Sendak Take Two

 

"A good way to tell it's snowing is when everybody runs outside and throws their hat in the air." 

Another very quick attempt, forcing my awkward fingers to obey my will. Result not even as good as the first one, but it achieved its purpose.

The goal is not to master Sendak's style, but rather to practice seeing again. By attempting to draw the same figures one sees the artists original result in a deeper, richer light. One notices subtleties that one did not see before. One appreciates the uniqueness of certain figures that one did not see before by casual inspection. It brings so much to one's attention, that one did not appreciate.

I notice I caught a bit of the edge of some computer code that is part of an educational/informational poster I am making. I go through 22 x 28 inch poster boards from Office Depot like you wouldn't believe. And glue sticks. So many glue sticks! One of my "secret weapons." Thankfully they are cheap.

The Towers of February

 

"A fourteen-year-old boy finds himself transported to another dimension and unable to remember his past."

I found this book in the school library in junior high school and was immediately captivated by it. I believe it must have been in ninth grade, because that spring happened a leap year (1980). This is significant because in the strange alternate reality into which the boy (Tom) was cast, February had 30 or 31 days. For fun, I decided that when March 1 arrived, I would date my papers as February 30, and I kept doing that through March, just adding additional days to February.

In many ways it felt as if it had been written just for me. I've never met anyone else who read this book. It slipped out of my memory after ninth grade and I didn't remember it until a few years ago, during a leap year, when the memory of it came back to me. 

It's very difficult to find a physical copy of the English translation. There is an Amazon page for it but no physical copies are available.  The review comments on Amazon are very similar to my own experience. "You'll never think 29th of februari just an ordinary date" (link). There is a digitalized copy on the Internet Archive.

I don't remember much of the story at all. The alternate reality was a not a dynamic and playful place like Narnia. Rather it was a bleak and cold, underpopulated and almost post-apocalyptic with brutalist buildings, the kind of utilitarian landscape that was built in both western and eastern Europe after World War II (the author was a Dutch woman who evidently wrote many similar stories). 

Looking back, I can say that the story captured a spiritual sensation I've had much of my life, that of being cast away from "real" reality and trapped in some kind of lonely, mostly empty dystopic sur-reality beyond ordinary time. I have had the feeling of needing to find my way back to the "real" reality, but also find other people in the dream reality and connect to them, to help bring them back too. This theme, a perception of the underlying dynamics of my life, keeps coming back to me in my life repeatedly. Last night I was thinking of this idea and the phrase "representational reality" popped into my head as a way of describing this general idea.

There are people I have met in my life who understand this, almost immediately and intuitively without my having to explain it, and there are others who, upon hearing it, would call this a form of mental illness. The latter type of person is far more common than the former, and I generally assume someone is in that category until proven otherwise. Only the people in the former category could truly become my friend and be allowed into my reality. It has always been that way. It is why I put my friends through a long rigorous process before I trust them, and after that I trust them utterly and completely, and treasure the friendship like life itself.

See this link for interesting commentary as well.

Also interesting comments here on Thriftbooks (where a copy is available for seventy bucks) with other recommendations of works by Drage.

First Attempt at Sendak

 

"I always go to bed after my bedtime"
based on Open House for Butterflies. 

If there is a pattern to my life, it is the times when I have felt the most creative and happy are when I do lots of drawing. In my adult life I've been through several intense periods where I did lots of drawing. The last such burst was in 2010.

OK so this one is not so good, but I am very much out of practice and this was done in literally 20 seconds, on the idea of "just pick up a pencil and start!"

New Moon Today

 New Moon today. The sky above sunrise where the crescent hung a few days before is clear and featureless. A day to appreciate basic sensations.

This morning pre-dawn the wind was howling outside the window. It was stiff cool breeze, gusting into the rising whistling pitch in waves and then subsiding. It is not a sound one hears very often in the early morning here, so I savored its presence while drinking coffee from my metal cup. 

Open House for Butterflies has arrived

 

Apparently a vintage 1960 version available online from a non-local seller, listed at about twice the price of the 1982 version I acquired. Mine looks the same but without a black binding as this one has.

- Kralik?

- Yes, sir?

- Now that you're the boss, if you want to give yourself a raise...

- Well, I'll talk it over with myself, and if I don't want too much money. I'll give it to myself. 

From The Shop Around the Corner (1940) 

As I mentioned, I am constantly "gamefying" my own life, making up playful rules as I go along and amending them as I need to, often awarding myself points or deducting according to some scale that seems arbitrary but makes sense to me. If you ever saw the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (itself based on a famous children's story), you might get the idea. 

A couple weeks ago when I decided to start building a collection of classic children's books, I decided the rules would be that I would have to find each book in person. I would not allow myself to purchase any books online. I also decided to make my first acquisition a classic picture book Open House for Butterflies, based on a random suggestion I encountered online, and buttressed by the coincidence of having rediscovered in the garage a long-lost item I call my "butterfly hat", which was created for me by my young nieces years ago.

The book was published in 1960, written by Ruth Krauss and with pictures by the great Maurice Sendak. So as I have written here previously, I went looking for it and I quickly realized that children's books published in 1960 are not easy to find. Modern children's books are, well, of a different category than ones published when I was young.

But I did find a copy for sale online on AbeBooks, one of the more famous second hand book outlets on the web. But my self-appointed rules prohibited the easy solution. That is, they did prohibit it until I noticed something about the copy for sale. It was in Phoenix! It was being offered for sale by a place called the Book Drop, which had an address west of downtown in an industrial area. I had never heard of this place. I thought it was a used book store and I immediately made plans to visit it and acquire the copy of the book as soon as possible. 

It's not a casual thing to do, to get down there. In fact, it is about thirty-file miles from where I type this. That's not something I do every day. Nevertheless I thought: I've got to get there because it is exactly what I am looking for, and apparently it is the only copy of this book available in the entire valley of five million people, including all of the county and city public libraries.

Then upon further examination, I realized that the Book Drop is not a book store that one can visit and purchase items. It's literal a warehouse where one can drop off unwanted books.  They sell books but only online.

They actually have a noble mission of "saving books from landfills", and receive many donations from libraries and thrift stores. It made me happy to hear about their mission, but I was disappointed that I couldn't purchase it in person. Here's their website.

Disappointed, I decided to make an appeal. So I convened my internal rules committee, and I decided, upon reflection and consultation with myself, to adopt the following amendment to the rules: "if a particular book is available in the local region but is purchasable only via the Internet, then such purchases are acceptable and allowed." Having obtained a favorable ruling on my appeal, I immediately purchased the book.

It took a couple days for my purchase to arrive by mail. It was smaller and thinner than I expected. From meta-information on the sales tag, I appears to be a reissue of the original work printed in 1982 as part of the "Carrot Seed Classics", which are described as "new, special-format editions of favorite picture books for every child to grow with and treasure." So it was not an original edition, but that was fine by me, at least for the time being.

Before opening the book, I savored the feeling of the smooth slender hardback cover in my hands. Then I opened it and eagerly began reading it. The text consists of a series of sentences as one might expect, each one in the form of advice to children, or commentary on some preference a child might express. Many of the pieces of advice consist of "good things to know". On the first page one finds "A screaming song is a good thing to know if you need to scream." Unlike contemporary children's books, which often strike me as sanitized and dumbed down, it contains a healthier spectrum of life circumstances.  "The minute you meet some people, you know you will hate their mothers."

I found myself laughing out loud with delight on several occasions for these bits of text that would certainly be prohibited from the saccharine of today's feelings-centered ideologies. Once again I found myself thanking God for having been born into that world instead of the current one. Everything in the book struck me as healthy in a grounded and realistic way that one could carry with one even into one's adult life.

