IDYLLOPUS PRESS IS A VALIANT LITTLE ROWBOAT

“Pinocchio, you’ve returned!” And here am I, the first decent morning I’ve had in a while, the whale’s mouth opening a crack. H.o.p. is running in to yell, “The garbage truck is here! The garbage truck is here!” Bang, boom, crash. He sits back down at the computer to draw some more of the marvelous pictures of robots he’s been sketching. And guess what he’s listening to over and over again. I know everyone out there in Progressiveland hates Lileks (I’m not blogging for Progressiveland however, I’m just blogging), and Lileks weirds me out as well and his politics–in fact I’ve thought of, in a sense, the Hanford paintings as being rather anti-Lileks, not him personally but that nostalgia for the 50’s, when the atom bomb ruled the earth (he leaves out that part). Anyway, Alicublog had a link to a Lileks post the other day, one he deplored, and I visited and returned for some reason today. I was thinking of the posts that Lileks wrote on the death of his mother, just like I’d thought of them–his mention of his mother’s hospital bed in the living room–when my father-in-law apologized for the hospital bed in his family room our last visit before he died. Anyway, I read his Bleat and because he mentioned his knowledge of the use of the theramin in “The Day the Earth Stood Still” and that it was in his podcast, I chose to listen to his podcast for a first time…

Which H.o.p. loved. He loved the theramin from “The Day the Earth Stood Still”. He wanted me to play it over and over. The podcast, which was mostly sci-fi music and commentary on it, ended (almost) with the movie theme from the 1996 movie, “Star Trek: First Contact”, which I don’t think I’ve even seen. Lots of horns. Something I wouldn’t usually like, I don’t believe, except it has vague touches of Ennio Morricone touching down in those horns and I love Ennio Morricone. I’m crazy about Morricone’s music. I need to get a CD to replace the tape I used to have of Morricone.

H.o.p. liked the music. He wanted to know what it was about. I said it was from Star Trek. He wanted to know what Star Trek was.

Oh m’god. H.o.p. doesn’t know what Star Trek is. I’m not a television sci-fi fan because I’m not a television fan and I just don’t care that much for television faces and stories. But I was raised on the original Star Trek and watched reruns of it throughout my twenties. For all its flaws and though a western vehicle shot into space, it was an important show. And H.o.p. didn’t know what Star Trek was. Knows Star Wars but not Star Trek. Damn.

Marty and I were talking before he headed out the door with our old vacuum cleaner (which is one of H.o.p.’s puppet friends and he didn’t want to see it go but we convinced it would be fine at the Singing Store where it might even be fixed, and he liked the idea of it being fixed). H.o.p. was playing the Lileks podcast over and over and over again, going from the theramin to the Star Trek music to the theramin. Marty left and I introduced H.o.p. to Star Trek through Dr. Spock, he liking the idea of aliens. H.o.p. gave me back my computer so I could finish the Hanford pic I have been working on. He wanted me to bring up the podcast on his computer. Which I did.

I finished working on the Hanford pic while Lileks had a “word from our sponsor” moment which was a 1950s Edsel commercial, and I was thinking about those plutonium radiated people at Hanford who had great faith in plutonium and thought they were protected from it, who went home and looked at ads for cars with rocketship tail lights and envisioned a future that was Cadillac Fantasia.

But H.o.p., who knows nothing of the 50s and the 60s and the 70s and the 80s and the 90s, kept going to the theramin and then the Star Trek music, appreciating it with his Today ears, and somewhere between the 10th and 20th listen it drew me in, and H.o.p. too, having given me some big hugs. I sat and looked at his intent self, listening to the Star Trek music, which has all the starry-eyed hope of “Once Upon a Time in the West” and nothing of the heart-busting pathos, for which reason it’s not at all of the same caliber, and it was suddenly a good morning. The Star Trek music had sucked me in, its broad, sailing, warm french horns (a good friend of mine is a french horn player), and for the first time in a long while I didn’t feel like the show ended gazillions of years ago when the universe splattered itself all over the cosmic kitchen floor, it’s all for naught, a Big Zero instead of a Magnificient Circle of Life, so what the fuck am I still doing here. Not a recent development, and something I plan on milking for all its worth with the new novel I’m working on, which has been incubating a while (old one up in the left hand corner there, one of the old ones at least). I felt happy. I was looking at H.o.p. and thinking this really is fine and I asked him for another hug.

I felt happy and didn’t know if I might have been still feeling miserable if H.o.p. and I hadn’t listened to the Lileks podcast and that felt odd.

I started making coffee and H.o.p. wanted a H.o.p. moment with me. He hugged and hugged me and had me sit with him on the bed so we could look at each other and talk. He was playing the Star Trek music again and talking about how much he loved it, that it made him think of robots and he told me all about the robot movie he’s going to make.

He suddenly said, “What’s the other world like?”

I said no one knows.

He said, “Is life like a field trip and death is home?”

I don’t talk about “It’s All For Naught, a Big Zero” around H.o.p. I talk about the Circle of Life. And this was a new one, the comparing death to “home” and life as an excursion. Where did he come up with that, I wondered, since, he has so struggled with the idea of death, doesn’t like it, doesn’t like to think about death. I thought how certainly many people think of life and death in that manner but I thought it best to expand it a little.

I said, well, I don’t know but that some people thought that. I said no matter what that he is life and that life of which he is made, that is everything he is, will live on, perhaps not as he understands it now, but it will live on.

This I know is so. Despite my own angst over the worthiness of personal ventures in the face of the great sea.

I heard my computer signing off after a Windows update and jumped up to try to catch it as I had unsaved material, but it was too late.

“Oh, it’s lost,” I said.

“Don’t worry. That’s the Circle of Life,” H.o.p. said brightly. “You haven’t lost it. Nothing’s lost.”

