State Of Novel Bigness

Well,

I'm sorta taking a couple of days off. I figure that running around and acting like I have no time is a very bad way to go. So, despite my fear of actually taking a breath and looking around, I am doing exactly that. I've been to Borders to read, twice in the last twenty four hours. And I didn't carry my phone everywhere I went, just to see if I could handle it.

I wouldn't say I feel good. Just different. But you know how that is.

I used to hate days off, which is another way off saying you are unhappy. Sometimes, in the winter when things are slow, or just when I only have thirty or so hours a week (for whatever reason) I can really relish the extra time.

But to actually take time, without some activity filling it up, is pretty hard. But necessary. I always tell my friends to slow down, but rarely myself. So this is my comeuppance.

I just watched Charlie Rose interview Guillermo del Toro for the second time. Gosh, what a really cool dude. Del Toro just published a novel he cowrote. Apparently it's about vampires. I am completely bored by the subject of most monster, and stagey fright movies. In fact, I went to del Toro's Hellboy movie with the same sort of attitude I might go to a recital, or the Opera with. An obligated sort of ritual. Needless to say, most of the time, this is a great way to surprise yourself with a great time. I'm never sad to obligate myself to most anything deserving of the description. I've always been a slightly haughty and somewhat otherworldly dude, for whom it suited me just fine when things folks don't like so much, actually seemed like fun to me. This is something, I think, that drives some folks nuts, and seems admirable to others. There is a suspicion within me, that most of the folks who hate this hautiness in me, are actually pretty damned honest at their core, and their suspicion of my aesthetics probably has some legitimacy. Concurrently the folks who admire my tastes and pilgrimages to various "do gooder" things and cultural what have you's, are often (it seems) somewhat needy of approval, and a bit self loathing. But in the end, I just basically don't care.

Strange things run through your head when you go to the Opera alone ('cus nobody wants to go with you, even when it's free for them.) You come to sense the spectacle of the human gathering, the theatre and the magic of charisma. If you've ever performed something yourself, and come to know that white hot terror that it is to bomb (I know this rather well) then you will feel an even greater appreciation for the confident people who have you in their hand, on stage, or in performance.

Among the strange things running through my head at the recital I went to recently, was the singularity of the violin and the hair pulled across it's strings: how it sang into the air, in that silent recital hall. Yes, I felt I was a bit alone. The performer, a friend of my friend Robert (he'd played Robert a small recital in our house only a few days before, which warmed my heart considerably.) seemed almost to disappear behind to magic of that strange little piece of carpentry. How in the world is a violin ever built? The answers are as mysterious to me as semiconductor engineering. I simply can't imagine building a device to produce such beauty.

Music amounts to just about the closest thing to a sober love of life I can imagine. What cynic or pessimist could invest a belief in something as magical as the process that produces both the violin and it's freakishly talented performer (and the man I went to see, a distinguished graduate of IU's School of Music, will never, ever, be a soloist of any note. He'd be more likely to beat Tiger Woods at your local Putt Putt.) Both seem about as related to the forest (where long ago the violin rubbed shoulders with fire wood) and the teeming masses (like the guy sitting and dreaming through the performance, me.) as the smell of perfume is to the smell of a festering corpse. How can a world of darkness and mean pursuit produce the miracle of a violin recital? This pathetic, drooling observer, cannot say.

So this evening I sat and listened to the great and strange Guillermo del Toro speak about his vampire novel (which I will at least glance at. He compared the eroticism of his vampires to anal cancer, which one has to admit, seems a bit harsh. Perhaps he had one of Charlie's Angels on his mind. I think he was attempting to distance himself from the seeming endless comparisons of vapire bloodsucking to sex. It must hurt a bit being a Oscar winning director to know that you will never truly be comfortable again producing the kind of trash we so love to watch, and remember. You will henceforth have expected from you, a more authentic repertoire. Shame.)

Del Toro seems like what he very likely is. A guy doing something he probably wouldn't even need to be paid to do. He is doing what he loves. Writing screenplays and directing movies about monsters. He is very clear about his taste for monsters. He has that artist's way of speaking about what he thinks is important in this hyperbolically emphatic manner. He doesn't want you to understand. He needs you to. He doesn't hint. He is blunt. This must have something to do with why Americans are so dominant in the visual arts (in terms of financing the most prominent of them, and having the Art Capital of the World here: NYC) Americans don't beat around the bush about what constitutes the money shot. So this proud Mexican man, Guillermo Del Toro, is here, in America, where it is rumored folks will pay greenbacks for monsters. If you stop and think about it, that is sort of nuts.

Del Toro mentioned that he was wounded and a bit freaked out by Mexico's form of Catholicism. It's funny, but I dearly love the iconography of the Mexican Catholic Church. I love the blood, the guts (del Toro mentioned even Jesus having bone exposed through torn flesh.) For some reason I regard Christianity as a brutal faith anyhow. With a dangerous God on the prowl, and his followers going around armed and ready to to kill, for the unborn. So, since I get to live in this pre-apocalyptic crazy country it always came as a shock to me to see the post Vatican II Catholic churches (meaning, any that were built or remodeled since roughly my birth) as nothing but a bunch of drywall trimmed out with maple. White boxes, not so different from the mall. I've no doubt that this is what happens when the people have spoken. Too bad.

Go to Mexico, and along with the dogs running up and down the aisle's (sometimes) you'll find yourself the savior himself, torn to pieces just for you. If you want, and your timings right, you can even eat a little of him. No kidding.