Of course I recognized the illustrations by Sendak immediately. They were black and white line drawings, multiple ones per page. They were simple and direct, in contrast the lush color ones of his more famous later work. 

One thing that was apparent was why the book is no longer circulating as it once did. It is not only unrestrained frankness of the text that I mentioned that is out of fashion. The book struck me as not politically correct, as they used to say. In this age, that is enough to doom any book from being offerred for sale. There is mention of making an "Indian hat," for example. That sentence alone would get it banned from most current libraries as being offensive.

I felt as if I found a treasure, in a personal sense. I could easily imagine reading this to my twin nieces when they were young girls, and them enjoying it, maybe while wearing my butterfly hat. Good memories. A great second acquisition for my collection.

Constellations and Fabric

 Today I was reading about the closure of all the remaining Joann Fabrics stores nationwide. I got sad thinking about this, because I imagined how sad it would make make my late mother to hear this. Going to the "fabric store" just to look at cloth and touch it was one of the activities that still gave her joy in her final years in Fort Collins, when she was largely confined to a motorized scooter. The thought of it made her exited.

I associate my mother so strongly with fabric stores. In Ames, there was a shopping center a, an early 1970s version of a strip mall, right where Grand Avenue came down and intersected Lincoln Way. The anchor store was department store that started out as, well I can't remember, but it converted to a Target at some point when Target was largely just an upper Midwest thing. It was very common for us to go there, park in the large parking lot, and then go into Target and just look around at things. We kids would be cut loose to do whatever, and in there I marveled at all the things that world could provide.

Stretching south from Target were a line of smaller stores in the strip mall, some of which I remember. My favorite one, the one where I spent the most time was "Walt's," which was a pipe and tobacco shop that was also a book store. Before they built the Mall in the mid-1970s, it was the only book shop in town. It was mostly paperbacks on racks. It also had a huge selection of magazines. "Getting a maggie," as my dad called it, was one of his favorite activities, so we often walked down from Target along the sidewalk to Walt's together. He typically bought Popular Science-type magazines, or science fiction stories, which was his own reading passion.

My favorite sections were the comic books. I learned all the superheroes there, the way people are obsessed about now, in Hollywood movies. I don't have any adult fascination with superheroes perhaps because I did all that in my boyhood and moved on.

A bookstore like Walt's---with its magazines and paperbacks---was as close as one got to the Internet and web back then. The books conveyed all the pop trends of those eras---psychology and current events--brought to a small town in Iowa in a way that would never have been available otherwise. My young mind tried to absorb it all because I was so curious about the world, the way I peruse my X feed today to do the same thing, but at a million times the speed and volume. How simple the world was back then.

After Walt's there was a tiny shop that served as the State Liquor Store. Back then in Iowa, if wanted anything else besides beer, you had to buy it in the State Liquor Store. This drove my (maternal) grandfather nuts, having to cope with this, and was one of the many reasons he found life in a small Midwestern town so antithetical to his needs and wants. Of course the selection of wines was very limited. He was ever grumbling about the tyranny of it all. 

By the way, I doubt my paternal grandparents (the Trumps) ever set foot in there. They were teetotalling Presbyterians, although they never made a big deal of that. They just didn't drink. I remember seeing them drink liquor only once in my life, and that was using some special crystal glasses they had brought back on one of their trips to Europe, when they used to run a travel agency.

Grandpa Don and Grandma Kate always had "booze" however. When five o'clock rolled around, they were usually on their patio with a bourbon and smoking camels for their daily game of cribbage. I'm pretty sure they did this daily until the last day they spent together, which was Christmas Eve 1993 in Florida.

My grandmother would say to me, in regard to booze, "you're a little short in the pants for that." 

The last store at the end of that strip mall (we didn't use that term back then), was the fabric store. My mother would typically head there after Target to peruse the offerings, and I loved accompanying her there, because I loved doing stuff with mom when I was a kid. I remember the fabric store being full of those vertical towers of fabric. I'd follow my mom around as went through the store. If buying a "maggie" at Walt's was my dad's thing, then for my mom it was buying a new dress pattern. She had so many of them, and even in her later years, before she became immobile, one would see a pile of the manilla pattern paper in her sewing room, as she called it. My sisters both sewed as well, although not with the same passion.

Back then it was so common for women to sew. When I was cleaning out my parent's garage in 2010-2011 (more appropriately just organizing it, as I threw out almost nothing), I found many old patterns in cardboard boxes and brought them inside for my mother to look at. Look what I found in the garage! It was such a delight to do that for her.

When she died, my sister made sure to hoard all of the ones my mom had left behind, as many were now valuable for vintage and collector purposes, and of course, they were an artifact that so much the essence of our mother.

Whenever we went to the fabric store in Ames, I would always seek out my favorite fabric, which was a deep blue cloth that was a star map with constellations and their names on it. How I loved that fabric, because I loved stars and astronomy. It was as if it were made just for me. My mother knew that and would always say she would make something for me with that fabric, but she never got around to it, which is ok by me. It was my thing, that fabric, and I just wanted to go in and look at it.

Just now, writing this, I went to Google and looked up constellation fabric. I found no shortage of results, but none of them are the vintage 1970s one I remember, which had the names of the constellations. 

My parents struggled so much with many things in life, right up to the end. I found it a beautiful consolation that they got to spend their last years living in a nice house in Fort Collins that they owned, and that among other things, there was a Barnes and Noble just a few blocks away. They often drove over there, and my father would head to the magazine section to looks at maggies, as he still called them.

One day, around the time I was living with them and cleaning up their garage, I had gone over to that Barnes and Noble and was sitting in the coffee shop near the front windows, next to the magazine section. While I was there, I saw my parents walking through the parking lot. My dad came into the magazine section and was perusing the computer magazines, which had become his go-to genre. He was only a few feet away from me where I sat, but he didn't notice me. I didn't say anything. I just watched him, as if watching a scene from a memory, which has now become a memory. It was such a beautiful moment that captured so much of my life that I didn't want to disturb it. When I got home and saw them there, I didn't even tell them I saw them. Now it is so vivid in my mind as one of my favorite memories.

Seeing my parents in the nice house they had spent their life achieving, in a beautiful Colorado town with its commercial comforts that delighted them, I was cured of a lifetime of discontent about the American way of life---about suburbia and commercialism. How I had railed against the corruption of all that! After that I became a defender of the very things I had one hated. 

I just now went to Google Maps and looked for the old shopping center in Ames that had once been our destination so many times in the 1970s. Of course it has been redeveloped, but it is still a shopping complex. Walt's is long gone. Those kind of pipe-book-magazine shops have gone mostly extinct, although there was one in downtown Fort Collins until a few years ago, where my friend Thor bought his comics to add to his collection.

As far as the fabric store in Ames where I used to marvel at the constellation fabric, according to the map I just brought up, it looks to have become a Joann's, at least for now. Soon it will be gone and fabric stores will pass into history, except for specialty shops and boutiques. They will no longer be a common sight in America. Young women no longer sew, except for ones who make it a dedicated niche hobby. The culture of sewing has died out among young women. 

Seeing the notice about Joann's going bankrupt and shutting down all their stores is like seeing a part of my mother fading away from the landscape at last. I'm glad that Joann's survived here. It would have broken her heart not to be able to go look at fabric.

The War of 1914

 

A Sopwith Camel

My grandfather almost didn't make it through officer's training camp, which was in Florida, which is were he would live his last days but was quite exotic to him in 1942. When he arrived there, he had a day's leave before the camp started and he took it to go out to the beach and lie in the sun. With the type of skin he had, he fried himself and gave himself an excruciating full-body sunburn. He looked like a lobster. The next day one of the first things the trainees had to endure was a long run in full gear. 

