I’ve recently become more and more interested in economics. for a variety of reasons. its fascinating, like a mandala. everyone sees what they want to in it.
there’s psychology, and sociology, and it matters, like food and jobs, and mom can’t even make apple pie if she don’t have apples or money to buy gas for the oven.
and there’s politics and these days, its almost a theology.
if you ask a some people, its like religion, and ronald reagan ain’t jesus, but maybe he is saint paul. the pharisee, converted. pointing the way to the one: that would have to be milton friedman, I guess, in this analogy. he did win a nobel prize (friedman, that is), but it turns out economics is also kind of like magic, you can be totally, 100% provably wrong, and still win a nobel prize in your field. you’ve got to love it.
so the basic idea is that we have these contending theories. there have been other theories in the past, but they have all been proven wrong. usually through the force of arms, it turns out, which would seem to be out of the field of economics, but no, its quite ecumenical. so flexible. it can accommodate any eventuality. it has to. that’s one of the many attributes it shares with theology.
one of these theories is that the market is the most efficient way to organize pretty much anything.
and that’s good as far as it goes, since the market relies on some very reliable forces: greed and self-interest.
but a free market is like an AI thing called expert systems. it works well enough, perhaps even optimally, but only within certain constraints. outside those constraints, a free market, like an expert system, is subject to catastrophic failure.
do I really have to cite chapter and verse on you at this point? oh, yes. another thing about economists is that their memories can be so astonishingly short.
now, the other idea is that we have rights and responsibilities as individuals, and we have other responsibilities as groups, organizations and societies of human beings. and to the extent that markets help us achieve our objectives and satisfy our responsibilities, that’s fine. but there are other things that we simply must do, be, and have, and markets don’t guarantee that these things come into being, so we as a society will them into being.
these include things like the military, schools, libraries, parks, volunteer fire departments, and so on. we used to have a word for it, we called it the “common wealth” or the commons. where we all shared the pasture. we helped raise each other’s barns. not for money, but because we were social minded. and at the bottom, we hoped that if we helped out when we could, should the need arise, we could expect help from others in return. basic human decency.
but there’s another word for that these days: socialism. ooh. how we hate socialism. its right there next to communism in our pantheon of isms. and we know we hate communism, because we fought a long and bitter war against it. the war was so long that the other side even forgot what they were about and morphed into something entirely different from what I’m talking about when I use the word socialism.
but unfortunately, most of us in the west have been brainwashed so thoroughly, that even volunteer fire departments are suspect these days.
like the man said, don’t confuse the map for the territory.
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the map and the territory
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banging on the bones
once, someone asked me what inspired me to take up the piano.
first of all, its more like a possession. I can’t live without it for long. but I don’t know. maybe its a family tradition.
I never took lesssons, but I began banging around in high school. I switched to guitar in college. my roommate Chris’s little sister got a new guitar, and handed down her old one to me to play around with. she taught me my first song, too. you’ve got to admit, guitar is practical. its light. its portable, you can tune it yourself. and its not hard to plunk out a few tunes that don’t suck too bad.
but on reflection, I think it was hoagy carmichael who first got me banging the bones. go back and listen to an early cut of stardust, from back there in the 20’s, and then get back to me. there was a scene in a movie, I think maybe “to have and have not”, or one of those with bogey and lauren bacall and there was this dude with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, always with a drink nearby, and a goofy grin, just banging away, and it looked like he was really having a good time. looking back, I guess I wanted to travel through time, and hit on a young thing like laren bacall was back then, as well as learn to play.
hoagy was a pretty accomplished songsmith, and I still love that big easy whorehouse sound, but ultimately his repetroire just won’t sustain you for long.
I’ve had different inspirations over the years. at first, I thought donald fagen’s jazz rock fender rhodes deep chorus over/under style was the tops
(can you hear me doctor?). then I might have said it was keith jarrett who I most admired. he’s something else, like an alternate logic ((if the) misfits (wear it)). turns out I have a lot of trouble with my memory, and something about his pure improvisation appealed to me.
then years later I banged on a blues organ in a band for a while, and that’s a whole other thing.
but lately, I’ve had a kind of breakthrough in my thinking, and I’m kind of triangulating between vastly simplified polyphonic ideas inspired by bach’s cantata chorales and fugues, the few ones I can even think of approaching, bill evans’ brilliant “conversations with myself”, and joe zawinul’s ballads, like “a remark you made” or “from vienna with love” (see city on the hill, or for monica, or any of that other noise).
anyway, that’s where I’m going, or I think I’m trying to go with my music these days. -
alt.jesus
Being an alternative perspective on the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth.
A long time ago, I read a book. I spent a little while this afternoon trying to recollect, and I think it was The Gospel of the Essenes by Edmond Szekely, that my roommate Chris had loaned me. But I’m not sure.
I do remember the author struck me as a little kooky.
But in any case, the topic was an alternative view of the life of Jesus, as informed by a newly translated gospel discovered at Qumran among the Dead Sea Scrolls in the late forties, but mysteriously kept secret by the official translators for reasons that are still not clear.
In the intervening thirty or so years, I’ve had the opportunity to read a lot more on this topic from a variety of sources. I especially loved Gibbon’s treatment of early Christianity for its refreshing skepticism and dry humor, as well as Will Durant’s deep and erudite series The Story of Civilization, and to the current subject, the volume Caesar and Christ. Of course I’ve read a lot more of the New Testament and the Torah, and as they’ve trickled out, I’ve read as many of the Qumran Scroll translations as I can, as well as those found separately, but by coincidence almost simultaneously, at Nag Hammadi, including the famous and formerly banned Gospel of Thomas — at least one of very books that had been enshrouded in such mystery back in the day.
The Gospel of Thomas is really just a collection of some of the sayings of Jesus, not tied together into any narrative, or any discernible order. That format itself gives it a kind of purity, and the document’s antiquity (Thomas probably preceeds the previously oldest known gospel by sixty years or more), gives it additional authenticity, at least to some.
Many of the sayings will be familiar to us all. Many scholars now think the canonical Gospel of Mark was at least in part based on something like Thomas, the hypothesized source called “Q”, and that Matthew and Luke were in turn based on Mark. But the unfamiliar quotes attributed to the teacher are most interesting for their peculiar character and subject. I recommend the interested reader research this subject on your own. Its a mind bender, that’s for sure. Start with a clear distinction between the two revolutionary finds, coincidentally both made in the late forties — that at Nag Hammadi in 1945, and the more famous Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran in 1947.
So, all that said, the following is not an attempt at a representation of anyone’s views, including my own. Its just a weird idea I had one time, perhaps inspired by a book like Szekely’s, but you have to admit, it kind of makes sense, when you think about it.
The first thing to know is that then, as now, Palestine was a contentious place. It was not considered particularly valuable real estate by the Romans, except maybe for its location. The locals were always quarreling and revolting. There had been continuous wars, civil and otherwise, and rebellions, since before Jesus’ birth, and more after his death, ultimately resulting in, among other things, the destruction of the temple.
As you might imagine, this was a catastrophic event and had many long-lasting practical as well as profound psychological consequences that reverberate in the world today (see the Roman-Jewish wars and Jewish cultural nationalism).
Another thing to know is that then as now, there were several strands of sometimes mutually hostile Jewish civilization and culture active simultaneously. As always, most folks were just trying to get by. It was hard times, and Roman rule chafed as you might imagine. Everyone hated the tax collector, who is viewed as the worst kind of traitor. But some folks decided it was best to just play along. These are maybe best represented by Herod Antipas (there are three different Herods in here, Herod the Great, appointed “King of the Jews” by the Roman senate after the Roman conquest of Syria and Judea, served essentially as a procurator of the province under the Roman general Pompey. The other two, his sons, Herod Archelaus and Herod Antipas, tetrarchs or nominal kings of Judea and Galilee, respectively, but in fact more or less figurehead puppets of the Romans).
The Herods were Jews, but relatively secular, especially compared to some we will meet in a moment. They were versed in the scriptures, aware of the traditions and so on, and sensitive at a surface level at least, in a political way, to the mores and taboos of their people.
It was Herod the Great who rebuilt the second temple, but he is known in the Christian tradition mainly through his part in the story of the Magi and the massacre of the innocents [Matthew 2:3], oft retold at Christmastime. Most modern historians do not regard this as a historical event. Like many other stories in the New Testament, it is clearly a construction designed to reinforce a particular point of view by echoing stories of the prophets, like those from the Egyptian captivity, the plagues and the passover, etc.
But it is his son, Herod Antipas, by all accounts a relatively weak character, highly constrained by his situation vis-a-vis the Romans, who crosses paths with Jesus at the peak of his mission, or rather, unwittingly initiates it, through his involvement in the death of John the Baptist. Many of Jesus’ early followers had been followers of John, as Jesus himself was. And John’s death created a leadership vacuum that thrust Jesus into the fore, it would seem against his wishes, or at least prematurely.
It is actually John the Baptist who frames many of these issues and is really a more important figure than most modern readers can possibly ascertain from reading canonical Gospels alone.
John forms the bridge for us to another group, or actually set of groups, one of which we now know more about than any other, that is the Essenes. These were radical traditionalists, who so hated the Romans and more or less despised their secular counterparts, that they dropped out and hid in caves in the desert, living under a strict traditional interpretation of the scriptures, similar to a monsatic lifestyle. They longed for an end to Roman oppression and a return to the golden age, perhaps the era of king David, or more likely the theocracy we might find from the time of the Book of Judges, or the more recent Hasmonean period, for example.
