, recreational opportunity, and game.

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Issues

Issues
Portrait of Martin Luther by Hans Balding Grien, 1521 Woodcut
"We dare not squabble over Issues …"

I take issue with Issues, which seem to have become the primary medium for political discourse, such as it's become. Reporters ask where a candidate stands, offering hardly a thin, brittle branch for any candidate to stand upon. They speak in a curious shorthand where keywords stand in for actual questions. "Where do you stand on abortion?" one might ask, a guaranteed double-binding, damning sort of non-question almost certain to elicit a meaningless response. Abortion has become a poisonous word. Even a sentence fragment containing it seems certain to taint anyone associated with it, for it's become the primary marker of ginned up moral outrage. Nobody ever asks where a candidate stands on preserving the life of a mother, for the unborn seem to have become citizens with rights exceeding any of those enjoyed by the previously born, even though they have universally failed to qualify as citizens at all. Their primary occupation seems to have become sparking outrage, which seems quite the clever accomplishment for anyone having not yet come into this world, let alone of age.

Issues represent the gotcha game of our time.

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SolstusInterruptus

SolsticeInterruptus
Pieter Brueghel the Elder, The Hunters in the Snow, 1565
" … I suspect it's only napping."

As if mistaking an afternoon for the wee hours, our summer pulled a reversal overnight. Eighty-five and terribly smoky just yesterday, I woke to snow covered ground. Roads remain bare, since we were frying eggs on the asphalt yesterday and it holds heat like a fire brick, but the trees, none even starting to turn autumn colors yet, suddenly inhabit a snow globe. A very small hummingbird visits the remnants of the hummingbird feeder's contents, still liquid, thank heavens. I'd thought to take it down yesterday afternoon as I prepped for this storm. I almost regret that I live in a time when I can know what the morrow will likely beget, for I spent the few days leading into today dreading summer's interruption. I dutifully carried almost every planter and pot to a tarp-covered basement floor, and even blew out the drip irrigation system as if it was suddenly November in early September. A whole season of sitting on the deck surrounded by sweet scented blossoms, undone but not forgotten in a single afternoon. The cats must have thought me crazy, uprooting our outside home on such a hot and smoky afternoon. My back complained, too, after the lifting was through and I was sipping a cold one and surveying the damage I'd done on the rumor of winter.

I remembered wrong when I recalled previous early snows, for twenty years have passed since the last September snowfall here.

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Synchroenicheatea

synchroe
William Blake: The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun, c. 1805
"I thank heaven that the most important things tend to happen at the least convenient times."

I yesterday introduced my primary manner of living, LivingAllegorically. In in, I asserted that making meaning comprises the bulk of my life's work, that everything I perceive when looking out any window might prove to be some unlikely mirror image of me, and that it's always my responsibility to interpret whatever I experience in ways that work for me by enhancing the quality of my experience. I omitted at least half of a complete explanation, though, not wanting to muddy up the creek more than necessary to delve into such a deeply personal topic. That other half involves meaningful coincidents' apparent role when LivingAllegorically. Obviously, nobody ever manages to plan moments when a fresh insight appears. These simply seem to simply occur without volition or advanced planning, like the revelation on the road to Damascus that Saul wrote about, which was clearly not on that morning's agenda. It occurred at an apparently inconvenient time and brought what might easily be interpreted as great good fortune to a clearly undeserving character, an authentic plot twist. I believe that LivingAllegorically begs a necessity to consequently maintain a firm belief in Synchronicity, a concept, first introduced by analytical psychologist Carl Jung, which holds that events are "meaningful coincidences" if they occur with no causal relationship yet seem to be meaningfully related. Those meaningful relations seem to describe the mechanism animating LivingAllegorically, which might not be so much a philosophy as a manner of actually living, an endlessly active leaning in sort of engagement with life.

Synchroenicheatea seems to be a more emblematic way for me to spell the word because it seems so much more phonetic and mysterious. However one spells it, it remains a mysterious force, the presence of which won't move any needle on any Galvanometer.

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LivingAllegorically

Allegorically
Allegory of Arithmetic, Laurent de La Hyre, 1650
"I might never get to breakfast or Damascus this morning …"

In the unlikely event that any of my grandkids ever ask me what I've learned about life, I would most probably respond by telling them that life seems to me to be an extended allegory, that reality isn't one percent of what it's cracked up to be, and that I believe that making meaning might be my primary responsibility here. Nothing seems as it seems and everything, every sensory experience, every dream, might carry a vast array of alternative meanings, depending. Depending upon me. I deeply doubt that a cigar is just a cigar, even sometimes, but each radiates possibility, depending. Depending upon me. I could choose to render that Freudian smoke to be simply a cigar, but what could possibly be the point of interpreting it so unimaginatively? Better sometimes, I believe, to perceive it with a touch of wonder, to check the context and discover some more meaningful understanding. It could be the clue I'd been hoping to appear that might just lead me to resolve the great mystery, or, alternatively, I could just perceive a mundane old cigar. Vitality, in my panoply, demands this more personal engagement, where I feel obligated to at least try to unwrap some deeper meaning from every blessed event and sensory experience. A rose might well be a rose and also a rose, but I also suppose that it might also be a harbinger of anything, a semi-secret messenger intent upon finally cluing me in. It utterly depends upon me to see through its initial instance to interpret something potentially more significant. All my experiences depend upon me being present.

Saul, when on that fabled road to Damascus, experienced a perfectly Standard Type 1 Revelation.

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Humbility

Humbility
Christ in the Wilderness, Moretto da Brescia (Alessandro Bonvicino), ca. 1520
" … lurching contest to contest, certain only of losing what we already too willingly forfeited."

And it came to pass that the people became prideful, proud of their many accomplishments and haughty within their identity; insufferable in the eyes of their neighbors, even formerly close friends. Where gratitude once swelled in their chests, an insolence replaced it and a definite arrogance overtook them. They suddenly seemed to know better the choices others should make, and even took it upon themselves to lean over others' plates to cut their meat for them without even being asked. How unappreciative 'they' seemed! Polity degraded into a me-ity, a me-for-me-and-nobody-for-all self-centeredness. Invisible hands and "wise" markets subsumed human agency and they segregated financially. They claimed The Best In The World without considering. "For whom?", and were subsumed by the promise of ever-expanding profitability. They funded their military more lavishly than they supported their progeny. They devoted themselves to promoting identity, touted as both brave and free to one another, but seemed to forfeit their former Humbility for a venial form of vanity. Then all was lost.

The ability to humble one's self might be the most human capability.

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Readering

Readering
Portrait of Georges-Daniel de Monfried by Victor Segalen, 1909
"I'm feeling as if I might be a writer now."

Michael Maccoby, American psychoanalyst and leadership consultant, defined a leader as anyone with followers. Others shave pigs, insisting that some observable skills really must be present to qualify as a real leader, but I take Maccoby's side in this small controversy. It seems to me, if to nobody else, that we define many occupations in just this back-handed way. We judge singers by the size of the audiences they attract and Presidents, initially by the number of votes they get, neither by any even rough assessment of their skill. Some of the most popular recording artists torture my ears, but they're successful based upon their audience, measured by their number of listeners. This principle seems to hold true even beyond the performing arts. What's a doctor without patients? Even a librarian seems to require patrons to qualify as a true professional. Professionalism's not simply what one knows or does, but related to recognitions. Does anyone follow you? Does anyone ever listen when you sing?

Writing's no different.

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FlatEarths

FlatEarth
Wilbur Glenn Voliva's flat earth map. Modern Mechanics and Invention, October, 1931
"It can well afford to wait until we Flat Earthers catch on to its subtle significance."

In his essay The Relativity of Wrong, [The Skeptical Inquirer, Fall 1989, Vol. 14, No. 1, Pp. 35-44], Isaac Asimov presented a canny reframe of the common right/wrong dichotomy. He provocatively declared Flat Earthers' notions as not so much wrong as incomplete. For the Sumarians, who he supposed had originally concluded that the earth was flat, for most intents and purposes, their world was, in practice, flat. Earth's very slight curvature, about 0.000126 per mile, a quantity very close to 0 per mile, turns out to have been almost right and not, as moderns popularly believe, utterly and totally wrong. The truly tiny difference between zero and 0.000126 (eight inches) per mile compounds, though, as horizons expand beyond the local neighborhood. What remained obscure to the ancients became inescapably obvious to their later progeny. We might even say that most of today's more complete understandings stand atop yesterday's less complete ones. The often infinitesimal nature of significance continues to fool us as it did our forebears. Today, we have tough guys crowding together in Sturgis, apparently because, to the vestigial Sumarian part of their perception, a sub-microscopic virus shouldn't qualify as anything to get all that worried about. Right wing-nut commentators wonder what all the fuss could possibly be if we're 'only' projected to lose six percent of our population to the pandemic, and many of those folks, in their calloused imaginations, were ready to shuffle off anyway.

If this plague year should have taught us anything, it should have convinced most of us that the infinitesimals matter more than we thought.

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Measuremont

Measuremont
La persistance de la mémoire (The Persistence of Memory), Olive Salvador Dali, 1931
"When engaging in timeless anything, expect expectations to prove misleading."

I can never quite remember at first. The Muse and I bought two more cases of fresh tomatoes thinking we'd roast the contents of one and juice the contents of the other, twenty or thirty pounds each case. We'd 'processed' tomatoes many times before, but those experiences produced little more than vague recollections, not immediately accessible in any functional form. The roasting takes time and includes a cumbersome step where I'm supposed to pull the peel off each hot roasting half, just as if that were humanly possible, while scorching my fingertips. How terribly renewing! Juicing involves little more than coring, quartering, and heating, then crushing in the Foley® food mill, an inherently picky and frustrating business. I finally plug into my vestigial muscle memory and set myself to work, slicing, salting, seasoning, and roasting. The recipe says check after twenty minutes. After twenty minutes, the roasting halves seem unaffected. I set the timer for twenty more minutes and settle into finish that novel while I wait. I repeat this cycle twice more before the tomatoes seem in any way peel-able, then painstakingly set about successfully performing the impossible ritual. I'm more than two hours into what started out as a twenty minute expectation by the time I decide that I'm done roasting and it's time to start canning.

I'd gathered the little jars while the tomatoes roasted, and also set the lids to simmering on the stove top.

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WillfulWisdom

WillfulIgnorance
Fresco depicting ancient Chinese philosopher and educator Confucius (551 B.C.-479 B.C.), found in a 2,000 year old tomb in an old residential yard in Dongping County, east China's Shandong Province.
" … we generally do not seem to conform to gross generalizations."

I sincerely wish that there were a wise counterpart to the wave of willful ignorance presently washing over us. Willful Ignorance, for the unfamiliar, is a polite way to describe stupid. It's polite because it presumes adequate intelligence, which only seems fair since measuring anyone's intelligence proves inconvenient and often impossible in the course of a casual interaction, so it concludes that in spite of adequate brain power, someone's apparently worked very hard to come to a delusional conclusion. These delusional conclusions are often quite provably fallacious by employing nothing more dangerous than elementary logic and … ahem … facts, but they tend to spark a childish round of 'call and denial', an equivalent to the old I Know You Are But What Am I? game of our youth. There's no talking with anyone entranced within their own twisted justifications. They've invested heavily in a storyline unsupportable by any rational or experiential means, a genuine flight of fantasy, but apparently will not divest, probably because they cannot without forfeiting a long-trusted element of their identity. I think of Willful Ignorance as a particularly virulent form of denial, a bury-the-head-in-the-sand strategy certain to ultimately betray even the truest of true believers. My usual strategy when encountering the apparently willfully ignorant involves sort of just putting them out to pasture. They do not appreciate my questioning and I don't really need their sideways justifications' lead weight in my life. Neither of us will be in the market for evangelical transformation.

What would a wise counterpart to willful ignorance look like?

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GodGiven

GodGiven
The Creation of Adam; by Michelangelo; 1508–1512
"We're never less powerful than when we're armed and asserting our folly as some GodGiven right …"

I was up early again this morning pondering how I might distinguish between the various rights asserted by those around me. The right wing gun nuts insist that they merely enjoy a GodGiven right to bear arms, though I recall no actual scripture reporting the granting of this authority. Others proudly sing that God somehow "shed his grace on thee," which I interpret as meaning "God shed his grace on me", or somebody, though I have no clue what shedding grace might entail or what might logically result from this act. Mention of it does seem to reliably encourage pride, the sort of pride which supposedly does not immediately precede a fall of any kind. Grace seems the iffiest of gifts, whomever might bestow it, for it always seems more resident in the eye of the bestowed than anywhere else. In spite of the widespread belief in the existence of godless heathens, each and every war ever fought seems to have been engaged in by self-certified God's own representatives on this earth versus self-certified God's own representatives on this earth, and expressly for the greater glory of God; not their God, but the one and only true God, who just happened to be on "our" side.

God gets used as an excuse for almost everything, and I suspect that she's not all that pleased with these attributions.

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Hop(e)

Hop(e)
Hop flower in a hop yard in the Hallertau, Germany (Wikipedia)
"Something significant seems to have stuck with me …"

My father, who was born near the Willamette Valley German immigrant town of Mt Angel, told of working hop harvest. Long days standing on the tall bed of a high-sided flatbed truck, reaching up to cut the cords holding the twenty foot tall vines into the truck bed would leave his forearms raw. Even then, the work beat picking beans, which was stoop labor and hard on the back and also left forearms chafed. I'd seen the hop yards, since I'd grown up near the preeminent hop growing region in this country, and dreamed of growing my own someday. I'd tried several times, always with disappointing results, short, rather sickly specimens yielding few of the treasured cones. I'd crafted small pillows filled with dried cones, which are said to induce sweet dreams, but had never more than dabbled in their cultivation until this year, this seemingly hopeless growing season. I'd late last summer finally found a plant at a local nursery, for which I'd paid a small king's ransom, and planted it in front of the fine, tall cathedral window out front, thinking that perhaps it might at least yield some interesting shade. That plant grew a begrudging six feet or so before an early snow halted further progress. I pruned it to the ground and forgot about it until Spring, hoping that it might prove eternal enough to sprout up a second year.

This Spring needed hope like no other I'd known.

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ShiftIn

ShiftIn
Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun, Nicolas Poussin, 1658
"I'll relish what little's left …"

In these mid-latitudes, weather comes out of the West, moving opposed to the sun's progress. Little of consequence comes out of the East, which is where we send our weather when we're finished with it or it's finally finished with us. Occasionally, some counter-clockwise rotation kicks in to produce what we call upslope winds. These can spawn magnificent thunderstorms in the Summer and genuine dumpers of snow in the Fall, Winter, and Spring, but these bring nothing in the way of lasting change. They appear and leave almost as quickly, handing the reins back to the West winds again. The only question is always which direction, Southwest or Northwest, will the weather come. Through summer, Southwest winds prevail. One day, a ShiftIn happens and the prevailing winds starts sliding down from Idaho or Montana pulling in Northwestern weather. This ShiftIn comes quickly and never quite fully reverses again that season, a certain sign that autumn's coming, though it might have been a hundred degrees in the shade just the day before.

Real rain, not that second or third-hand stuff stuff passing up and over Arizona from the Gulf of Mexico, but genuine North Pacific rain drenches everything.

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FalseEquivalence

FalseEquivalence
Gino Severini, aged 30, at the opening of his solo exhibition, Marlborough Gallery, London, 1913
"Wallowing in FalseEquivalence demonstrates an ignorance unbecoming anyone."


One of these things is not like the other. This one statement might properly summarize human existence, for we seem to (or, at least I seem to) constantly make distinctions. When my kids were small, we parsed the entire universe into two broad categories, Yum and Yuck. With these broad two generalizations, infinite variations might exist, but no Yums ever became Yucks, and vice versa. Once initially classified, little risk of mistaking one for the other existed. One was definitely not like the other. This universe, though, cannot be parsed so conveniently. We encounter many borderline cases, greyscale experiences which might seem indistinguishably similar, though actually different. Multiple classifications are also common, such that similarly-colored objects might also be more finely graded by size or shape. As the Ancient Chinese used to insist, ten thousand differences might exist between any apparently similar objects or events, but we've evolved into ever less discerning generalists, it seems, satisfied to call both apples and oranges 'fruit,' and leaving further distinctions pat, and we're fine with that other than the occasional disagreement over classifying tomatoes. Fruit or vegetable? A fruit that tastes like a vegetable or a vegetable crudely misclassified as a fruit? Wars have started for less.

All this distinction-making might serve to help us make sense of the world, but a tremendous amount of skill seems necessary to make proper distinctions, to avoid misclassifying one thing as another when it really isn't.

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SmolderingPants

SmoulderingPants
Psalter (the 'Shaftesbury Psalter') with calendar and prayers
Origin England Date 2nd quarter of the 12th century

"We might have been born to advance higher purposes of civilization …"

We apparently love to be lied to. I find no other way to explain civilization. Societies and cultures might exist solely to maintain and reinforce myths, reassuring lies sustained for solace. We seem to not-so-secretly believe most everyone else a rube, easily fooled, many emphatically insisting not that we hold certain truths to be self-evident, but that we're good for keeping the dirty little secrets quiet. I suspect that most of us know too well how deep down lame we are inside, how utterly dependent we are upon lying to ourselves and to pretty much everyone else to maintain some cobwebby semblance of self-esteem. Even if the much-vaunted truth actually made good on its promise to set us free, we'd most likely choose to remain in slavery to the studied reassurances that, no, these pants do not make our butt look big. We've elevated the completely spurious Energy Drink Industry to comprise a significant portion of our retail economy. Need I say more? Sugar water spiked with caffeine, and some even spiked with measures of, excuse me, bull pee. I mean, how gullible must we be to drink that crap? It seems to me that this reality simply could not be without a deep and underlying identity insisting that you absolutely must lie to me and that I solemnly promise to keep the little secrets between us. We apparently sincerely believe that we cannot handle the truth.

We wear SmolderingPants which, if the old adage — where there's smoke, there's also fire — holds true, our pants are actually on fire.

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Heraclitus'Insight

Heraclitus'
On the Island of Earraid, N.C. Wyeth, 1913


"No man ever steps in the same river twice", Heraclitus, Fifth Century B.C.

"No squirrel ever entered the same deer meadow twice."

Heraclitus might just as well have said that no man ever steps into the same morning twice, or sits in the same chair, or reads the same book. Further, he might have just as credibly insisted that no two people ever read the same book, not even once. Any author might, as I have, ask, "What book did you read?" when receiving feedback about their work. We seem to live within an almost constancy, surrounded by seemingly familiar objects and people, but these relations seem surprisingly fragile as we continuously rediscover that each might not be quite what we'd earlier concluded about them. Shocking moments of inconstancy punctuate our experience here, amplified, no doubt, by our abiding sense that things properly stay more or less the same, when they don't and never have. My continuing disorientation might well be self-inflicted, but I cannot seem to uncover any balance or Golden Mean between these two apparently opposing forces: stability and flux. Heraclitus also insisted that "panta rhei", everything flows, that nothing ever stays the same. I wonder why, then, we evolved to believe so vehemently in constancy, that everything's more or less frozen in place?

Glib self-helpless pundits blithely insist that the more things change, the more they stay the same, by which they might mean that most change seems insubstantial, a rearrangement of the proverbial Titanic's deck chairs.

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'Vesting

'Vesting
Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Summer, 1572
" … 'Vesting providence with our experience again."

Most of the growing year involves much waiting, culminating in a few shortening days 'Vesting: harvesting, preserving, labeling, and storing away for later use. There's no shortage of delightful fresh produce groaning shelves this season, the produce stand suddenly the most popular stop on everyone's rounds. Would that I could find this freshness year 'round, but I savor what I find when I find it. We neglected canning tomatoes last 'Vesting season, and lived to deeply regret that decision once sequestration stripped our larder shelves. For the first time in years and years, we reduced ourselves to buying factory canned, and regretted every second of the experience. We'd thought ourselves well-enough provisioned before our world sucked in on us. By then, it was way too late to rethink, and we sucked it up and tolerated the consequences. We'd foregone perhaps the single most solidly imprinting experience of the year last 'Vesting period. We'd been traveling when the tomatoes came in and recovering through the balance of the season. We missed that chance.

Now, we insist that this must never happen again.

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HownDogAfternoon

HownDogAfternoon
Going to Market, Early Morning by Thomas Gainsborough, circa 1773
"We're partners here …"

If I'm going anywhere today, I'd be wise to go early, before the sun and the smoke and the aridity become even more determined to have their way with me. I thought I caught a patch of blue in the sky this morning. The wind shifted overnight so I woke without my eyes stinging themselves shut again. My throat feels rough and the consistency of tapioca pudding, sinuses screaming again. By the last week of August, the elements combine to produce a neigh-on to unlivable environment. The lawn feels crispy underfoot regardless of gold-plated sprinklings, thin underlying soils seemingly thinner after rainless weeks. The monsoon never showed up this year. As each day progresses, the slight almost cool of early morning gives way to another baking, the sun, even through the smoky batten burns without thinking once. The sunrise lasts much of the morning as the smoky haze extends the reds and oranges until nearly noon. Afternoon seems fit for little more than napping, perhaps in a puddle of fine dust, the way an exhausted HownDog might approach it. Time fit only for practicing hibernation. There's no place to escape to but dreams.

The view from every lookout seems cruelly foreshortened and spare. I drive in a tunnel of heavily amended air

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MuseDay

MuseDay

Mérode Altarpiece (or Annunciation Triptych) is an oil on oak panel triptych, now in The Cloisters, in New York City. It is unsigned and undated, but attributed to Early Netherlandish painter Robert Campin and an assistant. The three panels represent, from left to right, the donors kneeling in prayer in a garden, the moment of the Annunciation to Mary, which is set in a contemporary, domestic setting, and Saint Joseph, a carpenter with the tools of his trade. The many elements of religious symbolism include the lily and fountain (symbolizing the purity of Mary), and the Holy Spirit represented by the rays of light coming through from the left hand window.The central panel was completed after 1422, likely between 1425 and 1428. [en.wikipedia.org]

"She insists that she's an A-Me instead."

She despises the moniker, or certainly says that she does. I persist using it, and not merely out of perverse habit. (In her birth family, once anyone learned what you hated, that knowledge guaranteed that you'd thereafter be inundated with it.) She was by any measure born the runt of her family, a premie as we call them today, and so had to stay in the hospital for several days after her birth. She claims that this rude arrival affected her. She still remembers feeling abandoned and alone when isolated from her newly-gained home. Being third in birth order, ultimately the middle, she was born behind, destined to always playing catch up, a childhood-long competition she was destined to lose. She won the race to produce the first grandchild, though, and so was carrying him at her high school graduation, whereupon she went into exile to live with hostile in-laws and a sullen showband drummer of a husband. She coped. She lived as a band wife for almost a decade, holding menial jobs to pay bills, including a stint cutting meat in a huge packing plant and later, as a Tupperware Lady®.

She finally decided at twenty-five to put herself through school, which she managed to do in fairly short order, ultimately choosing her own curriculum to satisfy her own notions of how that work really should be done.

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Q

Q
Guy Fawkes before King James, Sir John Gilbert, Circa 1750
"They ache for judgement day."

They meet in out-of-the-way places, a shed on one member's family farmstead, warmed by a barrel fire fed with scrap lumber. Their meetings combine the camaraderie of a frat brother kegger with the solemnity of religious retreat. One member, typically the host, leads but never in a domineering way, for these men never responded well to dominion. Lifelong misfits, they hold exclusively non-professional jobs, laboring, mostly. They to a man struggle to make ends meet and always have. Those who managed to make it through high school, graduated with a certificate in serial humiliation, for they struggled with their studies, never quite grokking college preparatory courses in math, literature, or the sciences. They hold grudges, not degrees. Many showed early on real promise in the mechanical arts, auto repair, electronics, and the Future Farmers of America programs. They're all hunters. Each owns several guns and each considers these the pinnacle possessions of any freeman. They insist that they're freer than they've ever once felt and meet to garner their resources for the oncoming assaults on what they authentically revere as their way of life.

They think themselves worthy inheritors of Colonial-era beliefs, thinly evolved first or second-generation interpretations of The Rights Of Man and The Wealth Of Nations, though none have read the original documents, much less considered their many contradictions.

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deCENTcy

deCENTcy
Jean-Pierre Saint-Ours, The Selection of Children in Sparta, 1785
At the age of 7, Spartan boys were removed from their parents' homes and began the “agoge,” a state-sponsored training regimen designed to mold them into skilled warriors and moral citizens.
"I genuinely want you to win, too, though never at any cost, …"

In this world where everything seems to have a price tag and few of us understand the cost of anything, deCENTcy often seems lost in the accounting. Schemes surround and smother us. Deals get made. Compromises demanded, the Bait And Switch almost obligatory. Fair deals, the rarest of all deals. Cheap-but-Good seems more weighted in favor of cheapness than goodness. Loyalties seem far too easily persuaded to switch support to shave a few pennies off some bill. Some commodities solely serve ostentation, valued by the excess expended to acquire them, for bragging rights or simply to rub some less fortunate's face in the deal, offered only at auctions where we're perennially out-bidded. Our democracy sometimes seems like that. We wonder why we should even bother entering the game. Our politics have been up for sale to the highest bidder for generations now, and only DeCENTcy seems absent from the equation because DeCENTcy costs almost nothing, a red cent lost in rounding among bilious billions and terrifying trillions. Where's the marketplace in deCENTcy these days?

Oh, here it is, right close to home.

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LOM

LOM
Francisco de Goya, Saturno devorando a su hijo [Saturn devours his son], (1819-1823)
"The more I've experienced, the less I understand."

Birthdays increasingly become subdued celebrations as I age. A passing embrace, a few quick questions asking what they might do for me, an overwhelming number of Facebook greetings, each unexpected, of course, and each relished as a slightly embarrassing excess. I register my appreciation in a sort of passing because I do not feel as though aging or even counting ages accomplishes anything. I spent the day feeling rather full of myself, greatly gifted by the virtual presences surrounding me and I fear a little too off-putting to those closer to home. I find attempts at celebrating at root unnecessary. They elicit little more than sincere 'aw shuckses' from me, which might mean that I'm finally entering that inevitable stage of being, that I'm turning into a LOM, a Little Old Man.

I've noticing myself getting ever more stuck in my ways, as if the sum of all my days had reached maximum absorption of experience, as if my existential larder might be almost full.

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RegularOrder

RegularOrder
Going West--1933, Boardman Robinson, 1933
"I'm not fleeing anywhere …"

I've started this story three times already, discarding each iteration in growing frustration. I wanted to say how it feels for me to be alive this morning, but a certain seething crept into each attempt. I do not feel like an angry old man, just one aching for RegularOrder. I've had it up to somewhere with stupid millionaires dominating conversations. There seems to be no better indicator of absolute inanity than wealth, as if mammon actually lowers IQ. The disruptive elements, the great inventors and marketers and promoters, seem to lack any sense of RegularOrder, the baseline regulating force each of the rest of us rely upon to maintain our sanity and serenity. I feel lucky this morning to be turning three score and nine. It's my birthday, for cripes sake, and I feel satisfied enough just to take what I've been given. The decktop petunia garden's at her peak, perfume creeping up and into the master bedroom windows. My hop(e) vine's cones have grown heavy with pollen and ready for harvest. The front garden's in furious bloom attracting hummingbirds and bees and grasshoppers in profusion. The cats, still kittens a few short weeks ago, have almost learned to come back home on their own after they escape.

The wind seems to have shifted.

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GrudgeWork

GrudgeWork
The Remorse of Orestes by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1862

"La vengeance est un met que l'on doit manger froid" Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754–1838)

"Revenge is a dish best left off the menu"

Setting out to settle any score seems to reliably produce some variant of the opposite of the imagined outcome. Revenge is not, as Talleyrand-Périgord insisted, a dish best served cold, but a dish best left off the menu. One might easily imagine settling some score, as the saying goes, 'once and for all', but such action produces reverberations guaranteeing that those scales will very likely be thrown even more permanently out of balance. Should the reaction be anything close to equal and opposite, a tragic cascade will likely ensue. Dogs chasing their own tails easily then becomes the new normal, for grudge lust never finds satisfaction from any GrudgeWork, however dedicated. Getting even amounts to a distraction, always under the influence of our worse angels. The reparations exacted upon the Weimar Republic following WWI produced Hitler and WWII, even though the French and British firmly believed that their demands were just. Germany had, after all, aggressively thrust itself upon France for no reason other than its deeply held grudge over having missed building its own empire. Why not simply swipe another's empire and thereby better balance the score? We now too well know why, but we never seem to learn.

GrudgeWork properly describes our current administration's approach to governing.

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NothingAndBeingness

NothingAndBeingness
Time Saving Truth from Falsehood and Envy, François Lemoyne, 1737
" … they'd come to understand and trust that the horse knows the way."

I believe, perhaps fallaciously, that I possessed when I was born every skill I later manifested. Contrary to the historical record, not even the KnowNothings ever actually knew nothing, not even those swearing to reelect our sorry excuse for a President can truthfully claim this state, for nothing's always been fundamentally unknowable and to claim otherwise only proves my point. I have not so much assimilated others' skills, but found ways to relate theirs to my own, nascent and previously knowable until after some small or huge revelation. I perceive this world as a network of invitations in constant struggle against the forces of formal education, which seem determined to claim ownership of knowledge and skill so that they might sell it for notoriety and profit. Knowledge, interestingly, also fails to qualify as knowable, though some certainly seem to exhibit clear possession. It might be that knowledge and even understanding possess us and not the other way around, once one's found fertile ground them to usefully relate to it.

If I would have had to know how to write before writing, I might have become an eternal student, Hell-bent on learning something unassimilatable by that means.

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RueTeen

RueTeen
Mary Cassatt, Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, 1878
"Some blessed shirker inside me has been complaining …"

How many times can I repeat an activity before repetition renders it banal and boring? What begins as necessary and refreshing might well become a crushing obligation over time. A perfectly timed taste of wine too easily slumps into an unmemorable second glass or a forgettable third. I've heard of activities so enjoyable that they never eventually bore anyone into a coma, but never actually experienced one. Experience seems to sum into something quite distinct from mastery, something more akin to a tragedy of over-familiarity, rendering almost alien through studied repetition, leaving the practitioner aching only for a beginner's mind again, a refreshing starting all over again from the bottom. Our Damned Pandemic has highlighted the utter banality of many of my RueTeens, activities I now rue performing and perform with all the mindful tranquility of a slighted teen. I might agree to do anything besides what I've become altogether too accustomed to doing after the umpteenth time anticipating doing it again.

Dinner, once creative opportunity, has become an utterly boring chore.

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Chokin'

Chokin'
Fainting by Pietro Longhi, 1744
" … this, too, was intended to be a part of the deal …"

This terrarium's oxygen seems just about used up. We closed up the place as the smoke concentrated, using fans to keep the suddenly suffocating inside air moving, but it moved increasingly listlessly anyway, suddenly neither fresh nor refreshing. We continued breathing, but substituting low octane for high test air, each breath an increasingly sorry pretender to what we'd grown accustomed to experiencing. Usually, the breeze here brings continual relief down from The High Country, some of the freshest air in the world. During fire season, it billows. Nearer the fire lines, ash falls like heavy snow. Here, it's only smoke bringing persistently itchy eyes and a choking sensation deep in the throat. And there's no respite. No cool glade to escape into. No secret room in the basement unaffected by this intrusion. I choose to sit on the deck as the day grows long, nose running and eyes tearing up. I get scowled at for leaving the slider open.

We're in no real danger here.

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Smokin'

smokin'
The Smoker, a presumed self portrait of Joos van Craesbeek, 1635-36


"I closed the side window so the breeze can't push fresh puffs inside on me."

I was a dedicated smoker in my youth, sneaking smokes out on the football field during lunchtime at high school. Slinking around, I mostly learned how to sneak there. My parents were raging liberals when it came to smoking, figuring that they'd rather we not sneak around at home. My dad, brother, and I thereby inflicted second-hand smoke on everyone else in the house, not so much indifferent as ignorant of the damage we inflicted. I quit in a fit of righteous self discipline on the new year when I would turn thirty-five, figuring that smoking was a young man's game and I was headed in the wrong direction to avoid one of the dead certain afflictions should I continue the habit. The Insurance Company had just before instituted a strict no smoking policy and I didn't relish becoming one of those poor souls forevermore hovering around a drizzly courtyard. We speak now of castes and classes. When I stopped smoking, I was immediately upgraded a class. I bruised my left nipple for months after from constantly tapping my shirt pocket, checking for the accustomed pack which was no longer there to cushion my panicky inquiries.

I later picked up cigars, fine little Dominican ones which I fallaciously claimed had been hand-rolled on the thighs of virgins.

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DogWhistlingInTheDark

dogwhistling
The Poacher, Jean Pierre Alexandre Antigna
"We're the ones inheriting that wind."

By mid-August, mornings smell of campfire, though campfires have been banned since May. The primary East/West freeway across the state was yesterday closed until further notice due to a zero contained wildfire burning through Glenwood Canyon. Even the transcontinental train service was suspended until further notice. The round and about alternative route, a twisty two lane up through Aspen, was closed after a semi-truck jackknifed on a tight switchback turn. Sunrises and sunsets come in brilliant oranges and reds and our usual pristine view up the Front Range is filtered through a smutty haze. We're suddenly all smokers again, shirt collars reeking and sinuses clogging. The sign at the county park reminded hikers that rattlesnake activity has been reported in the area, so keep those pets leashed and keep yourself safe. Everyone leaves reminding everyone else to stay safe. The world seems especially dangerous right now.

The Presidential race is off and running now that Biden has named his running mate, a formidable African American/Asian woman the opposition can't yet properly denigrate.

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Disorienteering

TheArtOfGettingLost
Pierre-Auguste Cot: The Storm, 1880
" … I lagged my way back home."

Sequestering provides few opportunities to get lost in anything more diverting than another fresh novel, fleeing ever inward as an antidote to such outward sameness. Suppers eventually come to seem like reruns. Didn't we just have this last night, or was that just the night before? Exploring the unchartable territory west of boring, each little chore hardly seems worth doing, fresh adventure insecurely out of reach. I've grown to know my neighborhood perhaps a little too well. Discovery only ever happens once, after that, it's simply not discovery anymore. An ennui settles over the proceedings and forward comes to feel like warmed over receding, a form of retreat. Mid-August brings vacation season for one excellent reason. It's damnably difficult to get lost at home. I know where every left turn will take me. I understand what's just over every hill. The thrill of discovery eventually slips beyond anyone's grasp and we're compelled to just disappear in favor of some Disorienteering.

We vacate to get ourselves lost.

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Gumshoe

Gumshoe
Harry Barton Vintage Pulp Art Illustration
" … when Amazon options it for the limited series."

As an enthusiastic consumer of Detective Fiction, I fear for the future of this genre. I've not yet encountered a character in any Gumshoe novel who wears a face mask other than to bump off a liquor store, and those masks don't seem right for blunting any plague. None of the heroes seem the sort to slip unnoticed into a cocktail bar while wearing a mask, and cocktail bars have been closed for months, anyway. Where do nefarious schemes get hatched in pandemic times? I'm trying to imagine C. J. Box's Joe Pickett or James Lee Burke's Clete Purcell operating in a post-pandemic world or Longmire issuing citations for violating mask mandates. Masks might inhibit identification of the Gumshoe's prey, though I notice that John Sandford's latest thriller came out under the timely title of Masked Prey, though there were no masks prominently displayed in any part of that story.

Few advertisements, even now, six months into this pandemic, feature mask-wearing characters.

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TakingAPass

TakingAPass
Thomas Moran: Mosquito Trail, 1874
" … a full immersion experience one can almost bring back home with them."

This Damned Pandemic encourages a discernment and detachment in me. I no longer feel free to enter just any establishment. As if I possessed a picky palate, I simply will not enter any restaurant, not yet. I might consent to a drive through or an accelerated step in to grab something to go, but I will not slow down long enough to even leave a footprint on my way through. I wake some mornings aching for a decent order of hash browns smothered in green chile gravy like only an authentic greasy spoon diner can produce, but I will not reduce myself to enter any such establishment. Not yet. Not now. I sense that I'm becoming somewhat of an expert at TakingAPass, just driving past though my desire might compel me to stop. I sense myself a budding aesthetic, like a solitary mountaintop meditating wise man, though I know for certain that I remain a simple wise guy deep down inside. I'm TakingAPass because I've grown to distrust all reassurances that we're bringing This Damned Pandemic under any sort of control. We're still learning how this devil works, and until we deeply understand it, I will continue to choose to just drive by most roadside attractions, even when I'm starving for that plate of smothered hash.

Living in Colorado offers some compensations.

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LittleDeaths

goneglasses
Winter by Jean Antoine Houdon, 1787
"Background moves into foreground sometimes …"

Life presents many LittleDeaths, sudden absences disrupting flow. These experiences might seem mere inconveniences to any casual observer, but the principal deeply feels their sting. Yesterday, returning from our usual larder stocking excursion, I felt my shirt pocket for my eyeglasses and found them AWOL, missing from their pocket perch. I initiated a quick search, well experienced with discovering that I'd set them down somewhere. I could not immediately recall where I might have left them, but I reassured myself that they could not be far. As near as I could tell, they were precisely nowhere: lost, gone, disappeared. I quickly engaged in denial, sensing that they simply must be near, even going so far as to just wear my prescription sunglasses to read a chapter or three in the latest library book. It would too soon turn dusk, though, so I headed out to the drug store to score some cheaters, cheap magnifying lenses to help me make do.

I still firmly believe those glasses will show up, though I'm plotting a visit to my optometrist tomorrow morning.

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Worker

Worker
Jean-François Millet, The Gleaners, 1857
"I might have been a gleaner."

I am most emphatically NOT a Worker. I haven't punched a time clock since I was in my teens, and even then, I found that experience to be anything but uplifting, demeaning. I can't seem to count my efforts by the widely-recognized Hours Metric. I do not quote anybody an hourly rate. Back at The Insurance Company, as a young professional, the accountants drooled over the prospect of collecting activity-based data and received instead, carefully crafted fiction, for few could perform tasks without forfeiting awareness of time passing, not without abandoning the possibility of experiencing the elusive flow. I'd go down to the employee cafeteria each Friday morning, carrying my agenda which I'd once again failed to maintain in scrupulous detail, and create my fictional record of my work week just passing, careful to avoid any appearance of idleness or overage. My job demanded that I always attend to about fifteen different things at once, never once single-tasking, so any notion of activity-based accounting seemed absurd, but only because it genuinely was.

Austrian Political Economist Joseph Schumpeter explained how economists gather their data. He said that watchmen report it and that they report whatever they damned well please.

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Discretion

Discretion
Jan van Eyck: The Virgin of chancellor Rolin. (circa 1435)
"Buck up, Brother, we're in this together however we play it."

Discretion, proverbially referred to as the better part of valor, was originally intended to caution that it's generally better to avoid a dangerous situation than to confront it. Modern interpretations of this term seem to vary considerably from the traditional intention, though, as one governor after another publicly insists upon relying upon personal Discretion when taking certain necessary precautions against The Damned Pandemic, like wearing masks when in public. School principals, too, have adopted this approach, instructing students to make their own choice about whether or not to wear a mask when shoving through class changing crushes. Name one other choice a typical principal leaves up to students? Just one! Given a choice of wearing pants or not, about a quarter of high school students would gleefully observe pants-less Fridays! Should completing homework, or, indeed, all schoolwork be left up to the "Discretion" of each individual student? How about attendance?

The idea that Discretion means free to choose whatever seems upside down and backwards, but then not everyone aspires to valor.

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SlicingBread

SlicingBread
Pieter Claesz, Still life with Musical Instruments (1623)
"Bless This Damned Pandemic for reminding us how."

I speak this morning in praise of blessed inconvenience, as embodied by the once-familiar act of simply slicing bread. With the exception of that period when my mom went all Earth Mother on the family and took to baking her own bread, my early years experienced exclusively the pre-sliced variety bought day old in a small bakery for ten cents a loaf and stored in the trusty basement freezer. I saw in books photographs of the kind of bread people bought in Europe, dark, rotund, and unsliced, and I dreamed of pulling off handfuls to accompany some whiffy cheese, but we were no longer Europeans, and hadn't been for generations. As Americans, we never really thought about most of the conveniences we shared. We thought them a birthright accompanying what was more than simply The Good Life, but the very best life imaginable. Beret-wearing Communists might walk straight-faced while carrying a baguette or boule, but we never would, and not just because we couldn't.

Then I came to test taste a plain baguette and found it good. No, I found it far superior to any sponge cake imposter.

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RushingRoulette

RushingRoulette

Edvard Munch, At the Roulette Table in Monte Carlo,1892
"Rushing into any roulette seems a fool's mission."

Every morning, some oleaginous politician encourages me to resume my "normal" activities, citing genuine statistics to justify their advice. I deeply doubt if they understand a word of their own justifications, for oleaginous politicians have never been elected on the basis of their deep understanding of Bayes theorem, or any other concept underlying statistical projection. Judging from the wild divergence between predicted and actual, their understanding might well be nonexistent, but true to all of us genuinely innumerate, mere failure to accurate predict hardly dissuades another morning spent hawking spurious convictions. Statistics has always been hard, mostly because our intuitions sucker us. Unbiased analysis demands an almost inhuman indifference and strict adherence to tenaciously counter-intuitive processes. Even analyzing results easily sucker-punches us, since we sometimes desperately want the numbers to agree with our a priori expectations, and when they do not, we're likely to fudge, touting the portion of the results that agree with us and burying those that don't.

We wallow in numbers now.

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StayingPut

StayingPut
Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, ca. 1614–20
"Not stir crazy yet, not by a long shot."

In this culture, we believe that strange things will happen to us if we simply StayPut. In Buddhist cultures, stillness might be aspired for, even revered, but we're a kinetic crew over here. We're up and gone as a matter of ingrained routine. We feel as though we haven't accomplished anything unless we've gone out somewhere then returned in-between. We make many round trip runs, almost always ending up just about where we started from, but with the added benefit, I guess, of having sandwiched a gone in there between the anchoring StayingPuts. If I were to deeply immerse myself into StayingPut, I might start stalking the hallways with an axe, chopping holes in otherwise perfectly innocent doors, slathering. I maybe might even turn into a creepy isolated old cat lady, newspapers piled to the ceiling. Or a shut-in, font of endless neighborhood rumors of what I might once have been, a definite haunted house has-been. StayingPut might be the most dangerous possible state for anyone seeking greatness or notoriety, and aren't we all in the Notoriety Business now? Excuse me, please, but I just gotta leave for awhile. I'll be right back. Not going anywhere, really, just … out.

We're StayingPut for our Staycation this summer, and not just because of our Governor's Stay At Home Order.

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Circlings

Circlings
'The proportions of the human body according to Vitruvius', Leonardo da Vinci, about 1490.
" … a Muddle Ages, arguing over theology."

Our Damned Pandemic seems to have sparked a spike in circular reasoning, that form of thinking Bertram Russel once compared to larceny. We've been swiping answers we want, probably because we so want them to be true, for the nightmare to conclude, that we suddenly find ourselves capable of justifying anything and calling that conclusion perfectly reasonable. Circular solutions seem to prove their premise. Because of This, That AND because of That, This, deduction be damned. An induced solution seems to resolve the troubling problem. Hydroxychloroquine certainly seems to cure this 'flu,' except it isn't a flu and supporting evidence seems rather thin. An act of faith or firm believe gets involved and seems to securely seal the underlying logic. Hopefulness gets the better of us, inviting in a following fresh bout of despair. The meta-cycles of hopefulness and despair seem likewise circular, and we spend some days feeling as if we were circling around a huge drain.

We set our expectations innocently, stating our objective clearly. No harm and no foul.

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Sorrying

Sorrying
Jacques Louis David, The Death of Socrates, 1787
" … no identity changing required."

The GrandOtter said, "Sorry."

"Sorry about what?" The Muse replied. "Sorry about saying you were sorry?"

I imagined an infinite spiral starting with an innocent sorry then circling ever further downward, one sorry inexorably spawning another, ad infinitum. Of course, The GrandOtter meant that she was sorry, though she sometimes prefers a more present tense and says that she 'is' sorry, after which I imagine I'm witnessing sorry incarnate. I thought I was sorry, though I more probably never was anything of the kind. Perhaps I
felt sorry, which might prove to be as far from being sorry as anything could possibly be. No feeling defines anyone, for feelings come as information, not definition. One most certainly feels sorry without actually embodying that sorry state. I think we mostly forget this fact and whack ourselves with an ill-advised identity, when we were simply feeling sorry.

Sorry seems a sorry excuse and a worse apology.

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LongHaul

LongRun
First Battle of Bull Run, chromolithograph by Kurz & Allison, 1889
"Heads you win, tails we lose."

Both Union and Confederate soldiers expected the first skirmish of the Civil War to decide the conflict's final outcome. Fine ladies in carriages accompanied troops to the battlefield, expecting a diverting exposition, an amusing afternoon's competition. The Army of the Potomac outnumbered the rebel forces, which were hardly an organized army by then, but were filled with fervor. Neither side imagined the possibility that they might lose. The Union crawled chastised back to Washington that evening, and thus began a long ordeal during which the futility of the rebellion never seemed to settle in. Each side won some and lost some, but each side's dedication rarely wavered. The Confederacy quickly became a brutal autocracy, starving itself in ever-deepening delusion that their dedication might ultimately count for something. They touted Lee as the superior strategist, though he managed to lose every significant conflict. He'd won at Bull Run then went on to narrowly retreat from Antietam and Gettysburg. The terms of engagement seemed to have been set on that midsummer day in Northern Virginia. The manner of engagement largely remained intact throughout.

Both British and German troops cheered their way to the Marne in 1914, thinking themselves on an organized holiday.

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InvisibleHandiwork

InvisibleHanding
Adam Smith, Our Invisible Friend
"May we each come to more deeply appreciate our own agency."

The clever critic starts every review with some variant of, "Far be it from me to criticize, but …". That's a really BIG but, ingenuous as Hell, so I will allow myself to start this criticism more authentically. Your Invisible Friend continues betraying you. Your continuing faith in his underlying beneficence crosses the line between devotion and idolatry. Believe whatever you choose to believe, I say, but consider what each belief bestows upon thee. (I'm very likely to get preachy from here on, so proceed with care.) Any belief that continuously punishes your faith in it, ain't that great of a belief. Any faith that feeds cynicism should simply be abandoned. Any devotion that breeds a deepening sense of victimization, does damage rather than good. I know I'm not supposed to propose any hard shoulds, but please consider what your experience could become if you ditched your insidious Invisible Friend.

He has, they say, an invisible hand, one which, without human intervention, rules economic progress.

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PursuingHappiness

PursuingHappiness
Reading of Voltaire's tragedy of the Orphan of China in the salon of Marie Thérèse Rodet Geoffrin, by Lemonnier. Circa 1812
"Could anyone find full satisfaction with that?"

The Age of Enlightenment eventually brought many improvements. Previous unspeakables became openly discussed. Rights of individuals came to be held as more sacred than the formerly presumed divine rights of either monarch or church, but at best I might fairly characterize that age as a lurch forward, for none of the resulting improvements came about easily. A couple centuries of brutal warfare has left us still divided, for both liberalism and its dedicated opposition emerged from those discussions, and the arguments continue perhaps in even greater earnest. Like all great movements, The Enlightenment was never advanced by particularly enlightened individuals. Assertions were made with little supporting evidence. Convictions encouraged every variety of pseudo certainty: prejudice, bigotry, misogyny, and racism thrived within The Enlightenment and, indeed, seem to continue thriving today, for The Movement could never produce the sorts of confident certainty divine rights might have bestowed. It represented a second order paradigm shift, trading extreme faith for continuing speculation and experimentation capable of approaching improvement but only by iterating, recognizing and adapting to error. All this performed by mere humans. It was and is quite the continuing speculation that it might succeed, and yet it did and has, though also didn't and has not. The path to anywhere from there seemed paved with the scientist's patient wariness, but few followers qualified as scientists.

We seem an impatient lot. We want what we want when we want it, not later, and enlightenment demands patience above all.

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Publickity

Publickity
Entry of John II of France and Joan I of Auvergne into Paris after their coronation at Reims in 1350,
later manuscript illumination by Jean Fouquet

"Notice how I'm not promising a glowing experience or to potentially change your life …"

Today's the day! I find myself suddenly NowHere after a couple of years' preparation, ready to more publicly display my creation in an act of Publickity, by which I mean not an act of publicity intended to gin up notoriety, but a slightly broader sharing. Few have seen my most recent works, though I have more than a dozen in various stages of final completion. A book goes through many completions, an initial one followed by several subsequent ones, each accompanied by its own sense of doneness, all but the final one ultimately false but nonetheless rewarding. There's always one more pass needed: editing, sequencing, re-editing, fine-tuning, the list extends well into a small infinity. Even the final, final, final, final version carries considerable uncertainty, it still being unproven in broader contexts.

I've combined the pieces I individually posted two summers ago under the hashtag #CluelessSummer into a book-length form sporting a new title, Cluelessness.

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SelfExamination

SelfExamination
The Ouroboros and the Tree of Life, Ancient woodcut
" … consider cluelessness to be the absolutely necessary precursor to learning …"

I don't think of myself as a snake and I most certainly do not possess a tail, but SelfExamination tends to leave me feeling like a snake who's eating his own tail, Ouroboros. I finished re-re-reviewing a manuscript this morning—those repeat offender readers might remember it as my CluelessSummer project from two summers ago—and I finished reading the danged thing feeling like Ouroboros again. The manuscript seemed to end just where it had begun, having resolved nothing, not really, the initiating mystery preserved through ninety or so reflections upon it. The ancients believed life worked like this, featuring unresolving cycles destined to endlessly repeat, inquiry not definitively resolving, but perhaps only animating the universal fate. Progress, or the certain notion of it, separates us from the Ancients, for we believe in the eternal possibility of progress. We want to have arrived somewhere by the end of it, for resolution to have become the reward for paying the price of admission and the cost of subsuming attention toward the performance. We genuinely believe that we're owed release by the end, that we'll come to know that the butler did it (again).

But I don't write like that. I couldn't come to a conclusion if kidnapped, tied up, and ditched at the intersection of Over and Donewith.

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Detention

Detention
Departure of the Joads, Thomas Hart Benton,1939
"Detention offers opportunities to more deeply appreciate …"

The cats Max and Molly "accidentally" escaped again last evening as I was finishing up the grilling. Fact was that I felt in need of escaping, too, accidentally or otherwise, for my heart felt like it was no longer home here. Oh, I hold the old place dear enough, but I'd had more than enough and needed something different in my diet. The lamb and veg kabobs were nicely finishing, and those two baby eggplant featured perfect grill marks, but I'd seemingly lost my appetite for home and hearth, which had by then accumulated a half-summer's worth of shirked maintenance. I'd accumulated a seemingly insurmountable backlog of everyday ordinary activities, somehow supplanted by even more mundane things. I felt out of place at home and caught myself aching to escape, so I staged a Great Escape for the cats, who seemed doldrum-ish and anxious to roam, too. I had grilling to do and The Muse was almost through making an emergency batch of homemade Tzatziki. The cats hadn't immediately disappeared, seeming to complain about the wet deck surface an earlier rain had left behind. Not even liberation produced the exuberance I expected from them. We all felt as though we were still in Detention.

Max was waiting when I opened the slider just after three this morning, and Molly appeared an hour or so later.

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Visitations

Visitations
Théodore Chassériau, The Ghost of Banquo, 1855
" … what these Visitations seem to do to me. "

It seems to me that my departed friends never leave me for long. Once gone, they revisit, often at inconvenient times, apparently intent upon setting me onto a somewhat straighter path, for I meander on my way to pretty much everywhere. The shortest route between any two points seems utterly irrelevant to me, as I seem to insist upon usually taking some more scenic route. I set a goal then head off in another direction, my dereliction ranging behind me, weighing me down. These diversions even seem necessary, for if synchronicity is to have any chance of influencing me, it seems I must stray from any straight or narrow. My detours sometimes seem down right harrowing, for I often get lost in those woods. I seem to sometimes even abandon myself when straying, as if my underlying purpose in pursuing might have always been betraying myself. I end up lost, good and lost though it often feels bad and betrayed, as though I've cost myself my dream.

My departed friends tend to visit me then, when I'm feeling pretty near to absolutely dead-ended.

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Experteasing

Experteasing
Left panel of the Dreux Budé triptych: the betrayal and arrest of Christ,
with the donors Dreux Budé and his son Jean presented by Saint Christopher by Master of Dreux Budé (circa 1450)
" … a place where few will ever suspect you of the sin of full expertise."

When I call for a refrigerator repair, I hope an expert (but not too much of an expert) will show up. I prefer working with an upwardly mobile journeyman rather than a full master. The full master's likely to be dismissive and perhaps denigrate me for abusing the appliance while the journeyman will still be inquisitive and learning, and more likely personable. Masters tend to be grumpy and filled with apparently irrelevant details, which they're anxious to share. I won't really want to learn the complete history of refrigeration, just enough information to get my machine working again. I'm even satisfied if the journeyman has to call back to the office for additional information. The expert who can complete the repair with his eyes closed scares me.

The problem with the experts in any field might be that they tend to scare the people with whom they interact.

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ReOpeningUp

ReOpeningUp
According to Sotheby's: Cats being instructed In the art of mouse-catching by an owl
Looks more like: A cat orchestra/choir directed by an owl, with sheet music made of little drawings of mice
Oil on canvas, circa 1700

"Yea, we can hear you now."

Each conflict seems to encounter its Midway Moment, an event that, while not fully resolving anything then, clearly presages an eventual outcome. I believe that this late July week just might have provided this cue. Though we're far from through with This Damned Pandemic, we seem to finally be taking it as seriously as it had been taking us for months and months. I see clear signs that we're no longer hawking bleach or hydroxychloroquine, and even Floridians and Texans seem humbled as their ICU beds fill to overflowing. Pandemics famously continue until. Until what is never obvious, but Damned Pandemics can be damned insistent, heartlessly continuing until we somehow catch on. Then we're playing catch-up for a long while. Few seem willing early on to trust mere knowledge or experience, and most want to rely upon their instincts, which have not yet evolved to fully understand the previously unexperienced challenge. We initially reject historical analogies as preposterous. We learn, painfully slowly, then we begin engineering a reckoning, a ReOpeningUp. Something seems to need to change within us before the changes we strive to engineer around us can come to anything but naught. This was the week that prefaced something different coming.

Extremism in pursuit of anything inevitably produces the opposite of its intention.

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Backlisting

Backlisting
"Salvation visits, and the heavens open in blissful chorus …"

Back in the earlier days of this Damned Pandemic, shoppers became familiar with terms like Fragile Supply Chain, a concept every bit as interesting as Capital Asset Pricing Model or Unsecured Credit Default Swap, stuff the average Jane or Joe never found reason to care about until the National Toilet Paper Stockpile turned up empty seemingly overnight. We had come to think of toilet paper as an almost God-given right, by which I mean it had become the ultimate free good, given gratis in public restrooms everywhere without ever a thought to where it might come from. It turned out that there was a whole industry behind its production and distribution, that fairies hadn't just left the stuff within eternally easy reach. Shortages were possible, and we had no idea how we might ration the stuff. Many had never fully appreciated that the lowly toilet roll might have been a tacit centerpoint of their professional compensation package, for the employee "lounge" had never once attempted to charge for or ration the stuff, though rumor had it that the executive floor stocked a fluffier quality than did the John off the loading dock. Anyway, us consumers were shocked when we found empty shelves dominating the old TP aisle. Shortages quickly spread to the paper towel shelves, too, and we formerly privileged many were rudely introduced to the sort of austerity that hit us square in the shorts. Ouch!

Some shifted to online shopping, prompting an armada of brand new Amazon vans with their weird smiley face logo to begin rushing family-sized containers of this freshly precious stuff to every corner of the country.

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LongDistance

LongDistance
" … a history where LongDistance briefly grew ever shorter before smartly snapping back closer to its traditional borders."

Geezers have always loved to tell stories about The Old Days, by which I mean the days when this world still seemed young to them. The later days, these days where geezers experience their ever advancing age, seem downright ancient in comparison, for they feature patterns grown far too familiar to frequently surprise or even delight, while back then, every new morning brought promise and discovery. Every generation believes that this world was produced for their delight and personal enlightenment. I remember doubting the existence of history then. How could history have been if I had not been included in it? I considered everything chronicled as having occurred before I was born to be a rumor, fiction created to cover up an obvious truth, that there could not possibly be a world without me being in it. Of course life eventually beat that notion out of me, once I'd started accumulating my own history for which many had not been present to witness. Aging eventually cures self-centeredness.

Horizons seemed to have broadened since then.

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ChickenShit

chickenshit
Katharina Fritsch, Hahn/Cock, 2013
"I cannot quite imagine a payoff or penalty worth the risk just yet."

Much of what tries to pass as information emanating from the current administration (which cannot seem to properly administer anything) bounces right off me. I can't care about crowd sizes or Our President's glowing self-assessments. I know they're all lies, and I'm not surprised or deeply troubled by them. He's a troubled man publicly wrestling with himself and largely losing. It's not really a fair fight. I mostly pity the poor guy, who by many accounts, never believed that he'd ever be elected into office and never really took to The White House. I understand that he'd really rather be golfing, a man his age, accustomed to big swindles and dedicated to never working very hard. He's arm candy gone stale and bitter, no longer really fit for public observation yet addicted to the stage. He seems to live in a dismissive rage now that he's the most powerful man in the world, or was before he started shedding power in favor of force which, of course, reliably backfired on him. Then he took to lying about our Damned Pandemic, obviously not even trying for a shred of truth, and I noticed that I noticed this and watched myself turn all ChickenShit.

ChickenShit's a Junior High word describing anyone unwilling to accept an unreasonable challenge.

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AnEcologyOfUnknowability

Unknowability
Cecil Collins, The Quest, 1938
"Our limitations denote the depth of our wisdom, not the breadth of our stupidity."

The unknowable seems to bedevil me. I do okay with the Known Knows, the Known Unknowns, and even with the Unknown Unknowns, for each of these categories still contain a presumption of potential knowability. My demons inhabit an orthogonal space which I cannot quite place on any known continuum, those defined by their tenacious unknowability. My ability to know serves no purpose there, for I could not possibly compare Unknowability's content to anything known or even anything distantly suspected, otherwise it might slip into some ultimately knowable classification. Some questions are nothing more than questions, posed, perhaps, not for answering resolution but to simply endlessly resonate. Who or what created the universe and when? What will next Tuesday bring? How many angels could actually dance on the head of this-here pin? We cannot even begin to know.

I can certainly pare down some mysteries, carve along margins to come to know a few details without ever actually addressing any fundamentally unknowable.

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Gathering

Gathering
The Ghent Altarpiece: The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb (interior view), painted 1432 by van Eyck
"They're well worth the occasional, exceptional, judicious risk …"

I reflected as we drove the narrow twisty road down into Boulder that I had not attended a Gathering of any sort in five full months. Focused upon sheltering in place, justifying going anyplace had become a negotiation, with just staying home usually winning the debate. Out, we became Covid invisible, proximity monitors on full alert, averted gazes taking the place of all human contact. We could move through as much of a crowd as an entry-controlled grocery store could offer without making a ripple, hardly noticing our own presence there before heading back to our altogether too familiar car which would as equally invisibly carry us back home and into isolation. But The Muse's first cousin's daughter Grace was holding a graduation recital up at their Boulder place, strict masking in place and to be held outdoors. The Muse's aunt would be there and the promise of a little family time drew us. I did not feel nearly as concerned as I expected to feel.

This was a genuine shindig attracting a crowd of perhaps sixty seated in lawn chairs across the broad front yard.

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ConSpiriting

ConSpirit
Youth of Moses, Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, known as Sandro Botticelli, circa 1481
" … some days, I even suspect myself."

Those in the know come to understand that everything's a conspiracy, and this might well be true. I gratefully live out of the know, largely unconnected, absent that conspiracy-minded spirit. I see ample evidence of a vast right wing conspiracy rooted way back in the Confederacy and dedicated to utterly undermining any threat of representative democracy encroaching on their autocracy. Most of us were certified under some form of neoliberal indoctrination, with "friendly" corporations funding special programs, even whole departments, at our so-called public universities. We come to hate commies, love Jesus, despise taxes, own guns, and distrust our own government. We weren't born wanting any of that. A conspiracy was probably behind it, but so what? So what?

ConSpiriting, that hounding sense that some deep dark conspiracy's actually behind most everything, cannot be disproven.

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WarFooting

WarFooting
Romare Bearden: Tomorrow I May Be Far Away, 1967
"Lead us, please, into temptation and deliver us into the open arms of genuine evil, for we've come to revel in our supreme sense of invulnerability, for we are free! Free …"

Our enemies show us who we are, who we become when under extreme duress. Our friends reinforce for us who we intend to be, but our enemies goad us into showing who we're capable of being when we stop trying to please. We never placate or reassure our actual enemies, but seem to seek opportunities to highlight just how evil they must certainly be underneath. We give no quarter, we take no prisoners unless forced to, and then, only begrudgingly. We have demonstrated our willingness to bankrupt ourselves when we're on a WarFooting. Nothing's too expensive then, we'll mortgage the farm and the truck and the cow without hardly considering how we might one day repay the debt. When it's war, we conscript our sons, willingly wager our futures, and forget what we learned in the past. Nothing seems too dear and we inure ourselves to committing unspeakable acts for righteousness' sake. We conscript God and all religions to sanctify our necessary insanity. We are gratefully rarely publicly warring, for we've grown to understand that we can hide what's going on in those distant war zones by keeping the press out and lying to the public about what those invisible tussles might really be about. We have no stomach for war or for the truths it discloses to us about ourselves.

I can tell that we are not on a WarFooting where our Damned Pandemic's concerned.

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Healing

Healing
Mediaeval tapestry illustrating bloodletting.
" … I'm satisfied with Healing from my latest attempt to heal myself."

I woke up this morning with a clear head for the first time in six months. The outset of the malady had somehow escaped my notice, for I was at that time filled with fresh promise. My Nurse-Practitioner had prescribed a fresh medication intended to counteract my high triglycerides level, a condition I inherited from my father and share with all my siblings. I had tried—honest, I'd tried—back during the cholesterol scare of the eighties, to find some way to combat this anomaly, but had surrendered when the prescribed medication was recalled as more dangerous than the impending disease. I'd taken to observing by far my favorite treatment, radical acceptance of the way things just seem to insist upon being. I figured, and probably not wrongly, that the state of the Healing arts had not then progressed to successfully treat what my father had only managed to unsuccessfully try to treat for the last half of his nearly eighty-five years. I'd concluded that my triglycerides were a feature and unlikely to encumber my life.

But my brother had told me about a prescription he'd started taking and my sisters chimed in that they'd begun this treatment, too, with promising results, so, though I was hardly convinced it would address my instance, I agreed to at least try it and see. I tried it and saw.

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JustPracticing

Practicing
Theodoor Rombouts: Allegory of the Five Senses, first half of the 17th Century.
"You're not actually going anywhere, anyway, JustPracticing."

When physicians ply their trade we say they're Practicing medicine. When surgeons work, we claim that they're performing. Since all surgeons are simultaneously physicians, are they Practicing when they perform? Our terms for engagement might misrepresent the nature of engagement. Are truck drivers performing a service or practicing a skill in which they've yet to achieve full proficiency? I might expect flawless service from a performing practitioner but accept a few flaws from a Practicing one. The very term practitioner suggests someone practicing, the skilled practitioner supposedly the more experienced at Practicing rather than performing. Practicing, as anyone stuck with a clarinet in 4th grade understands, does not necessarily translate into immediate or even eventual perfection. One might become much more skilled at Practicing than they ever become at performing, as every garage band member can attest. And it might well be that every performance serves as a simple extension of Practicing, albeit in some different context. Singing in the shower might prepare someone to perform on a stage, but the situations hardly compare.

Practicing seems necessary but not predictive.

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Memento Mori

Mori
Pablo Picasso, Goat’s Skull, Bottle and Candle, 1952

Memento mori: an artwork designed to remind the viewer of their mortality and of the shortness and fragility of human life.

"Plagues only seem interminable. Life remains short."

Not to wax too finely over the obvious, but The Damned Pandemic strikes me as an enormous Memento Mori. It hovers as an annoyingly continuous reminder of the proximity of morbidity, mortality, and tragedy. Threat hovering over an Eat, Drink, and Be Merry Culture so recently dedicated to ignoring these inescapable elements of existence. Excuse us, please, if we all of a sudden seem unusually pissy. I've noticed myself complaining more but curiously enjoying it much less. I never became an actual habitual complainer, thinking the practice generally unseemly, but I readily admit to finding some welcome solace in the practice, if only occasionally. My complaints seem to work like a capacitor, slowly building a charge before releasing it in a quick discharge, seemingly coming from absolutely nowhere. I'm a smoldering, slow-burn sort of guy, rarely belying my steady countenance until already over some edge. Curiously, I usually feel much better after an outburst, as if most of the cure for my complaint came from simply airing it. An ounce of finding somebody to whine to might be worth a pound of any other cure.

Now, we only have each other to whine to and we each suffer from precisely the same complaint.

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'Stitions

Stitions
Théophile Steinlen's 1896 poster advertising a tour to other cities ("coming soon") of Le Chat Noir's troupe of cabaret entertainers
"Evil might even appreciate my diligence whenever I remember to keep it at bay."

I consider myself minor-stitious rather than superstitious. This designation means that I maintain more awareness than belief. I certainly do notice when a black cat crosses my path, remain scrupulous about not walking beneath open ladders, and appreciate parking karma when it visits me, but I do not go into hiding at the drop of a black cat, open ladder, or when forced to park a quarter mile away from my destination. I believe it healthy for a modern such as myself to retain a taste for lore from the past, not to the point of foraging for newt eyes or keeping a caldron simmering, but to show respect for my ancient elders. I feel confident believing that a few of my direct ancestors believed in witches, for they were Puritans, and Puritans believed such things. I feel confident that a few of my more firmly held beliefs will have been shown up as mere superstitions four hundred years hence, for that's just something futures seem destined to do to our practices, particularly the more sacred ones. I acknowledge my primitive sides, even though they might presently mostly hide from my sight.

Many of my 'stitions stem from my relationship with synchronicity, that sometimes sense that destiny's discovered me by means of the apparently happy accident.

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Slipstems

Slipstems
Picture by Drawing Machine 1, c. 1960
"I type with one hesitant finger regardless of the keypad."

We now possess what we firmly believe to be a well-developed understanding of systems. It's systems this and systems that, everything spoken of in systemic terms. I, myself, sometimes seem little more than a minor node within some vast collection of interrelated nodes, probably contributing some essential element to achieving some unknowable. We have ample systems where the leg bone's quite obviously connected to the hip bone, and innumerable essentially unconceivable systems where mysterious viruses invade in mysterious ways. We do not seem to have a well-developed theory of unconceivable systems, though, other than to complain about so-and-so seeming to not be much of a systems thinker, and I think we suffer under this absence. I refer to these mysterious systems as Slipstems, for their subtleties seem to slip right by us. We perceive them as materially different from what they might actually be, and behave accordingly, coping poorly with the resulting feedback.

I think of systems as unforgiving monsters tamed only by understanding.

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Feckonomics

Feconomics
Richard Anuszkiewicz, Knowledge and Disappearance, 1961
"Human agency becomes evidence of absent fealty and simple want, a grave moral shortcoming."

Economics seems the most feckless profession, one largely populated with avowed blind men endlessly arguing over the nature of an imaginary elephant before them. Each wears the spectacles acquired through their religious conversion into one school or another, the sorts of schools more focused upon indoctrination than studied observation. One might claim to be of the Austrian School, an aristocratic pedigree, indeed. Another might have sworn fealty to Keynes, a mighty systems thinker who never actually settled into any particular insistence. The Behaviorists have become increasingly popular, though they fancy themselves as insurgents not aspiring to prominence within the profession. Supply-siders, rarer than exotic hen's teeth following their 2008 financial system debacle, executed a come back on the backs of whacky, self-espousing conservative Christian law breakers, only to systematically organize another feckless pilfering of the public purse for parochial allocation. It seems that only the depth and color of conviction separates these schools, each in turn becoming the favored idiot step-child of some ignorant administration.

However wise and well-informed any individual economist might have proven him/herself to be, their philosophy only ever finds utility when associated with some administration's policies, and those policies are largely framed by folks with much less understanding and perhaps even greater religious conviction than any individual practitioner.

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Bitchuals

Bitchual
Priests of Anubis, perform the opening of the mouth ritual; illustration from the Book of the Dead of Hunefer
"I have no idea who I'd be without them hectoring me."

I tell myself that I maintain my many rituals to retain my sanity, but truth told, they occasionally drive me crazy. I maintain many rituals, for I seem to be one of those beings more attuned to rhythms than melodies or rhymes. I hold an extreme sensitivity to timing, and sense in what sequences I should engage. I meditate before breakfast, never after, and insist upon fasting until after I've finished my morning writing. My doctor prescribed a pill I'm supposed to swallow a half-hour before breakfast, which disrupts my usual sequence of rituals, delaying breakfast until seemingly much later, so I can throw in my morning shaving and showering ritual before I eat. I fairly religiously maintain these little engagements, inevitably in precisely the same sequence, until long after I hear myself starting to complain about them. They sometimes seem more habitual than actual ritual, only occasionally inducing any increased mindfulness. I confess to complaining about them to myself, as if I'd been cursed with them rather than them having once been freely chosen. I might best explain them as Bitchuals now, rituals where the underlying incantation has become subvocalized complaint. I bitch to myself about 'having' to perform them.

I wouldn't trade my Bitchuals for the world and most of its charms, for it seems I'll come to harm should I disrupt my sacredly profane routine.

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Behinder

Behinder
Hare, Fruit and Parrot, Jan Fyt (Fijt), Flanders, 1647


"The hurrier I go, the behinder I get." -Lewis Carroll


Our society behaves like a still life painting aspiring to become a Walt Disney movie. Directed to stand down, we commence to running around as if simply sitting still might kill us. We had formerly proven ourselves to be an impatient lot with hungry eyes, sprinting into our future, prone to act first and think later, if ever, so I should not feel in the least bit surprised at our latest antics. Certainly some seem fully capable of simply sitting with themselves, alone with their existence, but generations cultured as Mall Rats seem more than hesitant to abandon their once reliable ship. Days off were often seen as excuses to get out and do something, and any urge to stay at home, evidence of some underlying social malady. We became public beings without apparent private life, sharing what would have once been seen as personal secrets with loosely organized audiences composed of more or less equally imperfect strangers, bound by our compulsions.

How, the pundits wonder, did the You Ess of A become the centerpiece in this latest piece of performance art?

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TheSphericalCow

cascading
"The scientist trains to understand how to propose and then let go of naive initial assumptions."

Theoretical Physicists seem to forever resort to a mythical Spherical Cow when attempting to analyze some natural phenomenon. Let's say, for instance, that said physicist wanted to consider the aerodynamics of a cow. (This sort of problem rarely comes up for consideration in the careers of chartered accountants. This might be the best reason to avoid a career in chartered accountancy.) Rather than first include all the variations a cow's body shape might add to the initial calculation, the canny physicists will employ a bit of fiction and first assume a Perfectly Spherical Cow, an utter absurdity. Given this regular shape, general principles might be easily identified to produce a rough first draft of a solution. Later, our physicist can add complications like legs, horns, hooves, and head, to iteratively produce more real world assessments. First pass assessments frequently rely upon a mythical Spherical Cow.

Much science advances in a similar fashion, building upon some deliberate fiction when first attempting to understand some phenomena.

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HeatWave

HeatWave
Die Kornernte (The Harvesters), Pieter Bruegel der Ältere (Peter Bruegel The Elder), 1565
"I cannot capture these dehydrated days for reconstitution later this year."

The petunias have finally come into their own, thirsty every other day. Those plants not yet convinced that it's actually summer probably won't amount to much this year. The deck fountain loses an inch to evaporation overnight and will need refilling by tomorrow. The yard crunches underfoot, though the grass still looks green. Everything dries from the bottom up, the soil losing moisture faster than does the foliage. I'm on watch, wary of another huge water bill, I become stingy and careful. The air feels so dry that I wake up unable to swallow, my throat desiccated overnight to the texture of dry rubber. The air feels lighter than air. A cloud tries to drop rain, but its moisture can't quite make it to the ground and leaves nothing but a smear along the far horizon. Deer graze through the neighbor's garden, pruning plants they usually avoid. I prefer a shady spot these mornings while the world awakens to face a HeatWave.

By what magic has that winter become summer? I missed the transition.

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ParodyProductions

ParodyProduction
Book illustration of Pulcinella in 1700 (1860) by Maurice Sand
" … we're each seemingly blessed with this bottomless ability …"

My first enlightenment came with a frightening realization. I really felt as though I had been successfully passing for what I deeply felt I simply had to be. I caught myself behaving as the self I'd convinced myself I simply had to be, and I, in that moment, saw right through my flimsy facade. I felt in that humbling moment, deeply ashamed at how I'd managed to game myself into that condition. I felt deep contrition, but had yet to understand who else I might pass myself off as being. I had known almost forever that nobody would ever accept the me I once knew to be most representative of myself, that I could publicly be anyone else, but never myself, one Hell of a deeply false premise. And so had begun my first and probably greatest ParodyProduction of my life. I've been living down that performance ever since.

A parody begins with a slightly twisted premise and over time tends to turn into a really bad episode of The I Love Lucy Show.

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SelfDeflection

Self-Deflection
"Maybe we can't afford to know any different …"

In this neighborhood, almost everyone comes and goes through their garage door. As a car approaches home, the door opens via remote control, the car enters, and the inhabitant exits their car inside as the garage door slides back closed. This pattern limits opportunities for interacting with neighbors. Indeed, it limits one's ability to ever even meet a neighbor. We live adjacent but largely anonymously. I see the joggers and dog walkers without usually knowing which garage door they live behind. Once buttoned up at home, most people live looking out the back of their houses, where the hillsides provides views. The front yards, dominated by the driveway, might receive little but modest attention and even less traffic. Further, covenants limit the range of potential individuation allowed by each homeowner. Colors must conform to a narrow palate and even plantings, to consistent guidelines. I just this week, while out looking at the twilit sky, met a neighbor who lives just five doors up the street. She'd been living there since long before The Muse and I moved in five years ago. We'd never seen or met each other before.

This lifestyle seems like a form of SelfDeflection to me.

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InterdependenceDay

InterdependenceDay
William Henry Fox Talbot, The Open Door, before May 1844
"Living free means living interdependently …"

Our kittens Max and Molly behave as if they'd rather I maintained an open door policy, for they feign fierce independence. They're apt to slip by me when I'm carting supper out onto the deck, though I'm more likely to accidently-on-purpose let them slip by me. They gleefully head for the stairway down to the backyard, where they munch long grass fronds —to later barf back up with their supper, which I will dutifully clean up without complaint—, cultivate garden beds, and roll around in the dirt before stealthily stalking birds they could not possibly catch. An hour or less later, and their independent spirit lags. Molly lies near the top of the stairs staring off into the distance while Max maintains his resistance, perhaps by climbing a tree. A shake of the kitty treats package brings them both fleeing back into accustomed dependency, though they shortly start sniffing and mewling around the door again, hoping to regain their independence.

Sometimes, Molly will escape and stay away for a day or longer, but eventually she'll return, contrite, looking as if she might appreciate a square meal.

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SelfReferencer

SelfReferencer
Pablo Picasso, Self-portrait with Palette, 1906


"I admit that I can usually see little further than my own nose …"


All literature seems inescapably self-referential, each work essentially self portraiture. That seems the sort of opening sentence certain to ward off all but the very most dedicated and/or delusional readers, for few want to experience another snake eating his own tail. Us readers want stories, and we're much less picky than we probably should be about where those stories come from or really what they're about. Stories can sooth readers into a supreme sense of self-control, elevating each into the role of almost omniscient observer and judge. After all, we're privy to what the protagonist thinks, his internal monologues, in ways we might not ever personally experience when observing ourselves. My internal dialogues only occasionally and perhaps accidentally distill into anything definite, and, as my dedicated Repeat Offender readers can attest, they often never reach any definitive conclusion. I roll around in my world like a wet dog on a recently clean carpet.

I have been over the past couple of weeks, working with my Genius Nephew to attempt to distill what I'm doing with my writing.

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HardWork

HardWork
Harry Brodsky, Tomato Pickers, 1938
"It's always a fundamentally unfair fight …"

All insistences that we're a HardWorking people aside, I'd rather not have to work that hard. I'd feel a member of a minority if I didn't look around me. As my brother used to ask, "You working hard or hardly working?" My honest response would be that I was hardly working. I feel fortunate to have found so-called work that seems more calling than indenture, so even engaging long hours in it hardly feels much like working. I believe that even clever Yankees found ways to leave their Pilgrim forebears' HardWork behind, creating passive income streams to replace brow sweat and aching backs. Few seem to aspire to careers solely consisting of HardWork, but most might consent to a period of it in the firm belief that they'll eventually graduate to become one of those shiny-seated suits hardly working in the front office.

Still, some HardWork remains.

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Educations

Educations
The Thinker (Le Penseur) by Auguste Rodin, model 1880, cast 1901
"It's pass/fail."

I learned more on my before and after school jobs than I ever learned in any classroom. I began as an intimidated student. Who wouldn't be, with the institution surrounding me? I later learned to become more enthusiastic, but I watched that enthusiasm leach out of me as I learned how the game was played. Even the well-meaning teachers expected me to memorize and test well, to diligently study (without once demonstrating what that entailed in a home with endless distractions), and to learn. I seemed more dedicated to preserving what I understood, defending that against threatening onslaughts ranging from math to science to foreign languages. I had no clear image of who I might become should I successfully assimilate all that orthogonal information, so I chose to hold onto what I had rather than abandon myself in favor of learning how to become anybody else. At work, I pretty quickly learned what I needed to do to thrive. School mostly taught me how to hide out until the serial assaults on my identity ceased.

The process of education deeply offended me.

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TheGoldenBlurb

TheGoldenBlurb
Narcissus by Caravaggio, 1597–1599
"Eviscerate freely, dear readers …"

My maternal grandfather seemed taciturn. He'd speak hesitantly except to poke fun, which usually seemed more mean than humorous. I knew that he'd seen a lot in his time, but he rarely mentioned his experiences beyond a few hunting stories, which I found generally uninteresting. I wondered after his manner of living, for his whole lifestyle seemed cloaked and therefore mysterious. I wonder now how he introduced himself to strangers and I realize that he never properly introduced himself to me. I remember him but admit that I did not now him well. He seemed of a different age. I'd seen the photograph of him as a barefoot school kid, with his Huck Finn-looking compatriots, back when he attended a one room school, where he'd stayed only long enough to graduate third grade. His census record lists him as a laborer, though he owned his own home on a small plot of land featuring a barn where he bedded enough livestock to service the household, chickens, a cow, and a lamb or two.

I began writing in earnest once I realized that I seemed destined for a similar fate, bequeathing little of my manner of living to my grandchildren, for I was certain the generational mystery would very likely ultimately nullify me.

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MendingNets

DeadStill
Winslow Homer, Mending the Nets, 1882
"When becalmed, mend nets."

I woke to the sound of my neighbor running a generator beneath his fifth wheel, a whale of a vehicle he surrounds with an annoying puce LED string when he parks on the street overnight. It provides just enough light to prevent anyone from plowing into it and just a tad to much for us up on the hill above to enjoy total darkness. Morning brings his predictable puttering, for he looks as though he and the missus will go camping this week, taking their whale up to some sprawling campground to, as they say, get away from it all. This morning brought a strange stillness, for the usual dawn winds failed to show up for work today. They usually get the conifer tops to tipping and whip around the aspen and cottonwoods, preventing any watering without wasting at least half of the precious water. This morning's dead calm, though, and it seems as though I'm missing a dimension. My usually animated world turned into a line drawing.

When becalmed, the fishing fleet would mend nets, for to idle away any day seemed tantamount to sin.

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TheGooseberryMeditation

gooseberry

" … transcendent scratch scars which will hopefully never heal."

Gooseberries might be fairly characterized as a bear or a bitch of a berry, depending upon one's vocabulary. I consider them near the top of my long list of culinary delights, for I find them evocative beyond their own spare attributes. A hard, tart, unpromising fruit, they grow on thorny bushes which make them a bear or a you-know-what to pick, and once picked, they demand much from any devotee. Each tiny sphere comes with a stem and a blossom end, both of which must be trimmed to do anything at all with them. My mom used her fingernails, much as The Muse does to accomplish this end. I, possessing blunt fingers, employ kitchen shears to snip off each offending appendage. This effort makes painstaking seem downright cavalier, as each quart seems to take a year or longer to properly barber.

Convenience foods offer both much more and much less than simple convenience.

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Shivility

Shivility
Philip Guston, City Limits, 1969
" … the one damned thing our Constitutional liberties do not provide."

Our melting pot seems to have become a caldron of complaints, our more perfect union defined more by its imperfections than by its inspiring aspirations, with innumerable factions, each presuming to speak for The People. Anything seems capable of sparking a fresh confrontation between passionate partisans and those they firmly believe represent some retrograde Dark Lord. Masks, strongly recommended by decent people dedicated to protecting public health, have somehow become tangled in notions of Constitutional liberty, as if protecting each other amounts to an unforgivable affront. The fabled Bill of Rights now seems the premise of an endless Bill of Wrongs enumerating endless infringements rather than encouraging civil consensus. Social Justice seems the new tyranny, as those harboring long-nurtured grudges forcefully demand a long-elusive equality, each advancement experienced as somebody's else's setback, producing a long, slow descent. Consent of the governed first requires some consent to govern by those to be governed, and no consensus seems likely to emerge. We've become an unruly herd, each seemingly dedicated to separate and inherently unequal interpretations of our common creed.

Civility cannot be insisted upon.

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Accschleptance

Accschleptance
The Third of May by Francisco Goya, 1814
"the first great picture which can be called revolutionary in every sense of the word, in style, in subject, and in intention". Kenneth Clark


"The world changed. I haven't completely kept up."

Acceptance of the NowHere seems a first step, not a final one, for any fresh acceptance will likely appear clumsy, more of an Accschleptance than a flawless integration. This seems a cruel joke, for once surviving the denial, anger, and bargaining before achieving a point where acceptance might prove possible, the cycle seems to simply start all over again with acceptance. An exhausted acquiescence might best characterize the first taste of this sort of success, more surrender than embrace. However such changes occur, they're unlikely to show anyone performing at their best. You'll be several songs into the new set before the sound check's really completed, and until then, any early audience should properly feel initially disappointed. Later some mastery might emerge. Maybe.

This first week of Summer included the tail end of Spring, a transition for both seasons and my blogging themes.

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EasingInto

Predawn1


"I dream of my own dominion while denying myself, as well."


I start my summer days slowly, waking early to waste the first few hours in a dark house gazing out into darkness. I wear a jacket, not wanting to waste an ounce of furnace fuel warming up space I'll later be desperate to cool. I step out onto the driveway to spy whatever satellite might be passing by and quietly curse the neighbor's paranoid night lights. They fear prowlers though their neighbors would just as soon somebody hauled their immobile vehicles somewhere far away where we wouldn't have to watch them rust all day and night. I suppose that I'm an annoyance to my neighbors, too, for I semi-scrupulously maintain my yard, which I do not consider to be hard work, just necessary, but in mountain communities, yards tend toward the natural, left as is, weedy and imprecise. We each display our vices, often proud of our attributes and unaware of the quiet rebukes our presence provokes. The Predawn slips like velvet across my face.

I feel master of this place in the wee, small hours.

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Gruel

Gruel
The disreputable cook from Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Ellesmere manuscripts, c. 1410.

" … fills me up without much fuss."

My earliest culinary successes came long before any literary success arrived, indeed, back when I was still essentially pre-literate. I'd read very few books by then and found reading tedious. I relied more upon my instincts then, rarely referring to any authority before undertaking a new activity. Cooking had long interested me, but my mother was no chef. My early influences included the Cub Scout Handbook, which illustrated how to boil water over a campfire. Once out on my own and poor, I learned through sad repetition how to make supper. A friend had gifted us with an enormous cylinder of a spongy protein powder athletes use when training, and I took to incorporating that stuff into darned near everything. Most of my meals amounted to naive inventions, eatable after a fashion, but rarely choice. The mysterious powder became the primary ingredient in what I called Giant Cookie Muffins, which resembled neither cookies nor muffins, but which carried more protein on board than the typical cattle boat. They were chewy to the point of spongy, and very, very curiously textured. You've probably never eaten anything even remotely like them. I also baked bread in empty coffee cans, having no proper bread pans, and I can confidently report that it always smelled like freshly baked bread, if not always tasting precisely like it.

I made many crude casseroles in those days, dishes which could serve as breakfast, lunch, or dinner, and often did.

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Procrastidestination

procrastidestination
Scene In Club Lounge by Thomas Rowlandson, 1798

"A time will come, or not, …"

It seems to me that some days were not created to be seized. Procrastination has its rewards, not necessarily as a chronic form of engagement, but as an especially savory sort. I find wearying our long collective obsession with efficiency, for it seems to me that not every frog demands to be eaten at the beginning of every day. Some seem to beg for some contemplation, or even some strategic distraction, perhaps a clever tactical delay. Those observing might well diagnose procrastination as if that were a serious disease, and prescribe decisive action for relief, but I often find great relief in delaying an engagement, improving ultimate satisfaction that way. I seem to need to cogitate my way into some actions, for I sometimes waste my effort by simply jumping in before, for instance, determining the depth of a pond. Furthermore, few satisfactions seem to rise to the level I experience upon completion of a task I've long, or even overly-long, shirked. Plus, in those situations, I feel as though I've achieved on my terms, not the damned clock's.

Some of my forebears were strict Predestinationists.

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Irrevocableution

Irrevocableution
Instruments Of Power by Thomas Hart Benton, 1930-31, from his America Today Murals

" … while this fresh-faced image in this brand new mirror wonderingly gazed back at me."

Some say that biological evolution works only over large scales of time, but I do not believe this assertion, for my own biome seems to have been in continual transition since the day I was born. I might have been evolving daily, scaling this or that feature, never once static. I look for my reflection in my morning shaving mirror and often stare startled into that image peering back, for I cannot remember before seeing anyone precisely like that imposter staring back at me. The hair's at a different angle. The eyes slightly sunken. The nose somehow wrong. Sure, I always find at least a passing resemblance, but I'm increasingly moved to wonder why I even try to find myself there, or more precisely, why I try to find any self I might immediately recognize. I might better serve my self-esteem should I inquire rather than peer into mirrors, trying to see who I might be NowHere, rather than attempting to catch glimpses of whom I should already understand was already a past self. No man shaves the same face twice.

My old reliables either betrayed my faith in them or were never all that reliable in the first place.

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NowHere

NowHere
Changing West, one of ten America Today murals by Thomas Hart Benton, 1930-31
"Even if this Damned Pandemic never recedes …"

I went to bed last night in the there and then. Pandemics have a way of simultaneously propelling one both backward and forward. Backward into longing for how it once was and forward into hopefully pining after how it might become. Meanwhile, one remains steadfastly in the NowHere, a most curious terrain where, depending upon capitalization, it might seem indistinguishable from nowhere or a stunningly present NowHere. The longing and pining too easily become heart-bruising pushes and shoves since both objectives remain steadfastly out of reach regardless of effort expended. For short periods, longing and pining might produce some reassuring respite from any sudden, shocking trauma, but neither serves well as a lifestyle, and both in concert seem certain to result in a sort of skitzy-paranoia serving nobody well, a form of self-destructive denial. However far anyone might long or pine, they remain precisely NowHere.

When will this pandemic end? Likely not in our lifetimes.

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RaggedEndings

RaggedEnding
Achelous and Hercules, Thomas Hart Benton, 1947


"Resolution was never anything but a dream."


We all learn early how stories are supposed to end, with loose ends all tied up, signaling resolution. The novel, once unknown and new, becomes experienced and thereby old. A few, we'll refer back to again and again, not to rediscover any ending already known, but perhaps to re-experience the style and craft of the storytelling, the satisfying phrasing and deft plotting. These stories might never properly resolve, for though we do learn that the butler did, in fact, do it, that knowledge quenches nothing, but sometimes encourages a longer, perhaps life-long engagement with this author and his prose. But that describes the book world. Out here in what passes for the real world, RaggedEndings tend to be by far the most common form of resolution, where though not completely done, one must eventually simply move on. Time and tide and all that.

The last day of Spring, just over a half of a day this year, finds me surrounded by unresolved WhatNow? Stories.

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Commtroversy

Commection


"I came from The Never Can Say Goodbye Family …"


When my ninth great grandparents left England in 1637 for what would one day be called Connecticut, they broke communication with everyone not traveling with them. They spent weeks in total isolation from even land, then years before receiving any word from anyone they knew in their former home country, and then, that communication relied upon writing and paper or long-delayed word-of-mouth. Direct connection with home folks became indirect Commection, and would remain so for the rest of their long lives. No letters survive, and, indeed, letters might have never been sent, for no reliable postal service would emerge for more than a century. Messages might take months to move between what would eventually become colonies and their former home country, and not all ships safely made the crossing. Some messages were doubtlessly lost in transmission. Aside from their charter governing the terms of their obligations to their backers—for they were perhaps more capitalists than Pilgrims—they were truly on their own.

In those times, face-to-face communication fueled the vast proportion of human connections. They talked.

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NDA

NDA
A votive plaque known as the Ninnion Tablet depicting elements of the Eleusinian Mysteries,
discovered in the sanctuary at Eleusis (mid-4th century BC)


"I pray that ours won't hang around for anything like a hundredth as long."


The modern organization is fundamentally indistinguishable from a cult. It perceives its secrets as its primacy, and self-importantly considers everything it does a proprietary secret. It expects employees as well as visitors to sign the cheesiest of legal documents, the holy NDA [Non Disclosure Agreement], a contract of truly questionable authority threatening severe penalties should the signer even inadvertently spill any beans. Some of these 'agreements' also insist that anything an employee or visitor utters inside automatically becomes the sole property of the proprietor without even a distant mention of compensation for that creation. These are privileged reprobates concerned first with dominion. These questionable contracts are agreements in name only, standing more accurately as coercements, my-way-or-the-highway insistences rarely open for negotiation. If a vendor, contractor, or employee doesn't like the terms, they're perfectly free to lump it. Period.

Later, when asked a straightforward question, a disgruntled ex might legally refuse to answer by claiming their speech stifled by a prior agreement.

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Fatigue

Fatigue
Hercules Fighting Death to Save Alcestis by Frederic Lord Leighton (1869-71)


" … when Fatigue wins, everyone loses."


The front line personnel complain of Fatigue, the constant mind-numbing companion of prolonged engagement. The Fatigue enters unnoticed, while the host focuses upon tasks at hand. Standing back, though, a wave of exhaustion washes over, astounding. How could I not have noticed? Fatigue brings no excuses, though, for even more of the same awaits and relievers seem just as scarce as does time. Diving back into the fray, distinctions like night and day lose meaning. Like an engine, one seems to run much longer on empty than when nearer full. A definite pull discourages disengagement. Beyond tired, fresh space appears where energy and fear forfeit their former influence. One becomes a machine repeating practiced motion and preconscious skill. Someone's likely to have to pull you off your work. Only then might real weariness settle in.

Doctors, nurses, and EMTs know Fatigue better than do you and I.

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FourHoles

FourHoles
Earth, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, possibly 1566


"It might not say anything about me or my overblown prowess …"


The oldest political advice counsels that if your opponent's busy digging a hole, stand aside, but what to do when you catch yourself digging one, or, as in my case, find myself engaged in digging four holes? I imagined each a modest effort, though I knew the substrate beneath that flowerbed. I was building a defense against the bastard deer, who, around here, put self-respecting omnivores to certain shame, for they eat anything, everything, even prickly gooseberry shrubs and rhubarb leaves, which by international decree have been recognized as deadly poisonous to all species since at least the early Middle Ages. I'd moved my circular wire fence from my rhubarb bed to enclose the gooseberry garden after The Muse had spotted the expletive deer gnawing my beleaguered bushes, thinking that now that the rhubarb's well established and lush, the deer wouldn't be in any rush to assault it this year. Once I'd moved the barrier fence, the deer mounted armed assaults against the rhubarb, stripping every leaf from every stalk, gratefully avoiding the edible stalks, which The Muse made into a custard pie, but the damage was done. I'd need a better barrier for the gooseberries once I moved the rhubarb's original protective fence back where it apparently belongs.

