Tag Archives: Philosophy?

A Little More Me. A Little Less You.

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So there was this night that a 16-year old was driving. It was dark, because it was night. This was a while ago. The 16-year old did not have her headlights on. Which caused a police officer to pull her over.

He asked to see her license. She obliged.

“Did you know you were driving without your lights on?”

“No, sir.” Pause for consideration. “I'm sorry. But don't worry, there are streetlights. I could see fine.”

Luckily, the police officer was kind and did not penalize the 16-year old idiot with a ticket.

Less happily, the girl was an idiot. Clearly.

Headlights are really not about helping the driver be able to see. They're really much more about permitting others to be able to see the driver.

Say this really happened to a certain person a long time ago. Say this person was driving a blue Cutlass Ciera with a Beatles tape in the cassette player. Say this really happened.

I can assure you, it did.

The 16-year old will grow up. For some strange reason, she'll remember the night she drove without her headlights. She will remember the night she said, all wide-eyed, “gosh, officer, no problem because I can see.”

Lord.

16-year olds grow up. Thank God. And then, then, they occasionally remember things like this and they realize: well, you know. It would have been nice if, at 16, or now, or sometime, my life didn't revolve around me. What was so wrong with me, that my concern was with me?

Well, unlike the city streets, which I really could see just fine, thanks, what I could not see– with or without headlights– was how self-centered the view of the streets and world I had.

After all, I meant no harm. I still don't.

But even now, many moons past 16 and that Cutlass Ciera (though never Norwegian Wood or My Michelle), it worries me that, more frequently than I would like, my thoughts are of the “don't worry, I can see just fine” variety. I would rather be thinking of “how well can you see?” and “can everyone see okay?”

Life is funny. It's my life and my work and my bills and my worries. My life.

My blog and my stupid memories.

When what matters is “we” and “us” and “you” and “everyone.”

A little less me. A little more you.

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Ether/Vapor

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Sunday.

I was motoring, along 465 on a grey day, waiting for snow. There were billboards, everywhere billboards, and signs for gas stops, truck stops, the cheap, plentiful, and ubiquitous food. And the mood that's been hanging over my head fell in the way it's been threatening to do for some time.

Thunk.

It's all so insubstantial, isn't it? A culture, a society, a way of life that's built on and of the disposable, the transient, the impermanent. And somewhere between the sign for Concentra Urgent Care (Jennifer chopped more than her veggies. Now she's at Concentra.) and the sign for Chik-Fil-A (Two cows in firemen costumes, appearing to paint “Try Spicee Chikkun”), it occurred to me that this world, or at least here, is built on vapor. You could pass a hand through it. You could see its breath on a mirror, you could see its reflection, but don't try to see the object reflected, the object that's behind the respiration– it was built of plastic and neon in 20 minutes of undervalued labor. It will be torn down in less.

It's been coming for awhile, this sense of inescapable, perpetual insubstantiality; the sense that nothing is solid. People's houses are under water, “security” has seemed to mean only rent-a-cops in doorways and not a meaningful value actual people can acquire for their lives. The murals painted by well-meaning and middle class volunteers on bridges and buildings in poor neighborhoods where a solid investment in infrastructure would have real meaning but, what the hell, paint is cheaper, so we'll go with that. The budgets built on Continuing Resolutions and not actual, annual, literal budgets of needs and income, black columns and red. The way relationships, profits, bills, earnings, livelihoods, health, stability all seem to hang on the slenderest of filaments, easily snipped by poor luck, a moment of insufficient judgment, or a vehicle's mercurial belt.

The way we believe in “middle class values” and tout terms of hard work and respect and decency, and for all our ideals, for all the weight of our history, for all our vaunted beliefs, and despite a very great deal of hard work and capital, at the end of the day, we're stuck in a world of minute-to-minute, a tango of plastic and short-attention spans.

So that was the Sunday drive. That was, is, the mood of the moment: this sense that everything in the internal and external world is TBA: to be announced, written in pencil but never ink, tentative, impermanent. Ether, vapor, and air. But not much else, no matter our best intentions.

Other people have hit on it before, of course, you get Shakespeare's mortal coils and “such things as dreams; ” you get the literary castles of air; you get the Beckett and the Kundera, the “Incredible Lightness of Being.”

And even for the fact that our kin has been there before, written about it before, you can't help but feel they weren't talking about mannequins of cows spray painting the benefits of inexpensive, readily available chicken. They weren't talking about state monuments that were built of drywall and convenience: monuments to decades not centuries. They were talking about something basic, but they were not talking about us– because we're, well, not that.

