The Digital Curtain

I read another one of those pap journalism stories today about how everything we put online is now sifted through by these companies that create profiles of us for voyeuristic employers and presumably stalkers to digitally track us. The author was going on about having too much information now about his lawyer's hair implants, or photos of his child's fifth grade teacher pregnant. Our desire to express ourselves or be ourselves online is now being used to judge us, categorize us and ridicule us.

So the answer would seem to be that we need to button down our digital lives in the Puritan manner our society seems to require. We can't be professional or reliable employees if we have a human side or quirky side.

Wasn't the point of blogging to be able to share something about ourselves? Isn't a social network of "friends" supposed to be where you talk about hobbies, share photos and "be ourselves?"

The irony of this all is that it is more often than not the professional self that is not real yet that is what we would seem to be demanding of people now on the Internet. At what point do we stop sterilizing our personalities?

Unfortunately, I believe many employers are now exploiting the economy to frighten employees into submission. People are tucking their heads down and skulking around their jobs, afraid of the bogeyman the media has turned the recession into.

If only FDR could remind people that we really have nothing to fear, but fear itself.

Layers

I have formed my own theory about the creation of the universe and all that we know. I think everything we know, have experienced and will experience has its foundation in layers. Everything builds on what has been before. Life is simply one big onion.

In my theory, if an archaeologist digs deep enough at a site he will eventually discover not only the past, but the present and eventually the future. I mean this literally as well as symbolically.

In my own experience, I have frequent flashes of the past as if it was occurring now. I assume this is because the chemical reactions in my brain are dusting off the memory synapses of past events and making them seem as though they are happening concurrently with the present. Or, perhaps all of my experience is happening at once in a microcosmic mirror of the multiple realities theory of Quantum Physics (I am not going to explain this theory to you...use Google like everyone else and sift through the bull shit to find something that seems reasonable).

I touched on the concept of human knowledge building on the layers of knowledge left by the generations before in my post Shoulder of giants back in September 2008. Layering on that post (ha, ha, ha...), I firmly believe our own lives are forged by layer after layer of experience that collects like silt on our consciousness. We are who we are based on who we have been.

At times, though, I get very weary of the sifting through the murkier layers trying to recall when a layer happened (or if it is happening now). When I was 13 or 14 and there were quite a bit less layers, I remember wondering what my life would be like at the turn of the century and I was a feeble old man of 42. At 42, after the layers had really piled up, I didn't so much wonder what my life would be at 50 as wish I was 13 or 14 again with less layers. Now, at 51, I just feel the layers piling on. I'm too weary most of the time to think about being 60 or 70.

Occasionally, the layers merge. I play with my children and find myself in the layer where I was a boy who climbed the apple tree in our back yard and stared at the clouds dreaming of great adventures and marveling at how blue the sky could be. But the fragile thread that holds me in that layers breaks when I glimpse myself in the reflection in a mirror. Then I find myself back in my middle aged man layer.

Okay, the layer theory isn't perfect. But it is interesting.

Blank stare

I don't know what to write about anymore. I never thought I was one of those "writer's block" kind of people. Once I got rid of my typewriter, I thought I'd gotten over this terror of a blank page.

Fortunately, computers provide so much distraction that even a constipated writer has plenty to do while he or she is trying to draw on their muse. There is no such thing as a blank computer screen. Something is always blinking at you.

I bought my first computer back in 1986. It was an IBM clone made by a company called Leading Edge. I believe they were manufactured in Korea. I paid $2500 back then. And that was considered pretty cheap. When IBM came out with the personal computer a few years earlier they were in the $5000 range. So the clones opened up the cheaper computer market for those of us who couldn't drop five grand on what was considered a glorified typewriter.

My first PC used floppy drives and pretty much had the computing capability of today's cell phones. It came with a word processing program, a spreadsheet program and the ability to play crude video games. I thought my PC would be my ticket to fame as a writer. I figured it would pry the words out of my head and quickly multiply them into a major best seller. I ended up writing a few short stories and playing a lot of the crude video games.

The word processors have become super sophisticated compared to the one I had on my clone and the video games have become pretty darn realistic. But computers still just give you something to do while you are waiting for your writers block to unblock. Though I couldn't imagine going back to a typewriter and I can't even read my own handwriting.

But I digress. Because I don't know what to write about. I'm going to go play a video game or see if anyone has sent me a stupid list to fill out on Facebook.

God I love technological improvements.

Kindness of strangers

 

"Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers. " Blanche Dubois, Streetcar Named Desire 

There is something strangely comforting about talking to strangers on the Web through your blog. And I use the term strangers in the sense that I have never met most people who read my blog. They are really not so much strangers as friends I have never met. Odd concept. 

