Monkey tails

At Graham's tae kwon do class on Saturday, they played monkey tails. This is the game where they put a little strip of cloth underneath the kids' belts in back, and then the kids have to run around and try to pull each others' tails out. The last one with a tail wins. Graham ran around quickly, avoiding the other kids altogether, not trying to take anybody else's tail, and by this tactic he was able to stay alive until the last 3 or 4 each time they played the game. So, a strategy of total risk avoidance -- just wanting not to lose -- took him a certain distance. In the end, however, he was defeated by a kid who actually wanted to win.

Round trip to Fayetteville

Graham and I road-tripped to the Special Forces and Airborn Museum in Fayetteville today. For those of you who haven't been: don't bother. Although the museum is free and housed in by far the swankiest building in town, it is small. In fact, there's no way in hell the size or quality of the collection justifies the expense of the building. We watched a 15-minute movie -- funded by Ross Perot -- in an entirely empty auditorium with seating for 150. The place is clearly optimized for the daytime school bus crowd. Actually, I might have learned more (though much of it focuses on D Day and I have by now read many detailed accounts of the goings on at Normandy) had Graham not been dead set on rocketing through the place, twice sending me into kniption fits when he disappeared while I was reading and I had to look all over the place. Certainly it was cool to learn that Ben Franklin was the first guy to think of paratrooping (from balloons, natch). It was nonetheless a pleasant outing, and I obtained my secondary objective of driving some NC backroads and getting a gander at some regions I know poorly. Fayetteville itself underwhelmed by any standard, with the portion of 87 that passes through Fort Bragg into town consisting of a really depressing array of skanky titty bars and scary motels, fast food joints, used car lots, and other junk retail. Need an iced coffee to drive home? No dice. I seemed to have memories of being in Jacksonville as a kid and being impressed by the variety of Asian food they had, Vietnamese for example. There was none of this low-level military cosmopolitanism in evidence around Fort Bragg. As we passed Sanford, it was very clear that we had come into another geological realm, that of sandy soil. It's hard to look at the shit and not think, "how the hell do you grow anything here?" But then, what do I know about agriculture? I was reminded of a conversation with a certain wise Swiss fellow recently, who said that some development specialists reckon the solution to poverty in certain American counties is to give residents a one-way bus ticket out. All in all, it made it clear that Jesse Helms did a great job of making sure that Eastern North Carolina got huge appropriations from Defense because, by God, it needed to get money from somewhere.

Back to mending wall

Some years ago I cryptically alluded to Frost's "Mending Wall" in a post.  Here's the poem in its entirety. Frost's point would seem to be that the function of the wall is not to keep property marked off in some literal sense, but just to have a wall.  I myself like the idea of just having a wall, because they look nice and gives notice of my somewhat atavistic connection to this one little acre of land.

Robert Frost "Mending Wall"

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

Earning the rock wall

As I mentioned some time back, I am slowly building a rock wawall along the uphill edge of our backyard.  Until recently, it had consisted of rocks -- stones, if you will (Natalie was asking me about the difference recently.  I think it's mostly a class distinction, "stones" sounding older, more worn with age, more expensive) -- that were already loose in the yard and which I pulled up and carried over to the wall area. And part of me felt that using already loose rocks was tantamount to having a kind of unearned rock wall.

Then Mary got it into her head that we should do some serious landscaping in the front yard. More serious than what mom had put there over the years, which was, in truth, plenty serious for me. But, having time on my hands, I offered to help her -- some. So I've been digging some holes.  And there are, truth be told, lots of rocks down there in the soil, itself much more clay-based than the dark loamy stuff we had become accustomed to up in New Jersey.  And so, I have been digging up rocks, stones, if you will, and taking some of them over to the rock wall project staging area.  Over time, I will have to educate myself on how to put the damned things together to make a wall. And educate the kids too, as I view the wall-building as a multi-year process, not to be rushed.

Or, possibly, they will just sort of tumble and jumble there together, as they're not really shaped ideally to nestle together. As I look at the walls around town, the really neat ones seem to be held together by cement, and I can't help thinking that cement is for pussies.

ps. Mary tells me that voles -- the little nemeses that eat her plants, like to live in rock walls.  Hence she's happy for me to take rocks from the one in the front yard and put them in the back yard.  We'll see how long it is before that wall gets blamed for vole infestation in the patio garden.  I may be forced to disperse the rocks or cement them together.

