Empty Face of A Twister

So one particularly wicked spring, in 1996, Bob Dole, running for the big P., was intoning platitudes a plenty, somewhere in America, entirely unaware that his words were perfectly syncopated with the rain... whoops!

The rain didn't care, however. It was falling with a regularity that gives certain months reputations, that for previous decades they had almost lost entirely. April of 1996.  It may not have rained every day.  But it certainly thunderstormed.  For about a month I drove my car to work on the farm and my smiling farmer friend, Chalmer, would sit there with a smile on his face looking up and out the window at the sky that could no longer torture him.  

"Might need the bushhog if this keeps up," he'd say in his Thorntown accent, which is in fact the way people in Zionsville used to talk, when it was actually in Indiana, not some virtuality of a bedroom community, populated with people dying to get back to Santa Barbara.

"Yeah, Chalmer," I'd say, "but then you'd be mowing for an hour, not seven."  

"Couple of hours," he'd say in that I'm being earnest, and about ready to laugh way that wasn't even an art to lose by my people.  

"Less than a six pack of beer, by far," I'd say.  

"Not for you, Wild-Man," he said, without hope of not laughing.

I joined him.

But things, in fact weren't so funny for me.  The rain meant no money.  Which was already something of a constant in the equation of my life.  This dead month of no work was a killer.  It was almost so bad, I'd have to get a job.  I was starting to feel a bit disoriented.  I usually really like this thunderstorm stuff.  Loved it, really.  One more thing to bandy about when I was feeling proud of the Midwest, my land, where I come from.  Thunderstorms!  Does London have real thunderstorms?  They probably think they do.  But come on.  Tornadoes?  Give me a break.  We're not in Tornado alley, here in Indiana, but man, we're so close, a few more people die than, let's just say, they'd like to.   In London, if they had Tornadoes, their famous Tower of London Crows might lose their apostolic succession.  Oh dear...

I love London (been there twice), but frankly, there is a thuderstorm plowing away, right this minute, outside my lovely window, and it sounds like what it is: pure mystery, a natural born liturgy for High Church of the Universe.  And... the only reason the Grendel of every big Supercell storm in Indiana: the occasional dozen Tornadoes that kill and maim what they find, isn't regarded as a natural born monster, is it's lack of regularity in form, size, and origin.  What monster could possibly be worse?  Only one with actual, readable, evil intention.  People will die this year or next, and the next, and the next.  The numbers are big, and scary.  But people never really freak.  For the truly honest monsters of our lives we lay as limp as a lamb in the jaws of a lion.  Despite our pride.

Hard not to kind of respect such an awful reality.  I have no choice really.  So for now, I love the screaming of the ionized air, as lighting three feet across just waltzes across flyover country, and I give my nod to the air from the Gulf of Mexico which is dumping that self same bodies water on my garden.  

What I couldn't of known back then, watching that water run down the windows of Chalmer's barn, like the balance of my checking account, was that the rain dropping on us wasn't living up to it's assigned metaphorical task of clean up duty.  No one's gonna get washed by this rain, in a sense.

And again, the reason is the Haber-Bosch Process

Blue Moon

When I was a kid, I, and this is really going to shock you, had a fairly active imagination.  You are probably thinking, either, well, I can certainly see that (the friendly patronizing voice.)  Then again you might be thinking the professorial, I'd love to know what you mean, Andy...

For me, it's a toss up between the two.  So I suppose I'll just deal with them both in order (I'm a predictable chump, with an active imagination.)  

Yeah, I am always saying in this blog how I am interested in everything.  Which is pretty self serving, since most folks would love to say such a thing, and it goes without saying that to actually come right out and say it, sounds either insecure (a real possibility) or conceited (having trouble with my vocab there...)

So I guess insecure wins!  So I'll try not to say it again.

On the subject of the active imagination being obvious from this Blog, I am not so sure, it really is that obvious, since, for example I am constantly wanting to say things, every day, and desiring to get across ideas, every time I do anything, and wishing to honor some of the fertile expanses of my past, and my colorful life, and basically completely failing.  In a manner you cannot even imagine.  I need a novel to get some of this crap across.  Though I feel that to be a crazy thing to begin just now, since before I write such a thing, I need to do a lot more research, and dredge a lot more stuff from my past up.  Like stuff from the the bad neighborhoods in Indy, and the truck stops where I used to hang out (just drinking coffee and reading and sleeping in my car, but still there were conversations with people that were fascinating).  Like the years I spent virtually alone working on a sort of hobby farm for a wonderful man, who grew up nicknamed "Patches" for the clothes him mother made for him.  Nobody calls him patches anymore, and yet the company of the admiring is something you can tell this man is not comfortable with.  Talk about a rock and a hard place.  But it's something people relate to.  

