Disappointments of home

My return to the US in the wake of my first trip to Europe--Canterbury, 1990--left me reeling with (literally) sophomoric misery. Everything American seemed dull, embarrassing, shoddy at best. Subsequent returns from subsequent trips have been easier (after a semester in London I ached for nothing more than a comfortable couch, my friends back home, and a bag of proper American pretzels), but the feeling that our fellows abroad are onto something we aren't has stayed with me.

While our president vaguely admits that global warming is an actual problem but follows that with the defensive stance that Americans should do nothing to change their ozone-wrecking ways, our European brethren drive ever-smaller cars and pay a premium for their petrol.

While we're almost willful in our waste of water, those across the sea (and, I'm told, the Japanese before them) have created toilets that one can half-flush or stop mid-flush, using only enough water to get the job done.

I won't even start on Europe's relative lack of chain restaurants, or the superior quality of their fast-ish food across the board, or the fact that a proper coffee is taken casually at a bar and does not cost a small fortune--all too hackle-raising to get into.

There are annoyances: diesel is pervasive, smoking is (mind-blowingly, to the American mind) permitted everywhere, and the toll system on the autoroutes is incomprehensible at best. But for the most part, I'm still left with the impression that despite the US's bluster and overweening pride, our quality of life doesn't match up to that of Europeans. There's a good deal we could learn if only, for a few moments, we'd shut up and listen.

European haze

I have recently escaped from a souvenir shop across from the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. A family (not sagrada, to be sure) of Danes (or their ilk--I didn´t hear enough to be sure) had me more or less pinned to a display shelf as they surrounded me in order to get a better look at the tchotchkes on offer.

We will soon endeavor to escape from these madding crowds, from the umbrella vendors and the ponchoed tour groups and the buses belching up diesel fumes. Barcelona is an amazing city, but this is not the best perspective from which to see it. (Standing hunched under an awning last night while the city exploded in rain and the street lights snapped off was a better, if still imperfect, vantage point.) I want quiet alleyways and restaurants that aren´t used to tourists and sites where the queue to enter does not snake around the corner (no queue at all would be even better). That´s the afternoon goal.

I´m losing track of days--was yesterday morning Bize Minervois? When did we leave Nice? Where in our journey did the Pyrenees fall?--but in a pleasant way. One more week of these shape-shifting days, these unstructured hours, and then it´s back to caring about the time. But I don´t need to think about that yet, not while there´s still the chance to let the days come and go as they will.

And this one, celui-ci, is not nearly done.

New, new frontiers

Although I recall memorizing at a tender age the words to my Dad's Beatles and Barry Manilow albums (quite a selection there, Pops) and the songs constantly flowing (check that--oozing) from my Mom's favorite Easy Listening station, my first musical love was Journey.

Greg and I had LPs and 45s when we were younger, but those were mainly filched from our parents (with the possible exception of Paul Hardcastle's '19', which came to us in mysterious ways). The first record I actually owned, presented to me (along with a Garfield nightgown) on my 11th birthday, to my immense pleasure, was Journey's Frontiers.

I remember this album well: the band members in a weightless, space-suited circle on the back cover; the vaguely creepy, Metropolis-esque face on the front; the lyrics printed out in miniscule type on the sleeve. I listened to it for the first time (although I had, of course, heard chunks of it before on RI104) the moment I got it, there in Aunt Connie and Uncle Vinny's living room. Glenn, my impressively musical cousin, slid the record out of its cover, held it (like you were supposed to) between his palms, barely touching it, and lowered it onto the player.

And there it was: 'Separate Ways,' that timeless plea of heartbreak and promise, swelling out into the room. Glenn turned up the volume; my 11-year-old self sat down on the couch and reveled in the music, the words, Steve Perry's soaring voice giving shape to a conundrum I could not, at that age, have truly understood (although that understanding would come some years hence).

It was bliss, and I was hooked. I don't think anything else touched my record player for the remainder of the summer and well into the fall.

