This I call God

We decided to work in one last camping trip for the year. Our destination was the end of a logging road on Bunchgrass Mountain. When we arrived, the sky was clear, the weather warm. Within minutes, chilly clouds had descended to just above our heads, hiding Fuji, Diamond, Verdun, Wolf, Judd, and David Douglas. Then the sky cleared, and we were warm again. Then clouds rolled up from below and surrounded us completely. Then we went to bed. Baxter and I aren’t half the men Peggy and Bonnie are, so we slept in our coats while they passed the night au naturel.

Fourteen hours later it was light enough—and, we hoped, warm enough—to get out of bed. Then it snowed, and the wind came up. Peggy set out to climb Fuji (7,144’) while I biked some nearby roads. My hands and feet were cold even with chemical warmers, so I soon went back to bed and read, alternating the hand that was holding the book while I warmed the other against my legs. Peggy returned triumphant with photos of clouds two feet from her face and hoar frost on shrubbery. “Fuji fed my soul,” she exclaimed, and I remembered that the one in Japan is also said to do that.

Later, we biked together in the little warmth that splotches of afternoon sun provided. Skeleton trees from a forest long since destroyed by fire stood ghostly white against writhing gray clouds. Vine maples consoled glacier-scarred andesite with leaves of red, yellow, orange, and purple. A coyote crossed the road in search of a chipmunk. A red-tailed hawk hung motionless on an updraft. Pinnacles too steep to hold snow pierced high clouds. Sunbeams illuminated patches of trees in a u-shaped valley that rose thousands of feet above the rapids of Black Creek. Purple asters, yellow St. John’s wort, and white pearly everlastings gladdened the roadside. Thickets of snowbrush made the air heavenly with honey-flavored balm.

I grieved that twinflower, prince’s pine, and vanilla leaf, are about to go underground for more months than I can well endure. The star-burst sprays of mountain hemlock made my heart leap for joy, and the haughty limbs of young noble firs reminded me of Bonnie when she was a cocky pup and thought it would be great sport to attack a city bus. I ate a choke cherry from one of numerous fragrant groves, choked, and ate another so as to hold tight to that which God has spared from pruning snips and selective-breeding.

God. Three weeks ago, we camped near Windy Pass. I had been there twice but only knew it as a warm and sunny place where five logging roads converge. It is not high (3,800’), not barren, not surrounded by precipices, and not the least bit windy. Mediocre Pass, Nothing-Much-Happening Pass, You’ll Not Remember Being Here Pass; such names as these seemed more fitting.

The wind came up that night. It did not touch the van, but I could hear it overhead, waxing and waning as it flung itself out of Winberry Canyon and vaulted far into the sky. I imagined it as a great beast that was inhaling and exhaling, and gaining strength with every breath. It continued for hours under the clear sky, maybe all night. I don’t know because I drifted in and out. I just know that when I awakened, Windy Pass was warm, and sunny, and still, and not at all imposing.

During the night an interesting thing happened. The wind stopped waning. It reached a very high speed—there above the van—and it never slowed. Bonnie became so frightened that she did something she would never presume to do in ordinary times, she got into bed with us. I have camped above timberline when winds rocked the van as if it were a boat on a lake, but this wind was greater than that. To be so close to something that vast, powerful, and unwavering, and yet to be untouched by it! I felt as though I could have spread a map on the ground without it being disturbed, yet there, just a little way above me, the sound was such that God might have been passing by.

I think that to die in such a place would not be death at all. I would hope to lie in a snowbrush thicket and become a feast for the hungry. No crematory flames would waste my substance or formaldehyde poison my tissues. I would feed the earth that has so generously fed me, and I would count it as a worthy end to the narrow life that I have known thus far, for it is without excuse that I have lived nearly three score years, yet required a mighty wind to awaken me to the majesty of a mountain pass.

“The Lord said, ‘Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.’ Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper…. And it said, ‘Why are you here?’”
1 Kings 19:11-13

Why indeed, except it be to praise that which created me and sustains me, yet which has no awareness of me and no desire for anything I might offer. This I call God.

The religious requirements of Masonry

I’ve been busting my butt memorizing Masonic ritual, which isn’t easy at best since only the first letter of every word is printed. To see the actual words, I would have to drive to Portland and ask the Grand Master to unlock his safe. By the time I got back to Eugene, I probably would have found another word I didn’t know, and would have to do the drive over. Instead, I call local Masons on the phone, and tell them I’m stuck on Page 52, Line 18, etc.
It’s a “Masonic offence” to make even a tiny pencil mark in a ritual, much less write the ritual out. A “Masonic offense” is even worse in Masonry than a mortal sin is in the Catholic Church, because Catholics aren’t ordinarily excommunicated for mortal sins, whereas Masons really are kicked-out for Masonic offenses.

Be that as it may, I learned my degree work from two wonderful men, and at least one of them had at least some of the ritual written down. I know this because when he couldn’t remember a word, he would turn his back to me and refer to a book that he kept in a drawer. I suspect the practice is common, and I interpret it this way. If you take a stretch of highway on which motorists can safely go fifty, and you post a twenty mile per hour speed limit, most people will ignore the law. They might not go fifty, but they will go over twenty simply because the law makes no sense. In the case of the Masonic ritual, you can find it on the Internet in a few seconds, and hardly anyone would want to read it anyway, because it would be—to use another Catholic comparison—like reading a mass. It’s an interactive affair—you have to be there to appreciate it.

Yet its attempt at secrecy does make Masonry more appealing. It’s not that Masons are hiding things because they are shameful or sinister, but because they are intimate and sacred. If just anyone could drift into a Masonic lodge, I would not be a Mason. There are no social connections, there are only private connections within a social context, and the secrecy of Masonry (along with its accompanying vows) facilitates that.

Masonry claims not to care what your religion is just so long as you have one, yet it requires its members to believe in one God, personal immortality, and the holiness of John the Apostle and John the Baptist. Well, so much for Hindus and Buddhists. Aside from this blatant hypocrisy on the part of Masonry’s Christian majority, I had to think hard about what these requirements mean to me. Could I in good faith affirm them so I wouldn’t be like my friend who got around Alcoholics Anonymous requirement that she believe in a Supreme Being by promoting her teddy bear.

I don’t believe in the supernatural, but I have no qualms about defining God as that which causes my heart to open—Peggy’s loyalty; Pachebel’s Canon in D; Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince; alpenglow on Diamond Peak; the kindness of strangers. These things I worship (and what a person worships is properly said to be his God). They’re as good as it gets, and they’re as real as it gets. When I pray, it is to the goodness within my own heart—a goodness that such things elicit. God is love and beauty. Love and beauty are God. Such is my religion.

Personal immortality posed a greater challenge. As with God, Masonry requires you to believe in it, but they don’t tell you what it is. Here is my problem. I am no longer the person I was when I was two, or ten, or even fifty. I even like to think that I am not the person I was yesterday, because yesterday was a lousy day. I ate nothing, drank too much coffee, and was pretty near psychotic by late afternoon. But being a tad psychotic from time to time is not always bad. Like LSD, it can show you the world through new eyes. Therefore the me who awakened this morning was, in a way, a different me than the one who awakened yesterday morning.

If Masonry meant by personal immortality that, if I died today, I would awaken in another realm as a white man with all his relationships intact, I would think them rather silly, but since they leave it to me to define personal immortality, I have to say that the personal (who I am at my deepest level) is unlimited in time or space. There is my ultimate reality, and there is my present incarnation, and the two are one. I am not a being but a passageway, within an indivisible whole.

Most Masons would shake their heads if they were to read this. Many might say that they can’t tell what the hell I’m talking about, and they doubt that I do. “But do you know what you’re talking about?” I might counter. “Do you know what you are talking about when you refer to personal immortality as if the next life were a perpetual family reunion with God carving the turkey? Do you truly believe that your existence is like concrete? Why even concrete is not like concrete; it contains atoms that are forever moving like an extremely slow river and, as Heraclitus said, ‘You can’t jump in the same river twice.’”

Personal immortality can only mean that we possess an inner core that is unchanging, and in this I believe. I just don’t believe that this core is synonymous with how I perceive of myself now/today/this minute or even this lifetime. “I” am bigger and older than that. So big that I see no end to me, and I am indebted to the Masons—and the Odd Fellows—for making me think about such things.

Seneca versus Wall Street

I’ve been doing some complementary reading. On one side, Wall Street Shoeshine Boy, which is about greed, depravity, competition, materialism, and drug abuse. On the other, the writings of Seneca and Epictetus. Wall Street looks even worse when compared so closely to the Stoic belief that virtue is the only good.

When Seneca was ordered to commit suicide by Nero, he first cut arteries in his arms and legs, but he had a clotting disorder, so that didn’t kill him. Then he drank poison, but that didn’t do the trick either, so he finally had himself carried to a steam room where he died of a heatstroke. All the while, he was exhorting his followers to remember the things he had taught them. Admiral James Stockdale spent eight years in the “Hanoi Hilton” after breaking his leg when he parachuted from a plane. He was nearly starved, often tortured, and kept in solitary confinement for four years. The writings of Epictetus enabled him to survive.

At 58, with all the mistakes of the past, how might I live better? How might I take life more seriously, not in a morose way but an intelligent way. First, I could be more polite. Am I rude then? No, I’m not rude, but I could go to greater pains to be nice. I could open more doors for more people. I could stand aside and let others go first. I could talk less about me, and ask people more about themselves. I could judge less harshly. I could try harder to see the other person’s viewpoint. I could show respect even when I’m not being treated respectfully.

Road clearing

We camped over the weekend for possibly the last time this year due to the shortening days. As we lay in the van reading on Saturday afternoon, something caught my eye, and I looked out to see a large owl observing Baxter from a nearby tree. This was the third time I’ve saved him from a predator. The first was a bobcat and the second a hawk. The bobcat was clearly on the verge of attacking, but the plans of the hawk and the owl were less clear to me, and maybe to themselves. Baxter is too heavy to fly away with, yet he is so enticingly helpless. A person doesn’t realize how many predators there are in the woods until he goes there in the company of something they would like to eat.