I could talk about the first time I saw a white shadow that was blue, on a white fence and realized my eyes were tricking me with colors.  With digital cameras and computers that is insanely easy to see, but I never did color photography lab work, and was, after all merely painting a fence.  The thing I kept thinking of when I noticed the white, turned blue in shadow, was the song, "Love Makes A Fool Of Us All," which aside from being both entirely true and false simultaneously (a sure sign of the meddling of God) has a line, 

"Morning blue shadows

Cross a room with clothes scattered

And a bed with two bodies entwined.

The one's that he's lied to

Aren't the one that he's tied to

And his own family, seldom crosses his mind."

The spectral usage of a kind of illuminating optics seemed to be on the mind of country writers a lot in the Seventies.  Then again Pink Floyd basically takes the cake, with their iconographic grade school science experiment as a design element.  So perhaps the country guys really are the bumpkins after all.  Though I doubt it.  Take these lines:

"Then one night he heard a sound,

And he laid his pencil down,

And traced it to the door and turned the handle...

And the pale light of the Moon,

Through the window of the room

Split the shadows where two bodies

Lay entangled."

That's from Kris Kristofferson's "Darby's Castle" about a man who lost his wife because he wanted to build a mansion instead of a McMansion.  Subtlety is an art.  

Perhaps with all these bodies lying around in a state of non linear order, all this music is telling us is that Twister had just arrived from Milton Bradley.  It wouldn't surprise me.  But that doesn't really change the significance of such lines to the dreamer and writer such as myself.  Even if something was written, "just because," I still wish to tangle my hands in its hair.  It's a mystery.

I Get Around (To The Haber-Bosch Process)

My Aunt Noon, who I wrote a somewhat lengthy ode to below, eventually left her Sugarbush Ridge home, and bought a small ten acre property, North East, over in Westfield, what would be swallowed by the wildfire of Carmel, Indiana.  While the surrounding territory around her farm was clickety clacking with the sound of generators and nail guns, all the dust and noise just blew right over the top of her property, a verdant spread, with a seriously park like atmosphere.  

The place had, by the owners before her, been run as a progressively diminishing horse farm.  It had started out, perhaps, as a fifty or one hundred acre property, and slowly, through the decades been parceled out, until finally, the ten acres stood, plaintively looking into the eyes of their owners, wondering, "How you gonna pave this, huh?"  The owners, as all must eventually, buckled to the sheer memory that those ten acres alone had produced (to say nothing of the rest.)  Eventually my lovely Aunt and smiling Uncle came along, and the fates straitened their dresses for something not indifferent to their nature.  Ca-ching!  

Actually it wasn't quite that easy.  But, do you really want to hear about it?

I'd rather tell you why they wanted to move there, other than the obvious pleasures of the pseudo rural life, three blocks from MCL Cafeteria.  As I indicated before my Aunt loves to garden, and by the way, my Uncle is quite the game partner in this crime against oblivion (gardening, of course...)  And so, the two of them as their big brick house began to empty, looked out each year at a forest that had the can do Yankee spirit that made our land the richest in history (before it was settled, even.)  They must have wondered outside of fire, what will ever yield us a yard that sunlight will settle on for more than a minute at a time?  Given the seven dwarve like chipper whistling of the trees all about them, a for sale sign was put up as quick as you might flick a Bic.

Now, do not be under the delusion that their yard at Sugarbush was anything but the most beautiful garden I have ever seen.  It certainly was.  They did things with verticality, and verdant, vertiginous three dimensional clumping and spacing of gigantic hostas and perennials (of every variety, provided they could handle a little sun.... a very little).  And don't forget the daylilly beds up at the top of the lane that had spread like glint in my Aunt's eye as she surveyed each space cut from the woods.  But honestly, every gardener who lives beneath something, dreads those words, FULL SUN.  It's as hard to achieve as the mountain top in the old time spiritual.  Unless you are in the middle of a field, or on a farm of some variety.  And many subdivisions are but houses plunked down upon a field.  So they have sun.  But my Aunt's subdivision, Sugarbush, was not like that, so to save the forest from her dreams, she sold that big brick house.

I could go on at some leisure, and with great pleasure describing to you how she planned meticulously the assault on that beautiful ten acre property, starting with planting many, many small plants on a different property, of a friend, and ending with an entire farm of daylillies, hostas and perennials.  Winding Way farm she called it.

Believe it or not, other than the fact that she comes up all the time in my thoughts and conversations with people in their yard (I'll be riding my bike and see somebody working in a yard I have admired for a long time. So I'll stop and do what's natural, and before long they are showing me all kinds of stuff, some of which I will recognize from my parents gardens, and a lot of which I recognize from my Aunt's gardens.) and the fact that I love her, what got me on the subject of my Aunt was the Haber-Bosch Process, which only very glancingly has anything to do with her, our history, and really, anything at all.  It's the chemical engineering process that allowed the western world (and eventually the entire world) to mine the atmosphere for the nitrates and nitrites we needed for our gardens and our guns.  Needless to say, I read a book about it a couple years ago.

