Zeitgeist

These times just don't suit me.

It's not that I'm getting old. I still enjoy new things, new music, new styles. I have no problem putting Mozart and Lil Jon next to each other on a play list. I just installed a new car stereo with iPod, auxillary and (ready for this?) USB adapters on it. I can cruise along, blasting Lil Jon from my USB key.

No, I'm all about innovation. That's not an issue for me.

What is an issue is how mean, angry, and insecure this country is getting. Well, has gotten.

When I was in my teens, we used to wear some damn silly looking things. Jams (those three quarter length shorts) in horrible clashing shades of neon pink and orange. Pink dress shirts with skinny ties, baggy suits with Hawaiian shirts. And yes, part of us knew we looked silly.

Those days are gone. Go to the store now and you find many shades of black, gray, brown. I love the utility of my cargo shorts, but there's a limit to the angry, militaristic clothes I need.

Cars. Take a good look at cars. There are the pathetic pseudo assault vehicles (choke, cough, Hummer), and the even sadder throw back pseudo muscle cars. Don't get me wrong, some of them are really sweet looking (muscle cars, not Hummers; all Hummers look stupid, including the ones you folks with dirty minds are thinking of right now). The thing is, can't we come up with anything new? And can't it be a little bit fun and a little less "My country will invade yours if I can't afford to gas this bitch up?"

It's depressing, and I've realized that over the last few years, I've let it get me down.

I've spent a lot of the week listening to Prince. New Prince, old Prince, Prince from that time when he changed his name to 0+> and we all laughed and kept calling him Prince. I miss the days of weirdly androgynous people in purple rain coats and women's underwear, and Wendy Melvoin pretending to give Prince a Hummer (uh, a hummer) while playing Computer Blue. It was just so... colorful.

I miss that. 1999 was an anti-nukes song, and Ronnie Talk to Russia was about as clear a message as you could get. Things were serious then. It's just that we handled them so much better. We didn't act as bitter.

I once asked my friend the Mad Scientist how the hell you could live in this atmosphere, and (to paraphrase,) he said, "I guess you smoke marijuana, listen to obnoxious music and download internet porn." (for the record, he was not seriously advocating any of that except maybe the music part)

So, that's what I'm doing. Resisting the bitter zeitgeist of our times by listening to a short, crazy, androgynous black guy in women's underwear sing about "purple bananas" and God. It really seem like the only thing to do.

A Joyous Grey

Eternity: While in the popular mind, eternity often simply means existing for an infinite, i.e., limitless, amount of time, many have used it to refer to a timeless existence altogether outside of time. Basically nothing can happen in eternity in the sense we understand it. In order for actions to happen, there must be a tense that corresponds to a continuing action: a tense in which past, present, and future are combined to form a continual action. ( Wikipedia )

One of the oddest things that seemed to rub my early teachers the wrong way was my answer to "What's your favorite color?"

Grey. I always liked the "e." ( UK v US spelling )

"Gray's not a colour," they would tell me. "Pick something else."

"If I pick something else just because you don't like grey, then it's not my favorite colour, it's the one I picked to make you happy."

Long discussions of what constituted a colour would then ensue. At some point I would be told that I shouldn't ever color in things in my drawings with black, except for cats and car tires. "No, you can't color the cars themselves black... Well yes, hearses and limousines are almost always black, but you shouldn't be drawing them anyway... No, I don't know why we say "black people" when they aren't actually black, they're brown, just draw something and don't color it black."

Grey is the mix of black and white, in whatever proportions. Black is a term describing the reflection of no colors, while white it the reflection of all colors equally. Or, if you want, black absorbs every color, while white absorbs none. Grey, then, is what happens when something that is everything, is mixed with something that is nothing. A perfect shade of grey can be said to be everything at once while being nothing at all.

Grey also has a sound. I dreamed it one night, and managed to get pretty good to reproducing it. I stood at the kitchen sink in my parents old house, on a cloudy afternoon, when the medium light made the stainless steel sink a flat grey. I turned the water on and positioned the faucet so that a small, uniform, steady stream struck the steel at an angle that created no splashes or ripples, just one smooth, continuous flow of water (a clear grey). The sound was a steady, infinitely sustained note, that was not really a note. That is, it produced a constant tone, but any note you picked on the piano would be above, below or beside it.

Today, I was thinking of a ride I took recently. I was peddling along the shore, with a misty fall sky over and around me. The clouds were all shades of grey, the water a liquid mass of dark grey, punctuated by light grey wave caps, the rocks along the shore a dull powdery grey, the road a smooth, hard, dark grey. I could stare out into an endless grey, with the sound of the wind and the waves and the hum of my tires, all a never-ending tonal grey.