The people I have never met seem to be less judgmental. Perhaps it is because they have no expectations or preconceived notions about who I am or how I should be. People I know often can't get past the me they think I am. That has its limitations. 

This is the reason I like to blog, but Facebook bothers me. Either the people who are my friends on Facebook aren't open to the quirkier side of Tim or they don't really want to see it. And it lacks the protection of really being anonymous that blogging can offer. 

In most cases, the blogging community has been very open to my quirky side. I have rarely had to be guarded. I wish that the people who know me in the real world could accept the me in the virtual world. Because that is the me that I feel the most comfortable with. And ironically, I think the virtual me is more the real me than the me that is virtually there in the real world (I couldn't resist the play on words). 

It's not that I don't think I am real on a day to day basis. It's just that, who can really be themselves at work, at the store, or even interacting socially. You have to act in certain ways to avoid offending people or creating conflict or losing your job. You can't always have deep conversations about sensitive subjects because most people can't function on a deep level or they just don't want to hear anything deeper than the weather. I suppose that is what keeps the fabric of society from flapping in the wind.

Walking a normal path is easier because it is well worn. Every now and then I catch myself deviating from the path in meetings or hallway conversations at work and I see the panicked looks of the people I'm with. More often than not I jump back on the normal path or slink away to my office chastising myself for not just maintaining the status quo. 

But I wonder a great deal about purpose in life as I slog along the beaten path staring at my feet. Once again, I think it is a middle-aged thing. Because I have finally accepted that we are all going to die, it is just a matter of when. So I wonder what that will be like and whether or not I will panic at the time because I stayed on the safe path for too long and didn't really accomplish anything great other than help raise my family. 

In the grand scheme of things, I suppose that is enough. I hold my children or watch them play and marvel at what is ahead of them and what they will experience on the journey. And I encourage them meander off the path now and then. I know all of this sounds odd (which is why I don't write it on Facebook). But you are all my friendly strangers, right (or my strange friends) and you will understand that I am just being me, right?

Punching yourself

I was watching the film, The Great Debaters with Denzel Washington over the weekend. In the film, debate coach Denzel Washington tells one of his students who had made a joke at his own expense, "You wouldn't punch yourself in a street fight so don't punch yourself in a word fight. Use humor against your opponent, not yourself."

The quote resonated with me. I have always used humor as a defense mechanism with the rationale that if I could get someone to laugh with me, they wouldn't be laughing at me. And if I could point out all of my faults before someone else could, I somehow would be ahead of the game. The problem is, no matter how many faults you point out to someone, they can always find more. And what really is the point in trashing yourself to beat someone to the punch?

Though I'm not into singing my own praises. I may be able to control insulting myself, but I can't imagine ever feeling comfortable praising myself, either. I know how I react to people who perform a contortionist act as they pat themselves on the back. So where is the happy medium?

And can I really break a pattern I've had since I was a kid? I think I learned how to be self-depreciating from my mother. She was always apologizing for the house not being clean enough, us not having enough money, our car not being as nice as other people's and for us not being of the "right" class of people. I honed in on it as a child, wondering why I never felt quite good enough.

My mother is still that way. A good percentage of any conversation I have with her is filled up with her apologizing for repeating herself, not having any interesting to say or for just being her. I kick myself (see) for not comforting her and reassuring her that she is just fine the way she is. But it has become so part of our interaction that I just sit there on the phone zoning out her chipping away at herself.

In the cockiness of my youth, I blustered about, feigning self-confidence that was often interpreted as arrogance or conceit. But so often, I felt like I was a little boy play acting at the situations I found myself in. I heard my mother repeating "you don't belong in nice restaurants...you shouldn't be in this store...you don't belong in college...our family doesn't become managers."

Not that she ever said things like that, but it is what I heard.

Now that I am middle aged, I have lost the that youthful facade that helped cushion the blows I inflicted on myself. I find myself questioning everything about me. And whereas in youth I figured time would eventually smooth out my faults and leave a polished person, I have discovered instead that time simply erodes self-delusion to a point that you must face the cold mirror and watch the future descending from the shadows behind you.

Ouch.

Cobwebs

I find it ironic that I write about ghost towns in the physical and symbolic sense and don't realize I'm also writing about my own blog(s). You can practically see a tumbleweed rolling down the digital streets of my online home. So it drives home the point to me how easy it is to "fade away."
Fading away is not a new topic for me. I've written two posts in the past with that same title. It wasn't intentional. Your memory kind of fades when you do, too.

Regardless, in some circles, I would now be considered a expert on the topic of fading away. I'm pretty up on being invisible as well. I've written a couple of posts on that topic as well. Middle aged angst does that to you.