So anyway, I wanted to talk about my Aunt teaching me one spring about the difference in the quality of rain on her plants, and watering by her plumbing, and how that had remained a fascinating mystery to me as well (rain is so much better, in terms of the way plants react to it.)

Then I read about the Haber-Bosch Process.  Scales fell from my eyes.

But to finish, properly, my Aunt and Uncle, and my Parents and family get the credit for me being interested.  My clients ask me all the time while I'm chatting with them, if somethings not too dangerous to do such a thing, "Is there anything you aren't interested in?"  I just laugh, for it is far from my fault.  Sometimes, if I'm feeling cheeky and a bit dramatic I say, in a deep and rediculous Hollywood voice, "Perhaps one day, Mrs. XXXXXX, you will meet my people." 

While it's safe to say that is the sort of thing a smart ass would say, it also is a bit more true than I am oftentimes comfortable admitting, given the realities of our world.  

Perhaps one day, reader, you might discover why.

When I Am A Young Man, I'll Smile Purple

In 1995 I moved in with my Aun't Noon in Zionsville, IN, where I was already from and, in any case, living just down the street from her.  Why did I move the four blocks into her home, at age 22?  I had gotten into trouble that I won't go into here, and lost a realationship with a woman who had been living with me.  In most of the typical ways that people would look at this sort of thing, I certainly didn't deserve the kind attentions of my Aunt.  I had screwed up in life, and lost a good woman for all practical purposes (in fact a woman my Aunt, not entirely to my pleaure, had set me up with.  Friend of her daughters.)  Moreover I had lived for a few years, after dropping out of a wonderful College, an aimless and trouble filled life.  I suppose there remained something, however, that my Aunt could remember.  What might I mean?

As you have already guessed, she was no stranger to me.  It is one of the many fortune's of my life, and not diminished by the plurality of the others in the least, that my Aunt Noon (Mary) has been in my life since I was, as she would put it, a "babe."  She is a keenly intelligent, warm hearted, no nonsense woman, who also happens to have distinguished herself in Indianapolis, and probably, truth be told, Central Indiana, as a Dermatologist.  Having never had much acne, or other skin disease I haven't had much of an opportunity to ask one of her competitors about her, but I run into people who have been her patient all the time.  And... I have spent a great deal of time, I wish you knew how lucky I was, with that fine woman, my Aunt Noon.

When I was a twelve or thirteen year old, and my parents finally could allow me to ride my bicycle throughout our small town of 5,000 without incurring the wrath of child protective services, I would understandably fly toward the drug stores for candy, and then to the library for another kind of confection.  These distractions while powerful and enduring, in the case of the candy, into an embarrassingly late period in my life; (I stubbornly refuse to acknowledge my library problem) both had an oddly short half-life once experienced.  It was difficult to stand in the candy section of the store, stuffing your face with gobstoppers, and Hubba-Bubba, and looking around through the green flourescent light delineating that strange stratification that occurs with cigarette smoke, and think to yourself, "I think I'll make a day of it."  It was, like most appetite driven distractions, a kind of work, that had it's beginning and (you almost worried about it before you were underway) it's fairly quick end.  As a child you didn't think about this much, it was just a product of the experience that you took for granted.  Some things are fun a long time, others, not so long.  

My Mom would usually suggest some sort of wholesome sandwich and ice cream place for my brother and I (or I alone.)  Most of the time she would take us herself, of course.  It is really a nice memory.  I marvel at her endless kindnesses in even going to the trouble to imagine such gifts for my brother and I.  I sometimes think, due to the fact that my Mom had a really very spartan childhood where spending money was concerned, that much of the material side of my privilege from her amounted to a kind of delight that she took in seeing her kids experience a days pleasure in something completely unnecessary.  That sounds obvious, but the reason I mention it, is that when I am thinking about my childhood self, it was far from obvious.  The things I take for granted about my Mom can have an odd, disconnected from her life, and just the way things ought to be quality to them, which is, of course, the magic of a mother.  So what might seem completely obvious, is none the less unappreciated by my reflexive "son" assumptions.  My mother very intentionally, created for me a sort of wonderland.  Partly because it was fun, and she loved me so much.  And partly because such an action reworked the rules of the world she grew up in (obviously only to some extent.)  