The Methodist church I sometimes attend has grape juice, and some sort of tasteless bread to stand in for Jesus. I asked someone who managed a Church for years, at the peace group I attend, "Where did you get the wine for service?" She told me she got Jesus blood, "Wherever it was on sale."

"You never settled on a brand?" I asked her.

"None that weren't cheap," she chuckled.

I didn't ask about the body. The whole thing kinda depresses me.

People sometimes ask me why, I, an atheist, even bother attending these bizzare places of worship. Their tone is, "I've got that all figured out, why don't you?" My answer, which is hard earned, is usually, "I haven't got it figured out, and never will. I live in a town of thirty some faiths, and hundreds of communities of believers. We are a particular culture, here in Indiana, one that is not dominant in the world. No matter how many times you hear the organ, or gather in silence, or sing a hymn, or bow your head, you none the less, each time will mark yourself as very likely, a Westerner, in the American Midwest. Outside of an old time revival, my cultures religious heritage is remarkable in its weirdness. And my parents protected me from feeling nervous about it. So I don't feel nervous. I feel interested." The whole things about one half pathetic and one half lovely.

Del Toro was not thrilled with the bloody iconography of his homelands Church. As he complained of this, I yelled at the screen, "Bullshit! Go to the drywall churches if you think it's so bad! People here think Jesus died quietly in his sleep. I, an atheist feel more for the guy than them!" Robert and David must have thought to themselves, "There goes Andy, again." They have me figured out.

I had a completely fascinating conversation with my friend Jaz today. I can't go into details since our conversation was frought with rather personal and private matters to him. But I will say that it never fails to fascinate me the damage people carry with them through life, including myself. We all know how to behave, love, live and even prosper. And yet, we maintain lives that are radically opposed to all those things in one area or another. Perhaps we hate a certain group of people. Or we deny certain friends our love. Or we orchestrate lives that simply exist entirely outside the circles of certain abhorrent realities (or personalities). This last one is my chief complaint with Bloomington. If you go around, as I have, and make the argument that our town is far too lean on the African American component of the cosmopolitan, some folks here, feel comfortable saying, "We don't need that." My uncle said the same about Hispanics in Carmel, Indiana. Is this racism? Some people would say, yes. I'm not comfortable calling it racism, especially coming out of my uncles mouth. I think it is one of the things that happens when an entire culture is victimized by racism, not merely the people of color who might claim it as their particular ailment. My Uncle doesn't know much about his discomfort with Hispanics. He knows merely that their presence as stakeholders in his community means certain things for his family, that they are unaccustomed to dealing with. It is a fear of that, not so much the Hispanic, that animates my Uncles so called "racism." A national conversation where such distinctions are made, without rancor, would go far toward helping us all unshackle ourselves from the shame that surround the issue of race. The secret is: most folks agree on the subject. How might we discover that? I have been accused, and have been guilty of forms of racism, and certainly prejudice. I would love to pretend otherwise. But what I needed to reveal the truest part of myself (on this subject) were black friends, or hispanic friends who could say to me, "Andy I know your a cracker and honky, and you know I'm a [epithet]. Maybe we should start with what we've got in common." Kind of a "three things you should not discuss at a dinner party" approach. Lot of wisdom there.

It's interesting how nervous geneticists are, by the way, about discovering scientific differences between the races of man. Eugenics was in it's adolescence just prior to the Holocaust, and were it not for Hitler, I'm afraid we'd conform more to the Lindberg's of the world, rather than the Obama's. The cost of the lesson was, of course, far far to high. But it gives you some idea of how stupid we are, even among our best and brightest, before we let our emotions get in the way (for our fellow man) when thinking about human beings in the abstract. Always us vs. them.

When my black friends would give me a ride back to Zionsville, back when I worked at a pizza place in a black neighborhood in Indy, it was rather instructive to see their faces grown dark and concerned with the slow retreat of the city lights, as we approached my rural neck of the woods. They would actually say, "It's so dark." Not so different from the words coming out of my mouth when I make a wrong turn in Chicago, or wherever. And I'm not talking about skin color, of course. You shouldn't be stupid and imagine every corner of the world as merely a variation on the village green, or some such b.s. I've been screwed over plenty of times in my life, in places I didn't belong. Such circumstances can be read in the callow vision of the fearful, or in the language that was on offer when a person offered me a ride. Nature might be for the eyes that see it, but we can all agree that a museum is perhaps too safe a place for all experience.

Speaking of Lindberg earlier, I remembered a story a biographer recounted, where Lindberg used to throw tantrums about round flashlights. Round things roll on an incline, and a source of light, unsteady, makes detailed work rather difficult, if not impossible. One might consider Lindberg as a man, like many you may know, who regarded much of the world as a place conspiring in his failure. For all his success, the round flashlight remains: and it's rolling to this day.

As I was saying earlier, the scientists that study the differences among people, genetically, sometimes fret enormously over what these differences might come to imply to certain, dark mindsets. I couldn't agree more that we are primed to jump to the wrong conclusion. Someone said to me the other day something about Jews making too much of their holocaust. Without losing my temper, I couldn't help but ask the guy, "So, given that you like to talk about your Mom dying, just about every time I talk to you... and given that you are not intimately involved in the caregiving you admit your siblings provide her... and given that she used to wipe your ass and kiss your brow.... I can't help but wonder why raping her and killing her and gassing her to death wouldn't make an impression on you?" I was tempted to tell him that I believed the rape of his mother wouldn't so much as darken even an hour of one of his days. But I have softened in my age.