Hence, the holes.

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ShelfControl

ShelfControl
Still life on a 2nd-century mosaic, with fish, poultry, dates and vegetables from the Vatican museum


"A decent pot of beans will last through a week of breakfasts and lunches if you're not too picky."


Three months ago, when the stay-at-home directives hit, you could be excused if you thought that few people had ever put much thought into the idea of maintaining a pantry. City dwellers have always struggled with shortages of shelf space counterbalanced with a choice of corner bodegas and convenient restaurants. Country dwellers have always maintained some cellar space for what they euphemistically referred to as canned goods, and many maintained more than one refrigerator and even a supplemental freezer or two or three to sustain a sense of self-sufficiency. When it's ten or more miles to the nearest store, an inconvenience market primarily selling gasoline, one quite naturally stockpiles and makes do. The professional class tended to eat out more frequently, daily lunches and a couple of suppers out each week, while the working class might have more frequently brought their own bag lunch and made their own suppers at home, often after a quick stop for that evening's ingredients on the way back.

But the stay-at-home directives disrupted these rhythms, forcing folks to suddenly attend to more than than just the meal before them.

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Ministration

Ministration

Philosophia et septem artes liberales, the seven liberal arts.
From the Hortus deliciarum of Herrad of Landsberg (12th century)


"When a leader pisses off their bureaucracy's Old Marys, they're posing for their own statuary; they're finished."


History seems inscribed with leaders' footprints, it's all Napoleon this and Hannibal that without properly acknowledging those who greased the gears of great revolution and, more significantly, the Pax Romanas separating upheavals. Those gear greasers came from the ranks of competent ministers, folks well out of history's limelight who designed, constructed, and maintained the vast bureaucracies which competently administered societies. We find no statuary commemorating the savvy minister, no steeples erected in fond memory of the geeks who broke only paper trails, no continents named after the genius who invented double-entry bookkeeping, but without them the touted leaders could not possibly have succeeded at anything. In our present time, with pandemic sweeping the globe, the scrupulous statisticians and hospital administrators have contributed more to containing the contagion than all the leaders proclaiming impotent dominion over it. Send me one Old Mary and I'll comfortably replace a Pentagon filled with Five Stars and a carrier fleet of sailors.

Back when The Muse worked in the property/casualty insurance industry, she interacted with many brokers and home office executives, but largely via their support staff, who typically reported to a matronly secretary who actually ran the operation, a role one broker referred to as "his Old Mary."

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InappropriateMetaphor

InappropriateMetaphor
The Solidity of the Road to Metaphor and Memory, Misha Reznikoff, 1934

"Suffering might always be the lingering effect of innocently ineffective metaphoring."

InappropriateMetaphor is the root of all evil. It enables us to perceive difference where no meaningful difference exists. It ties us to self-destructive habits, encourages international conflicts, and might convince someone to build ineffective border walls. It fuels global warming, redlining, and urban blight. It encourages disposables which last for centuries. It fuels fear and institutionalizes ignorance. It justifies dominance when cooperation would better serve. It promotes tenacious inequality and bigotry, poverty and great wealth, debilitating sickness and declining health. It makes us crazy while passing for perfectly sane. It represents manners of living as if they were necessary imperatives. It poorly informs us.

Shifting metaphors might mend anything.

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AsymptomaticSuperspreader

Asymptomatic


"Our walking shoes might finally be ready next Tuesday …"


I have come to presume that all people not wearing a mask in public are undiagnosed AsymptomaticSuperspreaders. I wear my mask to encumber my natural tendency toward AsymptomaticSuperspreading. Since I cannot definitively determine whether I'm carrying, I figure that we're all safer if I presume myself to be a dangerous presence. I know that I feel a whole lot safer when others presume the same about themselves. Sure, there's a chance that I won't immediately infect you if I don't wear my mask, but there's essentially zero chance if I do, so I take it upon myself to protect you. You're welcome. I do wonder why you don't feel compelled to protect me in return. Maybe you believe yourself not to be an AsymptomaticSuperspreader. This belief best preserves your innate ability to become one. Congratulations!

The Muse ordered the breakfast burritos the night before for pick-up at nine the following morning.

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Breakout

Breakout
Film still of James O'Neill as Edmond Dantès in The Count of Monte Cristo, a 1913 film.


"I've decided to escape."


I've managed to master about ten percent of a writer's craft in that I seem to be able to write. Raw writing, though, might amount to no more than ten percent of the craft, the other ninety percent being related to all that happens after the writing's done. Editing's in that ninety percent, but so are all the activities related to distribution: promotion, publication, and, I suppose, personality, wherein the writer projects a more pubic persona. Simply writing's a fine occupation, though it pays no bills and without some broader distribution, realizes little reach and influences few; not that writing's only justified if it influences, for it's possible to restrict a writer's work to only influence the writer or just a few close acquaintances, but a broader presence seems essential to fulfilling a writer's potential. Writing's a share the wealth sort of enterprise.

Approaching, let alone mastering writing's tail end ninety percent has always been my dread, one of those activities I wouldn't mind having done, but seem to have no passion for actually doing.

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Timemorelessness

Timemorelessness
Joachim Patinir: Landscape with Charon Crossing the Styx, 1515-1524


" … we'll claim to have been there then without actually having understood anything."


We usually define time as finite, a steadily regulating entity, drawing the baseline cadence of our lives, at least in ordinary times. But we live in extraordinary times, beneficiaries of that ancient Chinese curse, so our time proceeds much more erratically. Some days constrain every effort while others seem to expand before us like a vast ocean stretching far beyond the visible or even any imaginable horizon, essentially black holes absorbing every expectation. I cannot fill these immense days, which expand time into unexpendable excess to produce the opposite of feelings of being pressed for time. Time moves languidly then, without harassing drop dead deadlines, hardly seeming like time at all. A Timemorelessness settles in, not needing management or optimization, for it seems an infinite good aching to be what more constraining times might insist upon labeling wasted, but one cannot waste Timemorelessness, like one cannot ever squander any infinite, for expending any portion of it seems to reduce the remaining only insignificantly.

I become a time Midas those days, where everything I touch turns into even more potential, rendering closure meaningless.

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Esteem-ating

Esteem-ating
Study for Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus, John William Waterhouse, 1900


" … and not peer darkly into any glass."


We tend to peer into the glass brightly, always perceiving better ahead. Our self-esteem seems to rely upon this curious facility, as if darker visions might utterly destroy us. Those who project more pessimistically attract few followers, for they seem simply grumbly, suffering from some form of depressive disorder. Speaking truth to power first requires speaking truth to one's self, and few selves seem very interested in anything like the truth. We want the princess to marry the prince, which recently transformed from a toad, and live happily ever after because we'd prefer to live happily ever after, too. We first seek reassurance. The depths of deflecting denial seem just as infinite as the heights of our hopefulness. A No-Man's Land stands between these defensive barricades.

In mid-April, the US suffered the equivalent of a D-Day invasion's number of dead every two days, an unimaginable volume, even in retrospect.

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Poelease

Poelease
Basquiat being “stopped-and-frisked” outside the Barbican Centre, Banksy, 2017


"I still fully expect to be harassed if not arrested with every encounter …"


Every child of the sixties learned to distrust the cops. We were at constant risk of arrest, whether from simple possession or even simpler teenage passion, the cops seen as at best spoil sports and at worst voyeurs and vindictives. We maintained vigilance, a practice which left some life-long paranoids. We'd each seen plenty of swaggering cops playing the tough guy but only very rarely encountered a compassionate one. We each expected to be run in for some inadvertent infraction before we'd graduated high school, as we practiced a clandestine, fatalistic form of civil disobedience as a simple matter of existence. We weren't bad kids, but we were at continual risk of arrest, prosecution, and incarceration. These experiences formed a conviction that the Poelease were not, as Jack Web's Dragnet insisted, present "to protect and serve," but to harass and punish, an occupying force representing the forces of hypocritical Republicans. It mattered who you knew.

A friend and I were once arrested for the presumed crime of wading in a park fountain we'd both been wading in since we were small children, the arresting officer impatiently explaining that only little kids were supposed to wade in it.

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Longhair

longhair
Samson and Delilah, by Gustave Doré, c. 1860


"I'll recognize ordinary time when I see it looking back at me from my mirror again."


Since the age of twenty-five, my head has served as my chronometer, its finest granularity being the month, roughly the distance between haircuts. My face accurately measures time in days. My mustache, in fortnights, the time between necessary trims. Before the shutdown, I remained groomed as regularly as any clock works. Since, even my shaving's slipped to every other morning, often every third or even a previously thinkable fourth. My hair's gone feral, over my ears and curling along the back. I feel on track to return to my early twenties' self, frizzy pony tail dangling halfway down my back, tied behind my head with a thin rawhide strap. I for years contended that I carried the Sampson gene. Any deceitful Deliah carrying scissors could thwart my power, such as it was. I long lusted after long hair and maintained it with a reverence exceeding religious conviction. I didn't just have long hair or wear my hair long, I WAS a longhair.

Being a longhair qualified as an identity then, a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval of a certified Age Of Aquarian within.

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RecoveringGuru

RecoveringGuru
Adi Shankara with Disciples, by Raja Ravi Varma (1904)


"I make my own noise without hoping to change anyone's world but mine."


Looking at me now, you might never imagine that I was once considered to be a guru of sorts, for I was a designated thought leader and workshop teacher, and the guru designation just seems to come with that territory. As a veteran of the sixties coffeehouse music culture, I was certainly no stranger to the stage. I would balance on the three-legged high stool on the platform overlooking the place and perform my latest song to the largely distracted assembly, hoping to catch an eye, praying to be recognized, just as has every other budding singer/songwriter in the history of the world so far. That stage was never subsequently swarmed by entranced females, but I'd usually gain a heart-felt appreciation or two. Once I started consulting and teaching for real, the relationships became increasingly curious. Because I had been present, holding forth, personal insights participants experienced might end up somehow attributed to me, as if I had induced them, and maybe I had. Heartfelt appreciations sometimes became indistinguishable from veiled seductions. I was largely unaware, though home life could get complicated by a curious voicemail left for me but picked up by my spouse. Then some explaining would commence.

The cult of celebrity, even of local notoriety, did not reassure me.

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ImaginaryEnemies

ImaginaryEnemies
Crítica, engraving by Julio Ruelas, ca. 1907


" … hope springs intermittently, never seamlessly or continuously."


As society seems to crumble, live on the six o'clock news, I feel mostly moved to tap the snooze alarm. The broadcasts seem to need to cast their full color video in shadowy blacks and whites, a palette hardly suitable for representing any underlying complexity. It seems to be us versus them again in never-ending conflict. The simplicity imbedded within the storyline unfamiliar to anyone experienced in any sort of real world relationship. These seem soap opera representations, where human relations distill down to the color of a character's hat and the soundtrack's sinister tone. We each maintain our caricature characterizations of those we imagine to be our mortal enemies, mostly without ever having had the pleasure of their physical company. We remain willfully ignorant of others' intentions, if only because our fictions might prove unbelievable should they stray too far into self-contradiction. We hate more easily than we love, often holding ourselves hostage awaiting another's extension of an appreciation we ourselves withhold. There might well be far fewer bad actors than really bad plays, lines proposed to maintain a seemingly necessary simplicity, lest we grow too confused.

I watched a poorly masked so-called protestor paint graffiti on an innocently by-standing tree in the park adjacent to the statehouse this week.

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Cascade

Cascade
Destruction of the Tower of Babel by Crispijn de Passe the Elder Netherlandish, 1612:
at right men and women flee from the burning tower, at left men and women raise their hands toward two flying angels,
from a series of engravings made for the first edition of the 'Liber Genesis'


"Once prosperous farmers, they moved into a crooked little house in town to live out their days after the Cascade."


The great Cascade has already started, though the full flood has yet to reach many. Starbucks has requested twelve months of rent 'consideration' after not paying rents for the prior two months. Nearly half of the commercial enterprises in this country missed rent payments in April and May, and we're still in very early stages of this particular pandemic. This sort of situation marks only the beginning of a cascade of shortfalls, where landlords, mortgage holders, and property managers start to lose their usual inflows of cash. Insurances and other services follow soon after, with nothing left to even pay the cleaning staff and the garbage men. A building can go derelict after a few remarkably short months. The blood extraction units take over half the turnip patches as the lawyers get involved.

Prosperity has yet to be shown to trickle down, but austerity certainly does, though its trickle easily becomes a Cascade. It also trickles up.

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Thinnest

Thinnest
"
The Veiled Virgin,” Giovanni Strazza, ca. 1850s

"We inhabit a poor country, one whitewashed over blistered base coat."


Read any history of These United States and you'll learn that we've never been quite as united as we publicly purported ourselves to be. We project our stories out onto a frequently disbelieving world, for the world often sees right through our veil to perceive the underlying dishonesty and naiveté. We believe, after a fashion, though that fashion seems the very Thinnest imaginable fabric. We've mostly preferred to look good over doing genuine good, with self-interest a frequent companion. The recovery from the 2008 market crash produced a predictably thin result, with the bulk of the recovery focused upon repairing the veil, producing another remarkably thin result; perhaps the Thinnest ever. Employment rose to record levels, but so did the number of absolute bullshit jobs and scutty gig work, usually without benefits, providing only a distant appearance of prosperity. A puff of adverse breeze quickly brought down to their knees those inhabiting that house of cards.

Our pandemic defenses, too, were cardboard constructions, long starved of resources in favor of flashier uses.

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ThePandemicParadox

PandemicParadox
Rage, Flower Thrower, by Banksy, painted on a wall of a gas station in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, Palestine


"Even the most powerful people on this planet cannot influence the velocity of fate."


This Pandemic seems to have promoted paradox into fresh prominence. Paradoxes shred conventional problem-solving by presenting conditions not immediately conducive to understanding or resolution. They remain mysterious and above all tricky. This one does not crisply respond to even the more well-intended interventions. Our scientists seem uncommonly wise for initially prescribing strategic retreat. Politicians predictably embraced full frontal assaults, if only to preserve the useful fiction that they were in charge, a strategy doomed to fail. The more powerful you pretend to be against a pandemic, the weaker you eventually seem. Scream all you want, offensive speech and derisive action will not succeed. Conquering paradoxes demands a certain subtlety.

Responding to any emergency with patient inquiry seems so counter-intuitive as to feel like most certainly the wrong approach.

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Bookish

Bookish
Gutenberg: Colored engraving created in about the 19th century. Artist unknown. Source: Bettman-Corbis reproductions

"I never feel wealthier than when I'm carrying a fresh pile of found books out the front portal of my local library."

I identify as Bookish in the same way that some identify as Jewish. This seems largely a genetic inheritance combined with a cultural tradition. Bookishness carries deep obligation along with certain evolving rituals, tradition compounded through diligent practice. My shelves overflow with treasured artifacts, reminders of theres and thens, wheres and whens from my past. My social and spiritual evolution seems catalogued in my library, each volume a memory of a specific place in time, most holding some residue of satisfaction or insight, though I retain a few there out of possible spite, for I have through books maintained an inner dialogue, a dialectic inquiry into the vast variety and novelty of this life, little of which I feel properly positioned to personally experience. I've despised some of this. My library and my much broader catalogue came to more than merely inform me, but to define who I've come to become. My education ongoing, settling little to nothing, yet the dialogue/monologue continues.

I read much more than I write, and might most properly identify myself more as a reader than as a writer, though few accept reader as an identity or a profession, for it pays nothing but dividends, no cash incomes.

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Relentless

Relentless
Hope by George Frederic Watts, 1886
This image shows a lone blindfolded female figure sitting on a globe, playing a lyre that has only a single string remaining.


"This relentless siphon started defying simple gravity long ago …"


My hop vine, grown seven feet in a few short weeks, sparked my insight. I've come to think of it as my Hope Vine. I'd been reveling in spring, the great respite from winter's ravages, and wondering what I was witnessing, for this fresh season's beneficence seemed … what? … oh yea, Relentless. There has been no stopping it. A crashing hail storm pock-marked a few of the more delicate leaves and blossoms, but the expansion continued in earnest the following morning. The seeds I sowed without really knowing what they might become quickly sprouted and not even the neighbor cat using their planter for his bathroom discouraged their attempted dominion. Even the chokecherry, blighted as it seems, threw out fresh branches and suckers. Not even the endless-seeming setbacks through winter seem like barriers now, for I know how their progression turned out, or at least how it's turned out so far. A clear expansion relentlessly continues, with seemingly ever greater passion, no obvious end in sight.

We inhabit a tenaciously positive feedback loop where nothing seems capable of slowing or turning forward momentum.

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Opacity

Opacity1
The Blue Kimono by Chase William Merritt, 1888

" … we must believe in something much more than nothing to amount to anything worth anything in this world."

Nobody usefully argues for full transparency because nobody really wants to see my kimono flapping open from neck to knee. A useful level of Opacity seems necessary to maintain civility, though nobody walks around wearing an impenetrable brick wall or black box. We quite properly keep our kimonos firmly belted to maintain a certain dignity, though we well understand that as a result not everything's on display. Fantasy fills in what fabric conceals, and those fantasies reveal perhaps more than any flapping open kimono ever could. Hopes and wishes, fears and dreads complete the presentation, imagination always insisting upon ever more disclosure. A delicate balance maintains decency between cleavage and knees, and not every observer seems all that pleased whatever that balance might reveal.

Any relationship predicated upon a presumption of full disclosure seems doomed from its start because only a part of anyone's impressions ever become fit for any other human's consumption

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Anticiplaytion

wildanticipation
The Sixteen Luohans by Shitao (Zhu Ruoji), 1667

" … a post-graduate course in more warmly anticipating …"

It seems as though my days used to follow a certain cadence, each inducing its own rhythm. Mondays, I'd tidy up the place. Alternate Tuesdays would find me sorting recyclables. Wednesdays, I'd stop by the library. Thursdays, I'd shop to avoid the Friday crush. Fridays, I'd poke around in the yard. Saturdays and Sundays would bring a Farmers' Market excursion or two, extreme larder-stocking, and unrushed suppers with hot jazz beating in the background. Then the radio station cancelled the hot jazz program in favor of talking heads. We filled in with RadioDeluxe, a fine production but clearly lacking in Bix Beiderbecke tracks. Winter intervened to leave us snowbound. We were gone for a couple of weeks, returning with spring to be sequestered in place, snowbound without snow, no place to go. The Farmers' Markets didn't open this spring. Alternate Tuesdays still find me sorting recyclables, but the rest of my anticipations have gone arrhythmic. I can't coherently anticipate right now.

I imagine this condition a real world test of a long-considered situation.

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Imprecision

Imprecision
Gerhard Richter: Frau Marlow, 1964

" … revealing perhaps more than any of us care to recognize about reality and truth."

Back before the pandemic, when I could sometimes go out for morning coffee, the waitperson would often respond to my order by saying, "Perfect," as if we'd managed to achieve perfection together. I'd order my usual large (not Grande, thank you, or Venti … we are not in Italy and even in Italy, I chronically forget the proper word) decaf in a china cup and receive a "Perfect" in return. I'd noticed that this response had become common, so I was never surprised or shocked, but I remained curious about how such precision had entered into the most common of all transactions. It was "Perfect" here, "Perfect" there, and "Prefect" pretty nearly everywhere, while in what passes for real life, in ordinary times, perfection remained as it always had, slightly rarer than hen's teeth.

I figured that we might have forgotten how rare perfection always was and continues to be, as production values have exponentially increased.

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I'mWithStoopid

Stoopid
"Keying Up" – The Court Jester by William Merritt Chase, 1875

"I might never know what to say to any unmasked anyone."

I asked The Muse what I might say to someone not wearing a mask in public. She responded by reporting that she'd been considering just carrying around a few of her homemades, so she could generously offer them one, on the presumption that they might not own one. I thought that a fine strategy, though I notice that she hasn't yet started offering anyone this sort of assistance. Judging from the apparent belligerence of those choosing not to wear masks, her offer seems unlikely to attract many takers, though just one might reform my pessimism. I failed to convince my grand niece that two hundred thousand empirical observations might reasonably suggest that a medication might not prevent or cure Covid-19, but she insisted that the findings might have influenced her had they come from double blind testing, the very sort impossible to perform during an actual pandemic. She was married to her perspective. The more I argued counter to her preconceptions, the stupider I seemed to become in her eyes. Stupid in anyone's eyes renders impossible any seeing eye to eye.

Even a casual observer can't help but notice that our world seems filled with utter stupidity.

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Eigenvaluing

NikPicking

"Together, we might not get anywhere but where we always go and where we seem to belong, anyway."

Each relationship seems to resolve to a certain eigenvalue, a self-similar resolution. When a relationship becomes dominated by a single personality, a Me Me Me Me Me Relationship, it resolves to an eigenvalue of one, reputed to be the loneliest number. Other relationships seem to reliably reproduce certain shapes, the triangle being one of the more common. In these, every issue seems to have three sides, like when a mother-in-law seems to get involved in every decision, the two principals might struggle to find unaided resolutions. Families quite pre-consciously replicate reliably similar shapes, some deeply influenced by a forceful father or a tenaciously unruly child. Whenever they engage, they seem to play to the same stymie. Some relationships reliably replicate dissatisfaction while others produce great delight. It's a great mystery why relationships behave in this way, but they certainly seem to eventually project certain predictable outcomes upon themselves. Some seem especially blessed and others, unusually cursed, reliably fractal, each in their own unique way.

Those trying to shape this charge, this strangely-attracting force, often simply make matters worse, adopting one after another seemingly inevitably failing improvement strategy.

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Anniverstory

Anniverstory
The End of the Song of Jerusalem, William Blake, 1827

" … what actually came to pass one day but never, ever went away."

The crabapple trees were in full and glorious bloom. The iris bed across the front had just begun showing color. The house, still white with garish blue window trim in those days before I'd stripped it to bare wood to repaint it caperberry green. The rose garden and the spreading, ancient apricot were still in their more primitive forms, time's ravages yet before them. Family and friends gathered to witness The Muse and I marrying. We'd planned a fitting celebration with fairy lights strung in trees and all along the arbor over the back deck. James flew over from Seattle to serve as our chef. We bought Copper River Sockeye filets and huge bags of fresh-cut asparagus and enough strawberries to more than feed the multitude. The Muse's Aunt Lillian tottered around the yard, leaning over her walker to pull errant weeds. Everyone who attended accepted an assignment to do something, for this would be a Do It All By Ourselves affair.

The preacher drove over from Beaverton with his partner, both heavily tattooed and pierced. The Muse's siblings and cousins came vast distances to join the celebration.

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Unmasking

Unmasking

"Clothes make up the man more than make him."

Writing this morning, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd commented on Our President's mask peccadillo, how his refusal to wear the mask his administration prescribes unmasks him and how his insistence upon constantly projecting a public personna has left him without evident personal identity. Nobody has a clue who he might really be beneath his masking exterior, which leaves him a definite minority in a society increasingly identifying itself as dedicated mask wearers. Our new masks don't so much cloak as identify who's careful and who's careless, who's courteous and who's contemptuous, who's comfortable demonstrating their vulnerability and who's in reckless denial. Curiously, as Dowd notes, our great masking seems to have unmasked who we more authentically are, with those too awfully invested in playing dress up suddenly relegated a lower social standing.

The America I grew up in performed like a continuous carnival with each in the costume commensurate to their role.

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QueuingUp

QueuingUp

"I foresee a day when meat might become, for a time, flavoring more than centerpiece entree …"


I really should have paid closer attention through Junior High, for I contend that every life lesson worth learning was woven into that experience, few of them during actual classes. Those years now seem as though they were a perfectly crafted passion play, a junior soap opera with every archetypal character present. Lunchtime seemed especially rich. Each clique would congregate around their table, territorial and exclusive. The sack lunchers segregated from those rich enough to cough up the thirty-five cents for a hot meal. Whatever the class, everyone ended up QueuingUp, waiting 'on' or 'in' line for something. Americans have never been naturally skilled at QueuingUp. Where I come from, line standing was for foreign cultures and big city people. Us small city people might line up for a football game or Forth Of July fireworks, but our daily lives rarely required us to wait for anything. Our heritage seemed to be instant gratification, except for the excruciatingly slow queue in the junior high school lunch room.

The pandemic has popularized QueuingUp like I've never seen.

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WeightingHeavily

Weighting1
Paul Cézanne, Young Italian Woman at a Table, about 1895–1900

"Pandemics progress by such insignificant increments …"


I imagine myself trapped in a waiting room with time weighing heavily upon my soul, no real place to go, Weighting. C. S. Lewis might have imagined this place, every seat as hard as an old bench and none comfortable. I stand beside my possessions, which I've stuffed into an oddly-shaped knapsack, which seems a tad too heavy and awkward to handle. I'm weary of standing and cannot quite bring myself to sit. I want to wander over toward the newsstand, but I'd have to drag my knapsack along and I cannot quite face that chore. Besides, I know what I'll find at the newsstand: stale candy I wouldn't choose to buy if it was fresh, yesterday's headlines posing as news, a haze of cheap cigar smoke ringing the place. My train (or will it be a bus?) would be running way late if it was running on anything like a schedule. My destination unknowable, departure time up in the air, I could be waiting anywhere, but I seem to be Weighting nowhere at all.

I spent much of this writing week deferring, missing even my own meager deadlines.

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NoPlaceToChide

731px-John_Tenniel_-_Illustration_from_The_Nursery_Alice_(1890)_-_c06543_08
Illustration from The Nursery "Alice", from John Tenniel's illustrations to "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," 1890

"I am neither my neighbor's critic nor her champion."

Have you noticed that The Chattering Class has lost its class? No longer does mere difference of perspective divide us and discourse hold promise. Public derision widens our divisions, encouraging them, rendering unthinkable even civilly agreeing to disagree. Daring to speak my mind might find me publicly derided as a fully fledged Enemy of the State, arriving far too late for any hope of receiving redemption. "Off with her head," some social media Red Queen says, and headhunters appear to jeer and shout down. Can anyone dishonorably defend their honor? I find myself wondering, "Who stole your trike?", for the spite seems inborn, a carefully nurtured identity, a grand and glorious begrudgement of the first degree. Taking offense seems no longer offensive, but an anticipated if overly-defensive response. A simple question seems likely to bring brimstone down upon the questioner and a curious social standing upon the devil delivering it. Dogs eat dogs and pups routinely eat puppies now, every issue a dogfight to the death.

The death of civil discourse arrived on little cat's feet, greeting us as warmly as might any savior.

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IllAtEase

IllAtEase
The Raising of Lazarus after Rembrandt by Vincent van Gogh (1890).

" … having apparently traded in my innate senses for a double handful of IllAtEase."

This pandemic provides uneasy respite. The Muse suggests that we're better off if we just assume that we're infected and throwing off virus like one of those hose-tracking garden sprinklers. I imagine that everyone I encounter's doing likewise and that I'm not successfully dodging their bullets, so I slather sanitizer before and after every excursion. An ancient adage insisted that a dream come true amounts to the most insidious punishment, and the now interminable pandemic seems the perfect foil for any former aspiration to spend more leisure time with family. Time moves most slowly when held under this kind of lock and key, where nothing physically inhibits me, but where a certain moral sense suspends me in place. I do the right thing without the expected consequent feeling very good about my choice. Nobody notices my generous absences and nobody rejoices over my tacit contributions. The Muse wonders where I've gone and I respond by asking where in this constraining space I might feel safe to manifest. I feel distinctly IllAtEase.

Sleep produces no rest, but seems to encourage an ever-deepening restlessness; a Lazarus death.

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NumberPunching

NumberPunching
The Elephant Celebes, Max Ernst, 1921

" … at least one piñata short of a party."

Covid-19 case counts suggest whatever the watchman damned well wants them to suggest. Raw numbers seem to be inconsistently reported due to a near absence of testing. Some officials seriously support sponsoring fewer tests, since increased testing just seems to inflate the case numbers. Some firms and localities refuse to even discuss test results, insisting that they're thereby providing an important public service by preventing panic among people who might not properly interpret findings. One governor of an early-opening state has repeatedly privately apologized for releasing, with considerable fanfare, data which only showed a reduction of new cases because of what he later quietly referred to as "sorting errors." Who sorts data so that April follows May? Multiple times? NumberPunchers do.

A NumberPuncher professionally muddies waters.

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Crow-Ding

Crow-Ding
Plague in an Ancient City, Michiel Sweerts, c. 1652–1654
"I'm no more ready to return to what passed for normal than I was prepared to inhabit that normal when it was here before."

If we refer to a crowd of crows as a 'murder,' a crowd of HomeDespot shoppers might reasonably be referred to as a 'suicide' of shoppers, for the context seems to insist upon a shopper's acceptance of suicidal risk as the price of entry. The door monitor, outfitted in fetching blaze orange vest and weary-looking face mask, turns back no-one, but seems posted as a public genuflection to a government recommendation and not as any serious enforcement. The aisles might be marked with fresh masking tape arrows which no more than vaguely hint at a form of traffic control, but I don't know the layout well enough to understand how to get where I'm going should I follow their subtle advice. I don't even notice their presence until I'm halfway there and the side aisle seems to have been blocked off for some lift truck work. I'm stuck however I go. By the grace of one of the genuinely lesser gods, I find what I came looking for, but I abandon whatever hope I carried in with me when I see fresh chaos at the checkout stands, with unruly aisles-full of overfilled carts and impatient customers. I return my prospective purchases back to the shelf display from whence they came, wheedling my way past clutches of husband and wife tag teams leisurely blocking my way, and exit the store to slather my hands in sanitizer and slink back home. I should have known better than to have ever entered there, me and my surviving hope to find better.

My history with crowds and consequent Crow-Ding (that warning klaxon sounding in my head whenever entering a crowd) informs my relationship with them now.

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RustySpring

RustySpring
Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Angel Troubling the Pool, c.1845

'Now there is at Jerusalem by the sheep market a pool, which is called in the Hebrew tongue Bethesda, having five porches. In these lay a great multitude of impotent folk, of blind, halt, withered; waiting for the movement of the water. For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water; whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.' John 5.2-4

" … in need of an angel or two to trouble overlong-still waters."


Spring finally arrived after six full months of winter. Through the short days and the early lengthening ones, I survived on my usual time-worn fantasy, that if I was not snowed in, I would be out in my garden, on my knees, praising all creation, troubling dirt. I fondly fantasized about really taking control of my landscaping, culling rocks and loosening soil until the yard looked like a Sunset® Magazine cover. Once spring came, though, I watched myself milling around the periphery of the pool awaiting the arrival of an angel, I suppose, as if I needed permission to begin. I thought the season a false one at first, distrusting the prankster weather, disbelieving that the snows had actually passed, even after the snowbank melted into nothing more threatening than ground moisture. I'd all winter imagined myself simply springing back after hibernation, but I found myself rusty and distinctly less resilient than I'd remembered myself being before.

Resilience seems to be one of those overblown concepts, the kind that imagine much differently than they ever manifest.

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HasteningQuickly

HasteningQuickly
Tortoise above Venetian lagoon, Melchior Lorch, 1555

"Expect the skunkworks to fizzle after stinking up the joint."

Project Management's first principle, often ignored, insists that one must Hasten Slowly, for even The Ancients understood that each human activity held a natural cadence, worthy of respect, and that attempts to violate that rhythm reliably produced calamity. The human brain seems most skilled at imagining utter impossibilities. We experience an inconvenience and easily imagine better, faster, and cheaper ways to achieve that end, means which seem likely to produce less inconvenience. In practice, most of the time (not by any means all of the time) we produce greater calamity when attempting to speed up things. We shave subtle essentials like testing, for instance, which seems to produce no immediate value, even further slowing development when productive resource gets sidetracked fixing pesky bugs. We remain steadfastly capable of reducing any effort down to apparent essentials, eliminating what we, under duress, easily classify as trivial distractions, deferring any deeper appreciation of O-ring chemistry, for instance, until an even more inconvenient time. We take great pride at 'making our date.'


HasteningQuickly becomes ever more seductive when experiencing a critical necessity, like during a pandemic.

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AskChewing

AskChewing
The Death of Socrates by Jacques-Louis David, 1787

"My foibles seem more prominently displayed than my mastery"

I once engaged in frenzied ten hour marathons of yard work whenever Spring finally came, as if I'd stockpiled overwinter energy and it was approaching its pull date. I'd rake and prune and mow and dig, leaving a cluttered pile of debris behind me, then drag that jumble out into an uneasy pile beside the driveway. I'd call Kevin with his trailer and pay him a hundred bucks to haul that mess to the dump or cut the shrubbery into small enough pieces that I could fill the yard debris container for weeks into the future. I'd end those days utterly exhausted and also utterly exhilarated, holding a feeling of mastery and dominion that winter had so recently successfully held at bay. These were genuine red letter days, memorable for the ten thousand ways I'd managed to overcome all the usual complications, my own initiating motivation not the least of these. I would have spent the better part of at least a week thinking through an effort that only engagement could ever resolve, telling myself that I was not so much procrastinating, but carefully planning. I was actually procrastinating, for such a momentous engagement awed me from before its outset. I both relished and feared the work.

Now, I tend to parcel out the springtime yard work into two hour pieces, distributing it over the opening weeks of the season.

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Morpidity

Morpidity
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp: Rembrandt, 1632

"Our own innocence seems most vulnerable."

Up against The Ides of May, and best guess estimates of the number of pandemic casualties in the You Ess of A exceeds the number lost in all the wars we've engaged in since 1950. That's four and a half months to exceed the number of war dead over the prior seventy years, and we've been continuously engaged in war over that time. Some still doubt whether this epidemic hasn't been overblown for political dominion, with armed self-proclaimed militia "safeguarding" the "rights" of certain shopkeepers to encourage conditions shown to stimulate the virus' spread. Most of the dead seem innocent enough, having contracted the bug from inadvertent contact. I saw last night on television an interview with a top virologist who was recovering from a bout he figures he'd caught while on a flight to New Orleans last month. He wore a mask and gloves and carried his handy hand sanitizer, and had decades of experience working with killer viruses, but he still caught the damned thing. This bug respects nobody's God-granted or constitutionally-guaranteed rights to life or liberty, let alone the pursuit of simple happiness.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court overturned their governor's extension of his stay-at-home order, the justices insisting that he'd over-reached his legal powers in attempting to limit the possibility that some might otherwise needlessly die from viral infection.

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Pauseperity

Pauseperity
Adriaen van Ostade: The Schoolmaster, 1662

"What doesn't humble you makes you smug."

Our Pandemic has paused our planned prosperity. The Pestilence Horseman of the Dreaded Apocalypse rides roughshod through our society, heartlessly mowing down more than our fellows, for avoiding him drove us to flee from our jobs, our schools, and our precious, precocious society. One day, our economy seemed to be humming right along. The next day, it forgot that song: words, tune, the whole shebang. Even those who had subscribed to the widely popular Prosperity Gospel suspended their pursuit when manifestation moved from being a simple matter of personal motivation to one of humbled recognition and acceptance. Overnight, consumption turned cruelly inconspicuous when not even a stockpile of Benjamins could buy you toilet paper. We became jobless paper paupers instead of employed paper prosperous, suddenly unable to maintain appearances. Flow stalled.

The I Ching spoke of disruptive calamity overturning accustomed order, but those stories seemed more like history than current affairs.

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GroaningUp

groanUp1
"We each hold our world on our shoulder and we are each still GroaningUp …"

The Greek God Atlas held the world on his shoulders, a curious career choice. I suppose world holding's necessary work, but necessary of the sort that someone else should do. It's a utility position, one with little self-promotional possibilities, offering no leave and little potential for advancement. It's maintenance work. Though Atlas is usually depicted wrapped in swaddling clothes, I imagine him dressed in J. C. Penney khaki work clothes and Red Wing work boots, like the janitor at my grade school wore, for he, too, inhabited the nether region of my world, down where the coal furnace belched heat and the teachers fled to smoke. The place everyone knew was there but nobody spoke about.

I later came to understand that Atlas' story served as an allegory for the all too human condition, for each of us holds a world upon our shoulders.

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PandemicAmish

PandemicAmish
"I seem to have little to lose by dropping a century or two from my lifestyle."


As our pandemic disrupted lengthy supply chains, a certain simplicity seemed to emerge. The NYTimes Food Section features more recipes for dishes not traditionally found there, like beans and casseroles. Supermarket Ingredient sections seem hardest hit, with flour, pasta, and beans frequently unavailable for any price. Restrictions limiting a shopper to one or two of certain items have become commonplace. Our larder has consequently become more strategic and The Muse and I have increasingly become stockpilers, grabbing whatever's available when we spot it. The smaller shops seem better stocked. Thank heavens that our food security seems so far unthreatened, but our meals, always fairly simple affairs, have become even simpler, with fewer exotic fruits and vegetables and more reliable old familiars.

I've been reading a series of novels set around Ohio's Amish communities, and I sense a certain simplicity settling into our pandemic lifestyle.

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History-onics

History-onics
Le Désespéré (The Desperate Man), Gustave Courbet, circa 1843
"Suspended between two great mysteries, I face into another day."

I become a truly desperate man when asked about my past. I feel reasonably certain that I've had one—or several—but I don't recall specifics. I can't remember faces and must painstakingly reconstruct places and times. I didn't keep records other than journals and the few dated pieces of writing I've retained, many of them stored in formats now unreadable. Pass me a common "intake form" and I draw a blank, for I truly do not know. With considerable prompting, I might create a believable fiction, plugging dates and events to produce what might appear to be a credible history, but this will not resolve the fundamental mystery for me and will prove largely fictional in practice, should any of the details become critical for diagnosis or treatment. My past seems every bit as fictional and speculative as my future.

The pandemic has spawned a booming business in obituaries, half-page histories of those who've died.

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ExtremeDomestification

ExtremeDomestification
Relativity, lithographic print by M. C. Escher, 1953
"ExtremeDomestification seems to be positively effecting even the most feral among us …"

When under duress, I search for a reframe. My mother taught me at a very early age that toast never actually burns, but sometimes browns rather extremely. I grew to extend that response pattern into a lifestyle where my first (and often best) reaction to any adversity involved reframing the story. A bout of seasonal flu became a forced vacation. Car trouble wouldn't leave me stranded but engaging in an unplanned adventure where I might have to invent a new way to get back home. Doors didn't close behind but opened ahead. I found that I could safely reframe in response to what I otherwise might have classified as calamity, and thus retain some sense of control. I get to write my own story.

My reframing self might describe the Governor's Stay At Home Directive as ExtremeDomestification, for its effect has been to encourage transformation of what might have started as an authentic homebody into something more resembling a home soul, someone more than married to home life, but conscripted into it, sentenced to serve an indeterminate term with no reduction in sentence for good behavior.

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Pretensal

Pretensal
Self-portrait, Jacques-Louis David (1794).
He was a dictator of the arts under the French Republic.


'
Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages.' Samuel Johnson, from The Idler, 1758

"I intend to cast about for reassurances without pretense."

I compensate for my persistent lack of access to The Truth by embracing candor. I can certainly describe how things seem to be to me, understanding that this perspective might not have ever had the pleasure of actually meeting The Truth, but I at least own it. I can and often do leave myself feeling uncomfortable with my candor, understanding that popularity prefers me to project greater pretense, lest someone think the less of me. It's apparently a great sin for anyone to think the less of me. While I might certainly prefer everyone to appreciate my scribblings, I've been trying to get over the need to please, for that need alone can leave me a prisoner to pretense, poised atop a teetering tower of questionable premises.

Our current administration does daily battle with candor, a fresh poster child in a long line of similar poster children posing behind pretense.

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NegativeSpace

Withouts
"Looking at a Waterfall", Geiami, 1480

"They seem to be discovering a world I desperately need …"

In the Japanese painter Geiami's Looking at a Waterfall, the focal point of the work, the waterfall, seems like negative space composed of the space leftover after he painted everything surrounding the waterfall. The painting plays positive off of negative to produce a seemingly complete image. Life, too, seems to present in this way. From my writing chair, the visible ridgeline seems projected against a negative background of sky, where nothing but 'not ridgeline' resides. The off-white wall between this room and the kitchen appears as a interruption, a negative space visually cutting off counter, chair, and floor when viewed from my writing chair. These words depend upon NegativeSpaces framing them. Even the now long-lived Stay At Home Order serves as a Negative Outcome Objective, its purpose being to avoid a result rather than to acquire one. Pandemics produce NegativeSpaces, haves and have-nots, where the have-nots seem to dominate.

I've been noticing how seductive the newly prominent NegativeSpaces seem.

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Maudling

Maudling
A satirical cartoon attacking the Duke of Wellington, then Prime Minister, for the passage in April 1829 of the Roman Catholic Relief Act
"We're still nattering over tactics, Maudling our way into an increasingly perilous future of our own creation."

My first project management assignment came over a lunch, from someone I didn't at the time report to who managed a department in another division of the company. A succession of actual project managers had failed to tame an effort, so my name had come up, probably over another lunch, where his VP and my VP had reached an agreement that perhaps informally assigning Schmaltz as a sort of stealth project manager might finally tether the aspiring initiative. I was told, as a first step, to, "go get the plan." Naive me, never before having managed a project, I set out on what would become just another chapter in a never-ending saga to find a reliable plan for the initiative. I'd initially thought my predecessors delinquent for having failed to at least produce a plan, though I later learned that a) no plan had ever existed because b) the effort was inherently unplannable. Those VPs who had so blithely recommended assigning me to fix the so-called project had abrogated their responsibility, for this project had no strategic intent, and no two people I spoke with while searching in vain for the plan, agreed upon the purpose of the project. I never did manage to produce a credible plan before the executives wisely chose to cancel funding for that woe begotten excursion after the fifth or sixth time that I'd reminded them that they'd need to decide upon some strategic intent before the effort could ever hope to satisfy them.

I mention this story at this time because it seems to inform our current dilemma in our ongoing battle against the insidious Covid-19 virus.

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Doldrums

Doldrums
Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon coming on, J. M. W. Turner, 1840


"Adventure still awaits our arrival, entirely dependent upon our short-term survival."

We left port with reports of steady trade winds ahead, though those left us after two months at sea to find us beating across the Horse Latitudes of this pandemic. We lost the steady sensation of forward progress to enter a vast sea, seemingly endless, and so our originating purpose naturally diminished until we felt as though we held no aspirations save for the most primitive personal preservation. The crew grew increasingly restless as our collective helplessness came into ever sharper focus. With stores waning and patience at a premium, a certain feral nature overcame us. We lost our usual courtesies and decorums. We completed chores listlessly and suppers became sullen affairs with little evident cheer or hopefulness. We'd entered the Doldrums.

A second breadwinner in our extended family received his layoff notice this week.

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Banqueting

Banqueting
"A Mad Tea Party" by Arthur Rackham, from a 1907 edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

" … like family turned recursive, …"


Every month or two, B. C., The Muse and I would host some sort of supper party. Often, when a group of visiting scholars or such would be in town for a conference, meeting, or workshop, The Muse would invite the whole gang, instructing me to prepare for fifteen to thirty, with no real way to verify how many might actually attend. I'd plead for information about food preferences and prejudices and eventually just end up making two or three or four suppers in one, so as to not too deeply offend the vegan, gluten-free, paleo, or pescatarian, for at least one of each was always certain to attend. I'd spend a day cleaning house and prepping food. We'd pull out the good china tablecloths and pretend that we always lived that way. The food never ended up being the centerpiece, though. The conversations filled out the proceedings as our guests made connections they could not have possibly made within the constraints of their regularly scheduled meetings.

These were inevitably enlivening evenings where, even though I'd end up staying up way past my usual bedtime, everyone seemed to leave feeling richer than when they arrived.

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Eyedentity

Eyedentity
Banksy: French Maid, 2008 (Shoreditch, London street art)
"I could claim to be adapting, but I'm more emphatically faking it for now …"

I peer into my shaving mirror and see an aging Emeritus Professor of Ancient Languages in dire need of a haircut peering back out at me. I search, it seems, in vain for my usual cues while standing at something resembling parade rest, wondering where my initiative went. The season seems to be moving as seasons do, inexorably into, while I wait like a hesitant jump-roper to leap into each new day. I can't seem to find the old rhythm most days, and even when I catch a glimpse of it, the old timing seems somehow off and I'm caught tripping over my three left feet. In pre-pandemic days, my god-given two left feet seemed to serve me well enough. That third one, apparently sprouted since the disruption, often renders me flummoxed and confused. I usually find no clear clue what I should do next, … or before, either.

Some so-called primitive cultures forbade mirrors, claiming that they encourage unseemly vanity and worse, that they might steal souls.

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ThUs

ThUs
The Mystical Nativity, Sandro Botticelli, c. 1500–1501

Forget The Melting Pot, we're more rightly a stew.

In Botticelli's Renaissance masterwork The Mystical Nativity, symbolism seems thicker than the paint. He tried to depict the end of an apocalyptic time, when, after three and a half years rampaging around in the world, The Devil and his associates were relegated back into the underworld from which they came. Creepy looking angels dance above while others embrace "men of goodwill" along the bottom of the work. Both Mary and the Baby Jesus appear larger than life, a throwback perspective from times when photographic projection was often modified, with most important objects inflated larger than supporting ones. Overall, it appears as a busy image, but depicts a joyful time, for it shows a great evil exiting the world.

Some within each generation before and since sincerely believed that they were the chosen few, the ones intended to actually experience the apocalypse, apparently a longed-for honor among True Believers.

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NewAbnormal

NewAbnormal
Composition with Fruit, Guitar and Glass, Pablo Picasso, 1912
"My job, our job, seems to be to out appreciate our Old Masters."

Abstraction did not take the art world by storm, but by slow accretion, for the art world reacted to this change not as an opportunity, but as a threat to tradition. Societies care about tradition because their identity lies there, reinforced by the familiar and seemingly threatened by difference. Past masters serve as exemplars, and gatekeepers insist upon fresh works properly respecting pre-existing works without actually plagiarizing them. Revolutions knock on doors for decades before anyone opens in response. Progress leaves snails feeling smuggy about their swiftness. Once the door opens a crack, it might seem to fly wide open in an instant, but those artists who idled in enforced obscurity for decades understand than the orthodoxy never really wanted anything to change and will continue trying to subsume them into conservative normalcy in lieu of actually accepting the changes they bring.

I hear much mumbling about new normals, generally idle speculations about what will likely irreversibly change once our pandemic recedes.

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MaskedMen

MaskedMen
" [None of us should be] above extending an ounce of accommodation for a villain not wearing an identifying mask and not one of us can see."

B. C. (Before Covid-19), masks were for Mardi Gras, Halloween, burglars and Old West Train Robbers, and the occasional Lone Ranger. We intended them to obscure identity, though cowboys assigned to the hind end of trail drives might deign to slip a neckerchief up over their faces to fight trail dust. Okay, dentists wore them, and doctors when they were tucking into a case, but most of us never seriously thought about owning or wearing a mask. Now, that part of our world's turned inside out, and the responsible among us have grown to gladly don that mask when venturing out into public.

Those first few times, I felt self-conscious.

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Evangelistic

evangenicalist
" … mostly learning how much more I evidently have to learn."

I never liked being told what to do. I found the experience humiliating when I was five and still find it annoying sixty-some years later. I live by a double standard, though, as I catch myself telling others what I think they should do with stunning regularity. My friend Wayne stopped me near the middle of one of my tellings to ask me if I'd ever considered asking him if he wanted me to clue him in before I commenced to cluing. His question shut me up and served to render me a tiny bit more sensitive about how my tellings might affect my many targets.

While I can get carried away, I reason that I might find myself in reinforcing company, as society seems to have slipped into an Evangelistic phase.

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Logistics

Logistics
Pre-war Scammell Pioneer
" … necessity being the unforgiving step-mother mother of reinvention."

If my decades working in project management taught me anything, it taught me that an ounce of properly focused logistics tends to be worth a ton of almost anything else. Though nobody ever received a Congressional Medal of Honor for clever logistical support, none of the "great" battlefield victories throughout history could have been possible without a bunch of back office shenanigans worthy of deep respect. Our struggles over responding to Covid-19 clearly demonstrate the necessity for competent administration. Sending more first responders to the front might encourage upswells of sincere appreciation from a grateful population, but we witness otherwise unnecessary sacrifice as these genuine heroes fabricate their own personal protective gear and work around all the services suddenly rendered unavailable, like testing, apparently due to some genuine Bozos handling logistics. The World Health Organization has distributed hundreds of thousands of test kits everywhere but to the used-to-be good old U. S. of A. because some back office politicking decided that we should go our own way. All by ourselves. Alone.

Battles tend to be lost for want of a horseshoe nail as shortages cascade to render moot even the grandest intentions.

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NotQuiteYetSpring

notquiteSpring
Henri Matisse: Olive Trees at Collioure, 1906


Not Quite Yet Spring

Following Winter Solstice,
Springs goes on the move,
heading northward at the stately rate
of almost eighteen miles per day,
an enthusiastic snail’s pace
but still well within a snail’s range.
A walking horse might make
slightly better time.

Those in Florida,
who overwinter in Spring,
hardly notice anything like change,

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Alchemy

Alchemy1
Ole Worm's cabinet of curiosities, from Museum Wormianum, 1655
" … a cure for the curious urge to go seeking cures."

Being human apparently roughly equates to being passingly or chronically ill, with about half of humanity dedicated to somehow healing the other half during normal times. Pandemic times lower an already fairly low bar, with virtually all of humanity suddenly in increasingly desperate need for a cure which nobody possesses yet. This condition flushes out the alchemists and their claims. A self-proclaimed church in Florida insists that they've discovered The Cure, the mother load of all cures, the one that they claim can cure pretty nearly anything, though the FDA counters that it seems an effective cure for life, in that it just might kill you. An industry thrives along society's bottomland, hawking poison and placebo with equal zeal. The deal always seems to be the same: send money and we'll disappear into the ether. Word of desperate mouths spreads the story. Innocents and charlatans seem equally vulnerable. The Cure, sometimes producing worse than whatever the disease threatened to leave.

Up until two years ago, I'd lived prescription-free for two decades.

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Retreating

Retreating
The Escape Ladder by Joan Miró, 1940
"Our sanity now seems to lie in mere reason …"

When the thoroughly modern organization wants to move forward, to spawn a fresh initiative, they call a retreat. Over the last few years, Major League Baseball has seen an unprecedented spike in home run hits after a counter-intuitive practice gained broader acceptance: hitters learned to cock their bats backwards and up instead of immediately thrusting them outward and down in that split second after the pitcher released the ball. On weekends, city dwellers fled their cities while hinterland dwellers flooded into them, intent upon a respite couple of days just getting away. Farmers left for their escape cabins in the woods. New Yorkers hopped cheap flights to Paris. Walla Wallaians headed over to Portland while Portlanders zooted over to Walla Walla. Over my lifetime, we have sought retreat as renewal.

Now, living under lock without key, we cannot so blithely retreat.

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Aloneliness

Aloneliness
Thérèse by Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski), 1938
"I deeply appreciate those of you who have proven yourselves to be dedicated repeat offenders …"

I felt Alonely this week, this isolation's permanence coming into ever sharper focus. Aloneliness feels quite different from plain old loneliness, less disquieting but also more seemingly absolute. I just pretend that I understand these boundaries now. Protests against the Stay At Home Order reinforce my resolve to respect these rules. I think those shunning face masks fools, people who revel in demonstrating that they haven't a clue what they're doing, and deep-down disrespectful. Do we not have a duty—civil, moral, or simply out of courtesy—to continue to color within these inhibiting lines? The neighbor kids don't care and their parents seem just as powerless as I to influence their clumping together. They roam my yard like they roam their own, and every other, littering rocks and overturning flower pots in exuberant play. I deeply envy their easy association, for I remember when those days were mine, surrounded by a noisy throng of siblings, neighbor kids, and sundry hangers on.

I grew up in a family with five kids. I remember spending a significant portion of my formative years fleeing from that throng, seeking some place where somebody wasn't up in my face all the time. I sought space to hear myself think

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NeutronNews

NeutronNews
"What else might decency do?"

Effectively responding to a Pandemic requires access to good information about its nature, which begins as almost entirely unknown. Speculation replaces authentic fact at first, and probably necessarily so. Later, as initial inquiries yield additional information, our understanding deepens and broadens, and our responses' effectiveness improves. Not all sources of information seem equally dedicated to publishing 'the truth and nothing but the truth,' but the truth might well be initially impossible to come by at any price. Later, as apparent facts accumulate, rough truths might appear. I say "might appear" because not all sources seem equally dedicated to reporting facts. Our well-imbedded Fake News system, for instance, rarely finds a fact worth proliferating, for every event, for them, seems more an opportunity to amplify some pre-existing perspective than to discover or learn anything new or informative. Fake News rattles the same old sword regardless of anything actually happening in the world, and I suppose this underlying (lying) consistency satisfies a certain portion of the population. Even pure bullshit carries a dedicated constituency.

Fake News outlets revel in accusing their more reliable counterparts of proliferating Fake News, echoing an ageless "I know you are, but what am I?" feature of the human condition.

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Scenario-ing

Scenario-ing
Jacob's Ladder by William Blake, 1805


And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said: "Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew it not." And he was afraid, and said: "How full of awe is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven." — Genesis 28:10–17 Jewish Publication Society (1917)

"Which scenario wins what?"

The pragmatist insists that we're just where we are. The philosopher wonders how we know. The scientist sets out to understand well enough to definitively say, with studied degrees of certainty. The cynic, quite honestly, doesn't care. The optimist remains ever hopeful. The skeptic insists upon the benefits of doubt. The pessimist prefers to pout. The writer shares the stories which the artist illustrates. The minstrel crafts the tune. The politician shares a Spandex® truth. Each holding their own perspective; each perspective, a part of some whole. Each provides a slant none of the others could know. None holds The Truth that everyone does.

The Muse found a social media posting which insisted that The Rockefeller Foundation with the support of Bill Gates had planned our present Pandemic, then implemented that plan with the clear intent of achieving world dominion.

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DreamState

DreamState
Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing, William Blake, c.1786
"I seem to have stepped into another life which fills in the holes in the one I used to know so well."

Never much for sleep, I find that I've been vividly dreaming during this Pandemic. I had grown infamous for never needing much more than four or five hours of sleep and never remembering my dreams, but this last week or two, I've been sleeping through my three am alarm and sometimes even struggling to rise. I find myself so imbedded within alternate universes that the sunrise sometimes beats me up, an almost unprecedented occurrence. I revel in these scenarios flickering behind my eyelids, feeling warmly welcomed and more at home there than within my actual home, which has grown lonely and boring through the shutdown. I experience no empty hours in my dreams, but thrive. Last night, I bought into owning a restaurant on New York City's Upper West Side, a soon to be jazz club featuring fine but not fussy dining and first-class combos. The dream left me feeling exhilarated in ways the Stay at Home Order never has.

Humans seem capable of nearly infinite compensation.

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Stew-pid

Stew-pid
Rembrandt: The Parable of the Rich Fool, 1627

One of the multitude said to him, "Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me." But he said to him, "Man, who made me a judge or an arbitrator over you?" He said to them, "Beware! Keep yourselves from covetousness, for a man's life doesn't consist of the abundance of the things which he possesses." — Luke 12:13–15, World English Bible

"Some days I wonder where we think we're trying to take ourselves."

I have never been judged as one of the brighter bulbs on the Christmas Tree. This makes me a more or less prototypical American, for we were originally rejected stock: refugees and convicts, renegades and conniving scoundrels. Even the Pilgrims were more budding capitalists than pious pioneers, for they arrived with backers promising wealth in exchange for their sacrifices, servicing enabling debt more motive for their perseverance in this world, if not necessarily the next. Our founding myths largely ignore these truths, insisting instead upon a certain unconfirmable self-evidence that we were somehow, unlike every other culture in the history of this world, created more or less equal. Above all, we seem to revel in characterizing our fellows as Stew-pid, so stupid that they cannot even properly spell the word describing themselves.

We have a long history of calling reason oppression and strongly resisting that trumped up oppression on Constitutional grounds.

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SiegeMeals

"I understand that my current siege mentality serves as evidence of an underlying emotional immaturity …"

Suppertime arrives even when living under a Stay-at-Home Order. We won't order out, though I've considered it twice and even resorted to take-out pizza when the ennui inertia overwhelmed me. Most days, I find that I can still face up to my responsibility to feed the household, though the larder's slipped somewhat sideways between the simple inconvenience now associated with restocking it and the curious unavailabilities attempting to restock it reveal. I wonder what it means when the veg store offers not a single potato for sale, but it seems to bode well for nobody. I find curious combinations of plenty, which cast strange shadows across the kitchen come suppertime. Accustomed combinations disappear, replaced with strange plate-fellows. Each suppertime has become a fresh WhatNow? engagement.

Before this siege began, I spent a couple of weeks crafting an array of stocks: turkey, veal, goose, chicken, and veg, so we, by fortunate accident, hold a surplus of this one irreplaceable component.

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Fiberation

Fiberation

John Everett Millais: Ophelia, circa 1851
"What else could any obedient citizen do?"

We're enjoined to avoid all but essential outings, so the term essential takes on surprising ambiguity. I cannot honestly say that maintaining my former consumption levels in any way qualifies as an essential objective. In my young adulthood, I sometimes foraged for my supper. Since, I've grown accustomed to a certain relative opulence, but just how essential could any of that be? I remember the time before there was ever wine with dinner, and those long years during the cholesterol scare of the eighties and nineties when I lived on boneless and skinless chicken breast. I became more omnivorous since, but I can't really claim the resulting variety essential. Does boredom constitute an intolerable condition? Do I really need that bag of potato chips or are they just a nice-to-have?

The Muse and I escaped for a scant two hours yesterday afternoon to restock what passes for our wine cellar.

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PanDamning

PanDamnic
Francis Danby: The Deluge, circa 1840
"The worst hard times, the best hard times, or simply our hard times?"

The rising sun tints the eastern horizon pink and robin egg blue, transforming the conifers along the ridge into silhouettes of themselves. Yesterday's spring snowfall lies heavy upon the backyard pine's limbs, gloopy frosting expertly draped. By the end of this day, the twisting road up from the interstate will have burned to bare and dry. Tomorrow, the buried sprouting springtime will have reemerged back into warm sunshine again. I might have yesterday shoveled the last snow for this season, and I'd find reason to celebrate this small liberation if I had not grown to revel in the work. We weren't going anywhere and I insisted upon shoving snow anyway, a regulating obligation in my day, admittedly made up so that I had something different than numbing sameness to do. It seems so damned peaceful here.

I understand that these are the worst of times, the leading edge of what might prove to become another Great Depression, but the general impression I've received witnessing this latest apocalypse has not seemed at all like what I imagined end times would be.

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OutOfYourASSumptions

OutOfYouASSumptions
El Greco: The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, between 1586 and 1588
"'Twas always thus."

I think of the initial stage of every initiative as The Assumption, and Our President's strongly rumored and much reported task force's grand plan to reopen the country amid the current pandemic proves no exception. It seems to be emerging as an absolute exemplar of this general rule. The first iteration always seems to have been pulled directly out of somebody's BIG ASSumption. To many, it already seems unworthy of ever seeing the clarifying light of any day, more a self-portrait of narcissistic delusion than serious proposal, an embarrassment to its authors' intentions. It presumes altogether too much and also discloses waaaay too much. Couldn't there be a better way?

For the first iteration, I've grown to understand that there could have been no better way, for something needs nudging off its dime if any result is ever to come to pass.

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PandemicShopping

PandemicShopping
The Peasant and the Nest Robber, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1568
"I'll know for sure that it's safe to reopen the economy when toilet paper once again becomes a pedestrian purchase."

I feel increasingly like an old dog struggling to learn new tricks. Never that adaptable, I change when forced to and struggle to shift my studied routines. I've long considered myself an expert shopper. I hang around a supermarket's periphery, avoiding the central aisles. I hover longer in the produce section than in any other. I'm not embarrassed to exit without purchasing anything if the stuff I came to buy isn't available. Unavailability has over the past month become the new defining characteristic of shopping here. Whole aisles of empty shelves greet the aspiring shopper. Combined with the face masks and the continual Corona Veers, where erstwhile shoppers inevitably fail to maintain six feet of distance from their suspicious-looking fellows, perusing a minefield might prove more satisfying.

I'm growing to realize that selecting and purchasing amounts to something less than half of grocery shopping's allure.

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R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Respect
Procession of the Youngest King (Lorenzo de' Medici), Benozzo Gozzoli, between 1459 and 1460
"An ounce of respect counterbalances a ton of manure."

My father told stories about his older brother Dan, who was headstrong like his dad. The two boys lived with their Old World grandfather, who subjected them to severe punishment should they misbehave. Dan couldn't seem to help himself and almost daily ended up receiving a whipping and a lengthy time-out in a dark cellar room. Their father had been disowned and disinherited after acting out as an adult, though he might have known better since all but one of his siblings had been likewise disowned and disinherited before him for similar infractions. My great grandfather was doubtless a tyrant, but tyrants above all else respond poorly to perceived disrespect. My dad would plead with Dan, reminding him that things just went easier if he would at least pretend to comply instead of continuously defying. My dad grew to become a humble and deeply respectful guy, and I suppose I sort of naturally lie rather more low than I otherwise might. Dan never learned.

I will admit to a few memorable attempts to stick my thumb into an eye of authority.

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HighHollowDays

HighHollowDays
Archibald J. Motley Jr., Tongues (HolyRollers), 1929
" … segueing back into the infinitely more joyful ordinary times. Amen."

The high holy days of the Christian calendar induce a sort of seasonal affective disorder in me. I understand that these, above all other days of the year, focus upon producing cheer over depressive rumination, but the expectation that I should find joy there works like a paradox to induce the opposite. Not precisely sadness, but more of a hollowness overtakes me. These seem like hollow days of obligation, because in obligating, they undermine celebration. Requiring joy obviates every possibility for experiencing it. I'll go through the motions, but with a sinking heart.

I might lose the vibe in preparation, for my heart does tend to soar in warm anticipation that the blessed day might just this once appear as advertised, but it comes as it always came, rushing off to some semi-annual church service or sequestered at home with nothing but boring family surrounding me.

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Affronting

The_Snow_Queen_by_Elena_Ringo
The 2020 Easter Bunny
"T
he Snow Queen" illustration by Elena Ringo
from New Fairy Tales. First Volume. Second Collection. 1845
by Hans Christian Andersen
"Watch and maybe learn something new about yourself."

Easter morning brings an arctic cold front along Colorado's Affront Range. Snow starts falling well before the regularly scheduled and much-vaunted Red Rocks Easter Sunrise Service, which had been cancelled, anyway, as a part of The Governor's Coronavirus Pandemic Stay-At-Home Order. The sunrise itself seems to have been cancelled, replaced with a slowly increasing grayness seeping through sifting snowfall. The Muse rises long before any resurrection to start a batch of yeasty-sweet Hot Cross Buns. We display colored eggs in a transparent plastic tray on the kitchen table, no bunny willing to brave the swirling winds to hide them outside, where they'd just freeze and discolor the snow, anyway. Molly The Mardi Gras Mask-faced kitten and Max The Smutty-nosed Kitten sniff at the vase filled with small red tulips displayed atop the dining room table. This weather seems an affront to Easter, indeed, an affront to Spring, so we seem to be celebrating Affronting this Easter day. How to properly celebrate?

Some important something probably lurks here within this upside down, backwards and sideways holiday.

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MistOpportunities

MistOpportunities
David I of Scotland knighting a squire, 14th century
" … I exclusively pave the way I came, not the way I'm heading."

How did any of us end up here? What lucky breaks and unfortunate accidents summed to here and now? I suspect that this question might most probably deflect any How response. Though the story might make diverting legend, beyond entertainment, it probably couldn't qualify as instruction, any sort of functional How To. I think it most likely that nobody knew how until well after accomplishing any achievement, if even then, though many of us obsess over how before engaging, as if our next experience couldn't possibly fill in gaps in our prior experience. Many of us carry discovery fantasies that we might stumble into some well-placed connector who will discover what we have to offer the world, and benevolently or greedily pave our way. In my experience, which, like yours, never rises above anecdotal example, ways forward do not tend to be paved. Few have been discovered while sitting at a lunch counter at Hollywood and Vine. Heck, few of any of us ever manage to get discovered by anyone but ourselves.

I firmly believe that human progress has always been driven by synchronicity.

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ToGo

ToGo
The Night Café by Vincent van Gogh, Arles, September 1888
Reputed to be the ugliest van Gogh painting
"I'm feeling closer to some essentials now that I'm taking everything ToGo."

I'd really rather eat in a diner than any other kind of restaurant. I never feel completely at home in any of them, but neither do I feel terribly alienated there, either. I find no wine list to wonder over or small plates to challenge my patience and my pocketbook. The menu features only simple food and the atmosphere feels more like grandma's dining room than grande salon. Someone always greets my arrival as if they had been hoping I'd drop in. The decaf's inevitably crap but the food's honest, cheap, and good, if not necessarily that good for me. I order off menu, almost always the same thing, breakfast of sorts regardless of the time of day: hold the eggs, smother the hash browns, and throw a sausage on the side; maybe a biscuit to finish. I open my trusty Times with a half dozen conversations burbling around me and a running joke passing between The Regulars and the waitresses. I'd claim that I I eat in anonymity except my waitress keeps calling me, "Hon." The vibe of the place renews me more than does the meal.

I can't get that experience ToGo.

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Distancing

Distancing
J. M. W. Turner: Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway, before 1844
"Distancing seems to open up spaces rarely glimpsed since the transcontinental railroad appeared."

One of my great grandmothers crossed on the Oregon Trail on horseback. The trip took months. Twenty years later, she made the same crossing in a few days by train. If anything most typifies this modern society, ever increasing mobility must be that thing. I remember our neighbors flying to attend a convention when I was small, when jet travel was still a rare and novel occurrence, at least in my neighborhood. Their mom, a slim and elegant woman, wore gloves for the trip and brought back these little packages of three cigarettes they'd handed out for free on the flight. I could see the future from there! Up until last month, planes crammed full of people wearing their pajamas as if they were lounging around on a couch at home, were departing every other minute with fares well under the price of a modest dinner out somewhere. People flew on less than a whim.

We've temporarily traded in our mobility, Distancing in solidarity and/or fear.

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Marked

Saint_Francis_of_Assisi_Receiving_the_Stigmata
Saint Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata, attributed to Jan van Eyck, c. 1430-32
"My turn will eventually come …"

At five, I was slated for a tonsillectomy. My older brother and sister were to undergo the same procedure at the same time, but when we arrived at the hospital, I was somehow deemed too anemic or something and sent home all by myself in a cab. I still remember that deep sense of relief I felt as the cab pulled away from the hospital with me thinking that I'd actually gotten away with something Scot-free. The next day, my brother and sister were granted unlimited ice cream rations in which I could not share. In a week or so, I had to go the hospital alone to get my tonsils pulled. I remember nothing about the entire adventure except for that great relief I felt when I dodged that bullet, and even though that bullet came around and got me on its second pass, getting away with something made the whole experience well worth the trip.

I suppose that everyone appreciates feeling special, perhaps because deep down inside most of us don't feel all that special.

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PrecisionAbstraction

SquareFootage
A Foot of David by Michelangelo (Detail), 1501-1504
"Imagine how smuggy I felt …"

PrecisionAbstraction has proven to be a prominent bane of my existence. I can thrive on abstraction until precision steps in. Then, I feel myself smothering. Still, I try to maintain a positive attitude. Last Spring, when I ordered mulch for The Villa's odd-shaped front garden bed, Tom The Nurseryman deflected my request by insisting that I produce a PrecisionAbstraction, the landscaping equivalent of throwing down a gauntlet. I would have to produce, as a qualifying action, a statement of how many square feet of mulch I'd need. I retired to my lair to consider this challenge.

I walked the perimeter of the bed, a space without a single regular angle.

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Pacing

pacing
The Tyger, William Blake (1794)
"What fearful symmetry, indeed."

After Max The Smutty-nosed Kitten broke curfew and disappeared overnight, I put the pets on lockdown. I might have chosen to do this out of a curious form of spite, for I've been on lockdown for almost three weeks now. I kind of cower within my perimeter, pacing with my head held down as if embarrassed by my limitations. Like our kittens, I know myself to be capable of ferocity when in pursuit, and my still new boundaries more than merely limit my range. They limit my imagination, too. I feel like a clipped-wing bird unable to soar. My mind races endlessly, to no particular end, my perimeter seeming to define more than my range, but also my possibilities.

I always thought that I understood why the tigers paced in their cage at the zoo, but I'm gaining a fresh appreciation for just what cages do, whether they be physical, limiting range, or emotional, inhibiting whim.

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Lent

Lent2
Pieter Breughel the Younger (1564–1638), Battle of Carnival and Lent

"Beginning on Ash Wednesday, Lent is a season of reflection and preparation before the celebrations of Easter. By observing the 40 days of Lent, Christians replicate Jesus Christ's sacrifice and withdrawal into the desert for 40 days. Lent is marked by fasting, both from food and festivities." - Wikipedia

"Does anyone ever give up procrastination for Lent?"


Not having been raised in one of the classical Christian churches, my birth family never celebrated Lent, though I gather from The Muse's recollections that Lent in her Catholic family tended to be a Freaky Friday kind of celebration, by which I mean pretty much the opposite of celebration. She remembers giving up candy for Lent, a childhood practice that she swears made Easter candy that much more enjoyable. My family had more of a barely scraping by attitude to life, and I guess we figured that every day was already more or less Lent for us. Skin and bones possess little to further sacrifice. I notice when Ash Wednesday arrives, though. I revere the tradition without actually participating in it, the same way I revere Mardi Gras, as somebody else's fracas. I usually consider giving up something for Lent, without actually carrying through. I'm plenty penitent, but never overtly.

This year, though, the Year Of Our Lord 2020, everyone gave up something for Lent, unless you happened to live in one of the nine or ten states that chose to continue regular programming through the blooming pandemic.

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-Triarchs

-Triarchs
De koning van Thule, Pierre Jean Van der Ouderaa (1841-1915),1896
"This damned plague's taking our -Triarchs and leaving only us factory seconds behind."

This pandemic has been taking the -Triarchs, the matriarchs and the patriarchs, my elders and wise ones. I feel as though the fine frescoed ceiling that has always sheltered me is blowing away, leaving me without a roof over my head. I feel myself filling with a dread certainty. As the -Triarchs leave, I watch myself shuffle nearer the top of the heap to emerge as an elder. I try to rebut this commission, for I feel far too young and inexperienced to ever take the place of anyone I so long looked up to in wonder. For they genuinely seemed to levitate above the day-to-day to live nearer infinity, timeless in their age and experience. True, they had each once seemed more like me and you, bold youth, braless or with overlong sideburns, protesting how it had always been before. They opened the doors I later strolled through. They went through first, even to their last.

The past is forever past once the -Triarchs pass, a different scale rules forever after.

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UnCountables(2)

UnCountables(2)
Print Study/Drawing from The British Museum Collection
"I wanted to be certain to get my spurious statistics straight."

I rarely publish two PureSchmaltz Blog posts in a single day. This morning, though, I spaced out my usual intention to review the receding week's posts before moving on. I couldn't imagine any elegant way to simply append the following into what I'd already published, a screed on UnCountabiles. I'll call this review UnCountables(2) to strongly suggest just how meaningless social media use statistics seem. Not that I denigrate a single one of the six hundred-some unique page view that you, my generous readers, left to me this past week. I praise every one as the miracle it certainly seems. Still, I can't quite distill any great wisdom from the numbers alone. I suspect that these counts hardly hint at the value these postings hold, especially to me. I'm grateful for every even disinterested peek their presence attracts.

On the eventual grand list of weeks, the week leaving this morning will very likely stand near the top of the upper quadrant of Helluva Weeks

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UnCountables

Uncountable
"An Old-Time Counting Room," Fell's Point, Baltimore, MD, c. 1770; drawing dated 1879.
"We shared so much together back when we still lived so fiercely independent of each other."

We might pride ourselves on our fierce independence, though none of us do very much alone. Birth, marriage, graduation, financial success and failure, not even death can be accomplished alone. Each experience occurs through intimate association. That home, so proudly all-by-yourself owned, was purchased from someone, probably painted by others, and serviced by a small legion of supporting personnel. Each birth required a father and a mother, a midwife and aide. Each marriage, even one officiated by a lowly Las Vegas Elvis impersonator, brought two people together. Death demands some other to cart off and dispose of the corpse. We accomplish nothing alone.

The daily numbers numb me.

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Emergence-y

Emergence-y
Woman Holding a Balance, Johannes Vermeer, c. 1664
"The kids still want to see the cats, up close and now …"

The neighbor kids flocked toward the front door, demanding to see our kittens. The cats, on their first foray outside, strictly supervised and extremely wary, quickly disappeared back inside. I explained the dilemma to the kids: wanting to see them up close pretty much guarantees that they might see them from afar, fleeing. Searching for them ensures that they'll never be found. If they want to see them, they'd have to be satisfied with watching them from the distance of the street, but not even that alternative guarantees that they'll see 'em. The kids, baffled by my babbling, quickly dispersed, leaving me wondering what I'd just described. It occurred to me that the cats had become a decent allegory for Emergence-y, and seeing them at all, a good example of an emergent property. Sometimes, certainly not every time, when conditions seem right to them, the cats emerge, never together, almost always one after another. Sometimes Molly emerges first and sometimes, Max. I can't ask them about the criteria they employ to determine if it's safe enough to emerge. The conditions seem to vary. I'm left with inventing various speculations about what constitute necessary and sufficient conditions, most of which seem to serve to satisfy my curiosity without actually explaining anything.

When I leave the front door ajar, they sometimes emerge.

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EventHorizoning

I recognized the symptoms immediately. A really smart guy shut down in the face of a seemingly simple request. His charge? Just fill in his activities on this master program plan. The framework had been lovingly pre-determined by the program management office, the structure seemingly straightforward. The request, trivial. Yet after weeks of fretting and fussing, his task was still not complete. Worse, the obligation had thrown his rhythm off. He was working longer, increasingly frantic, making little headway.

"Activity poisoning," I declared. "A classic case!" Slip over here for more ...

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Pace

Pace
Chicago Rush Hour - 1909
"Nostalgia's not half what it's cracked up to be."

Within every pandemic, some optimist appears to cheer on the positive side of the thing. We do seem a whole lot better connected in isolation than we ever did when roaming around unconstrained. The vehicle traffic has abated to levels the streets seem to have been designed to hold. The road past The Villa sees much more foot traffic, with a steady parade of dog walkers, joggers, and couples strolling while holding hands. Kids pedal past in a nearly endless stream, and I'm sitting out front reading in the afternoon sunshine. The Pace of life has slowed to a rate I've rarely known. Home feels homier, too.

I keep losing my place in the novel I'm holding as I glance up to greet yet another neighbor walking by.

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BlindWatchmen

BlindWatchman
De Nachtwach (The Night Watch), Rembrandt van Rijn, 1642
"I admit that I just cannot tell …"

I fulfilled the role of night watchman through my father's final days, taking the six pm to six am shift, which included the witching hours. I'd sit up in one of the living room recliners and enter that coma state, aware but inert, watching; though, not being a healthcare professional, I'd diligently watch for what I knew not. I'd sometimes wander into his bedroom to watch him struggle to breathe in pitch darkness, listening for unsettling rhythms, but I mostly held my post two rooms away, watching with increasing intensity for the dawning and the end of my boring shift. A few times, alarming events occurred to which I'd respond with another frantic, completely anticipated call to the night hospice nurse. She'd arrive with aching slowness, though only a few minutes would pass, and neutralize the emergency while I waited at my post. My dad was performing a cum laude seminar in radical acceptance, having embraced his terminal diagnosis without ever insisting upon any but palliative care. I was simply there to witness what no watchman could see, often bored to my knees with the utter banality of the experience. On that morning when I watched him take his final breath, I believed that he exited out of sheer boredom with the proceedings. I felt that I could understand and even justify his response.

I figure that watchmen of old wore grand uniforms to elevate the otherwise insignificance of their role around the old castle.

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HeardImmunity

HeardImmunity
Saint Sebastian Interceding for the Plague Stricken, Josse Lieferinxe (–1508), between 1497 and 1499
Hunker down,
avoid others like The Plague,
the only cure we know so far
involves just staying away.
Talk's cheap.
Life's dear.
Nobody's immune to this damned virus,
no matter what you hear.

Pandemics bring out the crazies, the gullible babies desperately seeking protection. We hear of people too similar to us falling to the infection and understandably get to feeling itchy about its presence. Someone we trust appears to reassure us. We might come to firmly believe that those who fall ill are receiving some sort of payback, retribution for some critical shortcoming. Our news feeds reinforce our previously underlying prejudices, whatever they are, for we seem to run in herds now. If someone insists that only others contract the disease, we breathe a little easier, and might even continue to physically mingle regardless of the governor's latest directive. A pastor, a self-serving politician, a studied pitchman, an old family friend, credentials stemming more from familiarity than from any specific qualification, voices we trust seem to especially empower us. We want to believe, and so we too easily do believe. We hear salvation rumbling through our grapevine and feel protected when we're not.

Whenever chance rules, humans seem to create explanatory stories.

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TheProject'sManaging

project'smanaging
Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps, J.M.W. Turner, 1812.
"The project, like the fates, is always, always, always ultimately in charge …"

Our Administration Incapable of Administering seems to be simultaneously making every single classic project management error, just as if it wasn't standing on the shoulders of millennia of prior experience. This might not be completely their fault, though I wouldn't mind blaming it on them, for nobody's ever written anything like a definitive history of project management to at least outline how it came to be and what it actually entails. Instead, little self-serving fictions written by victors filled in, extolling one or another technique or one or another so-called brilliant man. The result might as well be sold as fiction and certainly provides no clear template for reliably succeeding when managing the achievement of any novel objective. Most certainly, the "profession's" deepest roots lie in military history, for the most ancient novel objectives always involved military campaigns. Several otherwise unremarkable generals have been credited with quipping that no plan ever survives contact with any enemy. They don't generally survive contact with friendlies, either.

Each generation has strived to improve upon each prior generation's so-called practices, always somehow managing to replicate what they first complained about, producing another method that succeeds a little less often than a fair coin toss, raised to religious necessity, filled with Thou Shalts enjoining someone else to be sure and do something those someone elses never have and never would actually do.

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SimpleEconomics

Economics101
Adoration of the Shepherds or the Nativity by Gerard David, 1490
"We covet health now, and a living more ennobling than any capitalist can count."

They were by all accounts humble shepherds, though that designation seems redundant, and not only because nobody's ever filed any report even hinting at the existence of haughty shepherds. Shepherds might find arrogance and self-importance less than useless in the productive execution of their role in society, for their wards are invariably humble and rather stupid, more interested in following each other around and not really in to adoring any charismatic leader. Shepherds were almost always contractors, not sheep owners or full time employees with benefits. They worked through the season in sublime isolation with only the adoration of their sheepdog as company. Yet they were counted as full equals at the nativity, right up there with those angels who had so recently rendered them "sore afraid" and the three wise men. Their contribution appreciated without compensation, for the Nativity, like much of every society, was not an economic activity.

We speak of ourselves as capitalists, though only a relative few of us actually hold much capital.

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ToDieFor

320px-The_Immaculate_Conception,_by_Giovanni_Battista_Tiepolo,_from_Prado_in_Google_Earth
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo: Die Unbefleckte Empfängnis (The Immaculate Conception) 1767-1768
" … faunching to go out shopping again, like a genuine Parisian …"

The phrase sounds so seventies to my ear, as if I hadn't heard it in decades, but back in those days, some would actually say that such-and-such (often a cheesecake or a particularly well-marbled steak) was, "ToDieFor." I was sure then that I couldn't quite unwrap the meaning. "Do you really intend to say that tasting this slice of cheesecake would have been worth risking your life for, and that had you not successfully waded through the surrounding mine field, or if a sniper had pegged you on the way in tonight, you would have gladly gone to your maker because you would have died pursuing this perfection? Really?" I never actually engaged in this sort of cross examination, though my mind always raised one skeptical eyebrow whenever subjected to this phrase. ToDieFor? Really?

These days, the phrase's taken on another connotation for me. Under orders to stay at home, my relationship to larder stocking's changing.

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Revisiting

modigliani_collar
"Jeanne Hébuterne au col blanc"
Amedeo Modigliani - huile sur toile - 1919

"Bless every blessed one of us here."

Psychologists used to insist that Revisiting the source of trauma helped resolve the effects of that trauma. More modern practitioners doubt that this was ever the case, and that Revisiting might resurrect strong memories of the experience, but might well amplify rather than mollify its effects. Freud was great for Revisiting, and the old joke about Freudian therapy reported that the typical patient was well on their way to recovery after only thirty years of intense clinical work. Still, a look backwards from a more secure location might provide opportunities to reframe the humiliating experience, but other techniques might allow for the traumatized to reframe the meaning of the experience without dredging up anything like the full past impact of it. I'm all for leaving the past buried, but for my money, I firmly believe that reframing might be the only effective way to change the past, which might be the challenge every traumatized anyone really faces.

The headlines once again scream Recession. Some even threaten Depression. These words hardly overplay the economic situation we all face, some of us much less prepared than others. Many have never experienced such calamity before, and while this current situation might well appear potentially much worse than any past downturn, each person experiences even the most global and far-reaching one, very personally; excruciatingly personally.

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Barriers

Barrier
" … one needs to invent a pencil to fill out the requisition for ordering pencils."

The Muse, The Otter, and I are presently cordoned off after a fashion. A minister in Louisiana hosted a gathering of 150 of his faithful, he insisting that if anyone contracted the dreaded virus, he'd heal them with the Spirit of the Lord. Good Lord! People reacted similarly to the Great Plagues in Europe. People became devout, hoping to at least be buried in consecrated ground, I guess. I'm trying to be more careful than that Senator who might have infected the Republican Caucus. (Notice how I'm not mentioning divine retribution.) The governor of Idaho thinks sheltering in place should be a local decision, encouraging that self-reliant pioneer spirit that killed off a considerable percentage of would-be pioneers. We're still not testing broadly enough to even get a half-decent statistical handle on the pandemic's spread. We count bodies instead.

I might not be quite as careful as I intended to be.

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CartoonScientists

CartoonScience
The Four Humours, from Deutche Kalendar, 1498

The Four Humours are the essential bodily fluids: Yellow Bile (Choleric), Black Bile (Melancholic), Phlegm (Phlegmatic), and Blood (Sanguine). It was thought that imbalances in these humours led to illness, but that they could be redressed by changing the diet, taking medicine and by undergoing surgery or bloodletting.

" … cider and kosher salt couldn't quite qualify as essential supplies …"

I consider myself to be a CartoonScientist. Not a scientist, I have accumulated a body of understanding based upon some science reading, certainly, but also through exposure to sources as disparate as credential-less self help authors and classic Warner Brothers cartoons. Yes, Wylie Coyote taught me almost everything I know about physics. I think I might have accumulated slightly more reliable understandings than has the mythical average person, but I confirm my scientific beliefs through firm conviction rather than by anything like objective observation. I hold at least one of my thumbs upon every scale, skewing my measurements in what I imagine to be my favor. I maintain my worse habits by essentially giving myself exemptions from any ill effects which might stem directly or indirectly from those habits. I believe myself to be much healthier than average, better fed, and more psychologically mature, just like all the other CartoonScientists surrounding me.

In my lifetime, "science" has confirmed as real many times more phenomena than in all previously recorded history, producing an astoundingly overwhelming body of understanding, the bulk of it utterly lost on me.

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GhostTown

Ghost Town
"Who would I have to become to thrive there?"

I drive because there's no place to go. I know nothing's open except inconvenience stores, and they're not really anything like destination resorts. The gas tank's full, milk supply fine. In the old days, I might head for a diner, grab a seat at the counter, and order a double batch of green chile-smothered hash browns while listening to the buzz and bustle surrounding me, having a little human proximity for breakfast. Us geezers are supposed to be up and out early, chasing lost youth or purpose reading our Times, appreciating our waitresses. The diners have closed except for to-gos, and what am I supposed to do, eat in my car? Drive home with styrofoam sweating on the seat beside me? Nobody runs news stands anymore. The drive-thru window at Starbucks sucks. I drive in broad circles as predawn twilight silently slips into day.

I drive to get away from myself, that quiet, sullen voice in my head stops muttering when I'm behind the wheel.

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HomeAlone

HomeAlone
Hermit Saints Triptych by Hieronymus Bosch, c.1505
"The background bustle could recharge my spirit …"

As a card-carrying introvert, I know alone. I know Alone In A Crowd. It's my natural state! I know the reassurance of bounded solitude, where I can hear the surrounding bustle without experiencing any danger of being run over by it. I understand Watching From Afar, where the whole rest of the world seems to be performing expressly for my entertainment and enlightenment. The Muse will tell you that she's often felt the need to forcefully expel me out into the world because otherwise nothing seems to happen. I can and sometimes even have passed for gregarious. I can work a room, though it burns through my energy like a diesel dually burns through fuel. I've known and come to prefer the pleasures of the solo presence, invisible at my choosing, alone on stage performing for a room of empty strangers. Not, though, sequestered away within an entire society of the sequestered away, I'm coming to know HomeAlone.

I hardly live alone. The Muse is here twenty-four seven since The Lab ordered her stay away and work from home. TheGrandOtter's here, too, though she keeps New Zealand hours, turning off her light about the time I get up in the morning.

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AssEptness

AssEptness
"I could be that vector I've been watchful for …"

I secretly hoped that enlightenment, should it ever deign to visit me, might arrive wearing a diaphanous robe and an ethereal countenance. Certainly some of my insights have arrived like cuddly little angels, but I'm coming to a nigh-on-to certain conclusion that my enlightenment will most likely arrive with all the pomp and splendor of a horse's ass. Not to denigrate the velvety curves of the equine behind, but that particular bit of anatomy has long been more closely associated with utter foolishness than with great wisdom. I understand that Jesus, when not hoofing it himself, often rode into a new town astride an ass, a common conveyance in those times. In these more modern times, I seem to most often enter new territories as the ass itself, not astride one. A donkey's cleverness extends to almost invisibly traversing narrow trails and sometimes exhibiting serious stubbornness, but I'd never imagined that my greatest contribution to this world might be similarly cast. I prefer the narrow, rarely traveled routes and I'm coming to accept that I can be just as stubborn as any disgruntled pack animal. I exhibit what I'll label AssEptness.

For me, acceptance almost always follows a lengthy period of stubborn refusal, during the later parts of which, my heels too-well dug in, I demonstrate well enough for even me to catch just what an ass I've been.

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First PureSchmaltz Friday

SoupCanTelephone


When:
Friday, March 20 at 11am MDT (1700 UTC)
Where: https://zoom.us/j/3019315733
(Please note that this link will connect you with David Schmaltz's Personal Zoom Account. The muse added me as a valid co-user this morning.) (03202020)

The web browser client will download automatically when you start or join your first Zoom meeting, and is also available for manual download here.
Download Version 4.6.7 (18176.0301)


This meeting will be the first convened video chat with people who have accepted my invitation to join my PureSchmaltz Facebook Group. What will we do? We'll chat, which means that nobody will attempt to sell anyone anything or stress out trying to convince anyone of anything. I will begin by making some provocative proclamation. Following that, we'll see where the resulting dialogue leads us.

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AnotherBeginning

AnotherBeginning
Moses Placed in the River (detail), from World Chronicle (text in German),
Germany (Regensburg), about 1400–1410, artist unknown;
author, Rudolf von Ems.
The J. Paul Getty Museum

"Moses has been placed into the river."

I think of stories as having a beginning followed by a middle followed by an end, though most don't seem to flow that way. Stories most often feature a beginning followed by a middle which is then followed by AnotherBeginning, more Möbius Strip-like than linear, multi-dimensional and circular. Each homecoming hints at another impending adventure. Even happily ever after suggests ongoing activity, not represented by detailed description but by more general inference. Even the most finite-seeming story leaves unanswered questions which suggest more than described. I'd conclude that every ending is AnotherBeginning, but there's no clear ending in sight. Perhaps consequently, I seem perfectly capable of identifying endings. 911 seemed to delineate the end of an era which I might have chosen to grieve over as if I'd lost my innocence. It also seemed to delineate AnotherBeginning, too, though, within which I might choose to divorce myself from my past. It was, of course, both and neither, my choice, my characterization which made it one or the other or both. Both beginnings and endings seem inescapably arbitrary.

This series of stories also begins arbitrarily, on the morning of the first day of Spring 2020, a day rather near the beginning of the Covid-19 Pandemic, an event which only recently swept into prominence.

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NowWhat?

NowWhat?
Studies of the Foetus in the Womb, 1510-13 by Leonardo da Vinci
"The long-procrastinated change finally comes as if in a lightening flash."

The National Weather Service predicts eight to sixteen inches of snow for this last day of winter and tomorrow's first day of spring. I worked all day outside in my shirtsleeves yesterday, rearranging everything in the garage to make room for that long-dreaded second car. The little voice in my head had insisted that it could not be done, two cars could not possibly fit into our two car garage, though most of our neighbors manage to fit two into their's. Our situation seemed somehow different. "None of our neighbors need to store a king's ransom in clay flowerpots in their garages," said that little voice in my head. "Store them somewhere else," my exasperated gut whispered in response. I dutifully schlepped that king's ransom of flowerpots down the steep sidehill and neatly stacked them on top of a carefully laid tarp, sorted by size, and bordered by innumerable cat litter tubs filled with last year's potting soil. The result looked like a bivouac supply base for a garden troll army, charming and primitive. By the end of the day, two cars sat parked in that garage.

I'd walked through that garage every day since the last time I rearranged it, averting my eyes.

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FinishingUp

FinishingUp
Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette (Bal du moulin de la Galette), Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1876
"Isolation's how we come to acknowledge our fragility, a superpower of immense significance."

I noticed yesterday that only a couple of days remained in this winter season. My SmallThings Stories would go on their way, replaced by another frame which I have not started imagining yet. I felt humbled creating these small stories, which started with no more than a tickle of intuition, hardly an inspiration, born of that frustration accompanying a necessity more than with any apparent foresight. Yet SmallThings now seems the precisely proper framework within which to reflect upon the three months now passing. Started on the first day of winter, with holiday grandeur impending, big things seemed imminent. After Epiphany, the days seemed to grow successively smaller, as winter days always do. Whispers started coming through from China about another viral contagion, the sort that China seems to regularly spawn; another bird flu, yet another distant swine flu. The news seemed as tiny as any that makes the back pages before it exploded, another SmallThing suddenly writ larger.

As if I needed to amplify my founding premise, Covid-19 came along to scream its underlying message.

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The Rhinoceros

Adaptability
The Rhinoceros, by Albrecht Dürer, 1515
"I'd much rather take care of anybody else."

I think of myself as eminently Adaptable, though I know I'm not. I'm certainly nobody's chameleon. I try to keep a low profile so as to not stand out. My primary defense never has been a good offense, but my diligence in remaining inoffensive and also unoffendable. I try to fit in by remaining invisible. When in Rome, I stick out like an infected thumb. The same in Paris, Prague, Vienna, and London, for I cannot even see what Adaptability might look like there. My fallback position seems to be to become even more me than I might have been anywhere else, an obvious difference in any ubiquitous crowd. I order my croissant with decaf and swallow that bitter reconstituted powder as if I enjoyed it even though I quite obviously—even to myself, even to The Muse—don't enjoy it at all. I'm a sheepish grin and bear it kind of fellow. I fake my Adaptability.

Facing a pandemic, I imagine myself somehow immune to the worst case outcome.

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AGoodTalkingWith

GoodTalkingWith
A Mortally Wounded Brigand Quenches his Thirst, 1825, Eugene Delacroix
"Wherever I might find myself, finding myself there might console me."