As with so many things we adore early on, I eventually moved away from Journey, tucked Frontiers into Dad's record case and more or less forgot about it as I turned to (in approximate chronological order) the illicit pleasures of Purple Rain, Top 40, Bruce Springsteen, and, come the angst-soaked days of high school, as much moody Brit Pop as I could digest.

And although it's easy--almost too easy--to make fun of Journey these days ('What Would Journey Do?' is a prime example of the ease of the jest), there's still something in me that surges at the memory of that summer day, those notes, those words. My adoration of music, my belief that it said to the world things I was feeling but couldn't say myself, may have been established well before the needle hit the record, but they were reconfirmed, forever confirmed, the moment Journey filled the room.

Robot

On Friday night, while looking for the David Hasselhof sticker my Finnish pen pal had sent me back in 7th grade (long and most likely irrelevant story here stemming from a conversation with Monique about the Cathars, Stockholm, and my extant Finnish relatives), I came across a folder bearing the things that used to decorate my walls back when we were cube-bound somewhere around 1999.

There were some amusing photos, some worthy quotations scribbled down for posterity (including Jed's infamous observation about some album cover: 'I thought he was in a wheelchair, but that's a plate of food'), some scraps of half-recalled inside jokes. And then there was something I'd totally forgotten about: a message from Mike, composed on his Pocketmail device (ah, the heady days...) during a sabbatical he'd taken during the spring of '99.

Mike, our former boss (although only nominally so, as we actually had a real--read: older and titled and larger salaried--boss), was and is the consummate outdoorsman and adventurer. It was a rare weekend when he couldn't be found hiking or biking or climbing somewhere, and sitting at a desk made him nothing short of miserable. So he took off for a while in April and May, much to the envy of the rest of us, who remained cube bound and weepingly bored.

He wrote us dispatches from the road, and we lived somewhat vicariously through him. The message I dug up on Friday--one simple paragraph--showed up in my Inbox on Friday, May 7 at 10.06 a.m., in reply to something I'd written (since lost) with the subject 'I wanna be you!' This is what Robot (as we'd nicknamed him) had to say to me that morning:

'Ms. Wilska,

I am writing to you from Yosemite National Park. Early today I was six hundred feet off the valley floor high on a granite cliff face about two hundred yards to the left of Yosemite Falls. Roughly 500 feet off the ground I was the lead man and I came very near to a major fall. This is a feeling of incredible aloneness. I was eight feet above my belay man very far past the point of return on an overhanging crack system and very tired. I have never felt this kind of fear. It is a strange feeling to be thinking, my foot is slipping and I only have my fingertips on this nob, but it's all I've got...and you move up anyway. It is a combination of belief in yourself and an acceptance of falling at the same time. I cannot describe the sensations of elation and deep sadness that slam together in those brief moments. They are as horrifying as they are fulfilling.

Wish me safe

mike'

I remember reading that message for the first time, remember wanting to cry both at the thought of a friend coming uncomfortably close to a situation that could not end well and in thankfulness that he'd come out the other side unscathed, that he'd been to the mountaintop (as it were) and was now sharing his revelations with me, grasping gratefully at his words.

Reading the message anew on Friday made me well up with tears again, as if the 1999 Robot were tugging at my sleeve with a reminder: you can't back off from the things that scare you the most; they just may be the things that keep you alive.

Let's look for Swedes!

This is more or less the intelligence level at which I'm working today.

Steve Martin's nonfiction

Among the stickers affixed to the BART ticket machines in the Embarcadero are those that warn 'Soft, old bills JAM!' They bring to mind, always, a group of flabbying middle-aged guys, all conveniently named Bill, gathering in one of their garages to play a few tunes.

