Waiting out the storm

When yesterday's big storm broke out I was inside Costco. My umbrella and rain jacket (?) were cleverly stashed in my truck a hundred yards away so I decided to wait for the rain to let up a little before making a dash. That was about 5 PM. Ten minutes later I went back inside for a berry smoothy and then took my post.

People came and went. Or tried to. It was a carnival of humanity with our best and worst traits on display.

People offered umbrellas to strangers. People ignored the Costco employees trying to make direct the chaotic flow of people, carts and cars. Some laughed and shrugged, some fumed and yelled at their kids. In general, the more expensive the car the worse the driver behaved.

A doofus in a big land crusher of some sort first practically drove through the doors, then he backed into a line of shopping carts being wheeled back to the store and without bothering to look raced of into the downpour.

My camera's battery was almost dead when I arrived, but here's a patched together minute from the 45 minutes I spent waiting.

Tall

Behold this year's sunflower crop.

Right as it went on the market, our house's previous owner planted the tallest sunflowers he could find. As to why, I can only speculate. Whimsy, madness, maybe a childhood dream. If he was looking for seeds with growth potential, he succeeded.

When we arrived in town to take possession of the place three years ago, a storm had knocked down the tallest one, which was 14 feet if it was an inch. I dragged it out to the driveway, laid it by the garage and eventually chopped it into manageable pieces. ("Eventually" is a key concept in my approach to yardwork and indeed life.)

The rest remained to round out the season and drop their seeds. The next year the seeds came up and we let a few of them come up again. This is our third go round. The only downside to this annual ascent is the annual chopping. But eventually it gets done.

No liturgical calendar (even a wordless one like ours) is free of a time of reckoning. At the moment we're happily still on the rise.

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Update: The tall guy took a beating in Sunday's storms, but the bungee cord is holding.

Book taggers

Catching up on several KC blogs last weekend, I discovered that some of the kids are caught up in game of blogger tag - some would call it a meme - about books. Name a book that changed your life, book you've read more than once and so on. Nine questions in all, then you tag some other folks. I've enjoyed reading the results, mostly, and was glad not to have been tagged because I'd still be agonizing over my list.

Here are a few:
Emaw
Dan
Happy
Jessi

Joe's response to #7 ("Name one book you wish had never been written") took me back twenty years to my Survey of English Lit course.

I know Joe only through his blog and his Flickr stream but I've always admired his forthrightness and conviction and willingness to ask tough questions even of himself. So I'm guessing his answer to #7 ("I'm not like that") is actually a coy reference to John Milton's Areopagitica.

Back in the 1640s, the English Parliament had passed an order requiring all authors to submit their work to a board of censors before it could be published. The state was mostly trying to maintain its publishing monopoly but Milton thought it also amounted to the state control thought. So he wrote a defense of freedom of expression.

It's an issue that's still very much with us in these days of Net Neutrality and so-called moral so-called majorities. Just for laughs, here are a few salient bits, chewy syntax, upper-case gods, sexist pronouns and all, with thanks to Joe for the trip down memory lane.

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From Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing

...books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragons teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.

And yet on the other hand unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.

Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. It is true, no age can restore a life, whereof perhaps there is no great loss; and revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse.

We should be wary therefore what persecution we raise against the living labors of public men, how we spill that seasoned life of man preserved and stored up in books; since we see a kind of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom, and if it extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre, whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at that ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of reason itself, slays an immortality rather than a life.

Memes, myself and I

Sterling blogger Fred over at Bullseye Rooster took up one of those web-roving questionnaires recently. The challenge: Name five weird things about you.

Fred came across the weird things challenge from several other blogs. That's how this sort of meme-ish biz works: You read two friends' blogs and they read two friends' blogs and so on and so on... (extra points for anyone who can name that shampoo ad with one Google tied behind your back).

I enjoyed Fred's list, like I enjoy most anything he writes. That said, I don't think being irritated by Philip Glass's music makes you a snob. That seems to me more a sign of mental/emotional health and saying so probably makes me a snob of some variety. Here's a weird thing about the word snob: in England (according to Merriam-Webster) it refers to a cobbler. Or is that a weird thing about the British?

Five weird things about me:
1. I enjoy spending otherwise valuable time looking up the etymology of words on the Internet.

2. In entirely arbitrary circumstances, I think that words with the letter z in them are lucky.

3. I prefer to sit just to the left of center in a movie theater. On several occasions when I've had to sit on the right side of a movie theater, I've left with a headache (even when Philip Glass hadn't composed the film score).

4. My permanent teeth all came in straight except for one lower tooth.

5. I'm a little paranoid about people knowing about things like #4, so I'm not saying which tooth it is (although I did spend a considerable amount of clicks researching the exact name of said tooth and the etymology of said name).

6. I resent these kinds of questionnaires but can't resist filling them out. I have the same weakness when faced with a television screen in my peripheral vision or an easy pun (see title above). And once I get going I usually end up with more responses than the exercise requires.

Moving On: A Tale of Two Layoffs

This stern warning stands above one of the doors at the place I used to work. On July 28th, I turned in my employee badge and parking pass and this old sign took on a much more literal meaning. A couple days ago my severance check arrived in the mail, which makes my layoff complete.