I was thinking of this when my co-worker came in dressed uncharacteristically well (for our office). Black pants, grey shirt, black and white tie. "What I love is that this is easier than picking out jeans and a shirt. I mean, black, white and grey, it all just goes, you don't have to think about it."

One of my favorite stories is the classic manga Grey by Yoshihisa Tagami, one of the best dystopian tales I've ever read (and I'm a guy that knows his dystopian tales). The title character is an almost-anti-hero who is willing to kill endlessly to find out why people are killing, and to eventually stop them. Black and white; all the colours and none of the colours.

Everything and nothing, all at the same time.

Baggage Claim

Intransigent - adjective - impervious to pleas, persuasion, requests, reason

I haven't been in many airports, and not on many occasions. Somehow, I seem to end up there late at night, by myself, waiting for someone's arrival, and standing near a baggage claim area.

Baggage claim is a weird thing: sometimes baggage can be seen, revolving around and around, like monkeys waiting for a back to cling to. Sometimes, you see people waiting, leaning forward, longing to retrieve what was once theirs, what they hope will be theirs again, or maybe what they hope will be theirs in the future. Sometimes you see the loved ones of those absent travelers straining for some piece of evidence that the missing one will return. Suddenly the baggage you didn't want to carry for your loved one when they were present becomes a treasure you grasp at and cling to. We feel that if the baggage is there, the loved one must be too.

Some day I'll paint a painting and call it "baggage claim." There will be a familiar conveyor, indifferently circulating those magic tokens of life: old report cards, Dear John letters, wrecked cars, bottles of booze, packs of cigarettes, smoking guns. Packed around will be the haggard travelers and their loved ones, pushing, reaching, grasping, clinging, to live the lives they've always known. If you look close, you'll see crying children, bruised women, despondent lovers, and many, many lonely and heartbroken faces.

All of them, victims of intransigence.

My advice to you is this: travel light.

Paving the Road to Salvation

The first year, it said "Booty Shakin' Contest Friday!" The second year, it said, "Wet T-Shirt Contest!" This year, it said "Badonkadonks Wanted!"

If you drive up, then take a right, then after a while, take a left, then drive deep into the tree-shadowed countryside, you find this place that, uh, "celebrates" the body. The existence of said place became known to us because we were seeking holiness. No, really, we were seeking holiness, and that was one of the things we found on tries one, two and three.

But before I get too far into bad analogies I could pull from the sign on a rural entertainment shack...

The destination was a retreat which ended about 8 months of Bible study and discussion. The first year, we studied the Bible in its entirety. The second year, I studied the writings of many Christians thinkers, scholars and theologians, while my wife taught a section of the class we took the first year. This year, we studied the Jewish prophets and the letters of and attributed to Saint Paul. The retreat is a simple over-night at a wonderful center run by our Roman Catholic sisters and brothers.

To reach this place, one may either take the highway north, then join into a succession of five, four, then two lane roads, before finally venturing off on packed dirt and gravel; or, one can be more adventurous and take the back roads all the way. I've done different versions of the first method the first two years, and the last method this year.

The highway is what it is: speedy, easy, not terribly challenging or direct. It takes more miles, but less effort, and that probably suits most people pretty well. It can even be taken, using juncture after juncture, to a spot that necessitates very little driving of secondary and dirt roads. Of course, there's not much to see if you go that way, and when something goes wrong on a highway, it goes wrong as fast as you're traveling, usually leaving you crawling bumper to bumper, with nothing to see but fellow frustrated travelers.

If you opt to travel part way by highway, you get a pretty quick jump on things, provided there is no construction, no accidents, no backups. Eventually, though, you find yourself on a large road that is five lanes, then four with "Michigan left" turn openings in a center berm. It's a fast road, with a few lights. It leads past a road called "Hill Top," which used to be the home of a wonderful man and his family. That man ran a center for the homeless, helped many a down-and-out fellow try to get on his feet, and was also a rousing success of a person who spared no expense on his friends and family. His house was on a lake, and he frequently entertained, sometimes in a style that would have made Jay Gatsby envious. A few years ago this man was torn from us by a sudden and aggressive cancer. He left a wife and child who had to part with the house on the lake, not to mention all those more important things. Clearly he was God's servant. He managed to be a success, to serve others, to celebrate life to the fullest. And he's still gone. No matter how easy that first part of the drive is, you still have to pass Hill Top and the lake.

There is another way to go. You take the roads out of town, heading north, north east. It's two lanes almost all the way. You pass farms, riding stables, beautiful mansions, broken down shacks. There are three story houses with private lakes, and at least one house with chickens and an old school bus in the yard. There are small country groceries at four-way stops, there are restored historic districts with new bars and restaurants a stone's throw away for the affluent folks doing all that restoring. There is also a Dairy Queen. Taking this road, you still have to pass Hill Top, but you see a lot more. People in other cars, people's houses, people at golf and on horse back. You see mansions, and simple houses, and a little poverty. You see a lot of nature, and all the ways man interacts with it. Having taken this route, and finding ourselves returning by it, we decided that Dairy Queen was in order. That is, we thought it was, not realizing that a couple of name-changing roads, a detour, and a wrong turn later, we would be lost in the country side, not on our way to Dairy Queen at all.