On an unrelated note, the New Yorker's summer fiction issue this year gets off to something of a grim note, with a number of pieces (which, now that I think of it, are not actually fictional) about the deaths of family members. To my mind, the most striking memoir is Steve Martin's, in which he writes about his disapproving and fairly cold shouldered father. Rather than attempting to dig into the words and analyze how they come together in such a way that poignancy and pathos seem present in equal measure, I offer up an excerpt:

'I walked into the bedroom where he lay, his mind alert but his body failing. He said, almost buoyantly, "I'm ready now." I understood that his intensifying rage of the last few years had been against death, and now his resistance was abating. I stood at the end of the bed, and we looked into each other's eyes for a long, unbroken time. At last he said, "You did everything I wanted to do."

I said, "I did it because of you." It was the truth. Looking back, I'm sure that we both had different interpretations of what I meant.

I sat on the edge of the bed. Another silence fell over us. Then he said, "I wish I could cry, I wish I could cry."

At first, I took this as a comment on his plight but am forever thankful that I pushed on. "What do you want to cry about?" I finally said.

"For all the love I received and couldn't return."

He had kept this secret, his desire to love his family, from me and from my mother his entire life. It was as though an early misstep had kept us forever out of stride. Now, two days from his death, our pace was aligning, and we were able to speak.'

Sacred hatred

The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod wins, hands down, the title of Intolerant Religious Organization of the Month.

An article in today's Times reports that the president of the Synod's Atlantic District, the Rev. David Benke, has been suspended from his post because, according to his church, he 'offended God, the Bible and all Christians..."dragged" his faith...to the level of Islam, committed heresy and violated two of the Ten Commandments.'

All of these offenses stemmed from Rev. Benke's attendance at an interfaith prayer service at Yankee Stadium last September, 12 days after the World Trade Center was destroyed. His elders claim he broke the First Commandment ('I am the Lord thy God') by 'worshiping together with "pagans,"' and the Second by 'putting other gods before him.'

To his immense credit--and with my incredible admiration--Rev. Benke has refused to apologize, as the leaders of the church have demanded in exchange for lifting their ruling against him, and has appealed that ruling. He's hired lawyers and has a solid team of backers. According to the article, the Reverend says he is 'waging war against religious intolerance, and an insular view of faith that not only prevents unity among peoples but promotes violence.' While his aims are inspiring, it's more than a bit maddening to realize that once again, the voices within organized religion calling for change, tolerance, and inclusion are almost never voices from the top, and those who are in high leadership roles almost always seem to do their best to silence the murmurings from below.

It's true that change always needs to start somewhere, and that that somewhere is almost never in the seat of power, religious or governmental or corporate. And it's gratifying that there are, relatively speaking, so many people willing to risk censure from their higher-ups in order to at least make some noise. But here's hoping that this noise--which is of particular importance in a society, like the US, that makes such lofty claims for itself--doesn't get drowned out or, worse yet, ignored altogether by those with their hands pressed over their ears.

Night, Death, Mississippi

Tired as I was last night, I found myself painfully awake at 11.30, 11.45, somewhere close to midnight and, after a respite, half past one. There is, as ever, too much in my head, and no one around but me to discuss it with, which leaves me reeling, aching for some sort of release--hard to come by in mid-day, near impossible at night.

I've never suffered from the sort of insomnia that might rob me of rest altogether (knock on wood), and always manage to will myself to sleep through some combination of sheer fatigue and repeated reminders that whatever I'm preoccupied with on the verge of unconsciousness can wait until the morning. The worries will still be there; the lists of things that must be done will rewrite themselves come sunrise; whatever pleasant thoughts may be keeping me up won't be gone for good if I succumb to sleep. But pushing those things aside tends to be an arduous process, and one at which I'm not particularly skilled.

Last night as I lay in bed with the usual set of fears (albeit with some recently added variations) racing behind my eyes, I found myself suddenly thinking of a line from Robert Hayden's 'Night, Death, Mississippi':

O night betrayed by darkness not its own

Whether that was just another example of the constant storm of lyrics, lines, words, phrases kicking up dust in my head or an attempt by my subconscious to steer me away from the melodramatic path to which I seemed to be making strides, I can't say. I do know, though, that it pulled me up and back, away from the details of my own fretting, at enough of a distance to show me more of a diffuse picture, to dilute the worries and uncertainties and doubts enough to allow me, finally, to sleep.