“Oh, really,” I said, pouring coffee.

Which was the wrap-up of “Unending Wonders of a Subatomic World in Search of The Great Penguin” (up there in the left corner).

As he gazed up at me, smiling, reassuring, I tried to remember if I’d phrased this sentiment in that way for him in the past. I wasn’t sure that I had. Maybe. Maybe not. It’s funny what he picks up and keeps and what he tosses. Because he tosses a lot. He’s his own person. Which is what the nickname, H.o.p., stands for. “His Own Person.” Which I want him to be and he certainly is because we have profoundly different opinions and thoughts on things. He’s not a “yes” kid. He’s not an “Oh, you like that, then I like that too” kid.

“You know, that’s the Circle of Life,” he said, smiling. “You lose something and you find it again later!”

A post worth reading. Arvin Hill’s “Minutemen? Klansmen” in which he talks about a protest, shows pictures, and mentions the assistance of the undervalued work of Jay Taber.

A book worth buying. Sex and War by Stan Goff. I haven’t read it yet, it’s not even out yet. But it’s worth buying. I will be.

Many years ago a guy showed up in our lives, a musician, had the art side of it all down cold, played in an Athens-Atlanta band but wasn’t really too much a part of the music scene, who hired my husband to engineer and produce some of his redos of Johnny Cash songs. He had concept and Marty implemented and filled it out.

Not-His-Real-Name was difficult to figure out. He was nice, polite and in some respects fairly reclusive, elusive and vague. Not that he didn’t spread himself around while he was around but it was in measured, small, well-manicured, contained doses. His intent was to give the read of a musician artist but he wasn’t working. Many musician artists are financed by family and usually in school. Not-His-Real-Name (hereafter given as NN) wasn’t in school and nothing was ever said about family. Not that musicians or musician artists living mainly on family funds go around talking about how their family is helping them. Slumming is popular. But there is a big difference between a working musician living on slim club earnings and a musician artist with family help slumming it. Posture slumming has the ability to be selective in its choices, is thus artsy slumming, and tends to be shocked and repulsed when it comes in contact with those who really do live on bean soup. Those who are posture slumming tend to be able to travel a lot. Like to Europe. They tend to be able to skip years of working on the road, living out of a van with bandmates. And if their clothes are Salvation Army vintage, their shoes and accouterments are likely to be selective, well-heeled gear. And they have the newest in little techno devices and toys. It is easy to tell a posture slummer, usually. And NN was a posture slummer who really, really wanted people to think he was anything but.

He drove a ratted out, rusting American car like an Olds.

“When he was pretending to be a person…”

We vaguely made friends with NN. Rather, NN. vaguely made friends with us. Which is how we became aware that he was importing and selling high end art, the kind of high end ar that is obscure and on a one-to-one basis. He would go to Europe and buy things. We became aware of this when we visited his supposed slumming apartment and saw the high end art packaged and crated, sitting around. Not the kind of thing NN would talk about. Indeed, he obviously didn’t want to talk about it. Push it off to the side as best as he could.

His apartment was the best posture slumming apartment I’d ever seen. A magnificent marble entry in the building with a long, semi-circular marble staircase. The place wasn’t pristine, but the parts that really mattered were. No black mold there. The floors in most of the rooms I saw nicely finished and the walls in most of the rooms nicely painted. Remarkable low clutter level. No clutter at all. No furniture at all. Not like a place where you live and happen to have no furniture because you can’t afford it. It was like a slumming show place. There was a new pink couch in the main room. That’s all. His girlfriend, more animated than he, was quite excited about the pink couch. You could tell it cost a nice slice of money. At least what I would have counted as a nice slice of money. A very scenic apartment. A perfectly theater apartment, which was appropriate.

His girlfriend thought they were real serious and he didn’t negate it. She was preparing to nest.

His girlfriend was interested in film. I had a hefty collection of Black Cat screenplays I’d collected. I loaned her my collection.

Then I didn’t hear back from the girlfriend.

I worried about my Black Cat collection of out-of-print screenplays. I called a couple of times but didn’t hear back. I’m not one to pester. I figure if I don’t hear back from you the second time then I never will and I cut my losses.

She called, eventually. NN had abruptly split up with her, which was why she’d been out of touch. She promised to get the books to me. She never did. Next thing I knew she was in Martha’s Vineyard doing something and I imagine my books went with her or ended up in some trash pile.

We hadn’t heard from NN in months and had pretty much forgotten about him. Then one day we got a mysterious call from NN. He was back in town. China had only recently opened for the tourist trade and he had been out touring China and other points unknown for several months. He wanted to meet with us and tell us something. Plus he had with him a woman he’d recently met, to whom he was engaged and planned to marry and wanted us to meet her.

We were living in a fairly respectable apartment building in Little Five Points. A librarian lived there and an actor and a computer guy and some Grateful Dead freaks who followed the band all over the nation all year long and a former keyboardist for Mother’s Finest lived across the hall from us at one point, and there was too the occasional crazy mother on bad drugs who would move in and rob apartments and terrorize everyone. They were small apartments, one bedrooms and studios. I’d painted ours in gorgeous colors and loved that aspect of it. Crammed into the living room was my desk and Target-type bookcases loaded with books and all of Marty’s music gear and in the corner was room for a small loveseat made of sponge and cardboard and covered with cloth. I was in painting mode and being a painter I will paint anything. That day I was painting the couch and it wasn’t working out. It wasn’t drying. I was painting the couch because it was long since ready for the trash pile and I was hoping for an extra couple of months of sitting on it. But it wasn’t to be and soon all we had for sitting were two canvas reclining lawn chairs that I’d painted, which were actually comfortable and looked great.

NN showed up with his girlfriend.

NN was driving a Porsche Targa.