My cell phone wouldn't work in Farmington, New Mexico, not until I connected it via my hotel's crappy WiFi. The Muse insists that I should download the area's map from GoogleMaps, but I can't find a menu option to accomplish that. I relied upon the sixteen year old GPS in our "new" car, the display for which looks like a poor art student's crude attempt at abstraction. Most of this country continues to exist outside The Web, No Service being the most common message displayed on any hinterland traveler's cell phone. Those of us accustomed to ubiquitous 5G find this state of affairs annoying in the extremis, for we've sub-contracted half our senses to our little electronic babysitter. Navigation, entertainment, news, weather, and just staying in touch hangs by the very lamest of threads. Hopping from public wi-fi to public wi-fi, I almost forget that such connections never were in any way natural, they've just become a newer normal, at least until I leave town.

I judge airports by whether they offer free high-speed wi-fi, with good old PDX still the egalitarian standard.

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Reservations

Reservations
"I hear the phone ring but cannot make it work"

The desert surrounding Tucson seems tropical in the late winter rain. Washes and riverbeds actually feature water, though most closely resemble thick, ocher-colored pudding. Tucson's suburbs seem to stretch forty or more miles into the northernmost reaches of the vast Sonoran desert, Saguaro stately standing along steep rocky mountainsides. The road, two-lane blacktop. The excursion seems backward through time. From the gated sprawl into many centuries ago, the road passes out of these United States into sovereign native lands administered by tribal counsels: reservations. Apache, Comanche, Navaho, and Ute own much of what we refer to as the state of Arizona, a vast and apparently barren country, dusty and strange. Reservations.

The road bucks like an unbroken mustang. I simply cannot maintain the speed limit, a condition for which I feel enormously grateful.

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TheGreatLeveling

Leveling
The Barque of Dante by Eugène Delacroix, 1822

"Just like last year, but ever so much more so."

I will remember the crossing, not the departure or the arrival, for I found traumatic the transition between the familiar into this different. In my life, I've left so often that leaving barely registers. I slip into my departure coma and simply disappear. Arriving still seems a distant relief. The transition upset me. It might not be over yet, arrival inexplicably delayed without setting expectations for its eventual appearance. A furious easterly insistently nudged the aircraft away from its assigned course. The plane packed with refugees, or so it seemed to me, each uncertain if they should even be traveling under these circumstances and each headed for an unknown destination, regardless of what the flight manifest insisted. I could not imagine the other side and felt as if I might have nibbled off more than I could reasonably swallow this time. This would be no trip from Hell, though, it was an excursion into a greater unknown.

I think it hogwash that we accumulate greater understanding by living. For me, the mystery only deepens.

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BassingAckwards

BassingAckwards
" … the very best things in life … tend to emerge from sincere, dedicated, and inadvertent BassingAckwards."

The best things in life aren't actually things. Looking for best in the things realm might be the very best way to engage in an extended search without ever finding the object of my desire, or so my experience strongly suggests. I have stumbled upon the best things in my life, but only after pursuing actual things first. I know of no way to effectively engineer a successful search for anything truly meaningful, for the very act of engineering seems to attempt to inject altogether too much prescience and certainty into a search. One simply must start off in the wrong direction to ever come to solidly understand the deeper significance of any right direction. I insist that successful searches first engage in BassingAckwards. One begins by chasing the wrong tail, discovering distinctions by first failing to discover them. The deeper the initial disappointment, the greater the resulting realization and, perhaps, the greater the appreciation for the eventual discovery.

I declare this after once again discovering that an object of my desire more likely lies well south of my recent course, and without yet understanding just what a more proper course might entail, just that my former course appears to have represented another BassingAckwards experience.

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BeggingQuestions

BeggingAnswers
14th Century map of England
"The crisp response seems the enemy of our existence."

Ilya Prigogine whacked part of the scientific world when he declared that answering the question "How long is the British Isle shoreline?" was fundamentally undecidable. People had been dealing in this measurement for centuries before this Twentieth Century mathematician declared the question unanswerable. Prigogine pointed out that measuring the length of the shoreline depended upon answering some unscientific questions like, To what scale?" He showed that the length of the shoreline increased and decreased dramatically, depending upon the chosen granularity of the measure, and essentially melted into the infinite at a small enough scale. The length of the British Isle shoreline, he concluded, was a political question unrelated to science's objective observation. As a purely subjective inquiry, science could only stand mute in response. Certainly, surveyors could employ precision instruments to measure that length, but the measures themselves, utterly dependent upon subjective decisions surveyors made when encountering high and low tides, for instance, and a thousand other little curiosities, could only represent a compromised objectivity, and could therefore never be definitive. The question carried no clear indisputable answer and was therefore null. Encyclopedias still confidently state the length of the British Isle shoreline, without muddying explanation or just saying, "It depends," but it definitely depends.

I catch myself asking BeggingQuestions. Last night, landing in Tucson after a bumpy flight down from Denver, I caught myself asking after Tucson's altitude, though I could see that the city hardly sat upon a flat plain.

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Plague

plague
Johann August Corvinus (after Salomon Kleiner): The Plague Column in Vienna, copperplate engraving, 1724
"Not one of us seem especially blessed or cursed now …"

A stroller down Die Graben, the highest-end shopping street in Vienna, finds a magnificent Plague Column dominating the scene. Sponsored by Emperor Leopold I and finished in the late 1690s, twenty years after that last plague lifted, it sort of celebrates survival. Some cities built their plague columns in real time, while their plagues raged, to placate whatever vengeance God seemed to have been inflicting at the time, to demonstrate piety and survival worthiness. This artifact graphically illustrates suffering as well as salvation with gruesome depictions of agony supporting a gilded top featuring uplifting cherubic angels. Today, the symbolism hardly seems to spark piety in the passersby, overloaded with freshly acquired mammon. The visitor might linger to briefly ponder their own uncertain fate, but not long enough to make themselves late for the Opera.

One of the times The Muse and I visited Vienna, we were met at the airport by two separate drivers. The conference organizers had concluded that since we didn't share the same last name, we were not a married couple, so we rode into the city center in separate cars.

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PhreeDumber

PhreeDumber
La Liberté guidant le peuple by Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) 1830
"Insisting upon absolute freedom seems like just another insidious form of slavery."

Contrary to popular misconception, freedom is not now and never has been just another word for "nothing left to lose." What could this assertion possibly mean? Freedom might more reasonably be considered another word for "everything left to choose," if only because freedom seems to strongly imply an ability to choose for one's self. But freedom to choose does not impart the judgement or foresight to choose wisely. Your choice might infringe upon my choice or even upon your own well-being, and I might end up having to clean up some mess your choice produces. Unlimited freedom falls into the old Insidious Assumption Of Unlimited Resource Trap, an initially comforting latitude destined to do in somebody. Freedom only seems workable within some probably undefinable constraints. People sometimes go to war to determine these limits.

My neighborhood has rules governing what colors I might paint my house, a clear infringement upon my freedom to make different choices, though I explicitly agreed to this limit.

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BackUp

BackUp
The Pomps of the Subsoil 1947, Leonora Carrington (1917–2011)
" … further evidence that technology tends to turn evolution backwards …"

In the early morning of January 15, a message popped up on my screen while I struggled to complete my daily SmallThing, a piece about negotiating myself into engagement which I'd labeled NoGoNegation. I did not even distantly expect that this message prefaced seven weeks of irresolution, an enormous disruption to my sacred daily routine. My TimeMachine was reporting that it was unable to initiate my one of my usual hourly backups. My TimeMachine was connected to a TimeCapsule, a nifty bit of usually invisible hardware which auto-magically grabbed fresh stuff off my hard drive as that stuff appeared, making it theoretically possible to BackUp my hard drive to any point within the prior few months. In principle, I could BackUp my stuff to any hourly point over the prior few months as long as the BackUps continued uninterrupted. In that early morning, I experienced my first interruption ever.

Diagnosis ain't my strong suit if it even qualifies as a suit at all. I tend to just go buck naked when I encounter one of these mysterious messages.

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DifferentFrom

DifferentFrom
Cerberus 1824-27 by William Blake (1757–1827): Inferno VI, 13-33.
The monster Cerberus presides over the third circle of Hell, that of the Epicures and Gluttons.

"The disruption's the thing."

If one state dominates here, that state seems to be difference, yet I seem much more attuned to similarity. Difference upsets me even when routine has dulled me beyond recognition. I realized late yesterday evening that it was Friday. Twelve hours too late to create the SmallThings Story I'd previously committed to writing, I'd missed my self-imposed deadline, thereby fouling a public commitment that perhaps only I noticed myself making. DifferentFrom settled into my lap like a toddler with a soggy diaper. I did not feel welcoming in that moment, but embarrassed. DifferentFrom elicits a WhatNow?, from which one must figure out what to do next. The chain's broken. The commitment violated. WhatNow?

I've committed this same crime before.

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Chaings

Chaings
Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640): Prometheus Bound (Gefesselter Prometheus), between 1611 and 1612
"Fine metal working skills preferred because we're fixing to make Chaings again."

Prometheus (meaning "Forethought") gained a reputation as a clever trickster. He gave mankind fire and metal working, actions for which Zeus punished him by tethering him where an eagle would painfully eat his freshly regenerated liver each day, a particularly painful fate. I think of him as the prototypical change agent, for change agents tout their abilities to foresee, a boast common among flimflamming tricksters. They employ a curiously inflaming, seemingly iron-clad rhetoric (fire) which seems irreproachable, even inevitable. This speech inspires and incites a sort of satisfying insanity in others. They tend to develop self-regenerating livers, or at least seem to, as they quite often feel the need to lubricate their efforts with liberal amounts of liver-destroying beverages. The eagle, which might represent truth or fact or at least encroaching reality, cannot quell his hunger regardless of how many Promethean livers he consumes. This dance seems infinite.

Each election cycle some fresh Prometheuses appear.

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Politicnicking

Politicnicking
Édouard Manet: Luncheon on the Grass (Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe), 1863
"I trust them about as much as I trust that platter of questionable deviled eggs."

I think of politics as a sort of smoke-filled picnic, a gathering of curious choices within an equally curious context. Hobson's Choices abound. No formal menu informs any individual selection, for these meals depend most prominently upon what a participant might happen upon. Each dish bears the prominent fingerprints of its creator. Old family recipes predominate, with each mother rather proud of her "unique" contribution. Tucked between curious salads and a platter of questionable deviled eggs, the fried chicken looks a whole lot better than it ever actually tastes, the few flies buzzing around little deterrent from partaking. The burgers seem grilled by someone with great enthusiasm and even greater ignorance. The beer's inevitably lukewarm. Billowing clouds of obscuring charcoal smoke hang over the proceedings and the kids rush around like soda pop-fueled maniacs, embarrassing their parents and frustrating the vicar. We generally refer to these gatherings as celebrations of a way of life, though their real reward comes at the end of the day when everyone has successfully tucked away their leftovers and taken their sunburns to bed.

Elections fill me with existential dread, just the way any picnic might.

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ImmaculateSupper

ImmaculateSupper
Frans Snijders, Still life with small game and fruits; 1600 - 1657, Rijksmuseum, Netherlands
"Cheers (or something)!"

I'm more skilled at creating leftovers than I am at producing suppers. I possess no sense of proportion. I can't seem to think in realistic portion sizes anymore than I can imagine in cubic furlongs. The Tupperware® remains in near constant use, holding some once-treasure in the often fantastic notion that someone might finish it off later. We periodically purge the fridges of science projects, leaving a congealed centerpiece on the deck for the magpies. Some of that shit, not even the magpies will tackle, and so it smells up the garbage can until the following Tuesday. I understand how wasteful this cycle seems and if I could do better, I certainly would do better, but I seem stuck with this disappointing status quo. Sure, the supper looks like a feast when set upon the table. It later becomes little better than an enduring inconvenience.

Last night, though, I managed to produce what I refer to as an ImmaculateSupper, one which fully satisfies the diners while leaving no leftovers, nary a scrap.

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PanicMode

PanicAttack
Edward Williams Clay: The Times
(1837 U.S. caricature on the financial panic of that year)

"Being human hardly seems human some days."

Given the choice between fighting or fleeing, few humans seem very interested in winding their watch while choosing None Of The Above. We're suddenly consumed with an apparently urgent need to survive, especially when the situation carries little threat. We seem to be herd animals, sensitive to subtle, even non-existent cues. Someone passes you and you might well feel absolutely compelled to catch up and overtake them, goaded into a curious competition. What might happen if that other arrived at the next exit thirteen seconds before you? Whenever a situation seems to compel me into a life or death contest, I might prove wisest should I turn sanguine and dispassionately evaluate rather than start berating some other who maybe could have been my benevolent brother but which I instead insist upon turning into just another one of those. You know who I mean. A Them.

A poster on the neighborhood listserv invites nobody to panic. "Don't panic," she insisted, "but if you're wanting to stock up on face masks and tissue, you should seriously consider getting to the store before all the panic buying begins.

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SundayOff

SundayOff
Dawn: Luther at Erfurt, 1861, Joseph Noel Paton (1821–1901)
Depicts Martin Luther discovering the doctrine of Justification by Faith.


"Remember The Sabbath and keep it holy." (Hebrew: זָכוֹר אֶת יוֹם הַשַׁבָּת לְקַדְּשׁוֹ) -  Exodus 20:8-11
(One of The Ten Commandments)

Not being a member of any religion, sect, or faith, I sometimes wonder if I qualify as moral. I long-ago rejected the idea that I could publicly practice a religion and remain moral, religion being a personal and private conviction in my personal and private moral code. I do not as a rule take days off, for I believe that if one's work is an honest expression of self, taking a day off amounts to sacrilege. I remember The Sabbath but remain unclear what it means to keep it holy, since I find churches and synagogues to be hostile worshiping environments. I do not worship, though I remain steadfastly grateful for all I do not comprehend, which, believe me, remains considerable. The Great Mystery doesn't seem to be aching for me to resolve it, but to distantly respect it. If Martin Luther properly interpreted scripture, which seems wildly unlikely as Scripture seems impenetrably ambiguous on pretty near every subject, even my distance from religion might be covered under his Justification by Faith notion, a masterwork of an escape clause. I more deeply appreciate the Hebrew tradition of engaging in dialogue not intended to resolve ambiguity, but to lever it to gain fresh insight. The whole God thing seems downright medieval to me.

For better or worse, we live in secular times.

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The Curious Case Of Pomegranate Molasses

Pomegranate
"Scarcity often results from a passionate and sincere lack of imagination."

I recently found a terrific granola recipe. I'd grown weary of the available commercial choices to the point where I'd just stopped buying the stuff, switching to plain steel cut oatmeal. The store-bought stuff tended to be way too sweet and often came packed with stuff no self-respecting consumer should attempt to swallow, like coconut, about as saturated a fat as exists, on the far side of even leaf lard, or so I imagine. I wanted no dried fruit, which inevitably turns into a sort of molar-cracking nut when included into the mix. I can add dried currents or blueberries to the bowl, and don't need some thoughtful individual to bake them into unchewable additions at the factory.

The Muse encouraged me to just make my own, but acknowledging myself as nobody's baker, I quietly demurred.

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Led-Gend

Led-Gend
Illustration from Legends of Charlemagne by Thomas Bullfinch, Illustration by N. C. Wyeth, 1950
"What fantastic mural might W. C. Wyeth have produced to depict MY story?"

Mary Colter, famed designer for the Fred Harvey hotel chain, always began her work by creating a rich fantasy about the building she intended to design. These fantasies had nothing to do with historical accuracy, but with design coherence. When faced, as designers inevitably are, with trade-offs, she'd refer to her fantasy to determine which alternative most closely cohered with her underlying story. Her La Posada in Winslow, Arizona, though partially dismantled into railroad offices in the sixties, still exudes a fantastic attention to small detail. A guest feels a sense of every element being precisely in its place, right for its purpose. From the wide hacienda porch around back to the great room tucked between the first and second floors, even down to the inconveniencing absence of an elevator, the place seems to be precisely what it purports to be, the legacy of a childless Spanish land-grant holder who bequeathed his inherited one hundred fifty year old home. It was none of that, of course, except Colter's Fantasy Led-Gend seems to have made it so.

I had concluded that a guiding vision needed some grounding in reality, but I might have wrongly concluded.

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ComingIn

ComingIn
"Living suddenly amounts to observing the passionate play and finding myself in it."

An average of a hundred and twenty-five unique page views passed through the PureSchmaltz Facebook Group each day last week. I find myself struggling to maintain my reputation as a loner and outsider with such crowds observing me. I've long identified with the old Five of Pentangles Tarot Card, where two street urchins pass by a warmly lit church window in the snow. The Muse always asks why I don't just go inside where it's warm. I usually respond that I do not know why. Perhaps I felt myself in the middle of my metaphorical forty days wandering through wilderness or had not dressed myself properly for entering a church, but I'd insist that I felt as though I could not belong, regardless of how warm of a welcome I might receive there. I'd continue trudging. Trudging can become habit-forming, a genuine addiction, and I might have grown to serve as its poster boy, for I have nurtured my trudge and grown accustomed to my place in society, but trudgers require a certain anonymity if they are to maintain their lowly social status. Surrounded by appreciative throngs, even a champion trudger seems a tragic parody.

I CameIn over the last week, an act almost entirely but not completely the opposite of Coming Out.

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ReEntries

ReEntering1
"We arrive home just to feel gone all over again."

ReEntering exacts the full price of absence. The longer-anticipated any repatriation, the greater that price. Twelve days gone returns to find a backlog. The place smells odd. The cat-sitter didn't take out the garbage. The dishwasher we thought we'd left running had not been turned on and had become a smelly science project in our absence. The place seemed knee-deep in cat fur. I lit a stick of that piñon incense The Muse had found in Arizona, though The Muse cautioned me to burn only one because it kicked up her allergies. Better to offload the suitcases in the laundry room rather than schlepp them upstairs full of stuff that would just need carting downstairs again. The Muse sets to sorting laundry, an activity I've learned to avoid lest I offend her delicate and mysterious sensibilities. She's still never successfully explained her sorting algorithm to me. I unload the car, perfectly packed after so many days on the road, a precise place for everything and not a single item out of place. A great undoing commences.

The kittens, predictably, do not rush to greet us.

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ColoradoWelcome

ColoradoWelcome
Building the New Road (mural study, Golden, Colorado Post Office), Kenneth Evett, 1941: Smithsonian American Art Museum
"The asylum doors once again successfully breached."

A ColoradoWelcome seems similar to a Bronx Cheer in that both terms describe the opposite of lived experience. A Bronx Cheer turns out to be nothing more than a slobbery demeaning jeer, more mocking than welcoming. A ColoradoWelcome works more like a prolonged dedication test seemingly intended to determine whether an arrival can be broken before allowing entry. Both localities prove to be tough places to live, let alone to visit, so the local Welcome Wagon® tries its darndest to chase off that newcomer or returning resident to either keep the riffraff out or, perhaps, to preserve the place exclusively for the riffraff already there. Try entering Colorado by air and you'll experience turbulence like you never imagined possible, deplaning to swear to never set foot onto another airplane again. Attempt entry by road and you'll come to experience more than you ever wanted to know about harrowing. No road leads directly to Colorado but must pass through some deeply discouraging buffer zone first. Once inside, something will encumber your passage. Escaping's every bit as daunting as gaining entry.

A hundred years ago, Colorado experienced one of those periodic squirts of All American optimism so common to the nation's history.

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Redemption

NewMexico_Spot_Alligators_1_134a5614-9ac1-4012-b9b6-0e297463a15c
"May our former blockages find peace rusting beneath a wind-whipped Southwestern sun."

Home seems unfamiliar now. Twelve days toodling around The Great American Southwest has left us accustomed to continual difference. We stage for our attempted homecoming in the most alienating place in The Great American Southwest: Los Alamos, New Mexico. This state, the quirkiest in the lower forty-eight, is neither new nor Mexico, but New Mexico, more a state of consciousness than geographic territory. Here, desert turns back into verdant mountains again. The Sangre de Cristo burn crimson each sunset. A frigid wind reminds us that we left the South behind some time ago and that we're nearer the Midwest now. We're apparently headed home.

I've dreaded this last day since the day we left, expecting a mad scramble through the Cimarron, over a treacherous Raton Pass, and along the sleezy western extent of the Eastern Plains to reach home, but our dear friends Mark and Rita reminded us of US 285, a more civilized two-lane alternative which sneaks up through the middle of Colorado, an hours-shorter and seemingly less-harrowing alternative to the most primitive of the unimproved Interstates.

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Reconnection

reconnecting
"The School of Athens" by Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino
"Bad fences eventually fall, leaving the finest neighbors of all."

If I could receive my druthers, there would be no divorce, dislocation, dismemberment, or death. I do not always get my way. Some separation naturally occurs. Someone moves away. A phone number goes missing. Another commits Facebook Suicide and falls off that corner of my Earth. I slip into one of my signature periodic depressions and consume my presence with paranoia. Any of at least ten thousand individual causes might conspire to separate one from another, and once unbound, that once thriving relationship stays unfound, sometimes permanently, or seemingly so. We live in big ruts, unable to even imagine up and over the sides. We stay inside rather than venturing out. I hermit, and claim to prefer the lifestyle. The Muse might know better. She forces me up and out to wander about, to see what I might otherwise never even imagine seeing.

I'm at root a big chicken.

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WhyFidelity

WhyFidelity
The (Great) Tower of Babel, Pieter Bruegel the Elder - c. 1563
"One day, we'll plug ourselves into a recharge cord as soon as we sit in the driver's seat …"

My iPhone features so many settings that it's a genuine wonder why it works at all. I don't often use it to make or receive calls, for even with the speaker turned up just as loud as it goes, it whispers at me. Further, when traveling, I find myself more often out of range than anywhere within it. Whole cities like Tucson seem mostly comprised of dead zones. Heaven help anyone seeking a wi-fi connection, for these seem few and very far between. Starbucks® remains the travelers old reliable, though, offering clean rest rooms and decent wi-fi almost everywhere. They serve the traveler like Kinko's® used to before FedEx® took them over. The Muse downloads maps of the region to her iPhone because otherwise GoogleMaps® would mostly remain inaccessible. I tend to ignore my iPhone when traveling, so complicated does connecting become. The Muse and The Otter mysteriously remain somewhat online regardless, probably because they've mastered their settings in ways that I most certainly never will. We hop from HotSpot to HotSpot seeking to stay connected.

I can't remember how I stayed connected before cell phones, even though my connection today seems spotty and intermittent.

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Cordiality

cordiality
The Inn Keeper by Edward Charles Barnes, before 1882
"Cordiality makes our world go 'round square, with hardly a wobble."

The Iron John Brew Pub in old downtown Tucson sells beer in minimalist surroundings. The bartender greets me cordially, just what I need as I lead The Otter and The Muse into the place. I feel initially dissatisfied with the offerings, a collection of burnts and sours, but quickly enough winnow options down to a choice. The Muse chooses a Licorice Stout which she doesn't care for, though I'm intrigued by its odd herbal loading. The Otter chooses a juicy guest tap IPA. I select a Black IPA and we settle in to recover from a fragmented day, one without the benefit of lunch. Recovering from multiple traumas, The Otter experiences good and bad days, just like the rest of us, though hers seem to carry stronger amplitudes; higher ups and lower downs. She sometimes feels as though she's drowning, and this had been one of those days. The Muse and I provide what support we can, and though drowning never qualified as a spectator sport, we're certain that we cannot swim for her. We had more or less managed to drag ourselves through the day, though at times, barely. We needed cordiality.

Throughout this trip around The Great American Southwest, we've quietly relied upon Cordiality to pull us along.

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ConspicuousPresumption

conspicupuspresumption
"The most conspicuous consumption leaves one utterly depleted at the end."

The Leisure Classes escaped to The Great American Southwest, where the great American presumption of infinite resource finally came into its own. There, everything necessary to sustain life would have to be imported at considerable inconvenience, for not even water could be counted on locally. The beleaguered Colorado River, hardly a decent creek coming down out of the Rockies, quenches thirsts and greens golf courses across the region. Rich in mineral resources, Arizona naturally features vast spaces, but virtually none of the supporting resources for maintaining even a modicum of modern life. Its comparative advantage seems to be winter sunshine, of which it provides plenty, but everything else arrives by rail, semi-truck trailer, or air. Phoenix freeways reliably clog at least twice each day as commuters cross this former wasteland to travel from home to work and back. Homes here tend to be modest one-bedroom structures, with little high-rise construction. Suburbs, though, stretch beyond scorched surrounding mountains into verdant desert where cactus thrives among low-rise hacienda-style homes of every size, from cinderblock shack to extravagant cliff-dwelling. Everyone drives everywhere.

Close in, barrios dominate. Further out, huge homes.

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As-Iffing

As-If
The School Exam, 1859, Friedrich Peter Hiddemann
"Reality seems a belief-based initiative, or so our scientists insist."

Sedona sits nestled beside the seemingly insignificant Oak Creek, a watercourse which has over countless millennia carved an admirable red rock canyon, leaving soaring sandstone spires surrounding it. It seems both the most unlikely and dramatic setting for a small city. Its airport sits atop a mesa. It's reputed to hold several 'vortexes,' places where mysterious energies converge to impart special powers upon those who can tap them. Tourists—as near as I could tell in passing, the same tourists we encountered at The Grand Canyon—flock to these special spots, climbing red rock trails to bask in something not immediately obvious. The Muse, The Otter, and I slid up a slippery rock trail to find what, precisely, at the top? As Mad Magazine used to proclaim about its writing staff, The Usual Gang Of Idiots, ourselves prominently among them. A small plane practiced touch-and-goes out of the adjacent airport, buzzing the crowd of seekers. It felt like a cut-rate Lourdes without the water source. We, and supposedly everyone around us, stumbled back to our cars underwhelmed by our brush with touted greatness. We climbed up there As-If we might experience something life-changing but left feeling as though we'd suckered ourselves. As-Iffing sometimes works like this.

We returned to the car, then headed ourselves in the general direction of Phoenix, just As-If we might actually be able to drive there.

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Cantilevered

cantilievered
"Rocks can't care."

The GrandOtter and I shrank back from that first cliff edge. The Muse strolled right up to it, leaning out, peering down. Two thousand feet below, scree validated that gravity had been working there since before time began. I stood well back, finding some solid ground to sit down upon. The Otter warily edged closer. One dizzying glimpse over that precipice had satisfied all the curiosity I might ever muster. The Otter edged even closer. The Muse wanted to hop over the retaining wall so she could see even deeper down. The Otter finally edged right up to the wall. I walked back to wait in the car, unwilling to watch these darlings dangle so danged close to eternity.

The next morning, visiting another precipice, The Otter stood on a cantilevered boxcar-sized boulder snapping a 360 degree photo of the display.

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PassersBy

Passersby
Quirky building at Meteor City, AZ
" … while passing by another hundred or three distractions we won't actually stop and see."

We drive past a hundred places for every one we stop to see. We say that we're toodling, but we do a lot more passing by than stopping to see. The Great American Southwest features no shortage of roadside attractions. From rickety little Navajo kiosks to a giant meteor crater, each attraction features some sort of sign intended to attract eye and interest, and each looks genuinely interesting in its way. We've chosen the destination or two for the day, and these diversions hector us every inch of the way. Were we to stop at each, we'd never make headway, so we become PassersBy rather than visitors. By the end of the day, we'll alight somewhere and linger long enough to feel as though we've developed a feel for the place, but our experiences will remain on the superficial side of staying, hardly even visiting at all.

When I was a kid, my family would collect bumper advertising proclaiming that we'd visited Sea Lion Caves or Trees of Mystery.

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ADifferentMan

ADifferentMan
Portrait of a Merchant - Jan Gossaert - [c.1530]
"Neither are any of us."

"What's changed for you in the almost three days we've been traveling into The Great American Southwest," I asked The GrandOtter as she deftly demonstrated how to drive across a Navajo Reservation.

"
I've started learning to just F*C#IN' DO IT," She exclaimed! (The Otter's language can at times emerge sprinkled rather liberally with a backstreet French dialect.)

Once I'd ceded driving duties to this sometimes presumed overly-brittle young woman, relegating myself to the significantly lowlier role of backseat passenger, her former brittleness utterly disappeared. Certainly, mine seemed to increase, as if to maintain constant the net mass of brittleness in the universe, but hers simply disappeared. She confided that she could feel me stiffening in the seat behind her, vibrating as I held myself back from butting in too awfully much, but she'd decided to continue as if my sensibilities didn't matter. She, after all, HAD the freaking wheel. What could I do about it? Nothing, she presumed, and so she drove as if she were fully competent and eminently capable of fulfilling that critical role, critics be damned, and so she proved to be.

Over the following three hours, I gnawed a fresh hold in my tongue, but we both held fast, and it's seductive to presume that The Otter had become ADifferentPerson by the time we'd arrived, though I suspect that she had not. Not really.

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ButtClenching

ButtClenchers
Deadhorse Lookout, Utah
"Surrounded by alien territory, greater authenticity could emerge."

The Muse travels well, she of the ungainly pile of tour guides and carefully curated maps maintains our places in spaces and times. I simply drive. Having successfully fled winter dread into ParadoxCountry, we find our collective ButtClenching as we investigate sentiment and erosion on the grandest possible scale. Much accretes over the course of a typical planet's entire history, and some leavings can't help but wash away over time. This washing away displaces original deposits, leaving behind the most curious structures and shapes, just like our lives seem to do. We live on time scales insignificant when compared to the total history of this planet. Modern geologists conclude with ranges multiple times the merely unthinkable, or within a few odd million years or so. We think ourselves senior in our sixties, not a paltry sixty million, but a sixty-some single years. We stand clueless but still curious, interested in observing, though looking over and into even finite eternity can produce some serious ButtClenching.

I suspect that ancient man sought out ButtClenching as a handy antidote to ennui.

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ParadoxCountry

ParadoxCountry
Job and His Friends, 1869, Ilya Repin (1844–1930)
"I suspect that it will always be too early to tell what the outcome might become."

Winter eventually becomes too predictable, with each day bringing a wearying self-sameness. The yard remains either a steadfast beige or a persistent white, and the kitchen produces endless braises and bean pots. There are only so many variations, and those differences eventually melt into no variation at all. Foot-dragging ensues. Whatever's doing, it seems a struggle to start and an utter impossibility to complete. Frozen in place, little change or growth or improvement seems likely to emerge. Animation seems to suspend for the duration, and the duration approaches the infinite, for the more familiar spring, summer, and autumn reference points sit beneath a snowbank likely to remain in place until after Memorial Day. Getting away seems necessary, though unlikely. The Muse insists. Who would anyone have to become to effectively resist her?

From the moment The Muse, The Otter, and I pull away from our freshly snow-spackled driveway, we feel more at home.

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TheRuleOfLawyers

RuleOfLawyers
"Decency demands no less of us or of them."

We insist that we, unlike many countries, live by The Rule of Law, though it seems as though we increasingly live under The RuleOfLawyers. The law stands for what has been legislated by duly elected representatives. Lawyers stand for anything, for they trained as advocates capable of arguing any side of any issue. They seem to seek something other than truth or justice, the oft-touted American Way, but their way instead. They shamelessly shave pigs, split hairs, and boldly dare to support any position they're being paid to support. A beleaguered corp of public defenders, underfunded and over-scheduled, seem to stand alone against well-entrenched forces dedicated to denying anything they choose to deny. Absurdity reigns. Inequality under the law prevails. Respect for the law seems neigh-on to impossible.

A democracy seems at root a faith-based form of government.

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RoadTricks

RoadTricks
Grant Wood, New Road, 1939
"I imagine Kokopelli, the Road Trickster, will be guiding our way."

The Muse has been hankering after a road trip to The Great Southwest ever since we relocated to Colorado. She figures that once we finally move back to The Great Northwest, we'll live far enough away from those vast and fascinating wastelands that we'll never feel moved to visit, so she's created a deadline of sorts. If not now, then when? She holds a short list of spots she'd like to visit. As usual, I feel relatively disinterested in the undertaking. I approach long road trips with the same enthusiasm I employ for root canal surgeries. I dread them beforehand, though I usually manage to click into some semblance of a spirit somewhere along the way. I'll go, but I'll drag both feet before we leave.

I understand that I'm nobody's great gift to driving. I don't exactly hate driving, but I'd rather take a train.

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HardLabor

HardLabor
Walker Evans, The Breadline, 1933
"You're just the care-giver."

The hardest work I've ever done didn't look like HardLabor. No muscle straining resulted. It was not accomplished beneath an unforgiving sun. Nor was it undertaken under the threat of a gun bull's steely eye, and not to take anything away from all those who have suffered so, I didn't really know I was laboring hard until I was somewhere into the middle of the effort, already having bitten off more than I might reasonably chew, and destined to one day swallow. Divorce was harder than bucking bales. Quitting cigarettes nearly killed me, but quietly, in the most nerve-wracking way imaginable before then. Losing dear friends hurt worse than my muscle groups ever have. Recovering from trauma punishes more than the original trama ever thought to punish. Helping another recover from trauma seems even harder than recovering from trauma since the work's necessarily arm's length and guided by unreliable supervisors. Progress seems unlikely for the longest time.

HardLabor seems fueled by faith, a firm yet quivering belief that the effort might one day seem worth it.

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SelfWorth

selfworth
Luis Jiménez y Aranda (1845-1928) - The Bibliophiles (1879)
"Maybe value's all in other peoples' heads, but not in mine."

It's tax season so I've been reassessing my SelfWorth. I'm unsure what currency to use to calculate this value, or even if I should employ currency at all, for I'm not now and never have been a money guy. I've never had a portfolio and The Muse has kept me well away from all household accounting since she watched me attempt to balance a checkbook decades ago. Two days of frantic effort left the result inconclusive, her appalled, and me exhausted. She claimed that she could have arrived at an indisputable outcome in a few minutes. I realized that I'd always reinvented my methodology every time I attempted to balance the books, imagining complicated schemas for creating whatever might constitute balance. However otherwise exemplary my university education might have once been, Accounting had been a definite low point, since none of it made any sense to me. I queried my professors, hoping that they might be able to explain the logic behind the much-revered Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, and they told me something like, "Abandon all logic, ye who enter here," for the principles had been founded by general agreement, not logic. They quite literally made no sense and could only be conquered by rote memorization and practice, practice, practice. The university bookstore refused to repurchase my accounting texts at the end of the semester because their covers had accidentally come off due to my repeatedly throwing them against brick walls in lieu of pounding my head against them. Accounting remains a deep and uninteresting mystery to me.

But if I were to attempt to calculate my SelfWorth, what besides the unholy GAAP might I use?

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Blocked

blocked
"They've got your number, remember your name, and ultimately tame themselves."

My grandson Roman, who turned eight last week, has grown into an aspiring writer. My son Wilder reports that he's been struggling with intermittent writer's block and asked if I might give him a gift of insight into this most distressing element of every writer's existence, so here goes:

Of course writers only come in the aspiring form, because aspiration forms the soul of even very experienced writers, who seem eternally no better than their
next production. Writing brings no residuals, no resting on past laurels, not in the writer's mind, which endlessly roams ahead. A finished piece does not continue as a work in process, but extinguishes the fire that forged it shortly after it's finished. Finished pieces hold little interest for the creator, and the writer might not very well remember the details about even a piece widely recognized as a signature one. Writing serves as an extractive effort, intended to discard/ Not a building up activity creating a body of work, but a disposal activity intending to make space for something else. Writers leave the critics and fans to accumulate. The writer eliminates.

The urge to create seems most similar to the urge to take a poop.

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Out

Out
"Would I become a better man once I can tranquilly stand to spend extended isolated time with myself?"

After the fifth sequential snow day, even an experienced meditating monk aches to get Out. He'd trade nirvana for a stroll around even a usually reviled well-heated shopping mall. He might even consent to a Cinnabon® just for the sheer variety it might bring, because he's been further away from Springtime than he remembers ever being and the serene snow seems simply tedious now. Somehow, some way, he's simply got to get away, just Go. What first seemed comforting and close became almost smothering, way too close for even the comfort a warming fire might bring. He'd consent to supper at that little place in the village where the food has always been consistently lousy and the service much worse, where a simple supper won't be served until two full hours after he takes his seat, where only two employees managed to make it to work that shift and the bartender's doing the cooking. Lord knows who's tending bar. That's how far down this latest storm's taken our humble monk.

Others, ordinary folk without the monk's extraordinary ability to discipline themselves, seem mad with bottled up frenzy.

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Impressioning

RegularShapes
Claude Monet, Impression, Soleil Levant (Impression, Sunrise), 1872
"I do not remember this familiar ever before being precisely like this."

We remember Claude Monet as the original impressionist. He was widely reviled in his time, for his work seemed to violate the rules for what had constituted valid. His first impressionist image, shown above, seemed out of focus, as if the subject was moving rather than static, more smear than clear imprint. Nobody could precisely state what it represented without reading the title, and even then, critics disagreed over whether Monet had faithfully executed his label-implied intention. Today, we conveniently say that Impressionism more faithfully represents lived experience, for nothing in this life exists in so-called regular shapes or sits still while a photograph gets taken, and resulting photographs seem small and flat compared to lived experience. The photographic-quality image seems most impressionistic to our more modern eye which has grown to accept every captured image materially misrepresenting the originating visual experience.

Some seem set upon insisting that photographs are more real than any impressionist's painting, though their insistence seems overly dependant upon how one defines 'real.'

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MisConnected

DisConnected
Snap The Whip, Winslow Homer, 1872
"We can create vast networks dedicated to delivering on a fundamentally foolish notion and produce its opposite instead."

Our Internet was supposed to connect us all but seems to have achieved the opposite effect. The Greeks labeled this phenomena Enantiodromia, and considered it a natural result, that things tend to run counter to original intent. Obsession explains some of this. Over-focus easily blinds one to creeping counter influences, leaving an over-passionate pursuer vulnerable to normal stumbling blocks. Ideation, initial envisioning, tends toward idealization, so we quite naturally imagine utter impossibilities and produce opposites instead. Given free reign, we seem fully capable of running anything into the ground. Judicious constraining might seem to blunt possibility, but it also buffers against catastrophic reversals. Modesty seems more likely to produce positive results than audacity might.

The trades insist that everyone's ordering online now because it's more convenient. I live well behind this curve

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TheChat

TheChat
The Glass of Wine, Johannes Vermeer, c.1658 - c.1660
" … one of those pleasingly notorious SmallThings we maintain between us."

Deliver me, please, from the ponderous conversation. Protect me from the onerous plea. Free me from all stentorious presentations. A chat seems what I need. A rambling one without apparent purpose. I trivial one where nothing gets disclosed. I cheering one where no-one gets derided. A hopeful one where we're clearly glad to see each other up close. One devoid of discomfiting revelations, a modest meeting of the most immodest minds. A face-to-face without verbal competition, a simple sit-down around a pot of tea ,or beer, or one of those clear cocktails you sometimes seem to prefer. A "what's new' unlikely to grown older. A "not much" serious sort of chat. A plain-old ennobling fresh engagement where no demons seem welcome to unfold. A meeting without an underlying purpose. A connection intended to lead nowhere. A brief breath of sorely needed fresh air, just the two or three or four of us there.

Let Presidents and politics lie their fool heads off while we engender sweet respite.

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-Bound

-Bound
N. C. Wyeth, Snowbound
"I'm sitting by the fire looking out while also peering within."

My dearly departed friend III insisted that Boundary Was Everything, an apparently paradoxical statement in a world more recently interested in everything out-of-the-box, where boundaries exist only to be ignored. Get yourself snowed in, though, and my friend's assertion comes into sharper focus. Snowbound serves as a sort of instant self-discipline. If you can't go anywhere, you suddenly have no place to go. Whims simply stifle themselves. Whatever else my heart might desire, we're eating in again tonight. Like always, there's nothing actually on the television tonight. The fireplace shows better movies no matter how many times we've seen this one before. The cats curl up close as if trying to catch their fur on fire when the temperature difference between inside and out hangs in the upper sixties Fahrenheit. Snow continues falling after the first great shoveling. Candles glow half buried beneath that snow.

It's darker outside than almost any other night of the year. I cannot hear anything. Even the plow mumbles as it passes.

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DItY

DItY
"Done in by a tiny recalcitrant sheet metal screw."

Paleo-man did everything himself because the specialist phase of social development had yet to arrive. For eons, generations of our predecessors never thought to ask for help from any factory-trained specialist. This was a presumably proud species, self-reliant and skilled enough, though none ever once encountered even the smallest of our modern conundrums, like the justifiably terrifying tiny hex-headed sheet metal screw. Their world featured rock, wood, and leather, wild beasts and flint-prompted fire. They had no crawl space fans needing replacing. They owned no socket set with three dozen differently-sized attachments. They never watched themselves schlump back up the basement stairs to fetch that tool they'd earlier felt certain that this job wouldn't need. They had no neighbor egging them on, boasting about how easy replacing that fan would be. They never experienced DItY, the harsh reality of our modern Do It Yourself craze, for it is certainly a craze, a crazy-making preoccupation wherein an otherwise self-respecting fellow's self-esteem takes it in the shorts again and again and again. DIT, properly translated, means not Doing It Yourself, but DYtI, Doing It to Yourself.

Two little letters, one almost insignificant word, 'to,' the difference between a job well done and doing another job on one's self.

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MyBetters

MyBetters
The Beggar Maid, German school, 19th c.
"We remain more equal than we can possibly know, let alone understand."

Declaring superiority carries its own disqualification. How smart could it possibly be to declare yourself smarter than another? Likewise with beauty and every other comparator known to humankind. Humans don't seem all that kind up close. We break ranks to stack ourselves like cordwood, judging our position relative to others', taking either solace or frustration depending upon how we, as the saying goes, "stack up." The self-proclaimed morally superior stack their cards in favor of their own positioning, looking down their long noses at all those so-called "beneath" them. The Founders of our once-great republic were exclusively of a single so-called superior class. They preached an equality their lives seemed not to afford them, hoping, perhaps, to level a mountain they stood atop, for there were others on higher peaks than they could ever aspire to, divinely righted to dominate over those less than themselves. By the divinely-righted's accounting, everyone was a lesser.

White Supremacists seem like so many misguided clowns failing to catch themselves parsing the world upside down.

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AbsoluteMagic

absolutemagic
Henry Gillard Glindoni (1042-1913): John Dee performing an experiment before Queen Elizabeth I.
"I don't quite know as little as she did … yet."

Knowing seems the most over-rated ability. Not to denigrate folks who know a lot, they're welcome to their achievements, but I speak here of what we believe we need to know. This belief seems like AbsoluteMagic. The stories I tell myself, explaining why I can't do, seem to anchor what I don't yet know, as if my lack of knowing reasonably prevented me from certain doing. In practice, this insistence rarely proves true. Most of what I've actually done seemed more fueled by desire than by knowledge, the knowing emerging after or along the way toward actually having done. Certainly, I usually struggled before achieving any desired end, but most of these complications seemed beyond knowing until the moment I encountered them then figured 'em out. No amount of preparation could have helped me avoid complications, or so I conclude.

My ability to assert what I could not possibly know serves as AbsoluteMagic.

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Actnying

Actnying
Mosaic depicting theatrical masks of Tragedy and Comedy (Thermae Decianae)


"One key to successfully assimilating into any new year lies in finding yourself already in it."

The PureSchmaltz Facebook Group attracted five hundred and forty unique page views over the six days following my last summary of the prior week, which produced seven hundred and forty-two unique page views, an absolute measure of an incomprehensible metric; but hey, if it's the only number I have, it's the one I'll use. Had I expected this group to amplify my brand or promote my business, I might feel panicky over the one quarter reduction in what's euphemistically referred to as 'traffic' in the internet world, but I don't consider the members of this group to be traffic or click bait or potential commercial targets. This group and my PureSchmaltz Blog, to me, represents the way our internet was supposed to work. Please do not mistake me for a commercial entity, for I have much more riding on this endeavor than mere financial success. I've dedicated my little stories to cataloguing life as I live it here, in hopes that some day, one day, my progeny might use them to experience a few tastes of what life felt like for me while living forward from here, absent history's blurring lenses and mythology's inevitable Comedic/Tragic glorification, and also for the enjoyment of a select cadre of self-selected 'fans,' the only group for which I've volunteered to be a member.

My prior week represented a return to familiar territory, an experience I'm referring to as Actnying, action infused with denial.

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Nesting

Nesting
Las Hilanderas [The Spinners] (c. 1655–60), Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez. Museo del Prado, Madrid
"Our nest feels fuller now. So do our lives."

The Muse and I have been empty nesters for most of our lives together. Our kids were almost grown up and out by the time we connected, and aside from a few fraught months here and there, and our accompanying cats, we've been on our own everywhere we've lived. Until last fall, we'd inhabited empty nest isolation for the ten months since Rose The Skittish Spinster Cat met her maker. Then around Halloween, everything began to change when The Muse invited her sisters, a niece, and The GrandOtter to visit. Our kitten Max arrived around then, too, and the place hummed for a few days before slumping almost back into an echo-y mausoleum again. The following week, Max's sister Molly arrived to herald in a new age, our formerly empty next infested with kitten play twenty-four hours of every day. Then The GrandOtter returned for a visit which has now turned into an impending full-blown relocation, and our nest seems far from empty now.

Curiously, the place seems larger full than it ever did when empty.

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CastOffs

CastOffs

"Once loved, once reviled, then once again loved again, …"

The Villa's furnishings have never matched, each piece hailing from its own era, half of it in long-standing desperate need of reupholstering, each CastOffs in their time. The Muse and I believe that our furnishing style imparts a homier feel than more modern matching furniture might. We refer to the overriding style as Early Undergraduate in remembrance of those apartments we once inhabited where one rented a room and shared furnished living spaces, perhaps with the bottom end of a closed-off grand staircase dominating the living room and providing overflow seating space. We've acquired these pieces in second hand shops and estate sales over the duration of our relationship, always looking for quality, of course, but also for an acceptable quirkiness. Our furniture mirrors our shared experiences. One chair in our master bedroom looks like it had rickets as a child, one foreleg curiously angled. I might get around to performing surgery on it one day, but it works just fine for the purpose we intend for it for now. Some of the stuff belonged to our forebears. A rocker my great grandmother rocked me to sleep in, recovered by the ever-inventive Muse, still retaining its original satisfying squeak. A cherrywood china cabinet from a consignment shop dominates our dining room. My writing chair, a remnant of my first wife's grandfather's estate.

Each piece, like all CastOffs, holds a story, many pre-dating our stewardship, our home an Americana museum.

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IrrelevanceRevisited

RevisitingIrrelevance
Remember Uncle August, the Unhappy Inventor, by George Grosz (1919)
"Irrelevance no longer seems the enemy …"

I want to be remembered as one who resisted the breakup of The Bell System, a regulatory change which eventually drove everyone using a leased phone to purchase one for themselves. The choices were predictably dissatisfying, cheaply built and expensive relative to the few dollars the sturdy leased one had set me back. I had been more than satisfied with the green Princess wall model hanging next to the basement stairs, its extra long cord allowing me to stretch the handset clear into the entryway and perch on the lower stairs when talking with someone. The phone I bought to replace it never hung properly and stopped working in under a year, starting an odyssey which left me doing much more for myself while paying more for that privilege. My concerns seem as irrelevant now as those of any master carburetor mechanic or revered buggy whip manufacturer for cars no longer employ carburetors and what passes for buggies these days no longer require their operator to ever employ a whip.

The first part of life seems centered around solidifying identity. Once one nails down who they are, what they are to become assumes a more prominent role, seeking relevance.

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TheStranger

Stranger2
" … choice a person makes before they can take ramifications into full consideration."

I heard myself say it, perhaps more confession than admission, "I've lived as a resident alien since I was eighteen." I'd never heard myself say that before, and my statement stuck in my craw. The suppertime conversation continued, though I noticed that it resumed without me. I eventually caught up, though I continued to carry my inadvertent little blurt along with me. Did I really mean that or was I just mugging for some non-existent camera, making another signature outrageous remark? My disclosure held fascination for me. Was it really true? Had I never, for fifty contiguous years, felt as though I was of a place I'd lived? It was true enough, I decided upon further consideration. Except for that one decade where The Muse and I moved back home, I later confided, I've felt very much TheStranger everywhere I called home. Helpfully, The Muse reflected that even there, I mostly felt like TheStranger, too.

I feel very attracted to the concept of community, of clan, of tribe, perhaps because I've experienced so very little of these in my life.

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PreConstruction

Pre-Construction
"PreConstruction always proves to be ironic milling around …"

By this time in my life, I should have accumulated more than adequate experience in the fine though under-appreciated art of PreConstruction, an essential stage in every development project commonly referred to as The Essential Milling Around Period. Each New Year throws me both forward and backward, ahead into a fresh calendar and also back to my internal drawing board to somehow determine who and what I might become this year. A new year's early weeks highlight that I simply do not yet know who I'll become. My now extensive experience within this throwback space insists that my greatest potential danger lies exclusively in deciding too early on inadequate evidence and understanding, so I'm out collecting stones, as Jerry Weinberg once characterized this activity, unprepared to declare my intentions for employing them. The resulting pile of rocks might not appear to be much yet, but only because it isn't. A few seem of exquisite proportion, potential cornerstones or centerpieces, though without a clearer Gestalt, I simply cannot yet definitively declare.

This time unsettles me. Seven hundred and forty two individual page views observed me gathering stones over the last long week.

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SmallDistinctions

SmallDistinctions
Allegory on the Blessings of Peace by Peter Paul Rubens, 1629 - 1630

"Not knowing has always been the first stage of genuine wisdom."

We do not inhabit a world crafted by large decisions but SmallDistinctions. I can't deny that sometimes HUGE effects follow some decisions, but these effects only rarely result from someone deliberately making some momentous-appearing choice, if only because nobody can accurately foretell future momentousness, and only a future can perceive large effects. Us humans seem to prefer to see ourselves as big-time decision-makers, though, and this preference carries a considerable cost. We seek to optimize when some barely good-enough option could do. We wholesale accept or reject when some smaller support or deflection might better preserve. We elect humans to high office expecting them to produce great things, when great things do not seem to be a human property or agency. Our world, like it or lump it, seems most deeply influenced by our eternally nascent ability to make SmallDistinctions encouraging well-informed choices. Standing upon such choices, wise but almost never Large decisions might be made and thereby nudge forward genuine improvement.

We insist that we have huge problems, which naturally seem to consequently require huge solutions, encouraging us to chase after largely irrelevant choices.

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Panicking

Panicking
"The tough guy who never cries seems like the bird that never flies."

When The Muse and I first got together, my life was in tatters. My second marriage had just ended, landing me back to Go without first collecting any two hundred dollars. I was living in a crummy little apartment. I felt separated from my life, a truly terrifying situation. Sunday nights, I would find myself crawling into the back corner of a closet and weeping uncontrollably, a full-blown panic attack temporarily taking over. These sessions usually lasted for two or three hours, though nobody was timing them. They'd end when I'd exhausted myself into sleep. I'd wake in the wee hours of the following morning to shamefacedly crawl into bed until dawn. The Muse seemed unflappable, observing my Panicking without taking it as a personal statement about her, a remarkably respectful and supportive response.

My Panicking pattern continued for months and months until it finally dissipated.

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LateStatusQuo

LateStatusQuo
Blind Justice by Michael Barton Miller, Ukiah County Courthouse, Mendocino, California

"We might usefully navigate using a guiding star without ever expecting to achieve it."

In LateStatusQuo, things have already fallen apart, though a society tends to engage as if they haven't. Yet. Revered traditions have become parodies of their former selves though almost everyone continues to play along. Once lofty aspirations have already evolved into mighty myths capable of sustaining themselves in spite of the clear absence of fresh confirming evidence. Disconfirming evidence itself becomes the enemy. People are judged by whether they're for or against us, and even mild support receives punishment as inadequately vigorous. The rule of law might still reign supreme, but subsequent rulings have successfully undermined the intention of equal justice upon which the law was originally drafted. The still revered 'equal justice for all' clause of the Pledge of Allegiance is amended to append 'worthy of equal justice,' for whole subclasses of once-equal aspiring citizens have become legally disenfranchised to make adequate room for those who deserve justice. Everyone else gets legally damned.

A man in Alabama might receive a decades-long prison sentence for stealing a loaf of bread while a shyster investment banker who bankrupted thousands receives a 1% slap-on-the-wrist fine as part of a deal with prosecutors which included no public admission of guilt. Some lives clearly don't matter.

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Appreciating

Appreciations1
"Appreciations are grace. Try not to chase them away."

Appreciations seem almost impossible to properly deliver. My mentors taught me that a proper appreciation must be delivered face-to-face and one-on-one. Group appreciations violate this first principle of principled appreciating. I know, before schooled, I'd felt nary a qualm when tossing off a quick group appreciation vaguely targeted at "you guys." However sincere my feelings, from the perspective of the receiver, I can understand how a certain depth of feeling might have seemed lacking. I find that it's not always logistically convenient to deliver a right and proper appreciation, like when I am in a group and I can't seem to leverage a moment of alone time to target my recipient person to person. Such logistical complications usually leave me failing to mention my appreciation at all, hoping that a flash of eye contact might serve as an adequate replacement. It never is.

I believe that most of the world's ills would be easily fixable if only we could openly talk about them without rancor.

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RoeDayOh

RowDayOh
" … us Townies will never understand."

I grew up in a town with a RoeDayOh, but I'd never attended one until last night because I was a 'townie.' Townies live in the small city adjacent to ranches, but live utterly separate lives from those lived by cowboys and ranch hands. Townies do not wear Wranglers, but Levi's, and eschew almost everything to do with the covertly effeminate cowboy boots, snap-front shirts, and mangled broad-brimmed cardboard cowboy hats. Townies name their offspring Bill, Bob, or Joe, not Yancy or Wade, and not one of us ever even think of wearing fancy belt buckles or getting any closer to a live bull than a very rare steak, let alone attempting to ride on one's bucking back. Townies pray that they do not win the door prize of a $75,000 diesel Dodge Ram pick-up. We think of cowboys as overly-committed throwback cosplay characters, mimicking a history that never was. Townies maintain their own delusions every bit as alienating as any cowboy's or cowgirl's, my point being that we're cut from different cloth, fabric with little middle ground upon which to meet.

Back in the 1930s, when Hollywood discovered The West, the standard plot line would feature city slickers visiting a dude ranch where they'd be introduced to authentic Americana replete with ballet-dancing cowboys and small symphony orchestras performing impromptu Gershwin productions.

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Shakedown

shakedown
"Few of us ever read the small print."

In Manhattan, the Shakedown exists as an art form. Nobody expects to find a bargain there. The very hotel which touts its dedication to serving clients won't blush when demanding thirty or forty bucks for a substandard Continental-Style breakfast. The client will hold his cool, understanding that the place has him over a barrel. They will levy spurious service charges simply because they can. Nobody seems to pass up an opportunity to take their piece of the action. The price of admission won't actually bankrupt you over the duration of your short stay, but it might get you thinking about staying away the next time you're enticed to visit.

My Subaru dealer makes more subtle threats.

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Waiting

Waiting ...
Waiting for Legal Advice, 1857, James Campbell (1828 - 1893) (British)
" … the machine will continue to grind …"

I think of waiting as an adult time out. Most delays amount to SmallThings, a few realigning moments between actual destinations, and I'm learning to simply accept them for what they are, which is never defining, a small interruption to the regularly scheduled programming. A brief respite between some here and there no matter how interminable each might seem. A challenge to cobble together a short alternate to the expected experience. I keep an audio book enqueued on my iPhone or some other worthy distraction which I access to fill in the space. Now that we all have smart phones, every waiting moment quickly transforms into a Facebook or email scan, we're rarely truly idle. Most of our interactions with our government seem to become exercises in patience, at the post office, the DMV, the title registrar, or some other outpost of our humblingly huge bureaucracy. We anticipate these waits, bringing along a newspaper or a book with which to entertain ourselves as we idle. I prefer to watch the machine working in the same way that I gawk at the automated tortilla machine or the juice squeezing juke box when waiting for a restaurant table.

The machine seems to never idle, whether present as a single inadequately-staffed post office window or a dozen numbered windows around a waiting area with actual seating.

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DreadOfWinter

DreadOfWinter
Dead Man Alley-Winter, Millard Donald Everingham, 1940
" …Nothing to dread but dread itself."

Ennui follows Epiphany like a baby elephant follows its mother, tiny trunk grasping reassuring tail, for this world seems especially forbidding then with redeeming Spring just as far away as it will ever be this year. Self confidence falls to its lowest recorded readings since this time last year as nights infinitesimally shorten and days drag themselves through unremitting self-similarity. The New Year, so promising just a fortnight ago, seems prematurely spoiled, already past its pull date while hardly even begun. Hollows hold snow frozen into alabaster insults, lawns a uniformly unpromising beige again. I dutifully light my luminarias each dusk and retrieve the candles each dawn, attempting to demonstrate the single watt of faith remaining from Christmastime. I maintain my schedule, some days kicking and screaming myself back into the yolk, where considerable pushing and shoving ensues. Each essay breach birthed with the inept assistance of an incompetent and uncaring midwife. Such is mid-January life.

If it would only snow to seal the conviction that there's really no place to go and no reasonable way to get there if there were, but the sky remains indifferent with unpromising clouds and fierce winds pushing backwards toward the East.

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DoctorVisit

DoctorVisit
" Modern medicine seems almost identical to medieval medicine, except the leeches are larger and more impersonal. "

The Muse and I belong to a Health Network, a common modern American euphemism which means 'limited monopoly.' Once 'enrolled' and accepted, a Health Network combines with insurance coverage to become a client's one-stop service center for all things medical, from check-ups to diagnostic procedures to prescribing. Ours features a patient Portal which was obviously designed to try our patience. It looks just like an early Windoze app and performs like one, too. All communication gets funneled through this needle's eye which might send a text message reporting that new information's been posted before denying access. What was that Pastword again?

The Network suffers from all the shortcomings common to transactional associations gussied up to appear relational. I, for instance, don't actually have a doctor but a nurse practitioner, which seems fine with me. Any deeper diagnostics, she refers to actual doctors which I never actually meet since other nurse practitioners perform actual procedures. Later, the doctor will post conclusions to the Portal which might deny me access again. Every encounter with The Network finds me repeating my birthdate, address, and the last four digits of my social security number, just to confirm that I am who I purport to be. I have been known to leave a waiting room if the questioning becomes too onerous. They always ask me to report The Muse's birthdate, too, which I tell them that I do not know precisely. They've allowed me entrance anyway, so far.

My Portal record, once I access it, always insists that I have not fully completed my personal patient history paperwork, though I have completed it to the very best of my ability.

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NoGoNegation

NegNoTiation
"A day without engagement might turn into a week, then a month, then a season, and finally a year or two or three. Who would I become then?"

Some Mornings, not even deeply ingrained habit can move me off the starting line. Most days, I'm up and running without a first thought inhibiting me, but those Some Mornings resist my lead. I would much rather veg out binge-watching a police procedural, lose my soul to an audio book, so just flip through the news, not an ounce of ambition egging me forward. I almost never completely submit to these slothful enticements, though. Rather than slip under that self-negating spell, I enter into a very specialized form of negotiation, NoGoNegation. My goal seems to be the most primitive form of mastery, the motive energy to move off a single stuck dime. I need not talk myself into any but SmallThings, since even imagining accomplishing any GreatThings seems to only further demotivate me then. One tiny excuse, one modest objective and the inertia of stuckness quite literally slips into its kinetic counterpart.

I'd think that after decades of practice and consequent experience, I would have become something of an expert in this field of NoGoNegation, but I seem to start as a novice every time.

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GroanUp

GroanUp
"I'm in a much bigger body now, but more of a kid than ever."

Maturation might involve little more than repeatedly catching one's self engaging in ridiculous actions; SmallThings which, when later tallied, amount to huge differences. Youth imparts a sense of invulnerability which experience shatters, and rightfully should. Even the wins might manage to impart a few of humility's finer points. Accumulated losses might convince anyone that they're a fool a heart. I'm now a grandfather of considerable experience, The GrandOtter now present as a twenty-one year old, though I suspect that I'll forever relate to her as though she was still about eight. The ensuing years have humbled us both without making either of us particularly wiser. We share mutual respect though my advancing age tips presumptions in my favor. I am, after all, the presumptive grownup in the relationship, though I experience my self as most frequently a GroanUp.

A GroanUp has made a fool of himself frequently enough to sincerely question his own authority and omniscience.

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Wariness

wariness
"The hopeful believe in Archimedean physics yet still persistently tug on their own bootstraps …"

I feel a certain Wariness after reading the newspaper, a SmallThing. I can no longer bear to tune into the network nightly news broadcast, and even NPR has recently shifted to the edge of the bearly bearable. I never did watch Faux or listen to Limbaugh or subscribe to any of the innumerable conspiracy theories which over-populate social media, all of which seem to thrive on vague generalities, if not intended to induce paranoid feelings, fairly successfully manage to routinely do so. I firmly believe that the second amendment remains widely misinterpreted for the most cynical of reasons. I favor a wide-spread freedom from religion more than I support the Constitutionally-guaranteed freedom of religion, and that mixing politics and religion inescapably poisons both.

I was born into These Paranoid States of America, where victory in WWII and a humiliating draw on the Korean Peninsula left this country too wary by half.

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ReasoningAgain

Thinking1
"What we do when we encounter these outcomes probably determines whether we drive ourselves crazy or sane."

I think, therefore I feel confused. Descartes apparently presumed much when proposing his now nearly infamous "I think, therefore I am" notion, for 'am-ing' seems to include much more than what might be properly represented in the Predicate Calculus. More people now deeply understand and employ logic than at any time in the history of the world so far, and what has that wash of Reasoning bought us? It does not seem to have brought us anything like the much-touted heaven on Earth early logicians might have presumed it might, for we seem to have neglected to purchase the Absurd Syllogism Insurance Rider which might have better protected us from ridiculous constructions leading to absurd conclusions. They say that we're all about data now and we increasingly seek computationally verifiable paths which seem to just about as reliably as prior methods, lead us into genuine Old Testament-quality temptation, even evil. Much of what I witness seems determined to defy any and all Reasoning, including but not exclusively those philosophies most firmly rooted in Reasoning. Our computers might be on the fritz.

While we might properly deduce much about our situations, much more remains beyond Reasoning.

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Rhyming

rhyming
"She quickly learned to sing along."

The most memorable poems leave behind the most curious images. A dish credibly runs away with a spoon. A huge egg tumbles off a high wall. An eensy-weensy spider, not a small or tiny one, climbs up the water spout. Tigers burn bright. Roses are roses are roses, and this otherwise redundant, tautological description stands, and taller than most every other attempt to memorialize the rose. Poetry often rhymes, but even when it fails to rhyme, it almost always exudes a rhythm scheme, a cadence which compellingly pulls the reader along. Nothing need be terribly exact unless engaging in some specialized sonnet, restrictive haiku, or bawdy limerick. The so-called nursery rhyme, many of which persist as familiar and reassuring ear worms throughout even long lifetimes, exemplify poetry for me, or po'ms, as I've grown to call these silly little spoutings to better suggest that something's missing but not forgotten from them. They might lack a scholarly decorum but compensate with a warming silliness.

Writing po'ms demands an unteachable skill.

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Timing

Timing
"This shift fools me every time."

A New Year induces an arrhythmia into the proceedings, for my life, every life, amounts to proceeding. Whether this forward momentum smoothly flows or jerks me around depends upon a seemingly subtle coherence. I mostly feel no need to fine tune my presence. It is, and is just as it is, background silence, a deeply muffled cadence. I might continue without considering my propulsion until some milestone steps into the middle of my road. Year End and New Year reliably disrupt my sublime unconsciousness, seeming to force more deliberate reflection. My reliables seize up on me and I'm unwillingly forced to rethink what I hadn't sensed myself thinking about in ages. My motions lose their continuity and my thoughts pace without concluding anything. I become a steam engine who's lost my tracks.

The past week amply illustrates this rethinking phase. My PureSchmaltz Facebook Group attracted 784 unique page views, some of which I can doubtless attribute to you and your presence here, a single point of continuity for me and I hope for you, too.

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Lying

lying
"I don't lie to myself about lying to myself."

In the beginning was a small misrepresentation, a truly SmallThing. Nothing vicious or deliberate, just a little attempt to improve the quality of my story. It exacted a small toll, a tiny tariff, and I moved on. I moved on mindful that I'd need to remember that deviation or risk my story seeming to slip into question in the future. I could over time become inured to even making distinctions between absolute truth and comparative fiction and increasingly trade in legend, like any name-brand product's advertising. Truth seems alluring only in theory. In practice, our stories need heroes and villains, damsels and dragons, disturbing beginnings and reassuring endings, not the unending ambiguity simple truth provides. I too easily justify my immersion, insisting to myself that any version providing a more easily accepted meaning might make even the occasional egregious lie totally acceptable, an improvement over an uninspiring truth.

Every great civilization was founded upon a fundamental lie, a probably deliberate inflation of potential or heritage, similar to the motivational stories each of us told to reassure ourselves that we might actually achieve what we naively aspired for.

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Squeezed

squeezed
"Take us aside and we'll register no real complaint, except for the nagging squeeze which seems as though it simply must be at root unnecessary when it might qualify as the very essence of life."

The Muse returns from work and recounts a meeting where everyone reported great satisfaction with their work, except everyone said that they felt Squeezed. Too much worthwhile work, but too little time to complete it properly, the eternal complain of the gainfully employed. The squeeze had been on since forever ago, for there never was a time where available time very closely matched expectations. This seems to be an Old Testament Problem, one that probably pre-dates recorded history. Writing that history was most likely delayed due to a lack of schedule time with competing expectations, trade-offs were made and written history deferred until more pressing business could be concluded. We're all squeezed. Even if no discrete expectations scrunched up the horizon before us, we'd still feel time pressure and wish for a tad fewer demands on our time.

I can foist a piece of this difficulty off onto human anticipation.

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Coping

Coping2
Vincent Van Gogh: Old Man in Sorrow. On the Threshold of Eternity, 1890
"We do just what we do, which might be the very wisest response any clueless anyone could ever muster."

I consider coping to be more emotional than any learned skill, and resilience, more a matter of personal pattern. Lose someone and one does what they do, and might not even notice what they're doing then. Coping amounts to one of those responses that don't necessarily register as a response. Given a significant-enough loss and a sort of auto-pilot seems to kick in without cluing in the pilot. I remember when my sister Susan died in a car accident, my youngest sister flew in for the services and I spent a long day tour-guiding her around the town I lived in. Only later did the excursion seem in any way questionable to me and she just numbly followed along. I was numbly leading, coping as I now recognize that I cope.

In the Midwest where The Muse grew up, a death prompts all the women to start cooking, usually scalloped potatoes.

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Seizing

Seizing
"As we speak cruel time is fleeing. Seize the day, believing as little as possible in tomorrow." Horace
(Historically bad advice better suited to epic works of fiction.)

"Seizings are a class of stopping knots used to semi-permanently bind together two ropes, two parts of the same rope, or rope and another object. Akin to lashings, they use string or small-stuff to produce friction and leverage to immobilize larger ropes. Seizings are not recommended for heavy loads for critical use as strain reduces the diameter of the main rope and can permit slippage even with proper construction." Wikipedia

Seizing the day does not seem to insist upon what I though it did. For me, I've long considered Seizing akin to grabbing and holding on, damn the consequences, but Seizing seems more nuanced in practice. It involves connecting, sure, but connecting with purpose and with acknowledgment of likely future stresses and strains. It is definitely not a cavalier grab, but a strategic connecting often employing small-stuff.

"Small-stuff is a nautical and knot-tying term for thin string or twine, as opposed to the thick, heavy ropes that are more often used in sailing. It is commonly used in a whipping to bind the ends of ropes to prevent fraying.

"Historically, the term referred to cordage less than one inch in circumference. Much of the small-stuff onboard ships, especially that used for decorative or fancy ropework, was made by the sailors themselves reusing materials unlaid from old and leftover pieces of larger rope and cable." Wikipedia

I sometimes watch a day slip away and chide myself for not authoritatively Seizing the damned thing before it slipped away from me, a strategy which sometimes seems more inherently self-destructive than in any way helpful.

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Scribbler

scribbling
"I might be writing a script … "

My ancient oak desktop holds two old notebooks. Its drawers hold several more. A pile of papers two feet tall sits atop the old steamer trunk across the room. My dresser top holds a couple more old notebooks, and a bookshelf holds more than a dozen completed journals. I carry a small Moleskin® in my back pocket wherever I go, and a pen in my right front pocket, for I am a Scribbler. I'm more inclined to jot down a short descriptive phrase than to snap a quick cellphone photo, for I more meaningfully retain my experiences with words than with pictures. I'm just wired that way.

My son's a Scribbler, too, though as a trained fine artist, he scribbles sketches, genuine visual images.

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Hubris

hubris
"The one who cried wolf might be tainted forever for demonstrating the audacity to confront the Hubris."

A certain Hubris seems to come with owning a system. It's yours, after all, and reason insists that it should attend to you by providing that which its designers intended it to provide for you, except systems don't actually work like that and never have. To own a system seems to be the equivalent of being owned by that system, in all the nuanced ways being owned entails. It's always got your number and always did. You quite understandably expected toast from your toaster but instead received a three smoke alarm wake-up call. Blame the toaster and see what that gets you. Resolution will demand inconvenience. You or some service representative (or, more probably, your spouse) will roll up their sleeves and get to the bottom of the difficulty, presumably forestalling any repeat performances. You'd be wise to anticipate repeat performances, though, because your toaster isn't so much first a toaster, but a system, and all systems come with unintended consequences built right in, albeit often unwittingly. A system, you see, remains capable of outwitting even its designers, for once that system roams free in the world, it will no longer find itself constrained by the breadth of its designers' imaginations. It seems to develop a conniving mind of its own.

Systems seem to insist upon a certain level of humility on the part of their owners, a wariness, a caution.

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ForeignTerritory

ForeignTerritory
"… my mind's still unlearning its preconscious tendency to date stamp everything as if it were still a year ago."

I didn't take a thousand mile train ride precariously balanced atop a freight car while fighting off muggers, nor did I swim across an unwatched patch of an icy stream or hike for days across trackless desert to arrive here, but I nonetheless feel every bit like an undocumented alien. My passage seemed precarious enough without all the pitfalls any decent Central American would have to overcome, and I feel as though I haven't quite mastered the languages and customs here, though I'm clearly on the other side of a contentious border and insecurely in ForeignTerritory now. Every New Year arrives like this, and perhaps it's the new year feeling queer around me and not dear old me to blame. Something significant's changed. I reflect that this fresh year has no experience here, either, and that I might be experiencing a contact buzz without having swallowed any of the new Kool Aid® myself. Whatever the cause, I feel at least as different as the surrounding territory seems. For now, I seem to have been passing. Now that I've disclosed my internal state, Immigration might jump my butt.

The first week of any new year used to feature mis-headed homework papers dated the year before or checks pre-dated by precisely twelve months, but nobody manually date stamps homework or even writes checks anymore, our smart appliances automatically fill in today's date on the appropriate line on every form.

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ArtificialEverything

artificial
Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet, 1854. A Realist painting by Gustave Courbet
" … a small town that grew up to still be small, but somehow less of a town for it."

South Table Mountain juts up as backdrop to the small town of Golden, Colorado. Its basalt rimrock crowns unpromising grades, draws, and washes still frequented by bear, bobcat, and small deer who browse surrounded by more rattlesnakes than I like to think about. Years ago, circa WWI, the Army built a base up against one side of it, but the rattlesnakes chased them off. A minimum security prison camp now inhabits what of that camp not ceded to the snakes, and The National Renewable Energy Lab sits just next door. High tension power line towers run across the top of South Table Mountain to service the largest beer manufacturing plant in the world along Clear Creek below. Failed attempts to build roads to the top remain as overgrown scars along all sides of the prominence. People ride horses up there, and mountain bikes, and even hike, though there's more to trip over than actually see up there. It seems a genuine bit of nowhere, offering views of Downtown Denver, not anybody's idea of a sight to treasure beholding, though the locals think of it as nature just out their backdoors.

I sat in a Starbucks, sucking down a china cup of decaf and staring up toward the top of that small mountain, realizing that almost nothing I could see bore much resemblance to nature.

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Predicting

Predicting
"The future seems perfectly capable of taking care of itself."

I woke up this morning with the genuine sense that I was suddenly inhabiting the future. The New Year arrived overnight and as usual, I couldn't quite keep my eyes open long enough to witness the fateful transition, so I faced this future in the early morning, all by myself, while the rest of the household slept. I remembered pondering this very future back when I attended elementary school, employing my newly gained arithmetic skills to calculate how old I'd be when, and the year twenty twenty always crept into my pondering. I figured that the future would very likely be much different from what my then present had been. I would be a fully-grown man by then, old, even, by my rough approximation, maybe even dead. I considered those I knew who were as old as I would be then and strained to imagine myself as how I might turn out. I never once suspected that I might still be striving and still not quite settled on who I would be when I finally grew up in the year twenty twenty, but here I am.

Almost every prediction I remember making then turned out quite differently than I'd projected.

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TheDailyRumpus

TheDailyRumpus
Le Derby de 1821 à Epsom,1821, Théodore Géricault
" … I once found it perfectly acceptable to start the day with a placid perusal of the paper."

Days begin with a thump now, the muffled sort of crash a kitten makes after misjudging a pounce, followed by a few moments of almost frantic pounding. The Daily Rumpus usually starts without me as witness. I enter the arena well after the start of the festivities to find another ornament down and the dining room table's cloth hanging at an odd angle. They've also displaced the carpet runners, making the room look like it belongs in one of those Vortex House tourist traps us kids used to plead to stop at when my dad was trying to make time on our summer vacation drive to Southern California. The food bowls will have been picked clean and the water bowl nearing empty. A plant might have been mysteriously tipped over, throw rugs knotted where they lay. Doilies lay like crumpled butterflies in the seat bottoms beneath their usual display positions along the tops of chairs. The wicker rocker will have lost its throw blanket and all will seem right with the world.

The celebration will continue for the next few hours, re-enouraged by the presence of an appreciative audience.

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Lags

Lags
" … it contains an adequate number of warts and surface imperfections …"

I hand-tooled my Production Process. I started it before I'd mastered my tools and well before I'd settled on what I would be producing. My process as well as my product have been evolving over time. Some of my process was obsoleted when Adobe® acquired FrameMaker® and decided to suspend support for the Mac version of their once-fine product. Several other pieces of the machinery became inoperable over time. There being no adequate replacements, I discovered little sneaker-net workarounds, creating a process that both defies logic and also fairly reliably produces output, as it's called. I've avoided any MicroSoft® product, finding them uniformly unusable, user hostile, and I never got over the anti-trust action that vividly described how they'd come to dominate the corporate computing market. I understood that I could definitely get better elsewhere, but that I'd never pay more, and since I was only sometimes a corporation in name only, I could not and didn't really aspire to compete in that realm. I cobbled together thises and thats and managed to produce close to what I intended.

Somedays, my hand-crafted system seems composed of Lags connected by no more than stepping stones.

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A Double Handful Of Coal

TheIdea
"Maybe I'll write two today, just to maintain my usual pace, if an additional Idea emerges."

In the beginning, there was nothing but void, and since void amounts to nothing, in the beginning there was nothing; no originating idea. Voids offer little in the way of leverage. Eventually, an Idea tottered into what had been the void's nothingness, temporarily voiding the void and leaving a sense of something in its place. Something, but nothing much more than the roughest raw material: a double handful of coal: Greater potential, yea, but little more. Few substances carry more potential and less promise than a double handful of coal, for coal, like any Idea, needs a lot of conditioning to amount to anything, and even when it amounts to something powerful, it only manages to achieve anything with great supplemental support and it leaves behind clinkers and nasty smoke; powerful perhaps for a time, but always producing nasty externalities.

Ideas seem to come in flurries when they come, if they come.

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Partum

Partum
"The creative act always retrospectively seems like a SmallThing …"

Fridays come but seem to mostly go, ever receding. A week starts, filled with promise, then ends, sometimes with the promise fulfilled, though even when fulfilled, it seems a strange sort of promise, for an aspiration never quite qualifies as a promise, it being more crap-shooty than any promise really should be. I work from Friday to Friday, with no weekends or holidays off, and at the beginning of a fresh Friday—my Monday as well as my Friday, both the beginning of a fresh week and the ending of an expended one (a Begending)—I feel more reflective than anticipatory, last Friday being my work year's sole exception. Last Friday ended my last creative cycle, GlancingKnow, marked the beginning boundary of my next cycle, SmallThings, and also heralded the start of my annual Christmas Po'm-writing cycle, wherein I write just as many fresh seasonal poems as I can in the time between Solstice and Christmas morning, this period marking my most intentionally creative week of the year.

As I noted in last Friday's reflection,
SmallerThings, rather than expanding my reach, my GlancingKnow three month enquiry left me feeling smaller, more tightly focused.

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Shaving

Shaving
"Some days, it seems to be the only thing that really matters."

The days where I've shaved before heading out the door seem to unfold differently than those days when I do not. For me, Shaving's like suiting up before entering the game. The uniform should properly not in any way affect the quality of my play, but it sure seems to. Shaved, I feel as though I'm putting forward my best face. Grisly, I know that I'm most certainly not looking my best. However mediocre my best might seem to anyone else, my less than best can't hope to compete. I feel complete after shaving, though I know I've just scraped off a fine skin layer and might reasonably feel a little less for the exercise.

I think the ritual, small though it might seem, makes the real difference.

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Kittens

Kittens
Mother Love - Paul Peel (1860 – 1892, Canadian)
" … they carry within them some innate skill to reset the rhythm of the place …"

I hold the strong opinion that every place holds a rhythm. Think of this beat as the baseline supporting the foreground melody. We more than inhabit our digs, they also invade us with the rhythm they induce. For the ten months we went without pets, much of the rhythm of our lives relied upon us to pound the drum. Aside from the magpies arriving each dawn and the weekly familiar sounds of the garbage collection trucks, The Villa's rhythms relied upon the recycling heating system to reset the tone. Sure, supper prep always reset the cadence of a day, as does cleaning up in its own curious way, but without the rhythms of a pet, it's very difficult to engage in even the more familiar melodies.

A life needs disruption, what Douglas Adams referred to as an Improbability Generator, some force to force-feed a different rhythm into the same-old status quo.

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Fulfillment

fulfillment
Laundress. This fragment is an artwork by Jean Baptiste Simeon Chardin
"As long as I could maintain this slight fiction, I remained golden."

However long any effort takes to accomplish its aspiration, the accomplishment seems to manifest in a moment. Before that point, it's not quite done and after, it's clearly over and I'm on toward the next enqueued accomplishment. The weeks of preparation leading up to Christmas will condense into a single moment on the blessed morn. We work so hard to achieve something as if it might bring salvation, but the best it ever, ever brings seems to be a quick moment of satisfaction. Immediately after, the internal critic probably resumes, and later, the hamster wheel starts squeaking again. Living seems largely soundtracked by the squeaking wheel that no lubricant could ever adequately grease. Peace comes in a moment, though it departs just as quickly.

Some of us, myself included, find our fulfillments in starting fresh stuff.

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Mattering

Mattering
Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
"I'm not supposed to know beforehand, but propel my work with faith, …"

I seem to seek significance here, where meaning is king and obscurity dear. My reputation sticks to my heels like shadows and my futures sometimes seem so uncertain and shallow. I seek some opening, an opportunity to shine, while I seem most afraid that someone else might get 'mine.' I sometimes shimmer green-eyed jealous, zero-sum at some level, as I seek my salvation with the help of some devils. It's a tough row to hoe here, of that I've no doubt, but I still hold enough promise to believe in myself. Have I built myself a set of wings set in wax or just plowed rocky fields while surveying the hind end of an ass? I'm engaged in my business, whatever that might be besides waxing and promoting a brand you'd call me. I'm not just in this for myself, though, for I engage in the kind of work that doesn't make much dough.

Oh, some mornings I'd certainly gladly pretend to be striving and driving as I once did back when.

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ChristmasPo'ms

townsled
"These are infinitesimally SmallThings, but nonetheless infinitely significant ones for me."

It's been a couple of decades now since I took up this practice. I've never reveled, as some certainly seem to, in bestowing gifts, though I mostly object to the shopping. The mind reading or the sheer presumption that someone should heed a list someone gave them, and then become the wish fulfiller. That's a spirit killer, in my humbled estimation. Humbled because there's something about shopping that utterly erases any intention I might have carried into the shop with me. I remain capable of inspiration, but usually of the distinctly lower order variety. I cannot seem to imagine what my loved ones might appreciate from me. In the old days, I'd eventually acquiesce the buy something inappropriate and not fish that vigorously for any complements afterward. I'd hold onto the receipt, too, because it might need returning to the store. In short, Christmas bored me, all sentiments aside, so after fifty Christmases or so, I decided to do the unthinkable instead.

Well, I'm still not beyond purchasing a small gift or two, but I now focus upon creating a dozen or so little tuneless Christmas songs instead, in the form of Christmas Po'ms.

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SmallerThings

smallerthings
Johannes Vermeer, Woman Holding a Balance, c. 1664, oil on canvas
"Small then even SmallerThings eventually amounting to something, which isn't really a thing at all."

Rather than strive to achieve BIG things, I seem to strive to more fully acknowledge smaller ones. Tiny yet influential seems more achievable than huge and consequential. Worlds move by comparative microns, yet manage to traverse vast spaces. Ideas spark in less than an instant yet utterly transform the person holding them. How finely am I capable of perceiving? Insignificance seems first a product of my own inattention. My salvation might stand right here in the palm of my hand, and releasing its beneficence might require a hero's journey no less daunting than any undertaken out into greater-seeming unknowns. Both journeys begin with denial and offer trials to test the hero's dedication. Both feature dragons and such, and each brings out characteristics the hero always held, implicit becoming more explicit in dispatching each challenge. Heroes aren't so much made as discovered, they emerge through unanticipated recognition. Look, there s/he is, right there. No more than a GlancingKnow ever confirms it.

Understanding serves as a condensation of more vaporous information and experience.

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WindingDown

windingdown
" …nobody waves to anyone passing from the back porch of this caboose."

It seems as if a giant clockwork finally began WindingDown this week. Reliable to a split-second throughout the year, as the Solstice draws nearer, its purpose loses clarity, perhaps a gear's gone rusty. The whole mechanism will most certainly receive a reprieve come Saturday, when a new astronomical year will begin an instant after the tired, now ancient one disappears. These last few days became abstractions of themselves. The more deeply I delved into their nature, the less I seemed to understand. The more I came to understand, the less I seemed to know, even Glancingly.

The snow grows tired and gritty after two weeks and more on the ground.

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BeansForBreakfast

BeansForBreakfast
"Makes me a musical SOB …"

Most Americans interpret the phrase BeansForBreakfast as a reference to coffee. Brits might envision a can of those ubiquitous Heinz beans served over toast as a part of the Full English. I take the term literally, for beans constitute my favorite breakfast food. With The Muse traveling this week, I can partake of my favorite every meal, repeatedly reheating the pot until nothing but a few hock bones remain in the bottom of it. I proudly possess a peasant's palate, one more pleased by simplicity than by complication. Subtlety's usually lost on me. Even when I create one of my artful-looking supper dishes, each remains shit simple inside. I leave a slow oven or flaming cast iron to do most of my heavy lifting in the kitchen. My beans seem simplicity personified.

John Steinbeck insisted in his Travels With Charlie that it was possible to find a decent breakfast in every American town. Fifty some years later, this assertion no longer holds true.

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AnImpossibleRecipe

ImpossibleRecipe2
"My meal was in the making of the meal …"

I think that people think I'm simply playing coy when I cannot crisply recount for them a recipe. I honestly never really quite remember, for I rarely follow a recipe and I never take notes. I follow my instincts instead, always starting with something threatening to spoil. I'm a little girl when it comes to throwing out food, so the edgy and almost questionable serves as the basis of all my food. This time, like almost every time before, our guests at last weekend's supper simply insisted upon knowing. The Muse further reinforced their requests when she reported that her boss had reported that the soup was simply the best ever, so The Muse suggested that I might at least try to recount how I'd made what I made.

I made a soup. I wanted something hearty but also something which would not offend all those with dietary restrictions.

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Fealty

fealty
The Accolade, Edmund Leighton, 1901
"Might just as well accede to this inevitability."

We speak of fidelity in marriages, but rarely if ever mention Fealty, a term sharing the same Latin root but which seems so steeped in medieval lore as to be useless to describe any modern phenomenon. The covenant underlying every marriage contract insists upon a form of Fealty, though, a set of tacit understandings delimiting subtly significant aspects of any such union. No formal agreement ever describes these responsibilities, yet failing to fulfill them provides grounds for eternally complicating conditions. Pouting might result. A poorly suppressed rage might even build over time, leaving the infractor feeling puzzled and isolated within the union. The aggrieved party might never find words to express the depth of their disappointment, though it will quite obviously be present. Typically, neither party will discover that this class of shortcoming lies beyond words. No apology ever quite repays the debt incurred when Fealty fails to manifest. Though both parties understand that a sin has been committed, neither will find any way to adequately atone. It should have never happened and can never be undone. These little crimes undermine domestic tranquility more effectively than mid-life drum lessons ever could.

When the spouse asks whether you're driving them to the airport in the predawn hours tomorrow, the canny spouse immediately recognizes an opportunity to demonstrate Fealty to, if not the spouse, then at least to the relationship.

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EndOfTheEvening

endoftheevening
"No, it's not Christmas yet, but this EndOfTheEvening I'll not soon forget."

By TheEndOfTheEvening, The Villa's ours again. Our guests, warmly welcomed, have wandered homeward. I salted the sidewalk when I realized they'd been walking the entryway gauntlet on fresh ice glaze. Snow fell as they arrived, and with the two luminaria lighting the end of our driveway and the glittering tree in the window, the place looked perfectly seasonally festive. The house smelled warm and spicy with my kick-butt soup simmering and my Veloute Mac and Cheese slowly baking. The cheese platter covered a quarter of the kitchen table, with sparkly wine glasses lined up like patriotic soldiers beside their respective bottles while crackers covered their flank. Everyone quickly gathered in the kitchen space while The Muse and I endlessly excused ourselves, stirring soup, warming bread, checking the Mac, and somehow tearing the chickories for salad. The Brit warmly accepts a fifty degree Oatmeal Stout while his wife holds up that smokey old red, her eyes pleading for my corkscrew. I open that bottle, pour her a glassful, then settle back into distracted preparation.

More people showed up than we have places to sit in the house, not an unusual situation and nothing for anyone to complain about.

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GamingASystem

GamingASystem
The Phrenologist (1874). Lucius Rossi (Italian, 1846-1913). Oil on panel.
" … but I also sidestep the apparent necessity of learning the dodgy skill of GamingASystem, which, for me, seems its own alluring reward."

Every system, the clever ones insist, consists of a game. The purpose of play might not always be to win or to lose, they say, but it is always, always, always to learn how to "game" that system. One need never break any formal rules when GamingASystem. The most skilled play with the rules, interpreting figuratively those regulations intended to be interpreted literally, and vice versa. One might most accurately explain that they play around the rules, practices, and traditions. One counts cards or reads other players' expressions, looking for tells, hardly attending to the formalities. Hoyle might find these gamers uncouth, though truth be told, they seem to win more than their fair share of the hands without ever getting called out for violating any rules. Some insist that those GamingASystem play a much broader game, a more or less moral imperative if the goal remains eventual dominion, for without these tactics, the odds of winning rely upon actual skill in the game, or worse, random selection, as the game designer might have intended.

The Muse insists that she was gifted with an intuition which enables her to test well.

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Realizing

Realizing
Diego Rivera, Man Controller of the Universe (or Man in the Time Machine), 1934
"Vive La DIFFERENCE. Vive the same-old, too."

Once any significant change occurs, I'm usually shocked by how little actually changes as a result. Last week, I learned my literary genre, as significant a realization as I've experienced all year, and yet the following week plodded along remarkably unchanged. Sure, I felt, and deeply, a closer connection to whatever I'm actually up to, but the old time machine marched on. This past week, PureSchmaltz attracted 678 individual views, a slight reduction from the previous week's volume. (Hey, it's a metric. It's supposed to be fundamentally meaningless.) I appreciate your continued interest.

The week began with my announcing my
If-ification, that realization that I might have a normalizing, even civilizing classification after all.

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Fog

fog
"I might be embodying one of those wise men before he found his trail …"

I can tell that Christmas is coming because I'm five days into trying to locate the wreath hanger without having found it yet. Each year, the wreath hanger proves to be the last of the decorations in use. The rest of the trimmings have already been tucked away into that location in the deepest corner of the basement, so rather than re-open that closet, I find some clever little tucked away spot to store the wreath hanger, a spot so intuitive and obvious that I most certainly will not repeat the lengthy search for it next season, only to always find myself searching again the following year. This is one reliable, certain sign of impending Christmas, though, so I suppose I should be grateful for the reminder.

I was fortunate to grow up in a part of the country where this season brought dense freezing fogs.

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FalsePremises

falsepremises
"We know what work faces us now."

It doesn't take much to fool an eye. At first glance, false perspective seems true. Following the lines quickly leaves one tangled, though, and unbelieving. That initial impression sticks through a few disconfirming iterations. The image starts to seem both wrong and right, with right holding his thumb on the scale. Poisoned by the imbedded FalsePremises, judgment struggles. My eyes seem to be lying to me. How very clever of the artist to turn me against myself, to compromise my formerly reliable perspective. I've been fooled and I feel every inch the fool. How easily a single falsehood compromises anyone receiving it! A series of falsehoods produce even worse results.

I'm a sworn enemy of cynicism, yet I seem to collect more evidence to support it than I do to encourage my optimism.

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Almost-ish

Almost
"I sense that this one's Almost-ish done, though I cannot definitely say."

It's almost Christmas this morning, two weeks away from 'Eve and I haven't really started thinking about it yet. I could say that I'm almost ready to start thinking about it because Almost-ish describes the highest state of readiness I ever achieve. I can't remember ever feeling ready for anything. None of my greatest life changes were in any way preceded by adequate preparation. I led each with my left foot, departing at least a day later than planned, yet still arrived within at least one standard deviation of On Time. I subscribe to the defining tenet that there's never any adequate replacement for a sincere lack of preparation. Almost-ish represents as close as I ever get to being ready for anything.

My status quos feature elongated tails. I despise letting go.

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TrustingThisWorld

TrustingThisWorld
" … Me and this world somewhere in-between."

I watch our new kitten Molly and I wonder how she might come to trust this world, for her world seems eminently trustworthy now, yet she still lives by tooth and claw. She defends every inch of territory against even her greatest benefactors, her true champions. She has not yet come to know the reassurance a petting hand might impart or the comfort of a languid lap stretch. True, this world stands as a convicted serial son of a bitch, with a long history of betraying anyone who would ever trust in it. It seems more indifferent than deliberate, though, a blundering behemoth perfectly capable of continuing inadvertences, but probably rarely on purpose, for this world has no real need of purpose. It need never justify itself. However cruel it might seem, it merely mirrors its inhabitants.

We discover the rules we must live by, never writing them for ourselves.

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SundayDread

NewYorkTimesTruthOOH
"I dread the responsibility this practice places on me …"

I pride myself on being well read. Most mornings, I warmly anticipate fetching my New York Times from the driveway. It's part of my ritual to peel off the protective plastic bag and spread the four or five sections across the kitchen table, ready for breakfast perusing. I've already read one or two of that day's op/eds online, but I tear into the paper paper anyway. I scan the front page then delve more deeply into the back pages, looking for stories that might help me make sense of what without some inside analysis, probably wouldn't make any sense to me. I'm a paper guy from my earliest age. When I delivered these pages, I poured through each edition. They were my primary source of education, so I revere them and the journalists who produce them, except on Sunday morning.

On Sunday morning, a behemoth paper awaits me in the driveway.