I've only been laid off one other time, back in 2001 at the outwhooshing of whatever was inside what we've come to call the Dot-Com Bubble. Everything about that layoff was very dramatic. For one thing, I wasn't expecting to get laid off. I was the only person doing my job, after all. For another thing, I'd just arrived back in town after driving for almost 48 hours from San Francisco to Denver and back (a long and essentially pointless story), so I was sleep deprived and road loopy. I packed up my desk and went for a long boozy lunch with some co-workers at the Holding Company (somewhere there's a polaroid of me at the table wearing a big Dr. Seuss hat). That was followed by a nap and then more drinking that evening in the Financial District with the laid off contingent and sympathetic still-employeds. I awoke the next day with a huge hangover, few prospects and little motivation to look for any. It would be months before I worked at anything but freelance gigs. In my defense, I was also very occupied with getting the woman who is now my wife to move back to California from Tennesee (a long and profoundly essential story).

This time around, I saw the layoff coming and welcomed it like a dry and weary land (see KC Star, summer 2003, ad nauseum) welcomes rain. Instead of giving me my papers and showing me the door like civilized people, my most recent employer told me that I'd have to work through a 60-day transition period before the gift of severance would descend. Sixty days of counterproductive cubicle purgatory followed. Whatever. When the 60 days was up, I signed the necessary papers and headed over to my other part-time job (which I had before I even before I started the full time job in July 2005). That evening I had a drink and dinner with my wife at home. I've since found full-time work that I really enjoy and started doing it (another long story that's just begun).

This is the point where a writer worth his This American Life salt wraps things up in a neat little package: "I guess it all comes down to this..." You know the drill. Maybe something poetic: "Two layoffs, one lightning, the other a long twilight..."

I'll give it some thought. In the meantime, there's work to do.

Back in blog

With apologies to all three of my readers [Hi, Fred!], I'm back (hopefully) to blogging and reading blogs.

A recent job change has been soaking up most of my admittedly limited free mental space and in addition to just learning the new job, it requires waking up everyday by 4 a.m. and I'm one of those night people you've heard about. The good news is that the afternoon is full of naps.

Anyway, see you in the funny papers.

A Saturday goofball

The world's an increasingly scary place of late, what with wars and rumors of wars, climate change and crazy/sad/pathetic Mel Gibson. So today I offer this bauble: OK Go on Treadmills. Not only have the fellas crafted a peppy pop tune (infinitely more difficult than it seems) but they've also worked out a delicious one-take performance that could make even Buster Keaton crack a smile.

Imagine that: people working together...

Some summer re-reading

About ten years ago, I read Ursula Le Guin's novel The Left Hand of Darkness for the first time and really enjoyed it. When I really enjoy a book, I try to get around to re-reading it. The LHOD is set on the planet Gethen, also known as Winter since the planet is in the midst of a period of glacial expansion. And what better time to pick the book up again than in the middle of one of the hottest Julys on record?

The Left Hand of Darkness is the story of Genly Ai, a representative of the Ekumen, a galactic federation of planets. He is an Envoy whose solo mission is to bring Gethen into the Ekumen.

The Left Hand of Darkness is also the story of Estraven, the prime minister of Karhide, one of the major kingdoms on Gethen. Estraven is one of the few people in power to accept Genly Ai's mission and attempts to help Ai.

Ten years ago, I was most struck by the novel's examination of gender: Gethenians are all the same sex, which is to say that they possess both male and female sex organs and everyone on the planet is capable of bearing children. (There's no hot Gethenian-on-Gethenian action in the novel so pervs needn't bother.)

Reading LHOD this time around, what struck me was the political intrigue. Estraven is labeled a traitor and forced into exile by the ambitious Tibe, who preys on the fears of Karhide's insecure king. Tibe becomes prime minister and to confirm his place in power threatens war with the neighboring nation of Orgoreyn. All of this depends upon dramatic appeals for national unity.

The best fiction -- whether it has "science" or any other modifier in front of it -- holds up a truthful mirror to reality. I couldn't help but think of things going on in our own planet when I read the following passage. Genly Ai suggests that Estraven hates Orgoreyn.

"How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in the autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; Is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one mustn't make a virtue of it, or a profession. Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope."

Ignorant in the Handdara* sense: to ignore the abstraction, to hold fast to the thing. There was in this attitude something feminine, a refusal of the abstract, the ideal, a submissiveness to the given, which rather displeased me.

Yet he added, scrupulous, "A man who doesn't detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such as thing as a good government on earth, it would be a great joy to serve it."

* a mystical Zen-like order that Estraven trained in as a young man.

Prepare to Meet Thy God

Exit 95, east of Little Sioux, Harrison County, Iowa

And if thy god is not at the off-ramp
When thou makest thine exit,
Fear not: Thy god shall find thee.

Look not for thy god in the abandoned Stucky's.
Thy god may be counting sparrows in the hills
or suckling fox kits in a ditch.
Your god's child is circling high above
and the Spirit rustles through the corn.

No preparation is ever wasted,
even if thy god should smite thee.
No person seeking is ever lost.

Have faith: thy god will surely find thee.
Prepare.