His girlfriend was a blond Atlanta model he’d met in Milan. She was leaving the modeling profession for NN and was going to write a memoir for their prospective children. She was around 21 years of age.

It was a bizarre and very uncomfortable meeting. NN was basically coming clean with us because he liked us and counted us as friends. Not friends with whom you share your new-old-real phone number, not that close, but he wanted to tell us who he really was.

Which was the son of an absolutely filthy rich coal family in West Virginia. He’d basically been given time to go out and play before going back and learning the family business. And the time had come for him to leave the land of mortals and to reascend Olympus. For which reason he had been out touring Europe and China, and I guess looking for the mortal wife who was to have the lucky pleasure of ascending with him.

He talked about responsibility to the family when you’re on that level of…whatever.

NN wasn’t even his real name. He had been going by an assumed name.

He told us his real name, which I no longer remember.

He said he’d really enjoyed knowing us and wanted us to know all this because he was leaving and would not be back ever, blah blah, let’s shake hands and let’s not say anything about how I will not be giving you my phone number so please don’t be discourteous and ask for it because I will turn you down flat because I am frankly telling you that I will never have anything to do with you again as I am done with slumming and you were nice folks but good-bye, I’m now going back to West Virginia because of my responsibility to the family fortune and company, taking along with me my showcase blond who will fit better with the family than the old girlfriend who had dark hair and used to be a gnostic nun or something like that and had no chance of being my significant other but was fun while it lasted.

Well, y’know, I was kind of speechless. I was partly speechless because of the prospective wife, who was terrified of us. She looked like she’d never been out of the palace, except to be on the runway, and she eyed our little, clean, nicely painted but small cramped apartment like it was a leper’s room. She was dressed in bright white very expensive pants. Despite her eyeing everything in our place like it was from hell, she had the wisdom to start to sit down on the sofa I’d been painting. I was still holding the paint brush. I thought, well, considering how she had done nothing to conceal her horror of us, I could let her sit down and ruin a very expensive pair of pants. But I instead leaped forward and and said, oh, no, so sorry, I’m painting the sofa, wouldn’t want your pants to be ruined.

I for some reason felt like I was being very generous not letting her ruin her pants.

She went to stand by the door. It was time for them to leave, uhm, about three minutes after they’d arrived. She said that if we ever needed a car, her dad was a Rolls Royce/Jaguar dealer and he’d give us a good deal.

What the fuck kind of offer was that? I never could decide if she was that clueless, thinking anyone could afford a second hand Jaguar, or if it was her way of putting us down just a little further.

NN had bemoaned that once, during a dark art phase, he tossed his typewriter out the window, talking like he couldn’t replace it. And Marty had looked at the pseudo-slumming and the leather portfolio holding the art and the crated art and thought, “What?”

Marty had certainly not charged NN very much for his work.

NN had been one of us. Supposedly. Wanted us to believe it. Barely making it by. But not! We’d known, “But not!” Though not to what degree of “But not!” We’d figured everyone has their secrets, or at least their not so public lives. Halls with doors and some people open up a couple and some three and some keep you standing on the Welcome mat. One respects that.

I don’t know what was wrong with me at the time that I didn’t say, “What the hell’s wrong with you, you son-of-a-bitch?” But I didn’t. It just seemed to me another one of those , “Oh. Hmmm. Well, such is life,” happenings. Except in one regard. There is a cardinal if unspoken code in the musician world and it is this: You do not waste anyone’s time on projects with which you actually never intend to do anything. Now, you may not do anything with them, but you must believe that you might. And it is one of the basic gentle person’s agreements among musicians, an understood, and you simply don’t break it.

NN had.

During the latest coal mining disaster, I recollected NN, and I was wondering what had ever happened to him. I was wondering what mines his family had their hand in and if they had any connection to Sago. Perhaps not, but I was thinking of NN’s Returning To Mount Olympus speech and the relationship of the coal magnates with anyone on a lesser economic level, much less coal miners. When NN had made his speech, I had wondered if the care taken in hiding who he was had anything to do with some notion of filthy money that he might ve a little embarrassed about, what kind of agony his family might have perpetuated on the serfs and the earth. Or maybe they hadn’t. Maybe they looked upon their employees like parents considering the long-term care of dependent children, and treated them well, but I somehow doubt it. If, in order to enter the world of mortals you must take an alias, then you must live on a very small island of the privileged.

Twenty years is a long time and it’s been twenty years since we’ve seen NN I’ve wondered how he might have changed and if he looks upon his alias days with some trace embarrassment or if the level of exclusivity has been amped.

What’s really freaking peculiar is that the fairly anonymous name that NN. went by, if you do a Google search for it (he did play on the occasion with one band here and I was wondering if they were internet archive worthy) nets zero results. Imagine that. Absolutely zero results. And it was a pretty anonymous name. A Me andMr. Jones kind of anonymous.

Ah, the travails and uncertainties of homeschooling. This chapter I’m naming “Alice in Wonderland” science.

We’re listening to “Carmina Burana” this morning, an old favorite of H.o.p.’s, because it was used in a video at a website on the “4th Revolt”, which I came across via Pen Elayne. The idea over at the 4th Revolt is that biogeography shows the earth is expanding and used to be much smaller. I couldn’t possibly give you the rundown. Go read. Please. Neil Adams is the author and he states…

On December 1st, 2005, articles on both expanding Earth
theory and the ether theory appeared in mainstream science
texts — my paper in The Journal of Biogeography and the
ether view in Scientific American. The title of The Fourth
Revolt refers to the current broad-based scientific revolution
involving these two theories…

The appearance of these papers in two different journals
on the same day is notable for two reasons:
1) Both theories have struggled for acceptance since the
first half of the 20th century.
2) And the theories are intimately connected: The ether
sink view of gravity provides a natural mechanism for
planetary and lunar expansion.