Somehow he was able to endure this. He had a great deal of motivation. 

"If he had said one peep of complaint, he would have been out," my uncle Mark told me one day when I was visited him.

Mark was his second child, born right after the war, a couple years younger than my mother. It is from Mark that I know many of the details of my grandfather's war experience, which he means he was willing to speak about these things at least to his son. The more I think about, the more it occurs to me that maybe my grandfather didn't speak about his early life and war experiences to me because he thought his grandson, me, would not be interested in that. Maybe he thought he would be boring me with that. I could totally see that about him. "He doesn't care about those things," I can hear him saying to himself. Thinking about that possibility breaks my heart, but that was the way many men thought. That had endured so much so that the new generation would not have to live those trials.

But war has a lingering effect, and I could start writing my own life story, it would begin with World War II, just as I am doing now (See the House of Atreus for reference).

After becoming an officer, he tried to go to flight school. He was always interested in airplanes as a boy and dreamed of being a pilot, like a World War I fighting ace. These guys had been the heroes of the war to many, and he grew up with that image, wanting to emulate them. He and my grandmother always delighted in discussing the character Snoopy from Peanuts, who fantasized that his doghouse was a Sopwith Camel and he was fighting the Red Baron.  

As a boy I piggy-backed on his lifelong obsession with World War I aircraft. The mythology that arose over that infiltrated me as well, which was not uncommon among boys my age. Like other boys my age in the 1970s, we could discuss the ins and outs of various aircraft of the nations that fought in the First World War.  That war---the Great War as it was originally called---the War of 1914---was still in the living memory of people of the older generation when my first memories of the world were being created. My grandfather could easily discuss that war, which took place before he was born. There was a sense, I think, that many people felt, that the earlier war, despite its immense carnage, was more civilized in some sense. 

Years later, in 1990 to be precise, when I was traveling in Poland, in a region that had been the theater of both of those terrible wars, my Polish friend there showed me a tiny graveyard from the first war. There were graves of both Russians and Germans, with Eastern and Western crosses carved on the rows of headstones. I was struck by how civilized it felt, to bury the dead of both friend and enemy with respect and digntity according to the faith. I remarked at the time that in the second war, there was no such respect afforded. There were mass graves. It is clear to me in retrospect what many people suspected at the time, that in fact the War of 1914 was the destruction of Western Civilization, and that we have been living in the ongoing completion of that demolition until the present day, where it seems well advanced.

I want to say that my grandfather went to flight school outside San Antonio. I know he was there at one point in his training. 

"Thankfully he flunked out," my Uncle Mark told me. Evidently he got the jitters.

"Most of those guys who made it through didn't make it through the war," Mark said. "If he hadn't flunked out, then I would probably not be here."

I owned this book as a child, and I'm pretty confident it is in my sister's possession in Colorado. She is old enough to know about the World War I aircraft obsession of my grandfather, and their continued fascination with Snoopy as above. Certainly it would deserve a place of honor in a collection of classic children's literature.

Forgive me, Hester

 

I loved Hawthorne when I was in high school, and I reread this in college.

Have pity on me, dear reader.

This morning I was listening to a Youtube video by an orthodox priest who was explaining the preparation for Lent. It was something I needed to hear, I realized, so I listened to the whole video.

For the last two months, I felt on a great emotional roller coaster. For reasons that I can't fully explain here in a blog post, many interconnected issues from my past have resurfaced into my consciousness. This is perhaps the main reason I have been writing about episodes of my life here. But as usual, I don't write about things directly, but instead I write about things peripherally, if that makes sense.  I tend to write about what happened before, after, or around things in my life, but not about them directly. I refer obliquely to important things, as if I am leaving a puzzle for the reader to solve.

I am so grateful that this breakthrough has happened. It feels as if it has disrupted a log jam in my life, the way a pouring of glacial snowmelt pushes down a tangle of logs and debris until clear water begins flowing in the channel again at last. It is painful and chaotic, but purifying. 

The lingering hurt I have felt is over things I did long ago in the past in my recklessness, injuring people I hold dear. I knew this at the start of the year, but what I didn't know is that I was using my shame and guilt over certain past missteps to conceal the deeper hurt I had caused by previous unconfessed sins. Yes, sins is the right word. So when I while I was able to let go and allow myself to be forgiven for certain things, I was hit by root causes that now drag me into even more painful memories of regret over injuries done to the same people. 

Twenty years is a long time, but injuries untreated feel fresh as if they happened yesterday. What I did to cause all this is the kind of thing that is as old as time. To wit, I was married. I didn't love my wife, at least not the way the way she deserved to be loved and cherished. I had not wanted to get married, but I thought it was the right thing to do.

Instead I was in love with another woman, whom I considered my soulmate. The love I felt for her felt so pure and good, and she made me feel loved in return. Being with her, I thought I could feel the love of God,  who was so merciful that he would bring her and I together. Loving her was like a form of worship of God and His goodness. It made me understand the mystical ideal of a marriage of a man and a woman.

Unfortunately she too was already married and had young children. Had I left my wife for her, I don't know what would have happened.  But I didn't leave my wife, at least not then (she eventually kicked me out). Instead I was weak. I was a coward. I'm not at all saying it would have been morally right to leave my wife for her. I'm just stating what did happen.

Instead I did something worse--the worst possible thing.I abandoned her, by stalling and dithering, unable to decide what to do, and feeling powerless because of personal circumstances at the time. When her husband eventually found out---because everything gets found out---her life became a living hell. I wrecked her marriage and her home life. Thus I took the one person whom I cherished like a divine gift from God and destroyed them. I had damaged her children, whom I had come to love as well. I damaged her husband, whom I had met, and broken bread with. My life did indeed feel like a living hell, and it was all my fault. 

Her husband rightfully called me dishonorable, which was absolutely correct. I spent years struggling to regain my honor. My own marriage disintegrated rapidly after that. Thankfully my ex-wife has remarried to someone else and is no doubt much happier. I haven't spoken to her in many years and that's the way it should be.

After everything went south, and my wife kicked me out, I compounded my misjudgment by attempting to contact the woman I mention, thinking I could fix everything that had been broken and restore my honor. The last time was fourteen years ago. It seems utterly stupid and foolish to think this was a good thing to do, but I was so mixed up in those days. Nothing about the world made sense to me, except that I had once loved her and felt nothing but joy in her presence. I just wanted that joy back. I wanted to see her face, ee her happy, as I had seen her before.

Finally I was able to restore some sense of balance in my life.  That was in 2012, the year I visited Clayton. Driving around the country was my way of healing. It worked to some degree, but the shame and regret always lingered. It felt like a blockage of all other things in my life, including my connections to other people, my ability to love again, and my ability to trust my own judgment. 

For years I wanted to apologize, even to her husband and her family, for the damage I had done. They didn't deserve this. Nor did she. It was all on me, I knew, and my weaknesses as a man.

Years have passed. I had recently come to forgive myself for the stupidity of trying to reconnect with her, but I had not addressed the original underlying pain of having engendered her love for me and then abandoning her. I could not forgive myself for that. I could barely think about that. Recently in the last couple months, I think I began to realize how awful that was in a way I didn't appreciate before.  In a way it dwarfs everything else.