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TheBug

TheBug
"I remain no more prepared to battle The Bug than I ever was …"

The Muse had plans for us to meet-up after work and attend the annual Candlelight Walk, to stroll down Golden's Washington Street, sing a few carols, and maybe grab a bite after, but I'd woken with a sore throat and a fuzzy head. I promised to lie low close to the bed and assess how fit I felt nearer the end of the day. I slept a bit and wandered around the place feeling distinctly displaced before texting her around four to report that I still felt shaky. Nothing especially alarming, just a touch of The Bug, though no Bug was likely involved. Maybe the sore throat resulted from breathing incredibly arid cat fur-infused air. I blamed The Bug but quickly recovered from what first felt like a scare. I wasn't scared for long. I'm blessed with good health. I rarely feel in any way ill and perhaps because of that, I can't seem to very easily tell if I'm ailing. My normal ranges over a wide variety of states from manic to despondent, but I do not usually describe any of them as sick. When I finally, rarely, ascribe my state to the influence of The Bug (not, notice, A Bug, but The Bug), I'm usually about half a day away from full recovery. So far.

Thanks to my nurse practitioner's prescription pad, my bathroom counter's suddenly full of plastic pill bottles, each with its own regimen printed on its label.

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If-ification

Classification
"… maybe next week will turn into being all about doing for a change."

Friday arrives again, time to look back over the past week to see what might be derived from the last seven days of PureSchmaltz' GlancingKnows. It was a tumultuous week for me, for this week my writing finally found an identity, an If-ification. I'd persisted in producing—going on ten manuscripts over the prior two and a half years—without possessing a crisp response to the apparently fundamental question: "What sort of books do you write?" I'd tried a string of cute, generally self-effacing responses, but to little benefit and perhaps inflicting some harm, but a precise classification had eluded me. Those who know would innocently ask what my works were similar to, an impossible question for any author to answer. I only manage to read three books per week, so my bibliography seems pretty thin. I do not have access to the population of potential comparable works.

Part of my difficulty seemed rooted in the great variety of classes from which to choose, which the existence of most I remain unaware.

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SchlockyEditing

schlockyediting
"Maybe I should be grateful that it seems to slow down this progression."

If I can write a book in three months, how long should it take me to edit the resulting manuscript? The correct answer turns out to be 'a lot longer than three months.' I don't know precisely how much longer, but it's definitely longer. Once completed, the editing shows that the first draft was pretty close to finish-quality from the outset, hardly more than moving the occasional dangling modifier or correcting the usual 'that' in lieu of an intended 'than.' The effort falls far short of any contemporary understanding of what constitutes work, yet it takes a very long time for me to complete it. Between compiling the pieces, properly formatting them, printing them out, reading and marking up, updating the original soft copy, then distilling into a fresh copyedited work, months might pass, much of the time spent procrastinating from the task at hand. Procrastination constitutes at least ninety percent of the effort, and it's by far the most exhausting and depleting part.

The chief difficulty lies in the inescapable fact that I'm one Schlocky editor.

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Dawning

Dawning
"Neither of us will wear western-cut slacks or string ties."

The sun seems a son of Kansas. It crawls across the sky, casting shadows for a living, before retiring to California. I know altogether too much to believably spin fresh creation myths, though I swear that I could use a few. Maybe we all could. Once I know better, I don't seem to imagine better. I adopt my reality and pretty much stick with it, no matter how poorly it serves my vitality. I feel attracted to the idea that the sun hails from Kansas, just another exported offspring of that windy weed patch of a place. I like the idea that it retires to California to wear western-cut slacks and sport a string tie, and drive a 1953 Ford station wagon with clothes pins on the fuel line.

The magpies serve as the most viable community in my neighborhood.

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Literally...

literally
Andre Derain - Three Trees, 1906
"I'm mostly focused upon the quality of your story …"

I suppose I should affix a little warning "Do not interpret any of the following Literally" on everything I write. I'm no journalist and never really aspired to become one. I do not trade in objective facts but subjective description. I appreciate that this convention relies upon my readers to perform some cursory interpretation, especially if they're expecting just the facts, but so be it. Fix those expectations first. I do not have access to the facts, and even if I did, I'm experienced enough to understand that I can't usually combine facts to produce a decent punchline. I'm not dealing in fake news. I'm not dealing in news at all. My purpose lies closer to attempting to induce insight more than knowledge, enjoyment more than education, and perspective more than acuity. Some truths lie more deeply than any fact. Some facts materially misrepresent experience.

Writing seems most often about inducing a felt sense.

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Snidely

snidely
"I'm always free to interpret a tad more generously …"

I remain surprised by how quickly even animals jump to conclusions about others. People seem infamous for our ability to conclude with almost no supporting evidence. The merest glance informs many of our actions, often resulting in anything but equal opposing reactions. Even I frequently jump first and only rarely ask questions after because my reaction seemed to need nothing more than the barest supporting evidence, if even that. I have no idea how often I'm wrong because I only very rarely find reason to second guess my instantaneously drawn conclusions. They imprint immediately and persist in spite of refuting evidence or experience. The GlancingKnow behaves as if it actually does know all.

I suppose that this facility results in certain efficiencies, but evolution never was an efficiency-seeking undertaking.

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DoubleStock

doublestock
" … nectar only fully appreciable by gods."

The Muse and I must own almost a dozen stock pots. These range from huge to mid-sized, and we regularly, as in weekly, use about half of them. We employ them for more than making stock, but we make a lot of stock. Every blessed bit of veg trim goes into an ever-burgeoning baggy in the freezer. Same with meat trim, leftover bones, and even over-ripe fruit. About a quarter of the kitchen freezer always seems filled with bits awaiting transformation in a stock pot. It doesn't ever take much material: a chicken carcass or two, a couple of quarts of veg bits, a few herbs and spices, water, heat, and time, and I'm making stock again. I might make up a small batch just for a single dish, but I most often roast up larger batches for pressure canning and longer-term use. Replacing stock when a recipe calls for water dramatically improves the resulting dish. We're stock people.

I could not seem to learn how to make delicate stock like consumme, and not only because delicate dishes do not please my palate.

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Weighting

Weighting
Norman Rockwell Visits a Ration Board, Norman Rockwell, 1944, The Saturday Evening Post

"I'll probably never learn."

The queue seems endless, progressing painfully slowly. I'm suddenly uncertain what brought me here. If I expected service, I know for sure that I have not found it yet or it has not yet found me. The system might have been designed to extract blood as a prerequisite for being allowed to donate blood. I feel like a shriveling turnip, but I will not leave. Once in line, and once hemmed in on either side, I hold territory which seems to need defending. I will not surrender, no matter how inconvenienced I feel. I hold a waning faith, but still some small potential for grace, a hope with most of its shine dulled to buff. I've already had enough but I will not be shouting "Uncle!" just yet, if ever. Probably never!

Some waits weigh more heavily than others.

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Preparation, Preparation, Preparation

PreparationPrep
"The dinner, like my GlancingKnow Story week beside it, came off like a dream …"

The Muse and I tend to spend the week before any holiday in preparation. The key to holiday satisfaction seems to be paved with Preparation, Preparation, Preparation. We need to secure little nit-picky items like Pomegranate Molasses as well as the over-sized fowl. The Muse takes the lead preparing for Thanksgiving, for she follows recipes and respects her food heritage enough to try to recreate it for holidays. I try to support her efforts by washing pots and pans AND my presence seems to throw off her rhythm, just as her presence in my prep kitchen throws off mine. She maintains a backward sink discipline to mine, for instance, as she insists on putting her dirty dishes into the clean dish sink and vice versa. She blocks off access to the disposal and completely complicates any attempt I might make to assist, as I simply must clean up her organization before I can help clean up her pots and pans, and my reorganizing her organization throws hers into arrhythmia. I'm forever walking on some tacit plot line she's following and so I eventually retreat to the further corners of the Villa and let her have her way. I justify this by saying to myself that I carry the bulk of the prep work on ferial days, so she can carry that weight on festal ones.

Last week, I started a fresh tradition, one with no cobwebs on it yet, the practice of briefly summarizing the prior week's postings.

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LearningToPlay

LearningToPlay
Baby at Play by Thomas Eakins,1876, National Gallery of Art
" … we're still managing the odd, awkward, occasional pet and heart-melting purring."

Molly spent her first few days with us cowering in the furthest back corner of the most remote room in the house, the cold and drafty room at the very end of the ductwork. I'd crawl back in there to point my finger at her nose while she eyed me sullenly at first, then suspiciously, occasionally permitting me to touch her head, sometimes even submitting to a seemingly welcome neck scratching which usually ended with her startling out of her budding delight before administering a scratching swipe and trying to take a bite out of the hand that had just been stroking her. She seemed sullen in the shelter before we'd brought her here and after hearing her life story from her caretaker there, I concluded that she'd earned her sour mood in the oldest of old fashioned ways. She could still technically pass for a kitten, though I doubted if she'd ever spent a day or even an odd morning at play. Her feral parents taught her what they could, a strong sense of self combined with powerful defensive survival skills, but between being trapped, neutered, ill and recovering from what I understood to have been two bouts of serious feral diseases, she'd apparently never learned to play.

I know, LearningToPlay seems the most oxymoronic of phrases, for play seems as though it really should be more spontaneous than learned, and needing to learn it seems at best likely to result in some wooden analogue of the genuine McCoy.

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GivenIn

acquiesce
"I suppose that I'll need to be generous toward myself; not giving up, but GivenIn for now."

I arose early thinking that I would head right out to scrape off the overnight snowfall, but the snow still fell at a forty-five degree angle and the back deck drift looked close to two feet deep. I can't really tell in the dark, but my intentions conflicted with one of my more deeply-held convictions: one should never start shoving snow until the snow has pretty much petered out. This snowfall showed no signs of petering anytime soon. I peeked out the front and found our two step entryway an alabaster impressionistic sculpture of its usual self; a Brancusi, perhaps, concrete smoothed and implacable. Arming myself with my snow shovel against this monster would be worse than a soldier heading into battle armed with a twig. I'd have to sit and watch.

My acquiescence came easily, perhaps too easily for my Take Charge snow day attitude.

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Impending

impending
"I know no company will come."

A giddiness takes over the place. Even Max The Ever-Curious Kitten senses it. Something's up, or, more properly, almost up. Everything appears perfectly normal as of this moment, perfectly normal and also odd. I know, though the sky hasn't started showing any sign yet, that a snowstorm's been moving in our direction for the last couple of days. It's slated to hit this evening, so this day already carries a last day aura, as if it offers a final chance or two. By this time tomorrow, travel will have become difficult to perhaps impossible. A gallon of milk might just as well sit on Alpha Centauri as on the shelf of the village inconvenience mart; both will become equally inaccessible by then. My mind races trying to remember what I need to do before, because there will be no doing after this storm hits.

Of course there will still be doing then, but this Impending upends my sense of continuity.

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SchlemielTime

GimpelTheFool-970x710

A portion of the cover art from a 1957 edition of Gimpel The Fool, a short story collection by Isaac Bashevis Singer, translated by Saul Bellow: Noonday Press

"A well-stocked larder seems the source of most of my supper-related satisfaction."

I have been repeatedly accused of publishing food porn photographs to my social media feeds. I suppose that I am guilty as charged, but I never post the deeper and more representative portrait of my food life. I am mostly a schlemiel in the kitchen. I cannot for the life of me follow even simple recipes. I have not yet learned how to replicate a single dish, each one a genuine original, turning out as it turns out, with repeated practice, if anything, leading me further from a perfection than my initial accidental outcome suggested I might possess the skill to produce. I cannot seem to understand all the theories governing food preparation and do not reliably intuit oven temperatures, grill heat zones, or ratios. My meals are almost universally accidental convergences, relying much more upon luck and quality ingredients than upon my skill. Still, I've accreted somewhat of a reputation as a cook, one which has done nothing to blunt my ever-deepening sense that I remain an apron-wearing imposter holding a spatula just off camera.

The Muse seems nonetheless appreciative, if only because I remain mostly a reliable preparer.

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SeasonalSourcing

SeasonalSourcing
"Our holiday tables will not feature that summer vegetable again this year, which might be Thanksgiving enough for me."

I asked the produce clerk when Buddha Hands would be on the shelf. He looked up surprised, reporting that they'd come in that morning. "We weren't gonna put them on display until tomorrow," he replied, "but I'll be happy to bring them out for you now." The Muse and I twittered in the aisle, barely able to believe our good fortune. In past years, our seasonal search for this distinctive fruit took us further than far and wide. One year, when we lived just outside Washington DC, we must have clocked well over a hundred miles on failed Buddha Hand forays, returning empty handed day after day after freaking day. This year, we happened upon a virgin stash. We'd get first dibs on a fresh boxful of these babies. The holidays began that instant.

The arrival of this fabled fruit always kickstarts a season of baking and rendering.

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DerivingWisdom

DerivingWisdom
The Court Jester Stanczyk Receives News of the Loss of Smolensk During a Ball at Queen Bona's Court (Matejko,1862).

“I see no reason to turn down any DerivedWisdom, especially if I discovered it myself.”


This week, I wrote essays which garnered 504 individual views, on a curious variety of topics, totaling just over five thousand words if I don't count the individual introductions. What do you suppose those words meant? I mean really? Individually, I might summarize them like this:

•I spoke of how I could not honestly swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, even with the intercession of an insistently supportive god. (
MyTruth)

•I then switched to speaking about my long and largely uninterrupted twice-daily meditation practice, admitting that I feel no closer to enlightenment (whatever THAT is) than when I started, but how I still feel enormous pride in and deep satisfaction with my discipline. (
TabulaRascal)

•I wrote about the inequality money seems to inject into our justice system, perhaps disclosing how little I understand about gilt and the nature of G(u)ilt. (
G(u)ilt)

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PhysicsLesson

CatPhysics
"I needed to no more than generally understand how the slope of my stance might influence my ability to respond …"

Since our new kitten Max arrived three weeks ago, he has slowly expanded to fill every square inch of The Villa. Wherever I go, he's already there, though often hidden until I pass, whereby he pounces, perhaps targeting the leather laces on my slippers, which long ago proved themselves capable of untying themselves, though they seem to welcome a cat claw's assistance. Each pounce seems a PhysicsLesson involving opposing forces, vectors, and gravity. Always gravity. Max, who weighs only a pound or two encased in fluffy fur, executes many pratfalls, none seeming to leave any lasting damage and none dissuading him from additional attempts to understand how the physical world surrounding him works. It's one PhysicsLesson after another from long before dawn until an hour or more after I've laid my own burden down in bed.

I woke a few nights ago to find him sleeping on my head, though I didn't immediately understanding that I'd been shanghaied into the role of lab rat in yet another PhysicsLesson.

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GodSends

GodSend
"I try to remember that each initial provocation might well have come from the hand of some curiously benevolent God …"

Good fortune moves in mysterious ways. Nothing says how any experience might turn out. An apparently advantageous first move might turn south without warning. An obvious initial disadvantage might likewise at any time seem to turn itself around. How any experience turns out depends upon where I decide to place the punctuation. It ain't over until I apply the hard stop designating the end. Many of my experience extend like run-on sentences, featuring more commas and semi-colons that words, it sometimes seems, continuing until some favorable twist renders a favorable outcome. Then and only then might I feel deeply moved to stop the progression. It's all progression, no matter the number of obvious regressions appear between here and that ever-emerging there. Even the fabled fat lady might have this once chosen to sing during an uneasy intermission rather than wait clear until the end.

GodSends might not appear to have originated in the hand of any recognizable God.

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Means&Ends

Means&Ends
"Where would my dignity reside if I didn't have to try so damned hard?"

Ends never justify means. Means usually, if not justify, then certainly serve to validate whatever ends eventually emerge. Those who cut corners on their way to the top inherit a legacy of continuing paranoia. Sure, they achieved the top, but their top can never actually belong to them and they understand that they do not quite belong up there, either. Their imposter syndrome isn't delusional, but well-deserved. But, you might ask, how might one compete if the world contains plenty of cheats who don't seem to carry remorse about their underhanded techniques? Everyone else is speeding. Why shouldn't I? Discarding the decorum erodes something significant, yet subtle. One refrains from ignoring the law not because of the associated penalties, but because respecting the law serves as a means for preserving one's self respect.

If preserving this self respect seems like a shallow payoff in a venial world, you've encountered the dilemma.

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Appreciations

appreciations
Wheat field With Crows, Van Gogh, 1890 (believed to be Van Gogh's last painting)
" … you probably don't know what I would say."

I speak today of Appreciations, those most curious of the many human expressions. A single appreciation, properly done between a single one and a single other, cannot scale, though some of us more shy ones will attempt to execute a blanket appreciation addressed to "You Guys" or "everyone." These fail to satisfy the underlying purpose of an appreciation because they are at root and inescapably an expression of a personal relationship. Any relationship seems threatened by being taken for granted. Continuing proximity need not necessarily breed contempt, but more often a certain complacency, an apparent indifference to its own continuation, a natural by-product of familiarity. Eventually, repeated, such casual interaction might easily spark certain questions such as, "Does he even care that I'm here?" The universal cure for such conditions lies in the skillful application of Appreciations.

Not that Appreciating's all skill, quite the opposite.

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G(u)ilt

G(u)ilt
"The g(u)ilty seem more likely to walk away free to commit their crime again."

Our criminal justice system struggles to treat everyone equally under the law. Those who can afford expensive delaying actions tend to invoke them, deferring justice if not thereby outright denying it. Years later, the urgency of meting out justice erodes and the well-heeled defendant might find the charges dropped or simply turning moot. The poorer defendants might find admission more attractive, throwing themselves on the supposed mercy of the court or hoping to bid down the damage through sincere contrition. The merely guilty and the more g(u)ilty experience really different days in court. The guilty might hang their heads in shame while the g(u)ilty might find any of an array of deflecting blames to hide behind. Until the jury's finished deliberations and the judge pounds his gavel, all seem equal under the law. Once that gavel sounds, the g(u)ilty will more likely walk away free.

The G(u)ilt seems obvious on the wealthy man's face, but it's a face more belligerent than contrite.

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TabulaRascal

TabulaRascal
"Meditation might be my very best imaginary friend."

As a twice-daily meditator over the last forty-five years, I feel somewhat competent to speak about the practice. First, it's not what you've heard. For me, there never was any sense of Tabula Rasa, no emptying of the mind. My mind might even slip into a sort of overdrive when I meditate, more TabulaRascal than empty and open. I might even be doing it wrong, but I figure that I've been doing it my way for long enough that I might have gained license to do it however I damned well please, to accept it however it seems to come to me. For me, it requires no more than an ounce or two of light discipline, just enough to encourage me to sit and do nothing for twenty minutes at a time with no soothing background music or expressed purpose in mind. I consider this my repayment in kind, a tithe of my available time. I read in the press that few people feel comfortable sitting with nothing to do for more than five minutes. The fidgets take over and nervous energy expresses itself. I would consider even this an acceptable form of meditation rather than an example of how not to successfully engage. It's at root an exercise in simple acceptance for me.

Whatever happens, happens.

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MyTruth

TheTruth
"Anyone bringing dog shit to a Stone Soup party should be forced to swallow the resulting soup themselves …"


"Do you swear to tell The Truth, The Whole Truth, and Nothing But The Truth?" No, I'd feel compelled to decline this common invitation, and not only because I could not possibly have access to The Truth, let alone The Whole Truth, not to mention possess the superpower to access Nuthing But The Truth. This oath seems altogether too absolute, for I (along with every other human) can only access an offshoot truth, one I think of as my own: My Truth. I expect My Truth to be riddled with inadvertence, misconceptions which I have probably conflated as truth, but which perhaps represent common cognitive mistakes. I might have misunderstood an implication or two. I probably assumed some portion of My Truth to be utterly self-evident, when it doesn't seem to be self-evident to you. My beliefs and expectations likely affected not only what I perceived but also how I interpreted, catalogued, and stored my sensory experience. On close reflection, I realize that I don't feel nearly as confident of what I witnessed. I can offer only my impressions.

My impressions might well prove useful, however, even if they cannot quite meet the standards of genuine The Truths, The Whole Truths, or Nothing But The Truths.

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Doltdrums

DoltDrums
"We both want family for the holidays, but we're settling for turkey again."

By mid-November I've grown weary of braises. My larder looks like a mid-winter Moravian supermarket with overflowing bins of carrot, parsnip, turnip, celery root, potato, garlic, and onion aching for another long, slow, covered bake. I can't bare to bake anything anymore. The quick chop chore, the boring obligatory stock pour-over, the tough cut tucked in underneath, with a splash of wine or cider. This all seemed wilder and more attractive back when it was just an emerging seasonal alternative. Now, it seems like the only game in town and I know for certain, before the first die roll, that Colonel Mustard will have done the deed in the drawing room with the freaking candlestick. Not an ounce of mystery or discovery to be found within any of it.

My menu leaves me feeling stupid, uninspired.

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InFLUence

inFLUential
Eugène Delacroix - La liberté guidant le peuple
"We live almost exclusively by anonymous association."

Who's following who? Fergetabout leadership, whatever that was, we've traded in that weary old meme in favor of being seen with someone truly inFLUential. I follow, therefore I am. I must seek first to inFLUence, to infect others with my opinions, delivered so subtly and forcefully that few can resist my call. Is this really all that came of the great revolution, not so much a chain of relationships but a gaggle of clans, each following their man or woman, no longer even desiring to think for them self. I shamelessly footnote, citing some source more reliable than little old me, someone genuinely in the know, someone genuinely worthy of me following? How many followers must one have to be widely considered a thought leader? Lead me, please, not into temptation and deliver us all from evil.

Which side should I be on?

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TheOppositeOf

opposite
"Our dichotomies seem to be trying to define us …"

Opposites distract. Absolute opposites distract absolutely, dangling modifier and all. The chief difficulty with opposites lies in the simple fact that they almost never exist except as placeholders for an absolute absence. The opposite of a tree seems easy enough to conjure. It's no-tree, isn't it? But what precisely (or even imprecisely) entails a no-tree? Every blessed thing except a tree? Hardly definitive. In mathematics, opposites emerge with the simple flip of a sign, except when encountering a nothing zero or a confounding square root. Sometimes, an absolute opposite amounts to just the same thing as its opposite, flash and bone, glimpsed unreversed mirror images which might make anyone's head hurt to consider. It might be that all opposites qualify as completely imaginary, useful perhaps for comparison, a defining opposition, but nothing much beyond that.

We inhabit a world which sometimes seems floundering on a surfeit of opposites.

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BetterByes

petunia#2
Petunias #2, Georgia O'Keefe 1924

"Flipping off winter won't slow it down, …"

You might have noticed that season ends almost always offend me. They come too early or too late to properly please me, yet I strive to be prepared when the actual shift occurs. I never complain about how early winter leaves, no matter how rainy the early spring. Likewise, I usually embrace summer when it finally arrives, though fading daffodils and tulips turn that experience bittersweet. I'm usually unprepared to let go so that the following season might simply come. I am never the one discarding perfectly matured petunias just because an overnight freeze impends. You can depend on me to hatch some season-extending scheme to defer an inevitable season end. One year, I tarped up the whole deck garden to defend against an intruding frost, and the tactic worked, extending blossoms another full two weeks before a more insistent freeze finally settled in. This year, I chose the best and brightest for sequestering in a corner of the garage, and I've extended their lives at least an additional month. I've dutifully carry their pots and planters out into the bright sun on clement days and left them tucked away through now the fifth snow event of this season.

I've been secretly hoping that the bastard deer would find them and provide a demise worthy of them.

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Demoncracy

demoncracy
"The Hapsburgs were plenty happy enough. Their ungrateful peasants, not so much."

Some insist that we have the best democracy money can buy, though our Founders did not originally intend our Big D Democracy to belong within the set of purchasable things. They'd naively intended it to be differently participatory, open to all free, landowning white males. Oh, sorry. They designed it as a plutocracy, ruled by the wealthiest, which historically has usually translated into a de facto kakistocracy, government by those least suitable and capable of governing. The majority who might actually depend upon what a Big D Democracy might deliver, those not male, landowning, or free, could go piss up a tree to realize their liberty, or so sayeth our heralded Founders, who turned out to be more eloquent than prescient, for their declarations out-stretched their designs. Later generations interpreted their intentions much more broadly than they had. Landless males would gain franchise, then former slaves, then women, as our original demo-aristocracy struggled to become an ever more-perfectly liberal democratic union.

We're still perfecting.

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Prosperitease

Prosperity1
Gustav Klimt(1862-1918) / Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907, oil on canvas, Neue Galerie, NYC
"I intend to bequeath no inheritance, …"

My parents were raised through The Great Depression. They instilled in their children all the phobias common to anyone raised with unresolvable want. They'd caught on early that the system was rigged against achieving prosperity, though they labored hard to achieve a modest level of financial security. My mom sewed her kids' clothes and taught her daughters to sew for themselves. My dad taught his sons to put their heads down and toil without complaint. Sloth stood as the sole unforgivable sin. We learned to get by in spite of whatever game the rest of the world seemed obsessed with. Prosperity meant not complaining about stuff that couldn't possibly matter. We had each other, and a fine home filled with make-do eccentricities. The windows might have frosted over on the inside on the coldest winter nights, but one could wear a coat to bed or throw on another hand-me-down quilt, the coal fire would be warm in the morning.

My parents never once owned a new car, and never really wanted to.

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Time-Id

Time-Id
"I continue to be my own worst tyrant."

Six days in and I'm thinking that I might have finally resolved the fall-back time change problem. Dropping daylight savings time feels like punishment to me, a cruel bait-and-switch. Just as daylight becomes increasingly scarce, we, by fiat, by mere convention, agree to swipe another hour of it from the time we need it most, from the end of already seasonally dreary days. Could there be a better way to ensure the onslaught of seasonal affective disorder? I think not!

Most years, I've become a complaining victim to this curious convention, shuffling along into longer and darker nights, but this year, I decided to take a stand.

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Interpregating

Cat_kitten_avatar-35-512
" … he seems to be Interpregating, interpreting to integrate rather than to separate."

This world seems to be continuously trying to teach me stuff. I remain a reluctant student. I suspect that I absorb most of what might eventually become learnings sub- or pre-consciously, and I feel truly grateful for this small gift, for if I had to maintain attentive concentration, I'd certainly fail to learn much of anything at all. We've acquired a kitten who reminds me what learning actually entails. The Muse and I find his antics entertaining, sometimes in a rather mean way, for he seems to endlessly play the fool for us, perhaps to teach us something. Learning seems to entail much foolishness, approximations of congruent responses morphing over time into ever more well-adapted ones. The first few attempts qualify as genuine comedy, easily observed when someone else performs but not so easily recognized when we mount the stage. We're always on stage but only occasionally aware of the observers surrounding us. We're probably always trying out some new routine, but largely unaware that we are. The more well-rounded among us might construct lives of well-practiced, numbing routine, but even these masters might continuously try out fresh variations unaware of just how silly they might seem to the rest of us.

The best I can claim about myself seems to be that I'm still learning.

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Volting

Volting
"A red state turns purple with suppressed rage before finally blowing up blue."

The Muse and I live in an area reportedly beset with voles. Our neighborhood ListServ frequently reports troubles blamed on the hamster-like critters, though we've never experienced a single instance. They're essentially invisible tunnel dwellers, browsing from the bottom up, apparently devastating some neighbors' plantings. We try to keep with native plants, not mistaking this region as part of the Northern Arboreal Belt. Trying to maintain some semblance of a classic English Country Garden here seems to buy more trouble than satisfaction, so we keep our garden aspirations modest and hopefully aligned to our seventy eight hundred arid feet of altitude. We consider the lowly vole as much a part of the native fauna as the deer and the elk, features rather than pests, and we try to live while letting them live.

Come election day, though, it seems as though the voles rush to the polls to cast votes in favor of those initiatives only a tunnel-dweller could love.

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FallTogether

FallTogether
"Small completions seem to render everything possible."

How fortunate for my life to FallTogether in the Autumn. So much these days seems to be progressively falling apart; my present great good fortune seems an outlying experience, almost a guilty pleasure, but a pleasure nonetheless. I'll manage my accompanying guilt somehow. I'm much more practiced at coping with guilt than I'll ever have even half a chance of becoming at coping with good fortune, so perhaps the two will balance out each other. Months of accumulating procrastinations have been resolving themselves with little effort. I cannot claim to have cleverly planned my present state. It visited me without making reservations. Nor did I finally achieve a level of self-loathing which finally pushed me onto a straighter and narrower path. I simply seem to have stumbled into this place.

One thing leads to another.

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Reflexivity

reflexivity


"It takes someone completely immersed in a subject to explain it in ways that nobody not immersed in that subject could ever understand."

I enthusiastically reserved George Soros' latest book, a collection of essays on the subject of Open Societies. I'd read other works by this great philanthropist and self-proclaimed failed philosopher, most memorably the one where he deconstructed the 2008 market crash. I found him both insightful and frustrating, as he exemplifies the above quote. He's long railed against certain foundational tenets of economics and social science in general, arguing that these fields seem to suffer from physics envy, and attempt to find level ground by adopting perspectives that could lead to truth only when analyzing physical stuff and might reasonably only lead to useful insight when applied to human systems, those being where human judgment and preference cast deciding votes about the outcome. He characterizes social science as compromised by investigators trying to emulate their physical science counterparts while lacking necessarily separate, agreed-upon social-science methods. Building upon Karl Popper's postulate which claimed that scientific facts forever remain hypothetical—prone to undermining with a single example of falsehood—he notes that social science cannot hope to achieve even that modest end, since social sciences rely upon human perspective, always subject to change. If you've ever gone shopping for something you deeply desire, found exactly what you'd imagined, then found yourself dissatisfied when using the product of your successful search, you've experienced Reflexivity. All human system most prominently exhibit Reflexivity.

The scientist, though, seems schooled in a firm belief in objectivity, a fundamentally paradoxical perspective which seems to hold that one could muster an observation without utilizing the services of an observer.

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Thyme

Thyme
"I might even throw up a fresh shoot or two in defiance of a regulating authority hardly worth believing in."

Our thyme plant expanded to several times its original size before I brought it inside for overwintering. Its tips turned brown though its stalks still seem viable and green. It's assumed a rather wiry habit, tough to harvest and difficult to strip, stems more like twigs than herbs. I remain fully aware that I fiddled with time, attempting a premeditated extension of an admittedly over-shortened growing season. The whole herb pot, a slat wood peck basket, now overflows with mutating herbals. Relocated into a sunny kitchen corner in front of the sink, sure, but missing wind, rain, and the temperature shifts that once kept its contents pliable and young. The contents have entered another stage of life, on the first hints of life support, destined to die, but not quite yet. The tarragon yellowed in protest, though it also threw up a few fresh shoots as if mistaking this recent life change for Spring. It will most certainly never see another Spring.

Daylight Savings Time seems like a godsend to me, its annual disappearance always more a setback than a simple falling back into regular time, for there never was any such thing as regular time.

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Dayzed

25 five hour day
"I'll recover somehow."

I take too much pride in my ability to thrive with little sleep. Pride, going just before falls and all, presciences inevitable downfall. I probably over-rely on this gift, for it leaves me with scant margin. I seem to do just fine with four hours sack time, but less than that can really cut into me. I imagine that someone who routinely sleeps two of my short nights' worth, won't so much miss an occasional odd hour or two shortfall, while I most certainly will. Micro sleep usually comes with some sort of travel-related activity. The last night in Vienna might find me sleeplessly waiting up so I won't miss my obscenely early ride to the airport, but little's lost as I'd just as soon crash on the plane crossing the pond, anyway. Giving others a ride to the airport provides a similar experience but with the downside that I'll then need to drive back without losing too much of my consciousness along the way.

Of course necessary stops seem to hinder my return.

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Dismay

dismay
Portrait of Doctor Gachet, Vincent Van Gogh, 1890
" … we're likely to be recovering for a very, very long time."

The news deeply disturbs me. We have a madman in the White House. It's not that I don't understand, because I do understand while reportedly so many clearly do not yet. Yet. Did we just grow to take for granted that an election would filter out the most glaring extremes and prevent anyone actually barking mad from taking the top job? I'll grant you that we've had a bad run, from Nixon to Reagan to Bush, we've seen Presidents push around our Constitution, largely, it seems in retrospect, due to their utter ignorance of its tenets. But this guy combines ignorance with arrogance, distain with cruelty, self-dealing with amorality, and lies heaped with even more lies until his inner insanity screams for wide public recognition. Yet the wheels of Constitutional government move achingly slowly, particularly when populated with those who've sworn fealty to absolute insanity.

Corruption should have more consequences than any election.

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OnceInA...

OnceInA 8.07.17 AM
"We take turns, one day the fool and some days the fortunate child, …"

We live in extraordinary times, or so the media insists. Who among us could resist reporting that seems to so solidly confirm just how special we must be to live in such extraordinary times? The old hometown team won the World Championship for the first time in ninety-six years. "We" set several low-temperature-for-the-month records this week. Never before has "it" been so damned cold this early in the year. Surrounded by unlikely events, we don't have to pretend to be special anymore. Even acknowledging the obvious fact that several of these stats seem spurious,—I mean, who keeps track of all this crap?—nobody can deny that we seem to find ourselves living in truly extraordinary times; just like yesterday, just like last week, just like every day since time immemorial.

Every day brings another blue moon somewhere.

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Preparation

preparation
Bernard Reder: Noah Planning the Ark (20th century)

"Failing to fully prepare might resonate nothing more alarming than the human condition …"


No one has yet discovered a fully adequate replacement for a sincere lack of preparation. Google '“preparation,” and you'll receive the sort of wisdom nobody really needs. You'll hear that "failing to prepare is preparing to fail" and other equally vacuous advice. I'll excuse you if you come to believe that preparation is the universal key to success, the Midas Touch on Wheels, and the one absolutely irreplaceable determiner of success. Preparation is clearly the key to every kingdom, except, of course, for all the kingdoms where only a deeply sincere lack of preparation reigns. The difficulty arises when we realize we cannot always predict when preparation will be key and when a sincere lack of preparation might better prepare. I'm noticing that many people carry a sort of civil engineering preparation philosophy. Why wouldn't one prepare before engaging in activities focused on moving stuff through space and time? Many activities, though, can't qualify as amenable to civil engineering preparedness. For those, some sort of non-preparation seems justifiable, if not necessary.

My greatest shortcoming as a project manager was always my lack of prescience.

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DreckNology

captcha
"These are clubs I might be wise to decline every opportunity to join."

My friends host podcasts, but the technology supporting those baffles me. I sometimes think that I really should offer an audio version of my daily musings, but the gauntlet of interfaces separating me from that end reliably chases me off again. Somewhere in that chain, I encounter a Captcha barricade and I cannot for the life of me figure out what I'm supposed to be matching. They want a Pastword, too, and while they offer to allow me to reset forgotten Pastwords, that process, too, proves impassable. I experience technological damned-whatever-I-Do until I construe what seems their underlying intent. Perhaps they're paid for attempts to scale the ramparts rather than by whatever they dangle as possible inside. It's all hidden behind crude sophistications that leave me questioning just how smart our overlording technologists might not be. Nobody ever once designed an interface with me in mind.

I don't mind, or not that much.

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SnowingIn

SnowingIn
"Lord knows this world could use some concerted frittering today."

The weather reporter seems to imply that I should consider panicking. I'm not panicking, though. I know that this storm will most certainly threaten my precious mobility, but it encourages me to reconsider just where I thought I was supposed to be going from here. A lengthening list of sudden imperatives intrudes upon my serenity, but the increasing impossibility of resolving even the least of them quietly thwarts those wants. None of them fully qualified as needs and I decline a clear opportunity to become ruled by whatever I believe myself to need. What if I needed nothing more than what already possesses me in this very moment? Invulnerable to any supplemental advertising, I might revel in some temporary semi-self-sufficiency.

The snowplow plies the roadway outside, piling freshly soiled snow berms across the driveway entrance.

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BreakingIn

BreakingIn
"At least I was used to them."

Our new cat slinks around the place like a sneak thief or spy. I fancy that I understand why, for I, myself, never qualified as resilient when encountering change. I tell myself, and rather over-proudly, that I carry an extreme form of context sensitivity such that I become a very different person when I'm immersed into a different place. I could be the poster child for Heraclitus' old saw about the same old thing being different in different places. As a child, when press-ganged into visiting my aunt's family in Southern California, I'd usually hold out for two or three days before finally consenting to eat anything there. Even familiar old milk tasted different, and not better different. I could even hold out on using the bathroom until my parents would finally resort to force feeding me into restarting my essential life systems. I empathize with the new cat. How utterly strange everything must seem to him.

We imagine that holding him will soothe him rather than ourselves, but he flees behind the couch when unattended, batting idly at curtain strings, peeking around the corner until we sing out another intended-to-be welcoming greeting.

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Pending

Pending
"I, too, am my father's son, and he could not fix much of anything at all."

I sit between storms this morning. Snow still covers the ground from that last one and the weather app warns of worse than that last one to come. Pending seems a perpetual state in these mid-latitudes. Living here yields a life spent somewhere in-between. When will that next storm arrive? There's always a next front just over the horizon. Will it come from the north, west, south, or, that most dreaded of all directions here, the east? Storms from the east seem to violate the first principle of western weather, which almost always travels on the eastbound train. When a counter-clockwise flow kicks in, though, it means heavy wintertime snow or battering summertime thunderstorms. Winter gets called for a day or two of spring before resuming its seasonal status quo again. Summer snow's not unknown. Like everywhere, the locals here proudly proclaim that if the current weather doesn't suit you, just wait a minute or two and another climate might just pass through. It's high desert with seasonal monsoons, crazier than a flock of schizophrenic loons.

Snow serves as the iconic image for all of Colorado, though peaks, let alone snow-capped peaks, do not cover most of the state's surface.

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Insubstantial

insubstantial
"The considerable spaces between molecules far out-measure the span of substances themselves …"

It first seemed as Insubstantial as pollen. I had to squint to see it at all. Even then, I felt uncertain whether I should trust my vision. I'd been fooled before, moonlight casting a convincing illusion of snow, though I was prompted by the weather report to believe a real dumper was coming. Even when I stepped outside, I simply could not tell for sure whether it was really snowing or just blowing around a little freezing fog. I stopped watching, focusing my attention on my inside chores instead, and shocked myself an hour later when I found the start of substance accumulating outside. The onslaught continued into the night, finally sticking to road surfaces around sunset. I'd check from time to time, still unable to tell if it was really snowing out there, whisps of blowing snow coming off the roof edge my only intermittent clue in the porch light backlit by darkest night. The ten o'clock news reported that the freeway was shut down for the twenty miles West of us, cars and trucks spun out in what so recently lacked any substance at all.

The next morning, the deck seemed knee deep in this so recently tenaciously insubstantial substance, a genuine undeniable presence by then.

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Homing ...

Homing
"Family catches up with us, not the other way around."

Homing pigeons have nothing on me, or on any of us. A serviceable homer might reliably return to a familiar place, but people can return to places they've never been to before. Home moves like a spinning kaleidoscope for us, vectoring overlays, a twisting Venn diagram casting a wide variety of shadows. Our home seems like a mobile home, unlike the old home place which passed out of the family after my mom sold off the back forty to the neighbor with the perennially remodeling house, the shabbiest place on the block, clear evidence that she was vacating her once prominent good judgement. Before, family would gather there and feel as though we were home. After, our previous concept of home shifted and still refuses to settle.

Home seems more concept than place now, contingent upon who's present more than where we congregate.

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PTBD

550px-The_Garden_of_Earthly_Delights_by_Bosch_High_Resolution
Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights,
oil on oak panels, 205.5 cm × 384.9 cm (81 in × 152 in), Museo del Prado, Madrid
"I seem to be better able to recognize blessings in retrospect."

Trauma seems the most modern of disorders. Everyone I meet seems to be working hard to recover from some past experience. Unsurprisingly, most of these prior traumatic experiences lean toward the painful side of the ledger, but not all. A curious portion of these traumatic experiences seem to have been more closely associated with pleasure than with pain. While the painful ones grab the bulk of the headline space, I thought I'd today reserve a little place to speak about the other, less widely advertised ones, those traumas resulting from a surfeit of blessings, good fortune, or luck. I can speak for myself when I insist that my most difficult to recover from traumas came about because I experienced an unaccustomed stream of extremely good luck. I'd been seemingly bred for coping with negative outcomes, but found myself utterly unprepared to integrate dream-come-true quality experiences. I most often created some uproar in response, upsetting some otherwise perfect little applecart, which enabled me to quite cheerfully switch into a minor form of disaster recovery mode, a response I might refer to as PTBD or Post Traumatic Blessing Disorder.

Literature seems woefully ill-prepared to present portraits of prolonged happiness, reserving the happily ever after for a footnote very near the end of an otherwise disastrous tale.

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GreatSignificance

michelangelo-creation-of-adam
"Whether any of this amounts to anything at all, couldn't possibly be the point."

I try to imagine myself accomplishing things of GreatSignificance, though I usually struggle with my attempts. GreatSignificances only emerge from great distances, it seems, and almost never from up closes and personals. Later, perhaps much, much later, the parsing might resolve to highlight just how terribly important that by then long-distance event was. It might be important to acknowledge that in the actual moment of occurrence, its GreatSignificance had yet to emerge, however much any participant might have sensed its presence then. Within the larger scale of history, most current events resolve to fuss, perhaps fuss with feathers flying, but little more than fuss. I suspect that any odd second might spawn the greatest event in the history of our universe, but it probably won't.

I'm picky, anyway, sincerely believing that I might pick and thereby choose the activities destined to age into a legacy of personal greatness.

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BigDeal

BigDeal
"If I'm not feeling overwhelmed, I'm never feeling very much at all."

I'm at my best when under the thrall of some BIG, hairy, audacious something. I might be able to limp along with some molehill conflated into a mountain, but my mileage soon lags as if I were dragging along rather than leading any charge. I find my best resources when I'm almost convinced that I couldn't possibly access enough to satisfy the situation before me. Furthermore, I seem to need to really, really, really want some likely impossibility before I ever come close to discovering what I'm capable of producing. I initiate none of these pursuits confident of my ability to achieve closure, quite the opposite. The pall of probable failure must accompany me almost every step of the way. I might conclude my work uncertain if I actually crested the originally-envisioned peak, but for the duration of the effort, I will feel curiously compelled. I might conclude afterwards that my efforts were never really about achieving anything, but more about the heart-filled pursuit.

It doesn't work to make a BIG deal out of some obvious triviality.

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HollowSpace

hollowspaces
"No will in the universe countermand's any season's commands."

A glance out the front window into the predawn darkness convinced me that a thin dusting of snow had fallen overnight. Stepping outside, I saw that moonlight had created an optical illusion. No snow had fallen. This morning, I told myself that I would not be fooled again when I glanced through that same front window, then I stepped outside to find a light dusting of snow and no moon. The neighborhood, and by extension the whole world, seemed hollow inside, as if I live within a snow globe's confines with no possible escape route. I felt hollow inside, too, a recursion befitting the season. Septober's definitely over, Octember's clearly begun.

I'd pruned out the wildflower garden in my shirtsleeves the afternoon before, absorbing warmth from the late day sun.

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Conflating

conflating
"My weaknesses could be my greatest strengths in unlikely guise."

Conflating doesn't have to mean mistaking one thing for another. Congruent conflating means nothing more sinister than combining two separate entities to produce an integrated new whole. Incongruent conflating, though, juggles apples and oranges while imagining them the same because they both travel beneath the ambiguous flag of fruit. Add a tomato into this conflation, and a logical fallacy might become more obvious, since most of us know but cannot quite accept that tomatoes are fruits rather than vegetables. Conflations seem to say much about how one parses their world. Insanity involves employing differing parsing strategies. So does genius. Seeing similarities between traditionally divisive distinctions can create harmony or great discord. Jesus is said to have insisted that he would see the unapologetic sinner on an adjacent cross in paradise. His conflation of sinner and penitent might have blown up the distinction between good and evil. He claimed that all humans are sinners. How do we tell the good guys from the bad one, then? Hat color? Religious turmoil persists.

Conflating has become a growth industry.

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AfterEffects

AfterEffects
"How else could any of us deal with the volume of accumulating AfterEffects we inherit?"

We talk about effects, but might be more deeply affected by AfterEffects, those unanticipated externalities closure brings. AfterEffects delay that expected closure, sometimes permanently. Long after "completing" the race, the race somehow continues in the complaining of a suddenly and surprisingly bum knee where there was never before any bum knee. The race continually haunts, threatening permanent disability. My two weeks spent devotionally kneeling before my great wall refurbishing project left a little knee stiffness behind after I'd finished my extended display of agility up and down the scaffolding. I thought little of it at the time, as though it might prove to be little more than a mildly bruised ligament or less. It's been over ten days now and the discomfort seems greater now than it did when I'd just concluded. I wonder if I've deluded myself again.

This bum knee encouraged me to think about all the AfterEffect externalities I carry with me.

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Reassurances

reassurances
"We need more critics about as much as we need another alarming increase in greenhouse gasses."

I believe that reassurance must be the primary responsibility of primary educators. I'm not suggesting that reading, writing, or even 'rhythmatic should disappear from the curriculum, just that Reassurances seem an essential precedent to successfully learning anything. The ever-popular whip and chair techniques only scare students into attempting compliance. The result might well seem wooden and tentative, lacking supporting self-confidence instilled first by means of repeated Reassurances. For those concerned that prominently focusing upon reassuring might produce snowflake students, so emotionally dependent upon supportive stories that they lack the callouses necessary to get along in life, I turn a scoffing cheek. Those who rarely receive reassurances turn into the most emotionally needy, callouses and all, if only because they ARE emotionally needy thanks to the severe shortage of Reassurances in their lives.

I was always afraid of my teachers, and almost terrified of learning.

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Slurvey

"You're doing just about as well as anyone could reasonably expect, given the circumstances."

I visited my nurse practitioner last week, so I could hardly feign surprise when the easily anticipated customer satisfaction survey showed up in my message queue. My first thought insisted that I should just delete that sucker before it spread, but I felt too lazy for such decisive action then. I this morning decided to just open up the link to discover if anything there might prompt me to respond. I was pleased to find that this survey had been designed as I believe all surveys really should be designed. I could respond to any question by not registering a response to that question, a critically important feature of any useful survey, lest the designer's presumption that their target might provide useful information to any question doom the potential relevance of the whole danged instrument. I usually peruse these damned things before deleting, if I even peruse first, but this time I decided to duck through the small gauntlet of questions by not responding to any of them before completing the two designated optional boxes at the end. I told them who I was and how they might contact me, then slammed the enter key (which, predictably, exited me from that domain.)

I despise surveys because they almost always ask the wrong questions, and sometimes fail to even successfully present a single wrong question, but simply irrelevant ones.

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Playoffs

Playoffs
"I know that it's never over until it's over …"

By mid-October, even the very best major league baseball team has been running on fumes for at least a month. Whichever team embodied invulnerability through August, starts showing some cracks. A key player or two show up on the disabled list and the play-by-play commentary starts leaning toward the team that was rather than the team remaining on the field. Playoffs seem like a Special Olympics for professionals by then more capable of delivering winces than clutch hits. Games become excruciatingly tedious as recently reliable pitchers revert back to their pre-season performance levels and batters watch pitches repeatedly wiz almost over the plate. Some games see almost no scoring, so-called small ball, where strikeouts and short flies dominate what hardly passes for play. Other games turn into stumble sessions defined by errors and misjudgments. The two teams surviving this final gauntlet, one from each league, are deemed proven prepared for one final best of seven game face-off, one of which might be called due to snow.

Players show up wearing cowls and layers, and balls fly about as well as rocks.

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Nevermore

Nevermore

"Why, I wonder, has it taken so very many words to report that no words visited me today?"

What if, I wondered as I slinked down into my writer's chair this morning, I find nothing to write about today? I peeked back through the last three years of material I'd written on this date and found it good. I scrolled back through the prior couple of weeks' stuff and stumbled away impressed (if I do say so myself), but what if this morning brought the day when I found nothing remaining worth saying anything about? What if? I've seemingly invested so much of what I've grown to believe represents me being here that I fear a vacuum might make me disappear. It would be as if my recurrent delusions of invisibility had come to fruition, that my walking could no longer produce footprints, as if the shrubbery no longer whispered with my passage. I wouldn't even be a ghostwriter then, perhaps not even a ghost.

I received in my email this morning a request to connect with a fellow on LinkedIn.

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ArmchairPhilosophy

armchairphilosophy
" … nobody ever really pays the slightest attention to philosophers …"

I hold the opinion that there's no such thing as a comfortable chair and that the belief that there could be such a thing has become a burden to mankind. I freely admit that I possess a deep aversion to furniture in general, particularly to the purchase of it in any form, though I do allow inheritance as the sole proper means for acquiring it. The Muse and I own a remarkably mismatched furniture inventory. Different ages, styles, colors, and concepts combine to exude an otherwise unattainable Early Undergraduate ambiance. Each chair stands as a unique form of torture, with each most certainly its own form of torture. Oh, one might just seem comfortable upon first sit, but try staying put for a half hour. I simply cannot. I can perch for a few fleeting moments before something seems terribly awry and I simply must move myself somewhere else.

I've grown to prefer sprawling on the floor when I watch television.

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AntiSocialism

AntiSocialism
"In any contest between social and anti-social, I choose the social, even if some wag attaches a misleading -ism to the tail end of it."

We live in an era of rampant paradox. I wager that nobody understands a single slogan, yet we speak almost exclusively in slogans. We interact via a medium euphemistically referred to as Social Media, a place where anti-social speech seems expected and surprises nobody, not even those it shocks. In politics, we argue as if every issue were all or nothing and as if moderation rather than extremism was the greatest crime of our time. Trump employs the most offensive speech for those he derisively refers to as socialists, offering a clear choice, I guess, between social and anti-social candidates, with him embodying the latter. His strategy seems to rely upon confusion as its primary enlightening element, betting that he can persuade more voters with provable bullshit than his more social opponents ever can with simple truths. Truth, in his crude calculus, is socialism, pure and simple, and socialism, by definition supported by flurries of out-of-context references to obscure discredited economists, seems to be evil. Truth is thereby proven to be evil. How could it be otherwise?

I will not mention the most "socialistic" government program ever devised, the Oil Depletion Allowance, the original tax-everybody-to-subsidize-the-richest operation, and perhaps the most socially ruinous, vehemently defended by the most self-proclaimed conservative and anti-social voices.

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OilyBoyds

OilyBoyds
"Just who could I think of myself as being otherwise?"

Back in the days when high speed Internet access was scarce, I took to writing at Starbucks when away from home. I'd arrive when they opened at five am, and settle in to write at a front table looking out on a deserted street while conversation from across the shop grew increasingly loud and occasionally annoying. I'd slip in and out of my writing coma, barely aware of my surroundings. An hour or so later, I'd finish up, surprised at just how bustling the place had become. The early arrivers seemed to invariably be older men. Their conversation an unsurprising mix of sports, politics, and local gossip. They seemed insular, a self-contained little society, probably life-long friends. They seemed to be on a first name basis with the counter help. I seemed hardly a shadow there, myself.

As I've grown older, I feel a growing compulsion to get up and out early in the same way as a younger me might have felt compelled to go out in the evening to mingle with crowds.

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TheEllWord

IMG_4381
Before
Painting by D. Wilder Schmaltz, May 2001
IMG_4373
After
Photograph of the same place, October 2019
"True love doesn't guarantee a happy ending, but a more engaging life."

A friend asked me why I went to all the trouble of scraping and repainting the front of our house and I surprised myself a little bit by responding with, "Love," but I couldn't honestly explain my effort in any other way. I feel a devotion to that place, a deep sense of stewardship that might not make any sense to anyone else, but which makes perfect sense to me. Over the nearly twenty years that The Muse and I have owned the place, it's taken up a great deal of space in my heart. I might, by all rights, hate the place by now. It can be overwhelmingly needy. It's proved me the fool so many times that I by all rights should be reduced to drooling my dinner down my shirtfront. Worse, we've lived away from it longer than we've lived IN it. Maybe absence really does make the heart grow fonder.

It keeps calling me back.

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TranSitIon

TranSiTion
"I have no idea what comes next …"

The early flight out of Walla Walla departs at 5:15 AM. I wake myself at 2:30 to watch my alarm clock tick down to my scheduled wake-up time. I'm out the door before a quarter to four, struggling with my brother-in-law suitcase over-stuffed with leftover tools and work clothes. I call that suitcase my brother-in-law because dragging it around feels like I've brought a clumsy, indecisive shirt-tail relative along. I find a conspicuous spot to ditch the step=son's enormous truck and lock the keys inside, then schlepp my baggage into the terminal. Small town airport check-ins lean toward the informal until trying to pass through Insecurity, which seems over-staffed with a half dozen unbelievably busy agents hovering around the process. I'm almost first in line, but still spend fifteen minutes while two agents pour through my knapsack's contents, which I know includes at least two illegal items which I should have sequestered into a separate plastic baggie. I've carried that nasal spray and those eye drops through Insecurity for over ten years and never been busted. They ineptly reorganize everything before passing the bag back to me, curiously handing over my car key and a flash drive separately. The couple behind me receive similar scrutiny.

The airplane looks like a preying mantis, ungainly in the pre-dawn squall, the inside miniaturized.

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FiguringGround

FiguringGround
" … even if that hero only ever existed in my own mind."

I ask myself, "What am I to make of that?" because my experiences seem unendingly ambiguous. Was that a last result a blessing or a curse, or even worse? I never can tell for certain, so I face some choices. By what criteria might I judge an outcome, each of which seem to serve as a set-up for some subsequent experience in a seeming never-ending chain? Today's delay might later prove to have more properly positioned me in ways that an on-time arrival could not possibly have. Today's disappointment might well become tomorrow's godsend. Today's blessing, next week's curse. It's even worse than simple either/or. Though the patterns seem to replicate, none of any of this has ever happened before. We are the pointy end of a very long stick. We clearly perceive neither our origin or our destination.

Two weeks of intermittent effort seems to have produced an array of changes.

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Dreader

Dreader
" … no easy mark for all the voices that shriek through the dark."


Some seem to exude confidence. I inhabit the other end of that scale. I exude dread. I don't envision worst possible scenarios because I'm confused by the concept of worst, but I only very rarely anticipate anything turning out right. Any impending event can send my imagination spiraling into likely complications. As a result, I tend to enter well-prepared for what rarely ever occurs, and no amount of contrary, positive experience has (yet) drained me of my preternatural dreadiness. Any fresh challenge, every freaking aspiration, sends me crouching into the experience. My current refurbishing project serves as an exemplary case in point. I fuss over the finer points, sure, and also natter over the larger ones, too. My head grumbles like a zoo just before feeding time.

Am I a man of little faith?

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Workitation

workitation
"Those without long, unforgiving rows to hoe might not ever come to know …"

Plumbers work with their mouths closed. Some work demands taciturn incumbents. Long incommunicado hours foster a rich internal world. Ear worm jingles give way to recollection and quiet consideration and a kind of meditation sets in. Endless uncountable hours spent in repetitive motion does not degrade the craftsman, but seems to elevate him instead. He's not so much working as workitating, as immersed in his experience as any cloistered monk might be within his. Time loses relevance. Aching joints shed their significance. Authentic transcendence settles over the job site. Phone calls seem to come from other dimensions. Removing gloves to answer disrupts the trance, if the ringing even penetrates the serene flowing bubble. I might not be home then, anyway.

Judgement seems to sharpen within this flow.

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Yretsam

MirroredMastery
"I didn't know how to tell him that my paint choice had almost nothing to do with the end result."

I suspect that every social scientist suffers from Maslow Envy. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, which presumed to delineate a set of sequential stages necessary to achieve self actualization, reverberates as perhaps the foundational presumption of most every social science. The nagging fact that it's probably wrong notwithstanding, it provides a clean and convenient framework within which to consider otherwise terribly fuzzy concepts. The fact that it's irreducible, remarkably impervious to scientific proof, only makes it more powerful. If only I could concoct such a foundational model rather than run down one that just seems so right to so very many. I'm not even a social scientist, yet I admit to carrying my fair share of Maslow Envy, too.

Back when I was still an active consultant, I employed models to impart concepts I thought my clients might find useful. Some actually proved useful

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WrestOrRant

smallplates
"I'd really prefer to depart with something other than notching in my belt on my mind."

One phrase strikes terror into my soul: Small Plates. Tapas run a close second place. I never know these days what I'll find when I step into restaurant or diner. Dinner might await me there, but it seems increasingly likely that I'll find little more than a feast fit only for a Barbie® doll and her friends. The menu might not describe the portion size, misleading my mind into believing that just because it promises roasted winter veg that they won't come reduced to a meager puddle almost obscuring the three (count 'em, three) halved fingerling potatoes vainly trying to avoid suffocation. The lamb chop up top, so encrusted with heirloom herbs and crap that it appears to have been a stillborn mistake from a faulty EZBake oven in the back. I'm still hungry just looking at it, the plate that would be supper. I'm still hungry after, so I order another consoling beer and ask the waiter to bring me a pile of fries like that woman's plate over there. He does not charge me for this supplement to my meager supper.

Restaurant has come to mean, loosely translated from the original French, "leave hungry."

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MissedAppropriation

MissedAppropriation
"I might most vehemently defend what was never really there at all."

We seem to hold many fallacies as self-evident truths. Even those who preach against the likelihood of physical evolution seem to hold social evolution as unimpeachable truth. We might not be descended from monkeys, but some (most prominently, themselves) sure seem clearly superior to others. They might even cite some behavioral psychology experiment performed on birds or dogs to justify human behavior, shrugging in acquiescence to what they might firmly believe to be immutable scientific fact while quietly discounting a raft of conflicting experimental results. They defend social status quos as god-given and progressive-minded change as the devil's own handiwork. I suppose, given random, entropy-infused experience, humans simply must project some sort of reassuring patterns onto the screen. Our projections seem drawn from simple models, side-stepping the more physically common exponential and logarithmic progressions, preferring straight-line addition of two and two over anticipating any point on a wave or curve. We fill ourselves with these fantasies and they quickly become our baseline realities.

What are we supposed to believe, anyway?

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Hard(ly)Work(ing)

HardlyWorking
"I am a man because I harbor such delusions."

My Puritan forebears would today easily be classified as masochists. They prayed hard, sure, but they worked harder, and not exclusively for the glory of any God here on Earth, but for the glory of the real estate speculators who'd financed their incursion. They arrived at Plymouth deeply indentured, beneath the yoke of powerful financial interests with the ear of the king. Their's was a speculative endeavor, certainly no sure thing. They'd traded a settled existence for an unimaginably primitive one, the sobering yoke of great debt perhaps most prominent on their shoulders. Many didn't make it. I might reasonably insist that only their myths survived.

Their myth intertwined piety with hard work, self-sacrifice in pursuit of so-called higher ends.

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IdlingTime

IdleTime

"The end, a terminal condition where IdlingTime starts threatening me again"

Forget the Chinese Water Torture. Ten years at hard labor? Kid stuff! If you want to inflict maximum punishment, mete out a sentence of a hard week of forced idleness. Prevent the convict from breaking big rocks into little ones. Set him in an isolation cell with nobody to tell him to do anything at all. Treat him as if he was not there and he'll more than disappear. Forced IdlingTime takes away even the more engaging mind. Force me to take a week reclining on a sunny sugar-sand beach and I swear that I'll go bat-shit crazy for you. Take away my keyboard. Rain me out for two mornings in a row and I already know where I'll go. I'll try to escape into sleep, but sleep won't come then. I'll look for a place to lie down, then watch my mind spin without engaging any flywheel. I'll burn my whole tank of gas without leaving anything behind to show that I was even there. True desperation.

I do not find vacation time rewarding.

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PickEmUp

pickemup
" … fifteen hundred pounds hauling a bedload of air and leaves blown in there late last autumn."

I possess no more than glancing knowledge of PickEmUp trucks. For me, they serve as an annoying presence on the road. They goad me from behind before leaving me in their dust and coal smoke. I've borrowed my share from brothers-in-law to haul the odd load of yard prunings or to move a few bed-fulls of grape skin mulch from a winery, but always with an alien's eye, the driver's seat too impossibly high a perch. The steering wheel positioned inconveniently right between my eye and the windshield, a patina of dust and grit priming dashboard and jockey box. I'd crawl between destinations feeling as though I was piloting The Queen Mary through narrow channels, the turning radius of a mile-long coal train, gun rack in the back window.

These ungainly vehicles have become an unlikely symbol of masculinity.

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RainedIn

cancelled
"What else was life supposed to be besides a series of clever recoveries from the way it was supposed to be?"

The chairs still sat atop the tables with lights still low when I showed up at 'my' Starbucks to write this morning, so I decided to try the truck stop instead. I found a welcoming wi-fi signal there, and an atmosphere much more conducive to pursuing my intention. No soundtrack blaring. No deaf regular screaming everything he says. No altogether too high-test decaf to jangle my spirit. As quiet as a library. My huge DIY project looks like it will be delayed today, with weather reports increasingly agreeing that today and likely tomorrow, too, will be rained out. Baseball games still get rained out. Sometimes schools close when the snow flies. Flights might get delayed or cancelled when threatening weather settles in, but most activities continue as if invulnerable to any kind of vagary.

Where might a person find a reliable source of disruption for their plans if not even a rainstorm can get much cancelled?

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MindlessEffort

MrMachineManual-7
"My name is Mr. Machine!"

Once I've laid out the job, my mind starts reducing it, influenced, I suspect, by The Principles of Scientific Management I've so long reviled. I am not, I insist, a machine, except, of course, when I willingly assume the role of machine while in pursuit of completing some repetitive series of tasks. Then, I'm actively searching for movements I might reasonably eliminate, seeking a pattern of least resistance, creating a simplified set of repetitive motions of the sort which might well leave behind permanent damage. I willingly, enthusiastically become a machine. The jingle from that sixties toy commercial endlessly echoes through my head: "Here he comes, here he comes, when you see him, you'd better run 'cause his name is Mr. Machine." I am become not light, not a force for goodness and right in this world, but a genuine machine.

My mind feels perfectly satisfied with my self-appointed role.

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ExpertAdvice

expertadvice
The Conjurer, 1475–1480, by Hieronymus Bosch or his workshop.
"Another spare ounce of budding expertise standing in for a ton of actual skill."

Experts tell others stuff, exercising cheeky presumptions that the advice seeker cannot validate. Some of the stuff they share seems unlikely to the point of unbelievable, but then the more complicated human activities have always seemed counter-intuitive. Charlatan experts abound. There are probably already a hot half dozen YouTube videos posted on whatever subject you need, ready, and perhaps a tad too willing to offer "good advice," each of which kind of contradicts every other, worth every penny any novice might not agree to pay for it. Real expertise seems different from the phony kind, though, and as I began yet another semi-massive Do It Yourself project, I decided to engage in the one way most seriously dedicated DIYers never would, I consulted a genuine expert.

I had reason to believe that my expert was of the genuine variety.

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Trabbeling

trabbeling

"Do not for a minute envy my mobility."

The Muse and I find ourselves Trabbeling again. Merriam-Webster defines Trabbeling as a common variant of the more common traveling, and while a variant, the term seems to better impart what I experience. The Muse Trabbels all the time these days, so her mileage varies considerably from mine. I once lived on airlines, weighted down by so many frequent flier miles that they had to seat me way up front so as to counterbalance most of the rest of the load. Then, I was a fearless flier, unruffled by turbulence normal or exceptional. Now, I've matured into more or less a complete ninny.

I presume that an airline reservation will probably fly me into the valley of the shadow of death, so I consider flying anywhere a reminder of my inescapable fallibility.

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Septober

Septober
"If I can't own up to the inescapable fact that I started out all wrong again,
I will never make anything right."

This morning dawned grey and gloomy. Septober arrived with her usual mope. Autumn never has qualified as even the second runner-up in The Hopeful Seasons Pageant, a little too much goose flesh showing during the Catalina Swimsuit portion of the competition, I suspect. We know where Septober's going. In with a mumble and then out with a slam. It signals the start of a season featuring thick socks, slamming doors, and serious preparations for another overlong hibernation. We should feel cranky when considering this nap time.

The Muse and I head out early tomorrow morning for yet another extended absence from the Villa Vatta Schmaltz High, this time to try to refinish the front of the original Villa Vatta Schmaltz before Septober suspends outside work for another year.

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KnowingNuthin

snob
"I shake my dead in weary dread
when I sense a superior beside me."

Supremacy carries the certain scent of some internal sense of its own inferiority. Lording over another seems to leave the lorder looking a lot less lofty. Feeling special doesn't seem to be anything special, we've all experienced it, but that sense of being special serves like a museum piece, meant to be exclusively displayed on interior walls. Taking it outside disqualifies in ways nobody can convincingly say without appearing a contender as superior scold. It demonstrates a disagreeable neediness in the proclaimed possessor, a separation between heart and soul we all know signals a moldy mushiness within. It hardly seems to matter where the realm of superiority lies. Holier than thou seems more than slightly similar to smarter, richer, handsomer, and cliquier. Effeteness sleeps in its own lonely backstreet.

The effete sometimes gang up.

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BegEnding

Oroboros
"I hear autumn approaching."

I never come seeking closure, though sometimes closure seems to stalk me. It whispers, "The end draws near." It promises clarity but demands that I forfeit purpose, to exchange kinetic for static, questions for settled certainty. I never feel more alive than when first setting out. That first step seems the stuff of eternity, the last seems simply past. This book making makes for the strangest bedfellows, ones who sincerely want to share my scheming, who seem to need to somehow capture my soul, perhaps to sell it for something less permanent, like gold. I'm told that something called a market stands out there. Precisely where this chimera might lurk, I do not know. I do know that nobody could possibly show me where. It might exist in the great unmappable nowhere. Its presence scares me.

I come to the end of another season, one I began, like I start all seasons, with a purpose, indistinct as all proper newborn purposes should be.

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FakeNews

Bullshit1
"Simply swallowing seems to make me sick."

Our venerable New York Times seems to have come under harsh criticism for having published a glaring omission, a shortcoming that they reported shortly after publishing. The harshest critics complained that this little incident, and it really was, in the scope of everything, a microscopic error, proves a point they'd been trying to make forever, (Or did it just seem like forever?) that the mainstream (or, in their vernacular, "lame stream") media has always been untrustworthy. The critics scream (must they always scream?) "Fake News" again, but we're deaf to their frenzied exhortations. We know that the REAL Fake News outlets never report on their own shortcomings, so na-na-na-na-na-na!

Truth is, the venerable New York Times has never once published an edition that failed to include a few errors. It has likewise never published an edition that did not feature an A Section column entitled Corrections, where the editors fess up to their own shortcomings. It also publishes readers' letters, a disturbingly large percentage of which take umbrage with something the paper published. Hardly invulnerable to criticism, seeming to embrace it instead, this whipping boy of those who insist it deals exclusively in Fake News somehow manages to maintain the self esteem to publish, then publish again. Shameless!

Well, perhaps not completely shameless.

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PatTurns

PatTurns
"I already drive an autonomous car most of the time."

I'm reasonably confident that I'm not closely related to sheep because my coat has no wholesale market and because I'm a pickier eater. In spite of the inescapable fact that I'd much rather bleat than bleed, I consider myself a notch above the typical lamb on most cognitive scales. My will seems freer and my judgement somewhat more sound, but I still seem to spend much of my life on autopilot, not really observing, thinking, or choosing for myself. My vast body of experience easily convinces me that I might reasonably just go with the apparent flow without frequently intervening to change course. Once settled into a pattern, I tend to stay down in those reassuring ruts.

I suppose that I turn where I turn because I didn't get burned by going that way the last time.

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Messo-

messo
" …to feed the needs you never genuinely had …"

I'm wondering what to call the kind of illusory examples I seem to be drenched with in my media-saturated world. I catch on that I'm supposed to sincerely want whatever's being advertised, whatever's being described, yet I know the ad and the description might only be best understood as examples of studious omission, contextless impossibility devoid of externality, a terribly alluring NuthinMuch at all. Have I become so suggestible that I swallow these seductions without catching on that they're cardboard cut-outs without the cardboard? It seems so sometimes. I understand that they tug at my heart strings. I'm supposed to want and I even do, sometimes. Other times, my heart aches as if I should be wanting but simply cannot. Someone left a Post-it® sticker on my screen door yesterday which reported that many of my neighbors have been replacing their windows, and I might want to seriously consider replacing mine, offering discounts I cannot afford to pass up. I moved the sticker to the front of my garage refrigerator so it can remind me what I'm supposed to really be wanting whenever I fetch myself a cold beer.

What IS going on here?

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Spindly

spindly
"I'll notice what left us behind."

Late Summer has a broad belly but stands on Spindly legs. Spiders spin increasingly frantic and Spindly webs, seeking to secure more of the last of their weary prey and set their egg sacks away. Pumpkin fields feature more desiccated foliage than green. Foothills regain their usual buff beige as their velvet turns back into crunchy sandpaper again. The mid-days retain their brightness and their heat, but each day's celebration rolls up the sidewalks by seven and sleeps until almost seven the following morning. We still sleep with our windows wide open, but slip out from under covers to don a supplemental sweatshirt before dawn. Flannel moves a few spaces closer to the functioning end of the clothes closet, eyeing the lightweights ahead of them as if they were already gonners. I seriously consider wearing socks again, but stave off that siren's song for now. Their time will come too soon.

The produce stand started stocking squashes and pumpkins, elbowing aside full summer's contribution to the diet

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InSpite

InSpite
"Every completed one turned out just precisely how it was supposed to."

InSpite of the plan, which I'd carefully crafted during the days before starting the little project, my anticipations quickly went to Hell. This was in no way a surprise. I would and should have been much more surprised if they hadn't. My decades of experience crafting clever plans convinces me that they are most often conceived to fall apart. This doesn't excuse slipshod planning, for shortchanging the process limits the insights resulting from a southbound effort. If nothing much gets invested in how it's supposed to be, no Oh, Shit experience will result, and these spark the insight essential to actually completing any effort in a satisfying way. Only actual experience can temper the confidence motivating the beginning. Only insight can spawn whatever's actually needed to get the job done. It's a rule or something.

The spite emanating from these sorts of realizations could power the electric grid.

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Educationing

educationing
"In practice, we're all mostly making it up as we go along, …"

Surprisingly, I don't consider myself to be stupid. By many measures, though, I'm clearly not smart, certainly not THAT smart. In school, I learned that I was not smart, with this lesson repeatedly reinforced until it became almost the only learning I retained, which might mean that I was at least smart enough to learn that I wasn't smart. I've retained that foundational lesson through my entire adult life so far, reinforcing it through near constant repetition. For instance, Denver's close-in western suburbs feature several North/South arterials. I frequently use two of the most prominent ones, Kipling and Wadsworth, yet I can almost never remember either name. I know just where they are, but when The Muse asks me which route we're taking, I might hesitate a beat before replying that we're either taking the W or the J street. Unable to recall the precise name, I offer some lame placeholder instead. I'm forever calling Wadsworth Wordsworth, which seems like a workable-enough alternative. Numbered highways don't even get placeholders out of me. The ring freeway is either 730 or an unnamed entity, I cannot seem to retain its real designation. The highway between Golden and Boulder has no name as far as I'm concerned. I think it's ninety something, maybe seven. Yet I can usually navigate without overmuch trouble, the names hardly mattering in practice.

School taught me that I don't seem to store information in crisp little recoverable packets.

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Wall-tering

IMG_4347
" … nobody but the next painter to follow will ever see the subtle complex symmetry I somehow left behind."

Today's project, should I muster enough gumption to begin, will result in a repainted wall. It's an exterior, southeast-facing wall, angled and elevated, lightly weathered by a hailstorm over two years ago. I've prepped and repainted all the south-facing walls in the period since the insurance adjuster proposed hiring painters and I replied that I preferred to do my own painting, thank you. I spoke the truth, I really do prefer to do my own painting. I work at a pace that leaves me coming in second place behind any snails in the field, but I think of myself as someone who values quality above speed. I first excruciatingly evaluate the surface from several perspectives. I stand close, then move further away, building an ever-deepening understanding of the effort facing me. I imagine how I'll begin, what tangles I'll likely encounter, how much paint I might need, and what tools I might employ. This considering might take weeks, with me finding ample reason to dread in anticipation, which might encourage me to consider even more.

I know for sure that once I begin, the work will quickly become my obsession.

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Choosiness

choosiness
"Unsettling, isn't it?"

When I was a younger man, I experienced a great revelation. This hardly qualifies as a headline-grabber because great revelations seem the sole property of youth. Older folks continue to experience their share of revelations, but they only very rarely strike them (or anyone else) as particularly great. The notion that age brings greater wisdom beggars belief, as anyone paying attention as their grandparents, then their parents, entered old age. At some point, accumulated wisdom seems to pass backwards to the following generation, often without their permission or immediate recognition. Catching on to this transfer might be the final great revelation most experience, though this ordinarily appears as a genuine "Oh, Shit!" moment.

My great revelation whispered that it's all about choice.

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Winning

winning
"They will celebrate by ceasing further play …"

I explain that I've never been terribly competitive. The Muse objects to my self-characterization, reporting that I have gotten fairly fierce at the old Scrabble board sometimes. Perhaps, I reply, but how often do I play Scrabble? It's not like I make a habit of engaging in competitive 'games.' I find every other board game aptly named. They bore me. I never really learned to play cards, chess, or the lottery. I have twice entered casinos only to realize that I didn't have the first clue how to engage in any of the 'games' there before going to find a quiet place to read. I sense the rising tension in a late-inning close call baseball game, but I never quite lose the understanding that winning and losing never mean much. There's always tomorrow or next season or never lurking around the corner. Winning's more transitory than cloud, so I don't quite understand the roar of that crowd.

Yet I do not characterize myself as a loser, either.

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Inconspicuous

inconspicuous
" … enable each of us to make choices which could leave us stepping a little more lightly as we conspicuously stomp around our Eden"

A hundred and twenty years ago, early economist Thorstein Veblen published his The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. The book reads almost as if it were parody, like any great work of economic theory should. He noted a strong correlation in the US between what he labeled Conspicuous Consumption and status. The higher the status, the more one would willingly pay. He noted that the old 'buy cheap, sell dear' ability said to underpin capitalism was not evident among major capitalists. Quite the opposite. Maintaining status required public profligacy. He provided numerous examples, several aimed at what we now call Elite Institutions, universities that built and maintained terribly expensive Gothic enclaves. As with anyone audacious enough to commit this sort of public truth, he was eventually blackballed out of academe. He died a decidedly inconspicuous death while living in an empty shipping crate which was situated just off Sand Hill Road, where Silicon Valley's venture capitalists now maintain offices, overlooking Stanford University's gothic enclave in Palo Alto. He'd reportedly adopted a pet skunk, the only remaining company he managed to maintain through his declining popularity.

Judging by the number of McMansions and McEstates dotting the Front Range around my more humble abode, conspicuous consumption has not diminished in popularity over the intervening years.

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CityOfScolds

scold
"I propose starting with me."

I live in a CityOfScolds. Any stranger will most likely receive a cold reception. Any neighbor might get burned. Judges seem to always be on duty to notice should anyone stray from somebody's straight and narrow, and it never seems to take much to be accused of stepping over some line, especially the ones only the judge ever knew were drawn. Such constant vigilance never was the cost of anything but sure and certain humiliation and ever hardening feelings, for we're all little kids stranded in big people bodies, mistaken for omniscient when only innocently faking it through. I seem certain to offend you as you seem equally certain to offend me. I feel well-justified in calling that foul, in exhibiting my very best scowl for you, though you always seem to me to be a tad too picky with me. Maybe that dog barking really should be prosecuted as the Federal case your reaction seems to indicate that it should be. Maybe my innocent inquiry broke every tenet ever known for propriety. Maybe your piety stands more than head and shoulders above mine. We each seem to have gone into the business of failing (flaying) to fix the recent past, aghast.

We behave as if we were each justifiably offended by each others' presence. We endlessly inconvenience each other.

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Smell0Vision

smellovision
"When well-produced fantasy becomes the new reality,
what does the viewer become?"

I do not know how deeply television has influenced me. It might be that it's in the nature of TV that no viewer could ever know how deeply it influences them. What I experienced as a passive watching, though, seems to have been a more complicated interaction than I sensed. I know that in my youth, I would have chosen TV over almost any other activity, even if, as was often the case, "nothing was on." I became a fairly indiscriminate consumer, relatively indifferent to the actual content and much more intent upon experiencing that zoned-out state. Before sex, drugs, and rock and roll, TV was there. More importantly, I was eventually, always there for TV.

My folks kept their TV on every waking hour. Mornings brought The Today Show mumbling behind their morning routine. It seemed to be their morning routine.

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HotGreen

HotGreen
"Eat to excess whatever's in season."

This statement encapsulates my personal produce philosophy. I will probably shun any fruit or vegetable until I find fresh and local, but when I find fresh and local, I turn into a genuine glutton. The Muse and I share this guiding philosophy. Winters force us into crouched, defensive positions where we somehow subsist upon root veg and obscure members of the cabbage family. Sure, we could score asparagus from Peru and blueberries from New Zealand, but we'll shun those carbon-clad choices. We'd really rather starve. Spring and Summer, though, find us enthusiastically frequenting the family produce market where The Old Man drives to the other side of the state twice each week to bring back truckloads of whatever's presently in season. We dutifully buy then eat to excess whatever's fresh each week. No produce better exemplifies this philosophy in action than the audacious HotGreen Chile.

No, I do not mean Jalapeño, that seemingly ubiquitous pretender pepper, the Wonder® Bread of hot chiles. I find the Jalapeño uneatable, mean heat accompanied by the flavor of muddy lawn.

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Reating

reating
"Neither exclusively a reader nor a writer, …"

I read a lot more than I write. Reading's how I fill my writing hopper, not so much with fresh ideas, but with inspirations. I read like an interior designer surveys paint samples, not to copy anything, but to remind myself of the possibilities prose holds. I am susceptible to subconsciously replicating whatever I'm reading, so I carefully choose what I read. I've developed a ruthlessness when it comes to finishing a book or a piece of writing. If it ain't going nowhere, I won't go there with it. When asked what I do for a living, I catch myself mute. "You mean, what do I do for money?" I reply. "Nothing." I read and write instead, mostly read; Reating.

Reating isn't the most lucrative occupation. It's only necessary, which gives it its only defensible attribute.

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HomingAgain

homing
"I'm a pigeon, for sure, but not entirely one of the Homing variety."

Scientists say that it's an instinct, an irrepressible urge to return home, so they refer to it as The Homing Instinct. This label contributes nothing to my understanding of the phenomenon, though I personally experience it when returning from some travel. As the scenery becomes increasingly familiar, I start feeling like my old self again, my traveling self sliding back onto the back shelf next to where my suitcase lies between excursions. I'm a fine traveler, able to smoothly adapt to a wide range of different environments. Within a half hour of arriving, I will have located some place where I can reliably score my morning decaf and a serviceable slice of bread. I've packed methodically, so everything I might need stays ready to hand, whatever the brand name on the side of that night's hotel. I grow used to the simplicity of the traveling life, a single bag carrying all my necessities. My guitar case hogging more than its fair share of space. My knapsack haphazardly stuffed wherever it finally fits. That's it, my entire traveling kit. I'm able to carry it all in one trip in from the car.

Home presents a wholly different sort of challenge.

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Driven

Driven1
"I'm cautious as if my fate were not under my own control."

I think that it's safe for me to assert that fewer than ten percent of the people driving cars are competent drivers. This assertion isn't just my snarkier side finding a platform for whining, but the result of careful observation and recent deep immersion into my fellow drivers' behaviors out there on the open road. experienced a remarkable sampling of my fellow drivers' skill, as well as my own. It's shockingly poor, but I'm not telling you anything you don't already know. I do not consider myself to be any more a competent driver than I consider myself to be a competent writer or cook. As Dirty Harry long ago observed, a man's gotta know his limitations. Because I judge myself a somewhat less than skilled driver, I lack the confidence I consider essential to drive like any self respecting maniac might. The Muse insists that I drive like an old Italian woman, only lacking a few pounds and that ubiquitous black dress from fully qualifying. I do drive safely, which seems to drive my fellow drivers to distraction.

I carry my personal ethical underpinning. I never exceed the speed limit, except when passing another driver who has clearly demonstrated their inability to maintain that limit.

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APerfectDay

APerfectDay


"APerfectDay, the memory of which will likely never, ever go away."

I awaken before four feeling perfectly rested just before the alarm breaks silence. I clean myself up for the day before sitting to consider just what sort of day it might become. I decide upon APerfectDay, one for which the memory will likely never go away. We plan upon driving up and over Lolo Pass, as fine a piece of road as exists anywhere, two hundred plus miles of two lane Federal highway alongside the Clearwater and Lochsa rivers. It will be the last day of this year's August, hot, dry, and windless, and we will sleep many miles east of where I'm just then waking up. I grab my knapsack and head out just before five, looking to refuel The Schooner, find a block of ice to keep cold through the long driving days between here and Genesee our ZipLock® quarts of frozen wild black currents we'd picked when we passed through the weekend before. I easily find both before heading for the old Main Street Starbucks and the front window table where I've written dozens of stories over the years. The counter clerk already knows what I'm going to order, the same thing I always order, a large (I will not say, "Venti" for anybody) decaf in a china cup. She surprises me by not asking me if it's okay if she has to give me a pour-over. Maybe they've brewed ahead in anticipation of my arrival. Perfect!

I write, by which I mean to say that words come to me, a prose poem to the end of harvest.

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ReSeeding

Reseeding
" … evenings would have turned to frost and the sky would have become that most remarkable blue."

Want follows excess. The Muse and I climb up and over White Pass, a low route through the mighty Cascades, moving through late summer fields showing the tail end of seasonal excess. Vine maple and alder hold the passage of July's brutal heat in their desiccating foliage. Wheat harvested, stubble fields stand like old men with their pale bellies showing beneath too-tight tee shirts. We drive beneath cool covering cloud until we reach the pinnacle, where the sky opens wider than a clown's mouth in a dentist's chair. High dry hills watch us pass, heading home(s), through our home country one last time, a short stop where our hearts live before heading on to our most current temporary mailing address.

Excess follows want. Our decade of exile taught us more than we ever wanted to learn, thank heavens.

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ChickenLittle&TheBigChicken

BigChicken
"The sky is not falling, nor likely to."

I got punked this week. Well, I might have actually punked myself. I read this finely-written article which a trusted source had posted. I found the arguments provocative and convincing. The piece maintained that steady voice I've grown to trust. It turned out to be complete bullshit, especially engineered to punk people like me. You see, I'm at root a BigChicken. I am not generally confident or particularly assertive. I keep a low profile, over-thinking my way through issues. I'm more likely to check twice before believing any house is really on fire. I might be more concerned about over-reacting than I am about missing any BIG news. I'm no ChickenLittle. My sky has never fallen so far. I feel no compelling need to incite any passionate reaction. I'm more observer than activist.

Some people, though, have gone into the business of inciting passionate reactions.

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MillingAroundTown

MillingAroundTown
"Everyone knew that those logs rafts would never come back …"

The Muse and I will just be staying two nights in the crappy hotel on the edge of the bordering forest. I dutifully slink out to find a Starbucks in the morning since the hotel's internet service can't quite seem to recognize my laptop as a valid user. I don't mind. I usually slink out wherever we stay, unable to keep myself locked away early in a day. My eye seems drawn to the down and out, those who justifiable feel left out; though, as The Muse confided, we seem to have landed on the more fortunate side of our towering Continental Divide. I carry no good advice for anyone trapped on the opposite side, good fortune visited us, and my empathy buys nobody nuthin except for perhaps an insignificant reassurance for myself as I wander through. I did not grow up here, a place seemingly founded to provide a decent back story for anyone fortunate enough to escape. Every Western Washington mill town seemed to have been founded upon this same principle.

Hell if it is the state capitol, it failed to shed its grittier roots.

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LeftOut

catlestout


"I almost always will have left myself out when I discover, too late, that I've been left out overnight again."

Before our cats left us, they taught us that leaving them out overnight amounted to the greatest sin we could ever commit in their eyes. This did not happen very often and, to my mind, usually resulted from them being just that much too clever for us. I thought that they'd outsmarted themselves of hogging more than their share of the matrimonial bed and of sharing our overnight body warmth, that they'd lost more than we ever sensed that we'd lost. We'd stretch out into what usually amounted to already occupied territory and accept that additional space without in the moment imagining that the space represented a greater absence. The next morning, opening the door to fetch the newspaper, a grey or ginger blur would slip past me and I'd realize the crime I'd committed. I'd offer the obligatory kitty treats in apology and steel myself for a few hours of glowering stares, for I'd left one of the cats outside overnight where coyotes or owls could have spirited them away. They might have initiated the slip, but I had failed to catch it. The resulting sin got chalked up on my side of the grand ledger and I could never adequately atone.

Anyone who, like me, could never really decide upon what they wanted to be when they finally grew up, carries a sense of having been LeftOut of something.

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Ghosties

sleazeattle
"It still terrifies me today."

Some places seem permanently haunted. No subsequent contradictory experience ever erases the spookiness of these places. Once jarred, forever barred from comfortable coexistence. Seattle, or Sleazeattle, as I used to call it when I lived here, serves as that place for me. The prospect of revisiting it raised my hackles. The two days before we crossed the Cascades, I caught myself dreading our next destination, even though nearly fifty years now separate me from those times. It was always a cold city, one seemingly still struggling to outgrow its sorry start. The great fire of 1889 seemed to just encourage those who'd grown accustomed to walking its soggy board sidewalks. They built skyscrapers on unpromising fill and kept growing until it began to strangle itself with its own traffic. Hillsides held huge houses overlooking a smoky port. Slums subsumed its Southern third. It was every bit as segregated as Atlanta or Chicago or Boston. It was and remains a distinctly odd place.

Walking this morning through the Pike Place Market before opening time, I find it still just as unpromising as it ever seemed.

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ImPerfection

ImPerfection
"Dreams come true in the same way that plumb gets achieved, through artful deception."

If I look a little harder, I might glimpse sublime ImPerfection. Peaches quite naturally seem to avoid perfection, the better-shaped ones always turn out to be not quite ripe, the slightly bruised, juicer, tastier. From a slight distance, every item on offer at the Farmers' Market seems perfection incarnate. Step up to the counter and I see a thousand little reasons to turn and walk away. Maybe television has so poisoned my eye to expect every object to have been staged, properly backlit and artfully arranged, that I struggle to recognize as good as anything ever gets, which ain't perfect. I could stomp around in a continual state of learned indignation, gathering complaints and festering them into grudges, as if I had been cheated out of some birthright. The GrandOther discovers a worm in the ear of corn she's shucking. Some of the ears appear, once shed of their silk, as if they could have used some serious orthodonture work. We'll slightly unfocused our eyes as we eat, trading taste for appearance. Up close, nobody can see whether those kernels line up straight, anyway.

A little too hot or just a smidgen too cold. A little early or a little late. My world stands in approximate space where nothing exactly fits together.

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CurrantAffairs

CurrantAffairs
"It's no skin off anyone else's back when they hold as secret lore what almost nobody even cares about anymore."

Most everyone living in this region holds a few deep, dark secrets. Among the very most closely guarded, the knowledge of where to forage the best wild edibles. One can tell if they've been accepted into a family if they're entrusted with the location of the most reliable morel patch, huckleberry field, or trout stream. Outsiders need not apply, as if to keep this essential portion of deeply local identity safe from Californication. These special places were invariably originally simply stumbled upon by some fortunate forebear, who sealed his lips just as soon as he realized his great luck. Visitors hear stories, of course, tales of pick-up loads of morels, but they believe them to be mere legend or braggadocio, and so quickly discount them. This perfectly natural disbelief further insulates these Elysian Fields from further discovery and serves as a near perfect defense against outsider intrusion.

The older families refer to themselves as hillbillies.

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Poemtry

Poemtry
"The true purpose and ultimate significance can only ever come later."

Another birthday comes and another poem needs writing. Long tradition demands it. Had I never become the sort of cheap bastard who steadfastly refused to purchase presents, I might be off the hook. Instead, I chose the cheaper on the speculation that it might be good, better than the obvious alternatives. "Better for whom?," I ask as I start the annual stare down with another perfectly blank screen, hoping it might blink first. Tabula Rasa seems no great challenge for me. I dream of great inspiration visiting before simply settling in. A garden to weed, a lawn to mow, every routine chore could devolve into a simple bore, though each could become so much more. This pedestrian transformation knows no How To how, a curious emergent property, perhaps, of never knowing how. I simply must begin.

I imagine my dearest friend and I still don't know.

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SetList

setlist
"Crazy begets crazy. How else could any love last?"

After writing songs for more than half a century, I've yet to manage to maintain a half-decent Setlist. I most often grab rather blindly when The Muse insists that I perform a short set after one of our suppers. I quite often forget a chord progression or reverse important lyrics to render pitiful my performance. I then return my trusty D-18 to its coffin-like case and set about embarrassingly studying my shoes. Having written a tune hardly qualifies me to perform that tune, and even someone with my experience still needs to practice, practice, practice, even if I never really expect to make it to Carnegie Hall. I well-understand that I really should play every day, but I do not and have not, seemingly wasting my talent. In recent weeks, though, I've begun to play a bit more, fueled by a particularly embarrassing attempt to play just a single song for visiting friends. We all managed to change the subject, but that belly-flop really stung.

Any performer mostly performs for an audience of one, comprised of the most critical observer in the universe, so practicing easily becomes an exercise in serial self abuse.

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Onward

Onward
" … I've come somewhat closer to understanding the expansive rules governing the playing of the Infinite Game."

In his Finite and Infinite Games, author James Carse parsed the world into two games: Finite and Infinite. He characterized Finite Games as those played for the purpose of achieving something, typically winning. We engage in Infinite Games for the purpose of positioning ourselves to continue play. I've long thought of my life as a form of infinite play, and not simply because I seem so danged determined to not accomplishing anything. Finite games lost their allure when I started wondering why they were even engaged in. What's decided when two sports teams go head to head? Many thing, but little of any real consequence, I concluded. Mostly, they demonstrate fealty to a set of rules governing play, the occasional bean ball notwithstanding. They agree to limit their behaviors to that small subset covered by Hoyle, then sort of pretend to battle for a win. Infinite games tend toward the much less dramatic.

The Muse and I woke up this morning to face day ten of a twenty-some day road trip.

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DisTopia

DisTopia
" … whatever home this world once extended is melting away around me."

Live long enough and your world will have have turned into a DisTopia, the seeming opposite of what you'd hoped it would become. A 70,000 population home town will have mushroomed into a cool quarter million plus. The bordering verdant farmland, so picturesque and quaint, will have sprouted endless identical anonymous suburbs. Backroads will have become four lanes. Favorite haunts will have evaporated, leaving haunted replacements. Solid bedrock will have turned to sand. Your former mastery of your world will have become about as negotiable as leftover Hungarian Florint change, a pocketful of excess weight in the front of your favorite backpack. 'Tiz the way of this world, it seems, to lose whatever once sustained us.

This newer world doesn't feel half as brave as the old one seemed.

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TheOldPlace

PleasantStreet
"New owners are raising their kids within those elegantly crooked rooms and quirky yards …"

By the time I'd grown up enough to move away, I knew every square inch of that short acre. I even knew what lay beneath the landscaping, having scraped, crawled over, or cultivated every corner. I knew that the back forty, as we called the yard behind the garage, lay atop an old creek channel, and so the soil was deeply plated with ovoid rock that drained much too easily. The side yard had been planted over an ancient septic pit. The grass grew much lusher there. Dandelion and plantain favored every inch of the property and required continual scrutiny and counteraction throughout the growing season. We used to spread coal ash clinkers along the driveway in the wintertime. I'd personally dug out the bed alongside the driveway innumerable times, always finding a few half-petrified cherry pits from a tree we'd cut down decades before. I'd fill an old metal wash tub to overflowing with weeds, unwanted roots, and the Silver Maple's helicopter seeds.

TheOldPlace passed out of the family after my father passed.

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ReUniting

reuniting
"A few of these people will always be my friend."