I skipped the mid-life crisis, though. It seemed too cliche. I never really had any desire to own a little red sports car anyway. In retrospect, I think I went through my mid-life crisis when I was 19 and have been emotionally aging in reverse the way that Brad Pitt is aging in reverse in his latest movie. This would explain my being a bachelor for 47 years and then becoming a family man.

But I digress.

I have let the cobwebs accumulate on my blogs for various reasons. The obvious has been my daddy duties. I have maybe two hours a night to do anything but play puppet, read "Wheels on the Bus" or change diapers.

The less obvious reasons for my dusty blogs are a disillusionment with Blogger.com and the challenges of dragging virtual branches over my tracks to hide my trail on the Web from unwanted eyes. My enthusiasm for blogging waned a bit when I determined I really didn't want to share all of my weaknesses, phobias and neuroses with just anybody, especially someone who is looking for them.

This greatly reduced my fodder for blog post topics. I also didn't want to succumb to the desire to write about the the economy, plane crashes in the Hudson, unemployment, how stupid Grey's Anatomy has become or how lost I am watching Lost.
You can see only having two hours of free time a night hasn't reduced my desire to watch bad television.

Anyway, I feel like I am a caretaker like my father was in my last blog post. I stop by here every few days or weeks to make sure the pipes aren't frozen and the toilets still flush. Then I check all the doors and windows and lock up. And like all of those abandoned buildings in a ghost town, my blog sits with curtains fluttering and waiting for the sounds of life to return and drive out the cobwebs.

Ghost Towns

There was a house down the street when I was growing up that I only knew as the Nye's place. As long as I remembered, no one lived there. I didn't know the details, but at some time the owner of the house had died and his widow had left to go live with family back in the Midwest. The family had asked my father to act as the part time caretaker for the place, tending to the yard and checking on the house occasionally.

The odd thing about the house was that it had been left full of furniture and frozen in time when the owner left. I remember my mom took me with her once to retrieve something from the house for Mrs. Nye. We stepped inside and it was as if someone had just stepped out for a few minutes instead of a few years. A plate of crackers sat opened on the kitchen table. An envelope sat on the table with "Paper boy" written on it, obviously a long over due payment for a paper that had stopped being delivered years ago.

It seemed strange to me as a child. I knew little about grief and the decisions people make to pick up and leave when under the influence of emotions. Now I assume Mrs. Nye just couldn't stay in the house where her husband died and live with memories.

Or ghosts.

We played in the Nye's yard when my father tended the yard. Every few weeks he would open the flood gates on the irrigation ditch that ran down the alley and would flood the yard (this was how people in rural Idaho watered the grass back in those days). We'd sail our wooden boats in the flooded yard and play hide and seek in stands of wild asparagus while my father trudged around in rubber boots.

It could have been our young imaginations but on more than one occasion, either I or one of my brothers would swear we saw a curtain flutter inside the locked house as if someone had pulled it aside to watch the strangers playing in the yard. But still we played at the Nye house. Occasionally we even would go to the Nye's yard at night to hunt for night crawlers (earthworms) to use for weekly fishing trips at Lucky Peak Reservoir during the summer. I could never get over the feeling that someone was behind me while I crawled around that yard on my knees with a flashlight with red celephane over the lense looking for worms.

Eventually Mrs. Nye passed on as well and her family sold the house. We lost our boat yard and night crawler hunting grounds. I assume whoever bought the house either dealt with the ghost or laid it to rest.

The memory of the Nye place surfaced when I was reading An Angel on My Shoulder's recent post about her fascination with abandoned buildings and places. I reminded me of my similar fascination with places that people seem to have just walked away from and left to the elements. I spend many summer weekends with my father (an amateur treasure hunter) tramping around ghosts towns and abandoned mining camps in Idaho as he searched with his metal detector for hidden treasure left by the former occupants.

It occurred to me then that if the occupants had had any treasure to hide they could have afforded to save their homes. But I kept that opinion to myself for my father's sake. He did so want to believe he was going to find a treasure trove in some old outhouse and retire early.

While my father scanned the earth with his metal detector listening to it's high pitched whine, I scanned the abandoned structures for the hints at the people who had lived there and then left, either by choice or by necessity. There is a sadness in abandoned places. A sense of loss permeates the walls. Because too often when one gives up on a place, they give up on themselves or their souls. And perhaps it is the souls that remain staring out the broken out windows, pulling aside curtains that have long since crumbled to dust.

They don't call them ghost towns for nothing.

Tis the season

Blue ice

Frozen King

Snow Tim

Belated Happy Holidays from Dizgraceland!