Some folks think leaving Southern Indiana will relieve them of friends like this. Good luck, and Godspeed.

What are people thinking? We live in this edenic town, part of the most privileged class of humans ever given the chance to babble on their own recognizance, and this "friend" of mine chooses the Holocaust to diminish. As if his hick life were somehow capable of resonating with the loss. To him, the honest Jew should engage in a sophistry of numbers and statistics, a sort of mathematical talking therapy, by which the death of mom, by the hand of some monster in a concentration camp (after hundreds of years of scratching a life out among hostile peoples) is happily diminished to the lottery that presses evenly down on all our chances. What a dipshit.

Sorry. But seriously. When a Korean, fresh off the boat thinks their mindless antisemitic joke is worth a chuckle, I gently speak with them, about the inequity of their culture and my own: toward women, toward the poor, toward men, toward the weak, the other. I gently point out that among the things to appreciate about the West is our embrace of the Korean. In a sense, in America, (at least urban America, where most Americans live: ha!) if your standing on Main street you are one of us. Tell me, I'm curious, my friendly chuckling, very pretty, decked out to the nines Korean friend: can you say that about your home town? In America you will find your average person feeling a little strange about a non American Korean. But just about everybody will raise a flag above the head of any Korean who wants to be an American. Isn't that funny? We sacrifice all the comforts of knowing who we are, due to being just about everyone who wants to be us. So you might excuse me, friend, if I have trouble understanding your rather frank ignorance of what a Jew really is. Suffice it to say, you never talked to one.

I think it's hopeless to hope that everyone will engage in such thoughtfulness about race. How lucky, and damned near providential it is that my country institutionalized a handful of the virtues bestowed by the Enlightenment. I've said it before, and it remains kind of odd, that this country remains an experiment in post enlightenment values. To the clannish and the tribal, these values remain an oddity. But where we pledge allegiance, we fail our clan, our tribe and our race. Thank God for that. Thank God.

I'm just waiting for the day when some fool mortars over Emma Lazarus words. To me she remains unsung (in chorus, in high school, not history class, of course, we sang them.) by the talking heads, due to their venal role as latter day demagogues. I'll end this post with her words, which constitute an American creed, only recently adopted by the rest of the Western world: may we continue clean the salt and grime, from their too brittle stone, and give our children to the dreams that Jefferson knew only the kids could handle.

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she

With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

—Emma Lazarus, 1883

My Korean friend was rather surprised to hear this. Not ashamed, since it was hardly my place to pretend such a mantle was meant for my shoulders, as the dishing out of shame might have suggested. But they realized, if nothing else, that Andy, and somehow, America, stands with the Jews. And yeah, I'm proud of my country.

The Usual Excuses

I have been, as we Westerners so love to tell one another, very busy. The result of this "very business" is that I will have a business in the future. This is my selfish preference. But none the less points to the fact of my life out of balance. I need days off, and fear I will have none before the week after my sisters wedding.

On the pleasant side: a number of somewhat higher profile jobs than I am accustomed to have come my way. The bid process being what it is I have stuck to my guns and weathered the fear of rejection. It seems some people realize my value despite the recession.

Everybody loves to talk about their job. To imagine that their job gives them the excuse they need to stand among the people of the world untrembling.

Not so much myself.

All the same, it is a seven day a week schedule of many, many hours a day, and some trifling bit in the garden that keep me from the terminal to write.

This is a pathetic excuse: I however offer it.

So I look forward to sharing in the future (hopefully before August, when Mary, my sister, will be married. Very exciting!)

I have, as always, much to say about life.

Richard's Request

If you asked me how I was doing right now I suppose I would make it sound like I was pretty busy and overwhelmed with work. And that's true.

It's easy to claim that opportunity is a double edged sword.

And yet, I have felt many times today that giddy pleasure that is juggling many different claims on my time.

It is a fine thing

This evening I was saying goodbye to two of my favorite clients. One of whom is Richard and I am so tired I cannot remember his wife's name. Her wit is so delightful that, despite my attempt to discover her name, I cannot. Perhaps I will remember it soon, before I am done with this post/chapter.

Richard called me yesterday to fix a bathroom fan he has. And while for most folks I might remind them that I do not fancy myself a handyman, he is such a wonderful guy that I would make time for him any afternoon... after work.

It's not that he doesn't pay the full price... it's just what I do not want to do. But he and his wife are worth the trouble.

I love to kid with Richard's wife, who met me (and thereafter introduced me to her husband, who does the vast majority of the talking) in my garden. She told me, "You like to do things the hard way." And since the vast majority of her life reflects deeply her sensitivity to this in others I can't help but mess with her head along the same lines.

They are, perhaps, in their middle seventies. And it was such a pleasure to leave them tonight, despite their brilliance in gardening and many other things they do well, having succeeded in what they found impossible. Not because I love showing them what I can do. They used to do it as well.

But rather the odd sensation of letting them know, that I know, that it is the cruelty of life that I can still do it, with pleasure.

My youth is cruel. I can bend backwards and see what they need a hand on a flashlight to do.

Richard, a justifiably proud man, could not believe I simply climbed a ladder, found a hole, and placed a screw to finish a job that had stymied him for hours.

My pleasure was in the grumpiness I caused in him until I started teasing his indomitable wife about whatever came to my mind. I cannot remember the details other than my comment to her:

"Didn't you tell me, when we first met, that I sure do make things difficult in my garden."