This was our fifth trip to the same abandoned roadbed. On the first, we biked as far as we could, often having to carry our bikes over logs and around brush. We got it into our heads that it would be fun to clear the roadway with the exception of a downed tree at the very beginning that we hoped would discourage ATVers. According to our map, the road went maybe two or three miles (crooked distances are hard to judge) and gained 800 feet before abruptly ending on the side of a nameless mountain. The map also showed a few spur roads and several creeks. None of the creeks were running, although some contained small pools for the dogs.

Some of the spur roads were still marked by plasticized signposts. The forest service really has a winner with these as they look almost new even after three decades. Our best map is supposed to show all the roads, even the abandoned ones, but some of the spurs were simply too old to be included. Yet, these faithful signposts continue to announce their existence.

Weeks later, we returned with a bucksaw and set to work. It was a lousy job for a man with a bad knee, but I enjoy few things better than tidying up the woods. As is often the case with abandoned roadbeds, the first part was easily discernible, but the latter completely covered by leaf litter and fallen trees. On an exploratory trip, Peggy actually became lost and had to follow the dogs out. Although she questioned their choice of direction, she had no ideas of her own, and was pleasantly surprised by how fast they found me.

The woods being shadowy, sword ferns had taken root in the leaf litter. They were huge, but so shallowly anchored that they could be easily peeled from the earth, exposing glimpses of the old roadbed. I hesitantly uprooted enough of them to create a passage. I often ponder ways to reduce the number of creatures that must die so that I might live, but my responsibility is unclear. For example, I’ve no doubt but what I often run over snakes sunning themselves on mountain roads, but what am I to do? I could drive fewer miles or even stay home altogether, yet it would be a terrific loss to me.

In their struggle to reach the light, quite a few big-leaf maples and western red cedars had grown so tall that their trunks couldn’t support them, and many had bent completely across the road creating an arbor effect. Maples can survive several years in this condition, and we let them be except when they were too low to bike under. Cutting cedars conjured memories of sharpening pencils in grade school. I felt guilty about killing even such stunted trees, but I consoled myself with the thought that they were doomed anyway.

Our work consumed a significant part of four days, and we did not expect to reach the end of the road even then, but the last few hundred feet turned out to be less challenging than anticipated, so at four o’clock Sunday we arrived at a spot beyond which no more gravel could be found. Some old growth logs awaited us there in company with a beer can, an oilcan and a Prestone anti-freeze container—all made of steel and requiring an opener. Since I didn’t remember anti-freeze coming in such a container, I assumed it must date from the early sixties if not sooner. A log had protected it from the elements.

Peggy wondered halfway through our work if we were breaking the law. I said that we probably could be charged with something, although I couldn’t imagine that we would be even in the unlikely event that anyone caught us. Then too, I offered, it is only a matter of time before the dozers return to reopen the area for another round of logging, so, in all fairness, we should be paid for our work. Without us, the forest service would have to send in surveyors to find the roadbed. Of course, they will probably send in surveyors anyway—as a matter of course—but those surveyors will be pleasantly surprised to find that someone did their work for them. As for us, our private treasure will be lost. Not just the road but the forest itself.

Lightning flashes

I saw lightning flashes in both eyes last night. The right eye got so bad that I couldn’t see anything on that side of my nose. I was biking with the dogs at the time, and we had to pass through several narrow gates to get home. I couldn’t even tell if a gate was open until I was upon it. When I got home, I found that I couldn’t read. I could recognize individual letters, but I couldn’t make them into words. I thought that, well, okay, I will separate the letters into syllables, but since individual syllables can be pronounced in different ways, I had to go through various combinations in order to figure out each word, and this made sentences impossible.

I hesitated to tell Peggy for fear she would freak out, but I did, and she did. “We’ve got to get you to urgent care,” she insisted. “No, no, no,” I insisted back. “I don’t know what this is, but I don’t think it’s serious. That migraine I had two years ago started with flashing lights, so I think this might be a repeat.” I reminded her of the time I had shingles around my eye, and, at her insistence, went to urgent care at 5:30 in the morning. I said this to convince her that I would be not only willing but eager to go to the hospital if I thought it necessary.

In this situation, I figured that, okay, if I go, they’re probably going to scan my head with some enormous machine. Then they’re going to run all kinds of other tests, and the bill is going to be a thousand dollars after insurance, and nothing will show up on any of the tests, and I will get well on my own after having spent hours lying around on cold gurneys waiting for people to do things.
Two hours later I could read but had a slight headache. Today, I am fine.

Biking with the dogs

We biked in the woods thrice last week, only stopping to water the dogs and to eat salal berries, thimbleberries, blackberries, dewberries, salmon berries, and red huckleberries. We covered ten miles some days, no more because of the dogs.

Baxter has diabetes incipitus, so he must never be without water. He drinks as much as Peggy, Bonnie, and me together, so much water that his pee looks like water. We carry a gallon for a ten-mile trip and, on warm days, stop every ten minutes or so to check him for heat exhaustion. We note whether he collapses in a heap or hunts for game in the bushes. We check his gums to be sure they are pink. We talk to him to gauge his alertness. We give him time to catch his breath.

We are aided in our attentiveness by reminders of how everlastingly guilty we would feel if we ran him to death. I say we, but Peggy leaves Baxter’s care on the road to me, which is a reversal of what we do at home where she looks at the dogs’ piss, pokes at their poop, feels their bodies for growths, observes their eyes; and sometimes works herself into a panic for little reason that I can see. I took Bonnie to the vet last week simply because Peggy was worried about a fleeting pain. The vet didn’t know what to make of it, and suggested x-rays. I demurred at the price, and came away with a bottle of anti-inflammatory pills of which only two were used—and them only because we had them.

Without dogs, we would bike faster, farther, and sometimes on pavement, but dirt and gravel are conducive to slower speeds and are easier on their feet. Their joy is worth our sacrifice. It is even worth having to bathe them when we get home.

Thoughts of investing

There are as many mutual funds as there are stocks on the Wilshire 5000 (which actually contains 7000 stocks). Many mutual funds charge a four to eight percent sales fee, a one to two percent advisory fee, and a 12b1 fee which goes for advertising. This in a market that averages ten percent. Less than half of these actively managed funds earn, after expenses, a return that is equal to the market, and that’s in one year. With every subsequent year, the winning funds have less chance of beating the market average again. By year five, the number is down to one in four, and those investors who own a market-beating fund pay higher taxes (due to the fund’s portfolio turnover) and incur greater risk.

Impartial financial writers often advise investors to not even try to beat the market. Instead, buy a fund that replicates the index. The passively managed Wilshire 5000 index fund that I own has no sales fee, no 12b1 fee, and a 0.1% maintenance fee. Furthermore, the portfolio turnover rate is almost nil (compared to 100% or more for many managed funds), so there are few capital gains. I also own a bond index fund that follows the broad American bond market, and a third fund that tracks the EAFE (Europe, Australasia, and the Far East) stock index. I own 50% American stocks, 5% foreign stocks, and 45% American bonds. If I were younger, I would own more stocks, but since there have been whole decades in which the market lost money, I can’t take the risk.

Yesterday, I heard over NPR that the stock market might crash this very week due to the domino effect of mortgage loan defaults. The brokerage houses are in a panic. The hedge fund managers can’t slow down long enough for their in-house shoeshine boys to polish their shoes. Some fund managers have even stopped honoring redemptions.

Maybe the sky is about to fall, but then again stocks are never more popular than at the end of a bull market or more shunned than at the end of a bear market. This is why I mostly ignore the prognosticators. I say mostly, because I understand only too well the twin emotions of greed and fear that drive the market.

Still, I’ve seen the market drop 38% without being tempted to bail. I’m not brave; I just think in terms of shares instead of dollars. If I own 100 shares of a mutual fund, I will still own those 100 shares whether they are worth a lot or a little unless I sell them. This means that I have reason to hope. If I owned 100 shares of stock, it would be a different matter because a person can ride a stock all the way to the ground. By contrast, a mutual fund is spread across many stocks, and my investments are spread further than any actively managed mutual fund. If big company stocks are rising, I rise with them. If small company stocks or Japanese stocks are having their day in the sun, I get in on some of that. If no stocks are going up, I have bonds to fall back on. And no matter what, I won’t pay high fees and taxes.

My only indulgence is 350 shares of a fund that invests solely in oil and gas exploration. It’s breathtaking to watch its movements on a given day, and, over the course of a year, it can go up or down by 80%. I tell myself that I should sell it while it’s flying high, but I love that fund. It’s like having a poisonous snake for a pet. The snake kills your rats, but then you can never trust the snake not to kill you too, and there’s something attractive about that.

Scandi Festival

I helped my Masonic Lodge staff a food booth at the Scandinavian Festival last week. When I arrived, I was handed a fake-embroidery vest and a pointed hat that looked like a limp dunce cap. Our specialty was meatballs on a stick. I assumed they were called meatballs-on-a-stick, so when a customer asked me for a frickadeller, I asked her what she was talking about. She pointed to our big sign (which I hadn’t read), and looked at me as if I had pretty much ruined the exoticism of her gustatory experience.

Another customer asked what kind of food we had. I knew what kind of food we had. We had Costco precooked sausages and Don Juan tortillas, but I didn’t know what kind of food we were supposed to have. I called Donald over since Donald was the only one of us who actually knew what he was doing. “It’s Swedish,” he said. Of course, Swedish meatballs, why didn’t I think of that? Maybe for the same reason that I don’t know what countries constitute Scandinavia. Sweden and Norway, I suppose. Denmark, perhaps? Finland possibly? Do I care? A little.

I neither hated my shift nor loved it. Mostly I watched women, felt mildly annoyed when we had customer, and wondered if everyone else who was serving food (eating appeared to be the point of the festival) was as fake as we were.

The sad story of American Home Mortgage

Last week, I lost $14,000 in the stock market. I didn’t do anything wrong—it was just a bad few days. Still, $14,000…. I pick up pennies from the sidewalk. If someone gave me $14,000 to actually spend, I would be stumped.