Night, Death, Mississippi
1
A quavering cry. Screech-owl?
Or one of them?
The old man in his reek
and gauntness laughs --

One of them, I bet --
and turns out the kitchen lamp,
limping to the porch to listen
in the windowless night.

Be there with Boy and the rest
if I was well again.
Time was. Time was.
White robes like moonlight

In the sweetgum dark.
Unbucked that one then
and him squealing bloody Jesus
as we cut it off.

Time was. A cry?
A cry all right.
He hawks and spits,
fevered as by groinfire.

Have us a bottle,
Boy and me --
he's earned him a bottle --
when he gets home.

2
Then we beat them, he said,
beat them till our arms was tired
and the big old chains
messy and red.

O Jesus burning on the lily cross

Christ, it was better
than hunting bear
which don't know why
you want him dead.

O night, rawhead and bloodybones night

You kids fetch Paw
some water now so's he
can wash that blood
off him, she said.

O night betrayed by darkness not its own

My grandfather is dying.

I write that knowing it makes it sound as if this comes as a surprise to us, as if we haven't known it for years. But it doesn't, and we have. We've known for a long time now (too long, I want to say) that Parkinson's is taking him away bit by bit, a little more every year. We know the prognosis is dismal. We know there's no miracle cure--scratch that, there's no cure period, miraculous or otherwise.

But maybe we've been fooled--or, more realistically, have allowed ourselves to be fooled--by his 'good' days (i.e., those in which he's at least somewhat lucid, or can open his eyes for 30 minutes at a stretch, or when he comes out with things we can't believe he has stored away in his brain, like the name of a couple who came to his and Gommy's wedding). They make us think that there's still a glimmer of a chance that he might pull through. I think we all know, though, whether or not we say it, that we're trying to pull him back to us with gossamer threads; we can't stop his leaving.

Dad writes, in his most recent letter, words that cause my breath to catch in my throat:

'I visited Poppa Wed. and Thurs. and found him in an even more weakened state than even a month ago. He spends almost all the time with his eyes closed, whether sleeping or not is hard to tell. He did show a glimmer of recognition when I showed him an old woodworking tool and [he] made a very faint gesture with it to indicate he knew how to use it. I suspect we are witnessing Poppa's twilight days that will soon bring an end to his long and productive life. As a man of great native intelligence, tho not always so cultured, I know he looked up to you as a kindred spirit who better than most understands the workings of the world and never ceases to add to your quest for knowledge. To be curious is a good thing, he would admit.'

There are losses far worse, I know, than an 87-year-old man who has lived, by all accounts, an explosively full life. If he had the words, I imagine Poppa would acknowledge that he's had the chance to cover most of life's bases. But what loss is ever easy, however long in the making or inevitable? I can't help ruing the coming end of a life that has so profoundly shaped my own.

In Seattle, as we're getting dressed one morning, Sarah and I chat about Poppa. She leans forward toward the mirror and, as she brushes on mascara, says, 'I dream of him a lot these days, and always--really, every time--he's his old self.' This stops me. 'God, I have those dreams, too. He's always up and about, laughing and talking like he used to. It feels' --and here I am trying not to cry--'almost as if he's trying to reach me now the only way he can.'

And that's the truth: when I dream of him it's as if we're communing. As if the things he wants to tell me, the things he's got stored in his brilliant mind that can no longer reach his lips or his fingers, can pour out in my dreams.