Which is the mood that has kept going, of course; after all, I'm not a dog capable of easily relenting its bone.

And so long as we live the way we live, all slab construction, paint, and short-term planning, with jobs that don't satisfy and work that has lost its virtue and its rewards, with a culture that can celebrate “Honey Boo Boo” but not remember that just because a word has an “s” doesn't mean it necessarily merits an apostrophe; so long as we go on building everything of vapor, full steam ahead, planning for nothing, or (in political banalities) kicking the can down the road, I think the mood will continue. Hamlet getting trumped by his ghosts. A topsy-turvy world. An insubstantial world. In some senses, an immaterial world.

Of course, I will say, every now and again you see a bird stick its little feathery head out of the recesses of a neon “B.” Or you'll hear a little kid squeal with joy at a Tonka truck sliding across a table. And you'll think Now, that. That is real. There is actually something there. Something solid. Something real.

And you'll be grateful. But that, like everything else, will not last. Because, apparently, for this moment, nothing really ever does.

But moments pass, too. Vapor, themselves, incorporeal, mercurial, impermanent, and temporary. Vapor, electrodes, synaptic connections that connect and evaporate, connect again. Insubstantial. Immaterial. What's next?

In which our heroine is confirmed in knowing she must change something.

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“Severally, on the occasion of everything that thou doest, pause and ask thyself if death is a dreadful thing because it deprives thee of this.”  Marcus Aurelius

“… I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.” Steve Jobs

Time Will Eat Us: This is Not a Pipe

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Listening to the podcast of Fareed Zakaria GPS (CNN) from last weekend, I heard economist Ken Rogoff explain that we could predict things about the economy because “We have centuries of examples.” It’s a meme that’s been popular in the past decade (probably forever): that whole “those who don’t learn the lessons of the past are doomed to repeat them” thing; that whole grand belief system in the infallibility of history to repeat, wash, rinse, repeat.

History: that map that we must study in order to conquer.

Only. What if history is not a timeline we can follow?[1] What if history doesn’t repeat but only rhymes, as Mark Twain quipped? What if history is the ourobouros, the snake eating its own tail? A circle, spinning. A cycle? And how do we know the course of the cycle? We can only assume from 6000-ish years of people living sorta like us. We can only assume from an historical record that leaves more gaps and unknowns than quantifiable certainties. And what if we’ve been poor at reckoning the cycle?

Then, what if it is not a cycle? What if it’s a grid that stretches out into infinite space or infinite directions? Or what if each moment splits time and history into separate fragments and directions? What if it isn’t only one thing? Who are we to think we’ve got it figured out? Seems to me reality offers more evidence to the contrary than in support of us mastering the universe.

Let’s just go with the past decade: I have heard the world at large get all Miss Havisham-y about Iraq, Afghanistan, the economy. I have watched the events unfolding and frequently thought we were getting things wrong by assuming we had the pattern figured out: Iraq/Af/Pak/Iran/Al Qaeda were all variants of the Peloponnesian War, the Crusades, Vietnam, the first Gulf War. The economic recession of the early 2000s mimicked the recession of the early 80’s (go shopping and perk up, America!) and the Great Recession could be handled like the Great Depression Lite because it is/was the Great Depression Lite.

And for a decade, all I could picture was that Dickensian lady in her yellowed wedding gown looking at a moldy cake. The two thoughts were: What if we are wrong? And: No, this feels different, this looks different, this is looking to me (and I am admittedly amateur hour) like a Shift, a New Thing, a New World in the making—one of those restructurings that happen and change everything we know into Something Else. And we’re living in the transition from what was to what will be.

Thus, the worst possible thing we could do, if that last is the case, is to think America is “the greatest civilization the world has ever known. The strongest economy the world has or has had”[2] and to believe—and act upon—the assumption that the U.S. sprang from the earth to dominate it and thus cannot possibly fail. (We’re exceptional, after all, and we’ll keep shouting about our superpoweriness while we stand on the rubble of what used to be streets, bridges and public works as the impoverished and diseased remnants of the population look on if we’re not careful.) There’s surely a peril in the strongly held conviction that “as is” equals “as ever” just because we’ve studied our history and the case is closed. “[The] assumption is that history is over. You know, we are very sloppy here. We don’t have a fixed identity.”[3]

Francisco Goya, "Saturn (Kronos) Devouring His Son," 1820-23. Museo del Prado, Madrid.