John disappeared for long periods into the wilderness. It was remarkable how he could survive alone out there. But as we now know, he was not alone.
Remember, it was the Sicarii, a Zealot sect similar to the Essenes, who overcame a Roman garrison at Masada, a former redoubt of Herod the great, and held it against the Romans during one of the many uprisings of the era. In the end, they committed mass suicide rather than surrender, as we have seen many radical sects do in the succeeding millennia, up to recent times.
The third strand of Jewish culture at the time is what we today call “Hellenized Jews.” Such was Saul of Tarsus, a former persecutor of Christians, who changed his name to the more Greek sounding Paul, had never met Jesus, and had never even been to Jerusalem until after Jesus’ death.
It is known that Paul had a Greco-Roman grammatical education, he spoke and wrote Greek (poorly, according to Gibbon), and he used a Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures. There is no evidence that he knew either Hebrew or Aramaic, although the doctrinally correct position is that he did. Durant sometimes confutes tradition with fact and this is one of the areas where he, like many another good Christian, errs. Paul was, like his father, a Roman citizen — a fact he used at more than one critical juncture to escape legal trouble. He identifies himself as having been a Pharisee, which was more of a political party than anything else. In particular, the Pharisees favored hellenization and stood in opposition to traditionalists such as the Essenes, Sicarii and Zealots.
As Gibbon points out with great substantiation, much of what we now consider Christian teaching has absolutely no basis in anything Jesus or any of his apostles ever said or any other Jewish tradition for that matter, but seems to have been invented by Paul and his followers. Thus Gibbon says, what we today call Christianity should more properly be called Paulism. If you study traditional Christian dogma closely, Paul the so-called “apostle” stands not coequal with Moses, the prophets, or even Jesus. He supersedes them all. Where there is conflict, Paul’s words carry the greatest weight.
Paul’s interpretation of Jesus’ teaching may not have been invented in a complete vacuum, though. As Frazier and others have pointed out, there is much in Paul’s interpretation of the passion, death and resurrection, the tradition of the Eucharist, and much else, that seems to have its origins not in Jewish tradition, or Jesus’ teachings, but rather in Greek mystery traditions, themselves based independently on Egyptian mysteries such as that surrounding Osiris.
In deprecation of the Law of Moses in favor of the new covenant, as defined by himself, in declaring the supremacy of faith over deeds, in the definition of the sole standard for salvation as faith specifically in Jesus, Paul’s interpretation of Jesus’ message has dominated and to a large extent defined Christian dogma. Paul said “Christ is the end of the law, that every one who has faith may be justified.” [Romans 10:4]. But Jesus said, “Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them. ” [Matthew 5:17]
Good food for thought, but all that is preface.
The thesis of this proposed alternative view of the life of Jesus is that intentionally or not, Jesus’ teaching was viewed by the Roman occupiers and many secular and Hellenized Jews in as much a political context as a spiritual one.
There is evidence now that Jesus had some exposure to the ideas of the Essenes, and a number of the very earliest gospel texts surviving today were discovered in caves at Qumran, written, read and preserved by revolutionaries against the Roman occupation.
Imagine an undercurrent in the events of Jesus’ life and teaching informed by the presence of one or more secret societies of radical fundamentalist Jews.
Imagine the concern the authorities would have as gatherings of thousands flocked to hear the words of a rabbi, a natural and charismatic leader, knowing that uprisings were continuously breaking out, leading to a full blown revolution at any time. In fact, as we now know, one was imminent.
The arrest and trial are all performed under Roman auspices, and the mode of execution especially speaks to this thesis. Stoning was the traditional punishment for blasphemy, and some other religious crimes, and the Romans clearly had no problem with that, as Jesus himself saved a woman from death by stoning. By contrast crucifixion was a terrorizing mode of punishment used throughout the empire by the military, reserved particularly for the worst criminals — and revolutionaries. The most compelling argument of all is right there in the gospel. The crime for which the criminal is to be put to death was traditionally inscribed over the head of the criminal. Jesus’ crime: INRI. The Latin abbreviation meaning: IESVS NAZARENVS REX IVDAEORVM (Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews).
This form of execution was a terror and a direct challenge to any who thought they could rise up against the Roman occupation. The story on the face of it is plain: Jesus was put to death by the Romans for inflaming nationalist aspirations, inciting sedition and possibly revolution. Perhaps even Joseph of Arimithea, the mysterious wealthy character who “loaned” Jesus the use of his tomb was, like others, secretly a follower of Jesus, and like him was involved with such an underground movement, though he kept his involvement secret in order to maintain his income and a front for the organization. (Another possibility is that Joseph was a relatively well to do uncle, who had pity and affection for his unfortunate nephew.) Maybe the whole tomb episode was a ruse, and that members of the underground rolled away the stone in the night, rescuing the gravely wounded Jesus from the cave, spiriting him away to some secret place such as Qumran, to be nursed back to health or to die with as much dignity as possible. Maybe he even lost consciousness up there on the cross, and for all the world seemed dead. For a small bribe, he could easily have been pulled down, near death, and a burial could even have taken place. It was ancient times, after all, and being dead was kind of a gray area. Maybe he did survive for a little while, allowing visits from a few trusted souls, maybe as much as forty days or so. Its an expression, after all, meaning “a while.”
If you go back and read the story of the preparations for the last supper in the light of such an interpretation, some of the characteristics of an underground organization kind of stand out: “When you go into the city, a man will meet you carrying a jar of water. Follow him into the house that he enters and say to the master of the house, ‘The teacher says to you, “Where is the guest room where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?”‘ He will show you a large upper room that is furnished. Make the preparations there.” [Luke 22:10]
And it was only a hundred years later, after the failure of three separate uprisings, the destruction of the temple, and in the context of a campaign to convert large numbers of gentiles of all races across the Roman empire, and after the break between Paul and his followers and the traditionalists, including all the actual apostles like Peter who continued to evangelize after Jesus’ death, but who maintained the supremacy of the Mosaic law, when the story as we now have it was revised to shift the blame to the Jewish religious leaders of the time. You can hear this in third person phrasing throughout the gospel, such as John 7:15, “The Jews were amazed and said, ‘How does he know scripture without having studied?’” It just doesn’t sound like a phrasing that a Jewish person himself would use, does it?
This editing was intended to redefine Jesus’ teachings to try to make sense of his death in the context of three failed revolutions and ultimate destruction of the temple, in order to remove barriers to evangelizing among gentiles, and to justify the centralization of authority and purging of dissent characteristic of what we now call the established church. -
issue clusters
Well, as anyone who knows me can tell you, I’m not an undecided voter.
But I am a divided voter. Life is not binary, as much as certain parties would have us believe it is. But on the other hand, reality forces us to make choices. So there you have it.
Like everyone else, I am not totally delighted with my choices this election season. I don’t agree with every position one party claims in their platform, and I do agree with some things the other party claims in their platform. Of course, I believe that for the most part, they’re both mostly saying whatever it is they think is most likely to get them elected, given the apparatus of which they are a part, and the biases of their supporters, and so on ad infinitum.
One way to think about politics, and complex issues in general is as a multidimensional matrix. (I guess I just lost 80% of you. oh, well).
[I have a discussion of this topic among my audio journals somewhere… todo insert cross reference to audio blog]
The dimensions of this matrix correspond to your views along an axis corresponding to what pollsters sometimes call “issue clusters.”
The social aspects of health care finance might be an issue cluster. And our opinions around this cluster, like all others, vary depending on our life experiences including our own health and financial situation as well as those close to us.
But the point is that our views on this topic are largely if not entirely independent of our views on some other topics such as national security, for example.
Often there are linkages, as practically everything has some economic implications, from tax policy to immigration.
But the point is that if you listen carefully, you find that there are almost as many different collections of opinions around issue clusters as there are people.
So if you think of all these dimensions, you can visualize them a couple of different ways, I like to think of a hyperdimensional surface.
[todo insert cool graphic here]
but anyway, today it occurred to me to scour the presidential candidate’s web sites first for their ideas of what would be significant issue clusters for visitors to their sites, and second, for their ideas about those issues. and two exercises came to mind: first, assuming they were being entirely sincere and candid, how well did the views espoused mesh with my own? I thought of a distance metric per issue cluster, resulting in a distribution, visualized as a curve maybe, where the columns correspond to the issue clusters and the distance from the axis would represent the distance of the candidate’s views from my own on that topic.