So, after the obligatory luch of pizza, or chicken salad sandwhich, or the occasional DQ (Dairy Queen) Full Meal Deal, and the face stuffing fest that was in such full compliance with my nature... it would be time to regroup and ask the age old question that all thirteen year olds are burdrened with:  how might I best maintain my relations with the important people in my life.  My tongue is purple, and my insulin reaction strong, if I can stay on my bicycle all the way to my aunt's (less than two miles), I'll be in like Flynn to something kinda Zen.  And you know, it basically worked out that way.  Isn't childhood wonderful (for me.... I mean.)

My Aunt Noon had a house at the end of a long street at the end of the bag.  But this was a fairly interesting bag as these things go, for the street had been built atop a very slight ridge top (truly a tiny one, that really, in all likelihood was more the topographical result of various stages of the Little Eagle Creek river flooding to the South of her house, forming a steep ravine, and to the North of her house eatiing away at various portions of the land (in conformation to the sweeping shape of the river itself, therefore giving you the impression of a high spot, or ridge.))  Her driveway was about a fifth of a mile lane that shot a rather straight path through a bunch of cherry trees (tall spindly things) along both sides of it a skinny patch of woods that she spent years hacking back to the long skinny boundaries of that peninsula of her property.  Really, just something of an access gate to the road, sqeezed between a huge alfalfa field on one side (just lovely, with cows and big circles of hay), and a sort of identical arrangement with her neighbors to the east (long driveway, strips of property to either side, and an either rustic, or symbolic fence like thing depending on one's point of view.)  The lane swept down to a huge, brick, two story house that I spent enormous amounts of time in as a visitor, and sometimes, guest, when my parents were out of town, and we were still too young to stay at home alone.  Just thinking of the place gives me strong sensations of my youth.  It doesn't hurt that some of my best friends of my childhood lived on the same street, and remained there until I left Zionsville for good.  Kind of a two decade still life that was made off with by that behooded rascal, and mastermind, Father Time.   

I'm sure there were many times when my brother and I would bicycle over and my Aunt was in the back yard, planting hosta's or some other such extremely shade tolerant plant against the heavy woods that swept up to and in fact superceded her house.  Pretty much her entire street, and development, was a footprint, placed Godzilla like, right down on a maybe third growth woods.  Her property was perhaps two hundred, or one hundred fifty yards from a sanctuary of sorts that seemed to really be just a flood plain not even safe for bottom land agriculture.  In addition there were some high tension powerlines and a freeway right of way back there, all of which seemed to conspire to the creation of a lovely, and yet somehow legally mandated, park: Starkey Park, which was a really important part of my young life and teenage years.

Though, like I said, I am sure there were many times my Aunt was out back, on her acre and one half or two acre property, what I remember best was her slow creation of the only spot on her property that could really provide the full sun required for daylillies she was developing a passion for.  So my brother and I would tear down the "ridge", her street, and come to her cul-de-sac, hit the rather rude bump of her ubiquitous suburban curved curb, and stop our bikes grinning like we were the mailman with a tax return check.  Of course, we had not a damn thing to offer, but our smiling purple teeth.  And as Billy Collins pointed out in his marvelous exploration of the mystery of a mothers love (yeah, not the same, but come on...) in his poem "The Lanyard,":

The Lanyard

The other day as I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room

bouncing from typewriter to piano 
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,

 
I found myself in the "L" section of the dictionary 


where my eyes fell upon the word, Lanyard. 


No cookie nibbled by a French novelist 


could send one more suddenly into the past.

 
A past where I sat at a workbench 
at a camp by a deep Adirondack lake

 
learning how to braid thin plastic strips into a lanyard. 
A gift for my mother.


I had never seen anyone use a lanyard. 
Or wear one, if that's what you did with them. 


But that did not keep me from crossing strand over strand 
again and again 

until I had made a boxy, red and white lanyard for my mother. 


She gave me life and milk from her breasts, 
and I gave her a lanyard 


She nursed me in many a sick room, 
lifted teaspoons of medicine to my lips, 


set cold facecloths on my forehead 
then led me out into the airy light

 
and taught me to walk and swim and I in turn presented her with a lanyard. 


"Here are thousands of meals" she said, 
"and here is clothing and a good education." 


"And here is your lanyard," I replied, 
"which I made with a little help from a counselor." 
"Here is a breathing body and a beating heart, 
strong legs, bones and teeth 

and two clear eyes to read the world." she whispered. 
"And here," I said, 

"is the lanyard I made at camp." 
"And here," I wish to say to her now, 


"is a smaller gift. Not the archaic truth, 
that you can never repay your mother, 


but the rueful admission that when she took the two-toned lanyard from my hands, 


I was as sure as a boy could be 
that this useless worthless thing I wove out of boredom 


would be enough to make us even."

(billy collins)  

............ I guess I sort of thought my blue tongue and teeth and stupid grin would be enough as well, for my Aunt.