So when I hear the expression of “history repeats itself” in the face of a world that itself faces man-made climate change, the unintended consequences of 6.94 billion people living on it,[4] a changing global economy, geography, and power structure (multi-polar, multi-polar, multi-polar!), I worry that if we, the U.S., doesn’t handle this smartly and listen more than we speak, metaphorically, then the events of History and Time—or our interpretation of them– will devour us alive.[5]

After all, as Simon Schama has pointed out, history “is definitely not in the thumb-sucking business.” It means “inquiry,” not “story,” and it, as he says, keeps us awake at night. It isn’t a predictive map or a “geneology of feeling wonderful about who we are now…[it is not] the furniture polish of antiques.”

But whether so many of the chatterati (and politicians) are right and everything now is clear and fits into an historical pattern or whether I am right and this could be something different, my position is: We just can’t know. We are uncertain and should proceed with caution. We should not be certain about our certainties, because it’s entirely possible that something can look like a duck, quack like a duck, walk like a duck and not be a duck. (Video of ducks, which is not the same thing as actually being ducks.)

Rene Magritte, "La Trahison des Images," 1929. Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Or, as Magritte painted it in The Treachery of Images: Ceci n’est pas une pipe. “This is not a pipe.” It’s a representation of a pipe. (And right now, you’re not looking at a pipe or even a representation of a pipe. You’re looking at a pixilated representation of a representation of a pipe. Put a mirror up to it if you really want to play recursive mind games with yourself.)

And so it is with history and time and our place in both. Sometimes we don’t see what we are so sure we are seeing. Sometimes the smartest answer in the world is “I don’t know.” This is not a pipe.

[1] “My own suspicion is that history is not symmetrical. And that unfortunately things don’t necessarily go down…the same arc they came up on.” James Howard Kunstler
[2] Senator Mike Lee (R-UT)
[3] Patrick Geary
[4] U.S. Census Bureau estimate as of July 2011
[5] The link to the Goya painting and the same opinion expressed by Teofilo Ruiz in a lecture at Stanford: “The Terror of History,” November 4, 2010.

My Beautiful Laundrette

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I swear this really happened.

Yesterday afternoon in hot, sunny downtown Indianapolis, I sit outside on a break from work to enjoy the fresh air, however tempered it may be from the potent combination of soap and fabric softener wafting from the laundromat/lavanderia across the street.

A young woman exits said laundromat and crosses the street, walking directly toward me. She is eating a fudgsicle and tugging a rather impish looking toddler with her.

“Hey. You know anyone with a baby?” She stands over me (I’m on the curb of the sidewalk). Her demeanor is chipper and it’s impossible to miss the brightness of the toddler’s eyes, the sweetness of his smile.

I answer an embarrassingly slow negative: the question has surprised me. Normally the questions from strangers are of the “You got a cigarette/quarter for the payphone?” or “What kind of work is in there/They hiring?” varieties. There are very seldom exceptions.

“Well, the thing is, my baby just died…”

“Oh, my god, I’m so sorry.” Horror. Pity.

“Yeah. Had to go identify the body today.”  She says this in the exact same tone of voice I would use to say “I could use a coke.” Now, a stoic or even matter-of-fact expressionless I could have understood; anything other than the vaguely pleasant, rather casual method of delivery of what appears to be, to her, a small detail of her communication.

She doesn’t really pause after this shocking sentence, but continues: “Well, I had just bought all this formula and now I’m stuck with it, so I thought if you knew anyone with a baby…”

Here, she pauses, bites off a piece of the fudgsicle, hands it to the toddler, who pops it into his mouth, stretches his arms over his head, stands on his toes, falls back on his heels and then covers his eyes with the upstretched arms just enough to peep disarmingly out from under, at me. Throughout the whole moment, he smiles his gift of a smile with immaculate little baby teeth, sticky face, and impossible good-natured perfection.

“Anyway,” the mother says, “I’m only charging 10 dollars a can, ‘cause I have to make my money back, so I just thought…” Shrug. Fudgsicle. And she and her toddler amble off away while I’m still sotto voce-ing between “so sorry” and “good luck” and some version of “how can I help?” and “what?”

I would like not to make a commentary here, to not judge, to class the moment as “surreal.” Instead, the only thing I can say is that in order to sleep, in order not to experience a dissonance so severe it drives me straight to crazy, I have to believe somehow the story she told isn’t true. Because I surely cannot square a personality I would describe as chipper (but not, say, of Paxil/Prozac/chemical derivation) with the words that fell out of her mouth, to me, a stranger.  And I certainly don’t know how to deal with the weighty helplessness at the thought of a recently (immediately?) bereaved mother selling her baby’s formula to strangers because the need for money is that desperate.

Just another Friday on Prospect (less) Street, Zipcode WTH, Indianapolis.