[insert another cool graphic here with explanation for example.]
so you could imagine someone who was a perfect match for me would yield a flatline, but most likely you’d see some kind of bar chart or the like where some matches were close and some were wildly diverging. (or am I describing a singles dating service? maybe I am. maybe modern politics isn’t as different from dating as we might wish to think. hey! maybe match.com should get into the political consulting business?)
maybe if you need it to boil it down to a single dimension, you could sum or average the distances.
but even the juxtaposition of taxonomies can be interesting. johnmccain.com has this breakdown:
The Economy
Health Care
National Security
Education
Iraq
Climate Change
Veterans
Immigration
Values
Second Amendment
Judicial Philosophy
Ethics Reform
Natural Heritage
Space Program
its fascinating. for example, foreign policy doesn’t rank as a top level category. the whole concept is framed as national security, which immediately puts you in a defensive posture, when you think about it. or look at his judicial philosophy. he uses all these phrases: “John McCain believes that one of the greatest threats to our liberty and the Constitutional framework that safeguards our freedoms are willful judges who usurp the role of the people and their representatives and legislate from the bench.”
wow. for those of you who don’t know, that’s code. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to translate it, but it shouldn’t be too hard.
oh the other hand, there’s http://www.barackobama.com/
perhaps characteristically, it seemed pretty wordy. But here’s his taxonomy:
Civil Rights
Defense
Disabilities
Economy
Education
Energy & Environment
Ethics
Faith
Family
Fiscal
Foreign Policy
Healthcare
Homeland Security
Immigration
Iraq
Poverty
Rural
Service
Seniors & Social Security
Technology
Taxes
Urban Policy
Veterans
Women
notice the list is quite a bit longer, but also that although the sequence implies a priority ordering, after looking at it, it turns out to be simply alphabetical. that’s kind of smart/dumb, if you know what I mean.. should I assume then that he is going to run cabinet meetings alphabetically? “.. now hold on tom, I know you have a crisis over there in xenobiology or whatever, but let’s stick with the order… go ahead agriculture guy.”
but then note what lakoff calls the “framing” of the taxonomy. it sets the stage for what you know is going to be coming — where do you stand with respect to national security? no one is opposed to it. the questions are all in the what, why and how. on the other hand, how are defense and foreign policy different subjects? do you see, the fact that they’re treated as separate topics is an implicit answer to an unasked question right there.
think about it. -
what's the point of tofu?
According to Neal Stephenson, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz once said “[there are] two great labyrinths into which the human mind is drawn: one is the question of free will versus predestination, and the other is the nature of the divine ether”
Addressing the first question at least, like many pairs of opposites, both free will and predestination are manifestations or imperfect perceptions of a greater whole, encompassing both. We clearly have an internal perception of the ability to choose our actions, and thus an implied responsibility for the consequences of those actions or lack thereof. At the same time, our observations of the world around us lead us to believe that the more perfect our understanding of the cosmic mechanisms and the more complete our knowledge of the state of the universe, the more successfully we might predict subsequent states into the indefinite future.
Neither and both cases hold. We may choose to act, but our choices are driven by a complex of motivations and thought processes and environmental factors we only dimly comprehend. We are actors in a play, but we are also the playwright, and sometimes the audience and critic as well. Contemplating consciousness is like the tip of a finger trying to point at itself. Its comical, really, when you think about it.
Or, consider: our perception of our own free will is like our perception that the sun is moving through the sky. Is it? It depends on your point of view.
Our consciousness is a point of light riding on a wave of potentiality in a hyperdimensional space which we are incapable of comprehending, at least thus far.
Reality exists outside our consciousness, if only in a potential, unrealized state (unrealized at least from the perspective of our own limited mentality and perception).
But its not all just idle speculation. It matters. Because if we are free, then we must bear responsibility for our choices. Neitzsche said “men are thought of as free in order that they might become guilty.”
Common sense tells us we must weigh our choices well against our best expectation of their results. We should not harm ourselves, one another, our environment or our fellow creatures for that matter, at least not without good reason.
Then does our responsibility only depend on our ability to predict outcomes? Or is it intrinsic? Ask yourself: if you’re an idiot and you can’t reasonably be expected to predict the outcomes of your actions, would it be fair to hold them against you? So then, are we we only responsible to the extent we understand and recall the past and can reasonably predict the future based on our choices in the present?
Put another way, what does the question of free will versus predestination even mean without concepts of time and memory? One of the many pairs of opposites to consider is perception versus reality. What perception of time do the inanimate stones have? What is time, or anything else for that matter, from their point of view? In other words, without a point of view, can you even formulate a meaningful question, much less an answer?
God has so ordained it that we are beings who are required to engage in a constant struggle just to survive. If we have subdued the beasts, and to some extent the germs and diseases that plague us, we must still be vigilant against one another or even our own darker sides.
We are wired up to desire human contact, including sex. Why then should we eschew or be ashamed of these needs? The consumption of a moderate amount of meat is normally necessary for our health and well being. Why should we eat tofu burgers, so to speak, rather than real ones? Why should we substitute a faint facsimile for genuine experience? Why should we pursue academic theories to the exclusion of the fullness of life, with humor and passion and gusto? What do we accomplish thereby? Is it not vanity to try to fight a billion years of evolution? First of all, you will fail, but in any case, to what end should you even try?
Now, would you blame a fruit for falling off a tree?
By the same token, its vain and pointless to attach to the object of your desires and positively self-defeating to clutch anything too tightly, for we are all in constant motion, always passing through an infinite sequence of moments, like a string of pearls, each one perfect and unique in itself.
So, as for the question of free will versus predestination, I say mu!
Neither fight the wave, nor succumb to it. Consciously, I and I ride the cosmic surf!
…
According to Wikipedia, Leibniz was one of the greatest philosophers of the 17th century, his contributions to mathematics are profound, he discovered the binary number system, and the Calculus, and his work anticipates much of modern logic and analysis.
Leibniz made major contributions to physics, biology, medicine, geology, probability theory, psychology, linguistics, and information science. “He also wrote on politics, law, ethics, theology, history, and philology, even occasional verse. His contributions to this vast array of subjects are scattered in journals and in tens of thousands of letters and unpublished manuscripts.” there is no complete edition of Leibniz’s writings.
Dude! What an inspiration. -
Topics in History
I was driving in the car with my daughter and got to talking about another graduate degree, and she said I should think about history. She said her history professor reminded her of me or vice versa, and she said I would be really good at it, because I was so well read.
I told her I knew a number of people with undergaduate degrees in the liberal arts, like history, who had gone on to earn graduate degrees in a technical field like computer science, for practical reasons, mainly, but I knew of no one who had done it the other way.
But after a while, I started to think it over, and one thought that came to mind was, “why bother with a graduate degree in history?” Why not just write a history?
The answer came that with say a Phd in history, I could then conceivably teach at a university, which might be a nice way to wind down into a second career, different from the first, and maybe an interesting thing in itself.
But the options are not mutually exclusive. So I thought I would consider writing some history myself, just to kick things off. What would I write about?
First off, my touch stone on the subject is a quote from Barbara Tuchman, probably my favorite modern historian: “all history is biography”
History is not about timelines or abstract concepts. It’s about people.
My second principle is perhaps a commonplace, but to me was a personal discovery. In high school, I spent some time in detention, for reasons that don’t matter. There I met a fellow who became my good friend, and we had many engaging conversations. one time he said “it’s interesting how the atom, with a nucleus and electrons, looks so much like the solar system, with the sun and the planets and I said, “and it makes no sense that we study the atom in chemistry class, and maybe we study the solar system in physics class, or whatever, and we study the war which drove so much of the research into the atom maybe in history class, and it’s all really part of the same thing.”
And he said something like “yeah, man.”
And many years later, reading biographies of Einstein and Bohr and Oppenheimer, and those cats, I learned that it’s no accident that the so called “Bohr model” for the atom looks like the solar system, it was quite conscious, and controversial. It’s a simplistic conception that’s helpful only up to a point, and they knew it at the time. And it’s interesting that closer examination seems to very disturbingly indicate that people find whatever they are looking for in the universe, that our will somehow exerts influence over the quantum field, or some crazy stuff like that. Go on and read some of the modern writings in quantum field theory, if you don’t believe me, it will blow your mind.
And that brings me to the history and philosophy of science, or “natural philosophy” as they used to call it, and people like James Burke, who did a couple of TV series and books called “Connections” and also “The Day the Universe Changed”, as well as the work of the philosopher Karl Popper, which has profoundly influenced my view of the world.
And I would love to drill down into how and why these two men were so influential, not just to me, but to so many people, whether they know it or not — one broadly and the other deeply, but I must rush on to list so many other human beings whose contributions are all interconnected in a vast, hyper dimensional web of thought and perception.
So many of our modern western commonplaces of thought, even assumptions about the world, were revolutionary insights derived from Locke, and before him, Hobbes, and arguments against Roman Catholic interpretations of Christianity, itself so deeply fundamental to western thought that it is just given, like air, like gravity. But Christianity is itself based on, or perhaps embedded in another cultural context, Judaism, or more specifically a form and view of Judaism as practiced by Hellenized Jews such as Paul the Apostle, and so we find themes of Greek philosophy and mysticism cropping up in Christian theology, fusing with the Judaic themes in exactly the same way that the colonies of the new world became an amalgamation of various European cultures, translated into a new context. So we can think of these Judaic memes being transplantated from the levant into (or perhaps invading) the fertile soil of the European mind. And to complicate matters further, the rich and complex web of Judaic thought before and since the time of Christ has had a kind of parallel development, profoundly influencing and subtly influenced by the development of Christianity. So nothing ever stands alone in this world, everything is influenced by everything else to one degree or another.
So, for example, I could talk about Spinoza and Newton, or the book of Ecclesiastes and Nietzsche, or for that matter, Christ and Osiris and Buddha. And that bring to mind Frazer’s “The Golden Bough”, and all that, and that’s a whole rabbit hole if ever there was one. And Frazer’s brilliant and original study of comparative folklore, magic and religion brings to mind Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, and Gibbon’s uniquely witty, skeptical and insightful perspective on the development of Christianity based on an objective study of original sources. If you haven’t read these things, you should stop reading these words, right now, and go off and read them, Frazer and Gibbon in their entirety, and I guarantee, you’ll come back a different person, if you come back at all.