Who did you grow up to be? Probably just who you always were before. I sincerely doubt if any of us ever grow up. Most of us tend to outgrow some of our more troubling tendencies, but most often by some form of out growth rather than by growing much taller than the least of them. Fifty years later, one might manifest a more reliably consistent version of their earlier self without really growing up much. We seem to remain the same kids imbedded within ever bigger people's bodies, still growing into who we probably always were. I speak of we when you probably suspect that I mean 'I', for I can't really know how it must be for you. If you sincerely feel as though you grew up, I say, "God Bless You," and "How did you do that?"

A fiftieth reunion of a high school graduating class comes only once, never to be repeated again. It comes at a reliably inconvenient time,

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Payshunce

payshunsh
"Maybe I can simultaneously like it AND lump it for a change."

Payshunce might be the sole necessary skill of modern life. The faster everything goes, the more everything seems to need to spool up before actually accomplishing anything. The Schooner wants to warm up before we zoot off. The laptop decides when I just want to quickly check something to not simply wake up but to desperately need a full restart, complete with demands for a half-dozen Pastwords I cannot remember in that moment of duress. Traffic moves more slowly than advertised, especially when a few drivers choose to go all Formula One on everybody and thereby slow down the overall flow. Queues naturally slow as they lengthen. It's apparently their nature. Your order won't come up until well after that fleeting wave of hunger has left the building.

One learns Payshunce by having it beaten into them, often at one's own hand.

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PoeTayToe

potato
"This pony ride's over and done."

Yes, Idaho license plates still proclaim Famous Potatoes, and quite properly so, for Idaho remains famous for its potatoes which, I guess, also renders their potatoes famous for being from Idaho. Fame works like this. The most popular category of famous people has always been Famous For Being Famous, with television celebrities topping this species. Fame must be a critical part of potato marketing, for in the East, Maine plays the Famous For Growing Potatoes Card and further West, Grant County in my native Washington state insists that they raise more potatoes than any other county in the country. Making a fuss seems necessary when dealing in a natively bland commodity. Nobody's license plate proudly proclaims Famous Tomatoes or Noteworthy Cabbage. Only the homely old potato holds this distinction: LPF, License Plate Famous.

In Idaho's specific case, the fame seems well-deserved.

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Stranging

Stranging
"He freely floats without ever coming close to feeling free."

Stranging should be considered one of the higher forms of art. It could not qualify as a science, for initial conditions inevitably evade scrutiny or systematic analysis. Strangers show up lost and build out from there, taking whatever presents itself, substance generally unknown and likely unknowable. I was blessed with the ability to feel disoriented even when staring at a properly-oriented and obviously accurate map, because North just doesn't always feel like North to me, and my feelings tend to rule. How I feel about a strange place hardly ever influences that place, though, so I wander off in wrong directions whichever way I go. I convene an argument in my head, my feet dishearteningly heading off in what will very likely turn out to be the wrong direction while my head mumbles dissent without even convincing himself. My head will chastise itself, but no argument will resolve the controversy. I might well find my way there and back again, but only by fortunate accident.

Had I tried to be a frontiersman, I would have been one of those whose bones—their story untold but nonetheless obvious—Later Arrivers find mouldering beneath an ancient cottonwood.

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Ghosting

ghosting
"We're West if, indeed, we're anywhere at all."

The Schooner runs quiet as a ghost. Inside, The Muse and I listen to old jazz, Gene Krupa pounding away on his jungle drums through Bennie Goodman's Sing, Sing, Sing. We could be front row center at that famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Concert, flopping to feral rhythms. Just outside, a wonderland passes by around us, with high mountain wildflowers punctuating our smooth passage. We quite literally bop through Steamboat and out onto the great basin country beyond, a landscape defined by uplifts, which naturally lift up our spirits, and spirits we seem to become. A town out there is defined as any relatively wide spot featuring a sign. Several of these exhibit no clear signs of life, but they apparently warrant a sign anyway. A scrappy ex-building or two might show where once some enterprising entrepreneur made a go of something, but the cafe sign seems permanently faded and the gas pumps have gone missing. I suspect that most of these "places" have become ghost towns now.

I think it only fitting that we flit between ghost towns out here because we seem to pass as ghosts, too.

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Guesting

guesting
"You're stuck with each other for the duration, at least try to enjoy the dance."

We're all guests here. Neither of us, none of us, have real dominion over the birds in the sky or the beasts in the field, we're stewards. Guesting entails a temporary sharing of a semi-sacred stewardship, with the guest's responsibilities no less or more sacred than their host's. They co-habitate for a spell, the host providing space for the guest to fill. A good guest will fill that thoughtfully-provided space without sucking all of the air out of the rest of the place. They'll appreciate the room, though it's never the best in the house. They will have explicitly explained their preferences and limitations before arriving. Most importantly, the guest should be present, genuinely there, for their presence will serve as their greatest gift to their host and to themselves, so show up on time for meals and limit the appeals for special handling. You represent the Big Door Prize of your stay, but never the Daddy Bear, Mommy Bear, Baby Bear, or Goldilocks. This isn't a fairy tale.

If you find yourself in desperate need of toilet paper or a plunger, speak right up; everyone's been there.

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Power

PowerButton
"it's the superpower I hold rather than the one I'm unlikely to ever possess."

I was yesterday listening to Alan Lightman's audio book In Praise of Wasting Time while mowing the lawn. He told a story from his youth about when he finally connected with a pitch in a Little League ball game. He reported that this was his first experience of power, and felt great surprise that he, a decidedly non-athletic nerd, might also be a powerful person. Later in life, he said that he looked back on that time whenever he faced daunting challenges, convinced deep down that because he had once demonstrated personal power, that he remained a powerful person at root, and so would most likely overcome whatever difficulty he faced.

I think many (if not most) of us do not carry a similar conviction.

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CumpKnee

cumpknee
" … genuine affection might be the only good reason to ever host any houseguest."

A buzz overtakes the place a week before they arrive as if the isolation pod can't quite believe it's about to become a social hub. CumpKnee's coming. The Villa will receive a thorough scrubbing, which means that I will scrub and vacuum and The Muse will dust, I long ago having lost my belief in particles too tiny for visual verification. I crawl the kitchen, utility room, and the garage hall floors, scrubbing as I go. I'll displace chairs and tables to dust mop and vacuum up all those odd bits the houseplants exhale all over the place. I unmake beds and the washing machine finally puts in a full day's work. I remake beds with fresh-smelling linen and rework the guest bath (my bath when no guests are around) and move my detritus into The Muse's bath, a so-called Master Bath within which I am not entirely welcome. I scrutinize the larder and perform an unusually picky shop, selecting stuff necessary to satisfy our guest's stated preferences.

I've become unembarrassed to ask after a prospective guest's preferences and prejudices.

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PreCrastination

precrastination
"I don't seize my days as much as they seem to seize me …"

I must have been born before my time. This world was no more ready for my arrival than I was ready to meet up with it. The world seems to have been playing catch-up since the day I was born. I've tried slowing down, honestly I have, but the world seems dedicated to tailing me, leaving me to cut the sea ice to ease its weary way. I don't mind. I'm uncertain if I could follow tail lights even if I'd ever found any out in front of me. A few years after I've lost interest in what was once a new phenomenon for me, here comes the world just waking up to that item's existence. The fabulously fresh by then seems simply old hat, for I'm off in some newly uncharted direction, making most of it up as I go along.

I have my traditions.

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Service

service
"Best Wishes! Your Customer."

My car dealer treats my like a duke. I'm there for an oil change and I'm greeted with a servile deference ordinarily reserved for visiting royalty. I ain't royalty and I ain't on no diplomatic mission. I came for my twenty four thousand mile service. Nothing more. I am nobody's "Sir." Please do not mind your Ps and Qs with me. Gimme a little shit, please, and I'll give you some in return, then we might hold some chance of connecting, of forming a relationship. Your best behavior seems wasted on me and could not possibly be any less appropriate to this situation. Treat me with less pomp and more attention to the circumstances. I'm unimpressed with that box of fresh doughnuts, which, by the way, seems most interesting to your sales associates, who have formed a steady if stealthy stream through the Customer Waiting Area since I arrived. That TV suspended above me seems more threatening than entertaining, distracting me from my reading. Nobody else's watching it, either.

Service has been earning a bad reputation for decades.

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ShootingStar

shootingStar
"I inch my way along in near total darkness beneath barely pinpricks of light."

Some nights, I wander through dark rooms, refusing to turn on any lights as if testing my muscle memory. I tell myself that I don't want to awaken The Muse, as if any force in this universe could wake up The Muse once she's down, but I feel genuinely comforted by my resulting blindness. I'm also trying to preserve my night sight for what I might find when I peer up into the sky. The neighbor's illegal upward-facing lights try to blind me from this reassuring night as I find a seat and peer up through the ambient evening air. Stars seem to congregate up here, with the occasional satellite floating across the plane. A ShootingStar streaks across before me, there then gone in an instant, more a blink of an experience than an actual one.

No matter how I might peer then, another ShootingStar will not cross my path.

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MovingOn

movingon
" …we drag that home along with us wherever we might get off to."

Out here on the edge of the West, or, as the sign over Golden Colorado's Washington Street insists, Where The West Begins, we enjoy a long tradition of MovingOn. The original inhabitants were nomadic, moving between locations as seasons suggested. Later arrivals showed up after MovingOn from some previous place, many of them nth sons without inheritance to hold them closer to home. Many of those MovedOn to somewhere else when the silver petered out, or moved into a different occupation than hard rock mining. We seem to live in temporary digs, acceptable until whatever passes for silver in our lives peters out. Westerners hold a long tradition of abandoning their past in favor of a more promising or less continually disappointing future. My own forebears rolled those big dice, came West, and somehow survived the transplants. Anyone might think that we're, as a result of this heritage, a fickle people, driving with one foot continually in the ditch, always ready, willing, and able to jump ship. Anyone would be wrong.

MovingOn the Nth time still brings all the anxiety of that first time.

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Thinking and Praying about Thoughts and Prayers

thoughtsandprayers
"Mutually Reassured Delusion absolves everyone."

I've been Thinking and Praying about Thoughts and Prayers, a solipsistic activity which extends no further than my eyebrows and no deeper than my neckline. It's a genuine echo chamber in there, with thoughts chasing prayers, then prayers chasing thoughts until the distinctions between them degrade into an oily, waxy substance that hardly flows at all. I seem more stuck now, mired in self-reference. Had I the wisdom of any second-rate god, I might have resolved this conundrum by now, but the more I think and the more I pray, the more I seem compelled to pray and the less productive my thinking seems to become. I feel like a genuine recursive mess, hoping to produce something useful, perhaps a solution, but at this point, I'd settle for a second-rate resolution. Negotiating the first SALT treaty could not have been as difficult as dealing with the damned gun lobby, and that involved uniformed Russians! And, as every school kid learned in the fifties, you can always trust a communist to be a communist, but even then, they agreed to reduce their weapons in exchange for us agreeing to reduce ours.

Sometimes, something like a Christian comity emerges between two avowed enemies, a mutual back-scratch; an 'I will if you will' agreement.

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Lib'ral

lib'ral
"It's not that we can never go home again, but that we can ONLY go home again …"

We live in a Lib'ral Democracy, yet I struggle to define just what Lib'ral means. Maybe you do, too, especially if you self-identify as a conservative or a radical. The term has been under constant attack from conservatives, radicals, and those who can't quite grok the idea of any form of governance reliant upon emergence as its central organizing principle. Yet in the nearly two hundred years since its emergence, liberalism has utterly transformed the world I inhabit from one which could not imagine what we merely take for granted today. Authoritarianism, which was pretty much the sole form of governance known to the world before, continues to assault what the vast majority of us consider our birthright, but it only has dominion to defend itself against liberalism's subtle but much stronger power. Plodding and painstaking, the Lib'ral seeks to reduce the net suffering in this world, and has succeeded beyond any of its original champions wildest dreams. This is a continuing contest between endless ebb and flow and periodic gush, and though those floodwaters seem overwhelming and permanent, they chose the long-term inevitably losing side.

Unlike you, I suspect, I've been keeping my political head down since the current incumbent stumbled into office a few million popular votes shy of a mandate.

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Health

Health
"Too much scrutiny spoils the soup."

I shrink whenever I enter a Health Food Store. I doubt many of the claims I see advertised there. I came not for salvation, but for non-hydrogenated peanut butter and cheap walnuts. I've never quite qualified as a food faddist, though I might come close to being considered a foodist. I subscribe to Michael Pollin's suggestion that I do eat food, though not too much, and mostly plants. I was raised adjacent to an Adventist community filled with proudly healthy pallid-skinned people who looked like warmed over death and lived to extremely ripe old ages. I've joined food co-ops where I rubbed shoulders with every form of eater known to man, always slipping between the queues to find the cheap but good enough stuff hidden in the bulk section there. I retain a lifelong membership in the Gluten Appreciation Society, an Adele Davis-inspired love of organ meats, and a natural aversion to all soda drinks, especially those touted as especially good for me. I believe Vitamin Water® a scam, whether it is or not, and try hard to avoid the latest recommendations regarding diet. I follow a turn of the twentieth century recipe for cooking beans.

I eat to excess whatever's in season.

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SunflowerSeason

SunflowerSeason
" …a glorious season progressing a scant fortnight per step."

In theory, a season should last about three months. In practice, a season's duration varies considerably depending upon location. Somewhere in middle America and perhaps Slovakia, spring lasts three months, everywhere else, it persists longer or less. Should one manage to stay in the same place they grew up in for the rest of their life, one would instinctively sense when a season changed. The rest of us fumble with the obvious differences between what the calendar insists and what we're experiencing outside. Here along the Colorado Rockies' Foothills, to this recent transplant, seasons seem to unpredictably lead and lag. Winter weather will probably infringe upon both autumn and spring, sometimes even summer. Even summer, though, near the middle of its advertised presence, varies from day to day, even hour to hour, leading me to propose that the traditional notion of three month seasons might have never been terribly germane. Seasons seem conveniently subdivided into better-suited sets.

Two short weeks ago, Sweetgrass Season reigned; now, SunflowerSeason.

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UnderThinking

existential
" … with meaningful insights struggling to be seen, much less appreciated, …"

I was going to write about OverThinking today, but I discovered that I'd already written about that three years ago. I caught myself in one of those rumination loops common to my practice. Prior considering will have only rarely settled anything. I believe that I could infinitely consider any topic and still fail to stumble upon much of a conclusion. Conclusions, I tell myself, seem over-rated, anyway. If I am because I think, as Descartes so proudly proclaimed, thinking might serve as a precondition to my even being here. Should I ever stop, Descartes might predict that I'd simply disappear. Not that my disappearing would necessarily set back civilization even an angry inch. Thinking serves as one of those activities which somehow survives without ever having acquired a cogent definition of itself. In that respect, thinking and I might be fraternal twins. I spend most of every day in my head, thinking, as the presumption goes, but perhaps not OverThinking so much as UnderThinking there.

UnderThinking seems an art, for its purpose couldn't possibly be simple representation.

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Rooms

huge-house-plans-with-second-floor-huge-homes-pinterest-floors-plans-love-house-plans
"It was memorable for a reason nobody could explain …"

Bradford and Hillary Keeney speak of Rooms. Should I feel constrained in the present room, I might simply move to a larger room, one capable of properly containing me. Likewise, should a room feel too roomy, I might move to a room more suited to my size. Bradford and Hillary speak metaphorically, of course, but I've been feeling overly unconstrained lately, as if my present room were considerably larger than necessary, than appropriate for my present endeavors. I feel as though I cannot fill the rooms I enter these days, as if each one had been designed to contain a larger person, a much larger personality than I bring to my game, for I hold humbled aspirations now. I no longer aspire to achieve greater things, but lately acknowledge that my accomplished achievements might well mark the high water mark of my career and my life. I understand and accept that our universe continually expands, but I find this a poor excuse to mimic it. I ain't no universe.

Or, rather, I ain't no large-infinity universe.

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EarlyMorning

EarlyMorning

"I will have in EarlyMorning warmed up the bed for him to wallow around in …"

The diners and coffee shops seem to fill with geezers first. Later, the driven corporate types trickle in, thinking that they've seized another day, only to find the territory already settled by second-cup sipping self-satisfied retirees, hard-core unemployables, and maybe a writer or two, those for whom EarlyMorning offers their sole refuge. Nobody watches them rise. Nobody's even trying to catch them along their way. They will become increasingly invisible throughout the following day. They have little left to aspire after, having found their eigenvalue, though they find great fulfillment acknowledging that they once again managed to beat that lucky old sun at his own eternal game.

Not even the magpies hear him rise.

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Downtime

Downtime
"The Muse ultimately makes this call."

I will never suspect. I might have noticed a creeping lethargy, a budding indifference, a blooming I Just Don't Care attitude, but I will not suspect that I might have contracted a bug of any sort. In my mind, one can only properly declare illness for a) a runny nose, b) runny bowels, c) sore throat, d) fever, and/or e) a broken bone; basically the same list of acceptable excuses for missing a day in elementary school. Dizzy disorientation falls well north of any threshold under which I can legally claim myself to be under any weather, since I consider it a part of what passes for my usual countenance. I get confused sometimes, as a normal part of my continuing inquiries. The Muse notices, investigates, then declares me out of the game. "There's a bug going around," she says, and I crumble into bed.

I have never made it a habit to schedule personal downtime.

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Deadheading

deadheading
"Gardening demands a certain heartlessness."

Gardening demands a certain heartlessness. It ain't all tender nurturing, but also involves a studied brutality: pruning, plucking, trimming, and the curiously-named Deadheading. No, Deadheading has nothing to do with a popular musical group from the sixties, but involves removing spent blossoms and their bud tips to encourage fresh blooming. Deadheading prolongs the purpose of planting the flowers, extending the blooming season beyond what it would otherwise have been. It's picky work, likely to damage the plant should it be clumsily performed. It tries the patience of even the more contemplative gardeners, insisting upon an extended level of focus almost orthogonal to quietly enjoying blossoming flowers.

I water our petunia planters every couple of days through midsummer.

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Exes

exes
"My first wife will forever have the flu on our honeymoon and my second will always have a cold."

My first wife had the flu for our honeymoon. My second caught a cold. My third wife caught nothing except me, an infection for which there might not be any effective cure, thank heavens. My first marriage ended after I'd fallen in love and turned into a giddy and somewhat irresponsible seventeen year old at thirty-five, my first and most significant mid-life crisis. My second marriage ended after I told a terrible lie. Accused of carrying on an affair I had not engaged in, I admitted to it after realizing that I could never convince anyone, who's identity so utterly depended upon me being such a cad, that she'd just imagined my infidelity. She despised my kids, anyway, which meant in my mind that she deeply despised me. Neither of these disconnects ever got talked out, for each was beyond words to explain. My first wife insisted that we go see a marriage counsellor, but refused to go back a second time when she discovered that the counsellor wouldn't take sides. I continued seeing her and still speak with her today. She's served as my fair witness and refuses to take pay because she insists that I'm an interesting case. My second wife just asked that I thereafter think of her as dead.

While both relations became beyond words as they moved into their ex- states, conversations continued in my head.

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TheSummerOf1969

summer-1969-lt-blue-prints


"I guess I would have swallowed most anything then, and likely did."

If you weren't there, you're unlikely to believe a word I say describing that time. TheSummerOf1969 seems in the future now, an idyllic upcoming state those of us who were there briefly glimpsed as we sped by. No, I'm not suggesting that everything was rosy then. I lived under the clear and always-present threat that I would be drafted to fight in a meaningless war half way around the globe. My hometown remained securely in the clutches of an entrenched plutocracy. But I'd somehow survived the gulag that was my high school and I really felt as though I was at least ninety percent upside. I had nothing to regret yet. I had not yet fallen hopelessly in love. I had close friends in high places, and while I didn't share their obsession with getting high, I found their presence nonetheless elevating. We fancied ourselves radical and were frantically growing our hair to prove it. Our future was finally now!

The world today isn't painted in the same alluring hues.

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BeaLonging

sunlitcloudtop
"The curtain hardly falls before another fist cloud boils up into the last of any day's sunlight."

The drenching rain comes in the third act, once the set-up drama just about ends. Some small overlap seems necessary for a smooth transition, but the drenching foreshadows the end. The credits will roll over driveways and ditches draining away the final residue and the standing water starting to seep into soil hardly thirsty by then. I might not even stay up for the final acts, since I prefer the dramatic lead-up much more than the down falling denouement. I appreciate the moisture, but worship the thunder and the lightning.

I saw what first appeared to be tall sails slipping above low clouds already in sunset's shadow.

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Fambly

fambly
"We think of ourselves as something really quite special, …"

My birth family seemed obsessed with visiting each other. We never once went on a vacation that wasn't primarily focused upon visiting family. We'd arrive and the Brownies would come out and the photographing commenced, lining up the cousins in stair step order, the sisters in mirror proximity, the in-laws as if they were genuine brothers. We also rarely stayed in motels, for there was always some family we could drop in on for at least one night when we were in transit. I suspect that we sometimes came as somewhat of a shock when, near sundown, we'd happen to be near Chico and call ahead to my mom's uncle to announce that the seven of us would be there around suppertime, but we were never once turned away, because we were Fambly.

This was my birth family's experience.

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SumMorning

SumMorning
" … because I'm already there."

A velvet curtain covered the windows overnight, so thin and permeable that the light breeze could squeeze right through its intricate weave. Morning light slipped through, too, as if the curtain's velvet has expanded to texturize the entire atmosphere. The sunrise screamed through the muffling haze that this would become one of the hotter days, but then, before the paper came, before I could rouse my upside-down American flag on it's stand, the land reclined in perfect ambience. Yesterday's extremes seemed at that early hour a bad dream, though even those extremes hardly blunted my seasonal enthusiasm. We wait through nine or ten months of disparagement for mornings just like this one, mornings which seem to last forever before seeming simply fleeting.

The flower garden's finally as fine as it's going to get, with experiment and old reliable doing their best to please.

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KeepingUp

KeepingUp
"I understand that I'm only marginally worthy of the fruits of their efforts."

I try to keep up, honest I do. I scan the morning news. I do avoid broadcast news, though. Trump's election broke my decades-long addiction to NPR. (Interns seem to have overthrown genuine journalists on NPR. I can tell because they elevate the end of every statement into a question, an annoying affectation.) The fact that it's on the tube chased me away from most televised news, though The Muse and I will sometimes watch the PBS Newshour on a Friday evening just to finish off the week; besides there's nothing else on at that hour. The various nightly newscasts, thoughtfully aired in late afternoon when we're still nose to grindstone, seem as over-produced as any campy Broadway musical. The cable alternatives have priced themselves out of our reach. We unprogrammed our remote's access to our local Faux station, but they never very convincingly pretended to be very interested in broadcasting news. They're a shameless, transparent propaganda distributor. I wonder how they keep their FCC license, or would wonder if I didn't know who was running the FCC these days.

As near as I can determine, anything our President touts as fake news is the God's honest truth news and whatever he touts as honest news is absolutely fake.

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Metalogue

metalogue1

" … a snake chasing his own tail,
still deeply uncertain what he might do should he ever finally catch up to it."

Prose comes in many forms: dialogue, monologue, diatribe, lecture, and scold, to name but a scant few of the more frequently encountered types. Fiction and non-fiction hardly stand as distinctive designations, each more dependent upon the author's intention than any pervasively factual foundation. Historical fiction can and does sometimes seem to better represent a period than does scrupulously fact-based history. Commentary takes many forms, and so might be accurately described as a meta-form, one not beholding to any standard classification. Much prose follows subtle rules that if they were ever written down, I haven't found the source document delineating them yet. To speak of these underlying forms seems to require violating those underlying forms, to go meta or mina to them, for speaking of a form seems to require sidestepping the form itself, which might subtly prohibit self-reference as a premise for employing it. My personal ethic to avoid telling people what to do cannot be conveyed by telling people not to tell people what to do, and this highlights the paradoxical territory speaking of underlying forms traverses.

People have been after me to classify my own writing, which I've always found to be a challenge. I can more easily declare what it's not than what it might be.

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Righting

righting
"Perhaps I might be an author after all."

I earlier this morning finished copyediting a manuscript I "finished" ten months ago. Copyediting and writing seem antithetical to each other, like shining the brass has almost nothing in common with building a ship from scratch, but the overall effort's uncompleted until somebody polishes that brass. I find this work to be, well, real work, unlike writing, which doesn't usually feel very much like work to me anymore. Furthermore, it feels like picky work, the sort that demands close attention without really paying for it. I'd read each piece before, even scrupulously copyediting them, though I'd never read through the whole work as if I were reading a whole work, which provided a unique experience for me to read something I'd written as if I was a scrupulous reader rather than the proud and slightly defensive author.

I felt surprisingly pleased with this author's work.

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Sturm und Drang

strumunddrang
"An old saying insists that Sturm und Drang signifies nothing"

I am not a man given to emotional outbursts. I hail from a placid valley where a summer day might passive-aggressively scorch but only rarely degrade into fearful vengeance. Colorado's Front Range experiences a different midsummer normal. Here, a July day's temperature routinely ranges forty degrees or more between sunrise and sunset, heating quickly as morning progresses before monsoonal moisture erupts. The fabled hiss of summer lawns by mid afternoon might routinely transform into brisk then fierce wind followed by first distant thunder, then terrifyingly close lightning, then drenching rain. Colorado's summer weather has serious mood lability issues, and one can reasonably expect it to turn unreasonable with little warning.

It's Texas' fault, a reasonable if slightly unfair attribution.

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ComingOfAge

Coming-of-Age
"I expect to continue ComingOfAge until my accumulated age catches up to me,
not until I finally catch up with my age. "

I'm supposed to attend my fiftieth high school reunion in a few weeks, and this event has me ruminating. I was ComingOfAge when I graduated, not yet eighteen and emotionally unprepared to accept that I'd grown up. In fact I had not then completed growing up and cannot yet admit to having finished that labor, for ComingOfAge seems an asymptotic activity, one which never fully completes its mission. I seem to have been chasing the chimera of maturity for as long as I can remember, always pursuing a mythical stable next state which seems to have always been replaced with yet another looming ascension as I grew nearer to it. I remember never having quite grown up into feeling like a fully-qualified high school student when graduation came along, just like I never quite satisfied my aspiration to feel as though I fit into my Junior High School class before graduating from there. Ditto with my grade school and preschool experiences, and ditto to every role I've attempted to assume so far.

I've grown to question whether anyone ever comes of age.

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Calculess

carbon-footprint-1
"I might be damned whatever tradeoff I choose."

'They' say that the size of my personal carbon footprint depends upon the tradeoffs I resolve, a series of this or that choices. Many of the choices come cloaked, relying upon me to be alert and aware and present enough to realize in a narrow moment that I'm supposed to be making a choice there. Like most everyone, I live much more automatically than this prescription relies upon me living. I only rarely think twice and even less often ruminate much on whatever choice I've already made, each completed action a sunk cost more than a lesson truly learned. Most of my carbon emissions result from me flipping a bloodless switch. Even so,I know myself to be a serial carbon emitter of the first order in spite (and sometimes because) of my deeply held concern about our precious climate. I'm good as far as that goes, but I'm fairly certain that it's not nearly good enough to matter.

Look, I'd take public transportation if it was available, but it's not.

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SlackerDay

fistclouds
"Aren't we all?"

The Muse and I become more insistent than actually obsessive come Saturday morning. We both know what we'll do. Beyond the age when we're obligated to attend any juvenile soccer games, we understand that Saturday morning's reserved far in advance for restocking the larder. This routine repeats itself without becoming ever the same each time, for as the seasons progress, different necessities emerge. In January, our go-to family-run produce stand's closed for the season, so we're relegated to picking through the less discerning supermarket's variety. In high July, though, that stand's finally wide-open, past the Saturdays when they offered the choice between onions and potatoes or both.

Asparagus was finished last week, other than that pencil dick, past season stuff that could be credibly hollowed out and fitted with a graphite core and used for scribbling.

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MuseGone

DCConventionCenter
"Those boundary conditions and the rhythm they encourage make my work possible."

The Muse is off galavanting this week. Part of her job involves galavanting, traveling off to conduct business somewhere else. She's done enough of this over the past decade that this week she was named Grand PooBah for Life by the Marriott Hotel Chain. This guarantees that she receives special service, a steep discount, room upgrades, and free high speed internet for life at every Marriott-owned property in the world. She almost always travels alone, leaving me to tend fort while she forays off into hostile territory. Our little fort hardly needs tending, save for watering the plants, so my schedule opens waaaaay up during these absences. Her away schedule allows for two brief check-in periods each day, one while she wends her way to her first morning meeting and another as she wends her way back to her upgraded room and high speed internet service at the end of another over-long day.

These check-ins usually find us with little news.

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SweetGrassSeason

sweetgrass
"Do not speak of yesterday or tomorrow today."

The hard luck farmers and harder luck miners who originally founded Denver were probably pretty much ready to head back to from wherever they'd come after that first hard winter and disappointing spring, until a couple of scant weeks into summer and SweetGrassSeason kicked in. Up until then, the region had meted out one humiliation after another. False springs had taunted their cabin fever. Heavy snow had isolated and humbled them. The foreshortened fall before had surrendered too quickly into an early blizzard. I imagine them forlorn with a nagging spouse questioning again just what had seemed so promising about here. But then SweetGrassSeason arrived.

The sky had been cranky, mustering up quick tempestuous thunder carrying torrential rain and hail every damned afternoon.

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StayingUp

stayingUp2
"I prefer to think of eternity not as some pearly-gated community …"

When I was about eight years old, I enjoyed no higher privilege than one I created for myself. I'd head for bed at the prescribed hour, feign almost immediate sleep until the bed check passed, then pull my bread-loaf sized radio under the covers with me and listen in to a live broadcast from The Big Y, a turnaround point on the long Main Street drag frequented by high school kids out dragging the gut. The program featured popular music punctuated with news alerts. One unforgettable night, the DJ announced the escape of a kinkajou from a traveling circus. Several nights, someone had escaped from the state penitentiary up on the hill at the far end of thirteenth street. I laid there, warmed by the radio's etherial glow, feeling as though I was situated near the center of the universe. I fell asleep satisfied sometime in the uncountable early morning hours.

A few years later, I took an early morning paper route and over the following several years, transferred that StayingUp reflex into a GettingUp one, finding them both equally satisfying, for both provided that bounded solitude I seemed to crave.

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SigjawPuzzle

sigjaw
"I'm more of a tape the box together sort of guy …"

I've put this puzzle back together scores of times. Each time, the age-worn pieces fit together a little differently. My memory holds an impressionistic representation of what the finished picture should be, mostly composed of reanimated routines snugging within old familiars, but it never seems to end up just as I remembered it being before. Each completion an off iteration of whatever had come before. Leaving crumbles the puzzle into constituent pieces, throwing them haphazardly into a box half Scotch® taped together, cover photo faded and worn. Returning pulls that box back out of the game cupboard to lay out those pieces for reassembly, tedious but necessary effort. One cannot stay away for ever and one can never return to find the SigJawPuzzle already completed.

It might not matter where I begin.

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Lagging

WoolyWilly
" … creating a self-portrait on a Wooly Willy canvas … "

I confided to The Muse that I probably should not be out. We both felt delicate, me having risen at 3am in the guest bed, having no recollection of how I had gotten myself there. The Muse, a reliable last riser, was already up. The laundry was done by seven. We'd gone out shopping at five thirty, aware that we'd left the larder bare when we'd departed for Europe two weeks before. When we arrived at the supermarket, neither of us could think of anything we needed to buy. We returned with a gallon of milk, a quart of yogurt, and a dozen eggs, all of which would remain untouched by the end of that day.

"Where are you going?" The Muse asked as I blew past the exit I had intended to take.

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Pavements

cobblestone-09
"Those weaned on concrete should struggle to absorb it all."

The flight paths into and out of Denver International Airport have not yet been paved, as evidenced by the routine insistence by every pilot of every arriving and departing flight that cabin service be either suspended three quarters of an hour before landing or delayed for a similar period after takeoff. These departures and arrivals prove to be white knuckle affairs for everyone except the flight crew, and even they give their seat belts an extra snugging tug. I find myself anxiously anticipating every departure and every return before finally submitting to the necessity of experiencing this ordeal, though I don't like or appreciate a minute of these adventures.

In the US, pavements tend toward the uniformly boring.

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RulesOfTheRoad

RulesOfTheRoad
"We expect ourselves to behave like the fully functioning adults we know ourselves to be …"

The Muse and I have traveled plenty. We're not genuine World-class travelers, but we've managed to make our way anyway. Our relationship began during a period of rather intense business travel, which we always managed, in the spirit of any fresh relationship, to make into net pleasurable excursions. A week in Winston-Salem rivaled a week in Rome, for we were younger then and so deeply in love. We learned our ropes, our RulesOfTheRoad under perhaps the most positive conditions. We learned not to take much of anything that happens very personally, for grudgy effects could sour an otherwise delightful experience. Stuff happens, inconveniences conspire, it's nothing more than their nature, but we never agreed to become pawns to their conniving games and always managed to have a vote in every outcome. We noticed early on that some people seem to travel for the pure aggravation it provides in their lives. Listening to their travel stories seemed like listening to a particularly vengeful prosecutor talking himself into filing a viscous bill of particulars. Flights arrived late. Hotel reservations lost. Dinners uneatable. Of course these minor distractions happen to everyone who deigns to move beyond the secure confines of home, but none of them amount to the stuff anyone should aspire to make into a Federal case. We early on decided that these amounted to nothing much more than plot twists and need not ever very deeply influence the quality of any outcome. So we arrived hours later than planned? We call this sort of occurrence a So What?.

We do have a few rather hard and fast rules which we intend to help ensure domestic tranquility.

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Traveling

traveling
"I expect my shadow to continue to surprise me whenever I chance to see it."

"They" say that travel broadens one. If it does, it accomplishes this end by successively narrowing perspective. From the row twenty-two aisle seat on the transatlantic flight to the semi-private compartment on a Central European train through Slovakia, remarkably tiny spaces contain most of traveling. The broadening, more a smearing, actually, must come from switching out these spaces over relatively short periods of time. Travel from Budapest to Prague involves witnessing a few foreshortened hours of quickly shifting vistas through farmland, picturesque villages about the size of a photograph of them, and through tiny train stations before finally slow-crawling into the massive train yard in Prague. Likewise, walking those old cobbled Prague streets provides no more than the narrowest perspective on the place at any one time. A walk might take one through a half-dozen remarkably narrow passages where one can't see more than a few meters ahead or behind them self. Even the view from the Prague Castle parapet provides less perspective than I might catch from our deck back home. Yet, near the end of an excursion, ten or twelve days in, I feel as though I can see much more broadly than I could from my deck back home.

We spent a few days in a genuinely tiny apartment in Budapest which featured a view clear across a narrow street.

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BurrLynn

BurrLynn
"Nuthin-particularly-special, but plenty and enough."

Berlin feels more like an extended suburb than a world capitol. It stretches from horizon to horizon to horizon to horizon, hardly rising from the horizontal plane. It clearly ain't no New York, Paris, London, Prague, Vienna, or Rome. It's looks like more of a Gary, Indiana sort of place with a few canals and a small river thrown in. It once, like many other capital cities, aspired to become the capital of the world, though by aspect alone, it hardly could have ever realistically consummated that romance. It fell, hard, dividing itself instead, a cautionary tale for any place defensively lusting after becoming some place more special than they were. It holds few treasures and more cold memories than any similarly-sized space on earth.

The more affluent neighborhoods have populated their sidewalks, making them appear no different from any other yuppie enclave anywhere in the world.

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Good&Lost

Good&Lost
"We can always choose to get bad and lost without really choosing anything."

Neither The Muse nor I seem to be immune from getting lost. Even assisted by GPS and the almost always available GoogleMaps app, we still get lost. We can't credibly blame these occurrences on the mapping software because it's just software and therefore eminently fallible. We can't always blame ourselves, either, and not only because blaming never found anything. In order for blaming to find anything, it would have to reverse the ineffable forward flow of time, which would be an unrealistically heavy lift for anybody. Blaming suggests just going back for a do-over, but there's never any going back and therefore no do-over possible. Getting lost seems an inescapable element of living and probably not that much of a problem, anyway, though it certainly seems like the problem it isn't.

I figure that getting lost serves as a force leveler, protecting me from getting what my mother would call "too big of a head."

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GrandEntrances

GrandEntrance
"We will have no opportunity to remake that first impression with another GrandEntrance."

The Romans perfected this schtick. Following some victory in Gaul or equally far-flung place, a triumphant general would ride ahead of his legions into Rome with much heraldry and trumpet-blowing. Employing the photographic technology of the time, the celebration would then be painstakingly carved into a bas relief and cemented into a city wall. An arch might be constructed over the following century or two, ensuring that this victory would live long in the citizens' memory. Today, some nerd schlumps off a long train ride to insist that he doesn't need a cab or a tram or even a subway ride. He and his lovely wife will instead drag their roller-bags through the middle of town during the height of the evening strolling hour. A lasting impression will remain, but mostly in the minds of those pulling those bags over dispassionate cobblestone. Finally arriving sweaty and breathless at their hotel, they receive the dispassionate attention of a distracted night clerk before proceeding without trumpetry to their room where they will leave a temporary bas relief of their exhaustion in the bedcovers when they rise the next morning.

The Muse and I have produced a considerable history of making GrandEntrances such as the latter.

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ClearingOut

clearout
" … open to discovering fresh futures."

At some point near the end of the first reel or the beginning of the second, the desperadoes would have done about as much damage as they could, given that a posse was at that very minute closing in on them. One of the bad guys, not necessarily the leader, would stand a little taller in his saddle and proclaim, "Let's clear out, boys!" Amid general disarray, then, the desperadoes would depart. I'm thinking about the notion of ClearingOut this morning, as The Muse and I pack up to head on toward our next destination. The refrigerator's emptied and swabbed out. Counters clean. All but the last load of garbage already sits in the bottom of the bin. The bathroom's returned to its original state, our bag's packed, and I'm an hour ahead of our scheduled departure time.

In my home life, I clear out about once a year, usually as spring threatens to cast a scornful light upon accumulated remaining winter sloth, but I never clear out to this degree except when moving.

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SlightSeeing

"The world-weary traveler just wants to go back home again."

Tourist can become a difficult role to fulfill. It might appear from the outside looking at, that the tourist lives the Life of Riley: chauffeured in an air conditioned bus, put up at tour rates in first class hotels, sumptuously fed on local specialties at every stop, but the non-stop services can leave the traveller feeling done for. When does he get to decide anything? That tour guide with the gaudy pink umbrella she insists upon waving around like she's rallying troops around the flag seems to take a tad too much sense of authority from her role. The bus drivers maintain their steely-eyed gazes. Rumor has it that they're all retired Special Forces with ice water running through their veins. The fellow travelers, too, can wear on a man's patience, capable of moving no faster than a reluctant donkey, a man only rarely manages to hit his stride so he shuffles along with increasing ennui.

After a few days surveying the legacies of several century's worth of royalty, another set of crown jewels resembles nothing more than a sale display counter at Macy's.

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Hunglish

atable
"I feel like a temporary illusion here."

Walk down any street in Europe and your eye will catch some familiar words displayed on shop fronts. Typically between two words clearly in the local language, a prominent English word appears. Much in the way that a French word in an English advertisement catches the eye and imparts a certain cache even when I don't understand the meaning of the word, I suppose English in a French or Hungarian business name sets that shop apart, perhaps a smidge above, its competitors. Some of the words seem necessary. I mean what besides Burger Bar would one name a burger bar in Budapest? Pizza's pizza the world 'round. The Chinese fast food joint in our Obuda neighborhood declares CHINESEFASTFOOD beside a Hungarian phrase I suspect translates into CHINESEFASTFOOD, so why the concatenated English version? It seems that all Chinese, Vietnamese, and Thai places in Budapest prominently feature English on their signs. Are these places there to serve English-speaking visitors, or does this encoding hold special meaning for the locals, too?

Menus rarely feature even a hint of English.

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You'reUp

Jean-Baptiste_Marie_Pierre_-The Rape of Europe
"The differences seem overwhelmingly superficial …"

Wherever I go, I find essentially the same old thing: people going about living their lives according to remarkably similar patterns. Different places offer different challenges for their inhabitants, but local adaptations aside, humans seem remarkably consistent in their manner of living. Some favor rice for breakfast, while others swear by strudel, while still others insist upon ham and eggs, each difference more superficial than substantial, for each rises hungry and proceeds to satisfy that hunger by relatively convenient means, largely relying upon local availability to determine preference. Some think ham and eggs unconscionable. Waffle House patrons would pass on the opportunity to choose any weird breakfast choices. (Cough, cough)

These superficialities attract much attention, though.

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FakingStock

FakingStock
"The results prove nourishing anyway."

During the earliest days of summer, a man's thoughts inexorably turn toward produce. The cherries are in, dark, firm, and glorious. Small rose-blushed apricots cannot be resisted without committing one of those sins of omission that at least one of the more vengeful gods will eventually get you for. The garlic's young, the parsley root, ancient, the celery so fresh that the root needs no peeling and the greens scent everything they touch. Though The Muse and I stroll through the Grand Market on the alien side of the Just Visiting line, I finally cannot resist. That little apartment we're staying in must have something like a stock pot, mustn't it? I could conceivably buy a small amount of braising beef, a slice of that extra fine-grained pork belly fat, and a turkey carcass with which to concoct a decent stock. It would't be very much like any of the many stocks I've seen described by fine chefs, but it might work just fine for some NuthinSpecial someone like me.

I groan our way home on the tram, my shoulders bowing beneath the accumulated weight of just a little of this and a little of that.

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DisOrientation

disorientation
" … it's just sometimes sorely needed."

Eventually, even the better-behaved gods tire of omniscience, which can become quite pedestrian even if one takes care to avoid constantly lording the ability over everyone else. It's a tricky balance, because omniscience isn't one of those senses anyone can deliberately turn off. It comes unbidden, filling in any threatening cluelessness before it can sting. But this sort of cluing in carries a sting of its own, eventually accumulating to just beyond the Dull Throb level. Then, even the most cultured god needs a break. "How about a vacation?", the ever-helpful omniscience asks, further amplifying the need for the god to take a vacation by merely asking the question. "Where to?", the god quietly wonders. "Someplace where your omniscience can take a well-deserved rest," a beleaguered omniscience wheezes.

There, the language should violate every principle of written and spoken communication.

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TravelingWithAHat

IMG_4172
" … at least in his own dazzled eyes, he looks absolutely marvelous."

Let's imagine that you're a gentleman of a certain age and that you're traveling. It's a common sight anywhere that tourists gather to see a gentlemen, even one wearing Oompa-Loompa cargo shorts, wearing a cap, a ball cap or a long-brimmed fisherman's cap featuring a Velcro® tightening strap around back. This casual headgear has become ubiquitous and hardly elevates a gentleman beyond the status of gardener, not that gardening's an ungentlemanly occupation. But when strolling the promenades of, let's say, Paris, what gentleman aspires to exude the presence of a rose trimmer or, excuse the expression, a Weedeater® operator? Few, I deign. A gentleman properly wishes at these times of promenade, to appear every bit the gentleman he probably wishes he actually was but knows himself to not be. These times demand a proper chapeau, perhaps a finely-woven palm Panama fedora, and finely-woven Panama fedoras are by nature fragile things.

When I bought mine, I asked the clerk if it was one of those Panamas I'd seen advertised as capable of being rolled up and stuffed in odd corners. He paled at my mention.

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Leifing

Leif
"One never brings the refrigerator along on a camping trip."

I'm thinking that I probably won't get away with packing light for our two week swat around Europe. The intentions start predictably pure. I targeted the smallest bag in the place and declared that one as mine this trip. You see, I'm a proud veteran of several campaigns, each of which was punctuated with logistical challenges. Schlepping oversized and overstuffed roller bags up three sweaty flights of unforgiving concrete out to street level in Rome, where the roller bags first encountered cobblestone, then dragging them toward our lodgings like they were cranky children overdue for their naps. Wrestling workshop leftovers through three bus and two train transfers following a session in a rural corner of The Low Countries to save a hundred euros cab fare. Failing to successfully stuff too much baggage into a car barely larger than the typical box store shopping cart. I've had my bruises and strained back muscles brought on by the idea that I somehow needed to take a tad too much of home along when traveling. I thought I might choose differently this time. Fat chance!

Cheap flights mean excessive bag fees, which means everyone tries to carry their doghouse onboard.

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CustomerCaring

shoeshine
"These so-called systems all seem jury-rigged to me."

The Muse ordered some makeup online … This declaration does not sound like the opening sentence of a gripping NYTimes bestselling potboiler. It hardly seems noteworthy. Everyone orders stuff online. Some people hardly exist outside of their Amazon Prime® account. I rarely order anything online because the hostile user interfaces scare me off. Every provider uses essentially the same sequence of screens to capture an order, and I reliably lose my way about halfway through these series. I understand that the underlying design must have been rigorously tested for utility, but they do not work for me. I always have to interrupt the process. I probably forgot my Pastword. I enter my credit card information incorrectly and cannot figure out how to correct the error. I inadvertently ordered multiples thanks to a hyperactive Buy button. Whatever the reason, if I don't just abandon the effort, I have to call the Customer Care line and speak to someone in Bangalore about correcting the mistake.

The Muse, however, quickly consummated her transaction.

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LivingBackwards

LivingBackwards
"Damn the dichotomies, full speed ahead …"

The old saw insists that we live life exclusively forward. Next builds upon next, no U-turns allowed. Meaning, though, seems to emerge in reflection, in LivingBackwards for a while. Reflection serves as a welcome eddy within life's relentless forward flow, where a weary fish might casually snack on a caddis fly or two. Sure, the river flows on as ever, but the fish slips out of the current to contemplate rather than endlessly compete. I believe that us fish need some reflection time to make and maintain sense of our place, a peek back upstream to appreciate what's passed and an occasional side glance to catch what we almost passed without really noticing. I seem to live my life in fits and starts as well as backward and forward flows.

Three months ago I chose FindingHome as the 'theme' of my upcoming quarter's writing.

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FutureTensile

tensile
"I'm still sprouting my tail feathers."

I felt old at twenty-five. I'd just started university, surrounded by freshmen seven or eight years my junior. I was older than my grad student TAs. My high school experience felt stale and distant. I'd probably never really studied anything in my life up to that time and though I felt old, I also felt as though I'd enrolled in a daunting game of Catch-Up. I felt dedicated, though, focused upon some future state. I wanted to have graduated more than I wanted to learn. I'd catch an early bus to make my eight o'clock, attend classes until around noon, then grab a quick lunch before reporting to my job, where I'd stay until just before my evening classes began, usually arriving home around nine-thirty, then to start my studying for the next day's classes. I went out for beers with classmates about twice during my university years, for that time felt like an extended exercise in social isolation, a solitary period where my bus rides were my primary study period. It was hard on my marriage.

I hardly noticed at the time, but my life's social fabric stretched in ways that wouldn't allow it to return to its former shape.

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Begginnings

Begginings
"I will be further from home than I've ever been …"

I can see the impending ending much more clearly than the new beginning, though neither have arrived. The impending ending casts a more believable story, as if the current plot line could not possible be broken between here and there. The following new beginning seems barely notional from here, and could turn out to be a simple extension of what I already know or could manifest as a sharp break, or even as something somewhere in between. I don't know. I do know that an opportunity for a sharp break lies just around the next corner. I'm not quite ready to let go of the current status quo, which has grown to serve me very well. I'm likewise uncertain of my ability to grasp onto a fresh thread, but then I never am.

I some days ache for change but only rarely ever try to treat those symptoms.

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Fatherhood

fatherhood

Today's FindingHome story focuses upon Fatherhood, perhaps the most misunderstood role anyone ever plays. I have wrestled with its implications since my first Father's Day, forty years ago today. I am growing to acknowledge that the meaning of Fatherhood might be found in how one actually performs in the role, not in how well one echos their prepared lines or finds his markings on the stage, but in how he engages. The expectations almost guarantee a belly flop or few, and most fathers more than fulfill this crucial part of their role.

That tie, hung in homage around the patriarch's neck this day, might easily imply that he should by all rights be hung high for his many complicities. He might not so easily absolve himself of all he did and all he failed to do. Dad's are duffuses, and absent this deep and appreciative acknowledgement, I believe that any Father's Day celebration falls well short of its potential, perhaps of its obligation. Fatherhood: no one could live or fully justify all those years of therapy without it. Happy, anyway...

"I was and will continue to be one duffus of a dad."

I think of Fatherhood as a second chance at childhood. Not a time of privilege, but of sacred obligation raised to the level of delight. The boogiemen seem bigger, the responsibilities more daunting, but it represents the next-to-last opportunity to experience innocence again. To see the world through naive eyes. To experience so much for the very first time. To break purposeful cadence and move at a much less than leisurely pace. To accept grace. To stare life directly into a face without blinking … much. (Made you blink! Made you blink!)

It brings a time of focus far away from self, an opportunity to fade into the far background in favor of those who really matter.

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Method-ology

ology
"Nobody very vehemently celebrates completing any checklist."

There's a science of that and an -ologist methodically practicing in that field. Our universe has been successfully subdivided into such specialties, the few remaining general practitioners relegated to working mere margins. The specialists take center stage now as if we're all quietly working our way toward a golden referral, validated by our need to consult with a real expert in some field we hardly knew existed before that dreaded diagnosis. How comforting to learn that someone dedicated their professional life exclusively to this narrow deep-dive deliberation. Have a difficulty? See an -ologist for resolution.

I've been searching for my home these last couple of months. Perhaps I should have consulted with a home-ologist, one more expert at finding what I seek.

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Constraints

Constraints
Pity the poor little rich boy,
raised with no constraints.
He could've been anything he wanted to be
except for what he ain't.


I am the product of my constraints, for I do what I can and never what I cannot. I curse these curious benefactors as if they were preventing me from becoming what I really, truly want to become, while they tirelessly hold the edge between here and oblivion. Every damned one of them serves as a limiting factor to frustrate my desires. Every blessed one of them seem damned determined to help me realize just who I might actually become. My clandestine constraints trip me when I rush to collect the product of my dreams, reminding me that I never was and was never bound to become the center of any universe, not even, especially even, my own.

My constraints help keep me humble.

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Vacations

notvacation
"I still have no freaking clue what to do with myself when I'm not working, preferably from home."

While planning for our upcoming trip to Europe, I received an email from a colleague in Vienna reminding us that people there are generally out of the office and on vacation in July and August. I flashed back to the many postponed and foregone vacations during my professional life. I had a knack for becoming a key person on a time-critical project whenever scheduled vacation time or a major holiday arrived, and being the good employee that I was, I would magnanimously volunteer to stay behind and work. One year, The Insurance Company sent my first wife and I, along with our two kids, to Disneyland to repay us for the planned vacation I'd sacrificed in favor of overseeing a crucial implementation which didn't end up happening on schedule, anyway. I remember what a miserable time we had there, discovering that Disneyland roughly equated to one of the inner circles of Hell. That vacation started when we returned home.

Europeans treat vacation with a seemingly imperative reverence, like the devout consider church attendance. Americans treat them the way secular Europeans treat church attendance, as one of those practices grandma might have observed but which moderns mostly do not.

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SenseOfPlace

senseofplace
"Home's not where I live, but where I'm of."

The more one wanders, the less home seems like a physical place. Repeated leavings, when combined with lengthy separations, leave no more than an increasingly vague SenseOfPlace in its place. I admit that this transformation makes little sense, for if a place is a place is a place, the physical space should at least seem to remain somewhat static in my absence, but it just doesn't. Instead, reflections, which manage to get everything but vague gists backward, come to dominate what remains of my sense of home. I might therefore catch glimpses of home wherever I find myself with only one prominent omission. I understand, even in my more entranced moments, that I project that image I so readily and warmly recognize. It's not so much out-there as disconcertingly close to in-here instead. I nonetheless feel the heartfelt satisfaction as if lighting up a long-favored and rarely savored cigar. I secretly hope The Muse won't catch me sneaking a smoke.

Still, people ask me where I'm from, which always gives me uncomfortable pause.

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SweetWeek


SweetWeek
"Shouldn't satisfaction come in such thin slices?"

Last week seemed too cold. Next week might turn unseasonably warm. One blessed week during the unresolved season, the world finally comes into focus, probably for no more than that week. The week arrives without notice, a veritable thief in the night, for no amount of anticipation or heart-felt wishing could have brought it around. It comes as a surprise, a form of grace, seemingly unbidden. I might spend a day or two before I come to realize just where I happen to find myself, then a sluggish recognition kicks in. The early morning air somehow lost her bite. The lengthening evenings hesitate before passing into night. I could leave the window open 24/7 if The Muse didn't complain of the chill only she can feel. I lose the socks.

The garden's satisfied, roots exploring through freshly-turned soil, another few handfuls of rocks tossed toward the rough yard edge.

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InfoWatcher

TMI
"I need much less of what everyone seems determined to provide ever more of."

The Muse received a FitBit® in the mail last week as part of a wellness program she joined at work. Now she wears a bracelet that counts her steps, identifies incoming emails and calls, and I don't know what-all else. She's wired. She suggested that perhaps I'd like one, too, but I declined the invitation. She photographs every supper to send to some wellness program consultant who critiques her suppers, for cripes sake, providing the sort of feedback nobody really has any use for. By the time she receives the information, she's already swallowed her supper and can only respond with remorse or a small celebration, though she might learn something for next time if she can find a place to store each fresh piece of information.

Me? I'm on a new program I'm calling InfoWatchers, an ongoing attempt to somehow limit the information assaulting me.

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Letters

Letters
" … genuine attention seems to necessarily take the slow boat between us."

Over the past two weeks, I've found three opportunities to write letters. My correspondents were in hospital, cut off from electronic communications, so I sent actual letters. Not e-mails. Not Tweets or quick Facebook commentary, but genuine actual personal letters. I first had to dredge up my faint memory of just how to format a letter, for these babies demand a specific formal: date and location at the top, etc. I next had to rethink what one includes in a proper letter, for a proper letter seems confidential. It will never go viral, or even aspire to, for it wants to be an outpouring, a heart to heart with one heart imagined and the other far-too used to hiding. Letters allow a rare sort of conversation, one-sided and many-faceted. The purpose seems to be an out-pouring, a lightening, a confiding unknown to every other medium. A letter lives on the stark edge between private and public, with a public of precisely one.

Much of history seems represented in letters.

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Vis-Ability

TheInvisibleMan
"Even The Invisible Man has his moments, or those moments have him."

Contrary to the number of FaceBook posts I make every day, I consider myself to be an intensely private man. I stopped using my Twitter account about the same time Our President started over-using his. I forgot my LInkedIn password and feel no great compulsion to remember it since its curious user interface required me to relearn how to use it every time I logged in and I admit that I never understood what it was intended to be there for, other than to broadcast the superficial specifications favored by curricula vitae, the most superficial sort of personal characterizations. Instagram couldn't capture my interest. I've lately created a private FaceBook Group where I post the bulk of my stuff to people I've specifically invited to receive it. I'm nobody's self-promoter in a culture which seems absolutely obsessed with self-promotion.

I've always preferred bounded solitude, comforted by the certain knowledge that others were nearby but not in my face.

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Viscosity

Viscosity-Chart-2-1
"Whether I move fast or slow probably has more to do with fluid dynamics …"

My first rule of project management insists that one must first find the natural rhythm of the effort, then do whatever possible to match that rhythm. I might have just as easily proposed matching the viscosity rather than the rhythm, if only because viscosity seems somehow easier to determine. The gist says that one should avoid expecting honey to flow like water. Well-understood principles govern the fluid dynamics of substances, but these principles become meaningless if one mischaracterizes the substance they're working with. Few projects in my experience ever flowed like water. It seemed that most of the executives funding the efforts presumed they would and could, an easy mistake if you've never been up to your armpits in window putty that was touted as likely to flow like water.

Different times, a project as well as a life, might well exhibit different Viscosities.

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Extraordinary

extraordinary
"The Extraordinary emerges from a meeting of my mind with the rest of my world …"

I started two years ago this month writing what would grow to become a series of seven and still counting books predicated upon the simple-seeming proposition that each day carries some Extraordinary enough experience to warrant writing about. I admit my audacity as well as the inescapable contradiction in my founding injunction, which dared me to go forth and notice the Extraordinary every damned day. Everyday experiences distinguish themselves from Extraordinary ones by the inherent infrequency of their appearance, so Everyday Extraordinary seems to violate some principle or other, but what do I know of principle? I know almost exclusively by my own personal experience, with even others' reports filtered through my, apparently unique, cognition. I proposed my predicate more as a challenge for me to disprove than for me to fully validate, though disproving it might deeply disappoint my aspiration. I wanted to believe that such an obvious contradiction might, just might, prove true, and so, it seems, it has so far. I cannot say with any great certainty what tomorrow might bring, but almost every day over the past two years has brought with it something Extraordinary hookie-bobbing along on its rear bumper. I've noticed.

My experimental quest might prove nothing more than the existence of self-fulfilling expectations, for I admit that I primed myself to become especially watchful so as to notice.

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SpringMorning

SpringMorning
"Our deck garden refuge serves as the center of this home from June into early October"

A Spring Morning shows up swollen with possibility, aching to be seized. Anything could happen. The eastern horizon starts glowing long before the sun's scheduled arrival. I check the clock, thinking I must have overslept, but I have not. The day leans ahead of herself, craning her neck across the starting gate, seemingly anxious to just get going. I can barely sit still. This will not be a day for reflection.

The Muse mentions that she misses her yard as we wander around the plant nursery.

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Songwritings

songwriting
" … inviting me to begin all over again again."

The Muse is forever after me to pick up my guitar. Last night with an honored guest over for supper, she quietly asked as we finished eating if I felt like playing my guitar. I nodded in the negative and she dropped her usual insistence with only the barest hint of a whimper. Over the past couple of years, I've found myself persistently not really in the mood to pick up my guitar. It's sat in a closed case down in my basement studio which I only very rarely even enter anymore. I consider this hesitance to be an affliction, though I remain uncertain of the underlying pathology, if, indeed, an underlying pathology even exists. I certainly don't have a ready name or syndrome to assign to this curious separation, one equivalent to finding myself separated from my self, since my guitar has been as integral a part of me as my heart since about fourth grade.

I write songs. Not to make a living, though I once imagined that I might, but to live.

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Routines

routines
"I expect the rest of me to catch up sometime over the next fitful week."

Traveling disrupts routines. Returning does, too. The disruption can feel exhilarating, liberating. Returning can feel more disorienting than reassuring. The old routines don't seem queued up for me to simply step into them and I cannot catch that once preconscious rhythm. I sit and stare at the place I so recently simply stared through, so common and so ordinary were my daily patterns of movement here. I almost remember where everything goes, but what starts out as an enthusiastic unpacking soon slows into ever tightening indecisive circles. I finally surrender to the feeling and adjourn to bed before supper, falling into a deep sleep while shivering under the covers with my clothes still on.

I'd neglected to turn on the furnace after that true Spring day before we left and yes, it had snowed four days during our absence.

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ThirdWorld

ThirdWorld
" … [I] might well find myself forced to call such places home again."

When I travel, I try to imagine what it might be like to live in the places we pass through. What sort of houses do the locals seem to favor? Where do they shop? How do they transport themselves? I'm unfortunate because, having grown up in a Walt Disney movie set, few places pass even perfunctory scrutiny as halfway decent places to live. Many seem too barren of the fundamental necessities of what I believe constitutes a decent life, unfortunate waysides where life as I know and expect it seems simply impossible to live. My first visit to New York City left me, as I believe it leaves most people, wondering how anyone could possibly eek out a living there. Later visits found me discovering tiny pockets of possible homesites, but even those seemed surrounded by hostile territory.

Subsequent visits often blunt my initial impression, which tends toward the scathing.

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DriveBy

driveby
" … hoping to make some real progress today."

Much of The Great American Road Trip involves driving by places. Stopping slows progress and progress might be the most important product of any American road trip. Distances seem vast but only because they are genuinely vast. A day's driving might barely get one through a region. Crossing some states require more than a day of concerted progress. The roads have become increasingly anonymous. With Interstate freeways, one can travel from coast to coast without once leaving the numbing pattern of essentially identical lanes, exits, and signs, with guard rails carefully positioned to block any view of any unique or unusual sight. Yet we insist that we've visited a place when we've probably only driven by it.

Driving up and out of New Orleans, the interstate travels along a causeway over an enormous spillway pushing an alarming current of muddy brown Mississippi water into a huge basin, a line dividing sparkling blue and murky brown. No Stopping, signs insist.

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ProDuckTivity

ProDuckTivity
"Allow some self-satisfaction to wash up and over."

Yesterday turned out to be one of those once-in-a-hundred-or-two-hundred days where everything just went my way. I finished stuff. My usual queue seems clogged with various undertakings likely to do me in before I ever finish them. I could justify feeling discouraged, even despondent, at the continuing prospect of never, ever completing anything had I not long ago grown more or less accustomed to the unfinished queue's essentially permanent presence. Over time, I suppose I've tempered my objectives a little — or a LOT. Incompleteness brings no sense of anxiety anymore, but more often leaves me feeling complacent, as if completion might have always been a rare but not entirely special thing, a Red Herring. I wouldn't engage listlessly so much as with a certain sangfroid. I tend to pick away at things.

But then once every quarter or so, I experience a truly productive day, one where I not only complete something, I complete something huge.

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FiveTwoFiveOhTwo

HawthorneBlossoms
"May we both continue to prosper."

On this date, the Hawthorne tree reliably blooms, scenting the street with apple blossom air. The yard seems simply glorious, a secret garden of subtle delights. So The Muse and I chose this day to marry. Family and friends gathered to meet and celebrate and everyone invited got assigned some small chore, for this was a do it ourselves affair, only possible with the contributions of everyone there. The Muse's aged aunt weeded out the fern bed, bending beside her walker to get her fingers dirty on the afternoon before the formal ceremony. We'd traded a friend for his services as the chef d'jour, grilling whole Copper River Sockeye salmon fillets and fresh cut asparagus. My niece played bartender. The Muse's son and brother wired up the party lights and everybody seemed to schlepp tables and chairs. I made a late afternoon run to a nearby nursery to snatch a load of bark chips to dress up the pond surround. The Muse's sisters helped prep in the kitchen, saving our butts when the vegetarian contingent wondered what on the menu they might consume. Instant magical Pad Thai appeared!

The Muse and I wrote our own ceremony, of course, overseen by the able hand of a man we'd met in one of our workshops, an imposing biker dude with genuine attitude and a disarmingly gentle hand.

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HüskerDü

HuskerDu
"It's just a matter of me continuing the search until I delight myself …"

Life seems like an extended game of HüskerDü. I seek matches for my wants. Yesterday morning, I noticed our bathroom was out of toilet paper, so I ran out to the supermarket, proudly proclaiming when I returned that I'd restocked only to hear The Muse patiently explain to me that there were additional rolls cleverly hidden in a place I could not find. This sort of action happens less often at home, where I'm usually considered to be the font of such knowledge. I believe that humans feel the need to travel whenever they've memorized the local HüskerDü board at home and ache for a little more mystery in their lives, even if that mystery might be where to find the danged toilet paper.

This temporary kitchen kept me entertained for the best part of an afternoon after I'd unknowingly volunteered to cook supper for everyone in the house.

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Settler

settler
" … recognizing ourselves as we'd not ever experienced ourselves before."

Three days into these temporary digs and I notice myself settling in. That first day, I felt like a blind man, complacently following those who already knew the way. The second day, I allowed myself limited excursions, finding the grocery twice and returning without the navigation system keeping watch over me. The third day, I flew solo, relying upon my budding sense of direction to guide me without disappointing myself. I broadened my horizons, even guiding The Muse through a neighborhood I realized that I suddenly and surprisingly knew better than she did. I even took advantage of the public transportation, a great and pleasing gift to any visitor uninterested in actually driving around strange country.

I expect that my pioneer forebears followed a similar pattern when assimilating into their new digs.

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Fierce

fierce
"A place can have its charms even if it's Fierce for most of every day."

I first encountered humidity in my early twenties, when I finally travelled East of Idaho. Around about North Platte, Nebraska I noticed an unease crawling down my back and wondered out loud what I was experiencing. My partner named it, prompting me to ask why anyone would ever tolerate this stuff. I came to realize that more than half of this country sweltered through half of each year, that The Founding Fathers fought for ownership of a country that smelled like the inside of an old leather suitcase. Our frock-coated forebears' stiff collars wicked sweat and so did the dainty petticoats of their whalebone corseted spouses. Over the following two years, I came to know humidity more intimately than I really cared to. I learned how it can magnify a sultry sun's rays to produce what the locals referred to as Sun Poisoning, a skin blistering not even ice baths soothe.

Our years in DC left me with a deep respect for wet blanket weather.

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HomeAway

homeaway3
" We move from home to home to home, never to ever come back around again."

On the fifth day, we pulled into the short driveway adjacent to the double shotgun rental. Two of our housemates had arrived an hour earlier, but they'd generously decided to defer choosing their bedroom until The Muse and I showed up. We surveyed the premises: huge and well-appointed kitchen/living room/dining room/library (with library ladder) dominated the front half of the first floor. A massive master bedroom and attached bath with both a soaking tub and an eight spigot full body walk-in shower took the back left and back end of the place, a smaller den bedroom and laundry room, the other. Upstairs, another master bedroom with attached sitting room and bath dominated by a clawfoot tub, comprised the whole second floor. I feigned indifference about which bedroom to choose, choosing to let the others choose, and The Muse and I ended up just where I wanted us to be, in the back downstairs bedroom. The door to the outside patio served me well when I woke rested and disoriented at three o'clock the following morning.

This place would never have been the result of either The Muse or my deliberate design, but it feels home enough after traveling halfway across the country.

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Charicatures

charicature
"Travel occurs between these two diametrically opposing perspectives."

Fan palms, a massive magnolia, ancient oaks, and a raft of fauna for which I have no label surround me this morning. I imagine myself sitting beside a tranquil bayou but I know I'm sitting on the backside of a rusty-silled tourist motel beside a shimmering cement pond. I possess an iconic rather than an eidetic memory, which means I hold patterns rather than specific images, matching presumed similarities rather than actual characteristics. My world view carries caricatures in lieu of actual examples. My memory bank seems more cartoon store than authenticator. I hold my prejudices more prominently than I suspect, imagining my neighbors as I have been entrained to imagine them based upon studiously superficial examination. I hardly know myself well enough to posit a credible theory of my own existence yet blithely presuppose that I understand my surroundings well enough to interpret them.

The atmosphere this morning feels like a warm damp blankey draped over my shoulders.

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After ...

after2
"The Muse and I were fortunately not victims of anything …"

My sister hid in her bedroom closet with her dog while my brother-in-law stood before the television. The Muse and I had simultaneously received a tornado warning on our iPhones and we were relying upon the locals to tell us what to do. The Muse grew up in tornado country. I had not. The announcer displayed rain-splattered images and map overlays, failing to catch any discernible rotation in the scudding cloud cover. He explained that this one was cloaked, surrounded by a wall of water, and could not be visually verified, but the instruments clearly indicated some budding rotation within those clouds. The weather outside seemed placid until it didn't anymore. Whatever it was, a twister or an announcer shouting, seemed about a mile away from our location and moving away to the East. We'd just been talking about where the hidey hole was in the house a short time before the warning came through.

Nothing came of that warning.

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FarAway

FarAway1
"If I slow down a little, I might recognize myself zooting through."

I didn't notice until later that afternoon. The Muse and I had somehow crossed over into the genuinely FarAway. No roadsigns defined the border. No real sense of distance overcame me until after we'd arrived. It wasn't exactly that the place smelled different, though it did, or looked all that different, but that we'd passed over some familiar horizon into space with genuinely undefined boundaries. North? South? East? West? The Muse, being a born Mid-Westerner, carries an innate sense of direction. She easily determines West from East even if no handy mountain range delineates the difference; something about direction and angle of the sun … or something. Those of us who were reared in a western valley missed acquiring that nth directional sense and have always cheated, or never really cared to make this distinction. Out on the vaster ocean of land, navigation depends upon nth senses I do not possess and I feel FarAway.

I find myself lost and disoriented for the first hour of the drive, sensing (wrongly) that we must be headed in the opposite of our intended direction.

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Prayrie

prayier
" … leaving behind only heartfelt prayers for this Prayrie and its familiar people."

The transition from high plateau to low plain passes with hardly a cue. The Muse and I disagree on the primary feature of the passing terrain. I say it's horizonless while she insists that it's all horizon out here, nothing but! I say that the sandy prairie eventually turns to dust before finally finding groundwater near enough the surface to do anyone any good, Prayrie. Too flat to have once been Dust Bowl country, though it might have made a decent run at a Dust Plate or Dust Platter designation. The wind here does everything but blow. It sucks. It howls. It draws. It nags The Schooner's nose as we edge our way Due East. No need to nudge off onto the finer compass points. Due East'll do just fine.

This is the Heartland of America, the great flyover zone, the region we love to denigrate for its degenerately conservative politics and rube lifestyles, where one encounters more wide-assed pickups and piece-of-shit Elantras than Teslas on the road, that's for sure.

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Gone-ing

gone-ing
"I cannot wait to be finished with this incessant Gone-ing and simply become a goner again."

The twenty four hours before leaving must be the most productive period in our lives. We're not leaving for good, not forever or anything, but the bustle of putting our affairs in order fills the place. The refrigerator receives the scrutiny it's been aching for and a supper of leftovers emerges. A few forgotten remainders go down the disposal and the dishwasher fills up with skanky Tupperware. A last load of laundry starts grinding away. I'd trimmed and mowed the yard, finally finished raking up the overwinter moss growth and carting it to the compost heap cleverly hidden behind the prickly spruce tree. I even remembered to fill The Schooner's window washing fluid reservoir in anticipation of Prairie bug swarms. I finally set the seeping drip line to hydrate the gooseberry garden and sprinkled a few wildflower seeds to fill in between the larger plants. I even dressed the bed with moist and sterilized soil. My work's almost done here.

The Muse announced that she had a raft of picky finishing work to complete before tomorrow, so she disappeared into her basement lair where the BIG laptop monitor lives.

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MetaFor

wolfsheep
"Some prove more useful than others."

I blame metaphor misuse for most of the worst difficulties humans face. Metaphors provide a means for describing the specifically indescribable, but to mistake a metaphor for its tangible-seeming referent makes people crazy. There never was an Invisible Hand. Adam Smith employed metaphor, even including the tip off 'as if,' when describing how markets seem to work. Seem to work, not how they actually work. Some became true believers in what Smith never intended to serve as truth but as speculative observation. He intended people to think, not to blindly follow. His was never intended to become a faith-based initiative. At least ten thousand alternative 'as if' metaphors might exist to help envision how markets work, none necessarily valid, but each potentially interesting or helpful.

Firm belief in the physical actuality of any metaphorical entity breeds trouble.

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FedBack

fedback
"I'm FedUp with FedBack."

I feel so surrounded by feedback that I sometimes cannot seem to experience the performance for the proliferation of reviews: positive feedback egging me on and negative feedback slowing me down. The past few months, at my nurse practitioner's insistence, I've been twice daily logging my blood pressure readings then sharing them via GoogleSheets®. I preface each report with my analysis of the data, which so far always concludes that the data seems too noisy and varied to support any definitive conclusion. Any budding trend seems quickly cancelled by contradictory data. Even average seems to materially misrepresent the obvious variability. Mornings seem neither consistently higher nor lower than target. Same story with each day's second reading. Overall, the advice seems the same: continue monitoring and we'll discuss at my next in-person visit.

The exercise has matured into a grudging obligation.

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ReasonablyComfortable

reasonablycomfortable
"A few deliberately imbedded ounces of inconvenience provide the spice of any well-lived life."

A home should be ReasonablyComfortable, a place where one need not nervously glance over one's shoulder, a kick-back space. I've found reasonable comfort in a wide variety of circumstances: an unheated sleeping porch through a damp Seattle winter, a Victorian bedroom with buzzing flies in the walls, a squat one bedroom apartment overlooking a busy arterial, a thick-walled main floor with parquet floors and a genuine Dutch door, on top of a hill, and down in a shadowy draw. The first few nights found me nervously glancing over my shoulder, but a few days' conditioning and I'd find myself ReasonablyComfortable all over again. I hesitate to leave ReasonableComfortable digs, as if I believe that I've somehow lost my ability to ever discover fresh ReasonablyComfortable places, as if leaving my present one would curse me to wander in an inescapably uncomfortable world. I exhibit little faith in the future's ability to properly provision me, or, indeed, in my own inventiveness.

I have always insisted upon a modicum of discomfort in my homes, though.

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Clatterglories

categories
"I wonder if it might be possible to categorize books by their ability to cast that spell."

Have you noticed how category-oriented we've become? I wonder if we were always this way. The corner store down the street from where I grew up seemed a jumble. Other than the butcher's shop in the back, the place seemed to have avoided departmentalization, and could seem chaotic to the inexperienced shopper. Over time, everything just seemed to be where it belonged, which perfectly correlated with where it had always been. A typical pantry isn't organized anything like a modern supermarket, with package shape perhaps more strongly influencing where an item gets shelved than any proximate similarity of content. I enter a BIG box store and spend most of my visit trying to figure out the central organizing principle, often coming up empty-handed and fleeing rather than asking for help. Asking an employee at The Home Despot where to find a particular item might or might not improve your chances of locating that item, for their classification schema seems a mystery to everyone, shoppers and clerks alike.

I shouldn't have been that surprised when my wise advisor confided that the first step of publishing a book involves properly classifying it.

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BeginningAgain

BeginningAgain
"When BeginningAgain, the unlikeliest rule."

I once believed in The Syphon Theory of Life, that I might struggle to get myself established, but once successful, my "skills" would thereafter defy gravity to produce a relatively effortless inflow. I admit to experiencing short stints of this sort of existence, but those periods were in every case separated by fresh struggles, not all of which resulted in relatively effortless inflow. Several of these separations seemed to completely strip me of any of my hard-earned sense of mastery. In some, my earlier successes seemed suddenly irrelevant. In others, my precious community seemed to evaporate, though it was more likely that I disappeared. In most, I felt much worse off for my past accomplishments, as if their sole purpose had been to distract me from some necessary reinvention ahead. I eventually and quite begrudgingly abandoned my faith in The Syphon Theory of Life in favor of a budding belief in reinvention.

Reinvention lacks the alluring promise The Syphon Theory offered.

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Sanctuary

sanctuary
"I feel sublimely suspended in soothing sanctuary. I must be home."

On a foggy Spring morning, our home takes on the silent solitude of an abandoned medieval chapel. The so-called cathedral ceilings in the front room arch toward the heavens empty of all but severely muted light. I can hear nothing but a background buzzing in my ears. The world lays still and silent. My mind seems to take this isolation as a good enough excuse to wander around. All seems possible then, though nothing seems all that likely. I flit from chair to table then try upstairs on for size. I feel as isolated and secure as I could ever hope to feel, and satisfied with pretty much everything.

The Muse hardly ever experiences our home in this state.

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Pestilences

pestilences
" … the bitter savory back-taste of the otherwise Home Sweet Home."

Homes tend to attract pestilences; not necessarily the full-blown Old Testament kind, but pestilences nonetheless. They might share a common root cause, though: staying in one place. The Hunter-Gatherer could pick up and leave their latest pestilence behind by just moving on to another place, but homes stay put. Staying put means that FindingHome entails accepting the minor and occasionally major visitations wrought upon the place. I'm currently, for instance, wrestling with the annual Springtime appearance of moss invading what passes for my back lawn. If I were a Hunter-Gatherer, I could shrug disinterestedly and just move on, but having found my home here, I feel compelled to pull out the heavy old garden rake and scrape up and dispose of the stuff, then spray on this iron-based treatment which is supposed to kill any remaining moss and prevent further intrusion, but doesn't. I'll be back at it again a year from now.

Over time, a backlog of pestilence grows.

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ReDiscoveringHome

DiscoveringHome
"I rarely underlook, if there's even such a word.
If there were such a word,
I'd define it as meaning a search undertaken directly beneath one's own nose …"

Even the finest home eventually comes to seem shabby and familiar. The Muse spotted a Home For Sale sign on our walk yesterday. Using her iPhone to access more information on the web, she learned that the owner was asking $4.5 Million. The nearly ten thousand square foot place included Eiger marble countertops, hand-scraped hickory floors, and state of the art electronic controls throughout. Even that place seems destined to seem shabby and familiar to anyone living there because living anywhere produces a personal footprint which eventually comes to seem shabby and familiar. Little habits and routines, even those rambling around nearly ten thousand square feet of space, tend to kind of tear up a place. Shortly after the Architectural Digest photographer leaves, the same old shabbiness returns.

The presence of visitors can spiff up a place.

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Home-opathy

Home-opathy
"May this streak of good fortune continue until it doesn't anymore."

After twenty years, I have a physician again. During my score's absence from the healthcare scene, I admit to crawling into an emergency room once after an unfortunate moment of inattention when chopping vegetables. Other than that incident, I remained largely as healthy as the proverbial horse with no physical complaints other than the occasional head cold or strained muscle. Not that my family history illustrates infinite invulnerability. My forebears eventually croaked like everyone else's have, many from what might be characterized as self-inflicted causes: smoking, horseback riding, and the inadvertent ingestion of milkweed toxin via cow's milk. Life seems an unavoidable minefield whichever era one inhabits. I probably drink too much beer and engage in excessive depressing self-reflection, but I have no complaints worth speaking of. Or, I might more accurately proclaim that I had no complaints until I reengaged with our fine healthcare system.

I admit that I've been uncommonly fortunate.

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SteppingBack

steppingback
"I can warmly anticipate what I have been cooly disdaining."

I usually step closer to gain better perspective, but sometimes, just sometimes, SteppingBack from an object does the trick. Anyone can get so close to anyplace that they lose the ability to really see what's there. Familiarity eventually starts breading that old reliable contempt, but insert even the threat of some away time, and the old place starts to sparkle again. The numbing routines start throwing off pre-nostalgia vibes. The better-worn paths start seeming well-suited rather than simply scuffed. The surest way for me to break a bout of early Spring cabin fever entails planning some getaway.

The Muse has a meeting in New Orleans and had planned to just fly there and back, but we'd been pining after a road trip, so I suggested that perhaps—just perhaps—we could drive there instead.

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HomingIn

voicesinmyhead
"These voices have not proven themselves to be infallible."

The voices in my head aren't really voices and aren't actually in my head. They might be more like a Nth felt sense with no physical location, no actual language, no sound. They might be more like long wave electromagnet radiation, far beyond the other five senses' ability to register or interpret and yet still subtly influencing me. I sense when it kicks in as a faint presence, like a hardly audible whisper, as if I intuit its presence. I figure it works like a Homing beacon, radiating signals intending to inform me without my actually knowing how, or even exactly what it's saying. Walking into that hobbit hut-like coffee house in Prague, I immediately "felt" at home. How could that be? Perhaps it was inherited DNA resonating familiarity, like the sensation I received when The Muse and I entered my father's family's ancestral village.

I swear that I'm not clinically schizophrenic, voices in my head notwithstanding.

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HardReboot

500px-Reset_button.svg


"Maybe a complete interrupt might restore the both of us back to some functional state again."

My blog software failed again last week. Hardly a story worth repeating (again), since it fails about annually with great regularity, each time utterly abandoning me. I can never remember how to snap photos of the offending screen and must relearn the jargon tech support insists upon when receiving a fresh problem report. I decided to post the issue to the User Forum, reasoning that other users must have encountered this same paradox, but after a few days without a response, I gussied up an email directly to tech support, which resides in Brighton in the UK, which guarantees an extra day's delay before I receive a response. My routine had already been disrupted for four full days by then. I hoped to receive something before the weekend.

Late Friday afternoon, I picked up tech support's response, which suggested I might quickly install their latest build, a Beta version not yet deemed ready for general distribution.

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ReFinishing

impossibly small brush
“I failed to astound myself again.”

It seems as if I’ve never completed any job. I’ve batted each around like a cat tiring a terrified mouse until the mouse or I finally conceded and suspended play. Perhaps another day would come where play might resume, destined to become another inconclusive contest abandoned short of complete. Between bouts, an unsteady truce reigns. Additional fiddling might become necessary. A bit of touch up paint, a previously overlooked imperfection, each evidence of an eternally asymptotic relationship with done. Most observers might never suspect that I’m a quitter, one who inevitably leaves each job undone, though I never shake awareness of this fact.

I have yet to experience the exhilaration of crossing a finish line.

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WhatWritersDo

whatwritersdo
“We must create trances without abusing our gift.”

Writers write, a tautological declaration hardly worth making. Some transcribe, or firmly believe that they do. Others exposit, delving into and fleshing out what might otherwise serve as little more than fleeting thoughts. Some say that they write non-fiction, a questionable assertion, since by filtering their thoughts through their fingers, they leave their own fingerprints all over the resulting pages. Others stick to fiction or fantasy, both genres capable of sometimes eliciting more authentic representations than any encyclopedia. But I speak of genres here, which attempt to classify writing into types, when writing seems more fundamental than whatever the Dewey Decimal System suggests.

All writing serves as a form of trance induction, in much the same way as all experience induces trances.

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Homer

220px-Homer_British_Museum
"I lived in the present then without understanding that I was also living timelessly."

Every homeowner seems part Homer Simpson and part Homer the ancient Greek poet. We live as everyman and exist as part of a mythic and heroic drama. We seem stuck in a role where we must repeatedly demonstrate our innate ineptness while also inhabiting an extended allegory. We catch ourselves demonstrating just how utterly clueless we are while simultaneously inspiring following generations. We mostly engage in utterly mundane activities which, viewed from broader perspectives, somehow embody an entire era, an archetype we would not recognized if we noticed it peering back out of the mirror before us. We are not either pattern we so convincingly embody.

The popularity of aluminum siding clearly demonstrates how gullible homeowners can be.

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AntiHome

antihome
" … a home still unsupplemented by an additional professional abode."

Many people maintain two homes, the one where they vacuum the floors and the one where they report to work. I know, work ain't home, but it carries a home-like familiarity. At work, one has "their" desk, a workspace reserved for personal professional use. If you're not reporting to a desk job five days every week, the absence of that auxiliary work home might prominently loom over the other home. One needs a significant other home, I think, in order to properly frame the real home, someplace meaningfully calling one out into the world. This seems to add purpose to existence. Nobody ever rebuts an insistence that one simply must "get to work" or "they'll be late." Out they go, no questions asked.

Where do the rest of us go to find that sort of work home?

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DiggingIn

diggingin
"Call it vanity, I don't care. It feels like sanity to me."

By mid-April, my backyard snowbank's finally less than two feet deep and the surrounding yard saturated as it will not again be soaked until this time next year. The underlying hardpan becomes friable for a few terribly short weeks, and I kneel in humble appreciation. The house has by this time of the year shrunken to the size of a toolshed, more jail cell than home. I flee the wintertime boundaries which kept me incarcerated since October, aching for fresh grass stains on my knees and a newly aching shoulder joint. I deadhead the buff beige leftovers from last year's yarrow blossoms and rake up the worst of the pine needles culled down by the insistent winter westerlies. Blade breaks earth and the garden seems to sigh in relief and forgiveness. The snow preserved everything beneath its benevolent blanket, protecting it from fifty harsh nights and a hundred heartless days. The soil seems to breathe a sigh of relief. It's finally Spring.

DiggingIn's an annual ritual. No tilling ever extends its influence over a winter.

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HomesAwayFromHome

homeaway
" … One of the thousands of HomesAwayFromHome we've stumbled into and back out of …"

In Europe, I've heard it said that vacationers seek places really different from home. In The United States, we hope to recreate home when we travel. Tourist traps tout Home Cookin', Homemade Salt Water Taffy (though nobody ever makes taffy at home), and Home Style Hotel Rooms. Often these places deliver better or worse than home style, actual home style having evolved into something more familiar than tout-able. Still, I settle into a definite familiarity when traveling, a sort of dance choreographed by dozens of repetitions, each somewhat unique and each also absolutely the same. The easy monotony of a Marriott hotel room, the furniture absolutely unfunctional yet entirely familiar, I long ago figured out how to jury-rig the couch so I could sit up straight there. The mildly disappointing menu choices at the diner promising home-style cooking reminds me most of how my grandmother was supposed to have cooked and never did.

I take little of any of this very seriously.

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Shamelessness&Spin

spin
"I'll find home without the shameless spinning or accede to eternal homelessness, thank you."

An important part of FindingHome involves mustering as clear an image as possible of what home might look like, to strip away the more prominent myths and produce a crisper portrait of the place. The mind might conjure gothic columns behind a white picket fence which reality could never deliver. Owning a home remains the most prominent indicator of success, whether that home be a one story rambler on a slab, a palatial estate, or a rusting double wide adjacent to a commercial refueling tank farm. Simply owning real estate smacks of some sort of success, indicative, according to the home ownership myth, of hard work, thrift, and responsibility fully assumed.

This presumption begs the questions, then, of what success really looks like now, how does it seem to be achieved, and what key indicators lead to its emergence?

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HomeAchers

ache
"The aches will soon evaporate but the satisfaction will linger on."

Home ownership begets aches and pains, for dedicated homeowners just cannot help themselves. They tend to overdo. When Spring finally comes, the pruning begins. The narrowest of windows appear within which the homeowner accepts the necessity of completing a week's worth of work over an all-too short weekend, and so does. By Sunday night, a satisfying sort of crippling sets in. The homeowner will drag that last tarp load of trimmings to the by-then ungainly pile, lovingly fold the tarp and set it onto its shelf, then limp to the back steps, slip off the boots, then pop open the most satisfying beer ever enjoyed by anyone anywhere; the first of several. A close to nirvana state reigns over the yard as the sun sanguinely sets just beyond the gate. The homeowner might measure a couple of inches shorter than on Friday, but he feels ten feet tall.

The aches aren't only the result of over-doing, but also caused by simply doing things not every day required.

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FeelsLike

feellike
" … no Home yet in the history of this world so far ever felt a damned thing."

Almost nobody will complain if I resort to proclaiming that something "feels like home," even though homes can't feel. Most will seamlessly parse the phrase without noticing that they've supplied one hundred percent of the meaning they experience, for phrases like 'feels like' act as trance inducers. If nobody raises an eyebrow in confusion, the induction worked. Congratulate me, I'm a hypnotist, except nobody noticed. If nobody noticed, is it still a trance? Perhaps it's the very best trance of all.

When I think of home, a thousand contradictory feelings bubble up, for home has hosted pretty much every sort of feeling I've experienced from my greatest sadnesses to my greatest joys, though the home itself seemed rather impassive, merely the medium within which those feelings emerged.

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HomeWork

homework
"Nowhere, you explain."

Imagine a swimming teacher assigning homework. Nobody has a swimming pool at home, so what does a dedicated student do? Practice the Australian Crawl on their bedroom floor? Homework felt like this to me. My first question was, "Just where at home might I fulfill this assignment?" My bedroom, which I shared with my older brother, offered semi-privacy but no writing surface. I could lounge on my bed there and read, but math proved almost impossible to do while sprawled on my belly balancing a book more dedicated to closing itself than staying open to the page, while the worksheet kept sliding off the back of my precariously-balanced notebook. My pencil would break, necessitating a trip to the kitchen to sharpen it, a gauntlet of distractions along the way. Or, I could work at the dining room table, Grand Central Station situated between the living room and the kitchen, the least private spot, bookended with distractions. I might cower in the basement, working bent over on an old coffee table until my lower back gave out. Or at the Kitchen table while carrying on a half dozen side conversations. I might end up with ten minutes of focused attention before suppertime.

Context matters.

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Homogeneity

Western-Balkans-map
" …who really knows what love is?"

We speak of homes as if the inhabitants comprised a homogeneous whole, when quite the opposite seems more likely. Sure, we might call ourselves a family, but nearly twenty percent of those families satisfy the definition of blended, step-siblings cohabiting or nearly steps, the adults not formally related yet, if ever. Even within directly related family units, significant differences exist. The extroverts drive the introverts crazy and vice versa. The smart kids dominate the dumber ones. The older kids lord over their younger siblings. Parents get gamed into paradoxical proclamations. Within each family unit, a tacit cultural map very similar to The Balkans persists, contradicting the apparent surface homogeneity of the group.

I was my family's 'sport,' a rose gardening term referring to the odd sprout which does not mirror a plant's other characteristics.

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HomeBody

HomeBody
"Where do I go when I disappear there?"

I'd prefer to stay home. Given the opportunity to travel the world, I'd still prefer to stay home. I'm a notorious HomeBody, into my routine, comfortable in my surroundings as long as I'm home. Good introvert that I am, I consider myself to be my own best company. Strangers exhaust me. Even too much family tends to quickly tucker me out. I live most of my life inside my head. The rest of the world and all its supposed charms seem about 98% distraction. I kick and scream at the mere prospect of leaving my lair. The Muse has to grab me by my hair and throw me out into the world. She insists that interesting things happen when I get out in the world, and I cannot disagree. Still, I'd rather stay home.

When I consent to go out, I drive with one foot in the ditch, wary and watching for calamity.

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Homies

wahipage
"We have each other now."

By the time I graduated from high school, I'd pretty much had it with my classmates. What seventeen year old doesn't imagine him self different from his cohorts? I did not attend the graduation gala, choosing to gather with a few close friends to conspire about whatever might come next. Most of the graduating class immediately dispersed, disappearing from that town, never to return. Some to college, others to war, a few to marriage, many into that foggy foreground that surrounds every great life transition. I stayed around town for a while working the balance of my adolescence off in familiar territory. I eventually moved on and out into a world where, for the first time in my life, I knew nobody and nobody knew my history, either.

Life continued like that for the following twenty years or so.

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Homesteadying

old-montana-homestead-sharon-foster
"Were it not for Homesteadying, my family's history would seem narrow and thin."

My family history features centuries of homesteading. Many of my father's ancestors were near-royalty, later sons and daughters of prefects, kings, and various mucky mucks, high born but eventually laid low by the passage of time. Their more recent descendants scraped out their livings, some too poor or unskilled to even homestead. One became a circuit rider. I know that means respectably homeless, honorably homestead-less. My mom's side of the family was involved in every homesteading scheme since 1600. Puritans, Revolutionary War soldiers, indentured slaves, on-the-lam protesters against British rule, dislocated sons, predestinationists, pro-slavery and against, a Civil War veteran, a sixteen year old bride, all relocated to hinterland with the intention of settling it.

They each arrived in some prior century, finding rock and hardpan greeting them.

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HomeWrecker

homewrecker
"This world will end with neither fire nor ice, but more likely with a whimper …"

The classic image of some blond bombshell as HomeWrecker overlooks a more present threat, the humble homeowner. More homes seem to have been wrecked by the well-intended improvements undertaken by homeowners than families have been laid low by scheming femme fatales or conniving gigolos. Something about owning a home seems to convince a homeowner that he possesses skills he never once demonstrated and never will manifest. He's likely at some point during his possession to become possessed by the painting jinn or worse, the wallpaper demon. Neither he nor his spouse exhibit any true talent for interior design, but the DIY videos proliferating The Home Despot's site materially underplay the difficulties of even the most daunting improvement. A dreary browsing Sunday seems to be enough to spark that dark urge which seems to spring eternal from the breast of even the most otherwise rational homeowner.

A gallon of paint nestled in the corner of the sale bin might be enough to start a long and painful descent into the netherworld of home wrecking.

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HomeMade

DIY-Chicken-Plucker jpg
"We're HomeMade snobs now."

Home is where many of us take refuge from industrialized society to 'make it ourselves.' HomeMade, to my mind, means better if a little weird. HomeMade stuff lacks the uniformity we've all grown to expect and have been taught to use in lieu of judgement to determine quality. A lopsided cake might well taste better and even prove healthier than any store-bought alternative, but it still looks not quite right. The HomeMade chicken plucker pictured above probably works every bit as well as an expensive stainless steel job built in some factory, but it looks just a little bit (or, maybe a lot bit) cheap. The subtle and insistent indoctrination accompanying advertising might be the most insidious factor of living in a mass-production culture. Taken to ridiculous extremes, we might find ourselves trying to reproduce mass produced products at home, creating truly terrible HomeMade Snickers® bars or horrible handcrafted potato chips. Home can serve as a refuge from this absurdity, though HomeMade sometimes looks simply absurd.