As I left I saw the exasperation (and delight) of a mature woman, and the secret smile of her husband that I might do to his wife what marriage makes somewhat difficult after decades of assumptions.

They are lovely people (and added many things to a list that I would refuse, did I not so love the substance of their selves.)

My Mom Always Said She Liked A Good Yarn

I've been thinking for a few weeks about some of the things I talked to Jim Sr. about on our trip to New York. It was an interesting talk, and yet, I don't mean to make it sound like something earth shattering happened. Just interesting.

It rarely occurs to me how isolated from the professional community we all are. And yet, we are. Aside from academic journals, and hiring experts to care for us or or property, your average person uses the work of an Engineer, rather than talking to her or him. Well, I had never really thought about this much until Jim Sr (for now on, Jim) started asking me what I thought about various different things. I think his ears perked up while we had worked a few years back, when I'd ask him what he knew about the origins of two by fours and stick construction. I had learned that balloon frame construction (balloon frame, is stick frame, but stick frame is not always balloon frame. Both use two by xxxxxx (four, six, eight and twelve) though what the standard for a two by four is (in terms of true dimension) remained in flux through most of the second half of the nineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth. It is crazy fun to learn when the standards for different western countries stabilized for fasteners, such as screws, nuts and bolts. You don't work construction very long before you are stymied by what had until recently seemed a nearly philosophical question, "What is this screw?" I didn't, for example, "get" machine screws, in all their glory, until this year. Now I understand their problems and solutions to their problems, and what is fixable and what is not when fastening metals (at least the most common ones in your house.) It saves a lot of time and money to fix something with the proper screw, properly fastened, rather then repurchase the part, or God forbid, entire apparatus, due to the fact that you'd rather go to the store, and let their inventory do the knowing for you.

So Jim seemed kinda intrigued that I was interested in the history of the philosophy of construction, and the same for construction materials. His interest was more along the lines of, "Who are you?" then "Yeah, I love that stuff." He seems to see homebuilding as a kind of burden, that men who want only the best above their heads engage in. But in fact, he is more properly understood as a freakishly germanic type Scandinavian (Swedish) who can't sit still due to the pathetic consequences of entropy. Trees fall down for him into lumber, for if they do not they shall surely rot to mold. That's putting it a bit extreme, but then I have spent a bit of time with him. When he isn't interested in something he acts like your average person and feigns an interest that lasts a minute or two. But when he is even slightly interested in something he gives it his focus, and it is a pleasure to hear him talk about it.

In New York, Jim merely needed my help. I haven't the foggiest idea why. But it was a surprise to be discussing electric vehicles with him, and Amory Lovins, Green Architecture guy par excellance.

He actually asked me if I knew who Amory Lovins was. I told him what I wrote on that post last month about the Chevy Volt and my more than decade long romance with the fuel cell. Jim, having run a coal fired electric plant (and the sewage treatment, and trash services for forty thousand souls) had met Mr. Lovins. Truthfully that wouldn't be very hard to do. But it was nice to talk to someone who knew so much more about Mr. Lovins than I. Usually people could care less.

But then our conversation really took a turn that I didn't expect. It's something I have been thinking a lot about. Also, of course, I haven't had much time to write. The work I do, however, fosters an hour here, and an hour there for speculation. Sometimes I write down a question. And as you often hear people say (and I used to not believe this, but I was wrong) the answer sort of comes to you without your thinking hard about it. Or, you remember, without referencing your note, to find out about some thing. Like capacitors... but more on those later.

Jim's surprising opinion, about two hours into our eight hour conversation, was that the Chevy Volt was something of a bad idea. He wouldn't completely like me to put it that way, since his opinion was more nuanced over the course of our conversation, but there were points along the way where his case was explicit, and he said as much, "a bad idea."

It was probably somewhat new for the both of us to be talking to someone who was as interested in really opinionated pessimism as the hopeful optimism that seems to have replaced last decades patriotism for the "ism" of our time. So, with a circle having been made for whatever "ism's" were necessary, we cast our lots.

Jim's basic problem with the Volt had a pretty interesting and compelling argument.

Take two mechanical animals. Call them Animal "C" and Animal "DC."

Now Animal C has a long list of components that create power to move the animal and its riders. Among these are a gasoline engine (over 150 parts), an alternator, a cooling apparatus, a transmission (hundreds of parts), a big tank to hold fuel, and a relatively robust fuel delivery, and exhaust handling system. And a linebackers frame in which all these things can be held safely together.

Animal DC, however, has an electric motor (with around ten, or less, moving parts), no alternator (which is itself a motor run backwards), no cooling apparatus, or radiator, in many cases no transmission (and certainly no complex transmission, electric motors distribute power on a gentle, rather humane, curve), no tank to hold fuel (though a somewhat equivalent tank to hold much heavier batteries), and relatively thick cables, that none the less are light as a feather compared to fuel delivery and exhaust handling systems. And a quarterbacks frame (at least one from a few decades ago) to hold this considerably smaller number of components together.

You have already guessed which Animal is the gasoline car (Animal "C" for carbon) and which Animal is the electric, ahem, "vehicle", (Animal "DC" for direct current.) Good guess.

But here's something interesting: what would you have if you added an electric motor to Animal C? If you answered a Hybrid, you'd be on to my game. In fact, it would have to have four, I believe, but you get my drift. A Hybrid, is Animal C, primarily, with some electric motors (on top of that gasoline engine and it's huge entourage of weight and complexity.)

Now none of this is Earth shattering news. We all know this already. A Hybrid is a step in the right direction. It's a half electric car. With half the benefits of an electric right? Sure it is.