I gain and lose money all the time in the stock market (I surely lost several thousand more today), but I don’t normally track my investments. I simply look at my monthly statements, groan or smile, and file them away.

My investment style is a combination of whatever looks good at a particular time (I buy but seldom sell), and my desire to protect Peggy from volatility. When we got into the market, she worried about how I would react to losing money, but I soon realized that she was more grieved by it than I. She interpreted every up as a fluke and every down as the start of Great Depression II. I accepted both as normal, and held to the belief that, over time, the market would go up more than it went down. The worst down we saw was 40%, and that was okay. It wasn’t something to sneeze at, but it wasn’t tragic either.

My first thought upon investing in stocks was to buy low and sell high. Everyone thinks that, only it’s harder than it looks—a bit liking throwing rocks at darting night birds. That’s why I mostly stopped selling, that and the tax liability.

Over the years, I felt like I should study investing more, but the subject didn’t interest me so I kept putting it off in favor of work that I could stand back and look at. Things like remodeling projects. In the last month, I’ve been making up for lost time. The main thing I’ve learned is that even knowledgeable investors have trouble making a significant amount of money in the market (although losing a significant amount is easy enough). Finding a way to beat the market is like finding a cure for the common cold. If scientists can cure a rare cancer, surely they can cure a common cold, or so it would seem, but after decades of work and millions of dollars, colds remain defiant. This gives my market studies a dismal air because, there being no one to tell me what will work, I might do really well, or….

The impetus to today’s sell-off was the fall of American Home Mortgage Corporation. This evening, I saw a graph of its demise that was updated every five minutes throughout the day. A year ago, AHM was selling for $36 a share. Today, it opened at $10.47. At 2:00, it was still at $10.47. By 3:00, it was $1.14. Picture that graph. First, a long horizontal line. Then a sharply descending vertical line. Then a slightly wobbly horizontal line. Then nothing. Like a heart monitor on a dying man.

Imagine that you woke up this morning in Houston or Milwaukee, and went to your job at AHM expecting an ordinary day, and then top management announced to Wall Street that bankruptcy was looming. Bang! By mid-afternoon you’re out of your job and possibly your savings. That’s drama. I once heard about an economist who was so moved by graphs that he sometimes cried. I can see that now, and it makes studying the market a lot more interesting.

The whys of organizing

I’ve spent the week organizing, or rather reorganizing, our finances and file cabinets. One of the traits Peggy and I share is that we are born organizers. The difference is that I organize everything—socks, tools, pantry shelves, even the kitchen junk drawer, whereas she is a selective organizer. She’s content to let things overflow in her purse, desk, and closet; but her checkbook is an accountant’s envy, and her button collection is displayed so symmetrically that a flea couldn’t crawl through the margin of error. I stop short of such perfection, though I still qualify as neurotic by most standards, my garage being tidier than other people’s living rooms.

Well, anyway, I organized this week. It was such fun that I had to force myself to go to bed at night. Organizing is, of course, an attempt to control reality—to make it safer, tidier, more predictable. The problem is that reality is inherently dangerous, messy, and unknowable. The harder I try to tame it, the more aware I become of its dangers, and the greater my need to eliminate those dangers.

The most frightened man I ever knew carried a .45 everywhere, even into the shower (he put it in a baggie). I visited him once. He had a yard alarm, and every time a squirrel walked by, that alarm would go off, and my friend would run to the window with his .45. So it is that prudent watchfulness can grow into full-blown paranoia. On the other hand, the world really is a dangerous place, and it makes sense to try to avoid the most likely dangers.

The trick here, as in all things I suppose, is balance. But where is the fulcrum? I don’t see it. Do you see it?

The whys of organizing

I’ve spent the week organizing, or rather reorganizing, our finances and file cabinets. One of the traits Peggy and I share is that we are born organizers. The difference is that I organize everything—socks, tools, pantry shelves, even the kitchen junk drawer, whereas she is a selective organizer. She’s content to let things overflow in her purse, desk, and closet; but her checkbook is an accountant’s envy, and her button collection is displayed so symmetrically that a flea couldn’t crawl through the margin of error. I stop short of such perfection, though I still qualify as neurotic by most standards, my garage being tidier than other people’s living rooms.

Well, anyway, I organized this week. It was such fun that I had to force myself to go to bed at night. Organizing is, of course, an attempt to control reality—to make it safer, tidier, more predictable. The problem is that reality is inherently dangerous, messy, and unknowable. The harder I try to tame it, the more aware I become of its dangers, and the greater my need to eliminate those dangers.

The most frightened man I ever knew carried a .45 everywhere, even into the shower (he put it in a baggie). I visited him once. He had a yard alarm, and every time a squirrel walked by, that alarm would go off, and my friend would run to the window with his .45. So it is that prudent watchfulness can grow into full-blown paranoia. On the other hand, the world really is a dangerous place, and it makes sense to try to avoid the most likely dangers.

The trick here, as in all things I suppose, is balance. But where is the fulcrum? I don’t see it. Do you see it?

Alan Wheelis and the absence of meaning

On June 16th, I checked out a library book by the psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis. I had never heard of him, but I always peruse the new book section, and The Way We Are intrigued me. I finished my second reading this morning, and looked the author up on the net. He died the day I got his book.

“There are two essential categories: that unchanging backdrop, the raw nature of existence, unadorned, unmediated, overwhelming us with dread, the way things are; and that changing succession of stage sets we put in front of that backdrop, blocking it from view, the schemes of things, the systems of meanings within which we live. The backdrop is a constant, too awful and too fearful to be endured; the sets change over the course of history, though they may seem fixed over the course of a lifetime.”

But what of those who can no longer believe in the sets?

“Do you know? Do you feel it, this losing of grip? The received interpretations no longer work, don’t fit, don’t take hold…

“Some people don’t hear the screaming; the old fictions still work. Some hear it keenly: The chalk has worn down, the fingernail drags across an endless blackboard, the sky is empty.”

What is there for the latter?

“When the ruling scheme of things comes to seem untrue or unimportant, one’s efforts within it become meaningless. One’s whole life becomes meaningless…. One seeks distraction…”

He sought distraction through women.

“…I remind myself that my papier-mâché angel will turn into a witch or a drab. Yet this passion for a falsified other may be the only thing in life really worthwhile.”

But why not improvise a meaning?

“Free to choose how to live, the way we choose is meaningless; living in the certainty of meaning, we live a life that is imposed.”

An improvised purpose is just that—improvised, shot on the fly, made with limited—and possibly inaccurate—knowledge. The shooter can neither see his target nor know the nature of his target. I very much doubt that we are even able to think outside of the scheme of things, because we are the products of that scheme; we are contained within it. Even when we reject it, we reject it from within, using its terminology, its images.

When people explain to me their core beliefs, the thoughts that keep them going, that make their lives worthwhile, I can scarcely take them seriously. Still others have nothing to explain because they don’t feel compelled to look for an explanation. I am likewise challenged to take them seriously. I can flatter myself about why I am different (“I am more intellectually courageous,” or “I possess greater depth”), yet I would trade places if I could. I neither take comfort in religion, nor acknowledge human authority. The most I can ever know is but a guess. I am limited by my senses, my intelligence, and my culture.

I think of my species as I think of my dogs. Bonnie is smart, Baxter not so smart; yet even Bonnie couldn’t master long division. The most brilliant dog that ever lived—the Einstein of dogs—could not have mastered long division. My race is likewise limited. Some of us know things that astound the rest, but all of us together know very little in proportion to the totality of knowledge, and we probably lack the capacity to understand many things. Like dogs, our intellectual ceiling is not only low, we are too unintelligent to know how low it is. Or so I suspect.

Murderous nurse

I hate to admit I watched them, but I did. Two true crime shows at the same time (I switched during commercials), one about a college student who chopped up his parents with an axe; the other about a woman who shot her husband. Alas, the announcer on the second show said, “A trained nurse, she dismembered the body and packed it into three suitcases…”

“A trained nurse!” I thought. “I’m married to a trained nurse—and she owns three suitcases!”

“Peggy,” I asked when Peggy got home, “when you were in nursing school did any of your courses include body dismemberment?” She looked at me strangely, and, having just seen what a pissed-off nurse could do, I let the matter drop. I consoled myself with the thought that the nurse on TV had used a reciprocating saw, and I knew that, nurse or not, Peggy would never use a reciprocating saw. In fact, the one time she used a circular saw, she cut the cord in two.

The pitfalls of optimism, of pessism

Walt got a Masters degree in counseling psychology. While in school, he married a welfare mom with two kids, so he was unable to give his counseling practice time to grow. Within months, he got a job with a steady paycheck. When that business laid him off, he was content to draw unemployment for six months before looking for a job. Alas, he discovered that his benefits were only good for three months, so he had to scramble for work. No work was forthcoming until I introduced him to Bill who owns an auto repair shop. Walt went to work at Bill’s shop, but was soon fired when he argued with the foreman. Now, Walt is driving a school bus while he looks for something better.

As Walt sees it, his problems are caused by bad luck or other people. This is because Walt is a raving optimist, and raving optimists underestimate their own blame while overestimating the blame of everyone else. I am a pessimist. I would not have majored in counseling psychology if I wanted to stay in Eugene, because half of the counselors in Eugene are waiting tables. Nor would I have married an unskilled welfare mom who was irresponsible with her money and, perhaps, her uterus. Nor would I have reached my 53rd birthday with no savings.

Pessimists anticipate the worst, and seek to avoid it. Optimists don’t realistically analyze the odds; don’t take responsibility; and don’t learn from their mistakes. Pessimists are painfully aware of their own weaknesses and of everything that could conceivably go wrong. They consequently exaggerate the likelihood that something will go wrong, and they become frozen. They lose faith in the possibility of good outcomes, whereas optimists see nothing but good outcomes.

George Bush is an optimist. He never loses confidence, and people are dying by the thousands because of it. But then optimists are generally happy people, whereas pessimists often have trouble getting out of bed in the morning. Which one does the most good in the world versus the most evil? I don’t know.