Excessively Partisan Mountain Dew Pajama Pants

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I Ask You

Following President Obama’s deficit-reduction speech on April 13, 2011, Brand Spankin’ New Bona Fide Celebrity and House Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) stated that the president’s speech was “excessively partisan.”

“Excessively partisan?” Like beginning the text of  Fiscal Year 2012 Budget Resolution with the words “Where the President has failed, House Republicans will lead.” That kind of “excessively partisan?”

Paul Ryan’s Budget Resolution, also titled “The Path to Prosperity: Restoring America’s Promise,” on page 5, the start of the actual budget, opens with the statement that the president has failed but the Republicans will save the day.

I ask you, what business does something like that have in a formal government document, let alone a budget proposal?

Sure, I might feel like scrawling “Sallie Mae sucks my will to live” at the top of my checkbook register (hey, I kick it old school), but I don’t write it on my checks or anything. Then again, I’m not a member of the House Committee on the Budget. I might be too grown-up and/or aware of professional etiquette for that.

Dear Congress: when people say they want their country back, I usually roll my eyes. But when you slur the president (any president, actually, or any fellow legislator) in an official government document, it makes me want my country back, too. Because I’m pretty sure that anyone else I might give it to wouldn’t open their formal legislative document with something that sounds like it should be hollered from a tree-house and followed by a secret club-member’s handshake.

Why So Huffy, Duffy?

On a trip home to defend the House’s passage of Ryan’s Budget Resolution, fellow Wisconsin Republican Representative Sean Duffy was a little overwhelmed by a constituent who calmly told Duffy in about 45 seconds of reasonable speech in a totally indoor voice that what Mr. Duffy had just said wasn’t right. Mr. Constituent (a.k.a. Duffy’s Boss, in theory) was in the middle of his third sentence when Mr. Duffy silenced him with “Let me tell you what. When you have your town hall, you can stand up and give your presentation.”

I could make a snarky comment here about town hall events not being events traditionally “had” by the common folk in their day-to-day lives, but there’s a really good reason Representative Duffy has been out of sorts lately: He’s been experiencing money troubles. As he told a constituent in March, he “struggles to meet his bills.” And that’s something I think we all can relate to. I mean, $174,000 annually just doesn’t stretch as far as it used to.

Bless Her Heart!

Of late, I’ve noticed that a new trend has emerged in the political theatre world. A politician says something unpleasant about another politician or their ideas and then follows it with “but [fill in the blank] is a Patriot.” It works the other way, too: “My partner from the other side of the aisle is a True Patriot but…”

I’m relieved to see the people in charge have begun to find a replacement for the overuse of insult flag “disingenuous.” For a while it had been getting difficult trying to explain the near-constant drinking I was doing while listening to the news.

And although I’ve grown up with the whole “She’s so sweet but…” and “He’s such an ass, bless his heart” insult formulae, I’m willing to give the whole Patriot variant a shot. I love my country just that much.

Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life, At Last I’ve Found Thee!

She walked into a bustling Speedway convenience store, a stranger I’ll call Misty, short for “Mystery.” Misty pushes past the five or six of us standing on line, looking disdainfully at our poor pathetic god-forsaken doomed to wait eternally for a cashier selves, and collapses her purse, her keys, and her job application in a heap on the counter and announces she’d like to apply for a job and look, it’s already filled out.

Misty is wearing stained furry bedroom slippers. Which are probably the only appropriate footwear one can choose to complement Very Pink Pajama Pants covered with endless repetitions of the Mountain Dew logo.

Yet again, this is one of those mysterious moments where I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. Poor Misty in her Mountain Dew pajama pants. It would be so funny if only I didn’t have a gut feeling that both of the following are true: Misty needed that job; Misty probably didn’t get that job. And I can’t stop the harsh, sneaking suspicion that Misty will not know why she didn’t get that job.

Oh, Misty, turn those pants inside out! Or wear something else, anything else. Dress for success, Misty! And then, stand in line with the rest of us poor souls. Think “customer service.”

Bless your heart, Misty, you Patriot, you!

International Day of Snow

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So: here it is, then, the topsy-turvy world I vaguely remember from Brave New World. A world where the absurdity is so great that it frequently occasionally feels as though the world has flipped absolutely over and up has become down and everything has changed so rapidly, so unalterably, and so inexplicably that nothing really makes sense.

For example, Chilean coal miners will have to live in a hole underground for three to four months, BP oil spills in the Gulf and we add chemicals on top of it and scientists admit that no one knows what any of it on that scale will mean in the long term. We routinely blast the tops from mountains and push the peaks into the rivers below, so we destroy two things simultaneously and we barely even shrug. We invent nuclear power. We expand its use,  even though we’re still not sure what to do with the spent rods when they can’t be recycled any longer. So we bury them: radioactive bones hidden by the dog-people.  We frack. And all of it, for what? So there can be a light in the refrigerator. So that even our closets can be air-conditioned. And things like that seem absurdly frivolous to exchange human lives and the earth for.