The problem is that no one can conveniently explain to Jim why, from an Electrical engineers perspective, all the extra infrastructure and complexity of a gasoline powered animal isn't that much more argument for the simplicity, and especially the efficiency and low cost of an all electric animal. All that extra machining and trouble that go into an Engine, and all the extra weight in the apparatus's of it's entourage, it has been argued, by the choices the car makers make, don't outweigh the batteries and motor of the most basic electric car. Jim, an electrical engineer, thinks something is Rotten at Volvo (whoops, I forgot, Volvo is made in Sweden. Something is Rotten at a neighbor of Volvo's home country! Much clearer.) And I cannot figure out whether I agree with him.

What he doesn't like about the volt is that it is continuing the tradition of more complexity and expense, that Detroit (meaning all automakers, here) seems to view as a great idea.

Now, when I first began arguing with Jim about this, I really had a lot of counter arguments (and to a great extent still do. I hate rolling over.) However, Jim had an ace up his sleeve, actually a couple. He had ordered some of his engineering staff at the electric utility he ran, to procure two electric motors and all the things needed to install them in two trucks. He had done this around 1990, nine years or so before he retired, just before 2000. Those trucks ran for fifteen years on lead acid batteries. The parts to change them over from typical gasoline powered S-10's to electric S-10's were available as conversion kits, from some nationally distributed outfits. Once the kits were in the possession of Jim's employees(!!), the lucky saps got to work putting them into the trucks, and removing the extraneous (now) entourage of the the modern internal combustion powered truck.

I could go on and on, but the bottom line was that the trucks performed rather flawlessly with almost no breakdown, or issues of usage on our typical roads and highways, for fifteen years. S-10's with lead acid batteries. Over a decade ago. Simple machines, with simple power, delivering it in one of the oldest set ups in western culture's industrial history: DC motor, from lead acid battery, direct to powertrain, direct to wheels. No transmission.

"No regenerative brakes." I said, with finality, and amusement.

"No, we added those eventually," said Jim with a chuckle. There were some things this kid didn't know about.

No kidding.

This is just a small part of our conversation. I also happen to love the subject of municipal waste, and environmental impacts, and abuses by the environmentalist movement, that may set us back as a culture. Jim, who clearly has been on a lifelong journey of change in his points of view about many things, would not claim a movement or side upon which he stands. He did tell hilarious stories about his electric utility being sued for many different things. One of them: the water from the cooling towers of the utility were warming up the river the plant had drawn them from, when returned to the river. Did this damage the ecosystem, forcing someone to sue to save the rivers fishes? No. The utility was sued by a guy who claimed he could no longer walk his dog across the river, that now, never froze in winter.

The dog walker won. The publicly owned, community, utility lost. Rough rough.

In response to this public flogging for canine abuse, Jim created one of the first completely insular, zero fluids back to the river, power plants. To this day, the power plant only discharges an extremely negligible amount. For example, were you to walk a grasshopper....

Instead the power plant, smack in the middle of Jamestown (Lucille Ball's home town), heats many of the buildings adjacent to it, and does other interesting stuff with the heat that it produces as "waste" when burning coal.

Jim, and the community board that oversaw the plant with him, automated the plant with fully electric, and automatic, or servo controlled, computerized systems decades ago. Before the costly conversion, the system employed a few thousand pneumatic devices, attached to many thousand valves, for control of the plant. Needless to say, pneumatic sensors exist, and have existed a long time, with the dials and pressure switches, ect. that are so familiar to anyone who has looked at old factories. But sensitive switches, tied into a computerized system with dynamic control over a broad range of choices, pressures, and feedback; all tied into databases with exquisite routines and information collection... yeah, pneumatic switching does not do that.

And lastly, I have loved reading about trash since 1993, when I finished a People magazine at Goshen College's Library, the cover of which read, "River Phoenix, dead at ##." I put the magazine back where it belonged and returned to my chair, to rest my eyes on a new book I had found in the new book section. And so it was that at nineteen I first read, Rubbish: the anthropology of trash at Fresh Kills Landfill. Fresh Kills is a landfill in New York. Which borough? I don't know. I thought some end of Staten Island, but that doesn't sound right? Then again it's out of commission. Though they did open it for the debris from ground zero. I remember being rather surprised. Let me find out for a minute where Fresh Kills is. Wikipedia say's Staten Island. I was afraid of that. Now how am I going to prove I didn't look it up first?

Apparently there are all these plans to turn the country's largest toxic compost pile into something really nice for the kids. I mentioned this to a woman I used to work with from New York, and she rolled her eyes, "Yeah, more grass, less jobs."

"Come on, I told her, it'll be nice." I was kidding. But who knows the answer, really. My buddy Daniel, was from Sheepshead Bay, in Brooklyn. His parents class consciousness and urban exhaustion, despite their relatively decent income (his father worked in one of the World Trade Center buildings, and Daniel had interned there with his father as well.) seemed to me a function of the difference between my childhood (people living homogeneously, pretending that to be a shame) and Daniel's (people living cosmopolitan, and feeling at times ashamed at their real feelings.) I love reading how the fishing is going on websites devoted to the pier at Sheepshead Bay. And Google Earthing it is no big pain in my ass. No. Coney Island is right off the Bay. And some seriously interesting, historically relevant seafood restaurants. One just went out of business, again. Daniel told me about it originally, but then I read about it and saw it, where else, on the Food Network. Then I read in the Metro section of the Times that it had finally collapsed from the palsy of our fisheries. I bet there's one little fish out there somewhere.