In all seriousness, there was an element of my nature, as you may have already noticed in this Blog, that my Aunt might have enjoyed along with the candy colored lips of her nephew.  I suppose, in all fairness, I have always been extremely alert to the sort of things that are important to the adults around me (and hopefully my friends as well.  Although I have my dullard moments to be sure.)  And I suppose I may have been pulling a bit of an Eddie Haskel with some of the adults in my life, though nobody ever accused me of this (crosses his fingers behind his back, whilst pretending to scratch his spine...)  But in all honesty, my Aunt is a fascinating figure, who lavished a genuine (and always has) joy on me my whole life.  Even before her own children were born, she no doubt considered my siblings and I as stand ins for her own hopes at family, don't we all see our nieces and nephews that way?  So I have always felt that I have received an outsized gift from my Aunt of love, for a long, long time.  In any case, even as barely a teenager, I suppose a light shone in my eyes that will often shine in the eyes of a young person who knows someone is there who will listen and tell you the things themselves that are important.  And among the many things we talked about (and still do, now, going on thirty years) were, of course, this small bit she had removed from the black forest of her property to grow what looked like big piles of green leaves with one, extremely vulnerable stem coming out of it.  Seemed like an awful interesting ratio of effort to reward, given the afternoon I had been enjoying.  My Aunt has this self conscious way of smiling, that belies her steel trap mind.  I don't know if it is an artifact of the era from which she came when to authentically speak her mind would have left some pretty devastating casualties in Kendallville Indiana (where my family originally springs.)  That said, it's a very endearing part of her personality, that with large quantities of cherry trees falling every which way, and this tiny flower sort of puffing out is verdant finery like Marie Antoinette or something, my Aunt sort of gets that this passion of hers is a vision, a bit otherworldly:  and she thinks it's pretty funny as well.  Until you experience her variety of confidence, it is easy to not realize how powerful a thing it really is. She doesn't really defend her choices, just kind of laughs along with the ambition that they intimate, and pulls out her considerable charm (and energy, and garden snips) to get on with it.  With time, trust me, the world sort of does this mirage like, heat wave movement around her, and ta da!  it's done.  It's not just endearing... it's impressive.  Real impressive.

She's not so modest as not to realize this on most levels.  So spoiling her is a snap, and a great deal of fun, since if you make eye contact with her she kind of winks at you, saying, "Hey buddy, I appreciate your interest."

Needless to say, the spoiling, in my life, as far as my Aun't is considered, has been a mostly one way affair.  And yes, you can tell from this Blog entry, that I have had a sweet and special and deep closeness to her for a long, long time.  Where it was interrupted, it had to be for fear (on her part) that she might be damaging me by not waking me up to the fact that I am a more capable person that I used to sometimes want to believe.  But I have never felt anything but the hardest to explain sensation of joy in her presence.  You can tell from this entry: I just admire and love my Aunt Noon.  

Dr. Stamets Gift To Me

Cellulose is the most abundant polymer in nature.  As Leonard Cohen never wrote, "That Old Black [Crone]'s still pickin' cotton for your ribbons and bows."  By an old black crone I meant Mother Nature, of course.  

The second most abundant polymer is lignin, which is not a polysaccaride at all, but rather a very complicated assembly of three modified alcohol molecules called p-coumaryl alcohol, coniferyl alcohol, and sinapyl alcohol. (they are actually bonded with a propane like molecule, which doesn't hurt when you are burning wood.  And, when lignin is broken down, what do you know, really valuable aromatic stuff comes flying out of this molecule that just prior to breakdown had been literally worth nothing to us (outside of combustion).  That's why evolution perked up it's ears when fungus and bacteria came across lignin.  It's a pandora's box stuffed with volatile organics that everyone loves.)  The damned things are so cleverly bonded, and so complexly mixed up in their construction, that mankind has had a bit of difficulty seeing the white of it's eyes much less cutting it down to size, something rather necessary should we wish to quit our "smoking" (carbon base fuel combustion) habit.  

So what is commonly referred to as the holy grail of "cellulosic" alcohol, is actually a bit of a more complicated matter due to considerations that need to be made (and are being made) about the other thirty percent of our Earth biomass:  lignin.

I have been interested in lignin for years due to having slowly in my life found it ever more interesting every time I come across it.  Sort of like girls.  As a very small boy they occupied almost no attention for me at all. But, by and by they gathered more and more significance as my self bumped into theirs.  And today I am about halfway toward that point in my late life when I will have finally placed "women/girls" on the pedestal that all old men, almost cartoonishly "learn" to place them.  Like I said, sort... of like girls.