Cabin fever

Even the cats are a bit sick of the uncharacteristic Seattle snow. It snowed most of last week and we definitely had a white Christmas. And though it is warmer today and I was able to make a pretty decent sized snowman with the wet snow, it has started snowing yet again.

We have an SUV with all-wheel drive, so I have had pretty good luck getting around. the hardest place I've found to drive is the local Safeway parking lot. They chose not to plow it and the throngs of people trying to stock up on supplies (you can't risk being snowed in without a decent supply of pork rinds...which gives you some idea of the clientele at this Safeway) are spinning around the parking lot in their little sedans with the one door a different color from the rest (another clue to the locals) skidding sideways into anything resembling a parking space.

I have to tell you I grew up in a place that snowed regularly every winter and you had no choice but to drive in it. But I cringe every time I hear someone pontificate about being fine driving in the snow but "it's all those other people" that freak them out. No one is good at driving in snow. They are just lucky.

Now that the snow is supposedly melting (though it is still coming down hard here), the news has started warning of the dreaded "urban flooding." This is known in the entertainment news business as a "dramatic hook." They didn't name this year's storms as they did in the past (like Storm watch 2008 or Tempest 2008). So they need to conjure up a new way to engage people and get them started building arks in their garages to ride out the "Urban Flooding 2008."

They do give tips on avoiding urban flooding -- clean the snow off the top of storm drains. Thank god the research department at the local networks were able to Google that little tidbit of hope for us all.

Oh well, at least the snow man is smiling (until his rock teeth start dropping out due to the urban flooding).

Freedom of speech

The one thing I have always liked about blogger was that they didn't try to censor your blog posts. It provides a free forum for writing just about anything you want. But I discovered the downside as well. It allows people to write just about anything they want.

Hypocrisy is a quandary I struggle with on a regular basis.

This is my cryptic way to say that I've gone invitation only to block a cyber stalker who first found my daddy blog and now has oozed his way into this blog. So I had to make both invite only to keep him from leaving unwanted comments and worse, links to a cruel blog he started to slander my loved ones.

The blog is cruel, untrue and mean spirited. And despite its libelous (or slanderous) content, blogger won't do a thing about it. They are merely the conduit for this forum, not its guardian. They will only remove a blog if a court determines it is libelous or slanderous. So I imagine there aren't many blogs removed. Because anyone who has tried to figure out the process to stop a cyber stalker will discover that it is a maze of misinformation and not a lot of help.

The Internet has truly become a stalker's paradise. It is a jungle of nooks and crannies that are easy for nut jobs to slip in and out of as they shoot their poison darts. Then they slink back to their pitiful, anonymous lives.

The true pitiful thing here is that I know exactly who the stalker is. And short of costly legal action there seems nothing much we can do to stop him other than block and ignore him in hopes he'll crawl back under his rock and stay there.

Freedom of speech is a bitch some times.

Father forgive me for I have joined Facebook

I only joined Facebook because an old Web friend of mine from Houston sent me an invitation. It seemed innocent enough. Little did I know that getting invited to join Facebook is a bit like being invited by someone you vaguely remember from junior high to attend a party and then discovering they are trying to sell you Amway.

The sole purpose of Facebook seems to be getting other people to join Facebook. One could say that Facebook is the Southern Baptist Church of the Internet, constantly trying to convert sinners.

I have always been comfortable hanging out inside of blogger.com. You can be anonymous at blogger.com. Facebook uses your real name and persona. It is a stalkers paradise. Whereas you can google old friends and acquaintances until you are blue in the face and not find any trace of them, all you have to do is plug in a name in Facebook and you just about find anyone.

And once you start looking up people on Facebook you are struck by this compulsion to ask them to be your "friend." They have to agree to be your friend before you can see their profile and send messages to them. So asking someone to be your friend on Facebook triggers all of those old insecurities you had in school similar to being at a sock hop and getting up the nerve to ask the most popular girl to dance. Once you've made the invitation, you are hanging out there perched on the precipice of rejection.

It's not that you get rejected outright if you send someone a friend invitation. Facebook only allows you the option of accepting an invitation or ignoring it. So if someone doesn't accept your friend invitation you are left just wondering what is wrong with you. This isn't a big deal if the person you have asked to be your friend is someone you barely know. But it is kind of disconcerting when you send an invitation to an old friend you used to work with or go to school with, thinking they will be thrilled to hear from you, and you don't hear squat. I mean, why wouldn't they want to hear from you? Haven't they all been thinking about you every day for 15 years, wondering how you are doing?

Facebook teaches you the reality that most people you have known over the years and lost touch with, lost touch with you for a reason. More often than not, they didn't like you in the first place.