But history involves not only the history of what we call “The West”, but so much more that is neglected by or even unknown to so many of us, that it is disturbingly sad to the point of shocking. I could talk about the vast tracts of time encompassed by the Chinese empires of the Ming, the Han and the Chin and other dynasties and the Ch’un Ch’iu periods, reminiscent of monarchical western Europe, fertile and innovative and war prone, the era of the great general Sun Tzu, and his classic “The Art of War“. Or the parallels of Feudal Japan to Medieval Europe, or the mysterious millennia encompassed by the Egyptian dynasties of the Upper and Lower Kingdoms, or the vast literature and scripture of what we call India, they themselves call Bharat, and its great tales, comparable to and in some ways exceeding those of Homer or Shakespeare, gathered into the Mahabharata, which includes as only one of its numerous volumes the Bhagavad-Gita. But the “Great Bharata” is itself embedded in a vast and ancient scriptural tradition including the Vedas and the Upanishads, all of which are worlds unto themselves.
But history involves not only the history of thought, but so much of human history involves conflict: and military history is a noble and worthy specialty in its own right. So many innovations were forced by war: so many examples are present in our minds from the modern era, but as just one example from history, consider that Galileo’s telescope was once thought so strategically valuable in the military context that it’s invention was held a state secret. Think about it.
Let us ponder the hundreds or thousands of wars men have wrought upon one another, the countless untold battles of the nations of pre-Columbian America, or the tribes of the central Asian steppes, of the Mongol hordes, of the Celts, the Norse, tales told in the Icelandic sagas, or now forgotton tales of the Germanic peoples of Gaul, of the Aryans in India, each embodying values and world views so very different from one another and our own, that we are shocked to learn how despite their differences in time and place, that all people are the same: we all experience love, and jealosy and pride. Even the Chinese, somehow lived parallel separate histories just the same in their own world (中, the ideogram for China, is a rectangle representing the four corners of the world, with a vertical stroke through its center, indicating the center or axis of the world, that is, “Chin”).
Or consider another path, so to speak, through the history of the traditional martial arts, wushu (武術). For example, the development of Te (手 “open-hand or weaponless martial arts”) in secret on Okinawa while under occupation by Japan. Open hand, because Okinawans were forbidden from carrying weapons by the occupying Japanese. According to legend Te was derived from Kung-Fu (功夫 “skill learned through great effort”), itself brought to Okinawa from China by itinerant Buddhist monks. And consider the relationship of Kung-Fu to Buddhism, itself an export from India to China, and transformed as it spread through southeast Asia and Japan to Korea and beyond. And then how the Japanese codified and renamed it Kara Te Do (空手 “the way of the open hand”), as we now know it. Or comparing and contrasting all the many different schools of martial arts, Tae Kwon Do (태권도 “the way of the fist and foot”), and Ju Do (柔道, “the gentle way”), and Ju Jutsu (柔術 “the flexible way”), and so on, and how they are all rooted in Yoga (control), and how isn’t it interesting that there is no martial art particular to India?
Or again, the rich, manifold, and to most westerners of European descent, the mysterious, almost alien world of Islam, yet in so many ways it’s a reflection, or alternative distillation of influences, and not at all unrelated mixture of Judaic, North African, and Western Asian thought and culture.
And again back to the crossroads of history, culture, philosophy, business and science, and the fascinating story of Leonardo di Pisa, known as Fibonacci, how he brought the Hindu-Arabic counting system from North Africa to Europe. And ask yourself, how profound an influence has zero-based arithmetic had on the development of western science and technology, and how has it changed the world? And consider the transit of the concept of zero from the Ashrams of India through the Madrasahs of Baghdad to the school in Algeria where Leonardo learned of it, and brought it back to Medieval Italy and put it to great practical use in his father’s trade business, and its history from thence throughout Europe.
And maybe you can begin to see what I mean when I say everything is connected.
Or travel back with me to Elea, a Greek colony in Italy, and to the early fifth century before Christ, and contemplate the origins of western philosophy Or consider the origins of the Ottoman Empire in the relics of the Caliphate, and modern Turkey and its unique relationship to Islam, and the peculiar origin of the phrase “Young Turks” and the involvement of the leaders of Young Turk party in the first world war, and the calamitous outcome thereof, and the influences on western Asia and the Arab world of the treaty of Versailles, the reverberations of which we are still dealing with today. That is a topic for an entire book in itself.
Oh, I could go on and on, drilling ever deeper, and roving ever more broadly, but to what end? Is there anybody out there? -
the time and the place
080603
To Jim, on the occasion of your fiftieth birthday.
To my brother and my best friend — everything changed, then changed again.
…
bumpty-two
my very first recollection of us together was that once upon a time, a long time ago, we shared a bed.
how many people have you shared a bed with? well, I am one of them.
I’m not sure, to tell you the truth, but I think we were small enough to lay crossways on a single bed. or really on reflection, you were able to lay crossways, and I layed kind of everywhich way. and you may remember that we used to take turns rocking each other to sleep.
I don’t remember when we started or when we stopped, but we used to crawl up the stairs, usually after a lot of complainining, on our hands and knees, up the thirteen steps, past the half iron bannisters into the top half, which was walled, and was crowned with the old hope chest, which was dark before Mom refinished it, we’d make the right turn into our room, BJ and Johnny’s room was on the other side, it always had been and it always would be. and we’d crawl into our bed, but first we’d say our prayers, the way we were taught, without question or reservation, “God bless Mommy and Daddy and Nanny, and BJ and Johnny, and Andy and Jamie.” Yeah, we referred to ourselves in the third person. Isn’t it cute? We might have added and all our aunts and uncles, cousins and pets and whoever else came to mind, but it would normally take too long, and Dad would often be the one to put us to bed, as I recall, sometimes with a story or whatever, and he would let us off without having to enumerate the entire clan, maybe we’d say “and the rest of our family,” or something like that.
I don’t remember any stories Dad actually told us, maybe you do. Maybe Dr. Seuss, maybe stories from the Tall Book of Make Believe, and Winkin, Blinkin and Nod, and all that.
But we’d crawl up the stairs, and we’d get into our pajamas, and kneel at the side of the bed, which I remember was way too high for us, and we’d say our prayers, and he would tell us a bed time story, and kiss us with his rough beard and smelling of smoke and coffee and whiskey, and then turn out the lights and thump down the stairs.
The tv might be on down there, and from time to time you’d hear an adult’s voice, usually dad’s mrmhummumum or whatever. and we’d creep back down the steps and peek out from behind the wall and see if we could see the tv in the reflection of the glass on the picture over the couch. but we’d inevitably get caught and sent back to bed, and we’d lay there, and watch the shadows the streetlight used to make across the wall and the ceiling, which was a complex pattern, because of the sloped ceiling and the geometry of the dormer, and the wallpaper we used to have, which was this kind of pattern of Xs and squares, just like the pattern of the grid across the radiator down in the living room, the metal grate that was ingeniously fit into the doors which opened and we sometimes used to store our board games in there, and the box over the radiator that I think was some kind of add in by Selma’s husband who was a Norwegian fisherman, or seaman of some sort, and part time carpenter, and the big old windowsill downstairs that sometimes we would stand up on like a stage and perform the way we saw the people do on tv sometimes, “attention, ladies and gentlemen and children of all ages” or tie towels around our necks and run around like like so many crazy little supermen in and out and around the furniture, I’m sure it was some kind of madness.
but we’d be laying there in bed, and trying to sleep and it wouldn’t be long before one or the other of us would get up on our hands and knees and start rocking back and forth, saying “bumpty-two, bumpty-two” and the other would lay there, being rocked, maybe unconsciously imagining or remembering being rocked in the crib or cradle or whatever, but anyway enjoying it, until the other got tired and said, “I’m tired. its your turn to bumpty-two.” and we’d take turns like that until we were both asleep.
…
babies and daddies
the next memories I have of us together is of course playing — building forts out of couch cushions and blankets, or outside in the backyard playing in the dirt, with trucks and lincoln logs and whatever came to hand.
but I think we can both take pride, and it may not come as too much of a surprise to anyone who really knows us, that we were, I think, unusually creative players. there were all sorts of things we used to do and imagine, that I remember fondly, and think, that was pretty cool.
one game, I remember, we used to call “babies and daddies” for reasons that don’t matter, and probably made no sense anyway.
we’d go out to the garage, and sneak into the car. we kind of knew we weren’t supposed to, we might hurt ourselves in the car door, and maybe we did once or twice. Did we?
and we got into trouble. usually that’s what it was about, staying out of trouble. but more on that later.
so we’d be in the car, sitting there in the garage. maybe the garage door was open, or maybe the light was on.
and it was one of those old cars, I have no idea which one it was, the mercury comet, or whatever we had before that, but it had the radio on the console with the push buttons, and we’d take turns pretending to be the cab driver and the passenger, like we’d seen on tv no doubt, “where’ll it be buddy?” “tirty-tird and tird! step on it!” and when I was playing cabbie, I’d frantically pound the buttons on the radio, that we thought made the car go, and punch in the destination, and turn the wheel and bounce up and down for a while, and say, “that’ll be toidy bucks!”
then we’d scramble over the seats, changing places, and one time, you were the cab driver, and I was the passenger, and you said “where’ll it be buddy?” and I said “Tokyo!” and you said, “holy cow, buddy, better hold on to your hat! here we go!” and you pushed buttons and turned the wheel and bounced up and down, and in our minds we flew through time and space, and after a while I said “we dere yet?” and you said “keep yer shirt on, keep yer shirt on!” and we’d bounce around some more, and I’d help with the imagining, and bounce around in the back seat myself, and you’d say “bumpy ride, ain’t it?” ha. and we’d both laugh. and finally we’d get there, and I’d say “how much’ll it be?” and I think you said “a googol bucks!”