I read and gave a profoundly distilled account to Marty on how the 4th Revolt states there was One Earth but there wasn’t this big ocean that the One Earth split up and went journeying all about willy-nilly, that instead of subduction and regurgitation the planet is expanding, something like that, in my layman’s ineffectual way of discernment, and his first question was on increase of mass and earth’s rotation. And if you go the 4th Revolt faq it’s briefly approached. And my first question and Marty’s second question was essentially, “Isn’t the expansion of planets and moons geophysically impossible and wouldn’t it violate conservation of mass?” and that too is answered in the faq with something about views consistent with ether-sink views of gravity, which I’ve not read up on yet.

Like it will make any difference to my beetle brain when I do!

Enter “Alice in Wonderland” science.

The thing is I well remember my days in science in the hallowed halls of public education and I would look at the map on the wall and I’d think, “The earth all fit together at one point, why doesn’t anyone talk about that?” Which was back in the ancient days when men were landing on the moon and no one did talk about that, at least not in schools I went to, and so I was very excited when I learned about Pangaea, a theory controversial into the ’60s, because it had been so damned obvious to me. And then there’s the time I circled on my science test the mutiple choice answer that the earth was pear-shaped rather than round. I was in 5th grade and stared at that, thinking for quite some time that my teacher could have been listening to Walter Conkrite tell me about the earth not being perfectly round but was kind of pear-shaped, or this could be a trick question where she wanted “round” as the answer. But I circled “pear” and got it wrong and when I explained to her why I circled “pear” she told me basically I was an idiot, that the books said round and that’s all that mattered was what the books said, and I decided that science in grade school was nothing but trick questions and that was that for me and science.

So, being the child who was staring at the map in the 60’s and thinking, “It’s so obvious, it all fits together like a puzzle,” but my elementary teachers were having nothing to do with that, I look at “The 4th Revolt” and think, “What do I know? Could be.” For which reason I sat briefly with my eight-year-old son this morning and told him a little about how some people think the earth is actually expanding.

When I read things such as “The 4th Revolt” I wish for some kind of easily accessible ongoing dialogue where I could recount more of the back and forth, “Could be! Can’t be!” to H.o.p. Hate the idea of H.o.p. being fed uneducated science because of an uneducated mom who looks at something and says, “Hell, could be! Let’s talk about this!”

“I’ve decided I’m going to make a movie about the day the aliens were alive,” H.o.p. is saying behind me. Which will let you know where he is mentally right now. Just right where an eight-year-old should be I guess.

On Saturday I was reading to him about how one of Saturn’s moons is geologically alive and spewing ice. Which I figured would entertain H.o.p. and did.

Right now he’s talking about Pluto being made of ice and the aliens living on it being frozen on it. He’s talking about an alien that has two heads and one head froze and the other head didn’t and the unfrozen head said, “Why did the chicken cross the road?”

No biogeographers are going to happen by my blog and give me tips on homeschooling H.o.p. on biogeography. I do know that. I’m one of the unwashed masses off whose tongue science latin doesn’t easily trip.

Anyway, not knowing big from small in “Alice in Wonderland’s” world, where things aren’t always what they seem to be, I tossed a few of the ideas of 4th Revolt at H.o.p. I played the video for him. He wanted to see it again and again, because of Carmina Burana. I told him to go put on his Carmina Burana CD as I didn’t want to have to keep skipping Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” which which the video opened and which he wasn’t interested in hearing.

“Please, can I look up aliens on Firefox which keeps you safe from viruses?” H.o.p. says. While we were all worried about IE and image viruses, I was trying to get H.o.p. interested in Firefox (which he wouldn’t use) but he insisted he couldn’t use it because of aesthetic reasons, he didn’t like the arrows. So I gave him stern warning then not to google images and go floating about the internet on IE. Now the patch is out but he in the meanwhile also absorbed that Firefox was a friend and wants to Google aliens on it.

I’m placing this in the “homeschool” category but pay no attention as .myategories so don’t work here. I categorize almost nothing. Except Hanford. I categorize that. And art.

Last night at around 3 AM I was looking at a photo of an Iraqi man holding up to the camera eye a dead baby in diapers. I always wake up a couple of hours after I go to sleep and I get up and drink some water and read a little or work a little and then try to go to sleep again and am up again in an hour or two, so I found myself looking at this picture and reading another article on Iraqi man accidentally killed by the troops and his body looted. I sat for a while staring at this and then went back to bed and was up in another couple of hours. And tonight I get up after a couple of hours and read the personal account of Ali Fadhil, how an American special task force busted up his home, took his recorded news dispatches, they hooded him and ferried him elsewhere and when in their elsewhere he was asked why he thought he was there. He said he thought it was to be interrogated and they replied, with a smile, that no it was all a mistake, mistaken address and released him from elsewhere to return to his home that had been in the supposed wrong place.

I looked up again the new sort-of no-torture bill that Bush signed and declared null and void with his “signing statement” that “The executive branch shall construe [the law] in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President…as Commander in Chief.”

And no I have nothing to write about any of this.

The road to where we are now started a long time ago. Emerson writing of the American Indian Removal of 1838 said, it was a “crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokees of a country; for how could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our Government, or the land that was cursed by their parting and dying imprecations our country, any more?”

That vision of the removal began with Thomas Jefferson.

A supposed free and compassionate society built on the extermination and removal of hundreds of indigenous nations? Well, that’s a queer sort of building of a supposed inclusive free society. Nor is it unknown that American opportunity and wealth was stolen, not a single treaty with American Indian nations honored, that pillaging transformed into some mythic story of the entrepreneurial frontier where anyone with will and a vision could build their fortune. People know it. People also also tend to talk about historical revisionism and that we can’t judge the past on today’s ethics.