So given some of what I just said, above, certainly not all of it, since I've seem to have forgotten what I was actually meaning to say. Jim was a bit fun to ask questions about trash. After reading Rubbish, I scouted around for the last fifteen years for books likely to have Rubbish in their Bibliographies (I have a stinky suspicion it may one day be in one of mine.) There are many, many examples. All of them worth a glance. And I have spent a handful of nights, at the Herman Well's Library (former Main) at IU burning the midnight oil, enthralled with the story of municipal trash. Also at bookstores.

Garbageland comes to mind, I don't remember the authors. And other books that talk about the policy of recycling, trash, polymers and construction wastes... you name it. I even read a great book by an apologist for the container industry. I picked the book up do to an egotistical desire on my part to see if Indiana's own Ball Company (now not located in Indiana, but still producing containers. They make a lot of plastic containers, and your occasional beer can for an "Import" beer brewed domestically after the batch of Bud's all done. Look on the side of the can. "The Ball Corporation." Jarhead's no longer.)

That apologist for the container industry mentioned The Ball Corporation. I don't remember why. I was already a bit of a sucker for the difference between an analytic approach to environmental problems, and what I more typically see, which is a sort of imprinting of a frustration in losing one sort of religion, for the necessarily even more humanist endeavor of the environmentalist. It shouldn't surprise the person surmising such a cynical thing that the born again Lefty for the trees ain't doing the math. This doesn't obviate being a lefty (I am one.) It's a little sad, none the less. Should you bring up math. At the sit in. Don't. Be happy.

The apologist, to my delectation, with full prejudice, and loads of math, did a little experiment in sustainability. He broke down the numbers of a single unit of a fast food store, like a McDonalds. You know: straw: one ounce; hamburger wrapper: half ounce; small cup: one ounce... on and on. From "utensil implements" to "glassware equivalents" (yes, they rhyme: blame him, he's the container industry apologist, not I.) And so, by checking into the total waste per customer (which common sense says a fast food restaurant produces a lot of) our hero, the apologist for the container industry comes up with a figure like: 18 ounces per customer. Now, he continues, imagine that there are 1000 customers a day. That's eighteen thousand ounces per day, every day of the year (give and take.) God, I love this stuff (meanwhile at the sit-in I am singing kum by ah, off key. Great song.)

Even a dolt like myself can figure out that eighteen thousand ounces divided by sixteen equals 1125 pounds. That's a lot of trash.

But wait!

How much trash would it have been if every table had been set and serviced with real glassware and serviceware, as opposed to their equivalents. And then how many pounds of water, at what force per minute would be required to clean all of the dishes that resulted. And how many napkins washed. And how many man hours tallied. And how much waste, off the plates, as opposed in your hand, when your teeth reach the end of the burrito or Big Mac.

I worked at McDonald's for at least two years. A half a ton of trash was not my favorite part of the job. Fermenting high fructose ketchup being the particularly memorable smell. However, I have also worked at a full service restaurant, a steakhouse. And a bakery (with throwaway everything for the customers.) And a sandwich shop, ect. ect. ect.

Seemingly greener, less convenient restaurants... slower restaurants, make huge claims. They should... it is almost impossible for them to compete for your dollar.

So they save the world with your patronage, or at least must claim to, or else attempt the impossible against the Dollar Menu's of the world. This usually requires a wink from a thoughtful, and forgiving customer. For most of us know--- the task of doing right by the world is nearly impossible. Eight out of ten business attempts will fail. And the other two be the ugly stepchildren of the multinationals. And risk being reminded at their next board meeting that they are not meeting financials, ect. Or simply pay the rent, with what they had wanted to pay a local farmer.

The apologist for the container industry will forever have my thanks for showing me what making a difference really means. You cannot want the best. You cannot mean well. You cannot be scandalized by the mechanisms of the multinationals. You must reconfigure the claims that got you here in the first place. Do I really intend, in business, to be quantifiably better, on all the metrics available for my claims? Or can I be happy to sit my people down, and ask them, "Which will it be, Glory, or a Story?"

Liam Presents His Parents

Some of my posts today were already mostly written. I have been interrupted by life a bunch with the writing. That is good. I haven't had the discipline to get up early and say something. So whenever I can I write something and save it, but don't "publish" it till I have more time and energy to edit it to something not completely embarrassing. About once a week I'll be in an extremely transgressive mood, and save but not publish something so sarcastic and ranting that I'm embarrassed to even have it on my computer. I never erase these. They will live forever as testaments to my fickle and explosive nature. Markers of the puerile beginnings of one man. Sort of like a little black diary.

Alas, you're thinking. Andy, your little black book should be bigger. There is wisdom in that, for sure.

I've been reading my sister and brother in law's blog, Life With Liam. Man, I cannot tell you what a gift they are providing me. Their personalities seem so alive in their writing. Liam and even his sister, Claire, come so alive, in the words of their parents. Both Angie and Gary write, roughly alternating, when they are inspired to say something. This activity of blogging is so interesting, in the ways in which it differs from a phone call, a letter, or really, any form of metacommunication out there. On a somewhat different subject, but similar point, I remember my brother, Geoff, six years ago put a huge List Serve (collection of emails around a particular subject, something like an old school Internet bulletin board, I guess.) from the website Beer, Beer and More Beer on a CD for me. I didn't have an Internet connection in my house in Elletsville. So I took the CD, which my brother had written in a file language that could be read as if it were on the internet by the Explorer application in my computer.