The Muse and I keep our efforts focused upon more traditional items.

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Homemaker

vintage housewife
"Such is the life of any Homemaker, and we're all homemakers now."

I admit that I was poisoned in early childhood from living in a normal family where the dad went to work each morning and the mom stayed home to "homemake," an occupation that seemed destined to drive the incumbent crazy. It worked as well as it worked for as long as it worked. My mom, who had always sort of leaned in the direction of crazy anyway, eventually instigated a coup and took a job outside the home, a financial necessity and a real challenge for my father to accept. By then, the kids were fully capable of picking up some of the homemaking duties, and we somehow survived. Since then, I've lived exclusively in homes where the homemaking duties were shared, though never without some tension. We each thought of ourselves as somewhat equal contributors, though in practice, one person tended to have more than their fair share foisted upon them, often due to their own sensibilities. Often, individuals overestimated what they personally contributed, thereby under-contributing, fomenting some strife. Typically, the expectation falls on the wife, however otherwise occupied she might become.

I try to do my fair share of homemaking, with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

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HomeBound

housebound
Heraclitus would have smugly said, "I told you so."

Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus was a busy man. He rarely simply sat around philosophizing, but was actively employed failing to remain similar enough long enough to step into the same river twice. He was constantly changing. He later reported that even the same old thing, perceived from some perspective as seemingly insignificant as a slightly different angle, would appear different. He might have been the first proponent of the notion that life flows rather than simply sitting there being. He noted that the world and all its inhabitants and the universe surrounding it and us exist not as beings, but as becomings. He is remembered as the weeping philosopher, one prone to overwhelming bouts of melancholia, as perhaps befits anyone endlessly pursuing without ever actually achieving. His travels never really started and could not be completed, but continued asymptoticly, an exhausting proposition. His spirit probably continues his necessarily endless pursuits.

I'm attracted to Heraclitus' perspective, though his lack of payoff might feel disappointing for anyone aiming to accomplish something conclusive from their efforts.

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Homeland

homeland
"Live freer of delusion or ultimately destroy yourself …"

Until November 2002, I'd never thought that the United States comprised a homeland. I understood that right wing forces had pulled the concept of Fatherland out of someone's butt following Germany's WWI defeat and that Russians had always spoken fondly of their Motherland, but I'd thought that the US would never come to a point of unallied desperation that would drive us to flee into the arms of an imaginary parent. I opposed the idea of mustering a Homeland Security operation, recognizing the historical dangers accompanying a national -land designation. Americans were by design less homogenous and more independent, favoring homesteads over homelands. Each subgroup thought of someplace else as their -land, and this place as a melting pot of ex-landers. After all, our founders had engineered a messy separation from our Mother Country, and not, I thought and still believe, to become what we'd once reviled.

It came to pass anyway.

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Homing

aspire
"Though I understand I hold nothing more than a believable fiction, it sustains me."

Home seems more of an attraction than a place, a magnetic pull more verb than noun. As such, I suspect that it never resolves into a particle, but must eternally exist as a wave form, tugging and pulling without ever ultimately manifesting into any thing. Move into a new home and you'll find reason to amend it. Maybe the yard needs some work or that back bathroom wants replacing. The eye might well never find satisfaction, not even a negotiated settlement. The list of next projects will only grow longer with incumbency.

It might be proper to speak of homing rather than of home.

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TheBillionaire'sCreed

monopoloy_guy
"One might feel tempted to refer to it as The Billionaire's Greed …"

I'm no billionaire myself, so I speak here as an observer of billionaire behavior rather than as an actual player. I often wonder what sort of moral or ethical compass guides billionaire behavior. I'm certain their's differs from mine and also from what any of the rest of us might recognize as normal or regular, but I'm not saying that they lack morals or ethics, just that their's differ from yours and mine. I feel the same revulsion you probably feel when watching some of their antics, for they always seem to be up to some surreptitious something, and while most of them seem to sneak around as if embarrassing themselves, they're often found out and exposed, so we generally know or strongly suspect what they're up to. Of course they deny even the obvious. I figure that response might be part of a creed, The Billionaire's Creed.

A creed informs an incumbent of both their intentions and their responsibilities, such as they are.

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HomeSweetLoan

homesweetloan
"Home still seems sweet even though we know we're more indentured to it than own it."

Almost nobody owns their home in this country. Here, we assume thin mantles of ownership by agreeing to carry outrageous debt loads in lieu of owning a home we might actually afford. The more outrageous the debt load, the more prestigious the address. Credit-worthiness stands in for perhaps more responsible forms of citizenship. Those who have not found a bank willing to indenture them are considered second-class citizens, renters. Homeowners, or, more properly, "home-loaners" tend to stay in one place for a while, lending stability to an otherwise potentially footloose populous. Each homeowner engages in speculation, plotting for the place to be worth more than they paid for it by the time they decide to move. Almost nobody ever pays off their mortgage since that would erase the leverage loanership affords them, the opportunity to enjoy any increase in total value of a property they own only a small portion of.

Leverage is the name of this game, though it works both ways.

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RunningHome

homebase
"We're all always trying to make it back home."

Today was the opening day of major league baseball season, New Year's Day, the end of the long fallow season of no broadcast sports, unless one considers football, hockey, basketball, or soccer sports. I do not. Baseball qualifies as a sport because it's not what it appears to be, but an extended metaphor. Those other pastimes might pretend to be sports, but they lack the fundamentally metaphorical foundation of baseball. Home base pretty much says it all. Each game seems a hero's journey seeking home. Each play, a part of a building story, sometimes destined to become legend. Each player, a potential savior.

I don't know how many people understand this metaphorical aspect of baseball.

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HomeSick

homesick
"I'm always here whether here or there."

I spent much of last month connecting to my hometown's Main Street webcam. The adjacent browser tab continuously updated their latest weather report, which I'd dutifully report to a largely disinterested Muse. I could see the shadows of that usual gang gathering at the Starbucks to loudly recount the prior day's sports events, a distraction I despise when I'm tucked in the corner writing there, but those shadows seemed warmly attractive from so very far away. Each subsequent snowfall would leave the sidewalk snowbanks a little taller and Main Street a little slipperier. That webcam became my primary window on the world, more informative than a long gaze out of my own window. HomeSick works like this.

Most sicknesses involve an excess presence, but HomeSick arises from the opposite of that, an excess absence.

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SecretPassages

secretpassage3
" … because it's a SecretPassage if we go this way."

Home lies at one end of a SecretPassage, a route only the homeowner ever knows exists. Long proximity to the place eventually revealed this route which always existed, awaiting discovery by someone dedicated to finding it. Once discovered, only its discoverer knows its there and no one else ever suspects its presence. Everyone else sticks to the arterials, figuring that herd wisdom will serve them well enough. The consequent traffic jams seem simply the price of inhabiting the place. The homeowner snickers while slipping around.

I have long reveled in my SecretPassage knowledge, perhaps the one element distinguishing me from the madding crowd.

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ReEntering

ReEntering
"Home is wherever you say."

Home is where your stuff is. A heart can sing anywhere, away as well as home. The heart might long to perform on the most familiar stage, but it might better serve a wandering-in-the-wilderness soul, where it's the only familiar presence around. The Muse and I said our heartfelt goodbyes and pointed ourselves in the direction of where our stuff resides. Hardly a wilderness trip and stripped of the warm anticipation of our arrival Back Home, we satisfied our sacred responsibility and left. We'd see more family along the way, connecting in public places, and inhabit one more anonymous hotel room for one last foreshortened night. I might get up at two so I will be up to awaken The Muse at three so that we can head toward the airport around four. Once we relinquish the rental car, a machine takes over.

I travel heavier than I'd like to travel, my tool belt, work gloves, and old boots packed into the bottom of my bag.

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NegativeSpaces

elephant_and_snake_negative_space
"Each search seems irrelevant in the face of finally finding."

The menu seems comprised of vast NegativeSpaces delineating choices I would never seriously consider. The few positive choices, items which I might ultimately select, shrink the options to a spare two or three. From thirty thousand feet, alternatives seem nigh-on infinite. Closer to the ground I've found the usual handful of hardly noteworthy alternatives. The tyranny of choice reliably presents many more unacceptables than attractives. The larger the store, the more chaff I must sift through to find what I would have more easily found in a mom and pop shop. I might know precisely what I'm looking for without holding any real authority to locate it within the overwhelming faux abundance looming around me.

My first wife and I traveled all around the East Coast looking for a place equivalent to the town I grew up in. Certain that we could not forge a living there, we exiled ourselves and began the search.

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FretEquity

man-clasping-hands-over-face-350
"… we've been unable to shift to a renter's mindset …"

I fuss over our home like a new mother fusses over her newborn. The Villa Vatta Schmaltz seems dependent upon me, even while we're renting it out to The Muse's son and his partner, people who have demonstrated their ability to take care of the place. Home ownership seems a symbiotic sort of relationship, with me needing the big hairy responsibility every bit as much as the place needs my caring. I dream of returning to repaint the front of the place, fussing over scaffolding placement and finishing techniques, finding great reassurance there. I fuss about whether my prepping and painting skills will prove adequate for the job. I will wrestle every moment with haunting negative self-talk determined to convince me out of even engaging. Home is the burden I relish bearing.

I realize that I will never find a time when my home will become a source of leisure and pride.

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ConsideringReconsidering

consideringReconsidering
"My present wealth stands atop almost endless reconsidering."

You makes yer choice and takes yer chances. Beginning, one never knows where their journey might end. The best of intentions (as if anyone could discern 'best' from any preliminary set of choices) won't guarantee much more than a temporary cessation of stasis, if that. One moves toward a presumption of forward, hoping that purpose might somehow emerge from the cloud of initiation. "Here we go again," I subvocalize, though I know this start won't qualify as a do-over or even a genuine new beginning. This tension seems familiar, though, and a certain reassurance accompanies it. I've grown increasingly familiar with the unfamiliar, and even the completely novel carries some patterns I recognize, or imagine I recognize, from some time before.

I proposed Reconsidering as the underlying theme of my considering this quarter. I was at the time teetering on the forward edge of Christmas, beginning my annual poem cycle, uncertain of my capacity to complete the blessed damned thing, as usual.

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Homeostasis

balancingrocks
"The new homeostasis seems simply homeless."

I live embedded within mutually compensating systems, largely notional, which seem to strive to hold each other in balance. I shiver and sweat not as ends unto themselves, but to rebalance when my temperature falls out of whack. These actions seem to exist within a terribly narrow range and find success only when rather quickly succeeding. Continual sweating suggests an imbalance, not an added feature. Shivering seems exclusively a short-term solution, not an alternate lifestyle choice. Homeostasis might stand as a strived-for hypothetical, a state eternally in a state of becoming without ever actually achieving itself.

The older I become, the creakier my aging homeostasis balancing seems to become. My blood pressure's been out of whack, or, more properly, recognized as having been out of wh

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Flyring

flyring
"I believe that the human soul moves at about the speed of a walking horse."

Airplanes seem the most brutish invention of man, engineering raised to the level of degradation. Just the thought of leaving the familial bonds of earth to "float" (flout, more like it) into the clouds, smacks of a most grievous violation of the human contract. It veers us out of our lane, into the space intended for the birds. Jousting with the wind. Collective pretending that we are not miles above the ground, blindly zooming through unpredictable turbulence and worse, proceeding into turbulence we know damned well lurks there. I try to distract myself through the worse of it, that being the brief period between wheels up and wheels back down again, but the chop renders my book unreadable. I try to swallow my complicit arrogance, and fail again, for I am inescapably a part of the problem.

I know, modern society could not survive without cheap air travel, which might just be the strongest argument against buying into the plot.

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Trans-planting

annual-flower-transplants
"We can still prune and stretch and scratch a fresh surface into our encrusted topsoil."

I become root bound by the end of Winter, just as if I had been in the same pot too long. Born bi-pedal, if I hang in one place too long, I become bi-polar, faunching in my cage. The days grow longer, ably assisted by daylight savings' quick hand. I understand that the changes amount to sleight-of-hand. They still catch my eye and convince me that I must have been standing here too long, staring into the middle space just beyond the window glass, seeing almost nothing anymore. I have transformed into a genuine bore.

The Muse must drag me out of my cave.

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SnowSense

snowshoving
"This snowfall seems every bit as false as the Pseudo-Springtime sunshine felt yesterday."

By this late in the season, I recover my full fluency in the art of conversation with snow cover. The wet Spring snow completes the cycle, which started with piddling pretenders to snowfall and persisted through weeks of fine powder varying from light dustings to significant dumpers. The mid-March snow weighs tens of times more than the earlier fine powder. Each snow variety requires a unique strategy, though I only rarely ever shovel any of it. Shoveling powder snow's like shoveling air. It's easy enough but tends to blow everywhere, rearranging it more than moving it out of anyone's way. Wet Ides' snow like this can only be shoved. It's too heavy to shovel and just clogs a snow blower. It aches to be nudged aside.

March snow needs early and frequent attention.

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LeftBehind

leftbehind
" … there's no escaping."

A decade ago, I sold our second car to a grand nephew for a quarter and The Muse and I embarked on a great adventure we're still engaged in today. We became a one car family. At the beginning, we relocated into a neighborhood where five bus lines passed within two blocks. For a six week period while there, we even went completely carless. No big deal. The Muse, in the seven years we lived there, drove the car to work exactly twice. I'd usually drop and fetch her at the mile away Metro station and other than those excursions, the car mostly sat unless I was restocking the larder. Now we live in a neighborhood that fancies itself a village. Bus service almost doesn't exist, so we maintain a fresh tension in our little one car family.

I still usually drive The Muse to work, a quick seven mile sprint down tight S turns, the alternative being that I'm stranded for the day.

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Ashes

doingwithout
" … we might just might be pretty much plenty just as we are …"

I fancy myself as having been raised right. Not that I experienced a care-free upbringing, more that I was blessed with parents who steadfastly refused to care very much about how I felt. My mom especially seemed to take a certain delight when denying my wishes. Like yours, my folks were just kids when I was small, still learning their way into their role, so we experienced a certain equality within our inexperience. Some kids could pout and get their way. Pouting around our place could be grounds for an even more gleeful denial than usual. I hail from a Like It Or Lump It family. I learned early to do without.

These skills have served me extremely well.

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WriteWright

Wheelwright
" … one should never attempt to engineer accidents."

Nearly a hundred and ten years after the publication of Frederick Winslow Taylor's The Principles of Scientific Management, we're witnessing a resurgence of artisanal craft. Taylor's book deeply influenced the way people thought about work, encouraging mass-produced uniformity, the underpinnings of our modern economy. Now, we hardly think in other terms. He argued that tightly regulating the means of production would result in the holy grail of any industrial-scaled economy: cheap but good. His Scientific Management concepts were even adopted by housewives and ministers. One would be hard-pressed to find any segment of the industrializing world uninfluenced by his rational perspective. Industrialized food production injected itself between the farmer and the table. Centralized production facilities vaporized smaller-scale local producers. Much in the same way that Amazon has undercut local retailers, Scientific Management insisted that big was necessarily cheaper and so somehow better.

Carried to illogical extremes, to ultimate scale, industrial production seems to produce more to an ever-shrinking market.

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FallowTime

fallowtime2
"I have not quite yet turned into dust."

The Muse bought a seed catalogue, a certain harbinger of Spring. I've been dreaming of hop vines shading the south side of The Villa this summer, wondering how I might protect them from the hungry, hungry deer. I spotted the remnants of last year's garden peeking up through its snow blanket. I wondered what might volunteer from under there to seed itself this year. It's still FallowTime, but our minds are projecting forward a few weeks. I shoved the final inch of overnight snowfall off the driveway, figuring that might hasten the melting recovery from the weekend's snow. By noon, that pavement might be bare and dry again. The season will scrape back to reflect the metrological season before another rebutting snow falls five days from now. We're imbedded in the tussle season now, no longer winter yet not quite Spring.

In FallowTime, I find little to amuse myself.

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ThreatOfSnow

threatofsnow
"A perfect place to remember and anticipate."

The rumor started two full days ago. Snow overnight Friday. We'd heard this story before. Sometimes it came about, sometimes not. With a two day window, nobody flinched. The day before, most remained sanguine. By the day of, I started taking the warnings seriously, but the prediction proved false. Two cold fronts, meant to meet and party over us, had slowed. The northern contingent decided to hover over the Wyoming/Colorado border overnight, the southern one still hounded Las Vegas, and had a lot of territory to traverse before bothering us. We headed out the morning after, keeping a weather eye on every horizon, for this storm would approach from at least two directions at once.

We managed to successfully restock the larder before anything but freezing fog fell.

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Overwintering

overwintering-red-poinsettia
"Fresh food seems just as scarce as it is this morning."

This late into the season, its damage has already been done. Those plants unable to adapt to living inside have already died. We've either given up on the stragglers or simply let them go, setting them out into the snow figuring that the cold would at least rid their carcasses of the dreaded white flies which seem to thrive inside in spite of the gooey traps we set. A skeletal poinsettia or two, leftover from Christmas before last, still hang onto existence in the shadowy, cool daylight basement, sucking in the meager northern light that suffocated the nasty little lime tree we nurtured from the brink last summer. It's a genuine gonner now, just waiting for us to snip off the carcass and recycle the soil.

The humidifier is such a complicated machine, hanging onto the side of the forced air gas furnace, that I cannot determine whether it's working or not.

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Constulting5 - Don'tKnow

dontknow
"It will either work or not …"

I eventually came to describe myself as an expert at not being an expert. This label resulted from my serial inability to become a genuine expert in something, anything. I'd read and study and practice and seek out acknowledged experts, only to find myself (and the sought-out experts) still somewhat short of full expertise. I could have turned cynical then, but chose to re-frame instead. If I could not master any alternative expertise, I might, perhaps, have a shot at mastering not being a master; after all, few ever achieve full mastery. I should not let my experience discourage me in what I seem to do best, which is falling somewhat short. Becoming an expert at not being an expert reeks of paradox, perhaps the unacknowledged natural state of pretty much everything.

Who needs a master, anyway?

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Constulting4 - Reframing

reframing1
"It's the client's choice and The Consultant's responsibility to remind and Re-frame."

Never once in the history of the world so far has any aspiration been born well-formed. Each tends to begin rather light in the head, altogether too attractive and relatively vacuous. Not that they don't also inspire, for there's the rub. Inspiring vacuity has been the primary cause for the downfall of generations of dreamers, schemers, builders, and feints. Attracting a supportive mob turns out to be the easiest part of any undertaking, for people seem naturally keyed to follow any fluttering flag. Satisfying that mob seems infinitely more difficult, especially when one reflects on the fact that even if the original fuzzy promise were delivered as the promiser intended, it wouldn't very closely resemble what most of the followers envisioned as the deliverable. I call the first iteration of any effort's vision The Bright Idea, and Bright Ideas might be the most dangerous substance known to man.

President Trump's confident promise of a wall attracted xenophobes left and right.

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Constulting3 - ParodyPathology

ParodyPathologies
"Perhaps the parody of a parody lies closest to some fundamental truth"

I started becoming a Constultant after utterly failing as a consultant, primarily due to my apparent inability to properly promote, diagnose, and prescribe for the popular pathologies and their presumed cures. When I first became a 'consultant', or first carried the title, my mom asked me to describe what I did for a living now that I'd joined a consulting firm, and I chose an unfortunate metaphor. In the last fifteen years of her life, my mom grew to love being diagnosed. Actually, she loved visiting a doctor, though she also sincerely enjoyed having hunky EMTs come to put her back into bed at night after she'd tumble out onto the floor. The doctor would in the process of the customary (and pleasurable) laying on of his hands, invariably find something remiss and prescribe something. She'd return from her visits beaming at the fresh prospect. I chose to explain that I had become a sort of doctor for organizations. They'd invite me in, I'd poke around a bit, lay on my hands, then prescribe a curative regime.

This was a lousy metaphor, not because it misleadingly describes how consulting works but because it so poorly described how I worked.

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Constulting2

Constulting2
"The frequent flier program knows me better than almost anyone in my private life."

People who work for others seem to pine after the freedom working for themselves might bring. They imagine self-determination elevated to full liberation: no time card, no mindless meetings, no clueless supervisor, no stomach-turning Tuesday special in the company cafeteria. The other side of that equation struggles to equal its counterpoint. Liberty's not always all it's cracked up to be. In practice, independent contracting not quite like what it seemed to promise. The cost of that liberty comes out of the shallower pockets, those you hardly noticed when still laboring under that much-maligned thumb. Most prominent, the isolation mocking the once-aspired for freedom. One learns to accept the freedom to arrive long after a Sunday sunset, to find the rental car agency unaided, to navigate the dark, damp freeway to another anonymous exit, to gratefully accept the 'free' upgrade to a swankier room, to decide that supper won't seem worth stepping out into the dankness again. The 'free' breakfast following the pre-dawn stint in the 'executive' workout 'club' might garner a couple of almost heart-felt "good mornings" from a fellow guest or an over-enthusiastic staff member. Time left to knot the necktie, grab the knapsack, and try to remember what rental car you parked in that lot last night and where you parked it.

You join the commute, identical to every other commute you ever made except you have little idea where you are. Is this Cleveland or Omaha?

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Constulting1

constulting
"Clients do not like to be told what to do, no more than any sentient adult does …"

I left The Best Of All Possible Mutual Insurance Companies In The Greater Portland Metropolitan Area (Bar None) after fifteen years of dedicated service to their policy owners, to join a small boutique consulting firm in Silicon Valley. I was unqualified for the position, but didn't know that yet. In that first year, I learned that my new consulting firm sported a phony Sanskrit name which we'd translated as "crossing the great water with balance." Since Silicon Valley was then and probably still is pre-literate, clients there were very attracted to magical-sounding names. We took full advantage of that. A native Sanskrit speaker workshop attendee informed me of the deception during a break. I swallowed hard and carried on. Much of the consulting company's material was of questionable heritage. It started as a genuine survey by qualified questioners, but the distributed materials, I learned during that first year, had been crash-developed over a weekend by a very skilled HR professional who had never actually practiced the profession the material purported to teach. I do not imply that the material was worthless, for it seemed to induce a shift in the manner in which participants thought about project work, which was a subtle, perhaps even unintended consequence, but a nonetheless valuable one.

By the end of that first year, I was the only consultant in the firm that brought in more revenue than I cost the firm in salary and expenses, this no doubt due to the fact that I had negotiated a starting salary about twenty thousand dollars less than I would have made had I stayed at the insurance company.

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IncompetencePoint

IncompetencePoint
"I have nothing to show and almost everything left to discover."

Having sat through just as many PowerPoint® presentations as the next guy, I took the news to heart when I saw Edward Tufte report that they tended to "lower the ceiling." I swore to myself to move that technology to the Avoid Learning side of the ledger. Who wants to lower any ceiling? The Muse works in a world where PowerPoint proficiency stands well up on the hiring criteria chart. Her slide presentation served as a significant part of her initial interview. She could not have been hired without demonstrating her skill as a graphic artist, a field of study not listed on the position description and one she never pursued. Even the PhDs hired there must demonstrate this odd ability, regardless of how many advanced degrees they hold. I still think Tufte was right, the mere presence of that fateful projection screen sets a context where one might reasonably expect that nothing very surprising will happen.

These sessions sometimes seem like competitions to see who cam cram the most unreadable words onto a single slide.

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Insecurity

insecurity
"Who else was I supposed to be?"

The older I get, the less secure I feel. I realize that this statement hardly qualifies as profound or even identifies me as in any way special, but if I followed the cultural tropes, my surprise might prove excusable. Some significant part of the media machine seems determined to enlist me in a few of the endless streams of self-improvement schemes: exercise, diet, investment, lifestyle, each promising to leave me better off than before, except the nagging insecurity seems to stand to one side, leaning against some darkened doorway, chuckling to himself, mouthing, "There's no such thing as security here."

Rather than live in endless pursuit of an unlikely security, perhaps my time's better spent learning how to better cope with insecurity.

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8- NotSupposedTo

NotSupposedToTalkAbout
"If I won't say it, who will?"

As a part of our initial client interviews when consulting, The Muse and I would eventually get around to asking what we could not talk about. Recognizing that we were aliens in each client's organization, and as aliens, we were likely to violate at least one invisible rule, we asked. Most hiring executives would quickly respond that anyone could talk about absolutely anything in THEIR organization, but even the client knew that was bullshit. Often, the hiring executive had no clue what couldn't be talked about. The smokers on the loading dock know only too well, for they carry more experience talking big, at least as long as the executives aren't in earshot.

My Eighth Ethical Responsibility of 'Project' Work, one I include at The Muse's emphatic insistence, reminds me that I have to Talk About What I'm Not Supposed To Talk About.

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7- MakeInformedChoices

Informed-Choice
"Make The Best of the curious choices life brings you."

My Seventh Ethical Responsibility of 'Project' Work insists upon my Making Informed Choices. This one might require a bit more explaining than any of the other Responsibilities because it's subtle and tricky. Enjoining anyone to make only informed choices seems like a double binding insistence because how could anyone possibly determine that they were properly informed at any choice point? Choices, like so much in 'project' work, seem to come at inconvenient and inconveniencing times, insisting upon a snappy response, the kind that generally obviates the ability to fully consider alternatives. Only scant information seems available and a decision needs to be taken. What kind of informed choice could that situation produce? The answer is: the usual kind.

Almost nothing decided in the course of any 'project' benefits from full discovery. Partial pictures produce fragmented understandings which unavoidably generate crappy options from which to choose.

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6- SitWithTheMess

sittingwiththemess
"It's still a wrestling match with myself most every time …"

'Projects' tend to spawn messes. What might have been envisioned as a straight-forward, even trivial effort manages to somehow find its share of complications. The easier it seems to be at first, the more complicated it's likely to become, if only because the expectations we set couldn't help but leave everyone wide open for some big surprises. Almost any hill looks less steep from the foot of it, also less tall. It's not until one gets about halfway up that any truer nature of the effort comes into focus. Mentioning these likely complications at the beginning will usually earn one the label of Chicken Little. Nobody will fondly remember your earlier cautions later, either.

Some new mess seems to be delivered to your door with each fresh dawn, each pleading for a speedy response. Few deserve a quick, reactive intervention, though, and not just because these tend to complicate messy situations.

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5- Work The System

workthesystem
"Had I expected the system to work without me working it a bit?"

No system ever devised worked as intended. Each embodied some flaw or feature producing different than intended responses. We adapt around these shortcomings until we become largely unaware of their presence. Encountering any new system inevitably becomes an at least somewhat frustrating series of learnings which we experience as mistakes until we figure out the fiddles and somehow seamlessly incorporate them into our repertoire. Some systems seem especially blessed with a seemingly intransigent nature. These, we never completely learn and so we struggle with them. Math was like that for me. So is the thermostat with the inhuman human interface. Each encounter with these systems involves essentially starting tabula rasa all over again.

We develop shortcuts and co-opts over time. We come to more deeply understand a system's tolerances, those points where a corner might be successfully shaved.

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4-GenerousInterpretations

generousinterpretation
" … never ascribe to evil intent what simple incompetence might explain."

My fourth Ethical Responsibility of 'Project' Work encourages me to at least consider Making The Most Generous Possible Interpretation. My natural interpreter tends to lean toward the more scathing, if only because scathing interpretations generate more entertainment value. Scathing interpretations rarely well serve any relationship. Unless you're surrounded by limping battalions of demonstrated sociopaths (see 3-ExtendingTrust), scathing interpretations seem imprudent. Was that component delivered late because of incompetence or a bit of bad luck? You decide, but you must decide with inadequate evidence. Will your collective effort be better served by a scathing or a more generous interpretation?

The rub, of course, seems to be that most of a 'project's' conclusions must be drawn with less than sufficient evidence. If there's no such thing as a 'project', there's also, usually, no such thing as a real root cause.

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3-ExtendingTrust

extendingtrust
"I might better serve myself and our collective effort
by sharing the benefit of my initial uncertainty …"

Lore holds that people must prove themselves trustworthy before one should extend them trust. This notion can easily complicate any 'project' assignment as everyone eyes each other suspiciously at first. I never could figure out what might constitute the appearance of trustworthiness, though. If a team member pulls off some selfless public rescue, I suppose that I might find it easy to trust them, but most team members keep their heads down and I'm unlikely to glimpse them demonstrating heroic behavior, so how might they prove themselves trustworthy in my eyes if I'm uncertain what trustworthy even looks like? Besides, the mere absence of evident behavior says little about anything.

I believe that the lore mistakes a sort of naive hopefulness for trustworthiness.

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2-PurposefulPursuit

purposefulpursuit
"I need not become an obsessed true believer …"

I find it extremely difficult writing about PurposefulPursuit without resorting to hackneyed synonyms. The term dredges up determined, recalls resolute and resolved, and sings of steadfastness and single-mindedness. Sticking no more than a toe in that water seems to infect me with a full-blown case of OCD, and I want to avoid that end. Of course 'projects' would operate more smoothly if everyone involved in the effort would become obsessed with achieving the objective. They will not. Contrary to popular conviction, one cannot drive any 'project' to a successful conclusion. Driven behaviors, whether exhibited by the 'project' leader or a particularly compulsive individual contributor seem more akin to bullying, a form of public self abuse.

When I speak of PurposefulPursuit as the second of my Ethical Responsibilities of 'Project' Work, I am most decidedly not merely trying to egg myself on by whispering a motivational mantra.

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1-ConsciousBlindness

consciousblindness
"I feel better informed when I presume that I'm less than fully informed."

This posting represents the first of seven (or maybe eight) pieces reconsidering my Seven Ethical Responsibilities of 'Project' Work.

In the beginning, I understand that there was nothing but The Word, which could not have even been a thing since words have no existence without several sorts of context like paper, screen, speaker, listener, alphabet, and history to hold meaning. Though there were apparently no observers present, save The One, certainly no journalists or diarists, the story stuck. Later, light emerged, attributed to an early act of God, back when he was still building his vitae. He, the Creator, proclaimed light good, though later reviews were mixed. All this occurred before God even married the first time. God's second wife, certainly significantly younger than he and probably uncomfortably closely related, was beautiful, but they lacked a shared experiential history. They struggled with metaphors, he continually referencing outside her cultural experience, she insisting upon quoting younger notables that he considered mere wannabes. That marriage, too, was fated to fail.

God's third wife came along just as he began to come into his Almighty phase, having by then fathered a son by his second ex-, Mary.

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ProjectPhD

ProjectPhD
"I suspect that most ethical lapses emerge as sins of omission …"

Whenever I ask a 'project' worker about their philosophy of 'project' work, I almost always receive a long stare in reply. A few, like me, might fumble for our little laminated card which holds our intentions in the odd chance that they might be of some practical use, but most, if they've even thought about their personal philosophy of 'project' work will offer no crisp response. Some might offer a variant on The Golden or the Platinum Rules, do unto others as you'd like to be done unto or do unto others as they wish to be done unto, but little practical light will shine from beneath their bushel baskets.

I'll quick draw my Seven Ethical Responsibilities of 'Project' Work, an explication I developed with considerable effort.

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ProjectManagement101.4-TheInvisibleWhole

bmate
"The object might not be to know better but to get better at not knowing."

Nobody ever sees (or really understands) the operation of the 'project' as a whole. Some mug as if they did understand. The most dangerous of these firmly believe themselves meta to the effort, occupying the objective observer role while also contributing to the cause. Most identify with some aspects without concerning themselves about others. Asking after the purpose of the 'project' can spark theological skirmishes since everyone inescapably perceives their 'project' quite differently than anyone else. This situation qualifies as a case of the normals without an ounce of pathology, with the possible exception of the perception held by those characterizing themselves as objectively meta to the effort.

'Projects' might be best described by employing metaphors.

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ProjectManagement101.3-Someone Elses Dream

someoneelsesdream
"Remember the caterpillar who somehow managed to choreograph his footsteps until some observer asked him how he managed to do that."

When The Muse asks me, as she has many, many times over the years, about my purpose, I respond with a heap of silence. I understand that almost every self-helpless manual insists that one must get in touch with their purpose, and even dress up that knowledge with a brief but compelling introductory elevator speech, the question reliably renders me speechless. It might be that my purpose is so subtle and compelling that it transcends language itself, but it's more likely that I hold so many competing compelling purposes that I simply cannot quickly choose from among them at a moment's prompt, though I doubt it. I manage to get out of bed every morning, but I do not very often rise with a full head of steam to charge off toward some alluring horizon.

The subject of motivation has already filled more essays than I'll ever read, or care to read.

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ProjectManagement101.2-Unavoidable Misunderstandings


"The difficulty with communication might be the illusion that it occurred."

Was it Churchill who claimed that Brits and Yanks are one people separated by a common language? The observation could apply to any two people, too. My daughter Heidi, who owns a small business providing translation services, can testify that no Rosetta Stone exists, for no one-to-one correspondence has ever been found between any words in any two languages. Nuance bridges the gaps. Interpretation, patience, and MISunderstanding seems to be required for any communication to ever occur.

Even in mature, routinely replicating manufacturing processes, miscommunication intrudes.

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ProjectManagement 101.1-TheEarliestResponsibleMoment


"
all promises are implicitly contingent."
ProjectManagement101

'Projects' exist as networks of explicit commitments, promises to produce something within some time frame. These promises might be represented as tasks on a timeline schedule, but often exist as no more than verbal agreements. Even when a promise is responsibly made, by which I mean uncoerced, it represents no guarantee, but rather a statement of good intentions. Good intentions might not even qualify as necessary but certainly can't be sufficient to assure expected delivery, and everyone should properly acknowledge this inescapable fact. By agreeing to fulfill the assignment, an individual commits to two apparent contradictions: 1) They confirm that they believe themselves capable of delivering as expected and 2) They agree to renege upon that promise at The Earliest Responsible Moment, which means just as soon as they realize that they probably cannot make the expected delivery.

The Earliest Responsible Moment will not come after weeks of painstakingly pretending that they have not blown the opportunity to deliver as expected.

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ProjectManagement101


"It's a chancy job, and it makes a man watchful ... and a little lonely."

Project Management is a fundamentally fraudulent profession in that it purports to deliver something that cannot be delivered: the on-time, on-budget, and on-spec performance of a temporary, one-time enterprise. Because of this, it traditionally attracted more than its fair share of touts and bullies, those with little compunction, much self-confidence, and small appreciation for conventional definitions of what constitutes fact as well as fiction, trading almost exclusively in 'believable fiction' and arguable fact, routinely over-selling and under-delivering to the fading enthusiasm of their clients, so-called sponsors, the money-givers. Projects, too, represent as a popularly believable fiction, an enterprise lacking most of the attributes of any more conventional form of organization. I've long held that there's no such thing as a project because projects aren't things.

Their context seems as perfect for misconceptions as a steaming swamp might be for encouraging bacterial growth, though not all 'projects' are the same.

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Closured


"I might just as well consider the illusion complete."

As I explained in my Pipeline post, I recently started focusing upon clearing out my backlog of nearly finished pieces. I consequently posted nothing new yesterday because I was inhabiting last winter instead, sorting through the nearly one hundred small chapters, performing my final edit. I read almost as slowly as I write, and I seem to find myself easily distracted when editing, perhaps because it doesn't feel like real work to me. I'm neither creating nor recreating then, but cleaning up. I should dress in a janitor's coveralls and wear rubber gloves. The work feels just that glamorous. It requires genuine dedication to get to the end of it. It requires real dedication just to get started, so when I discovered that printing it off erased some psychological barrier, I jumped right in.

I finished the scrubbing today. A little picky piece work remains around the edges, but it feels done enough to supply a shot of closure.

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ThePipeline


"I feel as though I'm unclogging ThePipeline for a change."

The phrase 'It's a process' has always annoyed me. Back when I helped develop software systems, the phrase was employed as an intended subtle scold by those Systems Thinkers who always not-so secretly consider themselves possessed of superior perspective. They could put in its place most any bit of otherwise good advice by reminding the suggester that "It's a process," at least in the Systems Thinker's mind. The phrase still seems vacuous to me, either blindingly banal or wholly presumptive, for if it's really all process, it's really nothing at all. Some of the supposed flow must stick somewhere, if only to qualify as a thing. Granted that much of what passes for systems hardly pass any thingness test. Still, evoking the process claim seemed to predictably premise some hollow process improvement suggestion.

The process mavens rarely seemed masters of any actual skill.

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SelfPromotion


" … my SelfPromotion gland still quakes at the thought."

The thought of SelfPromotion turns me into a quivering ninny, so I engage in it surreptitiously, hoping nobody will notice. I post unrequested pieces on Facebook, quietly hoping nobody will see, let alone comment, on them. I feel that I need to keep up appearances but pray that I won't appear too awfully forward as a result. The Muse insists that I sometimes expose too much, which might be a counter phobic reaction to my sincere hope that I won't expose too much. At the same time, I'm convinced that the most personal turns out to be the most universal, so I figure I broaden my audience by focusing upon my personal experience. I live a fundamentally paradoxical existence.

I have not yet learned how to tell what a reader might want, much less what any market desires. I struggle to read my own mind without expending much energy trying to read anyone else's.

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IrishTwins


"I figure that my statistical innumeracy produces the bulk of my good fortune."

My father and my nephew were born on the same date, January 15. A favorite musician's wife and father were born on the same date, too, a fact that seemed downright synchronicitous to the wooing couple. My family always thought it a form of a miracle that my nephew and father were born on the same date, a terribly special blessing, though the probability of that occurring hovers at 365 to one, hardly long odds. Genetic family patterns might have significantly shortened those odds. Many families produce what are sometimes referred to as IrishTwins, and I suspect that each feel the warm hand of a reassuring fate caressing them when that happens, too.

I'm rather blind to probabilities. I do not naturally carry a sense of them.

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Sifting


"Their home seems more like a castle somehow."

Once every fifty million years or two, some cataclysm besets this world. In between times, change seems to occur exclusively via insignificant increment. A snowfall starts as a sifting whisper, like wrens' pin feathers floating by outside, barely noticeable through the window. By the next morning, a foot of accumulated insignificance blocks my drive. Then, all my attention focuses upon digging out from under the insult. Before, it's eminently ignorable. Were any of us more activated by whispers than hollers, we might manage to keep up with the blooming significance and never face the back-breaking digging out, but we usually don't. We feel dumped upon instead.

As a species, we seem attracted to BIG things, as if true significance came only in volume and mass.

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Morningtown


"It's a fleeting place"

I'm down to two, perhaps three days each week. Some mornings, I feel no real need to get out. Others, I wrestle with accepting the necessity of it, unable to justify the drive. Guys like me, in the isolating profession, rarely go out simply to get out. Even then, I tend to end up at the same destination, the library, where I don't know anyone, anyway. It's a simple matter of being alone by myself or surrounded by strangers, each more similar than really different. I sometimes shop, thereby justifying my presence out of the hermitage neighborhood.

On rare mornings, then, I enter Morningtown, a small American city waking up.

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NaiveUse


"I think the universe remarkably forgiving."

Any first use constitutes a naive use, but then so does the second use, and the third. At what point does experience erase the naive underpinnings? I propose never as a reasonable response, for each subsequent use occurs in different circumstances, the subtlety of which probably distill into undetectable, yielding an unsuspectedly different situation. After over fifty years of shaving, I still manage to nick myself sometimes. You'd think I would have learned how to avoid those nicks by now.

Heraclitus had something right when he declared that nobody ever crosses the same river twice.

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Anticipating


"I remain much better at Anticipating the past
than I'll ever be at accurately Anticipating what's next."

Checking the weather report, I learn that a mighty windstorm is predicted for the foothills West of Denver. Expected to arrive around midnight, our flight's scheduled to land a scant half hour before its arrival. I've seen this movie before. So has everyone who's flown into DIA. The airport's located in a notoriously windy weed patch of a place, more Kansas than Colorado. The Rockies' Front Range regularly funnels slight breezes into full blown gales. Every flight locks down forty-five minutes before landing, the pilot apologizing in laconic tones for the impending inconvenience before the plane commences to terrifying rolling and yawing, inevitably catching one careless passenger on the way to the facility. That passenger receives a stern chewing out from a strapped in flight attendant while the rest of the passengers white knuckle their way past this latest portal into eternity. Landing always feels like salvation.

A veteran of an indecent number of Denver-inbound flights, I start anticipating early, before the plane even leaves Seattle. I once again convince myself of the absolute insanity of air travel as the plane taxis through heavy rain toward the darkest end of the departure runway.

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Homelessness


" …our heart understands that it just needs to keep playing along."

If home is where my heart is, I've been homeless for the last decade because my heart has been living far away from where it "is." Long story, often repeated, best left unsaid, we left our home for a lengthy exile which felt like an ancient form of punishment for having successfully made our dream come true. We lived in a house of our choosing, one endlessly challenging us with needed paint and repairs and a yard and garden always trending toward chaos had we not been there. We loved our lives there but found them unsustainable, so we went in search of some sort of grail, I guess, believing with all of our hearts that one day we might regain the ability to again inhabit where our heart lives. We figure that a few more years might do it, but we really, truly do not know for sure.

The tenuous space between anything and a heart's desire contains mostly Homelessness, however otherwise well-appointed it might seem.

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Ex-


"What was once done was never really finished with me."

The language of my culture allows permanent separation from my past, just as if an act, any act, might be undone by merely invoking a linguistic scalpel. A wife might become an 'ex-'. Ditto for a business partner, an employer, or a friend. Some infraction, a defection from the originating covenant, and the perpetrator might become an 'ex-'. Exes often carry a strongly negative, often derisive connotation, perhaps for the primary purpose of preserving the other party's self image. The ex- becomes the permanently losing party in the affair. They fell short or fouled out. The ex-er somehow holds himself blameless, at least stiff-arming culpability. Ex-s seem to become ditzes.

But no act can be undone. Each success and failure permanently echoes throughout time, recoveries sometimes more reaffirming than any success.

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Mapsing


" … a fate no Muse could ever sanguinely agree to accepting."

The Muse insists upon holding a paper map when we travel. Even so, we often leave The Villa having forgotten the requisite charts, which starts the explanation of why we have so many maps in that box in the garage. Before we're very far down the road, she'll notice the absence and commence a small fussing. My job if I'm driving will then become to find some place for her to purchase a map of the territory we're fixing to traverse. Gas stations, once reliable sources of high quality roadmaps, have become iffy outlets. Variety stores, drug stores, even supermarkets will likely disappoint. The essence of any search seems to lie in the unlikelihood of ever successfully concluding it. We search anyway.

The supermarket clerk expresses its regrets while I wait at the Starbucks counter where they're "pouring over" our choices for the day.

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Passing

passage
" … one of those ex-stage stops where the exit sign proclaims No Services (for me)."

The Muse and I have been traveling the last three days, reaching our destination yesterday and readying to head back to The Villa early this morning. We've passed scores of small towns and former stage stops, most hardly warranting a glance, let alone any deeper inquiry. We found ourselves fortunate to on the way overnight in a formerly unknown little town, one originally founded with the unlikely name of Hole In The Ground, though the founders later upgraded it to something more conventional. Today, it's a proud little place mostly off any well-beaten path, the sort of town that time might have not completely forgotten, but one where its name comes begrudgingly to even time's lips. It's not entirely anonymous, but might as well be for most passages and travelers.

We passed through Las Vegas, overnighting there with one of The Muse's gracious nephews and his family. Vegas, as it's generally referred to, seemed the perfect peek into an apparently not so distant dystopian future.

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DrivingCrazy


"Maybe we were both crazy beforehand."

The Muse and I drive each other crazier every time we drive. I'm amazed that we still consent to enter the car together and head out onto the road. Around town toodles never rile us much. It takes a freeway for our true insanity to emerge. You see, we do not now nor have we ever shared what she calls a threshold. This threshold delineates the speed one considers prudent. To her, I always drive like an old Italian woman, lacking only a few pounds and a black dress from fully embodying the look. To me, she drives like Mr. Toad on his famous Wild Ride, apparently distracted while madly passing everything in sight. I never, ever, even in my wildest dreams exceed the speed limit. She considers it perfectly prudent to exceed it by five or more miles per hour. She spends her passenger seat time distracting herself so she won't notice that we're making a whole lot less headway than she'd projected. I spend my passenger seat time frantically hanging on with both hands while pleading with her to slow the you-know-what down.

By the end of the day, we're exasperated with each other. I've developed a charley horse in my thighs from hours of fruitless bracing for impacts that wondrously never came. She notes that I seem all shocky.

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EmptyNesting


"I suspect that those magpies will miss that cat every bit as much as I will."

The Muse and I escorted Rose The Skittish Spinster Cat out of this shop-worn world. Rose, skittish to the end, peed all over The Muse's lap on the drive over to the vet's. I'd pleaded for just wrapping the cat in a towel to save her the indignity of riding in a cage, and The Muse assented. Her's was a tearful parting for us, huddled as we were like refugees over her silken body. We returned to an EmptyNest, a house demonstrably less home than the home it had been a short time before. The Muse was working from home. She returned to her laptop and I retreated to the master bedroom to read or pretend to read. My reading companion, my lap robe, was no longer there, a catnip mouse in the middle of the floor evidence of her recent tenancy.

She'd imprinted on a calling cue. I'd tap twice on my lap and she'd show up, yawning and tousle-haired from some semi-secret lair, and mount my lap, there to survey the surrounding territory as I read or fitfully reflected trying to connect with another elusive idea.

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Christmas'Eve


"Christmas will be here by then and a fat goose will be sputtering toward its eventual demise."

Christmas' Eves seem to meld into a single contiguous memory, overall indistinct. The traditions overlapping, sometimes contradictory, because everyone's in a blended family now, in-laws, out-laws, jurists, and priests. More a convergence than a celebration, another attempt to fit orthogonal expectations into a single place and time. I earlier spoke with my brother and he was expecting twenty. The Muse and I expect the usual two. We've hosted a few slightly larger gatherings since we left the hometown, so-called exile Christmases, but we usually settle on the same old two. I'm distracted writing my Christmas poems, so she takes the lead cooking something special. She decorates the tree which typically won't have any presents beneath it. Rose The Skittish Spinster Cat, under the weather this year, usually pokes around the edges, imprinting on one or more of the lower-hanging ornaments. The Nakamichi will knock out very traditional Christmas tunes, Rosemary Clooney and Barbra Streisand. A fire will warm the place.

This year, I finished writing my Christmas poems early, so I can take the evening off. I've spent so many Christmas Eves locked in mortal combat with the written word that I feel like an alien in my own home this evening.

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RealMagic


"When she finally accepts that you genuinely want to help, RealMagic occurs."

RealMagic seems so subtle I might miss it. It never pops up out of a spot-lit top hat or suddenly surprises anyone like that! It slips in almost always unaware to utterly change everything after there. It's like that first glimpse of Vienna through jet-lag amplified fog, a quiet mental jog, an irreversible changing of tracks. One never goes back after RealMagic visits, nor wants to. There's never any saying, "No," because it's hardly a choice. Even should some selection get involved, every alternative appears as a relative slog when compared. Usually, though, it just slips through and utterly changes you.

RealMagic seems to exist most intensely in language.

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Soytenty


"I remain almost certainly uncertain."

I've grown to deeply suspect certainty of any stripe. My skepticism about even death and taxes sort of drives me forward or at least seems to sustain me. I use the word 'seems' more than any other, for I sense a lurking uncertainty behind my every observation, my every utterance. I dread the day that I might be called to tell 'the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth' because I deeply doubt my or anyone's ability to satisfy that injunction. I might at best prove capable of telling the story as I believe at that moment I witnessed it, but I should remain uncertain if I saw what happened or some mix of projections of what I expected to happen and what never really happened at all. On the face of this confession might lie a tragic disconnect or a godsend of an appreciation. I can't be certain which or even if either might be the case. I suppose that this means I get to choose.

Earlier in my existence, I thought that certainty lay near the purpose of my existence. I might accumulate knowledge such that most of my experience would be wrapped in some form of sure bet. I'd have learned where to walk and where to avoid, what to eat and what to decline, who to associate with and who to shun, but this operation has never actually run that way. The examples I employed to guide me always seemed sufficiently unique as to leave a rather glaring gap between what I knew and what I wanted or needed to know. This apparent feature confused me for the longest time. I vacillated between believing myself rather stupid or terribly insightful, again uncertain which pole to properly classify my confusion. Only the absence of certainty seemed defining, and if certainty served as the success metric, I could only properly classify myself as a serial failure.

The Muse can testify to the number of situations I shrink from.

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CastlesOfCards

castleofcards
"I seek not to undo my past, a genuine fool's mission,
but to better understand and more deeply appreciate it as well as my present."

By the time anyone lives to my advancing age, they live in a CastleOfCards. Construction started long before the builder could comprehend that they were building anything, let alone the philosophical, moral, ethical, and logical foundation of their later life, their later lives. Keystones laid with little appreciation of the global ramifications of their masons' local choices, the place ultimately gives a bad name to the term 'hacked.' Even the more thoughtfully-designed pieces stand atop elements never intended to support more than an odd adolescent notion. Habits replicated across decades pulled large portions of the construction out of true. When I abandoned one or another habit in favor of one better suited to then present circumstance, walls supporting the new focus clearly never foresaw that shift. As one ages, whole wings might simply crumble into useless piles. The laird hardly abandons his castle simply because it's started crumbling out from beneath him and his court. Nobody ever starts over again, demolishing what was built in utter ignorance of future needs. Everyone lives in a hacked CastleOfCards.

It's not until older age that most will consent to a general reconsideration of the place.

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Begendings


"I believe I'll next focus my attention upon my beliefs …"

Had I intended to arrive somewhere by now, I should properly feel disappointed, but I intended no forward progress. I set out to slide sideways for a season and I seem to have accomplished that modest objective. I did not start with the ending in mind, but with an enquiring mind. I wondered what might happen if rather than plot my moves, I expected that my moves might coalesce into some semblance of a plot. I expected to sometimes veer off topic, temporarily stumped over my next move. I hoped that I might stumble into some interesting territory, that I might gain insight rather than more complete understanding. I might have ended up more clueless than I began, but what could I have to hide? I believed that I'd lost some appreciation for the fundamentally circular nature of life. Altogether too forward-looking and therefore less tolerant of the potentially enlivening lateral slide. I'd likewise split sideways into notional sides, too, left and right, right and wrong, the ups and downs of an orthogonal plane. Maybe direction need not matter.

I intended to investigate space, to stumble upon something or even nothing at all.

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HollyDave's


" … each celebrating a holiday called Good Old What's It's Name."

Think of a holiday, any holiday, and a set of standard images might come to mind: candles for Chanukah, witches and black cats wearing witch hats for Halloween, a turkey wearing a Pilgrim hat for Thanksgiving, Santa sipping a Coke® next to a decorated tree for Christmas. We all know the memes. Interestingly, though, none of us ever experience any holiday as portrayed. We identify with the iconography even though our family does things a little differently. Maybe we're a ham instead of a turkey family, or we celebrate Christmas without Santa's haunting presence, not even exchanging presents, certainly not boughten stuff. Each family detours from the advertised standard such that each collective holiday becomes a set of extremely personal experiences. Some open presents on Christmas Eve, others on Christmas Morning, and still others on Epiphany. I dare say that the majority of Yuletide celebrants would never self-identify as Christian, which seems fine since Christians kind of swiped a pre-existing pagan celebration for their own, anyway. Each unique form of celebration might well elicit a single common spirit, though, and maybe that's what we each celebrate, whatever the form.

Me? I observe HollyDave's, a uniquely personal end of the year holiday. It's sort of Christmasy and kind of Chanukahey, a little bit pagan yet hosting ample silent, solemn stillness.

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TakingStock/MakingStock

" … at least try out trying to do without before freaking out about the absence."

An impending end of a season, like an approaching yearend, brings out the auditor in me. I feel moved to engage in inventorying. What had I acquired? What expended? What remains after the passage of this latest period of existence? How might I value that flow of goods and services, and the not-so-goods and trespasses? Much of what came to pass simply passed back into the ether from whence it appeared, no longer here and unverifiable anywhere now. There were fusses and feathers, though little remains of their presence. What does remain hardly represents the hopefulness or dread by which experiences and stuff originally appeared. A few scant shards remain like the frozen vegetable peelings clogging my freezer's shelves, souvenirs from a hundred suppers otherwise forgotten now. I purge that inventory, roasting it off into an enormous batch of stock, the water of life, leftovers reduced back into essence.

I learned this year to roast my stock.

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Male-ing


" … an annual renewal of my relationship with my father, who taught me much worth fondly remembering."

I love visiting my US Post Office. Strictly speaking, it's really our post office, but I feel a deeply personal attachment to the place. My father was a postal clerk for over thirty-five years, and my mom used to bundle us kids up to go fetch him after his shift. We'd enter the back after crossing the loading dock, an entrance reserved for postal employees, or so the sign said, and while I knew we weren't strictly authorized to enter, we were family, so nobody called us out. Quite the opposite, everyone called us in with cat calls (my mom was somewhat of a "babe"). In those days, postal clerks smoked while sorting mail, so the place smelled of oiled wood floor, paper, and sweet cigarette smoke, with maybe a hint of machine oil wafting in the background. The sorting floor was a warren of sorting racks and stacks of boxes. Sometimes, a few crates of baby chicks peeped plaintively in the corner, attracting us kids to poke our fingers in through the air holes because that's what kids are supposed to do. Otherwise, who could call them cute?

My dad always claimed that the USPS was far superior to any other delivery service. "Only USPS employees take an oath," he said, and he took his oath seriously.

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Schleep


" … while The Muse snoozed placidly beside me."

Sleep has never been much of a friend for me. A tough state to enter and a tougher one to remain engaged in, I find it more of a schlep than a sweet embrace: a Schleep, if I dare coin a term. I dutifully set my alarm before retiring, but almost always wake a half hour before it gets around to reminding me to get up again. I maintain a routine my doctor frowns over, insisting that my brain could not possibly adequately reinvigorate in the scant time I allocate for that purpose. I don't know anything about adequacies. I simply take what I seem to tolerate without over-worrying about how deficient my habit might leave me. I subscribe to a notion that everyone carries a unique rhythm into this life. Those fortunate enough to find that rhythm and manage to somehow match it seem especially fortunate. Those who scour the self-help shelves looking for outside advice so as to conform to somebody's sense of normalcy might never properly settle in.

When some event disrupts my curious rhythm, I become dysfunctional. Illness or exhaustion might encourage me to wrestle with my dozy adversary more than might prove beneficial to me. More sleep generally leaves me feeling more depleted; less, more enlivened.

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BidingTimelessness


"I'll hardly notice either time or mind."

Healing happens within a timeless state. It occurs at scales beyond or before sensory experience, absolutely invisibly. Nor can anyone hear healing happen, or smell it, or taste it, or watch it happening. One can notice that it happened but never witness it in action. Time seems to work like this, too, that second hand measuring off what happened rather than anything happening. Watching it seems the one certain way to distract from actually experiencing it, as if anyone could experience time at all. Time accumulates into infinitesimals, my many years of life now distilled into flashes and glimpses of indeterminate duration, meaningless both in dimension and duration now. Timelessness might be the same sensation as meaninglessness, the same as each one of the lessnesses, for their very label assigns them to negative space, territory with no finite reciprocal opposite. The lessnesses come as close as we ever come to experiencing nothing at all.

The doctor passed me a passel of don't as I left the surgical center. My optometrist handed me a few more the next morning. Though I feel every bit myself, I'm enjoined to monitor myself as if I was not yet quite fully myself. They probably put the wrong guy in charge.

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PointsOfLight


"The key to living the good life lies in being easily impressed."

Living up here near eight thousand feet brings one clear benefit. The night sky rises much higher above at altitude. The mist and dust largely dispersed, nights remain clear enough to see many more PointsOfLight. Even satellites visit us up here, easily visible floating across from horizon to horizon a hundred and more miles above us. During the day, several jet planes remain visible at all times, most heading due West towards California, but a few always heading to seemingly every compass point. Heavies heading toward Hawaii. Prop jobs bound for Aspen. Who knows where they're going? Winds up there tend to remain fierce even when no weather moves through. We live below severe turbulence even when our trees aren't whipping in the wind.

My optometrist Dr. Joe says the procedure to reposition the displaced lens implanted in my first cataract surgery appears to have been successful, though another week's wait will better confirm.

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smallDay


"Sights hardly recognized. Vision still impaired."

The day after TheBIGDay dawns tiny. Maybe the shadow of the recent BIG event still blocks most of the dawning sun. Maybe my eyes have been blinded to anything scaled larger than a finger hold. I might not care about big things anymore, not right now. I'm back into the world, my recently repaired right eye staring as though through a wad of wool, my forehead sticky with remnants of the gooey tape the nurse used to hold that creepy eye protector in place. I moved like a lame zombie before sleeping like a soggy dirt clod, waking around 2AM to wonder if I could see any better than I ever could before. In the darkness, with that eye protector still in place, I listed heavily to starboard as I stumbled into my bathroom to survey the damage in the mirror. I removed the plastic barrier but could tell without peeking that my vision remained impaired.

No news, not yet. A few days might clear the cloudy covering to reveal a world improved. I read the morning news with my one remaining working eye, sighing with pend-up impatience. More time waiting for some sign of improvement.

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TheBIGDay


" … mechanics trade not in forgiveness and grace but in grimaces and unintended mistakes."

Today's THE day. Anticipation's finally over. The over-long wait, the thrumming great uncertainty, the fussing and worry fall away today. The planning's moot now, the preparation phase completed. The coordination of all the picky pieces won't ever matter again. I won't even remember the adaptations which had become my new normal, not after today. Tomorrow that dream will have come true or a nightmare will have ensued. Whichever comes to pass, aspiration will have slipped past. A breach in the wall separating past from future opens before me now, promising only future ever after. The past will be gone by the end of this day, this BIGDay.

This seems to be the way we parse our time, into preparation and passage, pre- and post event times, with a narrow, one-way bridging alleyway between.

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NotCollegeMaterial


"I consequently never learned the fine arts of football or basketball appreciation, binge drinking, or proper socializing."

Visiting with a high school guidance counsellor when I was about halfway through high school, I received one of those life-defining bits of advice. Reviewing my transcript in progress, the counsellor remarked that I was NotCollegeMaterial. Not that I'd been aching for a college career. That counsellor was correct in that I had never seen myself as college material, but to have even a minor authority confirm my self-assessment seemed a mixed blessing. Before, it had been a choice. After, it felt like an edict, as if no matter what I might accomplish, the 'powers that be' had identified me as uniquely unqualified. This was a bit of a blow. I'd known that I was nobody's mathematician or linguist. In those days, college admission required at least two years of successful foreign language study, and I'd failed to assimilate French and German, so I was cornered. I was then more interested in my guitar, anyway, and figured that I might one day become a star once I was discovered. Not a mainstream celebrity, for sure, but one of those narrowly-appreciated underground types never heard on top forty radio.

I figure that I got more of an education not being college material than I ever could have acquired had I passed that second year of German and stopped calculating on my fingers.

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TheMissingIngredient


" … the blessings rain down anyway."

Each holiday, one item becomes prominent by its absence, like an exiled newborn king. Some years it's a spice, others a vegetable or a fruit. Each year this whatever-it-is encapsulates the purpose of the celebration, the search for some seasonal satisfaction. Buddha Hand Citron filled this role for several years, and still threatens each year to reprise its performance, so The Muse and I start seeking sources for this curious fruit by November first. The Muse bakes for the holidays, and holiday baking demands candied citrus peel, the most exotic of these being citron, a fruit that has no pulp, just peel, the exemplar of candying potential. In the early days, we'd start asking after citron in the early fall, expecting to eventually find it displayed pre-processed in small plastic containers in some supermarket's produce section alongside iridescently dyed lime, orange, and lemon peel; little chunks of irradiated glop. But some places don't do citron, have never heard of it, which for us prompted one of those searches seemingly without end, initiating a true seasonal tradition.

We become magi without a guiding star, increasingly frantically seeking some treasure nobody else seems able to relate to.

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HouseCleaning


"If anyone tells you married life is bliss, slap 'em with a wet broom."

The Muse and I don't share everything. We don't, for instance, share a HouseCleaning ethic. What's clean for one of us doesn't quite pass muster for the other, so HouseCleaning days turn stressful for both of us. I try to stay out from underfoot, choosing an opposite side of the place to focus my efforts, hoping she'll get occupied somewhere else until I can finish, but the plot rarely unfolds that way. I'll be elbow deep in some special gift of a job, like dusting "her" plant shelves, and she'll show up to find the work somehow shoddy, or at least not quite the way she'd envisioned it being done. Yes, I moved every plant. Yes, I removed the shelves to clean both top and underside, but she'd wanted to move the shelves, too, so though I'd finished every shelf and returned the plants to the same places they'd inhabited before, she removes them again so she can move the shelves and vacuum beneath them. I go aargh!

A few iterations of this and I escape to the kitchen, figuring can clean the stovetop in peace. Three minutes later, she's occupied the sink to water the plants there while I stand aside, holding a dripping washrag waiting for access to the sink again.

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Vulnerability


" …my Vulnerability tucked in tight around me."

To the extent that I acknowledge and accept them, I concede that my vulnerabilities might be my superpowers. They mark boundaries which I only rarely cross, so they seem to keep me safe. I also acknowledge that some of those vulnerabilities represent otherwise meaningless limitations I impose upon myself, like my steadfast refusal to drive on I-25. I can be certain that I will never die on I-25 if I steer clear of it. I can't imagine not feeling vulnerable around that road. The Muse knows that I'm afraid of many situations and that avoidance remains my go-to strategy for coping with these. I've survived so far, but not without a shrinking feeling that my world has been steadily shriveling around me.

I chalk my default strategy up to a studied humility.

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LagTime


" … just another unrealistic expectation encountering reality again."

Project people are forever trying to calculate how much time their project will take to complete. It's a non-trivial calculation utterly dependent upon unknowns, so assumptions rule the effort. In the best of all possible worlds, a task that should take no more than two days might easily consume a week or more, and not because those assigned to it slack off. I used to guide my workshop participants through an exercise intended to help them calculate more realistic flow times. How much time does an individual scheduled for forty hours of work in a week actually have at their disposal to apply to work during that week? It was always a shocker when the average answer came out to be around sixteen hours. The balance of the work week would be spent on absolutely necessary, non-value add activities which could not properly be catalogued as being 'on task.' The actual available time would prove to actually be available for assigned work, but little more. The number varied little between industries and over time. This might represent something of a universal principle in action.

A colleague explained to me what it's like to work in a startup. He said it was as if everything required the invention of a pencil.

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ConfirmationBias


"Just me and my many shadows wrestling toward another resolution."

I knew I wasn't an objective observer, though I could have hardly suspected the depth of my biases. As both the observer and the observed, I could hardly hold myself to any benign standard of objectivity, for I have a self-image to uphold. Like any complex system, self-preservation is job one for me, and so I'll likely discount any incoming information threatening my conception of myself. I'll most likely perceive each disconfirming bit of data as a Black Swan, present but meaningless, even if it shows up in a majority of my glimpses. I fancy that I know myself, too, though I sort of understand that the me I believe I know so well changes constantly and invisibly to anyone watching as closely as I watch myself. A long-span series of infrequent observations might more likely highlight changes obscured by continual vigilance. I most often see not who I am but instead project instead who I once believed myself to be.

I avoid mirrors. They lie unashamedly.

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GivingAGoodGoddamn


"Count your blessings, mind your 'q's, it might not much matter what else you do …"

Stumped over what to give this season? Give AGoodGoddamn. The cynically resigned will not give AGoodGoddamn, and will proclaim their resignation from the highest steeples, steeples which were originally erected by those who seemed to care at least AGoodGoddamn, maybe several of them. Fools for their faith, however foolish that might have seemed and still might seem today, they built their ridiculous steeples anyway, then commenced to ring big brass bells from the tops of them, attracting attention as well as lowly curses. How audacious! How goddamned foolhardy! How holy! The commandment insists that we not take the Lord's name in vain, but AGoodGoddamn does precisely the opposite. The stifled GoodGoddamns denigrate the holy spirit, exchanging it for an indifferent, cheap, highfalutin, nowhere knock-off. Just try to be here now and give at least one GoodGoddamn on your way through!

Imagine that everyone really is your sibling, that nobody qualifies as an even half-assed them. Give AGoodGoddamn.

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StollenSunday


" … a warm and festive season blooming here inside."

The westerlies wrestled with a cold front heading South, promising but not yet delivering some sifting snow. It sure felt cold enough, though, as the first concerted cold settled in around the place. The fireplace burned all day long. The ovens contributed their part, too, for this sunny freezing Sunday marked the start of the season. The prior weekend, The Muse peeled oranges, lemons, and limes, candying the result along with eerie Buddha Hand citron fingers chopped small. The countertops had been stacked with baking trays overflowing with waves of drying peel, disrupting our regular routine through the week. I finally found some space for them atop the larder fridge in the garage so I could concoct my suppers in some semblance of peace, just in time for The Muse to turn the kitchen into a Stollen factory.

She made fruitcakes first, a cool dozen little loaves reeking of brandy and rich spice.

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Literature


" … hardly the high-brow notable kind."

I feel reasonably confident that I am not a literary snob, though I do maintain certain rather uncertain standards. I have not read many of the classics, and those I have perused, I found dated and stiff. Not that I could't appreciate the skill it must have taken to create them, more that the skill had not seemed to have aged that well. Shakespeare could certainly jot down the decent sonnet, but his iams seem labored and lost on me, the rhythm often obscuring the purpose. I've never really cared for riddles and confounding word play. I appreciate flowery speech but tire of the unending garden. I despise writing that leaves me feeling ignorant and uninformed, which might leave me snob enough, unwilling to bend over to meet an uncompromising author halfway.

I grew up in a home with plenty of reading material.

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TheNinnyGene


Smirking in response.

Everyone carries 'triggers' capable of reducing them into a ninny at times. TheNinnyGene expresses at what eventually become predictable times. Though most manage to keep the presence of this response secret (often even to themselves), those who come to know a person come to clearly see through whatever denying smokescreen their loved one might deploy. I feel reasonably confident that even Chuck Yeager carries TheNinnyGene. Given the right (by which I mean the wrong) conditions, he'd crap the cockpit of a P-38. I'm no different. Set me in the prep area of a surgical center, and my heart rate will attempt to set a new world land speed record while my blood pressure convinces the SurgTech that I'm preparing to stroke out on her watch. I feel perfectly placid during these events, with no sensation of horror movie hysterics. It's just my NinnyGene expressing itself.

My GP seems interested in identifying the source of my situational ninnyness, an exercise which I comment seems way too Freudian for me.

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Immersion


"I sometimes wonder if they even know what they've done."

I yesterday caught myself immersed in a book. I'd started the book more out of obligation than attraction. I'd spotted it in the library and found a strange attraction to it, though it came as an English translation from its original French. Then I kept it unread for nearly three weeks before sensing an impending past due notice. Opening it then, I learned that the manuscript had been delivered to the publisher by a retired attorney who had twenty-some years earlier agreed to deliver it following the death of the author's mother. The author, himself, had thrown himself in front of a train shortly after delivering the manuscript to his lawyer. This was the author's second novel, the first having finalled for a Man Booker Prize. Upon receiving the package, a junior publishing house clerk deposited it into the dreck pile where it remained unacknowledged for several months until a more senior partner found it. A flurry of authentication activity commenced, finally resulting in publication. I didn't suspect then that this set-up was part of the fiction. The book was actually written by the well-respected Scottish novelist Graeme Macrae Burnnet.

An Accident on the A35 is set outside of Strasbourg, France, and follows a rather bumbling small city chief of police as he investigates a fatal automobile accident, but all this plot serves as a nothing more than medium for something quite otherworldly.

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WeeSmall


"I chose to engage in some WeeSmall choosing instead."

"from dusk till dawn,
As the clock ticks on,
Something happens to you."

from Wee Small Hours by Bob Hilliard 1955

My most productive hours come in a WeeSmall size. The hours after dawn opens up, eventually spread between horizons, but the predawn time compresses into concentrated capsules. Like dog years, WeeSmall hours contain more time, in spite of their misleadingly tiny appearance. Distractions avoid WeeSmall hours, needing more space to frantically wave around their arms. Bright shiny objects seem relegated to modest sizes situated in outer space, hardly capable of disturbing concentration. The WeeSmall hours bring contemplation, the human facility capable of sorting through life's many and varied contradictions. Without my WeeSmall contemplative time, I might simply take this world and all its charms at face value and never suspect the many and varied interpretations I might make. In this way, the WeeSmall hours fuel better-informed choosing. In the dark and the cold, I feel safe to try on a variety of alternatives. By the time the sun starts thinking about rising, I'm almost present to my day, having made some initiating decisions which will reverberate in action thereafter. I can set aside my trial balloons and set about moving somewhat more deliberately.

I will probably have figured out nothing, but I will have sorted through the nature of the confusion.

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ColoradoSprings


" … salvation always on the wing."

I dreaded the coming of Autumn and the demise of our languid summer. I imagined, as I always imagine each end of September, that the snows would shortly start flying and The Muse and I would be sequestered beneath a snowbank until Spring, but the seasons don't work like that here. Forgive me for forgetting, but in Colorado, Autumn and Winter features more Spring-like weather than bitter cold. Sure, the weather here can turn on much less than a dime. Temperatures comfortably drop forty of fifty degrees in an hour or two, but not every day, not even every week. The weather turns both downward and upward, some dreary days melting into warm sunshine and the sound of moisture moving into the earth. Warm enough to paint outside. Warm enough to forget even a jacket as I step outside. Some plants dry to desiccated stalks but others seem nearly impervious to frost and seem to revitalize each time the warm sun reappears, and it seems to reappear a lot here.

These Autumn and Winter Springs seem capricious, and nobody gets their hopes up for a solid week of reprieve, but a day or two, sprinkled here and there throughout the dismal seasons seem adequate to recoup flagging spirits.

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Fizzle


"Soaring lasts longer than any crash."

Some plans gang agley, they go wrong. It's not really the plan that goes wrong, though, but the expectation of satisfaction the plan set up. The plan was fine, but the expectation proved faulty. The expectation, too, was just fine until it wasn't, perhaps even motivating hopeful pursuit, which is the very best kind, so the expectation wasn't really wrong either, not as long as it remained an expectation. At some hand-off point, the perfectly fine expectation fizzled out, as all expectations must eventually do. Perhaps it was whatever took over the expectation space's fault. I believe that we humans might be hardwired to expect good things to happen. Consistently expecting the worst gets classified as a mental disorder while hopefulness is seen as the cure. In that moment when hopefulness turns into cold despair, anyone might reasonably begin misattributing the cause back to the plan or the expectation, both of which were fine until encountering some Fizzle.

These discouragements sometimes prove fatal, but not usually.

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Dreadline


"I wonder what will keep me awake then."

I have a deadline looming. How is it that once a deadline's set, it does tend to loom, to threateningly hover over? I once took to calling these time marks 'stay awake dates' to try to ward off the associated sense of impending doom. The purpose of a deadline should probably not be to suck all the motive force out of the effort to meet that date, but they do seem to do exactly that, so I tried to associate those dates with a more positive moniker. Still, the inherent inevitability seemed to cloud my mind no matter how I tried to counter its influence. This particular Stay Awake Date seems more like a drop dead date, anyway. I'm really not trying to stay awake, but more interested in letting the time fly by so this date will fall behind me. This one represents a surgical procedure scheduled for tomorrow morning. I've been watching the countdown clock trudge away all day. It trudges exceedingly slowly.

I'm unlikely to drop dead once this drop dead date appears.

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GrowingUp


"I am about as strategic as a strand of overcooked spaghetti …"

Sometimes I wonder if I'll ever grow up. I've been growing for a very long time without really feeling as if I'm anywhere close to up. I'm still a kid at heart and not yet really much of a part of the grown up world, which continues to mostly mystify me. I prefer the company of small children, those still mastering the language but not yet outgrowing absurdity. I like to puzzle through the world with those who presume that I might know better, then demonstrate that I probably don't, and that they probably do. I tend to appear a fool around them, which suits me fine. I think I might hold the responsibility to never overshadow kids, to let them run the world we share. I don't really have much faith in grown-ups.

I know, kids grow up fast, though I didn't.

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Dentity


"Holding that question seemed worthy of me, but finding the answer, deadly."

Who am I? ranks near the top of the list of Fundamentally Unanswerable Questions (FUQs for the acronymic among us). Since FUQs remain presumed unanswerable, they pose a particular challenge. FUQs never prove to be Fundamentally Unaskable Questions, though, and we tend to ask with the same spirit that governs the old Seek And Ye Shall Find conundrum. Seeking without finding remains a common experience regardless of what the homilarians (people who promote the indiscriminate application of homilies) might insist. It simply does not follow that an answer exists simply because I can ask the prompting question. Part of maturity might include the growing ability to distinguish between FUQs and the fundamentally answerable ones.

Declaring a question fundamentally unanswerable does not render it unconsiderable, though.

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A Brush With The Transcendent


"… after I'd lost track of myself."

I reluctantly engage, as if facing some impossibility. I know how to paint, but never seem to trust my instincts or understandings beforehand. I make a deliberate ritual out of gathering materials, the thin rubber gloves, the defiled paint can, the handy hand-held paint cup, my spattered havelock, my special spotted shoes and smock, my ragged jeans. I try to preplan the job, imagining that my perception could extend into the near future, though I know for certain that I will never know anything until I show up and lose myself, immersed in the job. Too much depends upon altogether too much for me to foresee very much of anything. I intend to do some painting.

Painting occurs on some different plane where present remains as permanence. Imagine if a breath became a sculpture, an instantaneous addition to the permanent collection.

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GoingBackToGoBackToGo


"Iterating 'more perfect' never produces perfection, thank heavens."

The General Electric Corporation's advertisements, back when it was the largest corporation in the world, used to tout that "Progress Is Our Most Important Product." What then? I assumed that by injecting progress at every step, the company plugged into a positively recursive progression, where progress built upon progress to create ever more sublime expressions of progress until reaching some sort of engineering nirvana. Then people started asking what they meant by progress. GE started focusing upon financing more than engineering, and as companies tend to do, they dabbled, then grew to dominate, a rather shady side of the street, credit default swaps and other "junk" instruments. How does one inject progressive quality into the junk financing market? GE managed it by swallowing many bad investments, essentially swallowing themselves like James Whitcomb Riley's infamous Squimum-Squeegy "what swallered his self." GE was recently delisted. Now it seems to be GoingBackToGoBackToGo on the great Monopoly® board of industry.

GE serves as just another more recent example of companies following Ozymandias' lead. The mighty fall. The great ultimately achieve greater humility.

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InSlight


" … a land filled with freaks and the home of true knaves?"

The story dries up sometimes. It dries up and blows away, carried by outrage turned inward. Beyond some point, I can no longer smugly refuse to take the endless insult personally. The daily news no longer seems new. It becomes a recursive same old thing, irrational inventions intended to keep everyone feeling off balance. The only defense becomes another offense. Symbolic fences become indefensible walls. Calls for civility sound like cat-calls, chiding, deriding. The whole world seems populated with grudgy eight year olds, perpetually offended, somehow short-changed. This world then seems fundamentally unfair, bounty-hunting the good guys, posting gloating photos of her latest kill. Everybody becomes somebody's shill and everybody knows it, bracing in the crash position for the following unavoidable collision. Pick a fight, lose, then pretend it didn't hurt. Stand tall on pseudo hind legs, proclaiming another victory. A victim's victory, righteousness reinforced by the persistent absence of any discernible success.

The moral of the story seems inside-out. Good guys never win. Charity becomes evidence of great personal weakness. Humility, a symbol of absent grit.

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GivingThanks


" … that trailer park experience never leaves her."

No Thanksgiving season passes without The Muse recalling the holidays she spent living in a trailer park outside Fayetteville, Arkansas. However fine her sensibilities today, she's known times when three for a buck box dinners satisfied her hunger, and times when three for a buck seemed too dear to always hope for. The beneficiary of charitable giving, she revels in her present of role as benefactor. So when the local realtor came by the place this week to drop off an empty grocery bag, The Muse's eyes lit up. The note promised that she'd be back after nine thirty the following Saturday, so the deadline was preset. Saturday morning, The Muse was up by five, asking when the supermarket opened. We were out of the house by six, a winter storm gratefully delayed for a promising few hours.

The supermarket aisles were littered with packing boxes as a cadre of clerks restocked shelves for the weekend before Thanksgiving rush.

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ForcingChoices


"More choices rarely produce better results …"

Sixty years ago, when this time of year arrived, my siblings and I would begin our annual attempt to hog the new seasonal Sears Wishbook catalogue, where we'd imagine alternative universes in preparation for Christmas. I'd eyeball almost everything, mentally trying on that sweater and playing electronic football, making lists, chucking them many more times than twice, overwhelmed by the sudden appearance of so many choices. Knowing that I'd ultimately pare down my list to a bare handful only made making my choices more exasperating. The greater the number of choices, the more difficult the choosing because any choice excluded dozens of alternatives. I welcomed the early days, just after the Wishbook arrived, but after five or six weeks of concerted study, I was ready to settle for anything, or even nothing, just to conclude the ordeal of choosing.

This season, no Wishbook arrived. The local Sears sports a huge Going Out Of Business sign.

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UnderFoot


"That's ninety percent of any boss's job, anyway."

I spent my day trying to stay out from underfoot. It's a skill I learned from my earliest days. In my time (spoke the geezer), children were either underfoot or not underfoot. Underfoot was a bad state, a situation that would inevitably result in some form of chastisement. A child then should have been seen but not heard or, better yet, not seen, either. I was raised in a world almost exclusively inhabited by adults and children hiding out, lest we be seen, or worse, heard. No Black Hawk Helicopter Parents then, we were born sort of independent, or independent enough to know that we could not rely upon our elders to stroke the odd ego or attend to emotional needs. These days, and, indeed, in my own children's childhood, the kids are buddies and their parents their co-conspirators. Then, we were flotsam in public, best left to our own designs. If we made trouble, we prayed that the news wouldn't make it back to the mothership. We were largely on our own, and grateful for the space.

I spent this day trying to stay out from underfoot because I had workers on the place.

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Blue-er


"I settle for accepting this tiny overwhelming one."

The sky 'turns' blue after the snowstorm passes. During the storm, the sky disappears, moving so close to the ground that it essentially leaves. Ground and what used to be sky turn into one indistinguishable entity. Up falls down and down slowly moves up as snow accumulates. Outside loses a dimension. Even sideways takes a hit as horizon shrinks to barely across the street. I stand imbedded in a snow globe where the dimensions of the globe, of the entire world, shrink to barely arm's length. Inside, the rooms seem smaller, too. The house suddenly more homey, I feel warmly contained. The world seems almost understandable then, complexity reduced to the near absolute simplicity of accumulation. I ask myself, "How deep is it now?" Depth easily and unambiguously determined, I hold no further questions. I shovel off the latest layer completely satisfied, knowing full well that I'll need to shovel off subsequent layers before the storm passes. I seem reduced to mere observer, appreciative of the narrowing obligations. I'm out of toothpaste and try to drive out, but turn around in a preponderance of caution, relieved to return unharmed. I find my travel stash and conclude that I moved on false fears, and that maybe I could accept that my responsibilities lie right here and nowhere else for now.

Acceptance seems a terrible burden. Even grace, that most under-appreciated gift, wants nothing more complicated than acknowledgement.

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CityLegs


" … feeling about half the man I fondly remembered that I used to be."

In cities, people live on sidewalks. In suburbs, cars. When not on sidewalks, city people might hop a bus or the subway, sometimes even grab an Uber between neighborhoods, exiting onto yet another sidewalk again. In suburbs, it's cars all the way down. When the suburban visits the city, they drive their car, which they are shackled to for the duration of the trip. Should the suburban find themselves fortunate enough to find a place to park their car, they also find good reason to grumble about the price for parking, then still find themselves shackled to wherever they parked the damned thing, carefully monitoring how far they've wandered lest they find themselves cut off from their hasty escape. City people develop CityLegs, ones accustomed to a twelve block stroll. Suburbanites might notice blisters forming on their feet after four or five blocks. And the blocks seem so big, littered with distractions, shops for every faction living there; with curious customs. The proprietor might want to chat. What should a puzzled suburbanite think of that?

The urban/rural divide isn't a simple six of one versus a half dozen of another. It's long division, requiring some heavy lifting to carry remainders across columns separated by wholly different dimensions.

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Armistice


"Let us bless each other, then, for nobody else could ever be qualified to."

I wasn't there, a hundred years ago today. Neither was my maternal grandfather, though he was in uniform sitting on a troopship in New York Harbor, halfway there from home. Amy's grand uncle wasn't there, either, for he had become a casualty of that last big push along the Marne, mired in mud and insanity like this world had never before imagined, and can hardly remember after. Twenty million, probably many more, had been disqualified from attending, too, having become casualties before hostilities could cease. A few millions more, who might have attended but didn't, and a few who did show up, would fall prey to the Spanish Flu within the following year or so. It was a time when on any day, someone might simply go away as if they'd never even been here. They sang that they were over there though none knew where over there was or would be.

Last year, The Muse and I were honored to visit the cemetery where her great uncle lies, a stunningly beautiful park.

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DazeOff


"Forced into mindfulness, we muddle around hoping to stumble back into our familiar habituals again."

Years ago, The Insurance Company where I worked distributed Covey's Seven Habits to all management, strongly encouraging each recipient to carefully read the book, for it described how the company would henceforth operate. This title remains the only book I've ever felt moved to burn after reading. It helped accelerate my timetable for leaving the company and not only because it described a manner of living utterly alien and repulsive to me. One may not prescribe any habit without bumping one's head on a low-hanging Be Spontaneous! Paradox. Habits remain the antithesis of mindfulness, more indicative of obsession or compulsion than choice. The author described what seemed to me like a two dimensional solution for an n-dimensional difficulty, a superficial strategy for inducing some sort of pseudo-significant effect, affects too-desperately seeking causes. I felt crazy reading it, so I figured the very best service I could provide to the world would be to eliminate any possibility that my copy might infect anyone else, so I built a fine fire and threw that sucker in there.

Books don't burn all that easily. It seems as though they resist actually burning.

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VoeTing

"What we choose to do with the result determines its meaning as well as its significance."

In his Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, whenever author Douglas Adams' protagonist Arthur Dent found himself in serious peril, an impossibility generator would shift the plot into something completely different, if not always any less threatening. I think of voting as just such an invocation. Some mistake it as a referendum on knowledge or intelligence, and understandably so, but improbability generators hardly ever produce logical or rational (knowledgeable) results, but usually unlikely ones. Before the election, pollsters and pundits carefully take the electorate's pulse, just as if an electorate possessed such a thing, then project results with appropriate-seeming ranges of probability. Sometimes these predictions turn out to be true, though nobody ever investigates the root cause of their seeming accuracy when they are right. Folks seem altogether too busy failing to explain instead why they were wrong when they turn out to be wrong, the correct answer finally becoming beside anyone's point. This practice only seems smart, and might actually be smart, but how smart is smart in practice?

My point about voting might be that it is almost but not completely unlike
(to borrow another Adams phrase) an exam. It was never intended to survey for correct responses, though each voter might well hold convictions about right and wrong for themselves.

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Wealth


"I am a serial offender against the Law of Attraction."

As I neared graduation from my undergraduate studies, envoys from the Business School started asking me to coffee. Some of these had served as my instructors through my three years of university study. They described the turbo boost that a Master's would add to my upcoming career, and the B-school would finance it all if I agreed to teach classes while I studied. The two year commitment would guarantee me sixty or more hour weeks. By then, I was holding down a full time job and a little more than a full load of classes, burning myself out trying to rid myself of the damnable anvil of schoolwork. I had a family by then, a newborn son and a wife with clear and undeflectable intentions of of bearing a second child shortly thereafter. We'd just been displaced from our rental by a landlord who chose to raise the rent monthly to keep up with the fifteen plus percent annual inflation rate. We'd borrowed from family to buy our first house, a place that we didn't know would quickly lose twenty percent of its value, in the hopes of at least stabilizing housing costs. My job paid for my books and tuition as an employee benefit, but I had to work full time to collect the benefit. My life already seemed plenty turbo-charged at that moment.

I declined the opportunity to pursue my MBA, reasoning that my time spent with my newborns would not be deferrable until any later date. I simply didn't want an MBA enough to sacrifice what I was already barely holding onto.

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DaylightEnslavementTime


"I'll probably recover."

Once there was a time before time, before we managed to finely measure it. Then, all time was approximate, never exact, or never more exact than a cast shadow. When the sun stood directly overhead, one could say, "It's noon," without receiving a bunch of guff in return. A mile down the road, noon arrived at a different time than it did here; a constant difference, but nonetheless a difference. When mankind still moved at the speed of a walking horse, these differences didn't matter to anyone. The telegraph and steam-powered transportation changed everything. Once train passengers needed to make connections with steam ships, it became a lot more difficult to determine the time. The mighty Union Pacific operated on Omaha time, two hours ahead of Oakland time. A steamship might maintain its schedule according to its headquarter's time, meaning that Omaha time and Cherbourg time collided there. Modernists finally managed to negotiate an international treaty which calibrated standard times relative to Greenwich Mean Time, an act that infuriated farmers and fundamentalists worldwide.

During WWI, various national governments took exception to their earlier agreements, instituting a more thoroughly modern Daylight Savings Time, reportedly to provide more daylight to aid in the manufacture of war materiel.

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LarderFridge


"Certain ethics govern the acquisition of a LarderFridge."

Three and a half years have passed since we last owned a LarderFridge, a ramshackle second refrigerator intended to hold overflows. leftovers, and beer. It's been a genuine ordeal. In Winter, of course, we enjoyed the walk-out refrigeration services the weather delivers directly to our deck. Last week, the pot of leftover pozole and a nearly full gallon of sweet cider sat knee deep in fresh snow, though by Friday that snow had melted and I had to direct the refrigerator's contents to scrunch up so those babies would fit inside. Late in the week, The Ever-Vigilant Muse noticed another refrigerator give-away on the local listserv and she immediately contacted the owner. We'd been trolling for a free fridge for three and a half years, narrowly missing more than a few. This time, the owner replied that she'd already found a taker, though she'd leave us in the queue. Friday, she contacted us again, saying that the first taker had declined the offer. We readily and unconditionally accepted, sight unseen. We were that desperate for an "extra" fridge.

Certain ethics govern the acquisition of a LarderFridge. One may not, for instance, just go buy one, for that would demonstrate both a lack of faith in providence and a demeaning over-eagerness.

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MisterCommunication


"Maybe we could muster a week-long workshop on interpersonal miscommunication."

I think of myself as a solid journeyman communicator, certainly not a master. I've studiously avoided delving too awfully deeply into any of the many linguistic theories and practices. Neuro-Linguistic Programming gives me the creeps. Noam Chomsky reliably puts me to sleep. Formal grammar simply seems beyond me. I navigate language employing a mostly-reliable felt sense. I generally manage to make myself understood. I'm quick with words, skilled as producing the encapsulating phrase, and, though a lousy speller, a half-way decent writer. I still surprise myself, though, when rediscovering the first principle of communication, that it's often the illusion that it's occurred. I'm perfectly capable of flowing along convinced that I'm on the same page before shockingly catching on that I'm not even in the same library as my counterpart. I'm growing toward accepting these disconnects as imperfectly normal, though they still shock me every time.

I learned last night that The Muse will be heading out to attend a week-long workshop in New Orleans on Monday morning.

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FallowTime


"Nothing like that looms until planning season comes."

Long planned, I quickly executed the work in four days spread over three weeks, owing to the weather and my personal preference for procrastination. Too much sun or two much wind and I figured I was better off waiting for some better moment. The final push, two frenzied days, occurred as they always seem to, in a blur. Once I allowed myself permission to finish, goosed by the clear threat of an impending snow squall, I left my senses behind, immersing myself into the job at hand. Those final few sandings, several squirts of supplemental caulking, some final perfunctory smoothings of unredeemably rough surfaces, and I started opening paint cans. Oil based primer for the bare spots, a thick acrylic to smooth over gouges and caulkings. The acrylic dried to the mottled patina of Elmer's® glue. This first frenzy left me with nothing to do until the next day.

The next day, I debated whether the final day had actually, finally, arrived. By mid-morning, having finished my writing for the day and feeling terribly ill-at-ease, I finally surrendered to the inevitable.

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Complicity


"Life amounts to endless lessons in humility."

In his book Seeing Systems, Author Barry Oshrey describes what he calls The Blindnesses. I am unavoidably blind because I'm here, not there, like you are inescapably blind because you are there and not here. We're also mostly blind to the fact that we are blind. In my Seven Ethical Responsibilities, I name Conscious Blindness as an ethical matter. I believe that I hold the ethical responsibility to not space out the fact that I cannot see everything around me, and to remember that nobody else can see everything surrounding them, either. This reminder encourages a certain generosity of spirit. I cannot credibly hold anyone responsible to be fully clued in, including myself, not to make whiny excuses, but to better understand and appreciate.

All that said, I'm coming to a renewed recognition that to live is to be complicit.

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DiffsGiftering


"The difference finally starts feeling like a gift rather than a curse …"

Those of us born with few natural gifts might understand better than those born with an abundance of them. We learned to hide them lest they expose us as different, for as we all learned in Junior High, different is bad, sameness, much better. Some of us struggled to fit in without noticing that we worked much harder to cloak our differences than we would have ever had to work to embrace them. School, which might be best understood as a systematic process for instilling self-consciousness, reinforced the notion that different was at best a difficulty. So much easier and more efficient if everyone could just color within prescribed lines. At the end of the year, if I'd successfully respected the edges, my teachers declared that I'd passed, which meant that they hadn't found me out; a victory … of sorts.

Junior High provided an exquisite introduction into the fine art of passing, an invaluable ability as one sought to enter ever higher levels of self-consciousness: university and the working world beyond.

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SchKnowDay


" …to those affecting the flat American dialect, … I'm forever Smaltz and The Muse, Swab …"

The rumor starts a few days before. By the time it becomes a genuine forecast signified by the red triangle with the exclamation point inside, it's already arrived. Our behavior changes long before the first snow falls, though. I'm up and out, driving in pre-dawn darkness to the closest supermarket to restock the larder lest we get snowed in and starve. Neither The Muse nor I have been in any real danger of starvation since Reagan was President, but one never knows. I suspect that vestigial memories linger from that terrible Autumn of 1804 when our ancestors barely survived to carry forward our DNA. We know how to prepare for snow.

I try to talk The Muse out of going into the lab today, thinking myself just acting prudently.

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Jigs


'They've figured out our shortcut and know how handy we aren't.'

The jig serves as the craftsperson's secret weapon. The sculptor, the painter, the quilter, the woodworker each employ special-purpose tool-guiding tools which remain almost unknown to the casual hobbyist. The master's freehand work might not produce anything any finer than any rank amateur could muster, but on the master's way to mastering their craft, they first mastered crafting the lowly jig, which could more consistently guide their hands guiding their tools. The absence of jigs in my toolbox clearly demonstrates that I am not a master of very many crafts. My father's old carpenter's square helps me mark true perpendiculars. A scrap of tape on a drill bit helps me avoid drilling holes too deeply. The pilot holes I drill before setting long screws not only prevent splitting the stock but guides the screws better than could my naked eye and unassisted hand.

Writers employ a variety of jigs, too, most of these almost invisible in the finished work.

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PrepWork


"Are we there yet? Probably not."

Outside of industrial mass production, most work seems properly classified under the label PrepWork. Cooking supper mostly amounts to waiting for the oven to finish. Prepping whatever's cooking might have needed hours of concerted effort to process without producing anything more than supper's components, which the oven will finish without any active cook's intervention. Planting a garden's about 80% securing and schlepping supplies. Even mopping the kitchen floor involves much more moving chairs and Rose The Skittish Spinster Cat's feeding station than actual mopping. Because of this feature, I understand that most chores have been mislabeled, and this leads folks to misinterpret what tasks entail. Painting's almost entirely PrepWork. Even laundry requires more sorting than washing, yet nobody declares that they're off to sort laundry, but to wash it. The machine does the washing. No machine knows how to properly sort laundry.