The saga of a rebel Mason

My lodge conferred the Master Mason degree tonight. It is high ritual, more impressive than a Mass. It puts me in the kind of altered state that athletes refer to as “the zone.” The props and lighting; the officers in their tuxedos, the master with his top hat; the long ritual performed from memory; the intricate movements of body and hands. So many ways of doing each thing wrong, but only one of doing it right.

Behold, the hours wore on, and the lodge grew hot; and I grew rebellious in my coat and tie. At length, I removed the latter, but the small patch of bare skin that was exposed made little difference; so off went the coat. Some looked at me in surprise, but what else could I do—sweat and feel like an idiot? I am ready to rebel when reason demands it.

Allow me my small rebellions, and I will serve you well; but deny me, and we will both come to doubt that I am in the right place. Noting that the thermostat was locked at 75, I blamed the Scottish Rite for my discomfiture—it being their building. Others suffered too, but only I rebelled. I am the only rebel in many settings, although I do not know why.

Christopher Reeves and Aunt Peggy's attempt at suicide

Last week, I unthinkingly pivoted on my foot (instead of lifting it), and now knee pain is making it hard for me to work or sleep. When things are like this, I try to play it safe, but I find inactivity agonizing. And there is so much that needs doing! Forget new projects; just the upkeep on the house and yard requires hours a day on my feet.

I saw the Christopher Reeves’ movie (Somewhere in Time) tonight, and wondered how a formerly active man was able to bear quadriplegia much less remain optimistic. I used to think about him lying there, unable even to breathe on his own, and I couldn’t imagine how he stayed occupied. Movies? A fish tank? Recorded books? Visits from the rich and powerful? It boggled me, and always put me in mind of Peggy’s aunt who became a quadriplegic after her second suicide attempt. If life isn’t worth living when you’re healthy, ending up like her has got to be as near hell as most of us will get, at least in this life. She’s dead now. Ate herself to death. I suppose the bright side to quadriplegia is that, even if you take care of yourself, you don’t probably won’t have to put up with it for too many years.

I wonder what would have happened had Peggy’s quadriplegic aunt took it into her head to kill herself with drink instead of food. In theory, she would have the right, but in actuality, it would require an accomplice, and who would keep giving booze to a quadriplegic? The same people who gave her food, I suppose. I know I would. After all, why not? I had rather give her booze than food because if there is one thing more unaesthetic than a quadriplegic, it’s a fat quadriplegic. Besides, the alcohol might comfort her more.

Ah, but she might puke! I never thought of that. A fat, puking quadriplegic. What a vision. Sounds like a painting by Picasso.

Wright and Ellison and what I didn't learn in Mississippi schools

I just finished Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison and am well into Native Son by Richard Wright. Both were well-known black writers from decades ago, but whose existence was unknown to me until recently despite nineteen years of formal education and despite Richard Wright having grown up in Mississippi sixty miles from my boyhood home. Ralph Ellison, I heard of two months ago on NPR. Richard Wright, I heard of last month on Jeopardy. Why, I wondered would a Jeopardy contestant know the name of a veritable neighbor of mine whom I had never heard of—prejudice?

I read a passage from Native Son to Peggy. It was about two teenagers masturbating in a theater. Well, duh, said Peggy, maybe you never heard of him in school because he was vulgar. “No,” I objected. “They could have done him like they did all the white writers. They could have left the objectionable passages out of textbooks, knowing full well that not one kid in a thousand would go to the library looking for more. Besides, the books of a sexually explicit black writer wouldn’t have been in a white library.”

Really pisses me off that somebody on Jeopardy knew the name of a gifted Mississippi writer when I did not. Makes me wonder what else my teachers failed to mention. Ironically, both of these authors focused upon the fact that being black in their day MEANT being invisible. I can support this assertion by pointing out that the only black person who I remember reading ANYTHING by during my nineteen years in school was George Washington Carver, and that was only an excerpt from his autobiography. Every school kid knew that he was born a slave, was tutored by benevolent white people, was emancipated by another white person, and invented peanut butter at a college that was funded by white people. Such was my education in black history.

Now comes Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, and I am having nightmares. They are simply too damn good at showing me a world that I grew up in the middle of yet never knew existed. My only hint of that world came from the fact that I ended my friendship with every black man with whom I ever became close once I realized how he really felt about my race.

I get a letter meant for Michael

A letter came yesterday that was addressed to my former neighbor, Michael. It looked like an invitation of some kind. I took it and another letter along when I ran errands. As I drove, I was sorely tempted to toss Michael’s letter in the trash because I do not like Michael. The one store that had a mailbox out front was the last on my list, so I had a lot of time to think about that letter and what I wanted to do with it. I went over the matter thoroughly, and pleasurably, without coming to a conclusion.

When I got to the store, I saw that there was a trashcan between me and the mailbox, and, if I had only had Michael’s letter, the trashcan was where it would have gone. But since I had to walk to the mailbox anyway, I put his letter there too—and instantly regretted it. I even had an impulse to break into the mailbox to get it back.

Aside from having to mail my own letter anyway, I re-mailed his largely because throwing it away seemed piddling, tacky. If the envelope had contained something significant—say his income tax refund—it would have ended up on the sidewalk in the part of town known as Felony Flats. But an an invitation? Let it pass.

One might ask if I didn’t feel better by having done the right thing. Well, no, because I can never convince myself that doing good by my enemies is the right thing. I want my enemies to suffer, and I want to help it happen. In the absence of reconciliation, this is as true of someone who wronged me forty years ago as it is of someone who wronged me today. I don’t feel that I have to get along with people, but in the face of egregious or persistent harm, my patience runs out.

My own vengefulness inspires me to treat other people better than I might otherwise do, because I don’t want other people lying in wait for me as I lie in wait for some of them. I show respect and helpfulness for anyone who is not my enemy, mostly because it pleases me to please others, but also because I never know who might be in a position to harm or help me somewhere down the line. I am especially courteous—or at least tolerant—toward the many bicyclists and pedestrians who pass my house, including the ones who litter and steal flowers, because they know where I live.

I recognize that my vengefulness is an immoral attitude, but what is morality other than those rules inculcated by society for its own benefit, rules that: (a) sometimes harm the individual who accepts them, and which (b) society itself feels no need to obey (if I kill my neighbor because I hate him, I am a murderer; if I kill my neighbor because the government tells me to, I am a patriot). No, I prefer to determine my own morality, at least to the extent that it is possible. I doubt that any of us have the capacity to be truly self-defined, but the other way would have us not think, to accept on faith that someone else, whether it be the church, the government, the author of an old book, our parents, or the leaders of some club or gang, is in a better position to make decisions about what is good for us than we are. I would only suggest that one look at the fate of their followers.

“Why, their fates aren’t always so bad,” one might say. No, they are not. Conformity has its rewards. It is often ill advised to defy authority even if that authority is wicked or foolish. But there is an in-between place where the authorities are absent or powerless. This is where freedom lies for people who refuse to internalize the edicts of those who claim the right to control them.

Trust?

Peggy and I cashed $30,000 in government bonds this week. They looked good when we got them—secure, paid decent interest, added diversity to our portfolio—but the rate dropped so we converted them into a CD at a credit union. I would have bought stocks with the money, but Peggy insisted on a CD, and 5.5% is good right now.

The credit union lady was mischievous. When she got to the part of the application about how the account was to be listed—whether one of us could clean the other out, or we both would have to sign for the money—she looked from one to the other, as if to ask, “What’s it going to be—are you two gutsy enough to jump from the high board?”

Money represents ultimate trust. Some think ultimate trust is be represented by something like rope climbing with a partner, but it is not ordinarily in the self-interest of your climbing partner to kill you. Others might think ultimate trust would be represented by choosing a heart surgeon, but again, treachery would not serve the other party.

Peggy used to have a whole life policy on me. I never understood this since she could have carried on financially without undue burden, and because whole life is a lousy investment unless the insured party dies prematurely. I knew that her father had whole life policies on everyone in her family (he gave the policies to his daughters when they grew up), so I laid the decision off to her respect for his prudence. She has often encouraged me to take out life insurance on her, what with her being the breadwinner and me being barely employable. “What would you do without me?” she asks. “I would live frugally,” I answer.

So, no, there is no financial reason for either of us to murder the other unless we were so greedy as to want the house. Everything else could be had with a few clicks of the mouse. My trust in Peggy is such that if she cleaned me out, I would probably kill myself. But if I cleaned her out, I suspect she would kill me. I can just hear her talking to herself as she sat in front of a computerized spreadsheet with zeros at the bottom.

“I’ve put up with a lot from that son-of-a-bitch. He drank; he did drugs; he’s certifiably insane; twice he nearly went to jail; he never held a job for over four years; he not only womanized near home, he left me for months at a time so he could womanize in exotic places, all while I earned him a paycheck. But now this. Thirty-five years of hard work and savings gone. And for what—a new generation of whores? I’ve been kind, loyal, tolerant, and even loving for two generations, but, by god, this time I’m going to nail him.”

“Ah, trust, it’s a beautiful thing.” When I say these words to Peggy, she just looks at me. She’s never been much of a talker, and her silences are unsettling. “When you don’t talk, I don’t know what you’re thinking,” I say. “I’m not thinking anything,” she answers.

Yes, trust. Sometimes, in some situations, I think that one or both of two things must be true: Peggy’s lying (or doesn’t know her true feelings), or I’m crazy. I think this because I cannot make her words mesh with my reality. Since I know I’m crazy—regardless of whether or not she’s lying—I’m really only stumped about whether she’s lying in a given situation.

Paris Hilton and the monk who grabbed a bush

As I was buying gas for the lawn mower today, I had the thought that buying gas for her mower probably isn’t something that Paris Hilton does very often. If I had paparazzi six-deep lining the street out front, and three helicopter loads of paparazzi circling overhead, mowing the grass wouldn’t be the same for me either. I usually mow in paint-spattered pants with a zipper that won’t stay up, so that could be a problem right there—all those telephoto lens catching a view of old underwear and flashing it (pardon the pun) around the globe.