…
moosie ridesh
like yours, many of my fondest memories of childhood involve the beach.
from our earliest years, we learned the beach was the place where we really existed, where we really felt free.
the ritual began as always with a “big production.” everyone running around, grabbing their stuff, Mom making sandwiches, “did you bring the towels?” “hurry up!” finally, everyone was ready, but we were never really morning people, and the best we could do was maybe be rolling by eleven. sometimes the lots were full, and back in the day they’d let you park out on the grass, and usually Dad would drop us off in that case, and walk, or sometimes, he’d just get home from work early and say, “let’s go” and we’d all pile in and haul on down there at three or four in the afternoon, counting jackrabbits and fighting to be first to see the tower.
and if we got a spot in the little lot out there at field nine with the wacky nautical motif, and the portholes serving as windows on the building and the parking lot would burn your feet, and you’d try to walk on the white lines, reasoning that they’d be a little less scorching, but not much and the paint was blistering from the sun and the seagull shit was everywhere, along with the shattered shells of their erstwhile clam feasts, sometimes we’d watch one, hovering up there in the breeze, with a doomed clam in his beak, and with a “brkaw!” he’d drop it onto the pavement, whack! into a hundred pieces and it was munch time for gullie.
but onward through the tunnel of the little concession stand at field nine, a place that has passed from the world, but which we all posess in our memories, as if it were our own. the smell of greasy dogs, coffee and beer, and the feel of wet gritty sand cooling your feet still burning from walking barefoot on the hot pavement, and the roar of the surf mingling with the sqeals of kids and seagulls and the fat old guys hanging out back by the dune fence for reasons we could not fathom, with beer guts and cigars and back hair, sometimes speaking in Italian or whatever, but none of that for us.
right on through the burning sand, positively running into the water with an unabashed joy that is at once distant and eternal to us now, I still get it from time to time, it takes a long time unwinding from the cares of adulthood, but its worth it — on the slopes of Breckenridge, a hundred feet underwater amidst a coral reef and vasty schools of fishes, driving fast with the top down and my honey on a fine day. but back then, to us, it was just plain free. free as in free beer and free as in free speech. just whatever. still
it was kind of simple. just drop your minimal gear and go. low overhead. I’ve had time to reflect on that over the years and recently, as how families choose to spend their free time kind of define them, or vice versa. I don’t know. like just the other day we watched a family docking their sailboat, and pulling up to a restaurant over here on Chesapeake Bay. very nice life. but different. the sailboat has a captain. and everyone on board has a job, and its all kind of work. and the man is in charge, and if you’re a kid on a sailboat, your job is pretty much to sit there and stay out of the way, and try not to mess with anything. maybe if you’re good, they’ll let you coil a rope or something.
but if you’re a kid on the beach, especially a bold kid with no fear, the world is yours! jump on in! knock it out!
the bigger the waves, the better! let them beat the shit out of you! from time to time they will pound you, so watch out.
and I remember we used to categorize them. “here comes a double daddy-momma! here comes a moosie one!” yeah, moosie ridesh.
but after a couple of hours of that, and sun and salt and sand, and maybe a tuna sandwich on white bread, you’re nothing but an exhausted boy on the beach, snoozing to the sound of the breakers with your buds and your family. as innocent and content as a napping puppy. does it get any better?
…
tether rock
my fond memories of this time almost always revolve around the summer. I do remember school time, though. standing by the bus stop, which for reasons no one knew stood in front of the no-man’s house. that dude no one ever saw. but he had a big purple maple in his yard, we used to use for demolition derbys. again, we seemed to have a knack for creating games. when I exchange stories with other folks about their childhood games, they’re like “… what?” everyone played games like “freeze” or “hide and seek”, but you will remember, we used to play variations like “best fall,” where we would take turns pretending to be getting shot, like the guys in the endless war movies we used to watch, or tv shows like “rat patrol” or whatever, and we would take turns being the shooter and judge of who acted out the most “believable” death. or “sardines” which was a version of hide and seek in reverse, and we’d take kind of a perverse pleasure in the pitiful plight of the last guy who hadn’t found the can of sardines hiding behind the Farrell’s fence or whatever, like Johnny Fitzgerald, wandering around the hood all alone, crying “c’mon guys, where is everybody?”
so, we used to play demolition derbys with our bikes, I particularly remember intentionally running into no-man’s tree at full tilt. pow! and Tony’s neat sting ray with the banana seat and chopped handlebars was no match for the stout Schwinn, welded solid steel tubing, or whatever the hell it was made out of, it was fucking indestructible.
but we used to stand out there in the freezing cold, and the snow, waiting for good old bus #5, and on into the world of nuns and books and all of that.
an early memory I have of this time is of the big blackout of 1965. all the lights went out up and down the eastern seaboard, and of course Dad, being a cop, had to report in for work, whether he had it scheduled or not. so there we were, hanging around in the house with Mom. I’m sure you remember now we still had the camping gear from the great western expedition, I guess the previous year. and Mom insisted we do our homework, no matter what. doing the math, I guess I was in third grade, and you must have been in first grade. what kind of homework could we possibly have had that was so important? but anyway, Mom pulls out the Coleman kerosene lantern and fires it up on the kitchen table with the tar paper tablecloth, or whatever the hell it was made out of, and one thing leads to another, and the goddamned tablecloth catches fire, and all hell breaks loose. there’s screaming and hollering, and our homework burns up in the fire. at least, that’s our story, and we’re sticking to it, right?
when it snowed, we used to wear galoshes out there, which as you know, were kind of like fireman’s boots or something that you would wear over your shoes. I mean, here we were, rough housing kids who would be playing games like “kill the guy with the ball” or “death run” at lunchtime, but they made us wear dress shoes, white shirts and ties. its hard to believe, really. these days we’d just wear hiking boots or whatever. I like to exaggerate these tales with my kids and say “we had to walk ten miles to school through the snow, uphill, both ways, and with a mule on our back! and we were glad to do it, you little whiners!” but, you know, I’m only partly kidding.
most of the year involved school time, though, kind of cold, the grass brown and the leaves off the trees. and after the drudgery of school, we’d play rumble or just pile on each other for the hell of it, or play touch football in the street, which seemed so small and closed in when we went back to see it. but once again, sometimes we got creative.
I remember one time, we went up to Uncle Jack and Aunt Lily’s house. I think it was back when they lived in Glastonbury. And we played with Cindy in her back yard, they had a game called tether ball. It involved basically a volleyball on a rope attached to a pole.
When we got home, we got the bright idea to make a game of our own, based on the tetherball concept. Let’s see, we had a rope, and a tree, but no volleyball or the equivalent. What to do? What to do? So we looked around and found the slate pavement stones Mom and Dad had placed over that spot that always flooded around the concrete patio behind the garage that led to the porch . Yeah, let’s tie this rope to the slate, and play tetherball with that.
Of course you remember that after a short time, that thing whipped around and nearly took your ear off. As the older one, I was responsible. But as on many other occasions, and as in some of the stories to come, I let you down. I was a dope. I didn’t think like I should have, and you paid the price. I’m really sorry about all of that. I hope you will forgive me.
…
pride lincoln merc
but summertimes were full of time to kill, weren’t they? I swear, I don’t even know what time to kill means anymore. I have a todo list with 1300 items on it, for crying out loud. time to kill? time is killing me, it seems like. but anyway.
we’d hang out in the porch, or Dave Houseman’s basement or wherever and play monopoly or risk for a week straight. I remember one time in particular, we got bored of playing monopoly, so we’d go on a ride. yeah, that’s what we used to do, is mount our steeds, the schwinn typhoons or the sting rays with the banana seats, and we’d go ridin’. We were the wild ones, remember?
and we’d ride on up, all the way to Hempstead, play a couple of games of pinball or pool, or air hockey. it was in the days before pong, or any video games, (BP, if you will), but we weren’t really into that anyway, we were just passing time.
now, I don’t remember the sequence of events, precisely, maybe you can fill in the gaps. I do remember we made a practice of “going to church” all by ourselves. they had the youth mass with all that folk singing and stuff in the cafeteria of old St. Willies, and Mom and Dad just weren’t into that. but they thought it was nice that we were all taking it upon ourselves to go to church at 10:45 or whatever on a Sunday morning. what they didn’t know was that we would just as often take a detour and hang out behind the Seaford Avenue School for an appropriate period of time, and then just wander on home as holy as you please.
this worked well enough during the summer months, but as the cooler weather came in, we sought warmer hangouts. we tried lurking in the spaces behind the stairs of the school or other places like that, anywhere but church, which was warm and full of people, after all. that was simply out.
so, we just kind of wandered around.
one day, we wandered by the lincoln mercury dealer, and we just started exploring in there, looking at all the fancy cars. huh, nice.
then the next week, we got a little more adventurous and wandered into the back lot with the cars waiting for repairs of one sort or another.
then the next week, we got a little more adventurous and noticing that one of the cars was unlocked, we just kind of huddled in there for an hour or so, shooting the bull, and wandered on home, all holy from church.
then one time, we noticed there was a car that was not only unlocked, but had the damn keys in it. we were, I don’t know, eleven?
so we got bold enough to turn the key so we could get the radio and not only were we not freezing, but we had jams. cool.