A Loyal Character Dancer

Just finished Qiu Xiaolong's second Inspector Chen novel, A Loyal Character Dancer.  It is a good mystery novel, and gives what I assume are reasonable pictures of life in China, though the author has been in the states since the late 80s.  Much of the dialog is pretty stilted. But one can basically read his novels for the food.  Here's a typical passage.

"What about a dumpling dinner?"
"A good idea.  It's the season for spring bamboo shoots.  We will have dumplings with three fresh stuffings:  fresh bamboo shoots, fresh meat, and fresh shrimp.  I'll fry some dumplings, steam some, and serve the rest in an old duck soup with black tree ears...."
..."I'll go to the market to buy a basket of really fresh bamboo shoots."
"Choose the tender ones.  Not thicker than two fingers.  We'd better mince the meat ourselves:  ground pork you can buy is not fresh."

Keeps you hungry. All this talk of food is interspersed with a little romance, a few corpses, some cultural history, and copious quotes from Chinese proverbs and poetry and the like.  The characters live as if suspended somewhere between their stomachs and an all-enveloping literary tradition, somewhat menaced by gangsters but not enough to distract them from the niceties of serving tea. I'll read more.

ps. the more I think of it, the more I think Xiaolong's focus on food is a sign of homesickness.  He apparently lives in  St. Louis and writes in English.  I'm sure he pines for the foods he describes.

And so....

I find myself self-employed once again, at once blissfully unshackled from a job that wasn't doing much for me beyond paying the bills and giving me a short commute and driving me crazy and making me unable to sleep. Being infinitely fortunate in that I am debt free and financially secure for the near to immediate term, I'm trying to take time to breathe and scan the horizon, yet everybody keeps asking me: "What are you going to do next?"

This is the last thing I know, as my mind wanders in the space of minutes.  At one minute I am pondering the low carbon-footprint virtue of not traveling at all and drinking in the sheer richness of everything that's available within my immediate vicinity and indeed my walls (the books I've brought home from just the thrift store in the last month could keep me busy for weeks), and then I open a statement from American Airlines frequent flyer program and discover that I've got 75,000 miles (many more than I would have thought) and I wonder, could this get me to Russia for a quick jaunt? Reading Paul Muldoon's review of Philip Larkin's collected works reminds me that I really do need to find a good biography of Wallace Stevens, but also that I should have a look at Larkin himself, but in the middle of it I can't help but read a review of Frank Langella's travelogue of Hollywood's beds and make a mental note to come back and read John Gaddis's review of a book about Eisenhower.  Between a trip with mom to Roxboro and a fascinating talk by Jim Johnson of Kenan-Flagler I can't help but ponder the actual and desired trajectories of both rural and urban North Carolina.

In short, my mind bounces off walls in altogether good ways, possibilities are endless, I just have to select one and hunker down and bring it to fruition. But, honestly and thankfully, there's no huge rush right now.

Two gripes

1. The Wall Street Journal app for the iPad sucks.  I've downloaded a few new versions over the last few months and but keep having problems loading today's edition.  I have to toggle over to the Asia or Europe edition then come back to the US one to trick it to go out and find the current one.  They should fix this.
   
2. Checked out Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts out of the library last weekend after having pawed Rebecca West's massive Black Lamb and Grey Falcon and been daunted by it.  I should have taken the fat one. Kaplan's book is monotonously focused on the idea that the Balkans are always already about to blow up, that blood lust hides behind every door. It gets old quick.  The idea that Clinton read the book before deciding a course of action to take on Bosnia is a little depressing. Policy should not be formed at high levels by such flimsy crap.  The idea of any kind of cultural history of the region being written without any reference to Dositej Obradovic or Vuk Karadzic is just silly.  I'm taking this book back to the library pronto.  It is gonzo reductivism run amuk.

Let sleeping cats lie

For those of you who enjoyed the saga of Leon's departure and return, here's an update.  Though we still sometimes hear hissing and growling in the night, they have been getting along a good deal better. Natalie recently spotted Leon cleaning Rascal which, back the the days before his flight and return, would never ever ever have happened.  By and large, we're back in business.

Sling blade?

