Flatland

It's been a long time since I paid any attention to flatworms. The only worms I think about on a regular (irregular) basis are earthworms, and only when I see them committing suicide on rainy days. Which is an interesting practice, if mystifying, but probably not indicative of their fascinating existences.

Planaria are flatworms, and at one point I knew that, probably for several years after I took high-school biology, but at some point I forgot and just vaguely knew that they were critters that one studied in biology, under a microscope or in a textbook. When I was a freshman in college I drew an amusing little cartoon on the wall of a "disco planarian", referring to the Good Rats song, "Papa Poppa". Well, we were drunk a lot of the time. Now I feel bad that someone had to repaint that wall.

What I drew was a bonafide planarian; so I knew then what I don't know now. He even had a set of charming cilia ("Freds", in our collegiate parlance).

I knew a lot of things then which I don't know now, but I was also a pain in the ass. I suppose I still am, but I don't care much. I do care that I don't know anything about worms any more, though. Something to study upon for next year.

Rocky

I was walking through the Furniture tent when I first saw Rocky. I didn't know her name yet; as a matter of fact, I didn't know her name until a few days ago. Of course I noticed her because her demure, downcast look was all at odds with her revealing attire. In ancient Rhodes, they might have called her outfit "slutty" (the Greek equivalent), but in modern times, "revealing" will do.

I looked for her every time I went into the tent thereafter; I admitted to Dawn that I longed to take her home with me. She encouraged me. Dawn just wants me to be happy. So finally I made the necessary arrangements, and Rocky came home with me. She hasn't left the house since.

Did I mention that Rocky is less than two feet tall? And a bit pale and monochrome. She's made of plaster and I love her.

My Christmas tree is also less than two feet tall, even with the Tweety topper, and I decided that both would look more to scale if I let them be together. Then, when I saw them together, Rocky got her name: Rocky around the Christmas tree.

Rocky

Dollhouse

This is the part of my job I enjoy the most. It's four o'clock on a Sunday afternoon and no one is here but me. That's not quite true; the organist is in the church practicing her Christmas Eve music and I am on the other side of the wall, sitting at a computer and processing digital files of past Sundays' worship services. Luckily I don't have to listen to them, and I can listen to her play, instead.

It's starting to get dark out and it looks like winter out there: clear and calm and cold. It looks cold, colder than it really is, but it's the season for cold-looking days. I have set up all of the candles and put Harry's sculptures in front of the communion table, warm wood carvings of the Virgin and child, Joseph, the shepherds, and the three kings. Who, of course, weren't there at the birth; for years the magi were on the window ledge by the front doors on their way to Bethlehem, now they're on the floor with the rest of the gang

Harry, the sculptor, died a few days before Christmas last year, and his wife followed earlier this year. It used to be that the high point of my Christmas season was to hop into Harry's convertible and drive over to their house to pick up the art. Harry was over eighty, and the house was pushing two fifty. The house was knocked down and replaced with some lumpish megahomes.

I like his sculptures. They're not masterpieces, but they have their own integrity, they're brave, and strong, and true. They strive, they yearn, they seek. I wish the Christians I saw around here were more like them. So, me and the art and the music: peace on earth. For a little while.

Down

Maybe the past is beneath us, not behind. Most of it is buried, but it remains the foundation upon which we  depend and manifest our daily lives. So memory is like a well, look down and you don't see much of anything past the first few feet, but drop a stone into it and you hear the far-off plunk; and if you lower your bucket you can bring up, with effort, a little of the cold, clear matter that's hidden there.

Of course, every once in a while a chunk from out of the past drops out of a clear blue sky and clonks you on the head. So maybe the past is up and the future is down. I may have to send my metaphor back to the shop for some adjustment.

Crazy

A little while ago, I was spending a bit of the morning with the Fake Wife, and we got to talking of this and that. For some reason I told her that I believed that my shampoo was responsible for making me bald, and if I used a different brand all my hair would grow back. Then we moved on to talking about her Christmas trees or something.

I don't believe that my shampoo made me bald. She doesn't believe that I believe that (I hope). And I don't have the kind of brand loyalty it would take to accumulate evidence to support or contradict the proposition that particular soaps and detergents have any impact on hair growth. But I do say stuff like that once in a while.

But the conversation returned to memory while I was washing what's left of my hair while I was in the shower. I don't wash my hair anywhere else, that would be crazy. And I realized that I don't really worry at all about being crazy, but I do worry a little bit from time to time about seeming to be crazy. Not much, but probably enough to keep me somewhat in line.

One of the characteristics I see in the genuinely crazy people, though, is their indifference to this. They are often aware that what they're doing looks or sounds crazy, but they don't care; and I have to say that they seem strangely liberated by the fact. Concern for social reputation is a bit of a burden, it's true, and the crazies have rid themselves of that baggage.