I specifically remember it was on one of these occasions that I first heard Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” I remember thinking, “damn, that’s different from anything I ever heard. I’ve heard lots of love songs, but I never heard a hate song before. he really hates that chick.”
so that went on for a while.
then summer came, and one day, as I said, we were playing risk, actually, I think and someone said, we’ve been playing this fucking game for a week, I’m bored. I think it was someone who had just been knocked out.
but anyway, I don’t remember exactly, but we wandered around and somehow we wound up at pride lincoln merc.
we found a car that was open, and had keys. by this time we knew just where to look.
One of us, I guess it was Gerard, got the bright idea to start the car, and try to practice driving. Brilliant!
So he was backing up and pulling forward a little, but before you knew it, we heard “hey you kids!”
and we were like “what?!” and we got out of that car so fast it was like impossible. and we hauled ass out of there. and the guy chasing us was no slouch, I definitely remember him hopping the short little railing we usually snuck in by, like a gymnast over a pommel horse, and down into the lot, but he was no match for us. the way I remember it, we made it to the chain link fence complete with barbed wire over the top, which I later estimated to be eight feet high. I do not remember scaling that fence, the next thing I remember is being on the other side of it, with cuts in my hands, high tailing it for home, and counting heads behind and ahead of me to make sure we all made it.
we did. in two shakes of a lamb’s tail we were back on the porch, breathless, studiously pretending to be back playing our board game, but comparing wounds with one another in hushed tones, just in case a knock came at the front door.
an adventure. one among many.
…
night life
around this time we were kind of feeling our oats, and we were a little hard to contain.
we were off for the summer, and had no set schedule for waking up, and the sun went down really late, so our internal clocks were kind of fucked up.
we’d wander off to bed around ten or whatever, but we’d be up way past midnight, with nothing to do. but a kid with an active mind never has nothing to do.
once again, I think you and Gerard were the instigators. late at night you planned a rendez-vous. we had a pretty easy escape route, I think. we climbed out the window, usually the side window out onto the garage roof, up and over the top, and crabcrawling feet first down the back side on our butts, hands and feet, to the roof of the porch. and then an easy jump into the branches of the overhanging back yard maple, down and across the street to meet up with Gerard.
now what? we’d just wander around the neighborhood at one or two in the morning, doing whatever. hiding if ever a car came by in case it was a cop or something to bring us home by our ears.
I don’t recall if anything interesting ever really happened while we were out experiencing night life, or if we ever got caught. it was just an adventure to be out there, breaking the rules.
…
mohawks
now I do remember many more innocent, and maybe otherwise unremarkable episodes.
like one time up in New Hampshire, we had one of those cottages, and it had a nice little cove where we could swim and play, and we did, pushing each other off the dock, or wandering out through the mucky leaves that coated the bottom to the sandy part, and we’d soak our heads and fling them back out of the water, making it stand up in a spike, like a mohawk. and we’d splash around and pretend to be indians, and that was the kind of thing that would occupy us for hours.
but we never got far from the tv. I remember camping out on the floor of Dale Place watching cartoons, Sandy Becker or “Sunday” Fox, or Colonel Bleep or Rocky and Bullwinkle or the Wonderful World of Disney. One time up in New Hampshire, we had just watched some live action Disney movie involving a lion escaped from the zoo rampaging over town or whatever, and the hapless sherriff was driving through the town with a megaphone, shouting “we have got the situation under control!” as comical chaos reigned all around him. and as we went driving out to dinner that night, and we sat in the back seat, you turned to me, making a megaphone out of your hand and repeated “we have got the situation under control!” over and over, and I was torn with laughter, so hard I couldn’t breathe. I was at your mercy. often I remember laughing and laughing together at the silliest things for entire episodes. later that night we wound up at some restaurant, decorated with live game — rhinoceros heads mounted on the walls, zebra skins, stuff like that, and I think Dad looked around and said something like, “they’ve really captured a decor” and you turned to me and whispered in a mock “Colonel McBragg” english accent, “I say there, old chap, I’ve been hunting all over the world, and I’ve finally bagged a decor!” and I laughed out loud right there in the restaurant, and we stifled giggles like that all night.
…
psychopsychopsychopsycho
other memories from this time revolve around family visits, to our cousins, the Cullens, the Loftuses, when they still lived in Levittown, and the Currans, who lived impossibly in that little house in Bellerose. I’m kind of ashamed, to this day, I don’t even know for sure how many Currans there were, I have to count: Regina, John, Mary Alice, Janet, Elaine, Kevin, Cathy, Anne, John, that’s nine, right? Plus Aunt Eileen and Uncle John, that makes eleven. and Sometimes Nanny, for twelve. How did they all fit in there? Like the little old lady who lived in a shoe, or some kind of Christly miracle of the loaves and the fishes? But then there would be an occasion, and I remember one time in particular, when in addition to all those kids, we’d descend on them, bringing six Lowes, five Cullens, and God knows how many others, and there would be so much noise and so many people, that we’d literally overflow into the yard and the street.
And I remember it was a fine evening, early summer and the row of houses was protected by a roof of trees overhanging the street, and we’d hang out there tossing a football back and forth, “over here, over here!” but you will remember this one little neighbor kid who had just seen the recent Hitchcock picture, “Psycho” and he wasn’t interested in the football at all. evidently his sensitive mind had been exposed to a concept too appealing for him, and after watching Anthony Perkins doing his thing, he must have thought “that’s for me!” and all he could do was run up to everybody he saw, with his arm raised, elbow straight, and an imaginary butcher’s knife in his hand, bringing it down violently and repeatedly, shouting “psychopsychopsychopsycho!” and we were like “get the hell away from me, you little weirdo!” but sometimes a girl would scream and run away, and he’d chase after her gleefully attempting to stab her. I wonder whatever happened to that kid.
…
roosting and roving
but summers were mainly filled with idleness. we’d watch tv, play games, rough house, and when all that got boring, we’d just roost.
We’d climb a tree, you, me, Gerard, and his cousins Tony Cassano and Artie Billotte, David Houseman, and maybe Johnny and Billy Muller.
Up we’d go, and just hang and shoot the bull. we had a few favorite trees for climbing, mainly one of the maples in our front yard, not the curved one, but the double one. At times like this, maybe infused with the golden glow of nostalgia, in my recollection our conversations were surprisingly mature, our insights then not very different from now. Roosting up in trees, or hanging out on the street corner in front of old man Franz’s, waiting for the Mister Softee truck to come, we’d talk about politics and religion, and girls, and we’d wonder about life in outer space, overpopulation, the war, the atom bomb or whatever. I definitely remember being pretty sure someone somewhere was going to blow one up, probably us or the Russians, probably in Europe or something, and that would be it. We human beings were just too warlike. Stuff like that you might not expect from a ten year old, or whatever.
But not all our activities were of that nature. I remember under the mercury vapor lamps, we used to see who could shimmy up the lamppole and touch the top, and try not to get burns from the brushed metal on the way sliding down, and there was one kid, I forget his name, who came around for a short time, and he engaged us in a competition called “range” to see who could piss the highest, and once, using a special squeeze technique, he managed to get it all the way over the street sign.
But then Mister Softee would come, and we’d all get our fix, except Johnny Fitzgerald, who would take forever to decide, but always wind up with the same thing “oh, I’ll have a Mickey Mouse.”
But the sun would stay up late long into the summer evening and we’d be bopping out on the streecorner like so many little hoodlums until it was maybe 9:00 or later before we’d hear the call, “Andy! Jamie! Time to come home!”
And when roosting or just hanging out got boring, we’d get on our bikes and ride.
We’d ride on up to Hempstead, or Wantagh or over to Massapequa, and the new mall they’d just built, or down into the harbor and play in the construction, or we’d find an old abandoned house and explore it, like “the time and the place” with the creaky floorboards, and the musty smell of water damage, with soggy old porn magazines littering the place. we were like “what is this stuff?” and then we’d hear a sound, and imagine some old bum coming to get us and we’d high tail it out of there as fast as we could.
it was on a trips like this, over to Mays department store, in the winter, though as I recall, that we began to enhance our record collections, shoving albums like Grand Funk Railroad’s Red, or whatever, up the back of each other’s bulky winter coat and with it tucked into the back of our pants, we’d nonchalantly walk on out.
sometimes the pull job made no sense, like that box of cigars we stole from sears and tried to smoke behind Kemman’s bushes until we got sick.
and sometimes our crimes were compoundly stupid. like one time we cut school, and somehow we wound up at White’s department store. and we wandered around aimlessly until one item caught your attention: it was an aerosol can with a picture of a snorting bull on it. it supposedly smelled like bullshit. you were supposed to spray it at people when you called bullshit on them. we never found out for sure what it smelled like though. you grabbed it in an impulse and we tried to walk out of the store, but we got tagged by this overeager black woman gawk, shouting “where’s that booshit spray?!”
she hauled us back into the office, and we were sure we were going to get it. she demanded to know our phone number so she could rat us out to our parents. we were doomed. but to our great surprise and luck, when she called, only Nanny was there. and she said “just send them on home and I’ll take care of it” and so we just walked and Nanny never spoke of it. I don’t know if she chose to indulge us, or maybe she just forgot.