Of course, it is a two-sided coin. You get lots of people asking you to be their friend who you never really liked, either. And if you are a person who can't stand hurting people's feelings like me, you agree. One, the number of friends you can collect on Facebook is your status symbol. Some people have hundreds of "friends." It freaks me out because in the real world, I don't have to take off my shoes to count the number of people I'd count as my friend.

The thing I haven't figured out about Facebook is what to do when you have collected all of these "friends." I'm not really interested in the fact that someone is clipping their toenails watching Letterman while eating a bowl of Fruitloops. And I also don't like the idea that co-workers I barely know and wouldn't recognize if I passed them in the hallway have added me to their friend's list and are focusing on the mundane facts in my life.

So why hang on to my Facebook account? Why not just close it and fade back into my blog?

What and give up all of my friends?

This turkey wasn't pardoned

I now accept that the pumpkins are gone. But it was difficult accepting that the turkey walked the Green Mile and ended up in the roaster.

This is my clever way of saying that I can't believe Thanksgiving has come and gone. Christmas was nipping at its heels long before the wishbone was snapped and wished upon. Now I have to prepare myself for blinking and watching Santa Claus hightailing it down Santa Claus Lane as he and Rudolph beat a hasty retreat towards what is left of the North Pole after Al Gore's pie charts catch up with it.

Life does seem measured at times in holidays. When I was a kid, Christmas took forever to come. Now it seems as though I barely put the Elvis tree back in the box and it is time to resurrect the King and Blue Christmas yet again (if you are new to this blog and don't know about the Elvis tree, you soon will).

But I should at least give Thanksgiving its due. Our trip to Boise seems a blur now. Travelling with a two-year old and a three-month old baby doesn't leave much time for leisurely reflection when you are in the eye of a moment. I have to say, though, one of the highlights of the trip was watching my daughter run up to my 83-year old mother screaming, "Grandma, Grandma" and leap into her arms. The last time EM saw my mother was last Thanksgiving. But we show her Grandma's photo often and she was primed to see her again. It was one of those Hallmark moments for sure.

I also enjoyed taking my daughter to the pool at the Cambria Suites in Boise. It was kind of our father-daughter outing each day. She clung to me as we bobbed around the pool and pointed where she wanted me to go with her. I cherished the time, because I figure I have very few years left before she is cannonballing into the pool like the rest of the kids and I'll be demoted to spectator as my daughter spreads her little wings.

For now I really enjoy my baby bird just bopping around the nest.

Normally, I'd write this kind of stuff in my daddy blog, but I have a nut job lurking there right now and I'd rather not give him more material to fixate on.

Flying around the holidays continues to live up to its nightmare reputation. The flight to Boise was uneventful other than an asshole airport security person making my daughter cry because she had to put her bunny through the screening machine. The nasty woman deserves the minimum wage they pay her to intimidate two-year olds.

It was the flight home that was a nightmare. The flight was full and overbooked. They loaded us on one plane and then unloaded us and moved us to another plane. They moved our seats around and separated me from my family. The flight attendants were rude and unsympathetic. We were delayed about an hour. When we arrived in Seattle, two of our suitcases arrived with us, but Roan's car seat didn't.

It was a typical airline experience.

We are sticking around for Christmas. EM is old enough to know about Santa, presents and trees. It should be a memorable Christmas.

The pumpkins are gone

The ride is definitely picking up speed now. It is almost Thanksgiving and I still think the carved pumpkins are outside the front door. But they have long since rejoined the Great Pumpkin after surviving Halloween and several squirrel and slug attacks. Tess put them out of their misery in the trash can (though one of the neighborhood kids snagged one and put it on his front steps for a few days).

Halloween candy is still in some stores at 75 percent off as they try to clear space for Christmas merchandise. Santa is supposed to be making an appearance despite tightening his belt because of the recession everyone says must be here because of all of the indicators. I think the main indicator is that the press won't shut up about it. I saw a news story last night about people holding garage sales in a neighborhood in Florida to help pay their mortgages. One woman was trying to sell her nutcracker collection because her interest rate was 18 percent. I see a bit of irony there.

Our house will be more Christmasy than ever. Our children are too young to want the latest X-Box or iPhone. They'll be happy with the wrapping paper and ribbons regardless of what's in the box. So the press can take their doom and gloom about recession stealing the holiday and shove it up their South Pole.

I still can't believe Thanksgiving is only a couple of weeks away. We'll take our annual Pilgrimage (no pun intended) to Boise to be with my side of the family. My 83-year old mother hasn't met our three-month old son yet. And both of my older brothers will there this year, so it will be the first time my family has been all together in years. Both my brothers are a little right of right politically so Tess has made me promise not to wear an Obama t-shirt to dinner.