Conversely, I tend to be more concerned with being smart than looking smart, which in a way makes smart the anti-crazy. Of course, it's pretty hard to get, and keep, a reputation for being smart, but pretty easy to get, and keep, a reputation for being crazy.

Not Fade Away

In the fall of 1927, my mother started elementary school in North Philadelphia; my dad, in Cedar Rapids, didn't go to school until the following year. She has been dead for fifteen years now, and he turned 89 last week. 1927 was a long time ago, by most measures; there wasn't any Super Bowl or professional basketball. Bing Crosby and Rudy Vallee weren't yet household names. The Miss America pageant and the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade were brand new events. A long time ago, and even if my parents had lived in Bath, Michigan, they wouldn't have been in its Consolidated School that May, when the national tradition we continued this weekend began, the tradition of the school massacre.

I've never been to Bath; I couldn't find it on a map. But I have thought about it a lot, thought about the weight of grief that time still can't have lifted off that town. The people of Bath were united in mourning, a terrible thing to unite people, but I imagine everyone eventually went off to mourn alone, after a time, and one by one they all were gone, too, like their children. And what was left was a certain notorious distinction the crime lent to their community, until enough time had passed for it to become a bit hazy and almost unreal.

It was real, though, and there is probably still grief in Bath, eighty-five years later, and that's one of the many things that makes me sad about Newtown. There are a lot of years left in this century, and they'll all be taken up in the slow business of what we call healing in these situations. We call it healing, but it isn't healing, there is no healing; there's only learning to tolerate the pain.

Sideways

We had the office holiday party this week, and, though it was a pretty grim affair has the potential to get even worse in years to come. One of the few beams of light in the thing was the fact that, in the gift exchange, I ended up with a bottle of wine. We are gradually transitioning from a workplace where the normative gift is sweet to one where it is psychoactive; this year there were four bottles of wine offered which is a record.

We are a church, though, so you have to be careful about grabbing for the booze too fast. On the other hand, you don't want to be all judgmental and sneer at the stuff. Your attitude has to be: I'm not much of a drinker, myself, but I don't actually disapprove of it either.

How many of us that is actually true of, I wonder.

Coherence

For the first time I am using my phone to write my entries for Holidailies. The results are amusing, at least to me. In particular, I am using an Android phone, Blogger, an app called Blogaway, and Swype. So, unexpected words are turning up ("coherence"?), I can't save drafts or edit effectively, and I have to go online conventionally in order to link the entry to the portal.

Which results in a loss of, well, coherence, never my strong suit anyway, and the entries are shorter than ever. But blog entries are the opposite of passwords: they gain strength with brevity. At least for me.

Let's see if this bastard will upload now.

The Good Scissors

I left the good scissors by the bathroom sink, and noticed that they are getting a bit rusty. I will have to be more careful with them; it doesn't seem like there are Good Scissors any more.

Maybe the pinnacle of scissor-making was fifty or a hundred years ago. It seems to me that the turning point was past with the introduction of plastic handles. Scissors have been nothing but trouble ever since.

Somewhere around here there is another pair of Good Scissors, sewing scissors that also cut straight and sure. I wish I could find them.

Mostly I admit that the past was as cheap and unpleasant as the future promises to be, but they knew how to make scissors. And toenail clippers. Archaeologists of the future will wonder how they did it, when their technology mostly consisted of tinny sounding, crappy transistor radios and appliances painted unpleasant colors. Mysteries of the ancients.

Under

It was almost two weeks after the storm before I had a chance to walk around Evergreen Cemetery. I heard later on that twenty two trees had fallen, and I wasn't surprised. They were big trees, most of them at least a hundred feet tall, ten feet around at the base, all twisted and broken off or ripped out of the ground by the roots.

I took my time walking around, another little bit of disaster tourism. I got in the hole left by one of the root balls, I climbed over and under the trunks, found the secret rooms bounded by the trunks and wallpapered by the branches. It was a beautiful afternoon, clear and calm, the sky an uninterrupted sheet of blue.

This was not the end of days. No graves opened up and belcher out their occupants, blinking in amazement at a new heaven and a new earth, cowering in anticipation of the wrath to come. The dead slept on, undisturbed by the noisy party held by the inconsiderate neighbors upstairs, indifferent to the mess left behind. It was a scandal and a reproach only to the living, who did their best, later on, to restore the graveyard to a condition of order, and hide the evidence of nature's unruly misbehavior.

But, no surgery without scars, and I like the cemetery all the better for them. And the residents aren't complaining. Of course, they never do.

Over

It is a nice place to be. I wish you were here.

Let's imagine we are just a little bit above this place, maybe in a hot air balloon, looking down from the air, or, better yet, having an out-of, body experience, floating over a flaring world. Close enough to see the details, far enough to hide the pain.