We feed grass-eating animals corn. And then we supplement the corn with soybeans. And then we supplement that with meat by-product. So we have cows eating cows and corn and soybeans and chickens unwittingly cannibalizing chickens. And then, because they seem so unhealthy, we hop them up on antibiotics. And then we decide that, with chickens especially, they’re really just too, well, chicken-like and so we genetically modify them. All of which seems less than humane. And why? So McDonald’s can give us nuggets for a quarter apiece on Thursdays and so kids will have an excuse to eat more ketchup. And that seems a bit strange, too.

And there’s the sex life of frogs to consider. You know, the frogs with three legs or six eyes or what have you. The ones with rapidly diminishing male populations because the assorted melange of Prozac, hormone replacements, Rogaine, pesticide, and road salt in the waterways seems to affect hormone production and encourage strange genetic mutations. Endocrine disruption from microscopic amounts of chemicals that can’t quite be filtered out or eradicated. And it seems to have hit certain amphibious species first, which really sucks if you’re a frog, but will eventually get to us, too. (And in some research, it already has: American male youths have lower levels of testosterone; the birth rate for males is actually decreasing, and there’s still the question of what’s causing all the ADHD, autism, depression, and cancers). And for all the unambiguous gains due to the use of chemicals, when the water contains trace amounts of every single thing we put on or in ourselves or our land and you’re contemplating genderless or mutated frogs incapable of reproducing, it’s a little difficult not to feel that something eerie and peculiar and upside-down is happening.

And there are the conflicts and the wars and the pretexts. And people shooting because that’s what they were once ordered to do. Then the other team has to shoot back. And so on. Sometimes there’s a reason. Sometimes we only say there is. And sometimes, in some places, even those fighting admit that they don’t know why: that’s just what they’ve always done. And how in Africa (of course it is Africa; these stories are always in Africa), just over the weekend in Congo, an entire village was gang-raped: all the women, including grandmothers, and many of the children. And in other villages, the children are simply kidnapped, handed weapons, told to kill their families, and to kill or be killed. They are turned into soldiers for a non-army in a non-war. They are fighting because that’s what they’ve always done and no one stopped to ask “what for?” and besides, the government (such as it is) is following them and they’d be in trouble if they stopped. And so they go on.

And even in small, trivial matters, it all seems a bit bizarre, if I think about it much. Here, where there’s the gift of peace and occasional leisure, we have a steady diet of reality shows which ostensibly are about design or art or food. And they can be fun to watch. But the whole point seems really to be not celebrating human ingenuity or creativity, but participating vicariously in the subtle thrills of back-biting, back-stabbling, and other assorted methods of carping, sniping, and judging. The most vicious, catty comment is the highlight. The tearing down of another person, if wittily done, is the most entertaining. Only: we as people have declared bear-baiting inhumane. We no longer gather at arenas to watch people in shackles try to outrun big game cats. We like to think we are more modern and enlightened than that. But what is all the snark if not just another bloodsport, really?

It just seems to me that we all arrive in this world and we learn it and accept it. And when we grow up, we are just too busy, too threatened, too inundated and distracted by the living of life that we never have the opportunity to look at it long enough to ask ourselves if it’s really the one we want. If this life, this world, is the one we wanted or the best we can do. And maybe it is. And that would be fine, too. But I wonder sometimes if what we really need is just to halt everything for one day. To close all the non-essential things (and some of the “essential” ones, too) so that everybody could just stop for one second and look. Daydream. Think. Question. Or just breathe.

I need a snow day. And, judging from the looks of things, the entire world needs one, too.

Seen.

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1. The Tale of the White Truck

Driving to work, I find myself behind a beat-up white pick-up truck, its body sagging under the weight of its overflowing load. The hazard lights are flashing because the thing can barely move, though it’s trying, due to the not one, but two flat tires it has. What is the onerous burden the truck is carrying in its bed? A mountain of tires.

I don’t know if this is poor or brilliant planning. Don’t know if it’s some existential symbol of the human condition: that one should have a surplus of exactly what one needs and (a) be crippled by it and/or (b) unable or unwilling to easily access it or (c) completely oblivious to its existence and use.

I only know that this week on Shelby Street, the Sublime intersected with the Tragic, somewhere in the vicinity of that poor pathetic truck.

2. How to State the Obvious in 30 Seconds or Less

Yep.