Frederick Jackson Turner, a Wisconsin historian, wrote in his 1893 essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” that the continual confrontation of American (European) settlers with “savage” Indians, gave them,

that coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic, but powerful to effect great ends; that restless nervous energy, that dominant individualism and withal that buoyance and exuberance which comes with freedom…
Source: Margaret Walsh, “The American West, Visions and Revisions”

Walsh’s book notes that Turner’s views, profoundly popular, echoed by Theodore Roosevelt’s “The Winning of the West”, did eventually fall out of favor but were picked back up post WWII.

Though Turner’s western vision lost its pre-eminence among historians looking for explanations of the American past, it did not die. The thesis was resurrected or revised for another generation, not only of Americans, but also of industrial westernised societies. Following the Second World War the Americans again enjoyed another period of confidence, optimism and material wealth. They had triumphed during the war and their economy had not only recovered, but had surged to high levels of productivity. Once again exceptionalism became the flavour of the day. This time an historian with better professional credentials than Turner carried the frontier experience to both the academic world and the American people. Ray Allen Billington produced the textbook that Turner never wrote. “Westward Expansion”, first published in 1949, was a massive tome which grew larger with each edition until its latest abridged version in 2001 (Billington, R. A., 1949). This volume literally saw hundreds of thousands of readers and educated many hundreds of academics. Billington did not stop here. He was a prolific researcher and writer, producing at least fifteen ‘western’ books and/or pamphlets as well as numerous articles, which all helped to reinstate Turner’s reputation in the historical profession.

Regardless of modern skepticism that gives a nod to what isn’t just an appetizer of American history but the meat of it, those fuzzy ideas of American frontier virtues and American ethical, moral and intellectual superiority, tied up with Thomas Jefferson’s notions of grand frontiers swept clean of indigenous peoples, continue strong and proud and are the resounding qualifier at the end of, “yeah, it really was too bad, wasn’t it, but…”

But.

It does get tiresome reading and hearing about how far the mighty hath fallen. And I know it gets tiresome for those who write, “how far we have fallen”, to read the rejoiners of, “Not so far.” Like, what’s the purpose of someone pointing out, “Not so far” as in that’s past history, done with, we’re dealing with the now. Right?

And we are. But the “Yeah, it really was too bad, wasn’t it, but…” needs to go. As long as we keep talking how far we’ve fallen, there’s no clear emotional and intellectual acceptance of who we are, the fall being predicated with a golden past. “Ok, maybe not golden for all, but…”

No, there goes the “but” again. Not doing it for me. What’s happening now is not some new curve in the road. Now is not just built upon the past but built into it, emanating naturally from it.

Which is all I have to say on it tonight in my every so often “not so far” post. Except to return to Emerson’s question as to crimes that leave peoples without a country.

I think that is a pretty big question to pose, actually. That Americans possess no country.

I think too it was strongly on the minds of forebears. I remember the fear of the 60s, white America facing civil rights, fearing what African Americans would do if they got too much power. The fear of those with a slippery grip on country, worried that their fortunes and place would be claimed by those who did the break back slave labor.

I remember too Pine Ridge in the early 70s. I remember reading snippets of Pine Ridge in the papers. Remember hearing talk of it. And the fear. I remember the white American fear. Again, such a slippery grasp on “country”, to be so terrified of the idea of American Indian rights. But the fear in the 70s not going so far as to question what American Indian nations would do to the white Americans if they got too much power. No one was worrying about American Indian numbers, they’d been so confidently reduced. Just worried about the rage. And if that rage escaped the reservation.

For years I’ve wondered and thought about the substitution of free capital goods for culture in America. Which I think was really first officially acknowledged when post 9-11 Bush said to get back out to the malls immediately. Get back out and shop, he said. On the European side of my heritage I’ve thought in terms of people uprooted from foreign homes, who kept leaving community and family and pressing west, west. On the American Indian side of my heritage I’ve thought in terms of people deprived of home and forced to abandon culture.

It was a huge question that Emerson posed in 1838, the idea that Americans had deprived themselves of country, through the Great Removal.

It’s something to meditate upon. The myth of golden America being instead a land of countryless people. Were without country. Still are without country.

Deprived themselves of country with every broken treaty.

(Excerpted from Unending Wonders of a Subatomic World in Search of the Great Penguin )

If what Faith and Chance could not comprehend they could not imagine they could not possibly themselves discover then the field of New Physics was no place for them; and outside the study of the subatomic (well, there is no outside the subatomic, for if you are studying anything supra-atomic then it embodies a grand amount of subatomic), as far as they were aware, most everything there was to be discovered was already patented. Everything Faith and Chance knew had already been rolled out from under a rock and elaborated upon by someone other else they wouldn’t have known about it. Galileo had gravity, Newton got the apple and the marksmanship prize, Madame Curie snapped up radium; the French had done revolution to death. Forks, candles, furniture, taxation, electricity, clothing, sleeping, soap, hairless cats, ad infinitum, if Faith and Chance knew about it then someone else had known before hand. Nor were Faith and Chance likely to find new uses for old discoveries, or at least put old discoveries to use in any novel way that might be noticeable, as in the ground upon which man sat being replaced by a stone or a log, becoming a stone that was carved, becoming a log that was cut up and put together with little logs, becoming Pennsylvania Dutch style, then foldable and eventually an E-Z Boy recliner. Nothing new under the sun except for mutations.

A taste for fame has meant success or infamy via novel interpretations, hence people looked for crispier, spicier chicken crusts or no chicken crusts and found them and sold them and became rich because people enjoy a taste of fame even if they can only eat and not make it without the secret recipe.