I'm not a big believer in the mystical, and there are definite limits to what I find plausible as far as human communication goes, but I do cling to my dreams of Poppa. And I wonder whether he doesn't have his own dreams, coming to him in all those hours of closed eyes and half-consciousness, dreams in which we speak to him. Dreams in which the 3000 miles between us, and his disease-racked body, and the limits of the flesh--dreams in which none of that matters. And he can hear me say, 'I love you, just impossibly love you.' And, 'I always loved making you proud.' And, 'Know what I miss? Your big, callused hand around mine as we walked into the fields in Brewster; the way we rode the waves in Lake Worth; how you used to bolster my spirits throughout my gawky adolescence by reassuring me that someday I'd find a partner who would both love me and be worthy of my love; the tilt of your smile.'

And, 'Whenever you're ready, you can let go.'

Come again?

Also, here's today's nonsensical headline from Yahoo! News:

Study: Sperm Donor Women Fear Time

The drive-in

It's a good thing the entry I just wrote was more or less expendible, as Blogger has tossed it off into the void. Take 2:

The upcoming Independence Day holiday has instilled in me the desire to load up the trusty Corolla with friends and go to a drive-in. This stems, I think, both from the fact that I quite like the concept and from my unfilled hankering for a good dose of straight-up Americana, the likes of which can be hard to find in the Bay Area. (We like our fusion here.)

As I recall, I've not been to a drive-in for quite a while, at least since we had the blue VW bus (whose lack of heat was bearable in the summer). We equipped the back of the van with sleeping bags so Greg and I could retire at our leisure, filled the trusty Coleman cooler with dinner, and went to the theater over in Waterford to watch, if I remember correctly, Animal House. There must've been a kids' movie as the first half of that night's double feature (perhaps Lady and the Tramp?), but far clearer in my mind is the memory of watching Jim Belushi and friends stumble about in togas.

Anyway, thinking of drive-ins this morning brought to mind the eternally pleasant Let's All Go to the Lobby trailer (stills here), whose cavorting foodstuffs were meant to incite in patrons the need to proceed to the concession stand with all deliberate speed. I find it fascinating that this film was added to the National Film Registry in 2000, joining such other luminaries as Apocalypse Now, Lawrence of Arabia, and Porky in Wackyland. A prescient move on someone's part, to be sure. If only more theater operators replaced their tired, mid-80s live action concessions trailers with this one, moviegoing might once again seem sort of whimsical.

Achtung!

Mom sent me one of those FW:FW:FW:FW-type emails over the weekend, this one about safety tips for women. Now, I know the intentions behind these things are generally good, and it won't harm anyone to brush up on pre-basic safety skills (e.g., Be AWARE when walking back to your car in the middle of the night in a dark, empty parking lot).

But still, does no one realize by now that the 'Woman finds flat tire on her car, man offers to help fix it then requests ride to his car on other side of mall, turns out to have been plotting to rape and kill her' story did not, in fact, just happen to your friend Betty's daughter's friend at the mall last week? It's been making the rounds for years, and while I couldn't find a listing for it on snopes.com, it still smacks to me of urban legend.

Here's a direct quote from the list of tips:

(b.) If you are parked next to a big van, enter your car from the
passenger door. Most serial killers attack their victims by pulling
them into their vans while the women are attempting to get into their
cars.

While I will not claim to have tapped into the workings of serial killers' minds, I will venture to guess that most serial killers don't go hunting down their victims by sitting in vans in mall parking lots.

Just in case I'm wrong about, though, I'll exercise extreme caution the next time I park my car anywhere but my own garage, will learn to enter and exit through the passenger side door, and will work on BEING AWARE. Because, as the message informed me, YOU NEVER KNOW!!!

It's a mixtape/random quotation/regain perspective kind of day.

When I find myself likely to wallow in a sad or disturbing or otherwise unpleasant situation over which I have limited control, I try (not always successfully) to pull myself together in one of two ways: either by engaging in a sort of Schadenfreude fest in which I allow myself to make positive (from my perspective) comparisons between my own current pickle and the significantly brinier pickles of others; or by reminding myself that even if the current unpleasantness were to end in the most horrid way possible (which, God and the boy and my own moody Cancerian self willing, it won't), it would not spell the end of my world (despite initial appearances).