I'm not looking forward to flying with a two-year old and a baby. Thank goodness it is a short flight to Boise. We'll be safely ensconced in our rented mini-van before we know it, checking into the Cambria Suites, the same hotel as last year that we are pretty sure Roan was conceived in. If he was a girl we toyed with the idea of naming him Cambria. The boy lucked out. Fortunately for him we didn't stay at the Shilo Inn or he might have been saddled with a different moniker.

I have mixed feelings about the way I feel about Thanksgiving. It is difficult feeling sentimental about a holiday centered around eating when you grew up with a mother who hated to cook. She made it pretty clear that getting up at 5 a.m. to stuff a turkey wasn't an act of love but obligation and I secretly believed she wouldn't have been disappointed if someone choked on a turkey bone.

I had it in my head as a child that the turkey leg was the best part of the bird and always asked for it. It wasn't until I was older that I discovered that the leg was the toughest, least appetising part of the turkey and I had been missing out on breast meat all those years.

My brother cooks the Thanksgiving meal these days. He seems to enjoy it so I won't begrudge him that pleasure by suggesting we all go out for Chinese. Though I do think everyone would be more comfortable. I work in Seattle's Chinatown, however, so I suppose it wouldn't really be a treat for me to choke down General Tso's Chicken and an egg roll after listening to my born again oldest brother say grace.

On the bright side, with the speed my life is flying by, it should be spring in no time.

The Middle Ages

A new character on Desperate Housewives (Edie's new husband) was trying to convince the harpy-like wife of the guy who used to play on Melrose Place to let him be in a garage band. He did so by describing a man in mid-life suddenly coping with the realization that you had accomplished all you really ever were going to accomplish. You would never climb a mountain, win a marathon, write a great novel or achieve any real level of fame.

I just want to say to the writers of that show, "Thanks for crapping in my cereal bowl.

It is difficult to believe that it isn't true that middle age is the long slide into oblivion. Oh sure, you can all cite examples of people who accomplished great things after they turned 50, but let's be a little realistic here. Most of those people had some pretty established early years helped by trust funds to launch their golden age Renaissance. The rest of us pretty much spend most of our youth clawing our way to the top of the hill only to discover another hill and then say screw it.

Call me a pessimist. Many have. Some think of me as overly negative. I prefer to think of myself as arriving at a realistic point of view. I don't always expect the worst. I just am rarely surprised when it comes knocking.

It's not that I think life is over when you hit 40 or 50. After all, I didn't get married until I was 47. Our daughter came into my life when I was 48 and my son was born a few months after I turned 50. So I don't buy into the myths about the limits of middle age from an emotional and intellectual standpoint.

What I do buy into are the realities. You can work out all you like and eat relatively well, but unless you are Jack LeLanne, your body will change. You will gain weight, you will lose muscle strength and you will lose the flexibility you had in your 20s and 30s.

Face it, we all age. Look at the "Where they are now" Web pages and marvel at what the ravages of time have done to sex symbols, movie stars and athletes. It's entertaining for most people, but not quite as entertaining when you look in the mirror and see it happening to you.

It is the perceptions of you other people have as you age that are the biggest challenge. I've written several times about the phenomenon of becoming invisible as you age. The older you are, the less relevance you seem to have to the world unless it is to "honor" you for your contributions and then shuttle you off into the corner while the young people party.

I try to be conscious of the things that used to annoy me when I was in my 20s and 30s about middle aged people. I try not to talk to much about how we used to do things. I don't give advice (let them learn the hard way too...no one listens anyway). I don't berate people if they don't have the same foundation of popular culture I have from growing up in the 60s and 70s. I don't wear clothing that was popular when I was 25 or clothing that is trendy with people who are 25 now. I have become more and more aware that things that I thought made me unique and creatively quirky when I was young don't translate well into middle age. The best I can hope for is to be thought of as eccentric as opposed to addled and senile.

Although I was never considered sexy or handsome in the traditional sense, I still find it difficult to accept that I've traded in my pheromones for comfortable shoes and sweat pants. It's part of that being invisible thing. Though for the most part, I don't miss raging hormones. I think more clearly and I make better decisions.

I suppose being middle aged isn't that bad. It is what it is. It could be worse. It could be the Dark Ages.

Tonight we're going to party like it's December 2012!

I was going to call this post, "In case of rapture, break glass," but when I googled the title, I discovered some religious nut job beat me to it. Then I was going to call it "End of Daze," but I discovered that was the title of some alternative song title.

So much for clever me and my end of the world puns.

I started down this dead end road to Apocalypse last week watching a program on the History Channel about all these various sources predicting the end of the world coming in 2012 (Dec. 21, 2012 to be precise). They cited the Mayan Calendar as one of the key predictor of this date, followed by the Book of Revelations, Nostradamus and finally a Web Bot.