…
moosie pull job
but that was just an early episode in our life of crime.
when we got old enough to go to the beach on our own, either by bus, or hitchhiking, or dropped off by a parent, summer days were a constant stream of salt, surf, and shoplifting. I distinctly remember you and Gerard getting into a pulljob competetion, and Me and Tony were hanging out by the boardwalk, and you’d take turns to see who could be bolder or more innovative in your methods, until we were full from hot dogs and ice creams and whatever, we were like, that’s enough, but you went on and on, devising new and ever more creative techniques: the inside-outside method, the under-the-towel method, the buy-one-get-one-free method and stuff like that.
but after a while, we had to move on from the east bathhouse where the gawks bitch bastardly and the sunglass kid had been brought in to clean up the place, over to the central mall, where there were a lot more people, and the cover was better. it got to the point where it was so easy, it was no fun anymore, so we just moved on.
…
wantage hotel
things went on like this for a few years into high school. we were really still just kids, doing what we had always done, hanging out, playing ball, riding bikes. but some new elements began to enter the picture.
one time we rode up to Wantagh, and saw that the old Wantagh Hotel had just burned down. It was a real relic of a bygone era, next to the old train station, it must have been 100 years old.
the charred carcass of the building stood there beckoning to us from behind the yellow police line tape.
but there was no one in sight, the cops and the firemen had cleared the area and all gone home.
so we stashed our bikes out back and found a little hole that only a kid could crawl through, and went on an adventure.
Artie led, because he was the smallest and was wiry, then you, me, Tony, Gerard and Dave, who was the biggest and had some trouble crawling through the air ducts, which was what we were doing. God knows if we inhaled asbestos or worse, or if the building might have crashed down on top of us. Looking back, we might easily have died.
But this part of the building looked pretty stout, really, and we crawled along, until Artie came to a vent screen, and he shouted “Holy Shit!”
He pushed off the screen, and crawled out into a large, dark, perfectly preserved, obviously well used bar. It was fully stocked with scotch, gin, vodka and everything else.
We were like, “score!”
so I guess we’ve departed from the typical misty eyed recollections of an innocent youth, a bygone time of sandlot baseball and homemade fishin’ poles.
frankly, this later part of childhood or adolescence I remember was a little bit darker. we didn’t think of it that way at the time, for us, it was just the world.
I remember what we called the creek was a fig leaf stand of trees, filled with rusty old beer cans, construction debris and the mountains we used to play “king of the hill” on were piles of fill dirt, probably dumped there illegally by some lazy long ago trucker. and the creek was fed from a freshwater spring called Davis Field, just this side of Seaman’s neck road, that in the winter, when we were little, would sometimes freeze over. that’s where we learned to skate and play hockey. but by this time, Davis Field was being filled for construction of the Seaford-Oyster Bay Expressway, and the creek was polluted, and it was 1969 or 1970, and the world was going to hell.
so there we were, in the belly of the old Wantage Hotel, in a bar haunted by the ghosts of thousands of old commuters and traveling salesmen who spent the night there hiding from their wives, or on the road, traveling on the railroad in the days before everyone had a car, stopping over in Wantagh to try to sell their farm equipment or whatever and they slept in these little rooms we were exploring and they sat at this bar and complained about the commies or the hippies or the hordes of immigrants and their children burgeoning out of Brooklyn and Queens into this old farmland and fisherman’s stomping grounds, filling these thousands and thousands of tract homes popping up on the old potato farms, like mushrooms after a rain.
and we were completely unconscious of these old ghosts, as we cleverly formed an assembly line to haul the goods out of there as fast as we could before we got caught. I remember the debates on what we should take: “should we take the scotch or the canadian or the vodka? what’s the best kind? the four roses or the dewars? what about the creme de menthe?” and it wasn’t long before we had a whole pile, and we dashed across the parking lot to the old barn out back that was still intact and hid most of it there, and took the stuff from there back to the house one or two bottles at a time, and stashed them behind the bushes or buried them in the yard.
and we worked our way through that stuff for months, there was so much, we couldn’t handle it all, and we wound up even selling some of it to our friends. and therein lies many a tale, I’m sure, but for some reason I don’t really remember so clearly.
one episode I do remember, only vaguely, involved a fifth of scotch, that somehow you and I pretty much split, over water and ice.
I do not know how we got it down us or that we got sick. I do remember losing track of you, and thinking that somehow we were going to go to the beach on our bicycles. You made it as far as like Locust Avenue, and I went the other direction like a little drunken clown and crashed and passed out in the woods beside Wantagh Avenue.
When I came to, I got up and walked home, because I couldn’t find my bicycle. Sometime later I wandered back to the scene of the crime, and there it was, right where I had left it, crashed in the weeds.
Over the years, I’ve done a lot of dumb things like that. Its almost like a defining aspect of my personality. Some people think I’m smart or nice or have character or whatever, and some people think the opposite, I’m sure, but deep down, I’m really kind of a retard, or emotionally disturbed or something, and most of the time, I’m just covering. So, if over the years, any of these dumb things I’ve done have wound up causing you any pain, please know I’m really sorry, or I would be if I was even aware enough to know about it.
price and comp
but the way I recall it, we weren’t bad so much as we were just adventurous and dumb.
I remember one time we were coming back from the beach, it was just you and me, and I guess we took the bus back to Wantagh Avenue and Merrick Rd., and we were walking home from there.
It was a Sunday, and all the stores were closed. We turned off Merrick onto Wiloughby or whatever where there was this building supply place. Of course, closed like everything else. Their yard out back was filled with rolls of tarpaper and palettes of shingles and was protected by a chain link fence locked with a chain and padlock. There was enough play in the chain though that two scrawny kids could just squeeze in there between the gates.
Why? no reason. just to play. we played hide and seek in and around the piles of construction materials, and there was a palette of shingles backed up to the back wall of the brick building with a space so tight that no man could squeeze into. but you could. and there you were, hiding from me, when you found the door. “Hey, Andy! I found a door!” and it was unlocked.
Who could resist? so in we went, creeping as quietly as we could. We thought, maybe they have an alarm? Maybe there’s a security guard, or a dog?
But as we crept around the warehouse, there wasn’t a sound but our footsteps squeaking on the concrete floor.
Finally, we made our way to the little front office with a window facing out onto Merrick Rd, and a counter, and what today we’d call an old fashioned mechanical cash register. Back then it was just a cash register.
we crept behind the counter to avoid being seen, on the off chance that a cop was driving by, and noticed two little heads peeking up from behind the counter of a closed building supply store. still crouching, I reached up and hit the big return key on the old contraption. it opened with a rattle and a clang. still reaching up over our heads without looking, we felt around in the drawers to see what was in there.
it was kind of a stash. probably forty bucks and change, plus someone’s lucky silver dollar, I guess. we took it all. we were bad.
…
hollis
so it wasn’t long after this that we got the bright idea to spend some of that loot.
I don’t know how we came up with this idea, but we decided to cut school and buy train tickets into the city. wow. pretty bold, and adventurous. but for some reason we decided to buy one-way tickets. wow. pretty dumb.
I do not know what we were thinking. but again, being the older one, I really should be responsible for that bone headed manoever. then as now, I was kind of smart-dumb, oxymoron man. I was smart enough to figure, here we have x dollars, and the ticket costs so much, we just need to keep enough in reserve to buy a return ticket. ok, I guess, as far as it goes, but then you actually have to remember to keep enough in reserve when the time comes. but why not just buy the return ticket now? no reason.
but we rode the train in, and its really not that big a deal to see a couple of kids on the train on a school day, high school kids did it all the time, like John, going to Molloy in Jamaica, or whatever, but we probably did get a few raised eyebrows.
as I recall it, we were positive geniuses at being dopey. so we had it all planned out. we packed plain clothes into our school bags. I guess we were both still in St. Willies. How old could we have been? we changed and stashed our school bags in the woods, so we wouldn’t be wandering around in our school uniforms. (unbeknownst to us, we were spied right at the outset by Mrs. Galvin, I think, who called Mom, who spent the whole day frantic and worried.)
but she had no idea how worried she should be, because by that time, we were mingling with the pimps and hookers and drug dealers in Penn Station and were wandering up 7th avenue to Times Square. this was before it was cleaned up somewhat and made into a kind of New York tourist theme park or whatever the hell it is now. But back then it was a pretty damned funky place for two tweens from the suburbs with twenty eight bucks and change burning a hole in their pockets.
I remember some old hooker beckoning to us from a stairwell, “come on up, honey.” I actually considered it for a minute. “Sorry, I don’t think we could afford it,” I said. She just laughed. And we quickened our pace a little bit and got out of there. Seriously, how old could we have been? Eleven? Thirteen? Holy shit.
You’ll remember that one way or another we made it all the way to Columbus Circle, where the convention center stood back then. That was the day of the auto show.