Why did this all surface recently? Perhaps it is because turning sixty I have come to realize the finiteness of my days and I know there is little to be gained by not addressing such things in one's soul, confessing them and seeking forgiveness from God. The last time I corresponded with her, fourteen years ago, I solicited a promise from her never to contact me again. How I regretted that later, as I so wanted to seek her forgiveness directly for what I did to her.  I release you from that promise, I wanted to tell her. But  some things cannot be. It was bitter but it was the right thing to do I know.

Also---and this perhaps an even deeper reason---I have this feeling as if we are at the end of age of history, a great turning of the page of time. Things were in stasis for so long, it seemed, but now things from even a few years ago begin to seem like a long time ago.  Everyone senses it. It is time for a fresh start on many things. I find I cannot go on into a renewed world without sharing my confession here, even if expressed anonymously online, and to the few friends and strangers who might read it. 

There is perhaps no one alive but her who knows the details of this story, and that's how it's going to remain. There is no possibility that she will find this blog entry.  My blog doesn't show up in search engines, at least under my name, which is the way I like it (having the last name I do makes it easy to be obscure).  I don't link to it from elsewhere. The only people who read my entries are old friends I've invited here years ago, or random strangers who encounter my posts on the scrolling blogger feed, and sometimes they even leave comments, which is always a rare treat to know someone read a post and found it worthy of making a remark.

You will not find her name here on my blog, nor would you find any details that reveal her identity. I have no right to do that, and I wouldn't want to. 

I don't know what became of her. I don't know where she lives. I have no way to contact her. I have no friends from back then I could even ask.  She too is utterly hidden from the world of the Internet, probably in part because of me. I want to believe that she and her husband worked things out, and that the years passed and they forgot about me, the dishonorable interloper and would-be seducer. When I began watching classic movies, I realized that by classic rules of honor, her husband had a right to take a hard swing at me. I honestly would have let him do it. 

I once fantasized that by some twist of fate it strengthened their marriage in the long run, and that if my name ever came up, they can mock the stupid man who once tried to come between them. It is what I deserved. I want to believe her young children have no memory of me and the incident from long ago, and that they grew up healthy and happy. Or perhaps she left her husband and married someone else and has a different name.  

If I had one wish it would be the same I have for everyone I have held dear---namely, for her to feel loved every day for the rest of her life. I do pray for her and for her family, including her husband. I did so much wrong to them, and it is part of my penance for what I did, to pray for them.

I intend for this to be the one and only time I write about this directly. I don't know how long I will leave this entry up here.  I usually don't delete posts after publishing them. For now I will leave it up, like a message in a bottle thrown in the ocean. It gives me respite of peace to write this for now at least. If I were Catholic or Orthodox, perhaps I could have told all this to a priest in Confession. Instead I have to do it publicly.

Perhaps having written this, I can ask God directly for forgiveness.  Some form of humiliation is required. One day all of us will be gone and this tale of sordid passion will be lost, like tears in the rain, as the old line goes; or, as Hawthorne would put it: on a field, sable, the letter A, gules.

Clayton

 

STS- 128

My maternal grandfather---Grandpa Don, we called him--was born into a poor family a small town in northeastern Indiana in March 1923.  I know of his background mostly from other people, as he spoke so little of it during the time I knew him, which was quite substantial during my youth. 

No doubt in part it was shame over the poverty of his background, and also the additional fact that like many men who served in World War II, he spoke little about it afterwards, except maybe to others who had been through the same experiences. I could probably count on my fingers the number of times he spontaneously talked about that part of his life. 

He never spoke about his parents, for example. It was as if they didn't exist. His mother was hard pressed to keep the family fed during the Depression while his father, after whom he was named, was who-knows-where doing who-knows-what.  They were eventually divorced some time in the 1930s and went on to marry other people, with my great-grandmother having additional children to whom I am half-related. 

My great-grandfather settled in New Orleans, and there are many legends about his life there that harken to a stereotypical rogue indulging in the sinful deeds for which that town is famous. My grandfather went to live with his family and his step-mother in New Orleans when he was a teenager, and it was not a pleasant experience, from my impression. He eventually returned to his hometown in Indiana to finish high school. 

My roguish great-grandfather died long before I was born---during World War II, in fact, when his son was overseas in Europe. I never met my great-grandmother, even though I could have. 

My mother only met her rarely, maybe once, when she was a girl and they were visiting my grandfather's hometown in Indiana. One of the sorrows my mother carried was in not getting to spend more time with her "grandma", from whom she felt love.

Much of my image of her and my great-grandfather comes from a visit I made to my grandfather's hometown in the summer of 2012 during my great span of road trips around America in my Bimmer. 

I had been on the East Coast visiting friends and was on my way West to attend a friend's wedding in Omaha. I had gotten delayed because of car trouble for several days, so I was behind schedule when I got to Indiana.

It hadn't occurred to me to stop in Hartford City, which is the town where my grandfather was born. My grandfather had died almost twenty years before. But I had already indulged some family history on my way west, unsuccessfully attempting to find the grave of my great-great-grandfather in Pennsylvania. When I was in Ohio, it hit me: maybe I could visit Clayton. Clayton was the widower of my great-aunt---my grandfather's sister. He was still alive, in his Eighties, and living in Hartford City, as I knew from Facebook. 

Once the idea struck me to visit him, I became instantly desperate to contact him, as I tend to do. Please let him still be alive, I said to myself. Let me get ahold of him! Why had I not thought of this in advance.

So I got on Facebook and sent him a direct message hoping he would respond. I told him I was Don and Kate's grandson, and that I was eager to see him. He didn't respond. Instead I heard form his daughter. She said her father was in Fort Wayne getting treatment for cancer. He was doing ok and would be back in Hartford City the next day. She said he would love to see me.

I had last seen him at my grandfather's funeral in Florida in early 1994, when I also saw my great-aunt Barbara, who goes by "Bobbie." She had died a couple years prior to this. When I saw her in Florida, it was so obvious she was my grandfather's sister, as they looked so much alike.

It was a sunny June day as I crossed the Indiana state line and began driving south on the main highway from Fort Wayne towards Blackford County, of which little Hartford City is the county seat. I would later learn that this area of Indiana was noted as a glass-manufacturing center in the late Nineteenth Century because of the discovery of natural gas. In fact, it was this boom in glass making that had brought my ancestors from West Virginia to Indiana to pursue their trade.

Driving to Hartford City it struck me how much that part of Indiana  looked like the part of Iowa where I grew up, and where my grandfather lived for most of the second half of his life.  It was very flat with slightly rolling hills, a product of the scraping of the land from the last Ice Age which did not reach the Ohio River.

Hartford City lies off the main north-south highway on a side road. As I drove along it, I saw a sign indicating that the road commemorated a man named David who had the same last name as Clayton. In fact, it was Clayton's son. He had been an Indiana state representative and had died of disease, maybe cancer, in his prime. I wondered if it would be a sad topic to bring up to Clayton.

As I came into town, Hartford City itself reminded me of so many small towns in the Midwest I had seen in my travels. I didn't drive through the downtown yet but headed straight to address I had been given, which was on the north edge of town only a few blocks from where the corn fields began. At the address I found a nice post war bungalow that looked to be well kept. 

I knocked and Clayton met me at the door. It was one of those wonderful heavy steel screen doors I remember being common in my childhood. He greeted me warmly with a charming smile and invited me in like a long-lost friend. I was taken aback by how much happiness he seemed to exude. His eyes had a twinkle that showed he was full of spirit. It was magnetic. Instantly I was so happy I had come.

He was tickled by my visit, and more than eager to tell me anything I wanted to know. He lived alone apparently, but throughout the visit he sometimes referred to his late wife---my great aunt Bobbie---in a matter-of-fact way as if she were still alive and would come in the door at any minute. By that was the only sign of any dementia I noted, and it seemed utterly forgivable. It was clear he existed in some twilight awareness of her death, negotiating it in his own way.