Though Bigger! and Better! immediately and magically conjures consumers, a broadening of variety can be a hard sell for those who like their tried and true. There will always be recalcitrant pockets of individuals who for one reason or another must be convinced that shorts that don’t reach the fingertips in length are now part of god’s plan for your life. Which doesn’t mean they will be in agreement with those who don’t want mutant transgenic goat-spiders living down the road, or tomato-fish in their salads, who get pissed about mutant crops. Humans are kind of funny that way when it comes to distinguishing what’s sacred and inviolate. Natural instinctual response to the bioengineering of a goat-spider will likely be, “If god had wanted goat-spiders to exist, god would have made them!” Add in a few dollar signs, spider-goat materializing a greater variety of shelf goods that are (key word) cheaper, and, “God didn’t do it so it shouldn’t be done,” becomes, “If god had not intended for goats to be crossed with spiders, then god would never have made the option available in the grand scheme. Where’s my goat-spider silk?” Especially if a picture of a happy goat-spider is thrown into the mix. “See, we’ve done it already and they’re cute as a button!”

“Where are my Ding Dongs?” says Faith.

There, there, there is where is most certainly the bonding agent for the vast majority of American Homo typicalis today, yesterday and tomorrow. “They can have my Wal-Mart, my Dollar Store credit card, my freedom to purchase, when they pry it from my cold dead hands.” More and more multiples and mutations of more! What the brain can conceive is our duty to achieve. Long let freedom ring!

“Where are my Ding Dongs?” sayeth Faith.

“By the way things look, as well as the way they perform, our homes acquire new grace, new glamour, new accommodations, expressing not only the American love of beauty but also the basic freedom of the American people, which is the freedom of individual choice.” So speaks the Jam Handy Organization for General Motors, Chevrolet division, in the Eisenhower-era industrial film “American Look,” boldly acknowledging the strong family position of Democracy’s brother, Consumerism. No limits! Give us no limits or give us death! That’s the kind of freedom of choice I like. Yes, my freedom stops where the end of your nose starts so we’re moving the end of your nose way over there because we’ve determined it’s dangerous to my freedom as a consumer.

America the Beautiful, god shed thy grace on thee, from sea to shining sea, you there in the path of the fast lane get out of my way, we’re moving your teepees to the reserve, goddamn Indians a threat to the American way of life, get that, George Washington’s way of life (What do I think about Indians? Reflects George Washington, “little different than wolves, both being beasts of prey, tho’ they differ in shape…”), Thomas Jefferson’s way of life (What do I think about Indians? Reflects Thomas Jefferson, “pursue them to extinction…”), Hitler (What did he think about Indians? Reflects John Toland in his book on Hitler, that Adolph’s “concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild west; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination–by starvation and uneven combat–of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.”)

“Aw, come on, enough already. What do Indians have to do with anything?”

Progress coming through! Make way for the American Dream! “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children…(the Sioux must)…feel the superior power of the Government,” writes Sherman, in 1866, to the commanding general of the federal army, Ulysses. S. Grant, vowing to remain in the west until the Indians are all killed or taken to a country where they can be watched. No distinction made between men, women and children, Sherman tells his troops that during assaults they, as soldiers, are not to “pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age.” In 1867 Sherman refers to this policy, in another letter to Grant, as “the final solution to the Indian problem.” Final Solution, a phrase Hitler borrows, which became Enloesung in German.

“Excuse me, isn’t that a trifle extreme to equate Hitler’s Final Solution to America’s treatment of the Indian Problem?”

Maybe. Let’s ask Mr. Blue here what he thinks. Mr. Blue, were American colonialists to the First Nations what Hitler was to anyone who didn’t agree with him?

“Certainly not. We’re good and Hitler was bad. Though I do have to say he was a really get-things-done kind of guy and you’ve got to admire that!”

Mr. Blue, do you believe in Colonialist Capitalism strongly enough that you are willing to say, Give me no limits or give me death?

“Well, how about give me no limits or I have way more than enough money and pull and government in my pocket to blast you out of the water if you get in my way.”

Dance onto the cartoon screen the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution and Bill of Rights to complain, “Hey, why you pickin’ on me?”

Because, man, if you don’t mean what you say, have the decency at least not to write it down.

WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness…

Got that? OK continue.

That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.

“Yeah? So? Thomas Jefferson and George Washington were men of their time, who can fault them for that? Didn’t they help craft an ideal that has attained righteous implementation today?”

The United Nations in Dec. 1948 defines genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, and includes five types of criminal actions: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

“Yeah, so? What’s past is past. America doesn’t have a genocidal policy in this enlightened age–which we all owe to our venerable ancestors, by the way.”

Ho-Ho.

No, no, not laughing. Ho-Hos are a product. Ding Dongs are a product. Twinkies are a product. War is a product. Each must be sold.

For which reason there came to be advertising.

And who-whoo! what film and television, the great moving picture show and the small screen in the home didn’t do for the business of modern advertising.

The date is March 22, 1935. Time of the Spring Equinox. Winter is over. Birds are chirping. Bees prepare to buzz. “Now, in this hour, broadcasting is called upon to plant the image of the Fuhrer indelibly in all German Hearts,” announces Eugen Hadamovsky, Reich director of broadcasting, speaking of a leader who was a former commercial artist for anti-perspirant, who showed that a sound sales plan and advertising campaign were synonymous with successful politics, and that to make war the only possible option for a public was to convince that public that the other party had threatened the mother or fatherland, one’s country, the style of life that supposed freedom of choice bestowed upon one as a privileged child of that institution, and call dissenters unpatriotic.

The formula is simple. Create a problem by creating a solution to that problem which will empower the consumer with implementation and enact resolution. Such is advertising. Such is politics. Such is the reason a plain chocolate bar is a problem to be resolved by a chocolate bar with almonds.