I was completely entranced and hypnotized by the shiny cars and the pretty models showing them off, and I totally forgot to doublecheck our reserves when I bought us two tickets to the show.
So that was fun, but time was getting away from us, and we dashed back to Penn Station, I don’t know if we took the subway or what, but when we got there, and counted up our remaining loot, and looked at the price of the return ticket, the math did not compute. Dope! Much later in life, in a totally different context, I met a Texas Sherriff from “hang ’em high” Williamson County where I was serving on a Grand Jury. He said, in his inimitable Texas drawl, “some people say ‘crime doesn’t pay’. I say ‘crime just makes you stupid.’”
So once again we came up with a smart-dumb plan. The best we could do was buy subway tickets out to the end of the line as far as it would go, and studying the map, we found that would take us almost all the way to Nassau and onto familiar territory, where we’d have to hitchhike the rest of the way home.
Turned out the subway line we took came up a little short, and we popped up somewhere in Queens, in a town called Hollis.
We had no idea where the hell we were. So we started asking around, and we probably did seem a little odd, asking questions like “what town is this?” Or, “do you know where we are?” Even laughing at how stupid it sounded ourselves. But no matter who we asked, we got weirder and weirder responses. One old lady looked at us like we were some kind of little aliens. Or maybe she was on her afternoon break from the mental institution. Who knows. No one seemed to speak English. To this day, in my mind the town of Hollis represents a kind of warped twilight zone, a surreal place from another dimension.
Finally, we made our way to the Cross Island and caught a ride, I guess eventually we got someone to take us all the way to Wantagh, and we walked from there.
But by that time, it was already getting dark and we knew we were toast. So we made up some lame story. I remember we were clever enough to realize that we were going to be caught, so our story would be more credible if we “copped a plea to a lesser offence.” I think we used that exact phrase. What kind of nuts were we?
So we admitted that we had played hookie and claimed that we had been playing in the giant dirt piles from the construction down by Wantagh Park, and we claimed that we just lost track of the time. Yeah, we were that dumb.
Of course, they were pissed, and we were in deep trouble for skipping school, but our plan kind of worked, in a way, because they never expected what we had actually done, or where we got the money to do it.
…
I’ll leave a few pages blank here, not because I’m out of stories.. oh no.
as a token of stories the world is still not ready to hear,
in rememberence of old friends lost, some no longer here,
of the paths we’ve traveled my brother,
and adventures to seek tomorrow, and, God willing, together. -
break out of the box
I have found that sometimes people like to pigeon-hole you, to say that if you are able to function as an architect or technical manager or you can communicate well with partners or customers then you can’t be any good as a developer, or vice-versa. I personally think that is nonsense. At one time or another I have assumed all of these roles, and performed fairly well, thank you very much.
-
USA 193
I was near 30.231781,-97.864838 at about 1pm cst 2/13/2008. it was a nice day.
I was driving with my top down and hit a red light. I looked up. I saw a couple of vultures, way up there.
It was a long light. I sat through it twice. I kept looking around.
I was facing pretty much northward. I saw a jet leaving a contrail.
Over my right shoulder, to the southeast I guess, I saw a half moon.
The sun was on my left, pretty high in the sky.
I looked almost straight up, and saw a bright object tracking slowly northward.
It was perhaps as bright as venus in the morning.
But it was near midday. The object, whatever it was, was very high, and tracking so slowly I thought at first that it was stationary.
But then I began to discern movement.
I had seen the space shuttle and the space station with the naked eye before, and this object brought them to mind. I thought it must be in a low orbit. What the hell could it be.
Then today, I read about object USA 193, otherwise known as NRO L-21
It looked very much like this image: UAS 161, or maybe USA 129 although I can’t find a single image of 193 anywhere for some reason even the satellite trackers who have shots haven’t posted them.
Maybe because, evidently its some kind of failed spy satellite.
There’s a lot of speculation about the particulars, but what got me was the question was it possible that I could have seen it with the naked eye in broad daylight?
Still no answer for sure, but from looking at the orbit in this image or here we learn the orbital inclination of the satellite is 58.5 -
gandhi
Today, Jan 30 2008 marks the 60th anniversary of Mohandas K. Gandhi’s assassination, and I thought I’d take a few moments to reflect on his life and death, and those of a few others whom I know he influenced, and who suffered a similar fate.
Gandhi was, on the surface, a modest, self-effacing and not particularly impressive individual. But he was also a brilliant, creative and original thinker, a stubborn, and remarkably self-possessed person. He was a middle-class lawyer, educated in the UK. It was while on business in South Africa, when he experienced his epiphany.
The story is told that he was riding in a train, and the police came through and ordered him out of the second class car on the grounds that he was “colored.” He reflected later in life that he was disgusted by the treatment of blacks in South Africa, but he was willing to go through his life and his business trying not to think about the problems of others too much. He said at the time he actually thought of himself as “of the better sort”. As a lawyer, educated in London, as an Indian of a business caste, he thought he could expect at least middle class treatment. But this event and others from his time in South Africa forced him to confront the fact of the injustice of segregation face on, because the problem was no longer academic — it was suddenly a very real fact of life and affected him personally. That is actually something for us all to think about long and hard.
Upon his return to India in 1915, then, like South Africa, still under British colonial rule, he looked around himself and noticed with new eyes the division of races, and the essential unfairness of European imperialism and racism (to say nothing of the Hindu caste system, I suppose, both literally and metaphorically). It was around this time that he acquired the honorary title “Mahatma” that is, “Great Soul.” He always considered the title a burden and the responsibility weighed heavily on him.
Gandhi was a member of the Jain sect, which one might think of something like a fundamentalist Hindu.
Jains abstain from meat and alcohol, and have some other practices that might seem extreme, but are all based in the philosophy of respecting all life, including plant and animal life. For example, Jains have been known to sweep the streets before them as they walk in order to avoid accidentally stepping on a beetle and harming it.
Naturally, Jains are also strict pacifists.
So informed by his faith, Gandhi considered possible approaches to the seemingly invulnerable Raj, as British hegemony over India was called, which had lasted for something like 300 years. Preceded only by another 300 years of Moghul rule, and before that the subcontinent was essentially a collection of independent nations, alternately warring and starving, the Indians hadn’t ruled themselves, come to think of it, ever.
He finally concluded that the only way to defeat the British military rule was through the method of nonviolent civil action and peaceful resistance.
It was a truly revolutionary concept, without precedent in the modern world. It was unheard of, and could not possibly work.
Yet as we know now, it did.
But as Aldous Huxley said, in order to impose social order, governments will “make use of all the mind-manipulating techniques at their disposal and will not hesitate to reinforce these methods of non-rational persuasion by economic coercion and physical violence.”
Its easy now to canonize men like Gandhi and easy to forget how hard it was for them to accomplish what they did, what sacrifices they made, how profound the resistance to their movements were, how bitter the struggle became, how many lives were lost, and how when really challenged, our supposed “civil” government reveals a very ugly face.
In the end Gandhi was successful and India achieved independence. But shortly afterward, he was assassinated, for reasons that are not clear. Tragic.
These thoughts were in my mind already as I have recently gone back to listening through my collection of Martin Luther King sermons. King was very strongly influenced by Gandhi, and was likewise a deeply religious man. Although their religions seem on the surface utterly alien from one another, philosophically, King’s interpretation of Jesus’ teaching is not at all far from Gandhi’s interpretation of Hinduism. King said, “hate transforms the hater into a distorted personality, and to the hater beautiful is ugly and ugly is beautiful. No, it is only by loving our enemies, by sending the transforming power of love out into the world, that we can truly change it.”
I listen to those words once again in the car on my way to work this morning, and some forty years after they were uttered, I find myself moved. Inspired. But also saddened, when I think about the world we live in today, and what sort of force Martin Luther King might have been in American politics, indeed in world politics, if he had not also been tragically assassinated.
And I thought of how I read in a biography of J. Edgar Hoover, how he hated King, despised him as “the lowest sort of nigger” and much worse. How he refused to investigate allegations of lynchings and terrorism conducted by whites against the mostly peaceful civil rights protesters, and how he had a special team set up at the FBI whose sole task was to try to dig up dirt to destroy King “by any means necessary.”
And I think whatever faults he may have had, what a man he was, what character he had. How he said, “I have had that call at midnight, when my wife and children are sleeping in the other room, where the caller’s voice is thick with hatred, and he says ‘we’re tired of you and your mess. we’ll give you three days, and if you’re not out of this town, we’re going to come bomb your house.’” But he did not turn, he did not stop. They did in fact burn down his house at least once. But he survived. He prayed, he says, night and day, and took every step he could to protect his family. Well meaning friends tried to persuade him to let up, but he was not going to stop, because people were counting on him, and he had to see it through.
And I thought of others who had been assassinated over the past decades and other more recent events. People killed in the most vile, cowardly way, sometimes not only killed, but destroyed, falsely discredited, just for doing what they thought was right. All just because they stood up for what they believed in. And I thought there is no bound, there is no limit to what certain forces will do to destroy what they may perceive as a threat to the existing order.
And I was saddened, but also inspired, even encouraged to be just a little braver, if only for their sakes. We all need to have the courage to stand up for what we believe in, to think for ourselves, and act on our principles, no matter what. Its not only our right, its our most important responsibility as citizens in a democracy.
And its the least we can do to honor the memories of these brave souls.