He invited me into his large den, where he had a computer a desk. Large windows looked out over the sunny countryside. The walls were wooden paneling that used to be common in the 1970s but now is rare. The biggest thing that struck me were that the walls and shelves were absolutely covered with tidy arrangements of memorabilia related to his children, especially from his son Kevin---my mother's cousin--who had piloted the Space Shuttle. There were photographs of him in his astronaut suit with his crew, and meeting politicians, and also certificates and framed medals. It gave me a warm feeling to see the memorabilia that he cherished. He struck me as a man rich in the blessings of a family he had raised.

He spoke about his son David as well, who had been the local politician---an Indiana state representative I think. As with his wife, he did so without any apparent sorrow but only joy for having lived the life he had gotten to live. He seemed like one of the mentally healthiest old people I had ever met in my life.

Of course we talked at length about my late grandfather, who had been his brother in law. I heard stories about his youth in Hartford City, from the time that Clayton began courting Bobbie when she was still living at home with my great-grandmother. He talked about my great-grandmother---his mother-in-law---as well, I cherished hearing this snippets of stories. It was nothing too dramatic and long, just vignettes of memories he shared with me. I was eager to hear as much as possible.

As he talked about my grandfather's family I began to see a picture of the poverty into which they lived, especially after my great-grandfather left (which I gather happened several times).  She scraped by with odd jobs like sewing. 

"She had," he said, pausing in an uncharacteristic manner, "a lot of difficulties in life." He said these words with a sadness and reflection I heard nowhere else in our meeting that day.  At once I could see her as being like my own mother, whom I might say the same things about---full of love and good spirit, but sometimes just overwhelmed by the world. 

He said that the only time he ever saw my great-grandmother get upset was when he took Bobbie to the county fair and they overstayed their curfew. My great-grandmother was waiting for them in anger when they got back. I could see the twinkle in his eyes as he told the story after seventy-five years.

Clayton was keen to show me around the town to give me a tour of some of things I would find interesting. I gladly took him up on his offer.  I honestly can't remember if I drove or he did. I'm pretty sure it was him, although I certainly offered. 

We went through the small downtown, a classical county seat arrangement with the courthouse and the remaining businesses facing the town square. I'd seen so many towns like this from Nebraska eastward and in most of them, one is happy to see anything thriving down there. Hartford City was no exception.

When we drove by the high school, Clayton told me how my grandfather had always had a keen interest in learning foreign languages, just as I did in high school.  To my surprise, he said my grandfather was most passionate about learning German. This is not what I expected to hear.  I knew my grandfather knew some German, I most associate him with the romance languages---French, Spanish, Italian---that became his academic expertise after the War

German? It made sense though. When he was in high school, Germany was on the rise. He would have been drawn to that language for the same reason I was drawn to the study of Russian in the 1980s, because it would be useful for reasons that were patriotic in nature.

At once I could see my grandfather as young man, doing everything he could to escape small-town Indiana poverty. I had never known that part of him---ambitious and restless. I saw only his later maturity and respectability, and the carefully crafted middle-class image that he and my grandmother had built together by the time I was born in the mid 1960s.

He took that ambition and enlisted in the U.S. Army even before Pearl Harbor, when the war was already underway in Europe. I know from my own research and watching old movies that by 1941 everyone knew America would enter the War at some point. The Army was his escape---three square meals a day was a luxury. 

His initial ambition was to be a sergeant, which offered a good career and good pay. My grandmother, however, told him hat she would marry him if he became an officer (this part I know from my sister). When the chance came, after the U.S. got into the war, he took it and became what was known as "ninety-day wonder", because that's how long the officer training school was---ninety days. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1942 and was shipped off to Europe, but not before getting married. In the spring of 1943, my grandmother gave birth to their first child, who was my mother. They say a woman is born with all the ova that could ever become her children, which means I came out of a cell produced in 1943, which seems to make perfect sense to me.

While my grandfather was overseas, his father died. Clayton said that he died suddenly under rather mysterious circumstances in a nearby town in Indiana. He was buried in solo grave in Hartford City. Clayton pointed out the grave to me as we drove through the cemetery at the edge of town. His tombstone was one of those double-engraved ones, a space for a husband and wife, but the other side is empty because my grandmother remarried.

So on the tombstone only his side is engraved, with his name, which is the same name as my grandfather----Cecil Don. My grandfather always went by "Don" because of his dislike for his own father, and in his academic work he often went by "C.D.".

As for my great-grandmother, Clayton only said that "she's buried over in Upton with her people." I assumed he meant her second family. I tried to get details out of him about this, thinking I could locate her grave as well, but he just repeated the same thing in the same faraway tone, as if somehow it was something he didn't want to talk about.

He pointed out where my great-grandmother's house once stood, as well as the still-standing family home of my great-great grandparents. Seeing all these places I was overwhelmed with emotion. It was as if I could feel the struggles of these people in their lifetimes. All the pain, all the tears, were now gone and faded from the memory of everyone except Clayton. Yet for all the sadness and struggle of my great-grandmother's life, and the seemingly smallness of it, one her grandchildren would go to space. 

We concluded our day with a visit to the remaining local cafe/diner, the kind you still see in small towns in the Midwest that is a gathering place for local regulars, and which is often the most thriving business in town. He treated me to lunch at his insistence. It was the most marvelous visit and it was poignant to say goodbye after such a brief stay.

I would have loved to have meandered around Indiana, and looked up my great-grandmother's grave in the next county if possible, but as I was pressed for time to be a guest at wedding, by nightfall I had set up camp at a state park across the border in Illinois.  When I got to go back to Colorado in July, I could hardly wait to tell my mother the things Clayton told me. She was enthralled because she loved hearing anything about her parents and their early lives.

It was about two years later in the summer of 2014, that I saw a notice on Facebook in Clayton's account, posted by his daughter, that he had passed away. 

I felt so lucky and thankful that I got to meet him while he was still alive. 

Running Fast on Spongy Grass

My normal route takes me from the park southward until you reach 91st street, which currently dead ends but has access to the north end of the parking lot. Usually I walk back on the perimeter sidewalk on the east and north edges. 

A leisurely stroll down through the park to the soccer fields today. I have learned---or rather was reminded of the fact that---the soccer fields are officially known as the Bell94 Sports complex, because it sits on the north side of Bell Road, and west of 94th Street.

Today on my walk I saw the parking lot full of cars, as happens on weekend during the season of soccer practices. As per my custom I walked around the entire set of fields, passing along Bell Road until I looped back around towards home.

The fields were full of activity.  About half of the six fields had games or practices in progress. When I got closer to them on the other side while coming back I saw almost all the players were girls. It didn't really register to me at first, because that seems normal---that these days girls are the ones doing organized sports. I've seen boys play there, and adult competitions (where people shout to each other in mostly Spanish). But boys---active hard-playing boys as was normal in my childhood---seem to be more rare in our society with each passing year. 

Seeing all these young folks, along with their families and coaches under small portable tents and in folding camp chairs milling about, I felt an urge to play in a youthful way. Today a walk would not be enough. I needed to initiate a new phase of my physical recovery. 

I saw that the two fields on the two end of the complex were completely unused, and being as shy as a leopard when it comes to hanging around other people, I entered the gap in the fence and made my way past the preoccupied families and teams until I found myself in the furthest field, with no one else nearby. I am inhibited and did not want observation. 