So, I discovered lignin when learning stuff in grade school and high school in biology class.  Inevitably it was presented as part of a tree, or a part of the wood of a tree or whatever.  Not much was said about it because it was presumed to be above our heads to chat much about it's chemistry, ect.  It was certainly above the head of much of science to describe what exactly gave lignin it's incredible durability in nature.  A fully peer reviewed an rubber stamped scientific model of the molecular structure of lignin remains a bit off.  Sections of various different types of lignin have been modeled.  I tell you, I am not making it sound as interesting as I should. But wait...

So I went along in life until I was about thirty years old thinking occasionally about a rotten piece of wood in the woods, "boy oh boy, the cellulose in that wood was a nice snack some time ago, but the lignin, is here for the duration of my life."  Or something to that effect.  Then I read the great Paul Stamets Mycellium Running, after finding it in its appropriate spot at Borders Books.  That darn book, even though I had read Aurora's Mushroom's Demystified and really, a bunch of other mycocultural tomes when I was studying while working at Worms Way eleven years ago.... that darn book just hung me upside down and shook.  My head banged against the ground a few times, causing some much needed brain damage, and before I knew it I had the beginners mind to start all over again with my consideration of mold, fungus, and the truly delightful mycellium.

I won't go on and on, since I hope to give a better treatment to the delightful fungal world some other time.  However, every time I am in my garden, because of Dr. Stamets, I see stuff that were it not so cool it would give me the willlies.  Mold growing in every direction beneath the life I live and into the things I love and eat and live within.  Most of the time this is regarded as a terrible thing.  But common sense is useless in this realm.  My garden plants sit like miserable baby's, ignored and failing to thrive, until the mold in my soil pierces their roots with their fungal hyphae.  Once that happens, the old memory of evolution and eukaryotic magic enlivens my plants, giving them moisture and sugars, and a life that covers an area so much larger than I ever could have imagined before Dr. Stamets, that yes, I admit, mine is a different perspective entirely.

River Me Timbers

I always wondered as a kid why topsoil was so crucial to plants.  It was usually said to me that topsoil contains the precious water holding organic matter and some micronutrients that plants need for optimum health.  And in many cases, without enormous expenditure by man, and care, without topsoil and organic matter, plants won't survive.  

So, I realized, even as a child that topsoil was crucial.  But I didn't get it.  I would hear about the erosion of topsoil constantly.  I would watch filmstrips (beep!) with the rest of class (beep!)  The music would go a little minor from the tape cassette when topsoil was mentioned.  Unlike the television commercials today, that are so clever at knowing our human dispair, rarely at the end of the section of the filmstrip on topsoil did an acoustic guitar begin a more major modality to calm everyones nerves.  Topsoil was not only a mysterious subject, but a depressing one.  A dust bowl of mysteries, constantly flowing away.

In most ways, due to modern agriculture, for large sections of the country (and certainly the world) this problem remains it's identical self.  Believe it or not, out in the Gulf of Mexico, where you won't be surprised to hear the Mississippi drains, there is a huge pile of debris (trees, cars, trash, but mostly topsoil) just sitting in a nearly colloidal state of greater and greater instability.  You might wonder why it doesn't just build up such that the coast of Louisiana moves a few feet further South each year.  Well, we know that the coast is actually moving in the other direction from reading USA Today.  So, I need not make a case that an alternative scenario is taking place.  Just pause and glance at the cover of the paper as you leave the Circle K, houses are becoming ocean, not the other way around.   So what happens to all that soil from the Big Muddy? Well, interestingly enough, we really didn't even think about it until we started stringing undersea cables hither and yon all over creation.  And sure enough, just as we became comfortable that we'd be able to tap our messages to Cuba ad infinitum, the sea monsters on the map took a bite out of our super thick undersea cables, rendering the loquacious fervor of the roaring twenties to a muted state of terrified reflection.  Well, don't say God didn't warn them.

It took awhile for people to figure out what might (other than a leviathon) be snapping cables as thick as a telephone pole like they were strands of a spiders web.  Eventually, some mild mannered sap, majoring in seismic studies of earthquakes, ect. set up his "ears" to the ground close enough to the Gulf of Mexico to hear a rather stupendous crash, which to his astonishment, not one other Christian soul this side of the world seemed to have heard.  Must of been a strange thing to have checked his recording of the bang... there had been an earthquake. But not a soul seemed to notice.  No news reports, no radio reports, no nothing.  Except for one thing...