For some reason the guy who mows our yard hasn't showed up recently, and, as Mary has slaved assiduously in the yard digging holes and planting plants in accordance with the garden plan we had drawn up by some master landscaper lady, the grass and weeds up there have grown up a lot.  Now, as regular readers of this blog may recall, I am not the enthusiastic of suburbanites about on the topic of mowing (check out some earlier posts).  However, our little plot just looked shitty, and after pouring N-thousand dollars into our renovation somehow I didn't like how crappy it looked.

I don't even own a lawnmower, but down in the basement I found this old tool which is clearly used to swing and cut grass or plants or somesuch.  Not a scythe (though I love scythes, used one at somebody's dacha outside Moscow back in '98 to cut nettles), not a sling blade ("some people call it a kaiser blade, I call it a sling blade.."), but something one swings and it cuts grass.  Even though its old and rusty.

So I took this thing out on our little patch out front and cut down the most egregiously offending tufts of grass and weeds, even as Mary rolled her eyes at me, surely thinking I should be helping her with some project in her garden.  And it looks considerably less bad now.

Cryptic silence

Natalie often asks us things, usually to do with eating fairly luscious foods, and then we pause before responding.  I myself pause because Mary is the primary arbiter of dietary policy in our household, and Mary pauses because she is not always the quickest decision maker.  Here's how it went last night:
Natalie:  "Can I have ice cream for desert?"
(silence as described above)
Natalie:  "I'll take your cryptic silence as a yes."

This "cryptic silence" phrase has become one of her signature phrases here in recent months. Gotta love it.

Moving to the frisbee

I have been playing frisbee more with Graham of late, actually, basketball, soccer, and frisbee, but lets just talk about the disc for now.  Graham is not only catching and throwing better, he is, perhaps most importantly, beginning to anticipate where the disc might go and trying to get to it. Sometimes he gets there, sometimes he doesn't.  And, in the end, so much of life is about just that. It is immensely gratifying to see it.

Like magic

Natalie hurt her foot yesterday in PE going over a hurdle.  She was up at 3:15 this morning because it hurt so bad, but then she got back to sleep. In the morning I gave her some kids' ibuprofen, and it felt better immediately, as in, in seconds. 

But not enough to walk to school or go to Pacers this evening.

The Checklist Manifesto

I keep trying to read Atul Gawande's Checklist Manifesto, but am continually put off by the fact that there's so much blood and guts and stuff.  I could never be a freaking doctor.  

Fernando Torres

Sometimes I think the guy is a pretty boy whiner, but I must say it was good to see him break his drought yesterday against Aston Villa.  All told, I must say I am warming to Chelsea. Used to not like them, especially John Terry, but I find myself rooting for them to make it through Champions League and into the mix for next year. I surely love Drogba. Even Terry shows spirit, though he is a lout.

De li non aliud

It's astonishing how different my attitude is towards blogging, into which I pour what I actually think about just about anything, and which I do freely, and professional writing, where I comment on a much narrower range of matters and restrain myself to a pretty much technocratic point of view, which totally gives me the willies and  makes me feel like my skin is on fire.  Part of it is the fear of being called out for making mistakes in a professional context, which I feel like I'm at risk of doing fairly frequently, since I'm writing about areas in which I'm often something of a novice compared to people who might read my work. Part of it is simply the fact that they pay money for it, which gives me higher degree of accountability.  You would think I would feel more exposed and at risk in the text into which I have invest more of myself, but in fact I am more exposed where there is more that is not me. And, I guess that kind of makes sense. I'm happier to be myself that to be something other than myself.

Lot size, wildness, and noise

Just read Wade Graham's "Jesus is My Gardener", a Kindle Single.  Good stuff. One of the things he notes in there is that, in LA, wherever you are, you can always here some sort of landscaping equipment.  I often noted the same living in NJ, probably even blogged about it years ago. It is one of the prices we pay for imposing order on nature.

When we moved to NC a few years ago, I wrote how Mary was put off by the wildness of the landscape, and even by the size of the lots, accustomed as she was to the greater density and higher degree of maintenance that one sees in the Northeast. You can see what she's talking about.

But, there is a benefit. Bigger lot sizes, quicker growing rates, and a lower desire (or ability or commitment) to tame nature (the embodiment of contingency or, in Nietschean terms, the Dionysian) means that working at home during the day can be less of an exercise in noise suppression.

Vignette

The boys across the street play a lot of hoops in the driveway.  It's good to see, because so often kids aren't outside working on their game and just goofing off.