As with any dire predictions of doom and gloom, you have to sift through some of the generous assumptions used to arrive at 2012 as the end of days. The Mayans didn't actually predict the world would end in 2012. Their calendar just ends then. Personally, I think the guy chiseling the calendar ran out of stone and figured he wouldn't be around in 2012 anyway so what the hey.

Revelations and Nostradamus pretty much predict every year as the end of the world. The real stretch is the Web Bot that searches the World Wide Web looking for key words that define the mood of people around the world and draws conclusions. The search engine was originally designed to help make stock picks. Instead, it ended up predicting 9-11. Well, it didn't actually pinpoint 9-11. It just said something bad was going to happen in a three-month period that happened to include 9-11.

Something bad pretty much happens in any given three month period, so I'm thinking the Web Bot is a load of crap as credible as Nostradamus.

There are other urban end of the world myths floating around out there. The Web is ripe as a dead opossum in your crawl space with end of the world theories. Some say the sun is dying and we'll all be mega tanned with a solar flare in 2012. Others predict a super atom splitter being constructed by rogue physicists will rip a hole in the space time continuum and end it all.

The irony of it all is that we all will die eventually anyway. What is the point in conjecturing whether or not it will be a collective ending or an individual one? Oh, I suppose the rapture freaks who believe Jesus is coming to whisk away the righteous think it is our souls that are at stake at the end of days. One can only hope that when they walk into the light they discover it is the high beams of a fully loaded semi.


Meanwhile, if the world really is ending on 2012, I'm not going to worry about investing for the long term or global warming. I'm going live as if there is no tomorrow. Shoot maybe I'll even stop mowing my lawn and making my bed.


I doubt if my wife will go along with that one, though.

Test of greatness

"It is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation. He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great. Failure is the true test of greatness."
--Herman Melville

I didn't really mean to diss on Melville in my last post. The man could turn a phrase. I was just saying that Moby Dick, although great literature in a historical sense, lacks relevance in the context of popular thought.

I did not just write that.

Regardless, I do like Melville. He said some profound things. Like the quote above. It speaks to me. I fail in my attempts at originality on a regular basis. But it makes sense. Originality rarely catches on until everyone is doing it. As a culture, we love the familiar. This is why McDonald's is the choice of millions. Unlike a box of chocolates, you always know what you are going to get.

I would caveat Melville's "failure is the true test of greatness" by suggesting you need to be trying something and failing to approach greatness. If you fail because you are sitting on your ass or blaming someone else, you are just a failure.

When I was doing some research about Melville, I discovered the guy was actually pretty cool. He went to sea in his early 20s on the whaler Achushnet. He jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia and had a romance with a native girl. He joined the crew of another whaler but then jumped ship again in Hawaii. From Hawaii he joined the crew of a British Frigate and made his way back to Boston.

Melville used his adventures in his books and had a brief stint of popularity. But after awhile he fell from grace with the masses because he started to indulge in experimental writing and delved into more political and philosophical subjects. As John Grisham, Stephan King and numerous romance novelists have discovered, the key to monetarily successful writing is not to make people think.

Melville ended his career as a customs inspector in New York. After he died his experimental writing became recognized as genius.

I'm beginning to think my writing career has a chance after all. I just may not be around to appreciate it.

History

I started reading the first novel I've read since I got my first Blackberry. I picked it up at the airport on the way to a transit conference in San Diego last week. The book title is Lost and it's by American author Gregory Maguire. It's about a female author who is the descendant of a man Charles Dickens may have used as the inspiration for Ebenezer Scrooge. She travels to England to stay at the house of her semi infamous relative and encounters what could be the ghost of Jack the Ripper.

The bizarre plot and the thought of a two and a half hour flight in coach convinced me to buy the book and turn off my Blackberry. It turned out to be well written, but a bit confusing at times. But once I got used to the author's quirky literary style, I was drawn in.

But this post isn't really a review of the book. It is about something one of the characters in the book, a history professor, said. He said that he tried not to teach history as about people like us who lived at a different time, but as a lesson that human psychology has changed with each passing decade.

This may seem like a minor thing, but for me it prompted an epiphany. I doubt the author intended it as the point of the novel, but it really made me think. Because it alters the way you view the past...or at least the distant past. It explains why books like Moby Dick, although classics, are basically incomprehensible to most of the poor schmucks who have to read them in literature classes. Because if you read books written a hundred or two hundred years ago with a contemporary mindset, you can't possible understand what the author was talking about it. Not only are you from different times, you are from different worlds.

I read Moby Dick on my own outside of any literature class and found it amazing.