I walked over to one of the nets of an unused field and sat down on the grass. I took off my shoes down to the socks. I was partly in the shade of the net of the goal. It made a cross-check pattern on my clothes as I sat there. I lay back and looked up and deep blue uninterrupted sky. The short grass of the field felt heavenly on my bare arms and on my neck. 

But I was not there to relax. I was there to work out. I'd been studying videos of possible programs of exercise to address the weaknesses in my core and quads during the relative inactivity I suffered last year recovering from vertigo. I could still feel that weakness and I had realized that unless I started addressing it, the rest of my life would not be as pleasant as it could be. 

At that moment, I heard a banging noise behind me. The goal I was using as pseudo-shade (actually I was hiding from everyone else there) was back-to-back with another goal facing the other direction. While I had been lying there, a teenage girl had snuck up behind me and had begun using the other goal as practice to kick the ball into it. Everyone always wants to clump.

I took the opportunity to raise myself from the ground, which I could fluidly. I grabbed my shoes and walked directly away, towards to the remaining empty field in the corner of the complex. As I got the edge of the demarcated game area, it hit me that what I wanted to do was to run. I need to begin running.

Note that I don't mean what people call "running", like on streets and trails. I know many people from Colorado mostly who are runners, and have been so for years. I tried it, mostly out of peer pressure. It's not my thing, to be sure. I'm not sure that kind of running is healthy for your body. It takes its own toll.

For me, running has always meant sprinting. I loved "running fast" when I was boy. In fact I thought of myself as gifted in athletic sense. I was proud that I was always one of the fastest boys in class. I didn't need to be the fastest because I was fast in another way, in that I was super-quick at picking up anything in school. I could blow away any other kid that way, and it seemed like overkill to me, even as a child, that I should also be so excellent athletically too. 

Now at sixty the idea being that fast and agile was one I knew belonged to my boyhood. In fact I had tried to sprint one day while in a park in Staten Island, maybe it was 2002. I hadn't sprinted in years, and I discovered somewhat to my horror that I could not go 100 yards at full speed. I was 35, the age when Dante got lost in the woods. It had much the same effect on me as did his voyage to the Inferno---namely a consciousness of the passing nature of one's physical life on Earth. 

That experience, however, was now twenty years in the past.  I had discovered that the crucial muscles that launch one into a sprint are among the first to wither away. They are also the same ones to launch one into a jump.

So when I decided to sprint across the grass holding my shoes, I knew to be gentle in launching myself into the run. The grass field felt spongy as I walked on it. I was not afraid of tumbling over. I have a residual fear of that from when I was in high school and fell over doing sprints in gym class and broke my collarbone (while practicing breaking the tape).

So launch myself I did, and I let the wisdom of my body settle into a speed that would take me all the way to the other end of the field at an even pace. I was huffing and puffing at the end, but it felt exquisite. I decided at once that this would be part of my routine, along with the other calisthenics that I do on my walk. If I could do it on Saturday with the fields overrun by visitors, I could do it any day.

Whatever happened the rest of the day, this day would feel like a success in some way.  I put on my shoes and walked towards the opening in the fence where I could pass through the parking lot. There were a group of kids and adults sitting at the edge of the sidewalk, as if waiting for other folks to show up. I had to walk right past them to get to the parking lot.  I didn't care a whit if they'd been watching me. 

Mystery Moon

 "Oh, there you are, friend!," I said looking up at the black pre-dawn sky this morning. "That's where you've been hiding."

It had been days now since I'd glimpsed the Moon. It had been frustrating and confusing. Rising in the darkness, I had looked out to the West through the windows expecting to the see the waning crescent as it progressed to the New Moon. But it hadn't been there. Even a glimpse out the bedroom window to the south revealed nothing.

Obviously my expectations were off. Everyone knows that the Sun, as it moves through the year, hides high in the sky in the summer and low in the sky in winter.  It does this as it goes through the complete Zodiac cycle. The Moon makes the same journey through the Zodiac over the course of each month, swinging from low to high in the sky and back. But the journey is different each month, and depending on where the Sun is. 

For a Full Moon, the rule is fairly simple. In midsummer, the Full Moon sits lowest in the sky, because it is opposite the Sun in the Zodiac. Likewise in midwinter, the Full Moon sits highest in the sky.  At other times of the year and other phases, the Moon will be high or low depending on geometry that is predictable by mathematical means but seemingly erratic by casual human observation. 

Yet knowing this, I was still confused. As the Moon nears being New, it will set in the early morning later and later early it is barely above the Sunrise right before dawn. I confess I had gotten a little mixed up in my thinking. So hard it can be to develop a lunar intuition by reason alone. But isn't that the way we want things to be? 

To settle the issue this morning as to where the Moon was, I got dressed early. Right after morning prayers I went out into the still and calm morning darkness. Even walking out in the parking lot I could not find the Moon. The sky seemed clear. Then I spied it, a stark bright crescent low in the southeast, barely above the rooftop of the building to the south, at which moment I said the words at the beginning of the post.  I meandered down to the south edge of the complex along Trailside Avenue where one can see across the dark park to the South. There the Moon was unmistakable and prominent. Along the McDowells to the East was a bright aura of the twilight of the coming day.

Tomorrow morning I will look for the Moon again, but from the eastern windows. If necessary I can lean over the balcony railing while looking to the South. But even then I may need to walk out into the parking lot again to see it, given it will only a few days from being New. It's a small thing to do, to say hello to an  friend.

Moon Stripe

 Awakening briefly in the middle of the night. Time unknown, as I am sleeping with clock or cellphone nearby. As I come into consciousness, I see a streak of white across the ceiling coming through the blackout curtains. Is it the Moon?

Last Quarter

 This morning, awakening before 3 am as usual, but instead of lying in bed letting thoughts cascade through my mind in the dark, I rise and go to kitchen where I reheat a big mug of coffee left over from the day before. I feel like my grandfather doing this---reheating coffee. The mug is comfortably hot when I remove it from the microwave, intercepting it before the end of the timer so as to avoid the harsh beeping in the dark.

Today is the last quarter Moon. At this hour it is still too high to see out the window. It must be directly over head, I tell myself. This Moon has taught me so much, I feel, propelling me and carrying me forward and downstream along some path that is both personal and impersonal. 

Having risen so early I can indulge with leisure in the dark pre-dawn hours with the space heater delivering hot air around my ankles. I can and meditate. 

I reflect on the show from yesterday (link). It was fun and relaxed, one of my favorites so far. The audience seemed to like it more than usual. The main topic was a rather whimsical one, talking about the President at the Daytona 500 stock car race last weekend, and comparing it to five years ago when he was also there. I knew the audience would enjoy it, and they did.

After that I spent much of the show looking at the issue of whether an asteroid is going to hit the earth a little less than eight years from now in December 2032. Some astronomers in Chile discovered right after Christmas and the more data they gather on its orbit, the odds of it striking Earth have increased. I dug a little and provided the audience with some perspective on it. Turns out its not a planet killer and might well do no damage even if it did strike the Earth.

Some of my audience, and myself included, are very suspicious of anything offered as news that is supposed to make us fear and give power to people with grand planet-scale political solutions in mind. Give us power to redesign the political system of the world or else everyone is going to die! I was once an alarmist about such things but years ago I started to see through the fear. It doesn't work well with my audience. They expect me to push back on fear, which I do. 

After every show I always feel embarrassed in some way. But I am also on a high from the contact with the audience, which is a highlight of my week. What a weird thing to do, I think---to sit at my computer and talk into a microphone and have people listen to me and even give me money spontaneously. Do I deserve this? Am I really worth listening to?  Who am I to take up people's time this way? Don't you have better things to do than listen to me? I barely know what I'm doing. Maybe everyone feels that way. It's some kind of impostor syndrome. 