The thing that interests me most about Paris Hilton is how much people care about her. You might say they care for all the wrong reasons, but they still care—at least to the extent of being interested. If I died tomorrow, I would get a small write-up in the back of the local paper alongside the twenty or so other people who just died in Eugene. A longer obituary or a postage-stamp size photo would cost extra.

My entire life is of less interest to my fellow human beings (en masse) than how Paris Hilton’s hair looked in court (messy ponytail). This is true of nearly everyone. No matter how much we achieve or what obstacles we overcome, our lives are of less concern to society than the life of a twenty-something heiress who is possibly alcoholic, probably not too bright, and without any obvious talents. So has it always been. Even in the history books, few are remembered, and a large percentage of them for their silliness if not their evil.

But as with all things, there are different ways of looking at it. For all that Paris Hilton has, she can only find privacy indoors. She is not only followed, she is mobbed. No quiet walks in the moonlight; no tranquil moments in the forest; no possibility of taking a class or joining a club. The sad thing about Paris Hilton—and most of us, I suspect—is that we could have done so much more. Or at least, it looks as if we could have done so much more. What stopped us? If I were to die today—and I had the time and inclination to ponder my life first—I would feel awfully bad that I did so little and that so much of that was ill-advised. Sometimes it seems as my days are but a succession of missed opportunities.

Why is this? Two reasons. One is that I have little faith in what I perceive as my talents (or at least in society’s interest in my talents), and the other is that I have few standards by which to judge what is important. Should I write a book, start a school, or devote my life to rescuing abandoned dogs? I feel paralyzed by a surfeit of options.

I have garnered a great deal of practical wisdom about the details of living, but I know next to nothing about why I should live, about why any of us should live. I’ve read various versions of a story that goes like this:

A monk falls off a cliff. He grabs a bush on the way down, but, as he hangs there, he sees that the bush is about to come out by its roots. However, the bush contains a plum, and the monk plucks that plum, and eats it. He thinks it might be the best plum he has ever tasted.

The trick is to believe that the plum matters, but does it? I don’t think “matters” is a quality that exists. Like beauty, it is a subjective valuation that has no reality in the external world. Instead of enjoying the plum, the monk might have spent his last moments in terror. The plum was more pleasant, but was it more important? What would make it more important?

Windy Pass and the end of mountain biking

Peggy and I gave up on trail biking after I fell into a hole that formerly housed the root ball of a Douglas Fir. I estimated the depth at twenty-two feet, although Peggy insisted that it was closer to four (my estimate being more reliable because I got to examine the hole from above, below, and in-between). I was extremely pleased to escape with nothing worse than superficial cuts and bruises.

Our decision to avoid trails was not based solely upon my accident, but upon the absence of any really favorable experiences. Trails are for people who are less prone to injury, more prone to recovery, and who seek a different sort of experience. We go to the woods to enjoy the scenery and the plant-life, activities that are incompatible with having to keep our eyes on the ground.

After my wreck, we drove to an isolated road where we camped, biked, and botanized for two days. I also started a trip diary containing a critique of the roads we bike. The following is my first entry.

Saddle Blanket Mtn area (moderate)
June 7-8, 2007

Road 1802 from Windy Pass (3800’) NW to intersection with Road 1824 (3000’). Appx 10 miles. Southwestern exposure.

3-mile stretch between Windy Pass and abandoned Spur 210 goes up and down. Rest of trip downhill but not excessively steep. Low cliffs, numerous waterfalls, panoramic views, two abandoned quarries, and diverse flora mark first half of trip. Second half contains increasingly dense woods.

Secluded, scenic campsite on point at end of abandoned Spur 210, appx 3 miles from Windy Pass. Other area roads badly overgrown.

Sec17 Twn20S Rng 03E to Sec26 Twn19S Rng02E

Angry dogs, marital challenges, and the healing power of tooth paste

The dogs are mad because I haven’t taken them for a run. They ran ten mountainous miles yesterday, and I say that that should cover for today too. They disagree. Like everyone, dogs develop expectations, and my dogs expect a four-mile run everyday. “Just let me have today off, please?” I ask. “Feckless bastard,” Bonnie answers. “Pusillanimous son of a bitch,” intones Baxter. (I’ll never get used to the way modern dogs talk to their masters.)

“What do the two of you know about my mother? She was dead years before you were born, but if you had known her, you would have loved her. She would have accused me of never feeding you, and would have given you treats until you were as bloated as wood ticks. ‘Mother,’ I would have said. ‘They act hungry because they are DOGS, and dogs are GLUTTONS. They no longer have waists, for god’s sakes. Can’t you see that?’” No, she couldn’t have.

The partially remodeled den is a mess. Sheetrock dust everywhere. The house is beyond needing to be cleaned, but there’s no point in cleaning it until I’m done making dust. If I could devote full time to the den, it wouldn’t be so bad, but I had a Masonic meeting today and an IOOF one tomorrow, and then there was yesterday’s bike ride in the mountains. It’s 10:00 p.m., and I’m tired. I just want to relax and write a little before I eat a late supper and bike home with Peggy when she gets off at midnight. That’s why I don’t want to take the dogs for a run. Besides, I have a rash down below, right where groin hits bike seat. Something fungal maybe. Peggy suggested herpes. “You would know,” I retorted, as I wondered where the hell she thought I would have picked up herpes. She advised that I put toothpaste on the rash. Peggy is a big believer in toothpaste. “Will I grow teeth down there?” I asked. “Only if I grow teeth on my nose,” she said, and I wondered why she had toothpaste on her nose. Like the comment about herpes, a lot doesn’t get addressed in a marriage. Sometimes, the conversation moves too quickly; other times, the potential querier simply doesn’t want to know.

Peggy’s speculation that I might have herpes wouldn’t seem to fit either of these categories, but what might I have said: “Dear, do you think I’m fooling around on you?” Well, yes, I might have said that, and she would have probably said that the thought had crossed her mind, me having done exactly that kind of thing a couple of dozen times by now. Then I would have been obliged to assure her that she was wrong. But I did assure her that she was wrong with my “you would know” remark and my look of surprise. I wisely cut out the rest, the tedium of a discussion about a non-existent liaison.

We did discuss her coming trip to France. I am opposed to it, but what would be the good of insisting that she stay home; of insisting that she avoid plane crashes, crazy motorists, Arab terrorists, scam artists, transcontinental germs, an outrageous financial expenditure, the silliness of attending an opera and touring Mozart’s house when she has never been to Eugene’s opera or listened to Mozart on her own stereo? Maybe she would stay home, but I would have become the poop of her party, the rain on her parade, the despoiler of a “special once-in-a-lifetime trip” with her sister and Francophile niece.

Marriage is terribly limiting, terribly restrictive, so there’s no point in making it worse than need be. Therefore and wheretofore, I have to give her space to go to France. “It won’t break us,” as she’s fond of saying, and I know that, in all likelihood, she will survive—and maybe even avoid the flu, and maybe even have a good time. After all, it’s France. Not the Middle East. Not some bacteria-riddled dump in the tropics. It’s France. They’re civilized and sanitary over there. Maybe even more than we are here. I wouldn’t know. I’m unlikely to ever see France. I’m content with Oregon. I love that which is at hand simply because it is at hand.

Do I have no curiosity then about the history, culture, and natural aspects of a faraway place? Am I THAT provincial? Well, if I won a trip to France, I would probably go (that is if I couldn’t sell the trip to someone else), but otherwise, it wouldn’t occur to me. Peggy doesn’t like it that I am this way, but the secret of a happy marriage is not so much in shared preferences but in accepting—if not delighting in—your partner’s differences.

Right now, her desire to go to France is a difference that I am finding hard to accept. She will be halfway around the world, and what if she needs me, or I need her, or what if some catastrophe should make it impossible for her to come home. I won’t rest easy until next she’s back.

Bitchy, dogs, France, toothpaste for herpes

The dogs are pissy, because I haven’t taken them for a run. They ran ten mountainous miles yesterday, and I say that that should cover for today too. They disagree. Like everyone, dogs develop expectations, and my dogs expect a four-mile run everyday. “Just let me have today off, please?” I ask. “Feckless bastard,” Bonnie answers. “Pusillanimous son of a bitch,” intones Baxter. (I’ll never get used to the way modern dogs talk to their masters.)

“What do the two of you know about my mother? She was dead years before you were born, but if you had known her, you would have loved her. She would have accused me of never feeding you, and would have given you treats until you were as bloated as wood ticks. ‘Mother,’ I would have said. ‘They act hungry because they are DOGS, and dogs are GLUTTONS. They no longer have waists, for god’s sakes. Can’t you see that?’” No, she couldn’t have.

The partially remodeled den is a mess. Sheetrock dust everywhere. The house is beyond needing to be cleaned, but there’s no point in cleaning it until I’m done making dust. If I could devote full time to the den, it wouldn’t be so bad, but I had a Masonic meeting today and an IOOF one tomorrow, and then there was yesterday’s bike ride in the mountains. It’s 10:00 p.m., and I’m tired. I just want to relax and write a little before I eat a late supper and bike home with Peggy when she gets off at midnight. That’s why I don’t want to take the dogs for a run. Besides, I have a rash down below, right where groin hits bike seat. Something fungal maybe. Peggy suggested herpes. “You would know,” I retorted, as I wondered where the hell she thought I would have picked up herpes. She advised that I put toothpaste on the rash. Peggy is a big believer in toothpaste. “Will I grow teeth down there?” I asked. “Only if I grow teeth on my nose,” she said, and I wondered why she had toothpaste on her nose. Like the comment about herpes, a lot doesn’t get addressed in a marriage. Sometimes, the conversation moves too quickly; other times, the potential querier simply doesn’t want to know.