Anyway, there I would be, in my room, reading Emails off a CD my brother made for me. It seemed like a milestone, in my life, in a way. Writing and communication in a huge flux. Night after night I enjoyed reading about beer that way, and the silly little conventions groups of people develop when they want to inspire the sensation of community. One night I saw an Email from a guy in Bloomington. So I looked his name up in a phone book and called him. "Your not going to believe how I found you." I told him. He lived six blocks from where I sit today. Can you guess what we did together? We met through Beer, Beer and More Beer. So, we made beer together. My first partial mash I had ever done. The guy wore a white coat in his little brewery. He was a meticulous technician, and had detailed logs of every brew session. I tend to enjoy people like this. Not to the exclusion of others, just as artifacts of nifty architecture in the human neighborhood.

So Angie and Gary's blog, while supposedly about Liam, also happens to be a new way of loving their family, themselves, their kids, and this thing we call life. They reveal their humor, and heartbreak, and passion, and all the while tell you, "I didn't know what to write about." Whoops!

I think most people are completely paralyzed by the notion of getting out there with your ideas and feelings. They want to, just like anyone wants to somehow discover that some number of people have taken a few minutes each day to inspect the contents of your head and heart. It is among the things we live for as people. But most of us find ourselves vaguely contemptible, or as my sister put it, "mere shell(s) of [our] former selves." A blog in this context can seem a vehicle straight to the public gallows, where you can be punished for what nobody yet has discovered.

Oh well. There are gigantic benefits, rather hard to explain to people, in being publicly spanked as I was years ago, for being a very bad boy. I do not appreciate my past behavior, and I am truly not making light of it here, but I have noticed that it seems pretty damn difficult for the most principled folks I know to feel like they are worth listening to. And that is not only a shame (given their actual value to the world) it also means that those with the broadest voice, tend to be the least among us (including, possibly, myself.) This explains somewhat to me why the communication arts world is such a shabby part of the public furniture. Blogging, when done by the likes of my sister and brother in law, seems a remedy to the newspaper, radio and televisions self regard.

When they write an entry that seems to be about my nephew Liam's having a meltdown or something, you can't imagine a better way of someone describing how to be a better steward of love, understanding, and patience. You are literally reading how to be a better person, and laughing with mirth at the humor and heartbreak. You are also feeling the anxiety and discord that our reflexive Western standards of Independence have us all under the thumb of. My sister and her husband cannot pretend that they are always OK. Or that they know just what's going to happen. Their tone (or writing voice) is frequently a sort of Captains Log, on a journey, where no one pretends what's happening isn't within an arena of real danger, and adventure. At times this makes things rather more exciting then some people might think they can afford. At times I think of my Sister and her husband as people who did not necessarily ask (say, God, on their hands and knees) for a large dose of wisdom, mainlined in their warm sticky veins... But here it is, their own personal, interactive experience of what really matters, down close to the bone, every God Damn Day. From what I can tell, of the people I know, this makes people either very sick, or enormously thoughtful. Closed minded people describe it as saintly. That word is rarely a compliment to its receiver.

I don't know much about Angela and Gary. You could write half of Lewis and Clark's journals about getting to their house from where I sit, or if you're really vociferous you could write half of Least Heat Moon's River Horse. Either way, you're hundreds of pages of experiences from Bloomington. Flying to Portland is a magazine article by comparison. Or a blog chapter. It is expensive to leave home, to fly, to entertain oneself or one's family, ect. Until recently I couldn't even really afford a few days at that level of spending, so I am really embarrassed to admit that I truncated what could have been a better relationship with an entire family, until recently, due to a cold economic calculus. Happens all the time they say. My sister doesn't look at it that way, I know (she told me recently.) But, it helps to know the cost of not changing, in case your wondering why I don't think I'm the best Uncle that ever lived.

As Robert Boyer would say it, "There's some things you'll go ninety years and never do." Call it an accident.

So this blog of Angela and Gary's is an opportunity, for all of us. We get to hear the words of two parents who are marked by our culture as stained with a lack of normalcy. And whereas, the typical response of a culture is to turn away from the different and alien experiences of people who can't regurgitate the archetypal babble of an excited parent, with Liam's blog, we can choose to focus more tightly on the basic experience they bring us all on how to love a deserving, important, unique, and wonderful human being. How often have you clicked on a link to learn that? Sometimes, perhaps we have.

Angie and Gary want to know if I wouldn't mind enjoying them every day.

For the love of God, the answer is yes.

A Gift From An Enemy

I have been so busy the last few weeks... today has been incredibly useful, though far from relaxing. A woman at the coffee shop this morning offered me a back rub. I must look pretty beat up. And I am. It's funny how quickly you regain your strength after slower periods in life. While your doing the work and straight after you grunt with every movement you make, not realizing the day is a constant effort. You are completely outside of yourself, focused and abstracted to the last of the length of your personality. Things often aren't funny, or even interesting. Time becomes an anamorphic map, swollen beyond recognition with a meaning that isn't physically representative. It flies, it crawls, it empties your bank accounts and pools at the ankles of the smiling proprietors of the lumber yard. How many songs are written about time? As Chalmer, my farmer friend back in the day, used to say (constantly), "It never ends."

Time don't, that's what.

All of this is, of course, the privilege of the young and healthy. My depressed or dying friends, or fairly old and feeling cornered friends are not necessarily grunting through their day. The lucky ones still get in the zone. Thats surely why Jim Sr. is here a few weeks a month instead of back home. The zone don't happen at home. Though arthritis most definitely does.