PrepWork seems the source of much of my frustration as I rediscover that the effort I anticipated hardly resembles the work I find I must do before I can do the work I expected to be doing.

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Debasedball


" … no further injections needed or wanted until Spring."

Post-season Major League Baseball offers a final opportunity to shed the seasonal obsession before the playing ends. Without it, a fan might face a cold turkey withdrawal from a dependency not yet overcome. After, a fog of distain remains, a gratitude for evenings returned, a deep appreciation for the absence of a long-lingering obligation. Fans seem superstitious folk, ones who firmly believe that the simple act of listening in to the proceedings assists the beloved home team. They can't hardly stand to miss a single outing, they hold their deluded responsibility so dear. By the end of the regular season, a definite parting begins. The home team hasn't made the playoffs again, in spite of the fan's unflagging long-distance support, and no team making the playoffs seems nearly as dear. The fan makes it clear to anyone within hearing distance that all joy has already left Mudville, though they'll consent to dabbling in a likely mediocre witnessing of the remainders, but only for old time tradition's sake.

The playoffs bring fresh underdogs needing someone to root for them, and the fan eventually complies, choosing a least likely but somehow most lovable from each league's roster.

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SlowNewsDay


"Only the paint ever knows how to dry."

I hold the strong opinion that watching paint dry has been unfairly denigrated, for few experiences match the subtle satisfaction, after a few hours spent applying paint, of simply sitting back and watching it dry. During those times, the Earth seems solid, the sky blue, and the universe in good working order. The fresh paint scents the scene with cleanliness, even godliness. All's right with the world. A freshly mowed lawn comes in at a close second place, the activity having raised a slight glow of sweat which evaporates off with a soul-cleansing psychic sigh. The satisfying payoff might be the explicit permission to revel in doing nothing at all, watching paint dry being a dodge and not really a producing activity at all. Give the same guy placidly watching his freshly applied paint dry the opportunity to sit like some Zen monk in any other context and he'd likely fidget nervously in place, self-consciousness subsuming the opportunity for enlightenment. Focusing on that paint, though, the same man experiences true transcendence.

I open the paper, hoping for a SlowNewsDay.

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LongDay


" … sleep decided to stay out all night carousing with unreputable friends."

The Hunter's Moon, the final full moon before we set about setting back time this season, introduces a sort of circadian arrhythmia. It's a relatively bright moon, given that night has already fallen by the time it shows up. The Autumn air seems thinner and shadows streak the neighborhood until just before dawn. The nightlight seems particularly bright and sleep grows disinterested in her usual engagement. I lie awake lying to myself, pretending to feel sleepy, closing my eyes without amping down my suddenly hyperactive brain even a tiny bit. I'm raring to go with nowhere to go, playing solitaire charades until I finally just abandon the ruse. Not yet two am, but I'm up and wandering the halls already.

I search for Rose The Skittish Spinster Cat, concerned that she might have slipped into some inescapable corner of the place. She hadn't shown up for last call.

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HitHard


" I suppose that it's nobody's fault."

On August 24, 2018, Geoffrey Weglarz (alias Geoffrey Corbis) drove into New York City from his home in Connecticut to sell a camera tripod at a photography shop. They gave him a check for $275. He next went to his bank to cash that check. The bank had a policy of calling the source to confirm that the check was good, but the shop had closed for the day so the bank refused to cash the check. Geoffrey drove to the Lower East Side, parked his car, and drank a vial of poison he'd acquired on the dark web. He texted his sister in Florida saying that the stuff tasted every bit as terrible as he'd feared, then he died sitting in the driver's seat of his car. His family contacted the NYPD several times over the following week seeking their help in locating Geoffrey. The found him a week later, still sitting behind the wheel of his car.

Geoffrey started his adult life as a dinner theater actor, a passion he continued to pursue until shortly before he took his own life.

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GooDooding


" …I'm likely to just give her what I think she wants to receive in return,
and that without even asking her what answer she wants."

A quarter of a century or so ago, my dear friend Wayne Strider caught me inflicting help. He patiently explained to me that most help works better if one remembers to first ask the target if they want help. Simply seeming to need help doesn't mean that someone wants it. He'd caught me presuming. I think of myself as a helpful do-gooder type, delighted to assist, sometimes altogether too delighted to just jump in and assist without first asking for permission. Maybe that kind of help might be better classified as self-help, the sort of help one provides to feed their own need to feel helpful. It's one of the more popular ways to drive others crazy, a benevolent double-bind, like insisting that another put on their sweater because I'M cold.

Let's call this curious assistance GooDooding.

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SafeSpaces


"Places without SafeSpaces seem miserable places, indeed."

I've recently seen a lot of commentary complaining about SafeSpaces. The complainants seem to subscribe to the What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger school of social advancement, as if an absence of safety toughens people, encourages bravery, and yields straighter backbones. I'm of the opposite ilk. In my experience, the absence of safety brings out some of the worst in people. It might shut them down or set them off, neither state terribly conducive to full engagement. If I've got one eye employed to keep a watch out for someone sneaking up to get me from behind, I can't hardly keep both eyes peering ahead. For me, SafeSpaces seem fundamental to any endeavor.

Not that any of us should avoid at least preemptory preparations for the odd worst case scenario, but worst case scenarios so rarely occur that it seems pointless to over-prepare for them.

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AmNot


"I'd find the controversy laughable if it weren't so damned serious."

I am not a Capitalist, a Christian, or a Conservative. I accept that these nots alone render me a shadow in this culture. Add to these deficits the fact that I'm also not a chauvinist of any color and therefore decidedly not a patriot, and I essentially become an anathema of an American, though the original charter guarantees me the full freedom to embrace whatever beliefs I feel moved to hold. The freedom of speech does not guarantee anyone the right to scream Fire! in any crowded theater, and being no dummy, I remain mostly mute when it comes to my true beliefs. Culture, whatever that might be, always seems to retain a dominant perspective along with the will to squelch and smother those failing to subscribe to that outlook.

During the American Revolution, no more than a third of the population supported the uprising. A third firmly supported the king, while another third refused to take a side, viewing the resulting war as an unfortunate choice.

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Loaves&Flinches


"One startled flinch in preparation could have ruined the whole enterprise."

Back in Jesus' time, when the odd multitude showed up for supper, loaves and fishes were the popular response. Bordering The Sea of Galilee, fishes were common as pebbles then, and once you get started making pita loaves, you can't hardly stop, reliably producing dozens more than intended every time, so loaves were always in surplus, too. Another positive aspect of this menu was the Wow! factor, as one could plate it almost as if by magic. Everyone at table couldn't help but feel as though they'd been especially blessed and had witnessed a miracle of sorts. In those days before the invention of Miracle Whip®, a host, even the host of hosts, could not rely upon store bought to beatify any guest.

These days, mac and cheese fills the multitude menu slot. Macaroni drenched in a cheese sauce comes about as close to fully fungible as one can get without a handy Galilee and a neighborhood of over-achieving bakers.

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Errants


" … a whole five days will stretch to the horizon to promise fresh errants needing my attention."

The Muse and I live in a neighborhood from which we cannot walk to anywhere. Though we're plopped in the middle of a wildlife refuge, the only trails seem more suited to game and dog walkers than any through hikers. Even the village center lies a mile and a half away along a narrow-shouldered two-lane that feels equally dangerous to traverse by either foot or bike. Consequently, errands require driving, belying the rugged outdoors cache this conclave carries. The Muse was raised ten miles from anywhere on a South Dakota farmstead, so the commuting seems more wired into her system than into my own town-bred DNA. I'd much rather walk there and back again, but groceries wait ten miles away, uphill both ways, and I haven't figured out how to carry a couple of shopping bags there and back again. I'm married to the car.

I try to plan ahead, to limit the number of outings necessary to satisfy the list. I plot paths between the various purveyors as carefully as any knight Errant might, employing shortcuts and secret passages to reduce overall transit time.

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Illiberation


My hero: Henry L. Gantt

" … the utter subjugation of every individual contributor to the will of the machine."

Henry was a very smart bear working for a very powerful man. The powerful man was an authoritarian, convinced of his own genius, who strong-armed his way into giant corporations, gaining permission to implement tactics the owners lacked the hutzpah to introduce themselves. He called himself a scientist, though he was more Puritan than professor. He touted The One Best Way, and was so convinced of the righteousness of his cause that he infected others with his zealotry. He believed in First Class Men, those who exceeded his expectations. All others, he believed, lacked sufficient motivation to succeed and were therefore unworthy of receiving anything.

Henry worked as a sort of chief of staff to his patron.

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Recovery


"A glass of beer's hardly worth the risk of a long night spent freezing in the backseat of some stranger's car or a crudely sliced artery leaking life."

Autumn along Colorado's Front Range feels volatile, like a slow-motion drunken bar fight. Nobody ever explains what sets off this country grown complacent from months of placidly sweet weather punctuated with no more than a few much-needed showers and the occasional thrilling hail storm, but by October, the situation turns deadly serious. The sharp edge of a Canadian cold front slips into the fray and everything instantaneously changes. A quiet threat's exchanged which almost nobody takes very seriously, the sun still shining warmly and a breeze hardly ruffles barely turning cottonwoods and aspens. When the slash comes, it takes me by surprise. I'd forgotten how savage that first swipe could be and my native generosity takes the first cut. I flee inside and start plotting my own demise, certain that I'll be sequestered there for the better part of the next half year.

The following day, the damnation seems permanent.

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Figure/Ground


"Which it really was never really mattered."

I believe that I live in a holographic universe where what I see ain't exactly what's there. This belief could certainly drive me crazy if I took it too seriously; for instance, if I believed that something of genuine substance really should be there. I understand that my first pratfall should have persuaded me to take these holograms seriously, but sensation also seems rather holographic, transitory by nature, there then gone. This whole place seems like a figure/ground projection where whatever's attracting my attention amounts to the figure and everything else, backdrop ground, hardly perceived, so hardly there. Both the figure and the ground also seem continually present, only distinguished by where I'm focusing. How real is real? Not terribly, I say.

Physics seems to stack up on my side of this controversy, explaining as it does how everything's composed of stuff we cannot perceive in its native atomic state.

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ShowFall


"I spent the longest time timeless there."

The snow day came on a Sunday, seventeen degrees and snowing like a Son of a Bitch outside. The weather reporter insisted that it had never been this cold here this early in the season, the previous record low only in the mid-thirties. We were headed for single digits overnight. The paper never came, though the roads remained bare, still holding heat leftover from yesterday's nearly seventy degree sunshine. The neighbor kids were out in it, screaming down the steep sidehill, scraping it bare before the snow could gain any real depth. Rose The Skittish Spinster Cat huddled so close to the gas fireplace that she seemed to steam as she slept. I grabbed the latest John Sanford Freaking Flowers novel, a serendipitous find at the library the morning before, and retreated to the master bedroom to read and revel in the sublimely isolating weather. Neither The Muse nor I were gonna spoil that fifteen dollar car wash sloshing around through snow.

By the next morning, the roads would likely be bare and dry. At this altitude, nearly eight thousand feet, once the snow stops and the temperature drops, moisture evaporates off the asphalt so quickly the roads swirl with steam, ice never getting a chance to set.

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TheLastDayOfSpring


"I smile myself to sleep …"

The Muse and I celebrate, truly celebrate, two days each year: The First Day Of Summer and The Last Day Of Spring. The First Day of Summer arrives sometime in late May or early June on the first weekend following what seems likely to be the very last Winter frost, the day when we pull out all the pots and plant what will become our Summer garden on the deck, out of reach of the scavenging deer. The Last Day Of Spring comes the weekend before the first heavy snowfall of Winter, usually in early October, when we tear down our summer refuge. These days carry deep significance for us. The First Day Of Summer represents our active resistance to the degrading effects of seven or eight months of sequestration. The Last Day Of Spring represents our active acceptance of entering hibernation again. The First Day Of Summer lets come. The Last Day Of Spring lets go.

We exhibit great energy on these days, facing a body of physical labor greater than any we will enjoy on any other day of the year. I'll schlepp and scrub while The Muse plants or repots.

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Copyediting


" … sit me down to copyedit and I seize up."

I drag both feet when it comes to copyediting what I've written. I write in three month batches, finishing each piece to a readable state, then collate the heap into a contiguous form before carefully re-reading to make final improvements. The whole parses differently than individual pieces and copyediting hardly encourages itself the way writing does. It's picky work, the sort requiring focused attention. I can't get too caught up in the content or I lose the necessary broader focus, but I dare not get so elevated within any broader focus that I cannot catch the tiniest necessary correction. I find this work to be endlessly boring, nap-inducing, and infinitely unsatisfying. I engage in it only in very small
sessions, twenty minutes or a half hour, before I find I simply must focus upon something, anything else. I exit feeling emptied.

Every time I exit feeling emptied, I feel less motivated to re-enter and finish this scut work.

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ZeroSum


" … a winner of sorts sitting there all alone."

The conservative worldview seems to embrace the notion that zero-sum rules govern this world. It perceives this world as distinctly divided into winners and losers. Those who win, win. Those who do not win, lose. Progressives seem to perceive the world differently, as if this were an abundant place where winners need not produce losers; where win/win outcomes remain possible if not always likely, where ingenuity and persistence have pretty reliably produced some semblance of better for all: abundance. The world itself seems indifferent to which perspective anyone takes. It seems to produce whatever any perspective insists upon. If you believe in a zero-sum world, the world will not disappoint your expectation. If you believe in an abundant one, it might well satisfy you, too. The outcome seems sealed by the tenacity with which one holds their particular belief. The world might be a self-fulfilling sort of place, a medium capable of delivering upon anyone's convictions about it.

Many of us aren't terribly experienced with abundance. We honed our economic chops playing Monopoly®, a zero-sum board game promising to reveal the secrets of the rich and famous.

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TheAverageOfOne


" … every single human being is also above average … "

In Garrison Keillor's mythical Midwestern town of Lake Woebegone, " … all the women are strong, the men are good looking, and all the children are above average." Of course, in any discrete population, not everyone can possibly end up above the average for anything. Call this The Law of Averages. In any population, whatever the purpose for sampling, some will fall below and others above the designated midpoint. A few might classify as spot-on average, but no group can possibly be comprised of entirely above averages. This small fact has yet to dissuade organizations from carefully recruiting only The Best and the Brightest, to attempt to violate The Law of Averages and produce a high performing Lake Woebegone sort of operation. This strategy hasn't worked yet. Yet.

I can, however, inhabit a real-life Lake Woebegone.

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Reasoning


" … survival of The People seems to find in favor of those few."

Like many in my generation, I first encountered logic in an algebra class. I didn't understand that I was encountering logic at the time, so I struggled to remember all the strange new rules. My teachers treated these curiosities as simple extensions of the trivial principles governing arithmetic, but they seemed much more complicated, so complicated that I never managed to fully sort out or assimilate them. I experienced endless Easter Eggs, imbedded practices not obvious upon initial scrutiny and apparently only discoverable when the instructor judged my answer wrong. The gists never popped for me, so I learned to fake it, to work backwards from the answers in the back of the book or demonstrate my faith in an invisible higher power when taking an exam. I faked well enough to eventually earn a university degree, though the logical reasoning underpinning at least the mathematical part of that certification still escapes me.

My second encounter with logic came when I sat down to take the SAT exam.

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Silenced


Tomato plant succumbing to snowfall

"I have nothing left to say about anything."

The weather reporter insisted that it wouldn't snow until tomorrow, most probably over tomorrow night. I figured I'd have the whole day to watch the summer flowers bask in their last day gracing the back of the place. Yesterday, the fog hung low like on some backlot from an old Sherlock Holmes movie, humidity hovering in the nineties all day. I brought inside the huge three and a half year old geranium, and the half dozen basil plants so The Muse could make one last big batch of fresh pesto, along with the hibiscus, even though I know the hibiscus won't like it one bit in the house. It was still blooming, still late Spring in its head, and I felt it only decent to at least try to extend its life, even though I well understood the futility involved. The months of tender care, the casual evening fare grilled out there almost every night, are gone now. Silenced by the first Fall snow.

Autumn arrives abruptly here along the Front Range.

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WorkSing


"If you ever meet me on a golf course, shoot me. You'll be doing us both a great favor."

I have a difficult time envisioning my great grandparents hanging out. I'm uncertain if hanging out had even been invented then. They busted their humps for their entire ninety year-and-then-some lifespans. Even in retirement, they hardly slowed, having mouths to feed and a small home to maintain. They just kept at it until they were no more. I suppose that the notion of leisure as a just reward for labor originated with people who had insufficient work to keep them entertained, potentates and such. Later, it was sold as a promise, perhaps to mollify those who labored at the more exhausting jobs. Keep your nose clean and you could be playing golf on Saturday. In the mean time, tote that damned bale, slave.

I think the smooth transfer of the desire for leisure failed for me. I understand that it has now become an imbedded part of the amended American Dream, but it seems a more nightmarish threat to me.

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Crapmanship


"I'd better find my satisfaction in accepting that I fooled at least those eyes."

Replacing three sun-rotted window frames, I couldn't avoid encountering evidence of Crapmanship in their original fabrication. This sort of discovery doesn't qualify as in any way unusual, for stuff has always featured mixes of Crapmanship and craftsmanship. Exteriors tend to look as though they were painstakingly put together, but beneath any surface, which might have been no more than expertly painted, some real crap work likely lurks. I'm still learning not to become all indignant about this apparently eternal feature of this world. I understand that internal workings might not really require fine-looking construction to serve an intended purpose. We all seem to cut corners that don't seem to matter much. We hack, therefore we are.

I've of course added my own unique brand of shoddy into my fixes. I'm not the finish carpenter my grandfather was, so I improvise.

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Tolerence


"I wonder where our underlying Polity lies."

The Puritan Roger Williams founded his Rhode Island colony on the principle of tolerance. The Massachusetts Bay Colony had earlier drummed Williams out of their society, which they'd founded upon the principle of extreme intolerance, as though he had failed to demonstrate true Puritan values. He had. Williams welcomed all comers, Muslims, Jews, even agnostics, though he never actively supported any of their ideals. He explained that tolerance does not extend to supporting anyone's beliefs, but only as far as supporting the right to hold any belief. He thought Muslims and Jews damned, but he also considered their damnation to be their own damned business. Williams was fortunate that his principle of tolerance failed to attract many intolerant Puritans to Rhode Island, for even a minority, dedicated to promoting intolerance, can utterly destroy any tolerant society.

Karl Popper reflecting upon Germany's initial tolerance of the Nazi movement, coined the term The Paradox of Tolerance.

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Manliness


"Manliness might qualify as the most misunderstood identity."


I always wondered how one becomes One Of The Guys or A Good Old Boy. Maybe my invitation got lost in the mail or perhaps I (gulp!) never qualified. I know that I never submitted an application, but I sort of expected someone to approach me with an invitation. After all, I am a guy, a good guy; aging, perhaps even old, though admittedly no longer a boy. Can I confess that I never fully identified with the gender stereotypes supposedly appropriate for a person of my gender and my age? I look ridiculous in a hard hat and feel simply silly behind the wheel of any truck. I fear all power tools. I don't hunt. I do drink beer, though. Doesn't that count?

I proved to be an unreliable breadwinner, but tried not to take that very personally. I've lived exclusively with strong-willed women, each of whom proved to be more than a counterbalance for any deficiency I contributed to the unions.

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Humility


Walt Whitman washing the feet of former slave; illustration by Lewis C. Daniel
"I learned almost by accident that my words inspired someone yesterday.
How humbling was that?"


What big, hairy, audacious things have I done in my life? I sincerely hope my answer will continue to be, "Nothing." Not that I've achieved nothing, just nothing that might be construed as big, hairy, or audacious. I've done my work, but hardly ever with the intention of cornering any market, making any kind of a killing, or achieving fame or fortune. I thought once that I might get discovered and gain wide popularity, just like every baby boomer did, for we were the first generation raised in the proximity of celebrity. Prior generations read about the rich and famous or heard them speak on the radio, but our generation invited them into our living rooms where they dazzled us with their mastery, brightening our otherwise drab existences. That these demonstrations were heavily produced and edited to ensure that only the best of the best ever showed, was not obvious to us casual observers. We thought pure talent poured out the ends of these performers' fingers. We marveled at their skill.

We learned that popularity might just be the purpose of life, that we should rightly strive for broad audiences.

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Trolling


"Maybe I'll eventually learn to give up these ghosts more quickly."

I do not get where they're coming from. They arrive like non-sequiturs into the conversation, off-topic, sometimes even off-color. I at first think I've tumbled into a simple misunderstanding. I might take almost forever to finally figure out that this was never a misunderstanding. It was sabotage, clear and simple. Well, not clear to me at first, but ultimately simple. They seem to take some strange kind of power from diverting the flow. Their superpower seems to be the curious ability to undermine any flow. I finally exhaust my ability to make anything like a Most Generous Interpretation because I finally figure out that generosity isn't part of any troll's vocabulary. They specialize in leaping into a Least Generous Interpretation. They parse an analogy literally, then head off to rebut a comment never actually made. They seem to love being maddening.

My earliest attempt at social media, a wiki called PureSchmaltz, was ultimately brought low by anonymous posters who sprinkled obscene photographs throughout the content.

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CarSpooling


William G.R. Hind, oil painting, “Breaking a Road in Manitoba,”

" … there's really no place I need to be (or really want to be) except right here at home."

The Muse and I operate a one horse town, by which I mean we own a single car between us. Each of our neighbors own at least two, and one owns four that I know of, all more or less trucks. Each morning, we decide who will get the car that day. Usually, I insist that The Muse take it, that I don't have anyplace pressing to go. Some days I slip out for a few minutes to fetch a gallon of milk or some hardware for a project before she leaves, but most days, I'm left without transportation, save my ancient one speed bike and my two left feet. We live in a neighborhood which calls itself a village, and it might well qualify as a village because it sits in a rather remote location without supplemental public transportation. Without a car, I might just as well be in an isolated cabin, which suits me fine.

I might be the primary reason we have one car rather than two. I hold strong opinions about how many cars our family should own.

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Trans-It-Shuns


"I seem to know nothing of what lurks beyond."

On the morning of the last day of baseball season, I'm already grieving. Our team didn't play that well this year, hampered by early season injuries and tenaciously poor management, the opening day promise extended less than a month before fairly certain disaster loomed. It took me almost a month to figure out the new roster, one missing a couple of last year's favorites, and the last six weeks have seen so many upstarts elevated from the Minors that I've been unable to tell who's who, who's home team and who's visitor. By the last game of the regular season, I struggle to care about who wins any contest. Winning and losing doesn't matter very much. How each player engages with the game matters more.

The Muse and I will attend the last game of the season, a rare match between our home teams, the team that stole our hearts during early exile days and the one that has failed to attract our interest since moving here. We're visitors in both venues now,

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UnderSitting


"This is that unlikely place, I suspect."

I say that I understand, but I probably don't. Maybe I could understand, I might even be on my way toward understanding, but I've yet to sit down and deeply consider the situation. I seem to have something more like a strolling-by-ing. I haven't yet slowed down quite enough to stand with this perspective long enough to look it squarely in the eye. Even then, I'm still upright, still in mobile mode, not quite at my ease. I'm balancing on my heels, eyeing the surroundings, half distracted while failing to fully absorb. Understanding only gets me so far. A deeper comprehension requires me to sit a spell: Undersitting.

Undersitting seems a choice rarely proffered. I do drive-by comprehension, slowing just long enough to grasp some gist, but hardly long enough to recognize any whole concept or how it might fit together with other ideas.

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Be-Leaves


"I believe in the inherent goodness of people without holding anybody but myself accountable for living up to that belief."

Humans seem the most remarkable beings. We believe, belief being a kind of conviction requiring no supporting factual evidence. The highest, most treasured beliefs, insist upon, even brag about, being utterly unsupported, and necessarily so. Two generations ago, Stafford Beer named Firm Belief as one of the four antagonisms encumbering a firm's success; as with the firm, so also with the individual therein (and thereout.) We easily victimize ourselves with our beliefs, fueling certainty with the equivalent of gold-plated air. I'm not knocking this curious ability, but rather noting just how curious it seems. My more reverent friends seem especially blessed with their firm beliefs, confidently striding through a world that seems mostly overwhelming to the rest of us. The more self-aware of these readily admit that their doxology contains hefty bits of pure fantasy, easily disproven by even the most ineptly skeptical observer, and they also recognize the evident power their belief brings them.

The rest of us seem to struggle along beneath leaky balloons imperfectly elevating us. We seem to lose more altitude than we ever gain and scrape ground with some regularity.

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UnCertainTea


"If I want everyone to win, I might consider how I chose who loses."

I want everyone to win. Still, I seek resolution. I despise the unresolved. Encountering an 80/20, I'll give the eighty the benefit of little doubt and just disregard the dangling twenty as irrelevant. Encountering a 50/50, I'll switch to gut feel, discounting the whole concept of more quantitative evaluation. I will rarely leave any issue unresolved in my head. I develop a sort of spontaneous amnesia, quickly forgetting any controversy I could not very quickly resolve. I say all this while fully convinced that certainty seems to be the root cause of nearly every ill. Were I able to hold the exquisite tension between the thises and the thats, between the eithers and the ors, I might well leave myself better off in nearly every instance, but I seem unable to forestall the short-term simpler pseudo-resolutions attracting me. I create losers in this way while I say I want everyone to win.

I see them in fields of different-seeming us-es, missing the connecting structures. I sense almost exclusively superficially, quickly sorting to identify my tribe.

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Passsst


"They mostly only ever show through sometimes."

Some of the past never fully passes. A bit of it turns into legend, some of it into infamy, and the tiniest bit becomes deep, dark secrets over time. Even the secret seems more present than it should. No matter how many decades accrete on top of the original experience, it stays kind of close to the surface. A small scratch might reincarnate it at any time no matter how far out of mind it slips in the intervening years. A scent, a sound, a whisper from a dark alleyway as I pass, and that particular past, a Passsst, spontaneously reincarnates. Whether sweet or savory, bitter or sour, I re-experience the original sensations regardless of what I was just in the middle of doing.

I might then feel transported into another place and time.

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Ancienting


" … old treasure like me would never come up for auction, anyway."

The Antique Road Show appraisers speak of patina, and seem to worship it. The hapless owner's grandmother refinished the piece eighty years ago and stripped off at least ninety percent of the chair's value. In its present refurbished state, it might garner no more than a few hundred bucks. Had grandma been less of a go-getter, a few tens of thousands, maybe a hundred grand on a good day. What was once a treasure will now remain kitsch, authenticity forever compromised.

More than half of what some derisively refer to as The Aging Process involves retaining the deepening patina despite pressures to refurbish.

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Progressing


" … progress can be beyond even the the most watchful beholder's eye."

Ten years ago on this date, The Muse and I declared personal and professional bankruptcy. Lehman Brothers beat us to it by two weeks, and we'd lost a whole lot less they they did when we finally admitted to ourselves and to the world that we'd lost everything. We had not speculated in junk derivative bonds. The economy dried up and our business evaporated. Two weeks before we filed, my father died after a long summer of declining health. Those final six weeks or so, I'd manned the overnight watch. Both The Muse and I were ragged by then, frantic, then accepting, then finally simply dazed. We thought we'd probably lose the house, though bankruptcy allowed us to retain ownership in that one asset if we could wrangle some way to retain it; but with no work, no income, no savings, and little hope, other than a hopeful candidate running to replace the disastrous president, we finally admitted that we'd gone bust.

This experience represented real progress, as unlikely as it seemed at the time.

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Destructions

structions
"So it goes."

My friend Wayner calls them "destructions." Those step-by-step illustrations printed on the back of the box, that box you inadvertently pulverized when opening, before you realized there were destructions printed on the back. He calls them "destructions" because he insists that even if you hadn't pulverized the box when opening it, the illustration on the back probably wouldn't have helped you assemble the fine product within. The destructions almost always appear to have been produced by someone for whom your native language isn't native. Also by someone other than anyone who might have actually assembled the fine product inside. They hire copywriters, out-sourcing this sort of work. It's cheaper that way.

I almost always end up assembling the fine product exactly one more time than I disassemble it.

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Trolls

tomten
"Those who seem to have no interest in hearing generously, probably forfeit their right to speak."

The Muse can tell you that I rarely read the reactions to my postings on our neighborhood listserv. Something about the context seems to encourage people to drop their pants and lead with their least attractive profile when responding. Many tend toward a scolding stance. Some delve into the demeaning. Of course I feel goaded and sorely tempted to respond, if only to set the record straight. I'm learning that it's probably not my responsibility to set straight any record deliberately twisted through less than generous interpretation. Sure it feels as though I've just been ripped a new one and of course I really want to defend my integrity, but jumping into the pig wallow, even if explicitly invited, won't improve any argument, though the pigs seem certain to enjoy the spectacle of any high-minded anyone self-debasing themselves into to the troll's native environment. The Muse reads them. I don't usually.

My next door neighbor sent a text message regretting the latest savaging of which I'd been blissfully unaware. I appreciated him with a grateful reply. A few more personal messages arrived, each appreciative and generous.

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PeakingParanoia

peekingparanoia
"I'm wary, on the look-out, peeking over one shoulder every step of every way."

I have heard about an alien concept I'll call ConfidentStrides. This term describes a totally mythical state where a person moves forward without hesitation, said to accompany personal conviction. The literature speaks of revelatory insights inducing such a sense of certainty that ConfidentStrides result. The hero or heroine marches into their future, utterly transformed, unstoppable. I refer to this state as alien and mythical because, while I've heard that such a state exists, I've never personally experienced it. Further, recognizing that I have not yet experienced it has sometimes encouraged me not to act, to sit tacitly by rather than to move forward and engage. I've yet to achieve anything by means of ConfidentStrides, which is not to say that I've never accomplished anything. I'm apparently more of a PeakingParanoia sort of person, I guess.

When challenged to do some right thing, I notice my paranoia peaking. I would, in that moment, much prefer to take a break, take a nap, perhaps cower beneath my bed.

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Distressed

upside-down-flag2
"We cannot possess what we cannot share."

I humbly post this brief explanation. You might have noticed that I've hung an American flag upside down from my deck. No, I didn't accidentally string it backwards. This was a willing, willful act, one intended to express the extreme distress my house, my home, and my country currently experience. When I read in the paper that border agents play a cruel bait and switch with the children of those seeking asylum in my country by explaining that they're just taking the child for a bath, only later taunting the helpless parent by saying that they might never see their child again. This report distresses me.

Illegally crossing the border for the purposes of seeking asylum never was a felony. It would until recently garner an infraction about as damning as a speeding ticket, a misdemeanor easily dispatched with a couple of hundred dollars, a few days in jail, and/or a ride back from whence you came.

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DiningDown

Mead-St-Station-1000x500
" …home food seems better suited to our temperaments."

The place looked okay when I spotted it from across the street. Early Friday evening, seventy eight sweet degrees, and The Muse and I are out to do something with the tail end of our week. She suggested Highlands, a neighborhood of over-priced crumbling shotgun houses with a definite yuppie vibe: dog spas, yoga studios, cafes with sidewalk seating. I agreed. We found a place to park just a block down from the main commercial strip and strolled up to see what had changed since last time. We'd both sworn to not choose that pseudo Italian place we'd visited a few times, each dinner intended to convince us not to come back. Denver doesn't seem like much of a restaurant town, so choices limit our choices.

Not that we know the place. We're true exurbans now. We complain about the lack of urban services in our exurban neighborhood, but we seem as lost as if we were from rural Kansas whenever we near the South Platte, the seasonal stream separating Downtown (both upper and lower, LoDo) from its residential counterweight to the West.

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Lottery

lottery2
"We're lucky and cursed not by the lottery gods, but by ourselves."

I don't play the state lottery, mostly because I don't know how to play it. When I stop into our local inconvenience store, I usually find somebody buying a ticket, often several. I don't know what they do with them or how winners get selected. I do know that the odds of winning seem infinitesimal, and that I'm too embarrassed to ask how one 'plays' the game. I figure that if I was meant to know how to do that, I would have already learned how. I figure that I automatically win another sort of lottery by not knowing how to play the lottery, my lottery prevents me from ever losing a dime playing that other lottery. My ignorance serves as an insurance policy against the almost certain prospect of losing whatever I spend playing that other lottery.

I suppose that I play in many different lotteries. So far, I'm winning the health lottery, though I expect to eventually lose it. That's the thing about lotteries, play one long enough and you're guaranteed to lose.

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Relevance

relevance
"I gain fresh appreciation that anything perceived to be beyond this moment
might be aching after irrelevance."

Aging might be a process by which we learn how to cope with encroaching irrelevance. What I twenty years ago thought might liberate some oppressed class, helped only a few find their innate freedom, and even then, I quake at the thought of ascribing anything I did to their discoveries. I at most served as a medium for any message I believed I carried, my audacity perhaps communicating most clearly whatever I was trying to say. I would stand up and speak. I often felt eloquent then, sometimes insightful. Those insights seem irrelevant now. Civilization seems to progress by going backwards to relearn what prior scholars and philosophers firmly believed they'd cleanly resolved. Fresh generations enter skeptical of their elders, and honor most of them by assuming they were at least misguided, but probably wrong.

Yet we, as a society, persist in sharing our insights, of audaciously standing up even when we should know that we'll later be found misguided, rightly or wrongly, it will not matter.

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TMI

flickr-amattox_mattox-neurons-20141223
"Maybe one or two of those delights might stick to you in turn."

Writers feed the monster, though we are no less susceptible to it than the least of our readers. Though not all readers consider themselves to be writers, all writers are also readers, taking in many multiples of what they ever produce. Any writer's output seems paltry when compared with the fire hose volume continually spewed in their direction. No self-respecting writer could ever let all that goody gush by without trying to take a few swallows. For a writer, the antidote for Too Much Information seems to be creating Even More Information, but, you know, a somewhat better class of it.

We serve foie gras by the spare ounce because a ton of it too closely resembles what the sous chef calls it: goose shit. Served sparingly, it's transcendently wonderful stuff. In excess, it turns to crap.

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SwingArm

swingarm
"I washed my hands with Lava® soap after I finished the job, just like a real handyman would."

My readers know me to be nobody's handyman. Sure, I sometimes dress the part, hoping that my threadbare work clothes might somehow set a context within which I might manage to select the proper screwdriver for once, but handiwork requires some content behind the context. I'm learning, but I seem to have started way behind on the grand learning curve of handyman life, so I doubt that I'll ever catch up. My workbench tends toward cluttered. The sloping garage floor leaves me struggling to prevent my handyman chair from rolling down and into my work table. I seem to be at least one tool short of completing any project, almost invariably finishing by ineptly applying some lame hack. Usually.

The Muse's swing-arm floor lamp went bzzzzzt a few weeks ago. I'm no electrician, but even I could tell that the light bulb socket looked kind of fried. I wasn't that surprised.

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Dirt

dirt
"Dirt lies in that thin layer between bedrock and sky where, on my knees, all things seem possible."

I figure anything really worth doing deserves my attentive procrastination. I'd dedicated nearly two full weeks to circling this effort, maybe closing in on starting, maybe deferring imagined agony. I kneel before the space as if performing some ritual, and perhaps I am performing a ritual, one I've repeated many times before, each instance different enough to carry great uncertainty. The sod needs removing. I don't know for sure what lies beneath it, though I imagine bedrock. Once I scratch this surface, I've committed myself to follow through whatever I might uncover there.

I fill a five gallon paint bucket with rocks for every yard I cultivate. The dirt itself seems fine, surprisingly so, featuring earthworms and decent soil. I'm surprised, maybe delighted. My muscles remember the routine.

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CleanSweep

sweep
"We can breathe again. Not necessarily breathe any more easily, but breathe."

I've never thought of myself as a slob. Few of us believe that we're the mess makers we turn out to be for everyone else. I maintain my tidinesses quite compulsively, if quietly. My "orderly" piles of books ready to my hand. My shoes lined up just so serve me just as I intended. The Muse maintains her order, too, mysterious (to me) central organizing principles and all. Tidy for me might well constitute a mess for anyone else. I stumble over The Muse's carefully placed shoes, too. The tangles between us remain largely inadvertent, preconscious resonance of a sense of order we each absorbed long before we suspected we were absorbing anything.

Cleaning, too, echoes traditions probably predating great grand parents. The Muse's sensitivity to dust and my tenacious inability to see dust might have each originated in some pioneer days survival strategy.

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ConverSayShuns

cat-and-mouse
"Rose probably knows more about me
than any other living being
and she still consents to sit on my lap
for almost ten minutes at a time …"

I most days spend more time talking to Rose The Skittish Spinster Cat than to any other living being, other than myself. Many have written on the so-called art of human-to-human conversation, but I've found little advice on chatting with my most common companions. I've never really subscribed to the notion that one should converse in strategic ways, preparing as if for a debate competition and progressing as if engaged in chess. I'm more of the dialogue sort, engaging more to see what might emerge than to demonstrate how clever or well-prepared I could be. To my mind, no one ever wins a conversation, so I never worry about whether I've succeeded in scoring my points. I believe that real conversation has no point, so I might usefully engage with Rose The Skittish or even with myself without feeling as if I'm necessarily lonely or degrading my sociability by doing so.

"Hey, Weasel Head," I often begin when conversing with Rose, for she seems to undoubtedly embody the moniker. She sort of barks in response.

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Noteworthy

Coors2
"Feels like home to me."

The town smells of roasted barley malt this morning. Home to Coors brewery for nearly a century and a half, Golden, CO often carries the signature aroma of brewing, proudly off-gassed directly into the neighborhood. Tourists travel from all over to visit the plant, a dystopian hulk of glowering towers and steaming chimneys straddling Clear Creek and stretching downstream for miles of barren warehouses and railroad-sided grain silos. I've never taken the tour myself, having a local address and all. I frequent the less known but perhaps more noteworthy Second Largest Brewery in Golden, housed in a neighborhood alley pole building and ancient milk house behind a small brick Victorian home just three blocks off the main drag. There, they pass pints and pitchers through a window in the milk house and patrons imbibe in a year-around, dog-friendly open air beer garden while seated at communal picnic tables. I'm likely to meet somebody I never met before while drinking there. The beer's also clearly distinguishable from Clear Creek's water, too, unlike the stuff Coors produces.

I'm not very attracted to the biggest and self-proclaimed best of anything, but much more to the second best, or third, or fourth, or even lower on the pecking order. The best seems a notorious self-designation, unseemly in its self regard.

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Grumbling

thunder
"Around four this afternoon, the sky should commence to grumbling again."

The summer-ish sky starts darkening by four. I notice one towering thunderhead already east of me, moving like a single advance galleon leading a following armada. Then I notice a much larger fleet wallowing in to the north. Once I slip down into the valley, I see a dark smoke-screen smear obscuring the western horizon. More sails appear. It might already be raining up at the house. The Muse dawdles leaving the lab again. My mind generates alternative scenarios for skirting mindless freeway traffic, which instantly turns stupid with the arrival of any rain. The invaders depend upon our over-confidence and I refuse to fall prey and so I freely catastrophize while waiting on The Muse.

We make home before the storm makes landfall, though distant rumbling comes from the west, up and over the mountain separating us from the true west.

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Audience

Photos_space_high_res_file_5
"If I am powerful, I am powerful not because stars speak to me,
but because I emphatically speak to stars."

Eventually, someone will ask the question wondering after your audience. Who do you think can hear you from where you stand? Whom do you intend to hear you? To whom do you imagine yourself speaking when you open your big yap? These are terrific questions and not simply because they border on the fundamentally unanswerable, the only questions really worthy of human consideration. For me, I never find a snappy answer to any of them, perhaps because of a little understood yet fundamental law of human communication. The most powerful messages come from those one never suspects capable of delivering powerful messages. We could call this The Bushwhack Principle. We easily filter out familiar sources, somehow second-guessing what they're gonna say and hearing what we anticipated rather than what was passed. How insightful could those messages likely be?

The Earth sits, from our perspective, in the middle of an apparently infinite number of light points surrounding us. Some rather close by, but most, millions of miles away. Let's say that those stars and pulsars and such represent our audience.

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TheGreatAmericanSongbook

TheGAP
"That's where our innate greatness always resided."

When my contemporaries were busy imprinting on GlamRock and headbanger Southern blues, I was distracted listening to old Frank Sinatra tapes, imprinting on the music made for a generation or two before mine; The Great American Songbook. I studied the life of Jimmy Van Heusen, the songwriter that The Chairman of the Board wanted to be when he grew up, memorized Johnny Mercer lyrics, collected Cole Porter records, and pined after the long lost nineteen thirties, a time a couple of decades before I was even born. I instantly recognize Dinah Washington's voice, pitch perfect and reputed to never, ever having required more than a single take to make a perfect rendition. I listen to Hot Jazz Saturday Night on Washington DC's venerable public radio station WAMU almost every Saturday evening and tune in to John Pizzarelli and Jessica Molaskey's Radio Deluxe every week.

When some popular recording artist of the seventies, eighties, nineties and so on passes on, I invariably never heard a thing they recorded.

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Gardening

handplow
"I refuse to leave remaining roots to serve as witnesses to any inept beheading of weed tops."

I consider myself a student of gardening. Not a grad student, either. I'm still struggling to learn my way around soil, water, plants, and light. True, I have recovered several gardens in my time, each different, results personally paved with many, many grievous errors along the way. My greatest influence might have been an early and repeated exposure to The Victory Garden, a PBS series filmed on a former heavily compacted clay parking lot turned into an immaculate acre of garden, complete with greenhouse and a host with seventy years of experience. It all looked so easy and fulfilling, with no episodes focusing upon endless weeding and broken turning forks. Heck, that garden hardly attracted any weeds at all.

I never tried to transform a heavily compacted clay parking lot into an immaculate acre, but I have amended soil with peat, perlite, sweat, and love.

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MannersOfThinking

MannersOfThinking
" …his students can stumble upon a MannerOfThinking which might enable them to save themselves,
if only they'll stick with the pursuit."

To my mind, the greatest sin lies in telling people what they should do. Especially if I'm convinced that I really do know better. First of all, adults, even children, seem nearly immune to any sort of good advice and potentially hostile toward any intended to be good for them. We seem to want to discover and know for ourselves and when we don't, we really probably should. Much of what matters can't be transmitted as advice, no matter how good it might otherwise be. Still, many of us were early on convinced that we might usefully tap another's knowledge and somehow make it our own, either as passive witnesses like in school or as active inquisitors like in a court of law. How we come to know baffles most all of us sometimes.

Much of what we seem to know hardly qualifies as knowledge, anyway.

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EarlyDark

flowermoon
"I have some places to go where I seem to need to carry the places I've been."

My internal alarm clock rouses me before the mechanical ones set for four am. I called The Muse out to the driveway last night to witness the moonrise, a fine, fat Flower Moon, the last full moon of Spring. By three thirty, the neighborhood lies bathed in deep velvet green, an almost glaringly subtle brightness subsuming what might otherwise have been merely dark of night. Night's darkness has already begun to recede, replaced with EarlyDark, a softer and gentler form of night. Morning hasn't quite yet shown her cards. The birds won't start twittering for another hour or so. Stillness reigns. Whatever outrage might rampage through the upcoming day still slumbers, catching up on her beauty sleep before inevitably turning ugly again after breakfast. The world seems gleefully solemn, satisfied with herself, and should be.

We leave the windows open all night, fumigating the whole house with flower freshness.

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StormyWeather

stormyweather
" …the day hardly warrants remembering.
I hate it when that happens."

I knew perfectly well why there was no sun up in the sky. I'd been tracking lightening strikes for the prior couple of hours on the WeatherBug app. The line of storms had been moving steadily north and east, heading right for us. I mowed the lawn early. By the time I'd finished the chore, the temperature had dropped ten degrees and a gusty late March morning had emerged from the nearly-summer one. I'd hardly broken a sweat shoving that ancient push mower around the yard. I took this as a sign that I had been growing stronger for all my physical exertion this season, but I suspected the cooling wind. I'd opted to delay watering since the sky seemed as though it was aching to save me the trouble of hauling hose and placing sprinklers. It does little good to water when it's windy here, anyway.

The storm took her own sweet time arriving.

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AuntDavid

eyepatch
" …I insisted that I was henceforth Aunt David to him …"

Andrew, who must be eight now, always wants to take the steepest trail. Christopher, a couple of years older, insists upon zooming ahead of everyone else, blazing the trail, leaving the rest of us in his dust. Lilly stays close, intermittently screaming at Chris to slow down. I cede the lead, though I'm the only one who knows the way to the top of the peak. Everyone becomes just who they are when hiking.

I'd suggested a hike to the top of the mountain with the three middle kids, nephews and a niece, to fill that awkward hour between their arrival and supper time.

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EgyptianWalkingOnion

Egyptian Walking Onion sets -  summer
" … still actively aspiring, still learning, preserving the potential for if not better, at least different, later on."

The Muse and I cover the nearly twenty miles down to the Union Station Farmers' Market most summer-ish Saturday mornings, timing our arrival with the opening; easier parking, fewer people, more opportunities to chat with the farmers. Each week, something "new" appears on offer, or something new to me. This week's newby turned out to be Egyptian Walking Onions. I'd never seen them before, so I asked and got a long, nearly scholarly dissertation sprinkled with philosophy. These onions, like all onions, produce 'sets' atop their stalks, Eventually, these sets outweigh the stalks, causing them to fold over, placing the sets in proximity to the ground. There, the sets take root to grow a next generation. Over time, this repeated folding over to grow a next generation can result in the onions "walking" across a field, hence the name.

These onions aren't much to talk about.

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Hallmark®Holidays

Hallmark
"Today, Wikipedia informs me, is World Thyroid Day, …"

My friend Franklin recently recounted his family's Mother's Day fiasco. They'd intended to do brunch at a fine Italian restaurant, but arrived to learn that they'd already sold out of everything Franklin's lovely wife Monica wanted, so they went strolling around the neighborhood, figuring a second best would quickly appear. Every place was booked solid with reservations. They finally settled for a seventies-era steak house where they served Corn Chex® as salad croutons. Monica teaches people how to cook like their grandmothers cooked and reviles "cereal" like Corn Chex® as the embodiment of everything evil with the industrial food system. Happy Mother's Day anyway!

Franklin reported that HallMark®Holidays seem to be the most troublesome ones.

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MayAM

MayAM
"I shy away from my shovel, knowing I will barely scratch the surface of this place."

By the last week in May, the sun finally gets around to rising at a decent hour, even encumbered by daylight saving time. By five, it's hardly dark anymore. By six, the sun's well up. The mornings will lengthen for the next month or so before starting to recede back into themselves again. This final month of Spring brings seven hour mornings and eight hour afternoons. Evening arrives just before bedtime. Morning's the choice time through this month. Afternoons can slump into thundershowers, naps, and tedium, but mornings vibrate with promise and possibility.

Aspen and cottonwood finally figure out how to fluff up their leaf cover again, hardly luffing in the languid breeze.

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Reticence

reticence
"Anyone not reticent about starting a new adventure
will end up with a lot more adventure than they bargained for."

I become reticent when facing a new challenge. I understand that this culture better appreciates those who at least appear decisive, but I have never been one of those hard charging full-speed-ahead kinds of people. Even hastening slowly seems to me to exceed a reasonable speed limit at the beginning. I become reflective, sensing an impending disruption more than any possible improvement. I'm not so much interested in or obsessed with whatever end state my actions might induce, but with the beginning state they will insist upon. Who must I become to begin? What must I leave behind to start?

I call this time The Essential Milling Around Period. No project schedule ever represents this useful activity because it seems useless, trying the patience of the more decisive, apparently producing nothing of real value; no measurable deliverable, no fluff of wind in anyone's hair to represent progress, which as General Electric used to proudly proclaim, "is our most important product."

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HistoryLessen

JuneMorning
June Morning, Thomas Hart Benton

"It's a HistoryLessen to recognize how little anyone eventually knows."

When I peer into the portraits of my great great grandparents, I find the most superficial representation of these two people frozen in a forgotten moment in time. When were the photographs taken? I'm uncertain. Possibly eighteen ninety, give or take a decade. I know some of their backstory. My grandfather Elza's parents grew up on adjacent spreads in the dryland wheat country of Eastern Oregon's Gilliam County. He, on the top of Hale Ridge, some of the last land grant ground left by the 1880s. She, at the bottom of that ridge beside a year round stream. My great grandfather Nathaniel's chore as the oldest boy left after diptheria took his two older brothers involved herding his family's livestock to the stream at the bottom of that dry ridge to water them and to fetch water for household use, since their property had no water, no well, given that several thousand feet of basalt sat between it and the water table. My to-be great great grandmother Clara's family lived near the watering hole.

That story represents a kind of history which projects whatever image I might choose to infuse it with.

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PlantingSeason

PloughingItUnder
" … we've made another successful passage through the barren months."

Somewhere South of Mother's Day, PlantingSeason arrives. Sure, I'd been poking around the yard since March, but the containers which comprise most of our garden (thanks to the deer and elk, who seem to eat anything) have remained in garage storage until we could become reasonably certain the snow's finished with us for the season. The chokecherry tree's in glorious bloom, scenting the front yard with an aroma far sweeter than its fruit will ever become, or so I suppose since we've yet to see fruit on those trees. A killing frost or thunderous hail storm has managed to strike each year just as the trees reach full bloom, withering or bludgeoning the blossoms before fruit could set. This year might be different.

The bulk of our garden lives in containers on the back deck

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InstantFamily

instantfamily
"a stop just about halfway between there and somewhere else"

Families don't happen in an instant. They are the oldest and most permanent part of our lives. They predate any particular member and so far, for The Muse and I, have always succeeded in outliving any individual member. The Muse and I have never grown accustomed to living separate from family, though it seems as if the last twenty years have been for us an extended exercise in living separate from family. We hold family in our hearts much more often than we ever hold them physically near. When we come into now rare proximity with our family, our hearts sing.

The Muse's brother Carl, his wife Louise, and five of their eight kids stopped for lunch yesterday on their way to Arizona to visit her ailing parents. They'd left the evening before in their shiny new Suburban Subdivision

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Neighbors

yappy-dog
"I guess the subtlety undermined the message."


I try to comport myself as a good neighbor. Honestly I do, but I can become yippie sometimes if provoked. It takes quite a lot to provoke me. Yesterday, after about eight hours either on a ladder or crouched low on my knees painting, I'd just settled into a camp chair on my freshly painted deck to reflect on a job well done when a yippie dog somewhere down the lane commenced to yipping. It was fairly emphatic, whatever the provocation. I figured it might quiet down after a few minutes, but I was mistaken. I leaned back to meditate for a few minutes, figuring I could probably repel the aural assault by focusing my mind. Let's just say that my mind has nothing on any duck's back. Later, I was moved to write a short vituperation and post it on our neighborhood list serve. I know, unrequested advice. Now, of course, I'm crouching, fairly terrified to see what feedback I've received.

The Muse serves as translator when one of these things happens, and she read back a few of the many responses.

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Asympbotic

asymptotic
"I don't know what could possibly replace a sincere lack of foresight. "
Beware the wily asymptote,
he only knows how to run.
He quickly secures essential funding,
then never gets a hundred percent done.


Unlike the wily asymptote, I manage to get things done. Unlike him, my completions tend to happen quickly. My beginnings seem to take forever, though. I operate asympbotically, which is pretty much the opposite of the way our wily asymptote runs. He takes forever to never get completely done while I seem to take forever just getting started. Once started, I quickly complete the task, like a slacker rabbit racing a diligent but slightly misguided tortoise. Many physical operations follow the wily asymptote's path, so many that we generally forgive the asymptote's inevitable shortfall, ascribing it to nature, God's will, or plenty good enough for whatever kind of work we're engaged in. Who are we to insist upon an unnatural outcome?

For about 90% of the duration of any project, I'm convinced that it will never get completed.

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Handyman Dave

Handyman
"I become a disciplined robot for the duration."

I doubt that any military campaign ever received more detailed planning. Logistics have been swirling around unresolved in my brain for days. This morning, the wet weather finally broke, the humidity dropped twenty percentage points, and the forecast predicts no chance of rain for the next two days. I can put on the two top coats of paint on the deck railing today and even slop over into tomorrow if I must. I linger in bed, running through more obscure details, the order of application seems to trouble me most. What sequence will minimize wait time between coats? Should I mount the ladder or squat on the deck first? I suppose I should apply that annealing primer to the top rail first. It's likely to take longest to dry.

I wear a uniform every bit as steeped in tradition as any general's.

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Gluten

gluten
"The sermon, repeated each visit, is delivered olfactorily, in glory and excelsis, a cloud of nearly overwhelming sweetness, brimming with righteousness and salvation."

I heard this week that the Potomac (Maryland) Nationals, a minor league franchise of the National League's Washington Nationals, hosts periodic peanut-free baseball nights, so those allergic to peanuts but addicted to live baseball can exercise their addiction while respecting their allergy. Allergies can sometimes seem like a laughing matter until you discover that you've contracted one. I, over the last few years, seem to have become allergic to Rose The Skittish Spinster Cat. I consider my newly-acquired affliction ironic. My daughter has a gluten allergy severe enough to remind her with headaches whenever she decides to go ahead and eat the wheat bread before her. She tries to stay with the spelt stuff, which can be decent when properly prepared.

I am an unapologetic member of the local Gluten Appreciation Society. We meet each Saturday morning in a nondescript small industrial park in Golden, Colorado, the home of the snarkily-named Grateful Bread Company, a wholesale purveyor of high-end breads that opens for retail sales only on Saturday mornings.

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Civility

civility1
"Even Slugbug can be enjoyably played without resorting to slugging anybody."

Yes, The Muse and I continue to enthusiastically play Slugbug every time we're traveling together in the car, but we maintain a certain civility when engaging. We do not, for instance, actually slug each other, like a six year old might. Yes, we do observe the catechism, "Slugbug, no slug back," but only to preserve the essential form of play. Some days, The Muse quite joyfully skunks me, spotting a hot half dozen before I spy my first. Other days, it's me holding her underwater, reveling in my easy accumulation. Honest, there's no underlying malice. It's just a game for us.

I hold open doors for whomever follows me inside. If an adjacent driver signals to change lanes, I make it my business to open enough space for their shift. I expect similar civility from those around me, but I won't hold my breath until I receive it.

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OldFashioned

oldfashioned
"All things considered, I'd rather ride the bus."

I'm old-fashioned in the way that thirties black and white films are old fashioned, unselfconsciously. I do not paint my deck while wearing a suit, tie, and broad-brimmed fedora, though I do have a deck, something almost nobody had in the thirties. I'm also familiar with more modern scientific concepts. I no longer smoke. I never could dance, but I never couldn't enviously eye Fred Astaire's smooth moves. I suspect any store larger than a mom and pop shop. I despise freeways. I don't believe in microwaves. I prefer black and white photography, including films. Current movies and music baffle me. I still listen to old radio serials on Sunday nights and hot thirties jazz on Saturday nights, finding them preferable and far superior to anything of more recent vintage, with the occasional exception of baseball.

I read a lot, something of a lost art after alternative medias elbowed their way into the arena. I'd really rather stay in an old hotel, with the bathroom down the hall, than in another anonymous Marriott.

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Suddenlies

suddenly
"I grieved the end of summer last year but hardly prepared for its eventual return …"

This world trades in Suddenlies. For the longest time, stuff stays the same, as if stuck. Then suddenly, everything changes. Spring this year seemed to take her own sweet time to come, carrying Winter's frozen water for weeks and weeks before finally melting into herself. Likewise, Spring has suddenly become Summer six full weeks before Summer was scheduled to arrive. The neighbor kids run barefoot down the same street snow covered just a week ago. The yard, dormant then, turned bright green overnight. The season hasn't changed yet, but some Suddenlies sure showed up.

Boredom might be a natural manifestation of a deep disbelief in Suddenlies.

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Chislic

chislic
"Life goes on a little richer. Bring a Pepcid®"

The Muse explains as I wonder what the heck chislic is. The menu describes what sounds like chicken fingers, breaded, deep fat fried, except with "finger steak", whatever that is. She says that it's a South Dakota thing, common bar food, a dish she's known about all of her life. I'd never heard of it. In deference to me, she orders some so I can taste without committing to a full order. I nibble a piece and gratefully leave the rest for her. Some will remain after we've both finished our meal.

The Muse pulls up the Wikipedia page describing the many variations on the dish.

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Plotting

30_plotting
" … we're leaving with the destination unknown, but only because it's properly unknowable now."

I'm up early this morning, plotting the course for the start of the return trip. I learned on the way up that The Muse had planned for a two day run back home, which took me by surprise. I'd thought we'd tuck down our heads and drive the seven hundred miles in a single day, but she insists upon toodling back like we toodled up, and I'm more than agreeable. I texted the cat sitter to please put out the garbage on Tuesday morning and set about considering how we might spent that extra day. Distances seem so vast here that we tend to stay within the same narrow escape and reentry paths, struggling to justify the additional hours any alternate might demand, but with a whole extra day to play with, plenty of choices emerge. Too many choices emerge.

If the purpose of plotting is to pre-determine how we'll go, I'm not really plotting at all.

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Birdlife

Birdlife
"Forces marshaling before the great reconquering and resettling begins."

The ruckus starts early, before the sun crests the low eastern hills, and continues well into the morning. A slow decrescendo continues until later afternoon, when the ruckus starts again. Mourning doves count continuous cadence against which grackles chitter. Robins hop nearly ten feet in the air before returning to their relentless stalking. Swallows silently swoop through. Sparrows by the dozens fine groom unturned soil. Redwing black birds noisily defend territory. Hawks and turkey buzzards surveil from a few hundred feet above. Canada geese point out every imperfection troubling their passage, leaving behind cigar butt trails. The prairie blooms first in bird life. Before dandelion and quince, before tulip and cherry, birdsong breaks the long winter silence with exuberance, the soundtrack of budding life.

The passenger jets from Minneapolis fly over a fly zone that extends clear down to the ground.

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NotGoingHome

NotHome
"We must be heading somewhere else."

The map doesn't hint at the disparity between what it represents for us and what we'll find there. The roads seem unchanged, though a few new businesses have sprouted up along the still familiar route. My first visit, twenty years ago now, and The Muse's childhood here moved away long ago, leaving what was then the future in their wake. We, hampered by memories and lingering, long-lost first impressions, reenter for the first time again. We wade through what we expected to find, hardly able to see what we find. Old relationships have become history. Relatives still familiar, though everyone's been constantly changing since the last time we came. Us, too. We feel no more than almost familiar to ourselves here now.

The end isn't coming because it already came, elbowed aside by new beginnings again.

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Reveal

reveal
"… keep the roads clearer for those of us who come here for the reveals."

Top a hill or round a bend and experience another reveal. Driving across Nebraska, off the Interstate, produces a recursive kinescope of the state. Each hill, every damned turn and twist in the road, reveals a similar yet quite different perspective. I feel as if I'm delving ever deeper into what those who observe while flying over from thirty six thousand feet see as simply flat. True, with the exception of Scott's Bluff, nothing but ghostly grain elevators loom against any horizon here. Quite false that the country is flat, or even seriously flat-ish, for it rolls and seems to swirl as we top another hill and round yet another bend.

Difference, those of us blessed or cursed to have been raised in mountain country, seems to require altogether much more drama than it actually needs.

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Blogging

blogging
"I write, therefore I blog."

I posted my first blog entry on January 12, 2006. I labeled it The Autistic Organization. My editor at the time had taken great offense at its content so it had proven unsuitable for formal publication. I figured it qualified as blog material, so I started this blog called PureSchmaltz. Choosing a 'platform' proved nearly overwhelming, a road paved with more good advice than I could use. Many strongly recommended WordPress, but I could not figure out how to navigate around in it. It seemed to have been designed for people who learned to use computers using MicroSoft software on a Windows machine, two mediums I never could figure out. I decided to limit my search to native Apple apps, and found a start-up called RapidWeaver. I've been using their software for eleven years. Not all those years have been pleasant, as this software, like all software, occasionally suffers from improvements, aka upgrades, which usually degrade the quality of operation for a few days or a few months. Still, I've found nothing better suited to me.

I'm no computer wiz.

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SouDakoda

SouthDakota
"In Sou'Dakoda, though everyone seems to drive with a lead right foot,
time isn't so conveniently hurried away."

The Muse and I are fixin' to take a toodle northeast tomorrow, heading toward Sou'Dakoda, which we should enter the morning after. We're heading up there for a family event, one of those one-of-a-kind sort of gatherings we've mostly missed in recent years. The Muse especially feels those twinges pulling her back toward her home country from this latter-day homeland. The road between here and there runs through some of the most diversely interesting territory in the nation and also some of the most mind-numbingly uninteresting spaces. The Eastern Plains of Colorado fall under the latter category. I consider them a three hundred mile long dedication test, a gauntlet sometimes featuring fierce sidewinds, monster commercial semi-truck rallies, and undifferentiated khaki-colored prairie. Even with the willows finally showing some soft green along the riverbanks, that part of the trip promises distracting desolation.

Once in Nebraska, the Sand Hills add some variety to the panorama. We'll wend our way up into and through Nebraska, for there's no other way to cross the place. Grant Wood would have felt right at home there where the two lane black top twists and twirls through rough cut gullies and draws.

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Blah!

blah1jpg
"Maybe, just maybe, a total lack of inspiration might prove to be inspiring enough today."

Boredom might be the single unforgivable sin in our chirpy, self-help society. Each of us has been schooled in the doctrine of self-determination, in at least the rudiments of self-promotion, and with plenty of positive self-regard crammed in the few remaining spaces. We are not allowed Blah! days and we are not supposed to talk about them if we experience them, for they admit to the most personal sort of failure, the kind no one can credibly claim that the dog or anybody else committed. These are all on old number one.

They tried to teach me. Perhaps I wasn't listening. Maybe I didn't want to listen.

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GoodNeighbors

derelectfence
"We all live in glassier houses than we imagine …"

I suppose that Robert Frost waxed ironic when he proclaimed that good fences make good neighbors. In my experience, good fences distance neighbors, separating more than property. I've had good neighbors and not so good ones, great fences and crappy ones, even sometimes no fence at all. I built one from scratch nearly forty years ago that still stands as sturdily as when I first set it, pressure-treated posts encased in concrete and cedar pickets painstakingly set. Somebody built a house on what was then an empty field next door, an out-sized place now glowering down on my modest little fence which I only intended to contain the kids when they were small. The kids are long grown. It's somebody else's neighborhood now.

Our latest neighborhood doesn't allow fences, this to allow the free passage of elk and deer through yards that are more mountain meadow than finely-groomed turf, though some persist in presenting the grand illusion that only a closely-cropped green expanse can offer in an arid climate. They're welcome to their water bills.

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Pegboard

pegboard1
"I find myself at peace."

I sit in the yard sale office chair with my feet up on my workbench. I just finished restaining the deck while listening to a baseball game. The home team ignominiously lost in ten innings. After four hours on my knees with paint brush and roller, I'm grateful to simply sit but still jazzed up enough to not quite want to sit still. I survey the garage in the late afternoon sun, getting up to perform some little chore before sitting back down again. I'm burning piñon incense in the background, the smoke somehow purifying the place. I've cleaned up the brushes and tray, hanging the brushes to dry. My eye wanders to my pegboard wall, the first "improvement" I added after we moved in here.

Maybe it's only the after work beer thinking, but I consider that pegboard a fine self-portrait, one perhaps improved by the fact that I constructed it without the notion that I might have been engaged in self-portraiture, completely unselfconsciously.

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Aren't

aren't
"The way things aren't might not matter much at all."

The Muse reports that she's been on a tear at work lately, fed up with what she sees as an unhealthy fixation upon the way things aren't. It's a common and powerful seduction, to parse the surrounding territory as what it most clearly isn't. Look out the window on a rainy morning and characterize the view as "not sunny." This perspective almost guarantees disappointment. More importantly, it separates the observer from the way it is. If all change rests upon the full , albeit temporary, acknowledgement of the way things are, this sort of perceiving seems to guarantee that nothing will change. How it should be, with the addition of bus fare, will get you a ride downtown. Absent that bus fare, you'll likely just get to watch the bus head downtown without you.

So much energy these days seems to be expended describing how things aren't.

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Anonymity

anonymity-1
"It seems as if nobody knows anybody anymore."

At the time of The Dismemberment, our personal and professional bankruptcies, we relocated to Washington, DC, where The Muse had found work. The settling in felt incredibly sad, with us initially sequestered in a high-rise overlooking the Roslyn, Virginia, fire station and directly beneath the approach path to National Airport. Planes passed just overhead every forty five seconds between six am and ten pm, and several sirens-blaring responses screamed out of the firehouse each day. The cats never adjusted to that apartment where the only ground they could see lay a dozen floors beneath them. They'd hop onto the railing, peer down, and scream in abject frustration. Back home, before The Dismemberment, even the cats maintained a certain reputation around the neighborhood, but none of any of that transferred for any of us. We'd become anonymous.

Anonymity imparts a ghost-like presence.

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Bottomless

bottomless
"If I burn myself out now, I might be right on time."

In my relative youth, I tried to learn how to parcel out my efforts, lest the old well run dry. The well never once ran dry, but I remained cautious of over-doing, understanding somehow that excess might bring a bill greater than I was prepared to pay. I avoided becoming a burn-out, one of those geezers mumbling into his beard, his penny spent on some youthful excess or another. I wouldn't push myself to write, for instance, but favored the old 'let it come' approach, figuring I could rely upon inspiration to fuel my progress. I used to write a song a month, or try to. Now, I meet songwriters taking a challenge to write a song a day for a month, and they do it. I can say that not every song produced in this way achieves the quality one might hope for any tune, but it's nonetheless quite an accomplishment. I can't see myself agreeing to so engage, though.

It's true that I write at least a short essay every day, but I don't think of myself as necessarily going for volume.

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SockedIn

SockedIn
"I appreciate the fog over the curious clarity of the properly formed plot line."

Living at seven thousand eight hundred feet above sea level, I sometimes find more than my head in the clouds. Here, I might wake up to a full body immersion in the clouds, absolutely SockedIn. The usual modest level of background sounds muffle to almost nothing save the screech of delighted magpies when they somehow find that bowl filled with the spoiled batch of quinoa or the crusty cat food I left out for them the night before. Trucks on I-70 disappear in the haze, their noise contained, even their headlights mere whispered hints of their passage. The dog walkers come out around sunrise regardless of the weather, the yippie pups grumbling under their breath, a welcome reprieve from their usual snippy snarling.

My head seems filled with clouds, too, fat insulating ones as my sinuses adjust to the altitude's pervasive aridity again and with my reintroduction to Rose The Skittish Spinster Cat's incessant shedding.

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Betweenings

betweening
"It's so quiet here."

For a while, everything seems like a dream. I become a rather distant observer of my own activities, separate and dispassionate. I greet the flight attendant who probably doesn't recognize that I'm disconnected, hardly present. The turbulence seems like it's happening to somebody else. I change planes in a daze, surprised to find myself at the departure gate and finding my seat just as if I knew what I was doing. I read my book and refuse sustenance, a ghost on a plane. I'm in no hurry, neither the first nor the last to board the tram to baggage claim. My bag arrives soon enough. I text The Muse to tell her that I'm on my way to the passenger pickup area, then simply wait until she arrives.

An observer might say that I'd arrived home, though my internal experience feels less definite than that.

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Endings

Endings1
"A week later, perhaps more, some fresh bright shiny will attract my attention
and I'll find myself facing forward again."

I'm not looking to watch angels dancing on the head of any pin, but I was wondering when the end began and when it might end. Mid-afternoon, my niece's husband, our contractor for the remodel, packed up and left me to prune out the apricot tree and trumpet vine, all alone in the emptier driveway. Earlier my step son helped me disassemble the jury-rigged paint shed, my home away from home for much of the effort, and haul it away to the dump. I packed the Blue Box with the surviving brushes and other supplies, stacked the keeper paint cans together, took off my smocky painting shirt, now smeared with a fresh palette of color, removed my spattered painting shoes, and closed that garage door one final time.

Dearest old friends had invited me to supper, so I timed my washing up so I wouldn't arrive late. Downtown roared with activity. I had to park two whole blocks from the restaurant. Wine bars overflowed patrons out onto the sidewalks. Music, or the rougher equivalent of it, echoed down Main Street with competing tunes. Sidewalk tables filled. It seemed like the old days again, when every Friday night was shopping night as Dam Workers with fresh paychecks filled the streets of this small city, and families sauntered through Wards, Sears, Newberries, and J. C. Penney's, fingering dry goods with buttered popcorn-slick fingers.

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SittingWithTheMess

Its-a-mess.
" … moving at the approximate speed of drying paint."

This, too, shall pass, I suppose. The final touches come more like desperate throat grabs, determined to strangle the liveliness out of the effort. Unforeseen complications reverberate through the whole structure this late in the project, after the hip bone's connected to every other danged bone in the body. Tiny discoveries set back the projected end by two days in just four days. My job as the owner/observer remains to provide some relative unflappability. I dare not lose my cool.

One of my Seven Ethical Responsibilities insists that I hold the responsibility to SitWithTheMess. Not IN the mess, for that would simply taint my presence. Not simply beside it, but With it, fully acknowledging its potentially poisoning presence without tumbling to its continuing attempts to seduce me into sitting in the middle of it. The mess might even be my friend.

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SomethingNew

woodchips
"A truly terrible influence, indeed."

Usually, when The Grand Other, our eight year old granddaughter, arrives home from school, she wants to plug into MindCrap, some sort of video game that has completely enthralled her. She will insist upon reading with her dad, a homework assignment but also, for her, more of a sacred obligation. This week, though, we've been walking down to the park to swing. Not too many years ago, she struggled to develop the coordination to properly swing, but now she quickly gains the stratosphere. This week, she's become more interested in the curly slide; more precisely, in climbing up the curly slide backwards.

She hesitantly approached the challenge, confiding that climbing the slide backwards was against the rules at school. I argued that the park wasn't school and she reluctantly tried then quickly failed to make it more than halfway up.

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Untiming

frozen-in-time-gothicolors-with-crows
" … a fool's mission, but nonetheless our only mission now."

Time slows rapidly as the end of any project nears. Gravity seems to work harder and even the simplest task takes multiples more time than expected, as if the project was trying to deflect completion. Supplies go missing. Backlogs shrink but only under ever increasing effort. Momentum stalls and a different physics takes over, one not subject to familiar universal laws. Mastery reverts into apparent naivety again. Almost any effort utterly exhausts. The tiniest task takes forever to get started and even longer to clean up after. Done hovers just out of reach, chuckling malevolently. I put my head down and continue moving forward against obviously insurmountable odds.

We could just declare the whole thing finished as it is and most would never notice the absent final polishing, but we would.

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Waiting ...

waiting1
"I'm certainly a sucker for the technology I carry around in my pocket."

I might be addicted to weather prediction. I find myself continuously checking WeatherUnderground then following up by double checking WeatherBug, comparing their predictions against each other. WU predicts light showers to start at six am. WeatherBug reports that the closest lightening strike in the last thirty minutes occurred twenty one hundred and three miles away. No need for me to duck and cover this morning. The current radar shows a snow cloud moving toward my current location. I wonder if I'll be painting shoe molding this morning or waiting for the rain to arrive instead.

The ninety percent chance of wind and rain yesterday turned out to produce a passably perfect April day with bright sun speckled with mildly threatening clouds which hopped right over us.

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StillLearningAgain

child-reading-a-book-650x400
" …all the way down and back again."

Few people learn how to play a musical instrument as adults, perhaps because once musical taste develops beyond a certain (rather uncertain) point, those initial squawky sounds stop sounding like progress but more like failure to the budding virtuoso's ear. When I first picked up that old Washburn guitar when I was in the fourth grade, every sound that emanated from that instrument sounded like sweet music to me, not like the cacophony the rest of the family heard. I "played" until the ends of my fingers blistered, then continued playing until they bled. Then I'd patch them with Band-Aids® and continue playing some more. This story perfectly encapsulates learning for me. For me, it requires a certain (rather uncertain) amount of delusion which fuels an appearance of dedication. I couldn't stop trying to play that old guitar. I remember having little choice in the matter.

Some learning requires real dedication, though.

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BeadBoard

06-beadboard
"May they grace the space … for another hundred and ten."

The bead board first appeared as an inspiration. We'd started removing that regrettable seventies wallpaper and sheetrock to find bead board beneath. Original to the house, much of it remained in near pristine condition. The Muse and I considered this find to be one of those serendipitous symbols that simply insist upon catching our attention, a once in a lifetime opportunity we 'daresn't' ignore, so we changed the plan. Rather than simply refinish the walls with newer sheetrock, we'd use the bead board to create wainscoting which would highlight the kitchen and its half bath while showcasing some of the place's heritage, a prototypical Bright Idea. "I know, we could put on a show!"

Like in the old Andy Hardy movies, turning the derelict barn into a Broadway theater for a single amateur performance turned out to be a tad bit more work than the originating Bright Idea anticipated, but the kids channel their considerable talent as well as their all-consuming delusion to, in short time, create a stage worthy of a Busby Berkeley production.

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High February

HighFebruary
"August will eventually arrive and offer no February,
high or low,
and little respite on the other side."

I imagine this season to constitute a steady progression toward summertime, but it takes wild divergences along the way. I might wake up one morning to find May outside, and another, walk smack into High February. The last few days have felt more like February than April, cold rain slipping out of low scudding cloud. The rain seems to amount to almost nothing, but accumulates in every hollow depression. The damp pervades, penetrating even my waterproof jacket and quickly seeps into my shoes. I squish around in damp socks, trying to maintain some semblance of a cheerful, seasonal Springtime attitude, but the effort exhausts me. The weather report predicts more "light rain," but it seems more like dark matter than uplifting light.

The roses and flowering crabapple were fooled, too, for they came dressed up to receive swarms of nectar-seeking bees rather than chilling rain.

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Closure

closure
"A pocket full of Closure seems a poor reward for touching the face of God."

As a project nears completion, as the long-anticipated moment of Closure nears, nobody's planning any ticker tape parades down Fifth Avenue; quite the opposite. A creeping sense of imminent demise stalks the effort, gravity works overtime while everyone else arrives late and leaves early. The workspace seems increasingly flatter, as each completed component subtracts from the breadth and width of the small universe the project unavoidably created when it began. Infinite aspiration recedes into all-too finite acceptance and the almost begrudging acknowledgement that the adventure portion of the program has ended. All the significant choices having already been made, the world no longer stretches before anybody, but shrinks around what only those who were there will ever fully appreciate. We feel somehow smaller than we thought we would. Ready the fork. We're nearly done.

In this culture, we talk as if completion was somehow the purpose of activity, as if effort were the medium and Closure better embodies the "real." The remaining artifact never fairly represents the effort invested in producing it.

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Pastwords

erase-the-past
"A quietly malevolent voice seeps from the shadows velcoming me home."

One day, little of this will matter. Maybe not today, perhaps not tomorrow, but one day. Yesterday, it seemed to matter a whole lot more than it does this morning. Perhaps tomorrow, it will slip across the boundary into not much mattering anymore. For now, it's a toleration, an experience which falls South of anything one aspires to be mindful about but which nonetheless cannot seem to be purged from foreground awareness and therefore simply screams to be tolerated instead. I'm holding my breath rather than deeply inhaling. I cower rather than standing tall. I anticipate worse than will probably occur. I've lost my password, leaving less than nothing in its place. No, I didn't forget. I never knew but was unaware that I was unaware. Now, that Pastword stares me down, double dog daring me to think back to an event I doubt ever even happened as a condition of my continuing access. I shiver along cold curbstone, in exile for now.

Let's say that I did forget my password.

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LastClass

lastclass


"I think the experience improves as one moves toward the back of the queue,
the LastClass on the plane."

In my relative youth, when I seemed to be on an airplane at least twice a week, I guarded my frequent flier status as if it was the crown jewels. I'd call thirty seconds after the earliest possible moment allowed to request upgrades and carted around a treasured pile of upgrade coupons in my knapsack. I'd board the plane first, settling into a leather seat to sip a complementary beverage before the rest of the passengers even boarded. I could lounge around in the first class lounge before the flight, though nowhere else in my life did the concept of lounging ever come up. I imagined myself living the good life, though off airplane, my life seemed basically pedestrian. I was a minor king in the air.

When I stopped traveling so much, my frequent flier status plummeted.

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Vortexting

vortex
"The price of living might not be the soul, which seems pretty securely attached, but the spirit …"

I'm scheduled to be on an airplane morning after tomorrow and I already feel the pull. I have grown to despise flying. I suspect this feeling represents an intimation of encroaching old age, for I used to love to fly, even commuting to and from one job by air: down on Monday morning, back home Thursday or Friday night, but only for three years. Then, too, I'd retire somewhere on Sunday night and attempt to collect my spirit for the upcoming week, for flying discombobulates the spirit, even if one finds the experience uplifting, which I no longer do. I've long believed that the human spirit moves, through long tradition, at about the speed of a walking horse. Of course airplanes move a couple of orders of magnitude faster, which means that the spirit ends up chasing after the passenger until said passenger manages to sit still long enough for said spirit to catch up and reconnect. I'm reasonably certain that my spirit will be playing frantic catch-up until at least fifty years after I'm planted without this week's impending departure. I can feel the pull.

The pull comes from opposite directions.

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TheStoriesITellMyself

metalogue
"The notion that each of us holds the responsibility to turn each frown upside-down amounts to the most insidious form of despotism."

Between acts in Elizabethan theater, some character might take center stage and commence to speak. He might appear to hold forth on subjects unrelated to the performance, though the curious magic of theater tends to lend a grave significance to anything taking center stage, rendering it at least allegorical if not somehow central to the deeper meaning of the performance. These metalogues might have carried no deeper significance other than to mirror real life between the obvious artifices of the actual play, for we each confide stories to ourselves while waiting for the next act to mount the stage. I believe that these stories, often overlooked, hold subtle cues to making meaning of life.

As a writer, only a few of my more choice stories ever manage to make it into any sharable form.

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Cusp

cusp
" … I feel another cusp approaching, one that will pass without me even noticing until later."

Monday night's scant inch of snow had melted off the back deck by Friday morning, just in time for a fresh band of weather to slide down from the Northwest. Springtime along the Colorado Front Range is a season seemingly perpetually on the cusp of Springtime, toes stretched across the equinox with heels still firmly dug into Winter. Shirtsleeve days slip back into bundled up ones. The snowdrift beneath the back deck will likely hold on into mid-May. The whiteflies have started colonizing on the overwintered deck plants, taking their cue from the angle of the sun, I suppose, rather than the weather outside, which dances between delightful and frightful, and will continue like this until sometime in June, leaving just in time for Summer, which will likewise vacillate between Spring and Fall until Autumn slowly starts to dominate, sometime in late August.

I seem to endlessly live on cusps, those points of convergence neither true to their past nor to their future.

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Garage

garage
"Whatcha doing' Mr. David?"

The new car demanded a reconfigured garage. We could fit the new one in there, but with little room to spare. No way to open the rear hatch, for instance, without opening up the retracting door. Only a skinny passage from the passenger side to the steps down into the house. I'd been meaning to clean it up, anyway. Autumn and Spring, my garage gets at least a once over. In Fall to accommodate all the pots and planters, hoses and things necessary to maintain the summertime garden, and again in Spring to export out into the garden all the stuff I crammed in there the Autumn before. With The Zoom Car on to its next incarnation, I shipped the Summer tires off to the new owner, making some new space.

I put off the effort until after I'd thoroughly considered what really needed doing.

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OutToGetYou

gotyournose
"What you do next might make a world of difference."

I suppose that everyone had a loud uncle who used to play the old I've Got Your Nose Game. Even as a small child, I could see right through the illusion, though the hand suddenly grabbing my face absolutely terrified me. He inflicted no real damage except to our relationship, which was arm's length to begin with and out of easy arm's reach forever after. Who could possibly trust someone who even pretends to snatch the nose off their face? I immediately learned to keep my distance and I never trusted that man again.

The world seems filled with snatchy people, folks who amuse themselves by startling others, as sure a sign of privilege as I'm likely to encounter.

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Meanness

Hob Nail Boots
Fascism is colonialism aimed inward.

Colonialism always was an obscenity with high ideals. Still is. Following principles which insisted that trade would necessarily benefit all parties, the more powerful parties enforced this theory to the eventual ruin of their trading partners. The United States, once a group of separate colonies itself, long resisted the urge to international dominion championed by their former overseers, though it seemed less squeamish when inflicting the same barbarism upon its own inhabitants, particularly those who were steadfastly denied citizenship regardless of their obvious presence. The South, in particular, was never the gentile society it imagined rural Britain to have been, but a brutal kleptocracy that would have shamed King Herod, though Herod never published Presbyterian tracts touting slavery as being responsible for introducing Africans to Christ and therefore salvation. The North also created slave classes under the guise of free labor, which was only allowed to be as free as those in power preferred it to be.

The excesses of those times eventually undermined their own viability, opening space for more modern, by which I mean, more compassionate, compacts between The People and their society, though the powerful would persist in characterizing the more compassionate as the more barbaric.

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Museless

absence
"When everything becomes possible, almost nothing seems terribly practical."

The Muse has one of those jobs that frequently takes her out of town for a week. Originally, her assignment insisted that she spend a week away every month. Now, it's down to less frequently than that, but her absences have fully integrated as a part of her presence in my life. I'm "batching it" this week, having just dropped her off at the light rail station for the long ride out to the airport, which I've explained before, seems to have been placed closer to Kansas than Denver. We made final agreements last night while calculating when we'd have to leave the house to make the outgoing plane. If I was to drive her, we could leave as late as seven thirty but that plan would leave me driving catty corner across the Metro area during morning rush or cooling my heels somewhere until the rush ended. Light rail would mean more like a six fifteen departure but omit all but about ten miles of the seventy mile round trip for me.

"Not wanting to drive you to the airport doesn't mean I don't love you," I sort of pleaded, defending my stance.

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DeepContingency

CivilWar1
"We should … somehow wean ourselves off the need to expect simple resolving answers …"

Edward Ayers, in his brilliant essay What Caused The Civil War, recounts how The Simpsons character Apu passes his citizenship test. In response to the final exam question, What Caused The Civil War, Apu starts to go into a lengthy explanation of the political, social, and economic forces contributing to the tragedy, but his proctor interrupts him by whispering sotto voce, "Just say Slavery." We do tend to go looking for simple answers to complicated questions and even extending the more satisfying ones into culturally imperative memes. If you don't know the appropriated answer, your response implies that you don't know or, in more extreme cases, that you might be deluded. We all, after all, know that slavery caused that war, though it wasn't until the third year of the conflict that Lincoln reluctantly admitted that slavery had "eventually" caused it.

Apu's first answer was more right but also much less satisfying. Most everything cultural suffers from what Ayers calls Deep Contingency.

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Townie

Townie
"We're the same, hardly different, but seem so different, hardly the same at all."

When I tell people that I grew up in Walla Walla, Washington, most quite understandably consider me to be a country boy, though I'm not. Yes, I grew up surrounded by country, but my birth family lived in town, actually a small city featuring pretty much every amenity one might find in any large city. I went to grade and high school with country kids, ones who rode busses long miles in from farms and ranches out in what I, as a townie, considered to be the hinterlands every bit as much as my big city-bred colleagues consider my hometown to be a backwater. I was raised on Pleasant Street, a few bicycle-shortened blocks away from a corner grocery, grade school, and the primary city park. I grew street savvy cruising alleyways on that bike, discovering shortcuts, and delivering newspapers. I told The Muse when I first met her that I grew up in a Walt Disney movie. She later confirmed my assertion when she visited the place.

My small city held a microcosm of the larger world.

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YourAge

bus1
"I won’t play anything by Elton John now, even if you ask nice."

The Thirtieth of March is a national holiday in this family. It's The GrandOtter's birthday, always celebrated with a fresh poem! Here's today's:

Your Age

When I was Your Age,
I was waiting for a bus.
Not a literal bus, but a figurative one.
I imagined that some person or call
would magically appear, bundle me up,
and whisk me out of The Valley They Liked So Well, They Named It Twice.

My high school had declared me Not College Material,
so I possessed no dodge to distract me from the world
until I’d completed the process of growing into it.

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EyeSight®

EyeSight
"Complacency could, I well appreciate, become deadly, just like when I'm not behind any wheel."

The new car (as yet unnamed) came with a feature I'd never heard of before the test drive: EyeSight. I suspect that it uses some sort of radar to keep track of the traffic surrounding us. When someone slips into one of the blind spots, left or right, a small light illuminates on the corresponding exterior rear view mirror to warn us. Most remarkably, punching a button and flipping a switch invokes a special sort of cruise control that maintains a constant distance between our car and the one in front of it. If I punch in sixty five, the standard freeway speed around here, the car will maintain that speed unless the one in front slows down below that speed, in which case it will merely track behind that car at the same distance, even stopping if, as often happens here, the line of vehicles ahead slows to a stop before speeding up when that line resumes moving again, no foot required on any pedal.

I'm not always a champion of technological improvements.

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Cherub

cherub
"He even appreciates some of my taller tales, but not nearly as much as he loves his video games."

My grandson skitters around the floor at my feet. We were talking about going for a hike, but thunder snow moved in before we could get clear of the door. We went out in the backyard to play for a spell, but he just wanted to throw snowballs at me. Fortunately, he's a lousy shot. I fired back until my hands went numb, he taunting me from the deck above, me feeling like so much cannon fodder far below. I finally begged off the excursion and we came back inside where he took up with his new StarWars set, a Lego toy that, much to his continuing delight, shoots little light blue projectiles. He's been flying the Millennium Falcon around the house for a couple of hours now, with no sign of exhaustion yet.

Of course he's a little angel, though not nearly as little or as angelic as he was just a couple of years ago.

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Splatt!

Populus_fremontii_Zapata-5
"… the absolute absurdity of everything comes to a head"

The morning after the welcoming Spring snowstorm found us, my son, grandson, and I, investigating along Clear Creek, a stream lined with tall cottonwoods which were quietly dropping snow from their branches in a process we immediately labeled Splatting. Standing beneath any of these behemoths would shortly give us reason to giggle, as a branchful of wet snow might slap the side of someone face or plop onto the crown of my Borsalino. Wearing a hat seemed a definite advantage because our goal was not to avoid any Splatt!, but to receive one, even many. We plotted where might constitute the most likely place for a Splatt!, then test our theory before moving on to even splattier places.

We're dangerous, the three of us, when we get together.

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Grooven't

Groove
" … secretly hoping I won't see it here lest our eyes meeting simply chase it away again."

Disruption seems in endless conflict with flow, that mystical state from where, the Self-Helpless Industry insists, real creativity, productivity, and most every other -ivity floweth. Simple disruptions seem every bit as powerful as their larger, more complex brethren, pulling my eye off whatever ball I'm trying to stay focused upon and thereby fouling me out. A small jot of turbulence renders me unable to read the fascinating novel I carried on to entertain me through the flight. I feel trapped then, unable to do much of anything but struggle to suppress what I understand to be a completely unwarranted panic. Losing a wing could hardly induce any greater disruptive response.

I return from a lengthy absence, expecting to quickly regain the old groove, only to find that groove not nearly as smooth as I remember it being before I left. Grooven't.

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HomeCombing

homecombing
" …I did not have to plan a single move."

Arriving back at my current permanent address after seven weeks' absence feels like my first visit here except all my stuff's already arranged just as I would have organized it. I remember where to find stuff without having to think too awfully hard about it. I feel as though I've gained some prescient superpower that allows me to just move toward what I need to find it there. I vaguely remember some hint of a suggestion that I used to spend seven days out of seven behind these doors, but it seems like fiction to me. For the last weeks, every move seemed to require forethought, often followed by investigation. At first, this novelty entertained us. Later, it seemed oppressive. Supper seemed more obligatory chore than rightful reward.

We left the kitchen bare when we departed, so the first order of business just had to be stocking the larder, just with bare necessities.

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BuffCountry

buffcountry
"So much the worse for me, I guess."

Once you get about three hundred miles East from the Pacific Ocean, you enter BuffCountry. On Interstate 84, it starts just East of Hood River, Oregon, but fully emerges only after breaching the Blue Mountains' summit. To the East lies days of travel through the most obviously bleak landscape. Scorched hills. Buff brown fields. Apparent wasteland. In the West, geologic history left the land short of soil. Some more enterprising plants moved in, few of them what anyone would label really green, with grayish probably the most popular choice. The few green plants managing to make a living there only serve to amplify the contrast. Green's rare. Buff brown dominates.

My first visit to Albuquerque left me with the impression that nobody there took care of their yards.

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Receding

receding
"We're just passing through tonight."

If I stay in one place long enough, the whole world seems to snuggle in around me. What's near remains near; far away stays put. Others might move into and back out of the scene, but a serene stability settles in to surround me. I find this sensation not even a tiny bit confining, but quite the opposite. I find it liberating, for within that close confine, I sense my place in this world as well as the world's proper place in my space. We exist in a reassuring balance, one where I feel about as free as I ever expect to feel.

We headed back to Colorado early this morning before the sun had topped the still snow-capped foothills.

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ChickenLittle

chickenlittle
" …that old reliable sky keeps falling."

Chicken Little was right. The sky is falling. His observation was not particularly insightful, for he merely stated what might well have been obvious to any observer had they been paying attention and willing to speak their "truth." That he was later shown, to the satisfaction of his neighbors, to be a fool, merely demonstrates the iffy nature of sharing one's particular "truth" and failing to follow the party line. It had become, then as now, the overwhelmingly popular misconception that the sky was not, indeed, falling, but Master Little must have not received the memo, for it's difficult for even someone as studiously cynical as myself to believe that Little performed an overt act of dissent. He was not, by all accounts, that sort of bird.

So he spoke an obvious truth, but one that almost everyone knew polite people never publicly declare.

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Grace

Eric_Enstrom_-_Grace_-_bw
"Drives me freaking crazy."

I imagine The Gods conspiring over a few beers on a particularly jocular Gods' Night Out evening, just how to drive mortals most crazy. Some, the more hard-assed traditionalists, argued that nothing beat a decent pestilence, but the younger smart-assed contingent carried that conversation after the third (or was that the fourth?) IPA. The whippersnappers convinced the others that nothing, not war, pestilence, grief, or even rampaging boogiemen hoards could beat a periodic dose of grace, undeserved beneficence. What other gift could be more shockingly humbling? What other experience could so consistently hush a haughty mouth? What other outcome better encourages acceptance of a great mystery, the very soul of The Gods' eternal branding strategy?

And so it came to pass that the least of us totally undeserving would occasionally come to experience genuine grace.

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LastDay

LastDay
"Momentum's grinding gearbox knows only forward …"

The LastDay arrives like a thief in the night, just like Scripture predicted it would; one minute separating familiarity and eternity. Eternity's reported to last a lot longer, but infinite, beyond anyone's ability to grasp, while the familiar seems as if I somehow possess it, though it actually exists like a kinescope image, mere flickering flashes of light and darkness. Real, of course, has always been a controversial concept, us being such unreliable observers and all. I've been reluctantly imbedded in what began as an unwanted winter, now feeling as though I'm teetering on the edge of losing something precious, for yesterday was the very last full day of AnotherWinter. I had to look it up to confirm the rumor. By 9:16AM PDT this morning, AnotherSpring will have arrived.

The thermometer insisted the temperature was thirty degrees when I left the house this morning, not an unusual Winter morning temperature.

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SecularSunday

needlenose
"Bread and water will do for now."

I would have willingly sold my soul for a pair of pliers, or gladly forfeited my kingdom, or so I swore. The contractor doesn't work weekends, no matter how close to the end we stand, which means we have only the tools I thought to bring before the job began. Next time, I swear, I'm bringing my own pliers and screwdrivers. The Muse and I arrive at more or less our usual time because we're the owners and ownership doesn't come with days off. The neighbors head off to church but we're strictly secular this Sunday, focused upon painting interior windows and trim. We'd come by on the rainy Saturday before to get started, her priming, me putting finish coats on frame exteriors. This sunny Sunday should allow us space to prep a window frame and finish coat all the windows so the contractor can reinstall them Monday morning.