Peggy’s speculation that I might have herpes wouldn’t seem to fit either of these categories, but what might I have said: “Dear, do you think I’m fooling around on you?” Well, yes, I might have said that, and she would have probably said that the thought had crossed her mind, me having done exactly that kind of thing a couple of dozen times by now. Then I would have been obliged to assure her that she was wrong. But I did assure her that she was wrong with my “you would know” remark and my look of surprise. I wisely cut out the rest, the tedium of a discussion about a non-existent liaison.

We did discuss her coming trip to France. I am opposed to it, but what would be the good of insisting that she stay home; of insisting that she avoid plane crashes, crazy motorists, Arab terrorists, scam artists, transcontinental germs, an outrageous financial expenditure, the silliness of attending an opera and touring Mozart’s house when she has never been to Eugene’s opera or listened to Mozart on her own stereo? Maybe she would stay home, but I would have become the poop of her party, the rain on her parade, the despoiler of a “special once-in-a-lifetime trip” with her sister and Francophile niece.

Marriage is terribly limiting, terribly restrictive, so there’s no point in making it worse than need be. Therefore and wheretofore, I have to give her space to go to France. “It won’t break us,” as she’s fond of saying, and I know that, in all likelihood, she will survive—and maybe even avoid the flu, and maybe even have a good time. After all, it’s France. Not the Middle East. Not some bacteria-riddled dump in the tropics. It’s France. They’re civilized and sanitary over there. Maybe even more than we are here. I wouldn’t know. I’m unlikely to ever see France. I’m content with Oregon. I love that which is at hand simply because it is at hand.

Do I have no curiosity then about the history, culture, and natural aspects of a faraway place? Am I THAT provincial? Well, if I won a trip to France, I would probably go (that is if I couldn’t sell the trip to someone else), but otherwise, it wouldn’t occur to me. Peggy doesn’t like it that I am this way, but the secret of a happy marriage is not so much in shared preferences but in accepting—if not delighting in—your partner’s differences.

Right now, her desire to go to France is a difference that I am finding hard to accept. She will be halfway around the world, and what if she needs me, or I need her, or what if some catastrophe should make it impossible for her to come home. I won’t rest easy until next she’s back.

Grand Lodge, a downhill biking adventure

I attended the 151st Oregon Grand Lodge of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows last week. It was held at a casino, which struck me as ironic since gambling was once grounds for expulsion. I hated the thought that we were supporting a business that was created for the purpose of profiting from greed and stupidity. Like I told Peggy, sure I’ve chased women, done drugs, gotten drunk, am crazier than hell according to the DSM, and never been great at holding a job either; but, by god, I’ve never gambled. If the preachers are right about there being sins of omission versus sins of commission, then it makes sense that virtue runs in the same directions.

I took my new bike to the convention, and rode it during breaks. The first day, I got a kick out of screaming down a hill that overlooked the casino. I passed a cop in a curve, but there was good visibility and no double lines. I then swung through a large truck stop and wove my way among the slow-moving eighteen-wheelers like a fighter plane among bombers. Next came a stop sign, but nothing was coming, so I didn’t slow down. I was traveling too fast to make the first turn into the casino parking lot, so I gracefully arced into the second. Large yellow arrows pointed in the opposite direction, but no one was coming. I biked right up to the doors of the casino and had just wheeled my bike inside when an angry policeman came running in after me. As he outlined my many offenses, I realized that he must be the same cop I had passed, and that he had been trying to catch up with me the whole time. His list grew tedious, and if I had not been in fear of a ticket, I would have asked if he was always so negative. He let me off with a lecture, leaving me to suppose that casino towns must be the opposite of speed traps. Whereas the latter are looking to issue tickets, the former make their money by leniency.

I didn’t enjoy Grand Lodge, but neither did I didn’t hate it the way I did last year when it was held at a grungy Holiday Inn surrounded by freeways and parking lots. Having my bike and being in a small town both made a tremendous difference, because, after several hours among people, I have an urgent need to be alone and stretch my legs. I have but little to contribute to Grand Lodge, but my home lodge keeps sending me, and I keep going.

Oregon’s outgoing Grand Master was the first woman in the United States to serve in such a position. Women were only allowed to join the lodge within the last ten years, so her rise was truly meteoric, and would have been impossible had she not grown up in an Odd Fellow family and worked as an employee in the Grand Lodge office. She was kidded about being the first Grand Master to kiss the brethren on the cheek, but I never heard a serious word against her.

Snaky day

Yesterday was a snaky day—nine to be precise. They were all Northwestern Garter Snakes, and were all sunning nonchalantly on the gated Weyerhaeuser road where we found them. I lay beside one, petting it gently and admiring its intelligent expression. Its tongue was red on top, black underneath, and so soft that I couldn’t feel it touching my fingers.

I biked over another. Peggy spoke to it lovingly, but its back was broken and blood trickled from its mouth. I gently laid it upon a rock and stomped it until it was flat. Even then, the tail twitched spasmodically. I said nothing, but felt much. When we resumed our ride, I asked Peggy what she would have done had she been alone, and she said she would have killed it with a rock. I considered euthanasia the only honorable alternative, but I didn’t know if she would be able to do it.

The secret of uniformity

I went to a Church of Christ with Carl last night, and heard songs that I heard regularly during my first eighteen years, but hadn’t heard at all in the last forty. “This World Is Not My Home,” “Fairest Lord Jesus,” and “I’ll Fly Away” came back to me as clearly as if I had sung them yesterday. I was wrecked, absolutely wrecked, by memories of places and people from long ago and from the unparalleled beauty of the songs themselves. I tried valiantly to join in on hymn after hymn, but invariably lost it by the second line. I hid my tears as best I could, but that wasn’t very well, so I’m sure a lot of people wondered what kind of a vile sinner they had in their midst that Christ was working on him so.

The text was Romans 7, and Carl loaned me his leather-bound Bible—with Jesus’ words in red—so I could follow along. I immediately turned to Romans, and chuckled to think that most of my present-day friends would have to look for it in the table of contents. Come to think of it, Peggy would too. Eighteen years of Southern Baptist church services, revivals, Bible studies, Sunday Schools, Vacation Bible Schools, and mid-week prayer meetings; and through them all, she maintained her virginal ignorance of all things Christian. You’re really got to admire such strength of apathy. An ordinary person would have some tiny but flabby pore somewhere in her membranes that would admit at least a little knowledge through osmosis, but not Peggy. She knows scarcely more about Protestantism than she does about Islam, yet she is a far more ethical person than I ever so much as aspired to be. When someone tells me that you have to believe in God to live with integrity, I wonder how well they themselves would measure up against the woman I had the good fortune to marry.

It wasn’t just the songs that hadn’t changed in the Church of Christ. As I looked around, I asked myself what might give the place away as being from 2007 rather than 1967. The balding preacher had a beard, I noted, and he didn’t wear a tie. Also, we were using a twentieth century version of the Bible, and there were two black people in the audience, one of whom was the preacher’s wife. Now, that was really different, but everything else was pretty much the same. The women still couldn’t ask questions or make announcements much less preach; the music was still a cappella; stacks of metal trays still held tiny communion glasses; there was still a baptismal pool in a three-sided room behind the pulpit; and there was still an invitational hymn after the sermon.

I thought it a wonder that the Church of Christ can have no governing body beyond the individual congregation, yet remain so nearly uniform across time and space. Then it struck me that maybe the lack of a governing body is the reason for their uniformity. Governing bodies usually become the object of partisan struggle with the party that wins forcing the party that loses to either go along or get out. Because the Church of Christ lacks a governing body, there can be no large-scale struggle and therefore no mass exodus. Instead of stifling revolutions, centralized governments make them all but inevitable.

“I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing…. Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner…. What a wretched man I am!”
the Apostle Paul

As was the case with the hymns we sung, I had not heard the verses we read for many a decade. Such passion! Such angst! (Such harmony with the hymn “Amazing Grace” that I so recently criticized.) How little the human condition has changed in two millennia. Whatever it is that a person is fighting, who cannot relate to the above?

The preacher said that when he was a teenager, he would look at the failures of older Christians and wonder why they acted so badly, why it was that they couldn’t get things right after all their years of practicing. He said he now knows that the struggle just keeps getting harder. Yes. At least for me it does, and I don’t even have Christ to back me up. I will never have Christ to back me up. Yet, I enjoyed myself tonight. When the preacher greeted me, I told him that the only thing wrong with his talk was that it ended too soon. His expression said that he didn’t often hear that particular compliment. How odd he would find it if he knew that it probably came from the only person in the building who makes no claim to Christianity.

Carl exhorted me to bring my wife to church some Sunday, and I didn’t even laugh. This was no easy accomplishment, but probably worth the struggle.

Phil's funeral and thoughts about worship

Phil’s funeral was held today, eleven days after he died. It was a corpseless affair—funerals here often are—on a day that was gray throughout. Seven a.m. looked like noon, and both looked like seven p.m.; the whole day being one protracted and depressing affair that neither happened nor knew when to quit.

I was little touched by the words that were spoken, so I had no need of the paper towels that I tucked into my pocket at the last minute. The first songs were country songs that Phil liked. Then came “Rock of Ages” and “Amazing Grace.” Miserable song, “Amazing Grace.” I know that it was written by a slave-trader turned Christian and all that, but describing oneself as a worm and a wretch strikes me as just so much sucking-up. “Abide with Me,” now there’s a song I can get behind. Pretty imagery. Touching sentiments. Mournful tune. Good funeral song. We didn’t sing it.

The elderish Nazarene preacher pushed the microphone aside because “microphones scare me,” and proceeded to drone on in a low monotone for so long that the sermon itself seemed like a metaphor for death. He tried to add authority to his words by quoting chapter and verse, although a good part of the audience didn’t give a rip. Still, if his church weren’t a long bike ride distant, I would visit it because I have more faith in the goodness of inept preachers, and because I miss going to church.

For me, church is a mostly futile endeavor, but, as I said, I miss church. Unlike Peggy, who grew up thinking of it as something she had to endure until the first Sunday she was out of her parents’ house, I loved church. Church MEANT something to me. Church still means something to me, because I have a great and insatiable urge to worship. I can’t worship anyone or anything in particular, because I don’t believe in anyone or anything in particular, but this in no way diminishes my urge to surrender myself to the beauty and wonder—if not the goodness—of the universe.