Thus can the war against germs in all their forms, germs that threaten a way of life, of freedom of choice, ask the homo sapien for continued participation in and confidence in the consumer game. Go out and buy, buy, buy, please in your fight against germs. As a patriot. Where the basic freedom of the people is the freedom to purchase, to make the choice between the plain chocolate and the fancy, choice between cars that demand gas gas and more gas and an electric tram ticket. Unless Ford decides the electric trolleys will keep the car market down, purchases them all and dismantles them.

Yes the war is one of freedom against fear. The fear is fear of loss. It is the threat of losing past love or possible love which is to threaten one’s life because of father, mother, god, girlfriend, or the taxi driver recognizing one is a failure because one’s teeth aren’t white—so, buy a better toothpaste, build a better bomb (which, was it pointed out, cost beaucoups bucks and puts lots of money in someone’s pocket, this whole business of killing, which in a way makes sense for it seems only right that a single human life ought to cost beaucoups worth of bomb bucks), take a new anti-depressant, vanquish fear, purchase love.

H.o.p. carries his huge stack of drawing paper from the living room to his computer table. He drops part of it. “Stupid gravity!” he exclaims. “I hate gravity!”

He frequently complains about gravity and says he wishes it didn’t exist.

I did not complain about gravity when I was his age.

Sitting on the desk in front of me is my new power supply cord for my scanner which quit working suddenly at the beginning of January. I’ve not tried it out yet to see if it’s the power supply that’s the problem. I don’t want to find out if it’s not. And I’m deep in a project right now where I am pretty much eating, breathing, sleeping it and the scanner is not at this moment essential to my life. Thus the power cord sits upon the desk, still wrapped up.

This has been a water month for us. Walked in the bathroom early yesterday to realize it was flooding. I kept mopping and sopping up with towels and it kept flooding. But from where? Seemed almost as if it was pouring up from beneath the floor. But how? We called the landlord. He drove into town and looked and went and got dressed for work and got George to come in and help him. They spent all afternoon figuring out the problem. Took out the wall behind the sink which has been a nearly nondraining sink since we moved in and was like that a while before we moved in. Whoa, what a smell. A joint to a pipe had corroded out and water apparently had been dumping back there. They fixed, applied bleach, dried it out, sealed back up. Now the sink drains and it looks like (hopefully) that may have been the problem as the bathroom floor is still dry today.

No stories here because I’m writing and rewriting. But I heard some great stories yesterday from the landlord who says he lives in Green Acres.

See why I’m not posting? I’m wringing my brain out daily and there’s nothing left to put here.

The line that most stood out in H.o.p.’s stream-of-consciousness story last night (I get at least an hour of stories like this a day). He blends his stories with actions he is making. I was washing dishes. He came in and got yogurt from the refrigerator, in the middle of the relation of a Space Ghost story he’d been making up:

And Space Ghost said, “This is Miles Davis, a blob of yogurt.”

And as he ate his yogurt, Miles Davis was mocked by Zorak.

Miles Davis was one of H.o.p.’s earliest favorite musicians. Listened to him ’round the clock when he was two. But he hasn’t listened to him in a year or so.

Frightening. He has my brain.

H.o.p. was mortified when he learned that drone bees are kicked out of the hive to die. In tonight’s story-play-game he is a drone bee who has made himself useful by making a map of the hive (so bees can find their way to the nursery etc.) and protecting the hive from intruders. He is certain that having made himself useful in this way, he won’t be kicked out. He’s going all around telling me about the layout of the hive, about the different parts of it, including the kitchen where the royal jelly is made.

He brought this up last night when he went to bed. “Drone bees are kicked out of the hive to die.”

“Yes.”

“What am I going to do when I’m kicked out of the hive to die?”

“You’re not a drone bee. You’re not going to be kicked out of a hive to die.”

“Oh right! I’m so glad I’m not a drone bee. But why do they kick the drones out to die?”

“Nature made them that way. Feels kind of sad, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah!”

“To us, but maybe not to bees. I don’t know how a bee feels about it. A drone bee may feel it’s perfectly natural.”

Right now he’s taking extra cells from the hive and using them as buckets to go down to the river and get water to bring back ffor the baby bees. He’s come back to the hive and he’s closing the door so the baby bees won’t fly out on their own and get hurt. Now he’s asking me if I’m hungry, having decided I’m the queen bee, and he’s bringing me royal jelly the worker bees have made.

He’s talking about how the child bees need to be told to enjoy their childhood so that they will appreciate it while they’re children and that way they’ll enjoy being adults when they’re adults.

He did a marvelous recording at the studio this weekend. He told a story and did all his own sound effects and sang his own background track. He isn’t interested in learning an instument yet but he makes music in his head for all his stories. He rehearses the story and rehearses the music separately. I was really impressed with the recording. He sounded so confidant and self-assured, going by this internal clock that had the timing of his story just so.

Anyway, now it is winter (he checked the temp) and it’s time for the bees to pack their hive and migrate. I tell him bees stay in the hive in the winter, in clusters. “Not according to the rules of our game,” he says, “this is just a game.” Everything is packed and we move, the worker bees carrying us to a far off land and while they move us we enjoy relaxing in the hive and H.o.p. talks about how comfortable it is..

“I like the peace and quiet. No bears growling…”

He guides the worker bees to a warm island where we land and we are the same size as humans here.

“Yahoo! Nobody will step on us!”

Then he asks the inhabitants, “Are we bigger, or are you the same size as bees?”

Oh good, the island has turned out to have a toy store which is good as there are children bees in the hive. Does the island have flowers that make pollen? It does and that’s good of course. Are there mosquitoes here? No, and that’s good as they’re the villains. It’s a great place, this island.

Oh, no, the mosquitoes are on their way here. Gotta go.

I’m wondering tonight about idiosyncratic skills people pick up naturally and what might belong or have belonged to some individuals reading.