A river in a time of dryness/a harbor in the tempest

So I walk down Market this morning, iced Peet's in hand, and think, first, you must give sad and sorry thanks (always, always) for the fact that this street is not your home (an extreme view, but a useful and humbling reminder). Then I think, whatever you might lose now, you will always have that drunken night of donut soccer with Dave and Otis; those quiet moments of holding baby Ev, just up from her nap, in Mom and Dad's living room, and for a while it's just the two of you, her exceedingly pleasant weight in your arms; you and Sarah in laughing tears as you model her new underwear over your jeans; wandering around Nashville with Eric and Erfert, Tenneesse whiskey on the brain; lying on the grass with Dave and Jimmy at Kelt and Kristina's wedding and just looking up, forever up, and out, and beyond.

Is it so wrong/to think there's more?

Some Buddhist scholar (I'm blanking on the specifics) wrote an article in Yoga Journal last year in which he noted that it's folly to believe that you're either the cause of or the solution to all of the problems you face in life. It's a folly, I admit, to which I often subscribe. When I stumble, I spend what may be a phenomenal amount of time wondering what I could've done to prevent that stumble (even in those cases when the answer is clearly, 'Not much') and scrambling to right myself (and whoever else I might've taken down with me as I fell). But I think the lesson I'm missing in all of this is not, Why did I stumble? or How can I get up again? but How can I get myself on surer footing in the future? Because in this linear world, in which there isn't the chance for do-overs, isn't that the only thing truly worth learning?

You'll cry/believe me/come back

My head is full of words: imaginary conversations, apologies, strings of poetry, too many songs. But they can only take me so far. I can only plaintively quote Marge Piercy ('There is a turn in things/that makes the heart catch./We are ripening, all the hard/green grasping, the stony will/swelling into sweetness, the acid/and sugar in balance...') or Springsteen ('I'm no hero/that's understood') or Li-Young Lee ('Song, wisdom, sadness, joy:sweetness/equals three of any of these gravities') before everything becomes a blur, and I risk excess, and should just rest, allow some silence in, remember that it's either life or freedom from briars.

Whatever happens, whatever, we say, and hold hard, and let go, and go on.

Relative measure

From a Times article on the publishing world's lack of interest in an Andersen juror's tale:

'Reconstructing the ruminations of the Andersen jury and exploring their ramifications is "not the worst idea I ever heard," Jonathan Karp, an executive editor at Random House, said meditatively. "I think the worst idea was the Bible diet, where you ate all of the foods mentioned in the Bible. That was the worst. Although for all I know that became a best seller."'

Small wonder

I think the Wonder Twins may have been sort of Super Hero Lite fare, aimed more at those of us who were not yet ready to identify with the Twins' more impressive brethren, or who were perhaps content to strive to be--someday, somehow--the sort of kids who could dress all in purple, sport magical rings, and transform themselves into endlessly useful permutations of water and animals.

My support for the cartoon WT does not, however, mean that I'll willingly go see the live action movie based on same when it comes out. Because, really, have we not yet learned to stop filching after-school or Saturday morning cartoons for movie ideas? (I suppose if the lesson is that movies based on cartoons may be dumb beyond words but are also painfully lucrative, it has been learned, and repeatedly taken to the bank, and we won't stop being inundated with such movies anytime soon.) Surely there must be better material for kid-appropriate movies out there. Can't we allow the Wonder Twins (and the Flintstones, and Scooby Doo) to remain in the animated realm, thereby saving their good names from the sullying affects of live action and computer animation?

Dear Metropolitan Diary

I've not yet read the Metropolitan Diary in today's Times, but I think I have a pretty good idea of what it might include:

• story about an elderly woman on a bus with (choose at least one) a large bag of groceries, a small dog, or an inappropriately warm coat
  
• story about elevator shenanigans in some co-op or other
  
• story about how, despite everyone's expectations, a New Yorker did right by one of his brethren, thereby exploding the myth that all New Yorkers are self-involved and ungiving

(Mind, I fully acknowledge the fact that the San Francisco version of the Diary would include endless variations on Muni whinging, tales of dot-com failures, and tourists in shorts in the middle of July. I'm not dissing the Diary.)