If I could see my audience, it would be different. I cannot see faces. I cannot get that kind of feedback, which I love because it is the essence of the connection you make with others while doing this kind of thing. 

I've begun to feel like I'm at the point where I could handle a bigger audience than have, but maybe I'm fooling myself. I haven't minded the coziness and it has worked for me for now. 

These are the things I think about with the space heater churning out warm air on my ankles in the dark. Soon the day will start in earnest.

Camouflaged

 A nice brisk morning of about fifty degrees. Much of the rest of the nation is a deep freeze---everywhere except south Florida. 

The sun well in the sky, and having completed several tasks for the morning, I go a walk in the park, maybe intending to go down to Bell Road, which I do, and continue an extra longer stretch eastward on it, but not as far as the trailhead, which I reached a couple weeks ago. But now I decide that I will go faster. I make my legs pace faster, and they do, while reminding me how out of shape I got.

One savors these days when one can walk here, without the sun being oppressive. Hopefully we will get those days through March at least, and even some into April. 

The long walk lets me clear out many things in my head such that when I return I can sit down and concentrate on the big projects of the day.

Moon was lost behind high cirrus clouds of mid morning, camouflaged yes, but its presence somehow recognized.

The Woodpecker and the Moon

 We have trash butler service at our complex that picks up five nights a week, including recycling, but I prefer to walk the cases of empty sparkling water bottles down to the trash/recycling area by myself, partly out of consideration for the hard work of others, and partly for exercise.

Crossing the parking lot to the enclosure pen of the dumpsters, I see morning sky is an unbroken cloudless blue dome. In summer this would mean a very hot day. I am thankful it is not yet summer.

While carrying the heavy crate into the pen, it is awkward in the confined space to raise the flap lid of the large dumpster and toss the box of bottles inside in any way that could be considered graceful. 

 This morning the dumpster is empty, so when I drop the box, there is nothing to cushion it. It makes a huge booming thud onto the metal, and then the bottles fly outside the box and make a big mess of clinking noises inside the metal dumpster The echo of glass and metal resonates for a half second and dies down. It doesn't matter if they break at that point, but somehow I don't want them to break. I consider it a victory if they remain unbroken. 

As if inspired by my act, a woodpecker begins hammering away on a metal lamppost above my head. It sounds like power equipment---hard on metal. I look up but do not see the bird. But I do see the moon, which I had missed, amidst the blue. So easy to see once I was looking at it.

Confession of My Privilege

 America is full of phony non-communities, and people are sick of them. Even most small towns suck, as does rural America. They are overrun with the world and every is split up into boxes just like everywhere else.  American communities disintegrated in the 1970s. I saw it happening and I was horrified. I saw a nation of communities that had existed up to the time I was born was going away, being eaten alive year by year. As a child I saw it receding into history.

The only way you get community in America past your college years is to be in a nursing home. In between, we are on our own, unless you have family. People without family are in a very precarious situation in our society. 

I have been so very, very fortune to see what I did get to see, and live what I did get to live in my life.  So you want a confession of privilege. I'll give you one. I may well have been the most privileged individual ever to have been born on Earth.

I'm not saying I was born into a situation of perfect advantages across the board, the way you might think. For examples, my parents were broken and horrible with money, and we suffered greatly because of that, but only in a relative sense. We were living in the most perfect material conditions of peaceful that had existed on Earth, when disease was being eradicated through sanitation and other means. We could be kids without the threat of so many terrors that haunted previous generations, and continued to do so outside of the place I was born.

It was a golden time to be a kid. The old world had not yet been destroyed, although it was under attack, primarily through Pop Culture, which has fascinated me since I child, because I knew from six years old that Postmodern Pop Culture would ruin America. No one told me. I just figured it out. At the same time I loved Pop Culture and consumed it as much as any kid, in a sense of not wanting to be left out.

The people with whom I have resonated most strongly in life are ones who are of my age cohort or younger, and who were raised in a way took them out of the direct influence of a least a large chunk of Pop Culture. 

People like that could stick out as weird to those of us who were besotted by Pop Culture, but I always knew they were the sane ones. I bless their parents for the wisdom of having done this.

What was I saying about communities, and how America does not have ones anymore? We only have the simulation of community which is making everyone miserable and depressed. There is no solution to this within the framework of American society right now. No amount of communitarianism can possibly solve it. We've tried all that and it doesn't work because it is fighting architecture. It is fighting the technology we use.

The use of technology by a society tunes that society in a way that can seem obvious in hindsight. It is as if we have lose our innocence and find out what happens when you tinker with how people communicate with each other, both in a personal sense, and in mass communication.

Then we want to go back, because we lost a bunch of good things we didn't know could be lost.

Against AI Slop

 At this point it seems inevitable that I am destined to become a collector of classic children's books. There is something about very appealing to me. Had I enough time and money, I'd probably start a business as a collector and trader.

Part of the reason is certainly my shock at discover the underwhelming quality of the children's books I've run across lately while inspecting the changes in free library kiosk in the park (which I do at least once a day lately), and in bookstores like Dog Eared Pages. It was also my disappointing at not finding books I expected to find. I am so naive.

There is probably nothing wrong with children's books lately that isn't wrong with other published material in our society. But it is made much worse because lately visual design and illustrations are simply terrible. We live in an era far degraded from the past in all our designs.

AI is making it worse. When the AI revolution hit two years in the spring of 2023, children's books were hit immediately. My Youtube feed was filled with videos describing how to make money letting AI generate books that one could sell on Amazon. Children's books was hardest hits, because the stories are short. AI-generated illustrations and AI-generated text were supposed to make people money. It was disgusting to see this. People actually thought it was a good idea.

The word people are using lately is "AI slop." This terms refers to anything generated by AI, whether text or images, that has a noticeable inferior quality as marking it as AI-generated. AI slop is every. It has even invaded academic papers submitted to journals. I've mentioned the growing awareness that frequent use of em-dashes are a tip-off that it was AI. I saw an X post recently in which the author searched a database of recently published papers for the phrase "Certainly, ...". If you've ChatGPT, you know that's another tipoff that it was AI. 

I know that as a child I would have sniffed out AI slop and hated it. I would have hated a lot of kids literature that is not AI-generated, but nothing about AI kids books would have seemed real to me.

So if I become a collector of children's literature, I am going to focus on classic picture books from the 1970s and before. I don't necessarily need to find first editions and such things. I don't need to be that kind of collector at least for now. 

Everything fun for me is a game with rules I make up for myself.  In this case, I'm adopting the rules, at least for now, that I want to find books in person. That means going to used book shops, which I already do, but now I have an even better reason, and a whole new section of the store to investigate. Of course there are private sales too. I want to avoid just buying things off the web, even if its from a reputable used book site, but never off Amazon. They've already done too much to destroy used book shop.

Acquisitions will be slow. The first one I already know, and I have located a version locally in Phoenix which I can purchase. It's at a book shop I didn't know existed. It will require a field trip. How fun is that?

Desert Mountain Stonehenge

 Every morning it feels like the things of world press harder on my psyche from when I open my eyes. It feels like the world is spinning faster each other and we all experiencing whiplash and vertigo on a massive scale. There is not one particular thing happening that causes this, but the collectivity of the confusion and fear I sense from people on social media. Disconnect? Easy to say, and in fact this morning I do exactly that. I go for a rare early morning walk out around the pond.