For the third time, it became suspected that the ding dongs stringing the undersea cable through the Gulf of Mexico were going to go bankrupt.  They were claiming a sincere bafflement at their misfortune, but the circumstances could not have been more dire.  When they pulled the now silent cable from the Gulf, its ends were as split as the fibers of a hemp rope.  And about as useful.  What could have strained a cable this thick, to actually pull each wire, and thin it's ductile nature to a hair like diameter?  Nobody believed a whale, as witnessed and described by man so far, could account for such violence to the cable.  So, inquiry was being made into the various providers to the manufacturer of the cable to discover what had gone wrong in the manufacture of the wires such that their required strength was so catastrophically unmet.  This went on for a bit, as all investigations into matters that have nothing to do with reality must.  Then, a meek and bespectacled researcher in earthquakes finally was accepted into the audience of the cable manufacturer.  For some reason, a cigar chomping captain of industry, who hated researchers as a rule, was more than receptive to the nervous young scientist with his scroll of data, a plotted mountain of evidence, that, as far fetched as it seemed, was the only good news the Executive had heard, at his desk, in a long, long while.  The scientist refused, politely, a cigar.

Sure enough, the evidence mounted, that the cables were manufactured just fine.  As long as they weren't laid just beside the periodic underwater avalanche of debris that our hero, the non smoking scientist had actually heard, even on land, near the Gulf.  It seemed that a cycle of build up and fall down described the topsoil from the Mississippi that dumped into the Gulf.  And the violence that occurred when the mountain of wet colloidal soil disintegrated would be difficult to describe had that cable not come from the Gulf and done the describing for us.  Eventually the radio companies learned to float the cables about halfway down, and avoid the Big Muddy's progeny.  

I thought this all very fascinating.  

 

Talkin' Rubiks Cube on the Prarie Roddenbury Waxen Likeness

Like about a thousand other Bloggers I went to the new Star Trek movie tonight.  Again, proof that I am just a geeky American.  I really enjoyed it.  I have heard that it was critically appreciated.  That means very little to me since so often the critics don't appreciate my experience of a "movie" movie.  Who pans My Left Foot?  I plan to attend the Transformers movie as well, which can't be anything but embarrassing.  However, I will skip the G.I. Joe movie.  Yikes, what a dumb idea.  How is it different than the Transformers movie?  I guess I can't answer that question.  It's dumb, ok?  I'm trying to imagine some of my more serious friends going to the Transformers movie.  A quiet stillness has settled over me, my mind is empty.  I now have a new technique for obtaining Zen mind.

Outside of all the obvious pleasures that a science fiction movie presents to an overgrown boy, the Star Trek movie offers up a new style that was the old one a long while back.   It's got its Captain Kirk was a boy rebel with cars moment; and Spock was a monastic, intellectual, contrarian moment, which were oddly satisfying given the time we've spent on our backsides with these two fellows.  The less said the better, 'cus there really isn't anything to say other than if you like Star Trek, and your 401 K can handle another ten bucks worth of abuse, I suggest you juice the economy.

There is something worth saying about the director J.J Arbrams.  I have seen a little of Lost, and I know it's ingenious.  I haven't seen more of it 'cus I don't spend money on DVD's of television shows or movies.  For some reason seeing a persons bookshelves crammed with such things (or hearing that they rewatch them all multiple times) vaguely depresses me.  Even though, for most people, they represent a net improvement in their time management.  What can I say, I am a simply cheap and trying to rationalize that away.  I don't know.  But JJ Abrams show, Fringe, I have seen quite a few episodes online of.  He is pretty skillful at the pedestrian fascination that conspiracy type themes elicit.  And while he falls into tiresome Jim Henson Creature Shop stuff once in awhile... what else you gonna do with your college educated make up people? 

It's worth noting that Lord of the Rings was different from Waterworld mainly by virtue of the source material, not so much the appearance of the sets.  People would kill me for saying that, but I like movies and feel confident I am right.  Waterworld was a terrible idea that gave you lots of time to notice that it's characters looked like they escaped from the set of Total Recall to work with the Oscar winning Robin Hood himself, before their lengthy appearance for the Matrix trilogy.  I like the original (my brother would probably say here that those are my four favorite words... typical of a guy (me, not my bro) who has nothing original to say.) Matrix, but the clothing in post apocalyptic movies is enough to make you buy a Cosmopolitan (as a dude, of course... or a liberated woman, of course, or not, of course... boy, I should stop now.)  And the second two Matrix movies only served to cause people to wonder if it was the popcorn that had been dosed, or the soda when they began watching those goofy movies.  Have no fear, it happens all the time.  Remember the second Jaws movie.  Duh-uh, Duh-uh.... oh, if you don't know what I am talking about you were probably born twenty years ago.  The first Jaws magic was it's constellation of desires... Speilberg was interested in a lot more than the stupid shark.  But he still got the shark right, with John Williams almost philosophical treatise on the difference between swimming with and swimming without sound.  Stringed instruments have always been red in tooth and claw, but who knew?  Boy that sounds like something from the New York Times.  Kind of makes me shudder.