It's this last part I thought of last night when the middle seat in the row in front of me was taken, at the next-to-last minute, by a young woman who came barrelling down the aisle with a large suitcase, glared at us as she said, 'Well, SOMEONE has taken my seat' (when, in fact, she was looking at the wrong row), and finally plopped herself down after handing the bag to a flight attendant and almost hissing, 'That had BETTER be gate-checked.' She then put her tray table down to finish the cup of ice cream she'd brought on board and, after she'd finished it, thrust it in the direction of the passing flight attendant and said, 'Will you take care of this?'

In a nutshell, she made me want to smack her. I don't often have that desire. And while this is surely completely unfair and stereotypical and what-have-you, she also seemed to me the perfect example of the sort of insensitive, self-involved, purely selfish New Yorker who gives the rest of the city and its populace a bad name. Alas, on the plane, unlike in the Diary, there was no sudden change of heart, no turn for the good. She started the flight as a bitch and ended it the same way.

And, sure, no doubt she's nothing like the corrupt, Tonga-swindling businessman, but there still seems to me no reason to be so unpleasant. What's the benefit? Who wins out in the end?

I didn't dare ask and risk actually having to speak to her. Instead, I just waited in the aisle while she bustled out and down the jetway and into the maze of SFO with her gate-checked luggage and her self-righteous air.

Learned

Reading back through old journals is the sort of activity that's kind of painful while I'm in the midst of it, but winds up being clarifying and somehow refreshing--a bit like rolling about in the snow in the altogether after coming out of a sauna. It's easy to cringe at all of my past screw-ups, at all the stupid things I did or thought or allowed myself to feel, but in the end I find that I need to be thankful for precisely those things that make me shudder, since they contributed to the convoluted path that's landed me where I am now.

(As an aside, I sometimes think that if I ever need to inure myself to public humiliation and/or criticism, all I'll need to do is publish my journals in toto and let the world have at me.)

I could write reams on the particular subject of Past Mistakes in the Boy Department, as Recorded for Posterity on Paper, but the less gut-wrenching (not to mention more politic) course of action would simply be to sum up those mistakes by noting that they've taught me what I don't want while reinforcing the details of what I do. I've let myself stumble into (more than) enough of the former to truly understand that what I have now--the sweet, gut-shaking, heart-palpitation-inducing latter--is meant to be held onto.

I intend to do just that.

True Crime

Erfert has shared with us this criminal news tidbit:

I did read one interesting article this week -- the one about how a San Francisco banker bilked the tiny island nation of Tonga out of its entire $26 million national emergency fund (which the king claimed he had put into an American bank so Tongan authorities wouldn't use the money to fix roads). ... Before his dastardly deeds were discovered, the American managed to get himself declared court jester of Tonga. I assume that job is now open. I am adding it to my list of career possibilities if joining the circus doesn't pan out.

It makes me wonder whether the entire human race is always headed toward moral corruption, but most of us are able to keep ourselves from leaping over that ledge (sort of like how everyone carries around some strain of herpes, the vast majority of which are harmless), or whether the reverse is true: we're really all quite good, but some of us just can't hold ourselves back from making that terrible, sullying leap.

It also makes me wonder how many nations still employ court jesters.

The Phantom Tollbooth

Although it seems unpossible (as Ralphie might say) that I managed to make it through a rather book-filled childhood without reading The Phantom Tollbooth, that seems to be the sad truth. (Too much time spent reading and re-reading Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, perhaps, although James W. and Christopher K. agree that it's a classic.) Powells' interview with author Norton Juster sort of makes me want to jettison the rest of the reading material stacked up on my desk and go right to Dictionopolis.

True, true:

'You cannot live and keep free of briars.' --William Carlos Williams, 'The Ivy Crown'