The Muse works on the new window, a futuristic job with "easily" removable panes. (Easily if you know the trick, which I don't and likely never will.)

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TimeCapsule

timecapsule
" … what passes for ages in human-scaled terms."

Old houses serve as TimeCapsules. Pull flooring and discover clues to the past beneath. Walls hold decades-old toys somehow slipped between cracks and preserved intact. Layers of wallpaper hint at how radically tastes change and also how similar some eras seem. Not everything old seems new again, some of it just seems tacky now. The bottom layer, the presumed original stuff, showed remarkable workmanship and design. Subsequent "improvements" trended continuously downhill. Of course we believe our restoration superior to all but the original, though we have restored little beyond doorknobs, rethinking out-dated principles and employing what we think of as more aging-appropriate materials. We expect ours to last and not just cosmetically coverup, unlike some past remodels on the place.

We can date each change by the newspapers used for stuffing siding cracks and the quality of materials. The Seventies introduced a variety of then-futuristic materials that have aged about as well as potato salad left in the sun.

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TheConking

conked
"Enlightenment ain't all it's cracked up to be."

I suppose that we all live within some degree of trance, never fully mindful, never completely unaware. I think of myself as fairly fully present here, though I suspect that I'm a poor judge of my own reliability as a witness on this subject. I can get so focused upon completing a task or reaching some objective that I know I'm tuning out some of the outside world, though I doubt that I could accurately assess the magnitude of all I ignore when in active pursuit. I think of this focusing as a kind of streamlining, and while my little mind game makes me no more aerodynamic or svelte, I experience a slipperier passage than I suspect I otherwise might. I can also catch myself nurturing little grudges as my little personal sacrifices fail to fuel the easy successes I imagine them worthy of receiving.

I'm focused upon end results now, with less than a week remaining in our presence here in this grand delusional kitchen makeover.

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ShortTime

shorttime
"A week from now, I'll be gone again."

Time turns wobbly near the end of our stay. What seemed nigh on to infinite when we first arrived has compressed into a thin slice with many contentions. Neither of us seem to comprehend what remains undone or how much of our now semi-precious time each item might demand from us. The serial certainty of plans have matured into multiple dimensions, each vying for time and attention with probably much that we still cannot yet sense waiting to bushwhack us away from completing the recognized remaining important work. Some stuff won't happen in the stillness after we leave but we cannot determine what fits into this category, so we continue to do what we do. What else could we possibly do?

The fresh patterns which renewed us just after our arrival have become too familiar now and a vestigial longing for home and ordinary time competes with our appreciation of those differences so subtly becoming unremarkable again.

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Unpreparedness

unpreparedness
" …the great and often surprising gifts …"

I can't remember a situation in my life so far where I entered feeling fully prepared. I really could have studied harder, dressed more appropriately, brought the proper tools, shined my shoes, and remembered to eat breakfast first. My entrances teeter on the edge of pratfalls. My exits, inevitably untimely. I move like a Pachinko ball, bouncing off perfectly foreseeable barriers. When I sit down to write, I break into a little sweat, unsure, even after beginning, where I think I'm trying to get to.

I've always found offensive the idea that one might scrupulously plan anything ahead. As a project manager, I at first tried hard to satisfy the usual expectations before growing to understand that those expectations amounted to
magical expecting.

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Windows

doublehung
" …shortcomings prominently displayed."

I started this project more than a decade ago. I might complete it this month. As old house projects go, this one's in no way exceptional. Every old house holds more than a single owner's lifetime of necessary maintenance and aspired after improvements. The queue of undone work remains essentially fixed, as new necessities and aspirations easily replace any completion. In our time in The Villa Vatta Schmaltz, I've removed (or had removed) all but two windows, repairing and reglazing the many double hungs. These, to my mind, are real windows. Supported by sash cord, openable both top and bottom, easily as old as the house and still in remarkably good shape.

Everyone who sees them says the same thing, that we really should replace them all with modern double-glazed and fit storm windows over the outside, like we should grow up and face the future unafraid of utterly defacing the place.

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Doors

doorway
"She'll stay behind long after I've gone."

As the Winter winds down, doors open into a recently longed-for world. I've suddenly taken to taking off my sweatshirt before I set to work, hanging it on any handy branch or fence. I'm wearing my havelock to keep the suddenly brighter sun out of my face and off my neck. Until Daylight Savings Time disrupted the steady progression, a little more sunlight, or the hint of impending daylight, greeted me as I headed out to write each morning. After, I felt like I'd been sent back to Go without the promise of two hundred dollars, but Winter's almost a goner anyway. She's on her last legs, as a no longer false Spring nudges her aside.

I'm down to working on doors and trim now, the stuff real destruction and reconstruction contractors consider to be final touches.

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Hometown

fisheyewallawalla
"I hardly recognize the place anymore."

I stand a bit taller than the crescent of mountains protectively gazing down into this valley. Of course my perception must be an optical illusion, but Walla Walla has always thrived on illusions. From the valley floor, the sky seems to arc over its perimeter, giving the illusion of standing in the center of a half globe, a snow globe lacking only snow and a firm shake to convincingly produce a small snowstorm on demand. The weather tends to be gentle here, protected by moderating currents in the Pacific ocean, three hundred miles West, the influence swimming upstream along the broad and beautiful Columbia Gorge to impart what the Chamber of Commerce swears amounts to a Mediterranean climate, which, of course, it isn't. It's no Montana, either, but it lacks appreciable humidity to convincingly mimic Sardinia.

Promoters insist that it's a well-kept secret, and it maintains this distinction no matter how much international press the place garners.

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Connotatively

inkblot
" …I can't seem to see the world as it is …"

The way I write sometimes lands me in trouble. I describe my observations connotatively, which means almost everything I write remains open to the reader's interpretation. I'm usually trying to describe the essentially indescribable, perhaps a writer's sole duty. This means that I heavily rely upon metaphor and analogy, constructing relationships that could not possibly exist except as floating thought impressions. I intend to tickle the mind of my reader, but not every reader ends up amused with my antics. Some quite naturally read denotatively, expecting the material to somehow reduce to factual as well as felt sense. These folks frustrate and confuse me. More properly, I struggle to comprehend denotative perception.

I worked hard to avoid studying the sciences in school because I couldn't seem to catch onto the memorization involved.

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DispassionatePursuit

passionsysphesus
"I seek my jollies elsewhere now."

If you check the fine print on the back of the label, you'd learn that Passion carries a short shelf life. Go ahead and Google® the word. You'll be inundated with homilies, just as if you didn't already know that Passion fuels purpose, renders success inevitable, and holds the key to that quality of life that has been so long eluding you. If you're still holding down your lunch, check that fine print on the back of the label again. Passion seems to behave like rocket fuel. What doesn't quickly burn, evaporates faster. It's a boost, not cruising fuel.

Whatever I passionately pursue seems to fuel me plenty at first.

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WhirledAffairs

tamarack
"The view down the block can block any wider perspective."

I tried to tune into MSNBC but couldn't catch the significance of the headline stories. The New York Times seems to describe only trivial affairs. The local paper holds more significance than the whole of the mass media put together. I can see down the block in three directions and barely as far as the back fence behind me. The Blue Mountains retain their winter leggings between splashes of the deepest blue along the ridge tops. The traffic along Blue Street seems more consequential than anything on NPR.

I'm not currently current and I couldn't care less.

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Calm-amity

6406-Ionic-Ivory
"We seem to try to avoid salvation, sometimes failing. Thank heavens."

The call came just as we were sitting down to a late supper. In our absence, gone from the remodeling project for the last half of the afternoon for the first time since we started the job, the kitchen ends up painted the wrong color. In a reported flurry of frenzied effort, the contractors had purchased the paint and finished the ceiling and all the walls, the walls in a fine yellow, Ivory, rather than the Whole Wheat we'd expected. We thought we'd been clear, but half a dozen rejected samples still populated the workspace and, truth told, the Ivory and the Whole Wheat looked very similar when wet. The Muse rejected the idea that anyone could do anything about the error that night, but the next morning, I called the paint shop to learn that the wrong color could be easily tinted into the right color thanks to Stephanie The Wizard Paint Merchant.

No real harm.

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Sandstorm

sandstorm
"I'll be residing in solitary until I spring myself …"

I privately consider myself to be a world-class procrastinator. I'm no rank amateur at the practice, but recognize myself to be a professional-class crastinator, firmly believing that, like hastening slowly or meditative mindfulness, it pays subtle dividends to those who develop the practice into what we who really work at it consider to fully qualify as high art. Procrastinating can be its own reward. The dog that doesn't bark is rarely bitten. It can also be its own worse punishment, when avoidance comes seeking payback on some debt it believes I owe.

Payback can show up as a shakedown artist carrying a Louisville Slugger.

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ShadowTime

shadowtime
"
Maybe I've earned some supper tonight."

By four pm, we shift toward the general direction of shutting down the remodeling work. Though the sun won't set for another couple of hours, the shadows have already started stretching longer and the temperature has slipped. The morning takes almost until noon to shake off the overnight chill, so we're working bankers' hours, though no banker ever worked as diligently as we seem to. I seem to have lost some of my contemplative nature, tucking my head down and just doing whatever seems to need doing, sensing that our time here grows ever shorter, even while each day grows a tiny bit longer. The clean up seems to take as much time as it takes to make the messes in the first place and everything we do leaves some mess behind. The drywall dust has been the worst so far, but the floor sanding promises even worse. We paint today.

My brother Bob reminded me of the blue box, a storage container where I'd stashed my painting supplies from the times before.

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TheGrandOther

grandother
"The conversation further degrades into the absurd
as I close the front door and head out into a chilling afternoon."

The Muse and I call her son's youngest TheGrandOther. Her older half-sister had already been labeled The Grand Otter and, in our search for a proper handle when Kylie was born, she became TheGrandOther. She's something else, which I suppose we could have reasonably expected no matter what name we'd hung on her. Now eight, she fancies herself a princess, though she reports that she's lost her crown. She's discovered lipstick, which she insists every princess uses, though not all of them smear it from halfway to their chin to halfway up their nose, producing clown lips. The clown lips suit me, though, because they seem to resonate the deep truth of her princess pose. It's pretend and we both know it.

Last week, she entered the living room after school to find the white china Buddha head in the middle of the carpet.

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Stewartship

stewardship1
" … stewardship seems to be forever."

Moderns think of ourselves as stewards more than owners. The title might insist that we own that home, but we privately acknowledge that this home will pass on to others and that we no more than steward the property until that transition occurs. We own nothing but the title. These properties own us and our loving attention much more than we ever inflict our will upon them. Our responsibilities as stewards extends no further than we believe them to extend, with some seeming to deny any inherent obligations at all, behaving like renters using up the property rather than as loving nurturers seeking to preserve it and pass it on.

I'm sort of a sucker for stewardship.

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Disagreeable

Alberto Giacometti Disagreeable Object 1931
Illustration: Alberto Giacometti Disagreeable Object 1931
"All great decisions get made in this sort of space."

I suppose I pride myself on being an agreeable person. I find it extremely difficult to ever find anything to disagree with, for I seem naturally predisposed to look for the best, and I usually find it. I experience extreme discomfort at those rare times when I simply must demur. I might try on "yes, but" for size, but only very hesitantly ever pose a half-hearted "No!", let alone an emphatic one. My behavior probably means that I'm what the touts and frauds refer to as an easy touch, something my grandchildren deeply suspect or already know. A quivering chin and I transform into a placating boob.

Except on some issues.

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MumblingMeditation

brush-clipart-house-paint-4
" …the kind of knowingly only we could know but could not possibly explain to anybody else."

Applying paint might be one of the minor purposes of painting, for the surface and the paint, even the brush, merely provide context within which more meaningful purposes might emerge. One can always blunt this emergence by simply fleeing from it. Plug yourself into a playlist or recorded book and lose some potential. Let your mind wander where it will instead and you'll very likely surprise yourself by engaging in a kind of MumblingMeditation.

Painting a single board won't induce the trance.

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Springing

springing
"This must be how the future comes."

Here, Spring starts throwing feints and false promises before Winter's half finished. She's seductive but fickle, tempting with taunting tastes, windows open one day, biting breezes the next. Snow seems perpetually forecast but bypasses us for adjacent higher altitudes where she loads up the late season snowpack, destined to flood away almost uselessly. She's already loaded up the creek through town once this month and seems determined to load it up again before the Vernal Equinox arrives.

I brought the wrong clothes this trip, anticipating full Springtime by now, that I'd be painting in shirtsleeves outside.

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The Illusion Of Communication

canphone
" … we're enthralled by The Illusion Of Communication most all of the time."

The chief difficulty with communication has always been the illusion that it's occurring, that it has occurred. I might be best served by remaining stoically skeptical that I ever understand anything that The Muse tells me, and we're pretty tightly connected. Others? Forget about it. I have no prescription for fixing this apparent feature, though it leads to inevitable rework and sometimes great frustration. It also sometimes leads to great pealing cascades of laughter as we catch each other out, being human.

I'm lost in Cleveland, late for an important client meeting.

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TheTrick

powerdrill
"TheTrick might preserve the tool user's thumb,
but it won't make anyone into a carpenter."

Operating any tool requires one fundamental understanding. One must know TheTrick. Effectively using even a hammer or a screwdriver demands a functional understanding of their unique Trick. These tricks cannot be reduced to some simple command or instruction, but want a subtler sort of relationship with the tool. It might be that no one can properly learn TheTrick without first suffering some injury caused by not understanding it. This injury need not be catastrophic, but it must rise to a level causing some distress. A board ruined by not respecting TheTrick when using a manual saw might suffice. No thumb need be sacrificed to learn most tricks, though I avoid most power tools because they seem particularly unforgiving should I not fully comprehend their particular trick, and I never seem to fully comprehend any of them.

Power tool designers further complicate this situation by deeply embedding each tool's particular trick.

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TheCrud

wallawallavalleyfog
" … The Crud gets to deal at least one hand every year,
and The Crud cheats at cards."

As lovely as The Walla Walla Valley has always been, it retains a kind of curse certain to visit each and every resident and visitor during the Winter months. For some, it comes in the Fall, but nobody living in this valley through the unsettled season seems able to avoid contracting what the locals refer to as The Crud. I always called it Lewis And Clark Lung, imagining a curse dating to their visit to the Valley after narrowly escaping their demise crossing the Bitterroots. The valley seemed like a little Eden to them, and doubtless was a little Eden in comparison with the Camas Prairie and trackless forests to the East, but curses seem to favor Edens somehow.

The Crud can't quite be classified as a cold.

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Beer

moritz-s-a_u-l-p2aml00
"I whacked my share of moles in the grand Whack-A-Mole game today."

After an over-long day in my new role as scut worker on our massive kitchen remodel, I sometimes retire to my local down the block, The Green Lantern; The Green in local vernacular, where I'm certain to make good on that old John Prine lyric and drink my beer like it's oxygen. I might have never before understood the true utility of the beverage, for it seems to contain exactly the proper analgesic to negate the effects of long hours spent stooping over, crawling under, reaching deep into, and schlepping; especially the schlepping. I enter that safe harbor dragging keel and leave with renewed buoyancy.

The purpose of beer must be to provide that buoyancy.

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GoodWork

OldPaint
" … my good work took them there."

What, I wondered to myself while scraping clean yet another reclaimed twelve foot long tongue and groove floor board, makes this particular task seem like good work to me? Scraping's more tedious than difficult if the scraping tool's sharp. It requires little technique, though the technique it does demand seems satisfyingly subtle, a light-handed sort of understanding that emerges after frustrating myself with the first few. Scraping stands solidly in the center of the scut work spectrum, one of those tasks the skilled hands mindfully avoid and the unskilled hands never quite manage to notice that needs doing. I saw that the floor laying utterly depended upon the supply of properly prepped boards, so I made a little pact with myself to see that the board supply queue never fell into stalling our critical path. I discovered a bit of identity in this task.

What made it good work?

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Schedules

meltingclock
"The enduring question remains whether
we'll amplify our initial naivety or learn from it …"

Late in his life, after spending decades crafting schedules for The Father of Scientific Management Frederick Winslow Taylor, Henry L. Gantt (yes, the inventor of THAT charting technique) broke with his once mentor. Taylor had preached his way into an almost notorious position, like an earlier times Billy Graham, having promised with veiled threats before repeatedly failing to fully deliver. Taylor capped his professional career by assuming the role of President of the then most prominent Engineering society, where he quickly tangled up daily operations by insisting that they be run according to his rather whacky principles. He retired without shame to his estate he had purchased by swindling Bethlehem Steel out of a significant patent he'd developed when a contractor there, dying shortly thereafter. A few years before Taylor's demise, he and Gantt has "a falling out" when Gantt, a gentile North Carolinian family man, began to speak out about the inhuman tyranny of the then much-touted emerging science of Scientific Management.

Of course, subsequent generations forgot the lessons Taylor so ably exhibited in his behavior

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TheWorkingman

workingman
"I speak as if I might be an individual
but I act as if merely struggling to mimic
some indistinct caricature of someone who never was."

Americans seem to hold a fetish for The Workingman. We believe that he suffers rather gladly for his sustenance. He's exploited, but doesn't take his lot in life terribly seriously. He's up early and off to the job site where he works hard enough to sweat through his coveralls, packing his lunch which he eats with his work buddies without first washing his grimy hands. He's back on the job before the whistle blows. He engages in noble hobbies like hunting, fishing, perhaps woodworking. He's an able handyman with a well-stocked toolbox and tidy workbench. He drives a well-maintained pickup truck a few years past its prime. He'd rather drink beer than the finest champaign.

He would be uncommonly wise except he reportedly carries the wisdom of the common man, which Americans firmly believe is the very best kind of wisdom to carry.

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Exhaustion

exhaustion
Jean François Raffaëlli: The Exhausted Ragpicker (1880)

"I find that I'm more resilient than I previously suspected"


The repeated opportunities for me to experience total physical exhaustion might be the greatest benefit of "helping" with our massive kitchen remodeling project. I warmly anticipated that this might prove to be the case. My usual lifestyle often offers opportunities for me to experience mental exhaustion, but only rarely its physical counterpart. The two bear little resemblance. Mental exhaustion feels more like induced depression, where my body unwillingly surrenders to an overwhelmed brain. In contrast, physical exhaustion induces an emotional serenity, much more satisfying than the mental sort ever provides.

Nine hours spent yesterday, mostly kneeling before a seemingly endlessly refreshed pile of floorboards needing their nails removed, left me shaking with exhaustion.

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Sport

sport
"Diversity usually first appears as someone else
deliberately acting weird."

Sometimes, an otherwise pink-blooming rose will bear a white blossom. Botanists refer to these oddball blooms as "sports," and botanists propagate the ones exhibiting desirable traits to produce new cultivars. Sometimes, a new cultivar will revert back to the original's characteristics. Families produce the occasional sport offspring like me. The Muse insists that I could not possibly have come from the family I hail from, even though I have been known to sometimes revert back into exhibiting precisely the traits common to the rest of my siblings. Every child is unique in some way, but most at least bloom in the same color as their siblings. I'm apparently an exception.

I didn't ask to bloom differently.

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ShoppingSmall

shopsmall
"We'd eat dirt first, …"

In some ways, the old home town remains the dead end I thought it was fifty years ago. The city fathers wisely put the kibosh on both the railroad and the freeway system cutting through their valley, leaving the place quite deliberately off any beaten track. It's two lane blacktop in from every direction of the compass, and, of course, two lane blacktop back out again, which has discouraged some of the more virulent operations from pillaging here. The downside of those wise decisions left this place as another typical food desert surrounded by some of the most productive cropland in the world. In season, the local produce, eaten to appropriate excess, more than compensates for the sad wintertime produce aisles.

Yes, there are exceptions and truly exceptional alternatives to Safeway's interpretation of fresh.

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HomeCaming

HomeCaming1
"They warmly acknowledge both that we once passed by here and that we are back …"

Two weeks after arriving, this place starts feeling like home again. The first two weeks, separated with a three day swoot over to Portland last weekend, seemed discontinuous because they were. We're up early and down early, sequestered at the old place "helping" with the massive remodel all day, missing lunch most days, seeing little more than the short path between my sister's place, where we're staying, and the Villa. Last night, a Friday, we ventured out after dark to attend a gallery show opening at one of the local wineries. As we slowed into our parking place, The Muse later recalled, her usual anxiety flared until she noticed someone she knew inside. "Hey," she thought, "people know me here!"

Entering the gallery, she is met by another old friend Jacqui. Hugs exchange. "Welcome home," Jacqui exclaims, The Muse almost moved to tears.

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FengShui

FENG-SHUI4
"What harm could it possibly do?"

I might get myself into BIG trouble with this posting. I will very likely expose the depth of my gullibility before I'm through, and might incite some flashing backlash of anger, perhaps rage from one or more of my loyal readers. I have previously freely admitted just what an idiot I can be, and the more generous among you have demurred, insisting that I might possess a compensating decency somehow justifying my continuing existence. All those conditions taken into consideration, I intend to write today about Feng Shui, a subject about which I fear I can only demonstrate my complete ignorance.

The Muse insists that attending to the tenets of Feng Sui influences the quality of our experience.

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Idle-ick

twist
"Even the garbage man sings to himself,
accompanied by the truck's garbage-grinding groans."

A point comes in every project where there's little for some contributors to do. The more skilled might continue apace, but the common laborers, having completed the initial demolition, idle along the sidelines, impatient with what they understandably experience as delay. We dare not disband the now (finally) oriented laborers, but we have little meaningful engagement to offer them for a time. Such forced idleness could prove to undermine whatever cohesion emerged through the busy early days, for few assignments encourage more dissatisfaction than no assignment at all. A few days or hours in the future, the effort will be up and running at full speed again, but it'll have to survive this choke point first.

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Ashes To ...

Ash-Wednesday-cross
"I figure that this feature all by itself
qualifies me as fully human
and in decent enough company."

I am not a Christian in the same way that I am not a Buddhist, though I shamelessly borrow from both traditions. I relate most easily to the Deist notion as embodied by our equally non-Christian Founding Fathers, who saw evidence of deity in nature and in the higher inspirations visiting mere mortals. I take no solace in the presence of any God, vengeful or beneficent. I figure we're fine on our own here, however we came about, and I no longer labor in anticipation of any eventual reward. Life could be plenty rewarding without expecting some jackpot payoff or Hellfire damnation at the end. As a means for gaining social control, religion has enjoyed a mixed reputation, encouraging much discord as well as considerable harmony. Both the Nazis and the Allies believed that God fought on their side.

Ash Wednesday, though, qualifies as one of those Christian traditions I feel completely comfortable embracing.

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ReModled

screwed
"The slivers and sandpaper silicosis
hasn't slowed me down yet. Yet."

I might best define ReModeling as the willful self-infliction of repetitive motion injuries. The recent proliferation of cordless tools only seems to have exacerbated the dilemma facing any helper. Screwing in one screw seems easy enough to do, but spend the whole day screwing in one after another, with respite only accompanying the occasional dropped one, and the fingers go numb by the end of the day. Of course, any project worth doing insists upon just this sort of over-doing to ever get done. For the hardly initiated like myself, each ultimately numbing task starts as a sort of adventure, for I've likely never removed dry wall before or taken responsibility to insulate an outside wall or worked a cordless drill all by myself. The steps seem easy enough, and are, until they're amplified to the scale of any real progress. My muscles ache by the end of every day.

Not that I'm yet persuaded to play hooky.

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FamilyTalk

972871ae38e3d4ca2dc524205621cc56
"Explaining it only ensures that it won't seem all that funny or insightful to anyone else."

Every family develops a unique dialect comprised of words twisted into special-purpose shapes. Some fondly recall what originated as a malapropism, like when my Dwalink Dwaughta Heidi called a maze puzzle an "amaze." Forever after, in our family, mazes became amazes. Frustrated with a boring discussion, she proclaimed that she thought we had "disgusted" enough. We now exclusively engage in disgustions, a useful cautionary reminder. It seems that as kids learn the language, they help twist it into a more meaningful form, with the folks joining in. The bedtime announcement that "it's time to go potty and brush your teeth" morphed into "time to go potty and tickle your teeth", then finally into the short form "time to pot and tick".

Many FamilyTalk terms amount to verbal shorthand, sometimes even code.

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ASimpleRoom

siomplesittingroom
" … I'd fly a kite over this world we know and transform it into one we recognize."

I'm thinking that there must be a simple room somewhere, one where the grandkids, The Muse and I, and our kids, too, might spend more than the gilded, terribly rare afternoon together. Two and a half years ago, amid the swirl of my darling daughter's wedding day, we spent the best part of an afternoon together in my first wife's backyard. This afternoon, the four grands, my two kids, and The Muse spent a few scarce hours together, and it was magic. We accomplished little besides the grandson's birthday party, which was out of our hands, and a quick trip to see if we could spot the sea lions haunting Willamette Falls on the swelling Willamette at Oregon City. (We did!) The wind was bite-y and brisk and the grandson, filled with sugar and adrenaline from being the recent center of attention, seemed in a typical six year old's sour mood, but the time seemed plenty sweet enough anyway. Sigh! Maybe after another couple of years slip by, we might find ourselves together again.

These days, grandparents often live far away from the lives they revere the very most.

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SoapOpera

soapopera
" If it wouldn't make believable fiction,
it's probably the truth."

I told my brother last night that the primary reason The Muse and I came 'back home' this time was because we'd been running dangerously low on family Soap Opera. Family seems to be the source of all true Soap Opera. In the near decade The Muse and I have lived away from my old home town, our Soap Opera consumption has noticeably diminished. Visitors and resident aliens in any place away from their family home place simply cannot plug into the channel that carries the deep local dirt. Sure, the odd axe murder might make the front pages, but it'll be very unlikely that the murderer or the victim went to grade school with your cousin's oldest, for that sort of detail separates genuine Soap Opera from run of the mill scandal, tragedy, or news. The juiciest news isn't fake news or national news, but family Soap Opera.

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Wired

wiredbrain
"The meaning we're concocting happens nonetheless,
though I'm only rarely aware of its blooming presence."

When I speak of brains, I catch myself slipping into the realm of electronics metaphors. Though no wires seem evident when a brain's dissected, I confidently speak of wiring. Impulses morph into imagined circuits. Scientists search for underlying designs just as if designs just must hover to be discovered in there somewhere, and I believe. I suppose that I'm exhibiting some characteristic of brain behavior in the ways that I imagine my brain working. I deploy metaphors as though they are much more than they were ever intended to be. I concoct then buy into extended allegories before imprinting on the allegories as if THEY are the reality. I suspect that the reality lies far beyond the ability of my brain to comprehend.

Much of life seems to inhabit this same territory.

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Grumbles

250px-MagooAndDog
"We listen, perhaps, to avoid fixing some feature that,
if taken away, might cause the whole freaking structure
to fail."

Work seems to naturally attract grumbles; the more physically demanding, the greater the grumbling. Psychologists and self-help authors might manage to make it to the end of their workday without finding a single disparaging thing to say, but the rest of us will end our shift with more complaints than we clocked in with that morning. The primary purpose of work break times might be to serve as a release valve, providing "workers" with the opportunity to mumble malevolently about each other, lest they blow up from the pressures building inside them.

"How was your day, honey?" might best be considered a rhetorical question, for that spouse damned well already knows the answer.

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Inches

inchworm
"Who are we to question how it seems to be …?"

I measure real progress in inches. I'm certainly attracted to the ever-popular notion that some progress might be better measured in longer segments, even though these seem inevitably misleading. I'm also not immune to sometimes believing that I might, by clever application, manage to take leagues-long strides toward my more worthy objectives, but this inevitably leads to disappointing results. I figure I might have better things to occupy my shrinking time here than spending it plotting to disappoint myself. I manage to experience enough disappointments without dog-piling into the conspiracy with those who seem to be out to suck the wind out of my sails.

The grand deconstruction that is our kitchen remodel project got itself off to a strong start.

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HiddenSkills

crowbar
" … how one goes about acquiring a sincere lack of skill
as the recipe for accomplishing anything."

I still blanch at any request for me to catalogue my skills. If I have skills, I must be largely unaware of them because I never think of myself as particularly skilled. I seem more often to catch myself less than entirely certain if I can accomplish anything I imagine doing. Maybe I forget between engagements. Maybe I never knew. I still engage, but with a persistent sense that I'm just a beginner, probably a pretender, hoping to somehow accomplish the best. I might be most skilled at engaging with a deep sense of uncertainty about what outcome I might produce. I cannot honestly claim to possess any but this deeply questionable "skill."

So when called to help on some project, I tend to self-select into a role that's unlikely to lead to too much calamity should my initial self-assessment prove true.

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Demolition

demolition
"I suspect we’ll never know."

Boxes stacked nearly to the basement ceiling. Cupboards emptied leaving the barest shell of our familiar kitchen. The refrigerator’s already moved into the dining room for the duration. The whole back end of the house now poised to revisit The Great Depression as the demolition begins. Those rooms, the small bath and expansive kitchen with the hallway we’d always imagined would become a butler’s pantry though we never planned to hire any butler, suffered for decades from some former owner’s mid-seventies design sense. Like a Mod permanently stuck in a Sears and Roebuck interpretation of “updated” sixties Carnaby Street fashion. Narrow lapels, thin trim, too-wide bell-bottomed cabinets, misfitting doors and windows, vaguely psychedelic lighting scheme.

True to every project I’ve ever engaged with, this one’s different.

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TravelWriting

road-trip
"Whether or not anyone ever actually arrives anywhere
remains open to continued speculation."

Travel writing seems the very most dangerous sort, more seductive than the most seditious political screed and often more misleading than a Chamber of Commerce promotional brochure. A good travel writer seems rare and rather unlikely, since that writer holds a deeply vested interest in self-promotion of the Look How Fortunate I Am And You're Not variety. But travel, real travel, only very rarely lives up to its touted promise. Behind every romantic evening strolling along the Seine, lurks a cobblestone-twisted ankle or a bout of explosive diarrhea, neither of which will warrant mention in the resulting glossy magazine spread, nor should, but which results in a work of partial fiction, what Disney's Imagineers labeled Modified Authenticity: A Frontierland absent horse shit and thereby reeking of its absence.

The Muse and I are traveling

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Irrelevance

Irrelevance
"One foot seems to stand behind me no matter how straight I stand."

Irrelevance seems the proper reward for any lifetime spent mastering anything. I'm not sobbing into my beer, but reflecting on an apparent evolutionary imperative. I've forgotten more than half the stuff I once knew, but still know quite a bit more than even the cleverest Johnny-Come-Lately, who couldn't possibly have forgotten even half the stuff I have. Further, I've retained some truly subtle stuff, the sort of understandings that cannot be described or explained: sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth-sense stuff. The newer kids, though, still think they've reinvented the world, or are well on their way to utterly reinventing it. They worship a future that hasn't had her way with them yet while slandering a past they never knew or cared to understand. Those who won't worship that naive future or slander that trusty past seem simply irrelevant to all those who will.

Fortunately, none of this matters.

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TheProjectWithinTheProject

MasonicEyeOfProvidence
"Nobody can really achieve apathy
except when in pursuit of someone else's goals."

By far the most important element of every project turns out to not be the advertised objective of the project, but what I call The Project Within The Project. While the public pronouncements promote this or that feature or that or this other innovation, the real project, The Project Within The Project, looks on unimpressed. The PWTP wonders what's in it for him. He's searching for a premise to use this project assignment to assist him in his pursuit of some personally compelling goal or purpose. No matter how lofty the outside project's objective, it won't motivate much more than a half bucket of warm drool unless the people assigned manage to find their very own personal Project Within That Project.

Outside projects typically expend remarkably little energy encouraging individual contributors to find their personal PWTPs, though the outside project's success might most depend upon realizing this.

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TheGravityProblem

gravity
"Airplanes fail constantly, but usually fail less than they compensate for their failures,
and thereby succeed …"

The axiom that failure starts with the first step probably serves as the oldest comment ever made about project work. Since the beginning, successions of clever practitioners have proposed methods for ensuring that their project will not repeat this most ancient of axioms, each without success. I, too, in my turn, took up with one, then another, and then yet another philosopher promising to deliver the antidote for this feature of project work. I now believe that the problem implied by this timeless insight fails to qualify as a problem at all. I consider it a feature, and as such, should properly remain unsolvable. Solutions belong to problems, not features.

I don't mean to imply that I've grown cynical from following false prophets

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Leaving

exit-leaving
" …it will certainly first feel like some terrible shrinking."

The Muse and I are preparing to leave for a few weeks. The list of preparatory tasks seems to grow as the departure time approaches. I'm at the stage of life where leaving carries little attraction. I'd just as soon stay behind while The Muse travels, and receive updates from her at the front while hanging far behind the lines. She insists, though, that I get out into the world. She says that things happen when I'm out there, and I cannot disagree. Things do happen when I leave the safe confines.

The days before departure feel like grieving.

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ThinSlices

Thin-Slices-of-Behavior
" … like ThinSlices of impermanence drawn prism-like through space."

This morning seems composed of thin slices slightly shimmering in the rising sunlight. The eucalyptus tree below my window takes on an etherial and impermanent look, glimmering as if on the very edge of disappearing altogether into some adjacent place. Time seems like narrow vertical wafers through which stuff moves like light cast through a prism. Color, shape, size, even weight seem to derive from an optical-like projection, easily shifted by sleight changes of perspective. The time we inhabit also inhabits us, and might slip away from any of us without any advance notice. One minute here and another minute somewhere else, a sort of mist separating one from the other, prior from present, present from next.

Permanence holds no place here.

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Archtypicality

vanity
"Hooray for me, whoever that might be."

In this culture, in my culture, we describe individuals by associating each with one of a small number of exemplar descriptions, so-called archetypes. These comparisons don't even try to determine an individual's uniquenesses, but first attempt to classify according to some similarity, what they're like or not like. The sum of the resulting similarities stands in for an individual's description, their brand, even their identity. Failing to fit into some easily recognizable archtypicality earns one the default label of "oddball," which means unclassifiable, an unbranded range animal without clear social identity.

Billions of individuals vie for this sort of social definition, each selecting from a tiny few exemplar patterns.

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Gratitude

catch
“Exactly the pitch called for at the time.”

Today, I offer heartfelt prayers of gratitude for all my previously unanswered prayers. I hold no certainty that these fresh prayers will be answered, especially since I have no idea how I’d determine if they had been answered. I remain grateful for all of my unanswered prayers, whether or not I can accurately target my benefactor. This solo dialogue quiets my spirit. My confession, even as gratitude, lightens my heart. For all the times that the good guys failed to show up near the end of the third reel, I feel gratefully humbled. For the papers from the bank, lost for months in the mail or their bureaucracy, so passionately sought after but never found, I give thanks. I’m not certain who posted the casting calls for which angels never responded, but I’ll slip in a thanks to them, too.

The primary problem with prayers seems to be the same as the difficulty with customer specification wish lists.

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EulogyIII

thereof

This weekend, friends will gather to celebrate our dear departed friend III's (pronounced "Three's") life. My eulogy:

Viennese Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein attempted to define, in seven dense statements, what one can say to be true about this world. As part of the group that delineated the unforgiving terms of engagement in the Boolean computer age, Ludwig helped determine exactly what III spent much of his life enforcing. More than anyone I ever met, he attempted to police that narrow, mysterious territory between what we desire our machines to do for us and what we as humans could reasonably expect our machines to do. Deeply understanding this man/machine interface, III mostly chose to avoid personally relying overmuch upon machines to deliver him from even tedium. He seemed to deeply mistrust the most modern technologies, and perhaps wisely so.

He owned no smart phone.

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Youdentity

youdentity
"In this season, I even feel unskilled at self-deception."

By the last week of January, anyone should be excused for having somehow lost addressability to who they are or even who they used to be. The weather turned skitzy more than a month before, swapping identities day to day. Shorts one day, heavy boots the next. Ordinary times slip into full festal ones then back again. Bacchanal celebrations dance the hokey-pokey with solemn religious ones. The sacred expresses itself with venial exchanges. Smugness snuggles with humility. Darkness wrestles for dominion with light. Candles curse the darkness. Darkness mumbles invective against the light. Plenty seems to placate the barren scrubland that was once my well-tended garden.

By the end of January, I'm running on vague promises.

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Time-ish

time-ish


"Time seems altogether too unreliable of a regulator. "

I'm always astounded when I consider that time moves at a constant pace, a sleepless, silent drummer setting the background rhythm for everyone's existence. The same for you as for me. The same for Rose The Skittish Spinster Cat as for The Muse. The same for the Queen of England as for the panhandler along the freeway exit. I do not experience time as such a dependable regulator. Some days seem to crawl while others sprint. I've spent fortnight-long afternoons and split-second months. Some nights seem endless while others hardly find a moment to wink in passing. I figure this variation must be about me, if time exclusively runs regularly.

I don't seem to run that irregularly.

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Me, Myself, and Aye

closedeyes

"Nobody becomes invisible
just because they close their eyes."

A pivotal point in my learning how to write came when I stumbled across an arcane little volume at The Library of Congress. In it, the author(s) proposed what I'll characterize as an 'is-less' style of exposition. Since we construct language from metaphors, which must necessarily be fuzzy representations, characterizing anything as being something else makes little sense. Of course the sky isn't blue, it just looks that way. The author(s) counseled a touch more care when characterizing.

This observation whacked me up the side of my head.

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Jarring

MasonJar

"The jarring season leaves me carrying more responsibility
than I feel completely comfortable assuming."

Autumn brings jarring work. "Canning" doesn't adequately describe the experience of skinning and seeding a bushel of green chiles or blanching, peeling, and stuffing a hundred pounds of tomatoes into jars. The long, almost meditative hours spent in fine motor repetition with a razor sharp knife leaves the lower back barking for relief. The steamed up kitchen windows while the pressure cooker weight endlessly jiggles, jars the sleepy countenance of an early Autumn afternoon.

The procedures seem timeless and hardly need remembering anymore.

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A Real S. O. B.

Man standing X Ray-602x376

"It's one thing to exhibit good judgement
but quite another to possess it."

While delivering a series of workshops at one of our National Laboratories, The Muse and I heard from almost everyone we met about what a "Real SOB" their liaison to the Department of Energy was. According to the testimony, this guy seemed to be personally responsible for most of the trouble their projects experienced. A short time later, we found ourselves in Washington DC, and we scheduled some face time with this guy. When we arrived at the appointed hour, he greeted us but asked, "I'm not certain why you requested this meeting." I replied that never having met a Real SOB, we thought we'd take the opportunity to meet one. He laughed. Our scheduled fifteen minute meet-and-greet turned into a two hour conversation.

The Real SOB is generally in the eye of the beholder …

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Light

childfishing
"Teach a man to cook and his inheritance will be tiny."

Autumn sits like a bushel basket over the Foothills this morning, filtering light into a thick sauce which moves languidly among the trees suddenly streaked with the first golden leaves. Thirty nine degrees this morning, snow just a little further up into the hills. My head feels as thick as the sunlight sauce, unwilling or perhaps just suddenly unable to think, straight or otherwise. My mother, who was famous around the assisted living facility for her toys, kept a solar powered critter on her windowsill which would dance around when the sun angled in just right. That critter would be staring numbly out the window this morning.

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Motherist

motherist
My mother was a terrorist of the very most insidious kind. She seemed fundamentally incapable of complying with any injunction. Doctor's orders barely amounted to more than invitations to dissent. She mumbled about "polutocrats" and always followed her own rough-honed sense of propriety. She danced along this precipice for ninety years before the cliff edge crumbled from beneath her yesterday. Slip over here for more ...
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TheBoss

20140722-in-charge8
Like you, people have called me boss and I have called some boss, too. I have both loudly proclaimed that 'you are not the boss of me' and sotto voce whispered it to myself, mantra-like, hoping it might give me quiet strength in some overly-bossy presence. I knew the person Scott Adams modeled his iconic Pointy-Haired Boss after, and he seemed pretty much the opposite of Dilbert's characterizations of him, but then he was not my boss. Someone always seems to get elevated to the enviable/unenviable role of being in charge, whether or not they hold the formal responsibility of judging another's performance. Bossy older sisters hold no charter justifying their pedestal.

Some people seem to appreciate a strong authoritarian presence while others seem to just shrink in that kind of light. Bosses get blamed for everything, since they seem to hold superior responsibility, though they also seem rather incapable of accomplishing much of anything. They represent both the oppressive yoke and the absence of it, depending. They might try to be friendly, but who really wants to befriend someone with the authority to be your oppressor? Slip over here for more ...

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Sin-Eh-Schism

void
The cynic already heard the punchline and doesn't think much of your joke. He's on to the game and firmly believes it's all just and only a sad parody. He purports to understand what really matters, though nothing qualifies as meaningfully significant. In the long run, he quite logically insists, we're all dead anyway. In the short run, where we inescapably exist, the cynic rather too proudly holds his head in long-run clouds, an elite perspective utterly useless for living. The cynic appreciates nothing because he subtly insists he already understands all.

Not negative but also purposefully not positive, the cynic inhabits an orthogonal plane. Slip over here for more ...

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BeautifulMusic

Falloutshelter
I grew up in what today seems like an unimaginably repressive regime, where the privileged wielded tremendous power over ordinary citizens. Some cities and towns still had active sundown laws which made it a crime to be within city limits after dark if you weren't white. In the South, not being white was considered 'just cause' 24/7. My public high school had mandatory ROTC for boys; essentially, conscription into military training for sixteen year olds. Young women could be denied primary public school education for violating wardrobe rules or for the crime of teen-aged pregnancy. Prostitution was formally illegal but protected by the police and business leaders, who owned the buildings housing bordellos. (Wink, wink; nudge, nudge.) The John Birch Society was considered a community service organization.
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OverThinking

overthinking
Edvard Munch: Attraction I (1896)


" … necessary for me to get begun and then get through anything to done."


I wonder if I OverThink as much as I think I do. It's true, I do often think my way through an anticipated action two, three, four, and often even many more times before I take action, and even then, I might opt to take no action at all (yet). I consider my scrutiny prudent, though not everyone would agree. How many thought experiments must a standard ketchup bottle survive before it's set aside as too complicated to open yet?

I seem to have been born to run on intuition, yet I blunt my native sort of 20/20 vision with dump truckloads of conflating cognition.

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TimelessSpace

predawn
Mid-July mornings come savory-sweet, almost cold, promising punishing heat by noon. I set my alarm to an unGodly hour. I can nap through the heat of any afternoon, but I cannot as effectively dream of these fresh moments as I can experience them. Yes, it's high summer. Predawn, it's timeless here right now. Slip over here for more ...
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SecondOrderChangeDay

MyShadow
Welcome to the biggest change day of the year. Throughout the year, advisors and commentators endlessly prattle about the need for change, mostly for naught. On this day, though, everything seems different without anything really changing. Over night, a whole new year began. The old fled off the bus and we can now never go back there again. Feels like a brand new, fresh and clean start.

Today delineates the point where all the previous prattle manifests into a real difference, or so it so convincingly seems. But what’s really changed? Like the day before, we woke up in a different part of the universe than where we went to sleep, but unlike yesterday morning, this morning dawned on a Brand New Year! This distinction between last year and this year stems from an agreement, a conviction, a belief, rather than a physical difference, and that phenomenon alone renders this day worthy of great celebration.

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Love/Love

love:love
Just another morning. Brighter than most. No hint of last night’s calamity in this morning’s serenity. The magpies arrived to see if they’d trained me yet, rejecting the pumpkin seeds I’d left on the deck railing. I quickly replaced them with stale bread broken into bird bite sized pieces. Yes, they have trained me, I agree, but I entrain to entertain Rose The Skittish Spinster Cat, who seems to enjoy the first thing in the morning bird visits. She barks at them but it’s feigned alarm. No harm done and I dispose of the stale crusts.

A shadow hangs over the place, though. The BBC chattered half the night. NPR took over just before dawn. The unimaginable settling into another disquieting new normal. I must listen to the news to somehow infuse the unwanted recent history into the body of my acknowledged story. It’s inescapable now. Denial slinks back into her shadow, not selected for this team either. Once ingested, though, the shocking taste seems to disappear. The bitter flavor lingers longer than the sweet, but both flee the palate more quickly than the long anticipation enticed it. I’m soon enough hungry again.
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ScoopingOut

ScoopingOut
The activity’s more ritual than work, more sacred than secular. Some neighbors don’t bother, just driving through the slushy to leave later frozen tire tracks likely to stay around until Spring. I’m up earlier these mornings, rising with a deep sense of purpose for a change. Even if we’re not driving anywhere, I want the sidewalks and the drive cleared by eight o’clock.

My old boots, misshapen by long summer ladder hours, sweated through and mink oil improved at least a hundred times, fit me poorly now and cripple me should I hike anywhere in them. I’ve warmed them by the fire to loosen them up enough to fit. They’re plenty fine enough to keep the snow separated from my socks. I clump out the door, carrying Rose The Skittish Spinster Cat under one arm. In her youth, she was a snow cat, a dedicated snowflake chaser returning with ice pills all along her underbelly. Now, she cowers in the corner as the garage door rises, then huddles along a front porch edge as I set to my chore.

I own no snow shovel and never have.
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FactOrFriction

The_Elephant_House
I quite often develop an asymptotic relationship with my future. Though I seem to move forward at a reasonably consistent pace, whatever I imagine I’m pursuing seems just about as far away no matter how much time elapses or effort expends. I might be stiff-arming, holding manifestation back with one hand while swimming—sometimes frantically—with the other. Perhaps I have become a master at sabotaging myself. I know that my pursuit of whatever I seem to be after only rarely rewards me.

This situation could be a feature of my time in life. As I age, distances might lengthen like shadows do as the sun slips past high noon. Earlier, the horizon seemed endless and my direction obvious. Now, the horizon seems more constricted and my orientation uncertain. Relative progress seems impossible to discern and absolute progress, a once believable fiction.
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WeBecomeOurStories

Stories
You inspire me but that’s only your birthright and my responsibility.

We become our stories. Once we disappear, after we’ve gone, when we’ve left behind all the sacred possibilities every breath brings, we become our stories. Speak mindfully of nothing else. The facts don’t matter; the most terrible turmoil merely grist for this mill. We will each become the stories we tell.

They become the stories they heard. Not all of anyone, no, but some of who each of us become, while more than the simple sum of any explanation, certainly involves these parts which started by accumulating stories until subsumed into them, blended into the ones others owned themselves.
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Tribe

tribe
“Have you found your tribe yet?”

“Well, no, but I expect to shortly.” Or so I reported. I had belonged to a tribe of sorts in the last place, but I expected it would and really should take some time to attract a new one in the new place. I knew I was lying, and not simply because my lips were moving, but also because of the nature of my friend’s question. Her question presumed that one finds their tribe. I might have caught this subtlety, but it slipped past me.

Who knows where one’s tribe comes from? Reflecting on my experience, I might more easily conclude that my tribes have more found me than I ever found them. No tribe hangs around anticipating getting found and, again, in my experience, the whole concept of ‘lost tribe’ seems terribly Old Testament. Tribes don’t need finding, seem to resist being stalked, and never appear in a convenient pack.
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Lost Then Found

Jiminy
A very few excruciatingly long weeks ago, my friend Jamie changed his address. I’m uncertain about this part, but I suspect he changed it permanently. Some insisted that we’d thereby lost him, but I question that assertion. If he is, indeed, now lost to us, we might also now be lost to him, but I contend that Jamie is right this moment no more lost than we are. Of course, this statement doesn’t really say all that much, for I have been feeling quite exceptionally lost these last weeks. Maybe you have been feeling lost, too. This morning, I intend to get to the bottom of just where Jamie is now so I can ditch this disconcerting lost feeling I’ve been dragging around like outsized carry-on luggage.

When Jamie was still “with us,” he was perhaps most noticeable to me by his absence. We didn’t find or create many opportunities to meet face-to-face, yet we managed to feel as though we were in decent touch anyway. We Skyped sometimes, phoned others, exchanged emails, sometimes directly, perhaps more often as CC:s, as part of some shared group business. The last few months, I maintained a stream of correspondence I did not intend him to respond to, but even that seemed to sustain the clear felt sense of intimate proximity between us—none of that reinforced with actual proximity, mind you.

Then, when he “left,” I felt a sense of loss every bit as real as that former sense of intimacy had been.
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ItCouldHappen

countingStars
“Hide your heart from sight, lock your dreams at night
It could happen to you

So starts Johnny Burke’s haunting lyric to Jimmie Van Heusen’s remarkable melody. Of course they intended this song to be interpreted as a love song, and it works very well as a love song, but Burke cleverly employs the old ambiguity, playing off the peril love implies—the peril life itself entails.

“Don't count stars or you might stumble
Someone drops a sigh and down you tumble”

Burke offers no easy out, either. Wishing on stars won’t provide any protection. Love might turn on a simple sigh; life, no less so. The tone screams precarious. He is not in control. Neither are we.

“Keep an eye on spring, run when church bells ring
It could happen to you”

Anyone who’s fallen in love recognizes the absolute absence of self determination in the experience. We don’t refer to it as ‘falling’ for nothing. We no more throw ourselves into love than we carefully pre-plan our existence. Later, after we’ve clearly succeeded, we can tout our marvelous master plan, scrupulously omitting the parts chance contributed. Until then, we’re flotsam and we should know it. Slip over here for more ...
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CookingWithAltitude

CowboyCookery
Seventy Five Hundred Feet above sea level hangs a world quite different from the one you probably inhabit. The air seems thinner, which means it comes in a form not at all unlike non-fat milk. It feels less viscous and contains considerably less ‘goody,’ as I believe the scientists refer to whatever it is that satisfies lungs. It’s skimpy, stingy, and anemic. A lungful of air here can leave a flatlander breathless. This takes more than a little bit of getting used to.

The thin air affects cooking as much as it affects the cook, and equally mysteriously. Water boils at a lower temperature which means that food takes longer to cook. How much longer depends upon some quadratic equation nobody can solve in their head. Like with all cooking, success remains a matter of feel. Those who lived their early years below a thousand feet developed a feel for cooking that seems wholly unsuited to altitude.

Moving here seems like being sent back to Go without my two hundred dollars whenever I enter the kitchen.
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CreationStory

Adam_and_Eve_by_Lucas_Cranach_(I)
As the next to last student left the lab, she disconnected her call. Whomever she was talking with, the conversation had seemed intense to the instructor, a first year tenure at this red state community college. The class is physics, a subject the instructor carries much passion for. He’d disclosed to the class that their final would consist of each submitting a creation story that explained how they happen to be here, utilizing all they learned during the course of the semester. This one remaining student had raised an eyebrow in response to his assignment. She approached with a worried look in her eye.

“Dr. David, will I flunk the class if I include Biblical references in my creation story? I love hearing about black holes and all this physics stuff, but I believe the Earth is six thousand years old and I can’t go against my beliefs when writing my paper.”

Dr. David had mentioned this possibility to me before he accepted the position. He was unsure how he would handle the question then and he was only slightly better prepared for it now. He quite firmly believes in the creation story science has constructed from rigorous observation and scrupulous projection. One of his students had even labeled him an evangelist for the passion with which he lectured, a characterization that made his skin crawl. He admits to the passion but he would never characterize himself as an evangelist, but upon reflection, he had to agree with his student’s assertion. Perhaps he is an evangelist, but he’s not promoting any faith-based acceptance. He expects proof rather than speculation, and proof requires no faith for acceptance.
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RoundingDown

sweetcorn
There was a time, now long past, when early September brought sweet corn to harvest. Boiling pots of water welcomed golden yellow ears. Fresh cubes of butter wore a trough mark where hot ears had been dredged through. Grins stretched from ear to ear and even an eight year old could gnaw three or four down to cob and still have room for a quarter of a watermelon, consumed primarily for the spitting seeds.

In recent years, available corn has hardly resembled the stuff we once so treasured, though it was commonplace. In Maryland, they called this white stuff sweet corn. Silver Queen, they called it. They could have called it tasteless and sweet, tough or mysterious, but I could not recognize it as corn. A successful hybridization but an utterly failed food, suitable only for compost or silage.

Earlier this year, I found a supplier here in Colorado who could provide halfway corn, a combination of yellow and white kernels which, if eaten blindfolded, approached the flavor and texture of the genuine article. I ate my share of that while pining after what my palate long ago came to know as real corn. This speckled stuff worked as a substitute but it was clearly standing in for the real thing.
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YellowJacketTrap

YJTrap
It’s nearly obligatory to reflect on each anniversary of 9-11, to look back with regret, sometimes to rekindle a sense of vengeance not yet satisfied; perhaps never to be satisfied. For others, it’s a sadness that re-emerges along with a sense of loss. Everything felt different after that and we understood without fully accepting that we would not ever be able to go back home again. This anniversary evokes nostalgia for what came before and would not be coming ever after again.

As The Muse and I limped back toward home in our rental car generously ceded to us without drop charges since airplanes were not flying in the days following, our route took us from the Southwest north and even further west through what would later be referred to as red states. We had little besides the radio to accompany us across those vast deserts, but the radio was suddenly toxic. Too toxic to listen to. A side of the American character hardly imagined before became the prominent theme. “Kill them worse than they killed us,” the radio insisted without knowing who had done the deed or what had actually been killed.

The Muse and I quickly resolved to leave the radio off.
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Skillfully

shellgame
If writing qualifies as a skill, for me it’s a danged unreliable one. I experience days when flawless prose and even better poetry just seem to flow out of my fingertips, but also many days when I can’t coherently string two words together. Shouldn’t a skill manifest itself more consistently, or do all skills come and go at their own bidding like this?

That slugger in baseball only rarely ever slams one over the fence. He’s considered a master if he manages a hit on something between a quarter and a third of his trips to the plate, much less frequently homering, slinking back to the dugout many more times than his teammates ever baptize him with GatorAde. Surgeons, though, rarely fail to deliver their goods and carry onerously expensive liability insurance to cover the odd shortfall.

I have no access to the slugger’s or the surgeon’s internal state. Do their many successes feel like success or like impending disasters, too? One writer insisted that writing, done well, should feel like one continuous mistake in creation, and that the key to writing well lies in mastering that nagging, insistent sensation of failing while continuing to write. That kind of mastery
—a meta-skill, really, a fake-it-‘till-ya-make-it capability—might be the underlying ability defining every skill. Certainly with my writing, I experience no mastery more prominent than my now well-practiced ability to suspend my persistent disbelief in order to produce.
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The Colorado School Of Mimes

mimes
Not everyone understands that Golden, Colorado, besides being the iconic, long-term home of the Coors Brewery, also hosts the Colorado School Of Mimes. Founded in 1874 to train mining engineers, Colorado’s economy has since shifted far away from resource extraction toward supplying the ever-burgeoning entertainment industry. Introverts originally considering engineering careers find little difficulty fitting into the School’s more modern focus, as they arrive on campus so concave, faculty complain about having to wear miner’s headlamps to even call role. Born to not be noticed, today’s students find Mimes’ atmosphere perfectly congruent with their natural preferences.

The curriculum can be challenging, even for those uncomfortable with public speaking. “Public miming can be even harder to master,” claims one sophomore whose parents had previously encouraged him to join Toastmasters International. Mimes offers a minor degree in what they call Milk-Toastmasters, a course of study similar to public speaking but without the speaking part. “Holding an audience’s attention when you’re basically invisible seems like a definite impossibility,” the sophomore continues, “but the supportive faculty, many with extensive busking experience, understand how to silently encourage even the more extroverted.”
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Tyranny

scaleof1to10
“Commerce between master and slave is despotism.” Thomas Jefferson

The Muse thought, since we were moving into a fringe area house with an installed TV Dish® already on the roof, that she would sign up for the satellite TV service. The technician arrived while I directed the movers, who were unloading that last forgotten crate, and he encouraged me to finish that chore while he poked around, climbing onto the roof to check the dish angle and fiddling with wiring along the side of the place. After the movers left, he asked questions and poked around some more, finally coming around to the fatal question. “Do you have the power cord for the TV? I need to check reception on the actual TV before I can call the installation complete.”

Of course I didn’t have the power cable for the TV, and I told him that I had no idea where the cable might be. I found myself in the middle of one of those mornings where I just cannot properly parse the world around me. My judgement had not returned from dreamland the night before and I was barely functioning, but I found my trusty box knife and commenced to opening some boxes in the master bedroom, none of which yielded the sought-after cable. The technician would point at a box, asking, “How about that one?” I mindlessly responded by cutting open that one, then the next, then the next one after that.

I quickly began feeling assaulted, but continued with the absurd dance anyway. I was opening boxes out of any rational sequence, unable to place the contents into any proper context. I was making a mess when I needed some calming tidiness. I finally called a halt.
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Miscellany

Miscellanybox
Two days after taking possession of the new place, we’ve yet to spend a night there. The moving company called yesterday evening to report that they had, indeed, failed to deliver one crate. This crate included bed parts. The place still seems mostly boxes with cardboard walkways taped to floors. We unpack rather haphazardly, adhering to a first things first policy. First we unpack. We will determine the exact more permanent location for stuff once we see what stuff we have. The three months since packing erased most of my memory of what we possess and I’m discovering some serious doubts that we need all or even most of this stuff.

The last place had room to spare. This place seems just the right size. The stuff remembers where it lived in the last place, looking around anxiously for the familiar cues it does not find here. The whole unpacking’s a jumble, unguided by anything more definite than a general notion which doesn’t always work out as very workable. We inventoried every box number and label and found quite a few in the wrong room and several clearly mislabeled. No mistaking a box for the chair listed under that number on the manifest. The Muse resolved all these brain farts. I find it easier unpacking if I just have to move a box to another room and defer emptying it for now. Progress measures itself.

What was open possibility on Monday has by Wednesday morning become a more limited affair.
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EconoMicks

EconoMicks
After the movers had unloaded the last truck, while The Muse tried to reconcile the manifest with what seemed to have manifested in the new place, I sat with the crew while they rested in the shade beneath the empty truck. The conversation quickly turned to the economy. I knew they were being paid ten bucks an hour for carting what I considered heavy loads down that steep side yard or up that steeper stairway in the late summer heat. I wondered why they did this.

They quickly agreed that this was a good job. One said that he’d made the mistake of not finishing school, though he’d since studied to become certified as a physician’s assistant. While that paid more per hour, it offered no possibility of overtime so it actually paid less. Another reported that he’d completed a stint in the army then went on to earn a bachelor’s degree, but that this was the best paying job he could find. He could work at Walmart, he noted, or as a prison guard, but the Walmart didn’t pay as well and the prison guard work was demeaning, dangerous, and ultimately dissatisfying.

I was surprised that everyone on the crew, save the elder Robert, had spent time working for the private prison industrial complex. One reported that the turnover there was extreme. They offered no training, low pay, and extremely high turnover. One reported that he has a friend who had managed to stay for nearly a year and a half, and so had more seniority than anyone including the warden. All agreed that they’d rather unload truck than go back to prison work, though one noted that he could have become a highly paid parole officer if he could have stomached that guard work for a couple of years.
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In-Between

inbetween
Few insights seem more worthless than the one where the writer decides that his words fail to describe what he’s trying to say. Of course they do, for words serve as no more than messenger. The content sits separate from them, depending upon some largely preconscious collaboration between the by-then absent writer and the all too present reader. The meaning sits somewhere in-between them, depending upon essentially undependable words and the meaning both will make of them.

The meaning starts, of course, with the writer. Though he does not determine exactly the meaning any reader might make of his words, he weaves his web intending. His clarity when intending influences the meaning his reader might finally conclude. He also has tricks as well as tradecraft, and he either knows how to construct a cogent sentence and a coherent paragraph, or not. If not, the clarity of his intention can’t matter, the words will no more than natter. But the specific words might matter less than the rhythm of them when strung altogether. Can they carry the intended tune?

Writing, if it is to describe anything, might need to be properly inductive first. It should impart a felt sense coherent with what’s being described, otherwise it produces paradox and confusion, like insisting that a word is a color. Nobody should believe me if I insist that the color of the word red is really RED. It’s not, no matter what I said, and the reader senses this contradiction without experiencing any sensation at all. The reader will not believe what I’m saying then, no matter how eloquent my explanation.
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FillAahSewPhee

FillAahSewPhee jpg
“No hard and fast rules can be laid down for survival anywhere, particularly in the farther places. Conditions vary. So do localities. Especially do individuals. Initiative on the other hand may be guided by a consideration of general principles such as those we can here absorb.” Bradford Angier- How To Stay Alive In The Woods

They always ask what skills they will learn. My brain cramps in response. I didn’t consider skill acquisition when I created the workshop. It seems many can’t quite think of workshop in any other terms.

What other terms might there be? Years ago, I read a book by the seasoned backcountry guide Brandford Angier: How To Stay Alive In The Woods. I bought the book because I mistook it for a kind of cookbook, a reference that would show me what to do. Instead, it first focused upon how to properly think about survival, with few specific ‘do this’ instructions. I later understood that this perspective was necessary because without properly preparing the perspective, how-to instructions fall like seeds on poorly prepared soil. Angier understood this, and I suppose he faced the same dilemma I face with my prospective clients who believe they lack skills when they really lack perspective, an appreciation of the key role philosophy plays when coping with difficulties.

Almost nobody intends to get lost in any woods, and we invariably forget to bring along the instruction manual for surviving these surprise ordeals. A pocketful of principles better serves us there.
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Rocky Mountain Oysters

baseonballs
The Colorado Rockies baseball team has a lot of balls. Their pitching leads the National League in walks, clear evidence that the team has more balls than strikes. One of the food stands at the ballpark even serves rocky mountain oysters, also known as bull testicles, a narrowly-appreciated delicacy common to cow country—well, to steer country, anyway—and a revered sacrament of cowboy culture; a smirk food. Last night’s pitcher favored the cutter, perhaps in attempt to castrate the visiting team? This metaphor failed, though, as he more effectively delivered dirt balls. The home plate umpire and the Rockies’ batboy spent the game trading bruised balls for handfuls of new ones.

I revere the humbled double-entendre euphemism above all other forms of language. It stands before us with it’s ‘flag at half-staff’ threatening without attacking propriety. It lives well South of obscenity and slightly North of innocence, implying more than it declares, leaving the listener culpable for any bad taste lingering after. It can relegate a promising politician to an alternate career ‘hiking down the old Appalachian Trail’ or sideline another into an eternal ‘wide stance’ without leaving any fingerprints at the scene. Properly employed, the messenger strolls away whistling from the crime scene without even a shred of toilet paper stuck to his shoe. Everyone knows full well he did it, but nobody ever lays a finger on him.
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SpiderSense

spiderweb
Once the spiders show up, the show’s about over, though it seems as though a full third of the season remains. Spiders apparently know better. Shrubs and corners web up. Spiders dangle down into my hair and possessively dude walk across the bathroom floor. Predawn insists upon me remembering the down vest. Intimations swell from subtle hints to whispered stage direction to openly discussed secret. Summer’s ending.

School starts mid-August now instead of its proper post-Labor Day time. What so very recently seemed infinite, now feels dear and wasting. The remaining plans won’t be completed. The nursery sign says Plants Are Done. Thank You. The pantry swells with beans and potatoes even though the finest corn’s just now coming in and the tomatoes have yet to peak. I wore socks twice last week. Soon, I will never take them off.

Each season seems born immortal, only to grow into its mortality. This might be no more than the cycle of life. I recall my own immortality now, those over-long, boring, sun scorched weeks between the end of the school year and the county fair where I struggled to fill lazy hours and blanched at the threat of productively employing them. I seasoned those days with schemes, none ever maturing into concrete plans, dabbling rather than dedicating myself to satisfying even those. I lived with little more than time on my hands and that time weighed more than I could comfortably carry.

Not even summer turns out to be indispensable.
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Cat&Mouse

Mouse
Rose The Skittish Spinster Cat insists upon going outside very early in the day. There seems to be little she won’t resort to in getting her way on this, but she rarely has to work harder than a small attempt to smother me in my sleep. So far, she has not succeeded, and I suspect she would only disappoint herself if she did, for she intends to get me up, not put me under. Once out, she disappears for a half hour or longer. I follow her outside to lounge in my camp chair in the dark and talk myself into writing something in the predawn, weather permitting.

This morning started no different, but after that mysterious half hour, I spotted Rose batting at something beneath the office chair inside. This chair has five legs radiating from a central pillar, each with a roller wheel, creating a five-pointed star shape. Beneath that star this morning, a small mouse quietly evades Rose’s probing paws. It’s a perfect dilemma. The mouse need only step a few inches to avoid Rose’s pounces, but Rose must move a foot or more and hop a star leg to compensate. The mouse holds high ground. Rose cannot successfully counter. Finally, after several minutes of lop-sided combat, the mouse scurries off unseen by Rose, escaping through the sliding door and beneath my chair back into covering darkness. Rose, baffled at her quarry's disappearance, remained hovering beneath the office chair for the longest time.

She will spend much of the balance of the morning seeking out her lost prey.
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Requiem

requiem
On the occasion of my dear friend Jamie’s death:

I last spoke with Jamie nine days before he left us. In that typical rambling conversation, I confessed that I had grown weary anticipating his departure, and had simply stopped doing it. “There will be ample time,” I respectfully explained, “to grieve after you’ve gone. I’d rather celebrate your presence while you’re here.”

“I wish you would,” he replied. “I’m tied of anticipating it myself.”

There! That got said.

Now I find myself challenged to recognize that he’s gone. I’d long wondered what I would do with my morning missives once this correspondent’s receiver disappeared. Would I continue to find good reason to crawl out of bed and take to the keyboard, and what of the result? Whom would I write for? Would these become mourning missives instead?

I could see the question going either way. I might continue to celebrate life or resent death, but I doubted I could stop writing. The habit seems in me by now. My self esteem depends upon pushing or nudging or carving something out of myself every morning; more necessary than breakfast, far more essential than sleeping in. I would continue the siphon I’d started so long before, such a very short time before.
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Unbelievable

unbelievable
So very much of what I experience registers as unbelievable, and this poses a special difficulty for me. Most every object I interact with, everything I see, demands a faith-based acceptance because I simply do not understand it. Each seems too complicated, too subtle, or simply too unlikely to exist, yet there it is. I cannot comprehend how it came into being, even why it survived, so it fully qualifies as unbelievable. Unbelievable without a baseline of faith. Yet as unlikely as it clearly seems, it is, indeed, standing there in front of me.

I do not just speak of the things commonly classified as unbelievable, all the Dick Tracy and Flash Gordon technology, for these represent only the extreme edge of unbelievability. I speak to even the everyday commonplace, the routine incomprehensibles like water or beer. The bush I sit beside. The composite camp chair supporting me this very moment insists upon more belief from me than the old God of Moses routinely demanded.

I might be speaking to my own, deep and abiding cluelessness. Being pretty much uneducated, I have no grounding in the science of anything, but even science seems little more than a series of explanatory stories which utterly fail to adequately explain. Unlocking the human genome might enable much progress without ever elevating the elements analyzed into anything more than the metaphors they started out being. Science might represent no more than the systematic sharing of metaphors, the doxology of which leaves the fundamental mystery intact.
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AlienTerritory

blindmonk
Cherry Creek Mall would have seemed futuristic in the late sixties. Now it seems dated, a concept anchored in a transitory era not known for timeless design. At least the parking’s free. Everything else comes at a premium, and trades on that caché: You could get better, but you can’t pay more. Everything’s on sale today so you won’t have to pay more to get less than you would have ever voluntarily paid for.

Cherry Creek Mall looks like a three quarter scale duplicate of the Pentagon City Mall in Arlington, Virginia, doubtless owned by the same property management company. They’ve thoughtfully provided comfortable couches and chairs for bored and terrified husbands like me to cool our heels while the spouse browses, except these islands of neutrality also hold HUGE television screens silently showing tennis matches and golf tournaments. (Is golf only played in tournaments?) I avert my face from the diversion.

I stand out of the traffic flow while The Muse hits a friendly cash machine, the only one in
Greater Denver. I make the innocent mistake of standing beside the entrance to The Body Shop which has a special sale on body butter. Buy one, get one free. The display reeks of artificial strawberry. My stomach turns and I move further down out of the direct scent stream to watch people queuing up for afternoon whipped cream caffeine at Starbucks. Slip over here for more ...
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About

Herserys
You might have noticed that my posts always feature a headline title which might or, often, might not very well describe the following content. Sometimes, the title makes no sense until the end, by which time you’ve probably forgotten the title in its obvious irrelevance. This effect might be influenced by the fact that I often leave the title blank until I’ve finished the first draft, being myself uncertain what I will be writing about until I’ve finished writing. Other times, the title draws from some deeply personal and therefore publicly subtle point nobody but I could ever discern. I generally start writing with some intention but no clear—or even terribly fuzzy—notion of where I’m going.

My best writing has never been sharply-focused. It instead toodles around, but toodles in a certain style; and if not a certain style, a rather satisfying one for me. A decent toodle in the car begins with intention but remains open to discovery along the way. It most definitely begins with a few rather simple ground rules. 1- We head off in a definite direction. North, for instance, and with 2- a purpose. Whether that purpose be lamb-looking or tomato-picking, we’re clear about what it is but 3- not at all clear about how we might satisfy that purpose. We 4- have not outlined the route, but merely declared the destination.
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EasyBaking

easybake
I realized yesterday afternoon that even this sorry Deluxe Executive Home kitchen, with its forty watt Easybake® oven, could feel like home to me. I caught myself slipping into that state of mind where I find almost no separation between imagining and doing, perhaps the best possible manifestation of the elusive flow.

Around eleven, I realized that my old and dear friend Dan would arrive in a few hours. The Muse had supposed we would just eat out, and I’d presumed something similar until I flashed on the fact that Dan’s overnight on his way to Albuquerque would be my first opportunity to make a guest supper since before we left Takoma Park, nearly two and a half months ago. How could I pass up this opportunity?

I thought perhaps short ribs, slow roasted with veg, and a passel of those ping pong ball-sized golden beets.
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Inoculation

popcornman
I warmly anticipate green chile season. I am counting the days. Most places, nobody knows from green chile. In New Mexico and some of Colorado, it’s a staple. When The Muse and I worked in New Mexico, we’d bring home on the plane a cooler filled with freshly roasted hatch chiles. That was before 911. Now, I suppose they’d be considered contraband. I’ve long wished to live in a land where the chile was indigenous. Now I do.

I’ve been scoping out the best chile roasters and am delighted to find that Heini’s, the produce stand I discovered on my first provisioning foray, rates as one of the very best. The permanent fireworks stands and Spanish language tax preparers’ parking lots along Federal Boulevard, especially down South nearer I-25, also feature prominently in the guides. These are neighborhoods normally shunned by proper Denverians, but not during Hatch chile season.

You buy ‘em by the bushel and they thrown ‘em into a hamster cage contraption that turns above propane burners.
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OnManifesting

template
As The Muse and I returned from our morning spent measuring room dimensions and overseeing inspections at what we’re prematurely referring to as The New House, I mentioned that I sure am glad that I couldn’t have imagined the place we found to live here. My experience once again proved inadequate to support the kind of envisioning traditional New Agers of the manifesting class espouse. Like most people, my expectations have been completely prejudiced by my experience, so they couldn’t possibly have contributed to foreseeing any but the serendipitous kind, and the Western extents of greater Denver, Colorado seem unique enough to prevent stumbling upon any place alike enough to more than vaguely remind me of any familiar place.

We searched in vain. We were creating our own experience, I guess, frustrating ourselves by holding up our template for what we were looking for and finding only poor comparisons. The ceilings were universally too low, creating cave-like crawl-space halls and suffocating living rooms. I began to walk around with hunched shoulders, expecting to get stuck in some narrow doorframe. ‘House too small, yard to big’ almost became a mantra for these two piss poor monks meditating on the fundamental injustice of this world. We felt locked out. When had we lost the key?

We never had any key to any future, just one to a fondly-remembered past. Looking for then in the here and now might qualify as a lifestyle for us aging boomers, but it’s really no way to live: Looking for life in all the wrong places. For
then got all the goody sucked out of it on the way to now. Nothing but desiccation and a slowly evaporating puddle left behind.
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Today

pointyend
Today’s the day, the pointy end of time. I’ve kinda been avoiding it. Way back when yesterday was today, I felt the clear distance between then and now, but now that today’s arrived, I feel only immediacy. Now really is now.

It’s not like I haven’t been living in increasing anticipation of today, but I feel like a virgin in a biker bar here. I’ve heard an awful lot about today, I’ve even written some more or less authoritative pieces on the subject, but never experienced a minute of it until I woke up just now. Deflection doesn’t seem to work here because there will be no tomorrow for resolution. It’s now or never. (I wonder if today will be one of those days where only hackneyed metaphors work.)
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Disappearing

menial
My invisibility astounds me. This lovely big old house contained me well. Sure, it quite easily and naturally kept the inside in, but it also served as a sort of fortress to keep the outside out. Now even that defensive barrier’s crumbling. The outside first started seeping in. Now it swamps the place.I wade through narrow aisles between impossible stacks of boxes. How could these few shelves and cabinets contain all of that? I declared my desk a safe zone. Nobody touch nothing on my desk. It’s now piled high with untouchables, but not for very much longer. Today, the possessions I retain control over will shrink to fill the usual suitcase and computer bag, and a box or two of otherwise unmovables, as if packed for a week’s trip rather than an indefinite journey.

The packers delight in their work as only menial laborers can. The more cerebral and physical professionals seem to lose a dimension or two when they engage. The menial laborer, the clever ones, find extra parts of themselves there. These four absolutely delightful women, two moms and their daughters, took off their shoes and got down to work. Yes, they prefer to work barefoot. Unashamedly. They engage in endless chiding, genuine laughter infuses their effort with warm meaning. While The Muse and I tried, and even took pride in how well we’d prepared for their arrival, their job entails little more than ordering our disorder, which seems to be the primary element common to all menial labor.
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Greasy

renderedfat
Around the middle of the week following creation, day ten or eleven, God created grease. He was by then bored with the whole idea of creating anything even remotely resembling his image, having already finished a freak book full of variations on that theme, so he went all radical on himself and produced something volatile and certain to goad even the pious into taking his name in vain.

Great big gobs of greasy, grimy gopher guts resulted. Schmaltz traces its heritage to that latter day variation, too. So does my kitchen. So does yours. Imagine a substance that repels water, the freaking liquid of life. Oh, it also attracts lint and odd bits of cat fur, and dirt, and the odd bug carcass. Clearly, grease ain’t looking for an invite to my table, or should not be. He doesn’t need to beg or plead for an invitation, though, because I voluntarily escort him into my kitchen, shake him up a martini, then let him have his way with me.
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Why Project Community?

TrueNorthTransparent1X2
I’ve been considering the work I’ve done, the work I understand. This piece might best explain what my workshop entails.

The Industrial Revolution brought with it some unintended consequences. We learned to structure work around teams, but alienated our broader communities. We learned to manage work by decomposing objectives into tasks and processes, but trivialized the very craftspeople we need to actually accomplish anything. We learned how to control execution, but at the cost of a deeper sense of discernible value. We could deduce one right, most efficient way, but lost sight of our purpose.

The Industrial Revolution also brought with it what Peter Drucker claimed was the single most profound innovation of the twentieth century, the professional manager. As organizations have flattened, the fiefdoms which justified the manager's role are disappearing, replaced by social networks more agile than formal departments and divisions. Most of the work accomplished by modern organizations is accomplished cross-functionally, by individuals mustered for the duration of an individual effort and endlessly reconfigured until people identify much more strongly with their current assignment's community than with any permanent manager, department, division, or company.
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ChangingStory1.20-PassingOn

passion
Much of the stuff published in newspapers lacks passion. Sure, there’s ample theatricality, that studied intensity every theatergoer knows well, but little passion. I suppose passion counts as somehow unprofessional, ignoring reason and accepted logic that passes for well-formed commentary. The alternatives to passion read about as flat as a printed page, rarely elevating spirit, though sometimes awakening ire. Ire seems a poor substitute for passion.

Passion doesn’t guarantee cogency. Communicating coherently with passion, that’s one of those teenager poet dilemmas: those who feel as though they can pull it off, can’t. Like with love, deliberation ruins it. A certain kind of unconsciousness informed by considerable prior failed effort might be all that’s required, but that’s a lot. Slip over here for more ...

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ChangingStory1.19-PDTD

test2
It’s the middle of the night and I’m up writing, once again chased from fitful sleep by a bad dream. I’ll piddle around for an hour or two and maybe get back to bed before morning, I never know. This nightmare was a real bad one; no zombies or chainsaws, but real life events. I was taking a test.

Maybe I should call this Post Dramatic Test Disorder. Up until my seventh grade French class, I was fine with tests. I was considered one of the brighter ones, even segregated into a special gifted program; an active, enthusiastic learner. My experience in French class first exposed me to a regime of continuous testing, where the teacher, ensconced in a booth in the front of the room, listened in as students fumbled their way through their first attempt at foreign anything. I performed abysmally. There was no succeeding, only endless testing. Slip over here for more ...

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ChangingStory1.18-CultureChains

chains1
Engage with any consultant and you’re likely to learn that your organization needs a culture change. Culture grows rotten over time? Either a union’s insidiously trying to get more for less, or management’s playing that game; opposing parties stalemated pursuing the same end. Perhaps the organization’s moral compass’s gone haywire due to executive avarice. Maybe safety slipped down to Job #2 or #3 from its prescribed Job #1position. The possibilities seem endless. Pick your favorite reason, then get down to changing.

I can’t pick up The Washington Post without stumbling into waves of culture change recommendations: Congress “needs a culture change,” so does Metro, and The Pentagon, not to mention (which means I’m mentioning) the IRS, The DOE, DHS, and, of course, The State Department. Private companies, public organizations, even non-profits, seem in dire need of this most curious kind of change; or so say the editorial boards, attorneys general, independent watchdogs, blue ribbon committees, and every freaking inspector general in the DMV. Slip over here for more ...

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ChangingStory1.17-Housme

IMG_0512
We didn’t lose the place in The Great Dismemberment and Exile, when what was once our home, the center of our universe, turned into a house again. Our fond recollections romanticized the half-repainted place considerably. The first renters did more damage than good.

Three years ago, I returned to finish painting the outside, a six week epic obsession that enlisted family and friends. Last summer, I returned again, digging over the yard. This month, The Muse and I returned to find a bathroom needing replacing just as Spring pruning ached for attention. Both of the last two visits came under the guise of caring for our granddaughter, whom we call The Grand Other, while her folks dealt with her older brother’s extended illness, but that house, once our home, featured prominently, perhaps predominantly. Slip over here for more ...

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ChangingStory1.16-AnotherPlanet

waygate_to_the_multiverse_by_nitro912gr-d33ivir
I subscribe to the unlikely notion of parallel universes, though with a slight twist from the standard theory. In my multiverse, each unique world exists in the same physical space; not overlaid or merely adjacent, but completely co-equal, separated only by perspective. In my multiverse, the person standing next to me in the grocery line occupies a wholly distinct universe. We share nothing except the occasional illusion of sharing experiences.

My multiverse gets ramped up when I’m away from home. Home might be where my heart receives mail deliveries, but my feet are free to wander pretty much anywhere. Away from home, I experience more prominent sensations of inhabiting a multiverse. Out there, I less successfully anticipate other perspectives, and my tacit presumptions often surprise me. My sense of level, fair, decent, and normal strain before cascading alternative perspectives I could not have possibly ever imagined before encountering them, though I’m certain I will never understand any of them. Slip over here for more ...

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ChangingStory1.15-ShThFuUp

439px-SHUT_UP^_NAME,_RANK,_SERIAL_NO._ONLY^_-_NARA_-_515415
My inbox overfloweth. So doth mine Facebook stream, Twitter feed, LinkedIn thread, Google+ queue, Pheed feed, newspaper, and neighborhood listserv. They swell with advice, people telling other people what to do, what the sender sincerely believes others should do/ think/ feel/ believe/ support. On rare occasions, someone will broadcast some personal insight, something they’ve personally decided to do without anyone else exhorting them. These bring sweet respite to the fetid wind that seems to otherwise blow nobody any real good.

I’ve been looking for any concrete evidence that telling anyone what they really should otta do in any way results in them following these instructions. I’m concluding that these exhortations might be for the sole purpose of feeding the exhorter and nobody else. Like the street corner screaming preacher, nobody pretending to be invisible as they slink by ever finds Jesus on their way past, though the preacher sure seems to. Perhaps the very form of the injunction shuts down the ability to follow the advice, or, I think more likely, telling just does not work. Slip over here for more ...

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ChangingStory1.14-Mis-formed

mis-formed
I seem to possess the superpower that enables me to mangle any form. Give me even a smallish index card-sized one, and I will quite reliably find myself unable to fit something into one, often several, of the handy boxes provided to contain information. I sometimes start on the wrong line, uncertain if the label hangs over or under the space provided, entering my name into the first address line. I run out of room by the bottom of the form or have a line leftover.

I score no better when completing surveys. Many forget to include a ‘none of the above’ choice, and most seem to insist upon an answer, however irrelevant my forced response might be. Slip over here for more ...

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ChangingStory1.13-InTeGrationDay

13thDay
On the thirteenth day of Christmas,
my true love gave to me
the challenge of integrating
all the
cra ... er ... gifts she’d given to me.
The partridge, we’d long before roasted,
with a plum sauce en souffle.
The turtle doves still cooing,
day and night ... and every blessed day.
The three French hens are found out moping in the yard
after learning we didn’t much care for Heloise or Abelard.
The calling birds lost their cell plans, they say,
for overrunning their data cap in little more than a day.
I’ve now got rings on every finger
of what used to be a functioning hand,
as well as an especially ungainly one
on that adjacent thumb.
As of this morning, I count a full six dozen goose eggs,
with no end to the laying in sight.
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ChangingStory1.12-CantDo

cantaloupe
Some days I awaken obsessing about all I can’t do, recounting my innumerable failures to learn to do even the seemingly simple activities everyone else engages in without even thinking about them. For these, I remain the eternal rookie. No amount of repetition ever yielded mastery of these, and, truth told, I hardly hold out for any noticeable improvement now, having apparently already forfeited any possibility for improvement, radical or even small.

I consider myself a decent driver, but I should admit that I’ve not yet learned how to drive on freeways, beltways, turnpikes, or thruways. These are white-knuckle immersions for me, exhausting and terrifying. I suppose my experience stems from never having learned to pass on the right or change lanes without signaling, sprinkled with a deep aversion to driving fifteen miles per hour over the posted speed limit while riding the bumper of the car directly in front of me. I see the masters sanguinely engage in these apparently death-defying stunts, and feel bushwhacked every time. From on-ramp to off-ramp, I experience endless alarming surprises, as cars appear just where I never expected they would; without warning, without apparent strategy, other than to pass everything currently ahead of them; as if they were engaged in some kind of competition. Slip over here for more ...

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ChangingStory1.10-NeverAgain

neveragain
Somewhere along about the Industrial Revolution, a subtle shift started in the kitchen. Before, it might have just been taken for granted that each meal would be unique. After, that each might properly aspire to become a replication. Cookbooks became books expressly not for cooks, but books for people who aspired to become chefs, and the purpose of cooking shifted a tiny bit away from creation into replication.

Before, Lord only knew what supper would be cooked on. After, every home featured a little industrial facility complete with gauged surfaces and uniform measures. There became right and wrong ways for employing this machinery. Recipes took over while intuition and craft fell ever further out of favor. Great grandma might have thrived on a pinch of this and that, but we now measure much more precisely, and what started as a small revolution eventually forfeited the very soul of our heritage. Slip over here for more ...

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ChangingStory1.9-WickedWhich

which
I despise Big Box stores. They scare me with their over-sized Elizabeth Ann shopping carts and maps purporting to show the location of everything. Saturday, The Muse and I entered one, looking for a simple household appliance, and ended up wandering over most of the floor plan before we discovered that the map had been mounted sideways, and we found someone who could tell us that they displayed this particular household appliance, not in the household appliance department, but on a different floor, next to the toilet paper department. Yes, they had a toilet paper department. Slip over here for more ...
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ChangingStory1.8-Self-eek

sepiame
Whatever the product or service might pose as, it’s always self on offer. The content gains little traction and seems transparent. They buy the person, the personality, never the product. This can’t quite amount to a clever branding strategy, either, since brand separates person from product, replacing self with some vacuous avatar. Marketing mostly fails because it’s also not about the (notional) market, but about self; present self, self in service rather than selfless servitude.

Despite what they insisted when I was in business school, connections occur by accident, never by clever strategy. Strategy might be the sole property of those who do not need it and could never use it, but feel compelled, perhaps for appearance’s sake, to look as if they could command manifestation. This observation might seem cynical rather than simple truth or even simpler experience. When they ask after my strategy for marketing the book, I feel ashamed, as if I really should have a strategy already or must immediately stop writing, stop creating, stop being that self I know so well, and start crafting what my experience understands could never positively effect anything. Then I go looking for my self again. Slip over here for more ...

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ChangingStory1.7-Parody

oops1
P. G. Wodehouse wrote parodies. Bertie Wooster would try to pull some fast one which invariably backfired. Jeeves eventually bailed him out, but only after making sure that Bertie would get bitten a bit, but never really badly enough to dissuade from further misbegotten adventures.

I seem to create my own parodies, with The Muse playing Jeeves to my Wooster. The key to great parody might be the simple, completely human act of failing to hide something from someone else. The Wooster in me presumes he’s a lot smarter than he could possibly be, and that everyone else must be a whole lot dumber than they’re really likely to be. The result reliably produces parody. Slip over here for more ...

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ChangingStory1.6-Data

data
The way we proudly proclaim that we’re driven, you’d think we were cars or wagons, or maybe sheep. Driven to success does not, apparently, mean your mommy drops you off at the 7-11 so you can buy that Powerball® ticket. Executives insist that they drive performance, managers get held accountable for driving results, while individual contributors, the ones actually performing and producing, I guess they at least get a lift out of this.

The admission that data drives stopped being evidence of impotence about the time computers took to the desk top and Excel made everyone feel like real, live database managers. The following wireless revolution turned every action into some form of data to be sorted, sifted, stored, then mined. If you can’t measure it, they say you can’t manage it, but that’s no longer enough. Now, measures must be backed up with data because, contrary to what executives and managers proclaim, data’s really driving. Slip over here for more ...

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ChangingStory1.5-Testing

testing-testing-123
Since I was in the seventh grade, my story has included a chapter explaining how I don’t test well. In seventh grade, I learned how to perform poorly on tests. Before then, I seemed to posses that innate ability The Muse still exhibits: I could pass most any exam I took. Since then, exam success has seemed more crap shoot than skill-related, a random event unrelated to what I know. I suppose my current state springs from my exposure to the French language, for which, like all languages foreign and domestic, I had little aptitude. Later, of course, this budding ability migrated into math, then most every subject.

I could be excused for thinking I was somehow growing dumber with each passing year, and I remain grateful for that high school guidance counsellor who headed off deeper discouragement by convincing me that I was not, as he phrased it, “college material.” I most certainly was not, and perhaps most persuasively because I then, much more than now, believed that the purpose of testing might probably be to assess my level of retained knowledge, whatever that means. The Muse insists that she can pass most any test, and always could, because she somehow figured out that testing could never say much about who she is or what she knows, but might instead assess how skillfully she navigates that alien environment, one almost completely unlike the real, lived world, where right and wrong answers exist, like some prehistoric bug suspended in amber. Maybe she’s just a good guesser, but I don’t think so. Slip over here for more ...

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ChangingStory1.4-AdaptAbility

multitool
I feel about as adaptAble as the typical stone. I might hail from some native stream bed, but I could find myself anywhere: sidewalk, lawn, kitchen sink, inside some shoe. I suppose my very presence suggests some sort of native adaptAbility—I mean, I AM there, after all—but I feel more natively alien there than just another homebody. I feel like the resident sore thumb.

I stay on guard, watchful, uncertain of the local customs. I suppose I plot and plan, developing contingencies before engaging, because I really don’t know, can’t anticipate how even the most otherwise pedestrian excursion might turn out. Consequently, I seem more shadow than substance. Slip over here for more ...

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ChangingStory1.3-DayOne

DayOne
I calibrate each year twice, on New Years and on my birthday. Though nobody drops any lighted balls in Time Square in mid-August, my birthday feels the more significant milestone point. New Year seems to be one of those generally agreed upon celebrations, like George Washington’s perennially Monday birthday, which consensus set for the convenience of long weekend Federal employees rather than to denote any real event. I have documentary evidence that I was, indeed, born on the nineteenth of August, on a kitchen table in a country doctor’s house that served as the hospital in a tiny Eastern Oregon town.

Those comprise the facts. The rest of my beginnings might be no more than myth, for every human’s early life comes shrouded in the proud if unreliable testimony of sleep-deprived parents and siblings too young to remember with any clarity. A new child suspends history for a few years. No matter how carefully anyone might try to chronicle the baby steps, most of them will go unobserved by anyone but the child, and he will not yet have become entrained in the curious art of observation, and merely experiences without jotting even a memory for future reference. Slip over here for more ...

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ChangingStory1.2-Observing

observe
Jerry Weinberg used to insist that non-fiction must be a fictional notion, since all writing gets filtered through a writer first. Some so-called non-fiction seems more self-reflective than others, and perhaps this observation supports his point. Few authors, I suspect, ever get through to the bottom of writing anything without stumbling upon an unexpected, sometimes unwanted participant: self.

Likewise, Cyberneticist Heintz Von Foerster insisted that objectivity qualifies as a delusion that one could have an observation without the trouble of including an observer. The presence of an observer engaging in the observation nudges the notion of objectivity nearer the subjective end of the scale, a relative value rendered in rather definite terms. Since no observer can be certain of just how they filter what they report they observe, we might just be better off remembering Weinberg’s Insistence: non-fiction can’t exist. Slip over here for more ...

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ChangingStory1.1-Dewing

dewing
I suppose every writer lives in an echo chamber, a place where the primary dialogue unfolds while words appear. The echos sometimes deafen to the point that the writer cannot quite comprehend what’s appearing on the page, as if reading while a background radio’s playing way too loud. The words on the screen seem impenetrable then. The story, lost in inept translation.

For me, writing’s best attempted early in the morning, well before the sun comes up, before the sound of speeding Metro trains starts chewing up the solitude. If I’m up and doing in the wee hours, I might be almost accomplishing something. My head, which never seems to completely shut down even during sleep, seems most manageable then; most malleable, too. Words flow, meanings emerge, I feel my own presence. Slip over here for more ...

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ChangingStory1.0-Catching

catch1
I’d grown tired of my story long before I caught myself repeating it. I’d felt my enthusiasm fleeing whenever I mentioned the unfinished book, not initially noticing the connection. One can apparently repeat some actions over and over and over, without noticing. Then I caught myself simply being myself, and blushed. The second time I caught myself, I began to understand the source of my shame.

My story seemed even to me to have grown into an excuse rather than an adventure, an explanation which could not possibly impart understanding. If it baffled me, how could it do any better with anyone else? My words and my music had fallen out of synch; I kept right on singing. Slip over here for more ...

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SpliceOfLife1.21-Seamless

hillofbeans
I’ve hung enough wallpaper to understand that seamlessness qualifies as no more than a relative term, one of many haranguing me these days. Each declares itself by what it is not, dogs whose sole distinguishing characteristic seems to be the absence of barking. Be wary of the dog that never barks, as if you’d ever know it was there.

With wallpaper, seamlessness means one cannot easily discern where the seam might be, but it’s an optical illusion; one built upon both clever design and skillful application. Look closer, though, and you won’t miss them, for they are there. Slip over here for more ...

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SpiceOfLife1.20-Bi-Bye

bi-coastal
Because our relocation to the East Coast was kinda forced, we never divorced the left coast when we moved back here. That change left ragged liaments from our former rooting which encouraged us to feel exiled for the longest time. We decided last New Years, by fiat, to declare the exile over, but the connections remain. My excursion back into that space only re-encouraged those connections.

One should never revisit the scene of any crime or blessed event, lest the witnesses implicate you. They were there. Though you might strenuously deny your presence, they’ll have you out, and your credibility should plummet. But I didn’t deny my presence, I more than implicated myself. I explicated myself, kimono wagging in even that slight breeze. I’m exposed as a principle. I have no credible defense Slip over here for more ...

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