Something subconscious is going on here with my discussion about Jaws, because a few years ago I saw it again and was astonished how slowly it built its characters, even the massively unlikable Roy Scheider, into characters who were more than worthy of our attention.  Richard Drieyfus is so likable in the movie that he makes you wonder why he made it his life ambition to become as unlikable as Roy by this date.  Oh well... once upon a time, by the end of a movie called Jaws, I liked them.  The scene that makes me think that I am experiencing subconcious voodoo is the one where Roy Scheider is sitting in his kitchen with his family and he does this silly little playful Dad thing with his kid.  It's hard to describe exactly how beautiful the scene is, because what makes it so effective is the almost pathologically distracted atmospherics of the man throughout the movie.  In the scene, Spielberg once again gifts future graduate students, in film, with the consistent theme of the Lost little boy, only this time in reverse.  Scheider's family in the film are at a distance from the husband and father, due to the husband and fathers impossible duty of protecting the larger community (and only incidentally in the first Jaws, them.  I'm not sophisticated enough to explain why in the sequels even Speilberg couldn't have made the shark against family thing work.  I guess it's a bit like a rapist being after the ENTIRE family.  People would start laughing, till grandma hits the guy over the head with a cast iron skillet).  So, the scene where Scheider is goofing with his son, at the kitchen table, just stands out like a mesa, off the surrounding topography of a so called horror movie. Spielberg tried the same thing in Jurassic Park, and sort of achieved a few signature moments, but nothing like that little wink, that admittedly Scheider had his character give us.  Like when a crazy person says, "I know I'm nuts," in a brief moment of sanity.  JJ Abrams included that scene in one of his TED talks which I have watched.  Kinda made my hair stand on end (my selfish thought was, I believed his point, before he made it!  Pretty much everyones response to a well made argument.  Oh well.)  His talk was incredibly awkward.  Made him seem like he didn't know why he did things he does.  But, his work stands in direct opposition.

The thing I liked about JJ Abrams Star Trek, other than the crucial subject matter (i.e. better than Waterworld), was the look of the film.  You could look at it two ways:  one would be flashes of light are constantly flaring and obscuring the picture.  The other way you might look at it is to say it looks a bit like Japanese anime, which like their food packaging, kicks American ass.  Nobody who has a niece, nephew, kid sister, or children (or overgrown children for friends) needs to be introduced to the pleasures that (whether you know them or not) some people find in the Japanese style of cartooning and/or filmmaking.  Whatever your dark suspicions about those big eyed girls and puerile guys in the Manga rack at the bookstore or the Anime rack at the Cinemat, you can't deny they are stylish.  So, Star Trek had a kind of light and possibly a bit of a color palette that seemed to draw on that rich, saturated, world.  Just something I thought of while watching it.  

It was nice to see Eric Bana, if that's how you spell his name, playing Captain Nero (or Nemo, I kept thinking for no rational reason. Yeah, I grew up with the book and films 20,000 Leagues, but how is that rational?  More like helplessly human than a rational connection.)  The best role I have seen Bana in was Troy.  His character, Hector, played well to his good natured looks.  He is a handsome, masculine looking guy, which his five o clock shadow as an alien in Star Trek ought to help you figure out (I would love a list of alien five o'clock shadows.)  So in this movie he doesn't have to worry about disappointing the heavy panting focus groups of would be female fans (or seeming castrated to the would be fanboy's looking frantically for their hero.)  Anyhow, I hope he gets other Mr. Dangerous roles in the future (he will, he is a solidly liked actor) because I felt sorry for a guy who played David Banner in Ang Lee's absolutely disgusting Incredible Hulk.  That movie made the TV David Banner I grew up with seem like a manly, tortured genius.  It was probably just the incredibly sad TV theme music.  Music that says, "I'm still on the road... nobody wants me and my fairly well behaved monster."  It's not like the Incredible Hulk was a serial killer. 

If you are of a certain age you might remember the theme music to the eightees' Dungeons and Dragons animated cartoon, on Saturday mornings.  Sometimes I would watch the show, just after or before Thundar the Barbarian, and be bored off my butt until that theme came on.  Just filled with the melancholy anyone would feel if a roller coaster sent you to a different dimension in which who followed a little, twinkling mischievous dwarf around a dangerous place without so much as one Best Western.  It really filled me with emotion, that song.

I don't remember the song to Rubik the Amazing Cube's television show.  One of its episodes made me cry however.  Someone must have improperly solved him.

I'm not embarrassed.  It is said that Bob Dylan had two passions that made him who he was:  Woody Guthrie, and (I think possibly more important, from a how to moralize perspective) Michael Landen's own proving grounds, Bonanza.  No joke.

Some guys just love to moralize.  But it's a learned behavior.  That's why B.F. Skinner was so surprised when people moralized about his Behavioralist methodology in his research. Morality is mere conditioning, right?  If he'd only had a little more time...