Amazingly boring that is. I didn't have a clue what Melville was going on about despite the extensive footnotes in the edition I read. I know there was a white whale who ate a Captain Ahab's leg and he was really pissed off about it. Oh, and there was a Starbucks, but I don't think they served lattes. I have to confess I gleaned most of even these vague impressions about the book from a 1950s film based loosely on the novel.

You see, the language, the thinking processes, the morals of Melville's time make it read like a foreign language despite the fact it was English. I believe the white whale in the book is supposed to be a religious allegory of sorts. That is based on the footnotes. So I suppose in Melville's times, white whales were very religious. Or they worshipped whales. I suppose they blubbered a lot in church. Ha, ha.

See what I mean? Thinking changes along with generations.

God knows what people will think about a Steven King novel a hundred years from now.

Or my blog.

And here I thought I was timeless. Or was that clueless?

One Way Street

I see the sheeplike press have taken up the politicians clever "Main Street" not "Wall Street" rallying cry. And Congress failed to act on a bailout bill that may have stemmed the nosedive our economy is taking (along with my retirement fund). Even I, a person without a shred of economic savvy knows that perception is everything when comes to people's spending habits. Regardless of whether the bailout would have literally helped, it would have given people some hope and perhaps got them spending again (cash not credit).

I don't claim to understand the nuances of sub prime lending or how it is bringing down major financial institutions. I do know that trading on Wall Street is like throwing firecrackers in front of sheep. They'll stampede in the opposite direction at the slightest hint of bad news. And with it goes our bank accounts and retirement funds that are inextricably tied to the value of stocks.

I have never been one to use credit cards to live. I hate being in debt. I have a mortgage, but it kills me knowing that I owe somebody money for my house. And with the panic of the latest economic situation, I probably couldn't sell my house if my life depended on it. One no one is lending and two, there is a glut of foreclosures out there that the vultures can swoop down on for pennies on the dollar anyway.

So I sit like everyone else, wondering what will happen and what it means to my family. Oh, and I don't give a rip about Main Street or Wall Street. I care about my street.

Debating the hook

I tried to watch the first presidential debate between Obama and McCain. We even taped it so we could watch it at our leisure between diaper changes and feedings. After about 45 minutes, changing a dirty diaper seemed more interesting.

First, I couldn't get past the fact that Obama and McCain's message experts came up with the same clever play on "Wall Street" versus "Main Street." The luck of the draw allowed Obama to use it first and then McCain, obviously coached to make sure he said it spat it out in his first two minute ramble.

Having been in the messaging business, I also cringe when I hear the words, "accountability" and "transparency." I give the debate to Obama mainly because I couldn't take McCain pointing out all of the various places he has travelled to while in public office. "I've been to Kandahar. I have a very nice pillow cover I picked up at the airport there and I tell you that the people of Afghanistan are pretty skilled at embroidery."

It could spark the next college drinking game.

The value of debates is debatable anyway. I still think you watch them with your mind made up and wait for the guy you aren't voting for to screw up. I came away from watching the debate thinking McCain seemed a bit too much like Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now for my taste. And Obama needs to work on hiding his look of disgust at stupid comments or he'll never be able to sit through all of the State dinners he will be required to attend as President.

Oh well, it's almost over.

The shoulder of giants

"nanos gigantum humeris insidentes"

I'm actually amazed that humans have as much knowledge as we do. Because think of it, we all have a life span of say 80 years. In that 80 years, we have to learn as much as we can from those who came before us and pass as much knowledge on to those coming after us. And in that time we also have to sift through the misconceptions, half truths, myths and outright lies that are passed along from generation to generation to arrive at our best guess at what really is the truth.

Collective consciousness aside, none of us are born knowing everything. So why is it some people insist that they don't need an education? Education is that giant's shoulder we stand on to review what past generations have learned so we don't have to start from scratch as we venture out into our world. And every generation someone suggests a better way to build a fire or else we would still be rubbing sticks together.

But still I am impressed at how advanced our species is considering we are all just marking time here. Scratching on cave walls advanced to pencils on paper, tapping on typewriters, and now clicking away on computers. I marvel that I can store and listen to my entire music collection on a mp3 player the size of a matchbox. I still can't believe something as big as a 747 can fly. And I really can't believe I can receive 300 different channels of television via satellite and still can't find anything decent to watch.

Despite the old adage, "Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it," there is still this propensity for our species to repeat the same mistakes over and over even after reviewing history. Perhaps it is the folly of youth to consider themselves immune from the pitfalls from following the same paths as their fathers.

Or perhaps there is a danger when perched on the shoulders of giants of having our vision obscured by clouds while the giant plods off a cliff at the end of the path.

Oh well, I've mixed enough metaphors for now.