We feel our worst when we sit around, wondering what to do. We don't really believe much of anything about the sitters of the world. We wouldn't be caught dead imagining ourselves capable (or admitting a capability) of legitimately living amongst the authentic contemplative monastics or what have you. Even nuns don't have much time for God. That's why we call ourselves worldly. There is a great book, for kids (!?!), called Nuns Hurry! Needless to say, its a bunch of Nun's slaving away. In the Zone. Not even one picture shows a face in contemplative rapture. The author of this Trojan Horse of subtexuality is clearly having a ball, stretching their limber muscles of freedom, given us by the Enlightenment. Between the lines. Between the lines.

There really is no lesson in any of this for me. I'm not even really looking for one. It's obvious to me that in another life I would have been possibly a far more conventional dude, or a far more uncontrolled disaster. The magic of life I suppose is having chosen different than what you otherwise would have become. Sometimes people tell me to lighten up and be more spontaneous. I don't tell them this, but often times it is obvious that people have made no spontaneous decisions in their life. Acting spontaneous is fairly easy. It's like acting loving. Find some weak, worthless thing and employ your powers. The world is full of studio audience members who will clap on cue. Acting through your instincts is something I can't even imagine, though we all feel them. They make us cry, and cringe, and speak with an authority unknown to the aural and visual world. And yet we often live as if our intellects run the show. Perhaps our intellects are responsible for the world at large. For all its spectacle, that would explain a bit.

My words may seem a bit clinical, and detached. Those attributes, as well as my infamous flat affect have been uttered by many a wise guy and wag. So, fine. I am attempting to understand the outlines of my consciousness without taking myself too seriously. This sort of thing, I'm told all the time, is impossible. I, however, know how low my standards for truth can be, and am comfortable coming to no conclusions, but merely feeling out the outlines. How such intuitive searching is clinical is beyond me. Though it certainly is detached from the Nintendo Wii, which from what I understand, is a wonderful machine to bond through. Sort of Twister for the Facebook set. Cool.

In most ways observing life is more magical for me than observing the (inter-objective) technologies of our life. An old friend of mine used to shake her head and tell another friend of mine (in a fairly kindly way), "What the hell is Andy doing? I saw him staring at this building. I went into a store, and came out, and he was still there. There was nothing on the building. Had I not known him I might have thought he was a crazy person." Her concern was real. And I find it rather brave that she'd inquire about my nature instead of merely coming to the conclusions most of us prefer. I know I've got all kinds of conclusions. What my ex-girlfriend Katherine used to call, "Opinions." Man I'd love to hear her say that word. There is something so wonderful about being mocked by a loving friend.

But there is something even more wonderful, if you have been confused for most of your life about your nature. One day a man comes along. For what ever reason you are a smart ass, and play with his head. His head is not in the business of taking lightly your bad decisions, and he proceeds to rip you a new one. His violence is on the edge of physical. Your memory of the pleasure of such violence makes the world seem very strange. You look beside you and see your friends in a state of shock, their mouths hanging in a manner that a tabloid photographer would love. You wonder if maybe you don't look pretty stupid yourself. So the violent thug continues to mock you with enormous charm and cutting anger. You realize you are deeply embarrassed and hurt, but for whatever reason can't feel anything but intense interest in this crazy man. You come to see, in no time at all, that you have somehow crossed him. You called him, "Buddy," or something. Or you asked him a personal question, which he viewed as beneath the protocol of public discourse. You somehow insulted this walking volcano, and he now is glowing red. Everyone in the room is tensed, and yes, you know you want, just slightly to hurt this man. Though you also feel bad for whatever it is that you did.

As Garisson Keillor might say, "Isn't this a great time for some key lime pie?"

Being a smart ass, and having gained an appreciative bunch of friends otherwise known as community, you discover you can no longer afford to be a person who ever hurts another. This is the first time you have ever thought about or realized this. The truth, and power of your shared pleasure in the world, shines briefly within you. So even more than your dignity, pride and safety you realize something inutterable that separates you from the man you have somehow hurt. You glance at this bolt from the blue and know just what to do (if you are as lucky as me.)

"My burdens obligate me to see you as my friend, sir. And my burdens, sir, are very heavy indeed."

You used to want to be like this. But back then you felt so small. Today you are far less free than back then. But, in the end, it can't be explained. You are simply a fighter no longer. Just a man.

Phantom Whim Syndrome

I am more than a bit of a smart ass, as everyone who knows me experiences pretty much whenever I'm around. I tell myself (actually my loved one's do) this is OK, though it is pretty shady, and insecure. The joker and trickster can be romanticized into charismatic gods, but the final analysis is that they are too weak to live quietly, sentry to the world as it is with them in it.

We like our jokers and tricksters however, just like we like our little dogs that piss on everything. Laughter, and pleasure at each others expense is how we escape from the prison of earnestness the Pilgrims surly would have preferred (publicly.) Me thinks that drawn comic art must have provided some side splitting amusements in such a closed mouth culture. Whereas in our culture today just about everyone is a somewhat activist rebellious advocate for something. And people that aren't, live in Wyoming. Or Indiana, for that.

As I age I come to realize that I must choose my fate. Will I reveal for the remainder of my life my weakness in these parenthetical, editorial, comments? Or will I try to simply await the almost certain inheritance that the level headed vouchsafe. "You'll never change," is almost as popular as the lottery and pays more to boot. But is it true?

I know everything I need to know to live this life. I just hope I give a shit.