The waning moon is noticeable---white orb amidst a sea of pale white clouds in the pre-dawn blue sky to the west. A comfort when I see it. To the east, the glow of the sun is intense yellow along the ridge of the McDowells heralding an imminent sunrise only minutes, perhaps seconds away. I notice the location of the glow along the ridge and think about how fun it would be to make a Stonehenge-like guide to the location of the sunrise from a particular point on the path---on this day it will rise here, etc., swinging north and south along the ridge during the course of the year.

It is a great relief when I reach the little Free library kiosk. By the time I arrive, the sun has risen and the red box is sparkling in the most vivid scarlet. The air is fresh and cool. Morning may become my new walking time, especially as summer advances.

Still still still

 This morning:

Still chilly enough before dawn to use the space heater.

Still chilly enough to go outside wearing my fleece vest and knit cap.

Still dark enough at 7 am to see the brilliant waning Moon tracking us as we drive south along the 101 to breakfast.

Me, a little groggy as I had stayed up later to watch a hockey game on television, the first one I'd watched in many, many. years. US vs. Canada in an international tournament. I watched the game solely because my old friend had texted me, saying watching the tournament reminded him of time we had spent together. So I watched because of him, solely so I could text him during the game.

More coffee needed.

In Cave Creek

 A nice mini road trip up to Carefree and Cave Creek today, two towns at the very north end of the Phoenix Valley where the mountains start. The temperature was perfect.

Carefree is known for having many nice properties among the rocks and boulders. The 99-year-old actor Dick Van Dyke lives up there, as does the woman who wrote the Twilight novels. My dentist lives up there too and goes to the same Mormon church as does the author. 

Cave Creek by contrast is more rustic. It's a huge biker destination, but also has plent fine furnishing galleries. Something for everyone. For the first time we went to the Cave Creek Museum. It was charming and the woman inside was very friendly. I love little museums like this and it had me thinking about what makes a good one. Outdoors were relocated historic structures, including a tuberculosis cabin from a century again, and church that is used today as a wedding venue.

We had dinner---early for others but not early for us---at a café that had an outdoor patio. A musician was playing the guitar in the shade next to the building, as entertainment. As we waited for our burgers, we sat listening to the songs. A man was sitting nearby at a table in front of us, as we looked at the musician, and his young daughters, one about six, the other three. Their hair was supernaturally blonde, the way that is natural only for a young girl. They were dancing to the music, the older one moving with long slow graceful movements as if performing modern dance. With the music playing in the warm air, the dancing produced in me the most serene appreciation of the beauty of the moment, and of the heartbreaking passage of time.

The Em Dash War

New trend in the last week. People are noticing that responses from chat AI models, like Chat GPT, make heavy use of the em dash---like this. 

I actually love em dashes, but the prevalent feeling is that few human beings use them, and if so only rarely, so using them means the text is likely AI-generated. 

The North Country Prophet

I was quote-tweeted by Hick! (see bottom of thread).

Hick is someone I follow on Twitter. He's a young man (late 20s, I want to say) who as developed a massive following over the last year or so because he has a consistent clear voice with strong opinions on what is wrong with American life.  I have written about him before in my blog. I admire him greatly. He's on a one-many mission (with his new bride) to save America's youth from suicidal despair, which is an epidemic. 

They just bought a house and some land, for cash, in the North Country of New York State, where he is from. That's the part of New York north of the Adirondacks, in the valley of the St. Lawrence River. I know the area from having driven through it on my long journey back west in 2004, after I left my marriage in New York City.  The North Country is quite a surprise. On feels almost part of Canada, which is something Hick talks about a lot as well.

He enjoys living up there because it is an abandoned part of the country that no one wants to live in (like parts of the Plains and the Farm Belt). He is constantly exhorting despondent young folks to forgo the illusion of the city life and carve out a life in the abandoned places, as he does in this thread here. He went back after extensive hitchhiking and roaming over the country. He is passionate about car-free life, as I was years ago. So I see a lot of my younger self in him.

He is also a devout traditional Catholic and attends the Latin mass. His wife is was the runt of a huge Amish family in Montana. She is planning to convert to Catholicism.

I liked this thread yesterday, where he starts with the following message from one of his younger listeners: 

In case you don't know

DM = direct message

hikikomori = the despondent "grass eater" generation of young men in Japan who have simply given up on life and never go outside.

socials = social media accounts

I have made a ton of missteps in my life, as I have written here. But I did some things right. I too have bought a long-distance Greyhound ticket on a whim, for example out to Berkeley in May 1984 when I saw Ken and David. I also hitchhiked down the Alaska Highway at the end of summer 1987. I did that partly because my dad had done that in 1961. For all that gumption, I was rewarded. The next year of life was the most intense of my young life. 

I even got to "sneak a kiss with the gal the next town over." I've had a pretty good life, on the whole, even as I have felt a ton of pain, shame, sorry, and regret as well. Part of my life's mission is to share that with others, in a way that inspires people both young and old, and in a way that brings me closer to God.

Hey, I'm 18, just starting my life and I was wondering if I could ask for some advice.

A few hours later, he posted this thread, highlighting a possible house to buy from someone following his advice. Ogdensburg is probably the biggest city in the North Country. One feels much closer to Ottawa there, than to the rest of New York State.

Regarding his suggestion, a large-follower account replied to his advice with this snark:

To which Hick replied:

I replied to his comment with my own, and re quoted it and posted it for his followers to see.

I think a lot about the same issues as Hick---the future of the nation, and of western civilization. I can feel the pain out there, among the people of all ages, so strongly. Back in my day, lots of people wanted cocaine and orgies too, but the difference is that lifestyle was genuinely pursued by only a small group. It was not encouraged or condoned by society. Now it is in our faces constantly through social media, in a way that makes it seem accessible to young folk. What we see so closely, we can envy. I did a lot of stuff out in my youth of envy, and not wanting to be left out of some things I thought I deserved. I understand why two entire generations---Millennials and Gen Z---have created the stereotype of wanting to live in a hip neighborhood in Brooklyn or San Francisco. I lived in a bunch of places like that, and knew many people who did as well, and often envied them. I wouldn't go anywhere near those places now except.

I knew only one close friend who was averse to cities from the time I first knew them, and preferred small town life. It seemed like a quirky part of their personality back then. Somewhere along the way I completely re-aligned to that type of thinking. Living in a huge metroplex, as I do know, does have advantages, but this is not feel natural for me. Much of my life at the moment feels like I am plotting an escape from that. 

Hick makes his entire living off his writing through Substack online. He also sends out actual mail to ihs subscribers with real letters. He has even floated the idea of having a get-together on any land he has acquired, where his followers could come and camp, having talks and presentations. Ideally he wants others to relocate to his small abandoned town in the North Country to transform it into a liveable village.

Much of this feels "beyond politics" at this point. Politics can only get us so far. That itself is a heretical statement in this age. For fifty years we have lived with the doctrine that "the personal is political", and that the dynamics of oppressor-oppressed must be present in every human interaction, even inside families and marriages.  There can be no part of human existence that is off limits to politics, for to do so is to continue an oppressive dynamic. Like many neotraditionalists, I believe this is a demonic proposition that has ruined many people's lives.

I reply to Hick's posts more than anyone else on Twitter. This is the first time he has "quote-tweeted" me like this. I have great respect for him and hope he succeeds.  If I were younger I would go join his village project. Maybe we will all wind up doing something like that, before we are all driven insane by technology. 

Things were disrupted greatly already in my youth, and a lot of people wound up as road kill in the cultural shifts. It's only going to get worse that way. Something's got to give. The way we've been doing things doesn't work anymore. There is a lot of wisdom in the past that we can recover, even as we have to make our own new solutions. I predict a lot of change in the next five years. What I just wrote about above will be eclipsed by bigger trends, the nature of which I can only guess at.