On the other hand, why subject myself to certain disappointment? Most especially, why go to a fundamentalist church when there are at least three churches nearby that don’t give a rat’s behind if I even believe in God. The answer is that churches that don’t give a rat’s behind are not churches in which there is much worship happening. They are often little more than an intellectual smorgasbord of world religions with Sunday schools that make prayer flags one week, draw the Star of David the next, and celebrate Beltane the week after.

In regard to religion, they are without FOCUS—sort of like an ad hoc committee that can’t come to a conclusion. But in regard to politics, it’s another story, because they are utterly and unapologetically liberal. Sure, they say they’re creedless, but they’re really humanistic with a creed that is as narrow as the Nicene, and they themselves are as intolerant as any fundamentalist.

Optimists versus pessimists--what's the difference?

I just biked to my Masonic Lodge on the right night but the wrong week. Life can be confusing sometimes. I was biking yesterday when I looked at my speedometer and saw that I was going 53.5 miles per hour. I knew this had to be wrong, because I only felt a slight breeze, and because my schnauzer was running alongside.

Yet another example…I was wondering today if an optimist can be depressed, or if he would have to first give up his optimism. I should think that a “depressed optimist” would be an oxymoron: he could be a sad optimist, maybe but not a depressed optimist.

Then I remembered that, in experiments, chronically depressed people rate their abilities and amount of control accurately whereas chronically happy people overrate theirs. I observed this with Phil (God rest his soul) who believed almost until the end that he was going to get well. This led him to neglect doing things he should have done, and now other people must do them.

I have another friend who never saved money, because he figured he would always have enough or, barring that, could easily find a job. He was wrong on both counts, so what did he do? He looked for a pessimist to loan him money. Said pessimist (I won’t name names) agreed to do so in the belief that said optimist had learned his lesson. He too was wrong. Optimists are slow learners.

Futility is but a value judgment that I impose over reality

I didn’t see Phil today, and he was asleep yesterday, his breath shallow and five times the speed of my own. His coming death is unexpectedly hard for me. As I saw it, he and I were supposed to be among the few who would carry on the lodge when the older members died out.

I am so depressed over his imminent loss that I am having trouble coping. I am in my third day of failed attempts at a carpentry project that should have taken but a few hours. As for my studies in natural history, I can scarcely see the point. I reflected tonight that if all the seconds of all the lives of every human who ever lived were added together, the number would compare unfavorably to one raindrop against the totality of all raindrops. Where is comfort to be found in our brief temporality?

This is hardly the first time that I have experienced depression, and I worry that such intermittent moroseness will undermine my health. I can well imagine Virginia Woolf walking into the surf, or Ernest Hemingway blowing his head off after a failed attempt to throw himself into an airplane propeller. The desire for death becomes almost too great to be denied by the earliest and most certain method available, no matter how grotesquely unthinkable it would appear in ordinary moments. I do not know how to survive such times other than to wait them out, my marriage negating any genuine threat of suicide.

I sometimes think that I should at least get drunk in order to buy a brief respite, but I am blessed in that I have no great appetite for alcohol, and actually tend to drink more when I feel good than when I feel bad. Thus deprived of all obtainable comforts, I carry on as normally as I can, confident in my belief that the darker the night, the brighter will be the coming day—or so it has been in the past. But always, I know that there will come another night, and that I can no more resist it than I can resist the revolution of the planets.

And so I thrash about for any ready diversion. Last night, I read about the Confederate general, John Bell Hood. He lost an arm in one battle, a leg in another, and finally succumbed to yellow fever at age forty-eight. “At least, I have beaten him,” I say to myself, “for I am a full ten years his senior, and my limbs are intact.” It seems a very odd thing to simultaneously wish for dissolution and to rejoice in reading about the people I have outlived. It’s as though some remote part of me is mocking my misery. This part serves to remind me that, even if all the dire things I might say about the state of the universe and my part in it are true, sadness is not a given. While sadness might be a given for some other reason (hormonal, perhaps), it is not a given due to futility, because futility is not reality. Futility is a value judgment that I impose upon reality, and sadness is but the outcome of that value judgment.

Another visit with Phil, misplaced compassion

I spent a few agreeable hours with Phil today. He was awake and talkative, but I could understand little of what he said. “I am miserable,” I caught, along with, “I am going to die.” Frustrated with his inability to speak, he often tried to point at what he wanted, but his muscle control was no better than his control over his voice. The twenty-year old CNA was happy for me to take over most of Phil’s care. I told him I would return tomorrow—if Phil is alive tomorrow. And Phil might well be alive tomorrow and for several subsequent days as well. People who bet on how quickly someone will die are prone to underestimating the tenacity of the human body. (I read today of a British man who, when he was ninety, bet $200 that he would live to be 100. The bookmaker figured the odds at 250 to one, and lost $500,000.)

I felt little pity or repulsion today, just a firm resolve to never allow myself to die in such a manner. Phil remains too proud to let anyone feed him, yet he is too helpless to perform his basic bodily functions unaided. I imagine a contradiction here, but then I believe in suicide and euthanasia as an honorable way to avoid suffering, waste, and indignity, whereas Phil regards life as a gift that only God can give and that only God should take.

I used to be a CNA, so I know what it is like to be awake at 6:00 a.m. shaving the faces of drooling idiots (not that Phil has sunk so low). When I did such work, I would ponder the millions of dollars a year that taxpayers spend to keep such people alive, and I came to regard it is a criminal act. There never has been and never will be enough money for everything, so why waste it on those who are so hopeless that they don’t even understand the concept of hope, on those who are so brainless that it is hard to tell their good days from their bad or even to determine whether they have good days and bad days?

I often find myself in such extreme opposition to the values of society, especially in regard to compassion and justice. Tonight, there is a hip-hop concert at the fairgrounds. The band last appeared in Salem, where their performance was brought to an early end by gang gunfire and fistfights. I am therefore under some small apprehension that a bullet could come flying through my wall. Yet, I don’t blame screwed-up kids for the existence of gangs; I blame society for the existence of gangs, because we could stop them, and we don’t.

One approach would be to simply kill the bastards. A complementary approach might be to set aside parcels of land, and make them into law-free zones where gangs could do as they pleased. They could die of overdoses; they could kill and torture one another; they could rape one another’s hoes; they could do anything whatsoever without the least apprehension that anyone would help or hinder. Hip hop “artists” would try to shame anyone who lacked the courage to visit such enclaves, while those who buy into the values of hip-hop could have a gay old time of it for however long they wanted—just so they stayed at least twenty-four hours.

The smell of cancer

I visited Phil in the hospital today. He was neither awake nor asleep, and his hands kept grasping at things I couldn’t see. He gurgled like my father did as he lay dying, and the percolator-like sound made the last thirteen years disappear in an instant. Tears that never fell for my father, fell for my friend. An aide asked if I was his brother. I said I was, realizing for the first time that Phil and I could be mistaken for relatives. The staff treated me more familiarly than they would had I said I was his friend. They even left him in my care for a while.

Phil awakened, and tried to eat from a tray that had been in the room when I got there. He waved his spoon over his food like a magician trying to conjure a rabbit. Now and then, spoon and food would touch, and he would lift the resultant smudge of gravy or tapioca to his lips. I offered to feed him, but he would have none of it. I sat on my hands in frustration. An hour later, he gave up on the spoon, and tried to eat his applesauce directly from its plastic container. He couldn’t get the container turned so that the opening was toward his face, so I removed the foil completely, and watched as he tried to lap the applesauce with his tongue. I began to laugh. Phil didn’t care. He knows me too well.

He was in a talkative mood, but his speech was as amorphous as his movements, and I could only catch one word out of twenty. “Here I am,” I told myself, “missing out on what might well be my friend’s dying words.” This too struck me as funny.

The stench of cancer caused me to choke down vomit at times. A physical therapist asked the belligerent man in the next bed where he was. “Sacred Heart,” he replied confidently. “Can you tell me what kind of a place Sacred Heart is?” she persisted. He paused. “A large industrial complex with office buildings.” “Not bad,” I thought. The nurse continued, “Do you know what year this is?” “1976.” “Good guess,” I told myself—“close enough for working purposes anyway.” “Do you know what time of year it is?” Under my breath: “Geez, lady, he’s already missed the year by three decades. What is it you want here? Are you really going to chart” ‘Patient off on the correct year by thirty-one, but hit the month dead-on.’”

Phil’s room was six stories up and directly over Hilyard Street. I wondered if I could aim well enough to land in the back of a passing pickup (it tickled me to imagine how high the people in the front would jump), but reflected that the pavement looked more welcoming. I thought it a good day to die. Not the best, perhaps, due to a chill wind and a growing cloud cover, but not the worst either. I looked across Hilyard at the parking garage from which a woman jumped onto the top of the Subway Restaurant. She had told the shrink in the ER that she was suicidal, but he didn’t believe her. That’s the way it is at “a large industrial complex with office buildings” when you don’t have insurance.

I pictured Phil lying in that bed until he drowned, just as my father had. Give me a bullet to the head any day. Seriously. Take me to the woods; shoot me in the head; and leave me for critter chow. It’s a lot to ask, of course, and so I asked myself if I would do as much for Phil. “Yes,” I thought. “If Phil wanted it, and if I wouldn’t go to jail, I would blow Phil’s brains out, and watch the smoke waft from the hole in his head.”

I wondered if a wild animal would eat a malignant tumor. Some creatures will eat shit, and a lot of creatures will eat carrion; but I find it hard to believe that anything but a fire would eat cancer.

But then Phil wouldn’t want to be put away. Phil would choose life no matter what. I live everyday with the thought that I am dying. Phil didn’t think he was dying until this week. Long after everyone else accepted the fact that good old Phil wasn’t going to be good old Phil much longer, Phil was saying that he was going to beat this thing. It’s easy to think that we’re all basically alike, but we’re not. Phil’s tough. Phil’s a great deal tougher than I, at least emotionally, yet he’s going to die younger.