Around 6:30, as the light was getting soft, I was sitting at my desk banging through an edit of a draft when the elder boy from across the street ran out from his garage, jumped up to touch the rim, then kept running out through the driveway (I was trying to figure out what he was up to), balanced on the railroad tie the edges the driveway, and finally came out to the street to wheel the garbage can back in.  It was a perfect little childhood moment.

Just then, an 70ish guy in a tank top and shorts came past him, running down the hill making his way round the circuit of the lake, like everybody does.

And there it was, childhood, old age, and me up here chained to my desk, raking a few ducats. Three major life phases at dusk.  All we needed was an adolescent with a boom box and we would have had it all.

Back to the sandwich line

I wrote earlier about this sandwich maker. Over time I've come to believe that he probably does have some sort of "different ability", in the most PC parlance, and have developed much greater patience with him. I am, in fact, happy to see a guy like that be able to hold down steady employment. Lord knows I'm a fucking mess in my own way.

My kids like to go to the public library almost every Sunday, and it's located at the mall now while its permanent home undergoes a renovation. I had seen the sandwich guy waiting for the public bus near the mall, and now I have started to see him there at the library on most Sundays, usually attired in business casual Sunday best. My guess is that he doesn't have a family, maybe even doesn't have an internet connection, who knows?  The library seems to be part of his Sunday routine. We recognize each other and say hello.

I must say I like it, it makes me feel kind of warm inside to live in a place that provides a good public place where a guy without much money can go and dress up and feel dignified. A church would work much the same.  Maybe he goes to church first. All good.

People looking at our house

People go past our house all the time as they circumnavigate the lake, and they turn and look at our house.  Or are they looking over it, getting that last glimpse of the lake.

Many people congratulate us on it, say how great it looks.  As I think I have said before, I don't really identify with the house and how it looks, I don't feel like it reflects me in the same way as say, the blog does. But I do wonder if they really like the house, or are just saying so or, as is so often the case with me these days, are they just happy to see people putting money into their houses or even into commercial construction just because it indicates and is in fact identical to economic activity.  And yes, it reflects on the value of their own houses, however tangentially.

Central coherence deficit, midlife crisis, and the fragment

Was talking to Leslie about the concept of central coherence deficit ("CCD") and its relationship to autism spectrum disorders and the anxiety that is their fellow traveler. Basically, CCD theory says that those on the spectrum capture details super-effectively but have a difficult seeing the big picture. Since we're looking at these issues in our family now even as I struggle through what seems like an endless midlife crisis accompanied by serious anxiety, it all seems very apropos.

Going back to Stephen Covey's "7 Habits," which I've kind of characteristically stalled out in the middle of, one of the things he enjoins readers to do is to kick back and think about what we'd like to have people say at their funeral service, really dig into what their core purpose in life is, what they'd like to be remembered for. That's a hard fucking thing to do. There are so many swirling priorities, life is so many faceted. In the end, in my case, it's much easier to say what I don't want to be remembered for than what I do want to be remembered for.

Certainly life is much easier for those who see the world in very black and white terms, and in many ways that's what central coherence would seem to correlate to.  Boiling it all down to "make more money" or "save the planet" or "help poor people" or "protect my children" or just "pay the bills" makes it very easy to live. If you can or must accept any one of these you can roll forward easily.

Temple Grandin et al. trumpet forth the idea that if everybody was neurotypical, the world wouldn't move forward a whit. Somebody needs to focus down on details and see stuff that the big picture obscures.  Certainly the part of the Western tradition that has appealed to me has been the part that opens discourse.  In philosophy, the fragmenters rather than the systematizers, Heraclitus, Plato, Pascal, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Wittgenstein rather than Aristotle, Augustine, Kant and so many others whose spines I could scarcely crack. To say nothing of scripture. In prose, always Dostoevsky and Balzac before Tolstoi (and I do think Bakhtin is right that the miracle of Dostoevsky is the way the various voices coexist within the novels).

In the end, the great thing about the world is its breadth and texture, even though we all breathe, love and shit much the same.  Or rather, we all aspire to do so.  The great paradox of modernity, capitalism and material progress is that it tends to flatten out the breadth of human experience even as it makes it easier for more people to perform some of the basics (and yes, paradoxically once again, even as global capitalism and crappy tax policy has in the last couple of decades created insane wealth dispersion, it has also pulled more people in developing markets out of abject poverty). And, to be sure, it's destroying the planet.