It's very green, isn't it? Even so late in the year. The houses are charming, many of them, and the hideous ones are all sequestered together, along broad, meandering streets.

There are fields and forests, swamps and ridges, rivers and lakes, just siting there, looking nice. Long ago most of it was under cultivation, and there was no room for forests our swamps to sit, looking pretty. Now we have pretty nature, to fill the spaces between our bedrooms.

Nearby we have our pretty stores, our pretty gas stations, our pretty dumps full of pretty refuse. Not so pretty from above, maybe, but better than those hideous houses. A church, a school, a park, soccer fields stretching to the horizon, and beyond.

And beyond: the twin ribbons of highway stealing away, and the pretty cars speeding along them, seeking the promise yet unseen, but hoped for. Or just going to work, or the mall. Nice, though.

99 Excuses

It's only the second day of Holidailies, and I've already stalled out. I'd call it writer's block, but I'm not enough of a writer to merit the term. Just loss of momentum, lack of discipline, or just plain missing the wave.

I got up this morning with a good idea for a post; actually a title that had the potential to become an acceptable post. 99 Minutes: and I thought, as I was going through my morning routine, that I could recount the first ninety-nine minutes of my day. (I'm pretty sure I did something practically the same last year, or the year before, but whatever.) So far, so good. And I had a pretty good time this morning, noticing what was happening and thinking of amusing ways to describe it all. (Not much, and not very.) I started writing it up.

Then work intervened, and by the time I had leisure to write again, the wave had broke without me. So instead, I wrote this. Hooray for me.

How To Be New

By the time I got home the other day, the snow had melted enough that the flag stones in front of the door were clear. On one rested a pale green ribbon, a gentle curl warmed by the mild sunlight. The residue of a life changed, a biological palimpsest, in short, a snakeskin.

Last summer I was relaying the flags and unroofed the house of two garter snakes. If they were angry at me for displacing them they never said a word, but just slipped coolly further into their nest. Leaving their revenge for another day, and that day came.

No worse pick than to handle a snakeskin, everyone knows that, so I let it lay. Each morning, each evening it confronted me, it mocked me; some day, it said, you'll touch us and be infected with our bad juju. But I was spared. Today the skin has disappeared.

But I am pensive. For the snake, change is easy, just drop your skin and make a new life in a new one. My bad luck is to be hampered by my old skin, the one I can't quite shed, no matter what comes. Maybe I should have touched the skin and accepted its curse. Maybe I did.

The Dharma Bums

I read it, I guess, when I was in the seventh or eighth grade, and I have no idea how I got hold of it, or why I decided to read it. Probably Kerouac was one of the authors featured in the publisher's promotional material in the backs of the other books I read in those days, or he was getting an endorsement from one of my bookish friends. reading was a haphazard affair in those days.

...

Possibly I never read this book after all; I took a copy out of the library and nothing about it seems familiar. On the other hand, I know a minimal amount of trivia about On The Road, but I am pretty sure that is mere cultural leakage and not genuine familiarity. I remember an orange cover; did The Dharma Bums have an orange cover?

Whatever the truth (and we all know there is no truth), I probably stepped sideways into Kerouac, however briefly, because he bore a vague resemblance,at least in the eyes of publishers, to Richard Brautigan, whose books I read enthusiastically in those days.  A family resemblance, maybe second-cousinish.

Brautigan's The Abortion certainly had an orange cover. I have a copy on one of these shelves.

Burr

My recollection is that I read Burr voraciously forty years ago, and I am hard pressed to figure out why. Not that there's anything wrong with it. Today I find a competently written, intelligent, readable historical novel. The Jacksonian period is a good one, though not vividly portrayed; but the real appeal of the story is not in that time but in the Revolutionary reminiscences of iconoclastic, cynical Aaron Burr.

In the last few decades, I've read a lot of historical novels with iconoclastic, cynical protagonists, and a lot of them had much more verve and humor than Burr. Of course, the last few decades were a good season for iconoclasty and cynicism, in literature, history, and politics. Gore Vidal may deserve credit for putting his plow to the ground first, and coming up with a decent book.

From bygone days, I remembered only a couple of things about Burr; first, that Martin Van Buren was in it. Actually, talked about some, but not a major character. Second, that there was a surprise ending. I remembered the surprise by page two, and was surprised mainly by its irrelevance to the plot.

Introduction

I started this blog for a more specific purpose than usual. I have been a reader for about forty years now, forty years of reading books for adults. I read some of them then, as a teenager; occasionally I find myself reading the same books, or authors, again, now, as an aging but still immature man. I have noticed how my impressions have changed, and I started this blog to record them.

I doubt that I will manage to hold to this purpose, any more than I have to any other, but that's the idea.

I am currently reading Burr, by Gore Vidal, which I first read when it was a best seller, in 1974. In all the years from then to now, I have never had any inclination to read anything else by Vidal, or reread Burr.