I caressed Phil’s thigh as he tried to eat. At my touch, his spoon paused in midair, and he tried to look at me through his remaining eye, but he couldn’t raise his head enough. The spoon resumed its arcs through space, and we sat in silence as I held his leg, and wished so very, very much that I could give him a long life. I left a note for Molly in which I offered to stay with Phil overnight, but as I biked home, the smell of cancer seemed to grow stronger with every passing block. Still, I will go if I am called, and I will be honored.

Biking Winberry

Peggy got her new bike yesterday, and we biked up Winberry Mountain today. Winberry is not a prestigious peak, but after three miles of a continuous 20% grade, we found it adequate, and our bikes found it more than adequate. Bikes, we’ve discovered, dislike hills, and despise mountains. I cannot say why—although I have certainly wondered. If a bike were a car or even a motorcycle, I could understand a certain amount of antipathy, but their riders are their motors. My best guess is that they are afraid of heights, because the steeper the slope, the more frozen—as with fear—their pedals become, and the greater the determination of their handlebars to go in any direction but up. And if the road is tilted to the side—as was today’s road—their back tires evince an appalling determination to slide off the gravel and down the mountain, leaving the front tire and the rider to carry on as best they can.

We—Peggy and I—are weary tonight. Her thighs are cramping, and my knee hurts more than a little, but not so much that I am screaming and writhing, at least not noticeably. Upon returning home, we exchanged our new bikes for our old ones, and rode to the U of O to hear a presentation entitled Amphibians of the Northern Oregon Cascades. Peggy found this final cycling insult galling to her thighs, and the fact that she was nearly run down by a speeding woman at an intersection did not improve her outlook. The driver apologized profusely, cried, offered us money, apologized profusely again, hugged Peggy, apologized profusely a third and a fourth time, hugged Peggy a second time, and walked away trembling. Peggy was also upset, but the driver’s emotions were so intense that Peggy found it necessary to comfort the very person whose bumper had just brushed her fender. I was not sure at first but what the driver was going to leave the scene, so I wrote her tag number on my palm. She saw me do this, and it could explain her apologetic reaction.

The dogs accompanied us easily on the trip up Winberry, but the trip back being downhill, Bonnie (who is now nine) was especially fatigued despite numerous stops. I really don’t know how to reconcile the dogs’ needs with ours. The most isolated roads near Eugene are in the Willamette National Forest (a tract the size of New Jersey), and they are all mountainous. This means that finding roads and trails that are both isolated and doable is all but impossible. I study topo maps, not to find a lot of places we can all comfortably go, but simply to find a few places.

I was surprised by Peggy’s considerable speed coming down Winberry since she was so cautious on her old Raleigh. In places, the gravel was loose and the road a washboard. There were also curves, low-hanging limbs, winter storm debris, and potholes. I enjoy the challenge of such an environment, yet I lack the experience to know my limits. Peggy and I later spoke of numerous moments when our back wheels were no longer following our front, and they were not comforting moments. There were even times when I was bouncing so rapidly that I had trouble focusing upon what was in front of me.

My biggest fear of bicycling (in town or in the woods) is that I won’t see something coming. Just last night, I ran up onto a curb that I didn’t see. Luckily, it was rounded at the top so I was able to stay upright, but barely. When I consider how many close calls we have had on bicycles, I almost wonder if we should ride them. Since I can no longer hike, and Peggy’s knees aren’t holding up so well either, the answer is not difficult.

Virginia Tech

If 32 Americans were killed in Iraq, how many hours of news coverage would they get? Or if 132 were killed in car wrecks during prom week? Without the media to tell us, we wouldn’t know what was important.

I heard of the Virginia Tech shootings over Fox News while I waited in the service lounge of the local Chevy dealership. I heard of it, and heard of it, and heard of it; for three and one half hours, I heard of it. In the background, Barry Manilow sang romantic music, and the grill of a $66,000 Cadillac truck reflected a harsh fluorescent glow against the gray day that drooped beyond the floor to ceiling windows. Occasionally, I would take a walk among the acres of cars. Battleship-size SUVs are not a thing of the past, I thought, as I noted the twenty inch tires on Tahoes and Escalades.

Fox had nothing new or remotely reliable to show or report, yet it couldn’t keep from showing and reporting, with split screen coverage no less. Every few minutes, the same police dogs sniffed the same spot of grass on one side of the screen while the same photographers photographed the same other photographers on the other. The announcer interviewed a student over the telephone. “Like, me and my roommate heard that the killer chained the doors,” she reported dutifully over a bad connection. “Did I understand you to say that the killer chained the doors?” the announcer asked in what I took to be mock horror. “Well, like, that’s what the man on the TV said.”

The “fair and impartial” network decided early on that Virginia Tech was to blame for not closing the campus after the first shootings, and every question was framed to prove it. The day dragged on, and I wondered why I didn’t care more. I felt bored in advance by the coming days of eulogies, analyses, and blame; and I wanted to go home. Beyond that, my thoughts were as lifeless as the machines by which I was surrounded, any one of which cost more than most people in the Third World earn in a lifetime of making things for Americans. A dozen other customers watched the flat-screen TV alongside me, and no one said anything. No one looked like they felt anything. Maybe they too just wanted to go home.

The dealership had a café, and outside the café there stood a fountain that kept throwing water back into the rainy skies, but the rain just kept on falling, and falling, and falling. I wished I had a new lover. A new lover would make me feel alive. A new lover would make me feel that something mattered. A new lover would give me a new illusion, and a new illusion would devour my thoughts, at least until she wasn’t new anymore.

I had wine for supper tonight, and I will blame what I just wrote on it, because the responsibility simply cannot be my own. The shooter at Virginia Tech—was he responsible? All the explanations we are likely to hear will be either dismissive or excusatory. They will prove that he was crazy or evil, or they will prove that society is crazy or evil, but that’s as far as they will go, and it’s not very far. Maybe we don’t really want to understand him because “…if you stare long enough into the Abyss, the Abyss stares also into you.” Surely, the shooter at Virginia Tech stared into the abyss for an awfully long time.

Don't come unless you're whole-hog enthusiastic

I just sent a letter about city priorities to the Register Guard. If it is printed, my name will be mud in the bicycle activist community just as it is already mud in the peace activist community. Most groups prefer no support at all to support that is qualified or ambivalent. This makes me a marginal member, at best, in every group I join. I am marginal in my lodges, because I do not believe in a personal god. I am marginal in my mineral club, because I have no interest in lapidary. I am marginal in the butterfly society that I recently started attending, because I am more interested in plants.

One of the things I valued about the anti-tax protest was that Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and Libertarians, all came together in harmony to gather signatures, and no one thought it necessary to discuss our differences. I think it safe to say that we even delighted in the fact that our differences didn’t matter. I only wish I could feel that way in other groups. What I have often found—with cause-oriented groups especially—is that, because many of the members think the same about a variety of other issues, they don’t realize how exclusionary they are. Liberal groups are worse about this because people are blindest to their failings in areas they pride themselves on most, areas such as tolerance and openness.

Ralph and Rhonda

We went dirt biking yesterday—really and truly sliding through diarrhea-like mud and flying down steep and curvy hills, all while dodging stumps, roots, and rocks. The dogs thought our new hobby grand: lots of inviting mud puddles, water to drink whenever they pleased, and a speed suited to canine legs. We discovered the trail entirely by accident while biking logging roads. Someone had even installed ramps on the curves, so bikes could round them really fast. Not that Peggy and I rounded them really fast. No, not us. We walked them really slow, because we don’t have mud tires on our bikes. We have all-terrain tires, and all-terrain tires are not really meant for ALL terrains, and they turn to squirrels in mud. One minute they’re gliding along nicely, and the next minute they’re either lying down for a nap, or sliding sideways to the direction of travel.

We discussed these traits—Peggy and I—and we determined that we did not like them. They are thrilling traits, to be sure, but we agreed that it is better to have at least some idea of what one’s bike is about to do. Although nothing in life is guaranteed, even a vague notion about ones future is superior to no notion at all.

Because Peggy’s new bike is on order, she was on her Raleigh commuter with its two-inch tires. Having christened my new bike Rhonda, I determined that Peggy’s bike needed a name too, so I named him Ralph. Peggy liked the name Ralph, pointing out that since we had B names for out last four pets—Bonnie, Baxter, Becky, Buster, it is only fitting that we have R names for our bikes. That way, we can tell our dogs from our bicycles without looking at their undersides. Inspired and uplifted (although more the former than the latter) by her sentiment, I named my other bike—the one that was home in the garage—Ramon; and Peggy named her other bike—the one that is on order—Rufus. I thought Rufus was too bookish a name for a mud bike. I thought Rufus sounded more like a sedentary pipe smoker in loungewear, and I generously offered to donate the name Ramon to her for her bike, but she was obstinate as usual. On my gloomier days, I suspect that the woman lacks good sense as evidenced by the fact that she so often disagrees with me.

Ralph cost $400, yet he performed better on mud than Rhonda who cost $1,700. I was naturally perplexed—and even a little put out—by this, and I began thrashing around in my mind for a comforting explanation. Ralph is heavier by ten pounds, I told myself, so maybe his greater weight made for greater stability. That sounded plausible, but I could hardly stop with one theory lest it turn out to be wrong, and leave me with no theory at all.

My next theory was that Ralph’s 26-inch diameter wheels are more stable than Rhonda’s 20-inch wheels. I didn’t like that theory much, because I could see no upside to it if it were true. The next thing that came to mind was that Ralph is a boy, and Rhonda is a girl. No that couldn’t be it, not in our enlightened age. If women firepersons are the equal of men firepersons, then women bicycles should be equally equal to men bicycles.

This left me with but one possibility: Peggy is a better biker than I, at least in the mud. I liked this explanation best of all, because it was the only one subject to change. When a person has spent a lot of money for a bike, and said bike does not perform as well as another bike that costs a quarter as much, any explanation that excuses the bike is preferable to any explanation that blames the bike.