The second place Marty and I lived after we were married was a second floor in a house that had a screened porch. We had no air conditioning of course, the house was ancient in the downtown residential area that was at that point dead. The screened porch looked over the old broad street split with a median and during the warm months I wrote and we ate on the front porch. And a strange thing happened. Somehow, without giving any thought to it at all, within a couple of months I suddenly realized I was able to identify almost any car by its headlights and tail lights, but in particular its tail lights. I’ve no idea how it happened. Later, when we were on the road, I’d entertain the band with this skill which even to me was a trifle bizarre, that I didn’t know anything about cars but I could tell from a distance, by the lights, what one was. This was in the late 70s and by the early 80s all the cars on the road were Japanese and my talent was lost. But it was an entertaining skill while I had it, and was amusing way to pass time on the road. People would at first bet I could only identify a few and then would stop betting because I somehow knew what every car was. There may be a number of other people who could do this with American cars but we happened not to know any and others were always amused. But then one is easily amused on the road.

One of those things that comes up during a long night of band driving from town to town.

Long silence.
Marty: Hey, guys, watch this. This is too weird.
Someone: What.
Marty (pointing out distant head lights on the horizon): Jules, what kind of car is that?
Me: Such-and-such.
Car draws near and passes.
Someone: Wow, how’d you know that?
Me: The headlights.
(And eventually.)
Me: I don’t know what that one is. It’s Japanese.

Made for a good half hour of entertainment. If we were slightly stoned it was a wee bit more fun. Dissolving into helpless tears of laughter thing after about five minutes.

Someone: Hahahaha! What’s that car!
Me: Hahahaha! It’s a such-and-such!
(Car passes.)
Someone: Hahahahaha! You’re right! Hahahaahaha!
Me: Hahahahahaha!
Someone: Hahahaha! What’s that car!
Me: Hahahaha! It’s a such-and-such!
(Car passes.)
Someone: Hahahahaha! Wow! Too freaking weird! How the fuck do you do that? Hahahaha!
Me: Hahahahaha! I don’t know!
Me and someone: Hahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(And eventually.)
Me: Hahahahaha! I don’t know what that one is, it’s Japanese!
Me and someone: HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What’s more weird is I wouldn’t even be able to describe what was different about the head lights and tail lights, the knowledge was that dissociated from conscious realm. I had to see the lights to know the car, but get it out of sight and if you asked me what kind of head lights or tail lights different cars had, I couldn’t begin to tell you.

I was reminded of that last night after reading Stone Bridge’s post on his first attempts at identifying water birds and, after some study in the field guide, embarrassing himself by believing a domestic duck was a marvelous snow goose.

Well, we will call the landlord again tomorrow with the news that it is very nice our sink now drains but that tearing out that part of the wall and replacing a corroded joint did not fix the flooding. Because the bathroom flooded again today and this time I was able to catch it in several stages of its flooding, rather than coming in and finding the bathroom a pool. Apparently a pipe under the concrete floor is broken. There’s a couple of feet section between the bathtub and sink where obviously the ancient tiles were once removed and relaid in an uneven pouring of concrete. The landlord remarked on this when he was here last Sunday, hoping that wasn’t the problem, phrasing it that you could see where it looked like they’d worked on the pipes down there sometime before, which means it was over thirty years ago as our landlord has been landlord of this building since the 70s.

Anyway, a problem we had last Sunday was pinpointing exactly from where the water was coming. I said that the way it was acting was like it was coming up through the floor and the landlord decided it was perhaps from inside the wall and excavated and replaced the corroded joint that was causing the sink not to drain and was indeed dumping water back there as the area was wet.

But there is another source. I walked in the bathroom today and found that the bathroom mat in front of the sink was soaked through again. There was no water anywhere around it and none between the bathtub and the sink, in that area where the floor had in the past been removed and relaid. So I removed the bathroom mat and started coming back every ten minutes to check the floor out. Eventually then the area between the sink and bathtub began to flood, and the water is obviously coming up through the concrete and tile. I would soak it up and watch it promptly repool up through the floor. And then I returned to find later a small amount of water had appeared on the tiles in front of the bathtub where the floor has never been removed. So, from where the sink begins to the back of the bathroom, a good portion of the bathroom floor has become a spring and the water is coming up through the old tile and concrete. There is no one small spot where the water is coming up through the floor. It is coming up through the tiles in different areas over a space of a number of feet. It is soaking up through the floor in front of the sink. It is pooling up in the area between the tub and sink. It is soaking up through the tile in front of the bathtub. It is also obviously pooling up from under the sink cabinet. Where the cabinet (vintage 50s) sits on the floor there are two places where the tile is chipped out and the water is pooling up in those as well and flooding out. There’s no one source with the tiles acting as little beds that the water flows into. No, the water is coming up through the floor in all these different places.

I am not looking forward to having half of the bathroom floor ripped out, the sink taken out. And that’s what I guess is going to come next. And not a linoleum over wood floor. Nothing so simple. An ancient tile in concrete floor. They will come in I guess with things like big hammers and bust up the floor. It will be a foul mess. I am wondering how long this will take. I am wondering what our bathroom floor will look like afterwards. I will be allergic to all of it because I’m allergic to dust and mildew and mold and everything.

Sigh.

At least today I was able to watch the process and see what’s going on and it was no small satisfaction to not just walk in after the flood but to be able to catch it from the beginning and watch as it began pooling up here and there through the cement and tile, swab it up and sit and watch it continue to pool up.

Early evening I had a nap and dreamt that I was checking an old pipe that leads from the old rounded porcelain tub to the wall and that it was springing leaks everywhere (nonexistent as the tub has two pipes that go down into the floor). Too bad it’s not that simple. But I felt the same satisfaction in the dream, that I’d finally caught the pipe when it was leaking instead of after.

Pretend we are PBS. Installments on the state of the bathroom are sure to follow.