The road to salvation is tricky, so this time we cheated. My wife and I offered a ride to a priest. Oh, we love her company, and have greatly enjoyed her leading our Bible study this year. She and I share the hobby of woodworking, and she is good conversation on many subjects. But, let's face it, if you're on your way to find salvation, it never hurts to carry along a priest. "Don't worry about it," she said when we got lost, "I don't have any where else to be."

Ah, that's why you take a good priest along, isn't it? Where else did I have to be? No where but cruising the road to salvation with my wife and one of God's servants. So we got lost on the road. Salvation is one of those destinations where you can get lost on the road and still end up where you're going. God's cool like that.

We traveled up and down a country road called "Buno," eventually finding the paved two lane we needed to head home. No Dairy Queen, but we did see a lot.

Today, I retraced that path, this time, to meet up with my father (uh, my human, genetic, race-car-loving father). I shot pictures out on the the race course while he and his fellow volunteer workers made sure things went safely and fairly. On the way home, I retraced our steps of a couple of weeks before, and guess what I found? Our little jaunt down Buno Road had led us out just about a long block, no more than a quarter mile, from the Dairy Queen. Had we turned the other way, we'd have been snacking on Blizzards and Sundays. Instead, we had somehow managed to drive miles in a truly circuitous path, only to just miss our cold treats.

Sometimes the road to salvation is like that too, I guess. You get there, but some confusion or poor planning on your part means you miss out on life's Dairy Queens.

Do I really need to analyze what it means that there is a bar on the road, deep into the trip, almost near the end in fact, that tempts travelers with booty shakin', wet t-shirts and round back sides? It's buried deep in there, back off the main roads, where none of your friends would see you should you choose to shake, or maybe check out a badonkadonk or two.

We've all heard that aphorism about what paves the road to hell. Now I know some of what makes up the sights, sounds and smells of the road to salvation.

Scent and Sensibility

Smell is of all senses by far the most evocative: perhaps because we have no vocabulary for it - nothing but a few poverty-stricken approximations to describe the whole vast complexity of odour - and therefore the scent, unnamed and unnameable, remains pure of association; it cannot be called upon again and again, and blunted, by the use of a word; and so it strikes afresh every time, bringing with it all the circumstances of its first perception. This is particularly true when a considerable period of time has elapsed.

Stephen Maturin, from Patrick O'Brien's Post Captain

The space which my colleagues and I share as our office is in a sort of basement. A half basement to be precise. The building itself is old by American standards, and made of all types of brick, stone, concrete and wood. I have been privileged to visit the highest heights of the place - little attics that house forgotten treasures, dust and wires - and the lowest depths - more full of treasures and intrigue, and also of dust and dirt. At its pinnacle, the place give one a thrill like soaring, with broad vistas of buildings and people, and a sense of a sprawling future unfolding before you. In the deeps of its foundations, it proves that hell must be both more terrifying, and more intriguing, and certainly a place that brings out something darker and more personal. The future is bright and shared, the past is dark and private.

I was reminded of this today as I climbed the stairs from our lower level, to the food court above. In doing so, I passed from the heat and humidity of our test lab, to the cooler space of a student lab - nearly empty in the early summer - and on to the stairs which reached ground level in a wholly comfortable, dry, air-conditioned space.

All of these came together at a landing half way up the stairs. A place where these joined: the damp and warm of oppressive summers; the cool and dry of fall nights; the bite of spring rain on warm pavement; dusty and dank concretes from levels well below "basement;" many types of food, cooking in the court above; aging woodwork, smoothed by years and shined by the oil of a million hands.

There were scents from my childhood, from old homes and summer in the yard, and smells from my teenage years, excited with a sense of my own powers. There were scents of college, crazed with sex, booze and every extreme of emotion and expression. There were scents of hopeless times when the sweetest and purest of smells seemed to mock me; and scents of triumphant times, when even smells of garbage and filth were bright reminders of life.

I paused on that landing, and inhaled deeply through my nose, with what I suspect was a somewhat sad smile on my face, as I smelled how irrelevant I am to the greater part of the world; that last smell, the one smell we never sense for ourselves, but have breathed in deep as we send loved ones on their final journey.

A voice pulled me back to this world, this time.

"So'd they get the air on yet?" asked the towering figure half a dozen steps up from me as he paused on his way down.

"If they have," I answered, "it hasn't caught up yet."