Saturday, December 26, 2009
Terrifying realities
It must be frightening to live in a world where you are positive there are no muffin cups and baking muffins in one of those things you love to do.... And in the store your hair-brained ditzy daughter says "but we have several boxes at home." And you say, "No, we don't have any, I know what I am doing! You can be sure of that!" And you get home with the new box of muffin cups, and when you go to put it away, you open the cabinet door and lo -- there are three unopened boxes. That must scare a person right down to their slippers. Enough to push all four boxes behind the olive oil spray and close the cabinet door and never mention it again. At least until the next time you think there are none.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Of Annual parties and dumpster relations
Today I am asking questions about friendship. This is the season where a certain sort of party-giving person might give a party and invite their friends.
I have never been much of a party person. I have days when I can work a party room like an insurance salesman- charming even strangers, cajoling and connecting. Other days I sit in the corner nursing coffee or alcohol without saying anything unless directly spoken to.... I think this is a fairly common failing.
In advance of a party where I don't know anyone but the host, or where I haven't seen or spoken with anyone there since last year's party - I work up a great deal of dread. Over the years in a changing life, one can accumulate annual parties where your only existing connection with the other party-goers is a memory of a past connect that may be decades old. You don't know them anymore and they don't know you - but someone keeps inviting you for old times sake, or for the sake of a memory of friendship past.
But you can't recreate a friendship that has died with party small talk. There isn't time in a half a minute of conversation to catch someone up on the nuances of a year of your life or to understand their life in return and when those un-communicated nuances pile up over decades between people - what you have is no longer a friend. What you have is an acquaintance.
Then there is the question of what is a friend. That's not as simple a question as the teenagers think it is. I am not talking about having 2000 "friends" on YouTube or Facebook. That's a study in volume not nuance.
Then there are folks who use you as an emotional dumpster. For instance, if someone calls you up over 18 years only when they need to vent about their boyfriend, spouse or children misbehaving - is this a friendship? If you call me up and invite me to watch you clean your house, (yes I actually have had two different women do this repeatedly), and a part of the conversation is the various fun things you have done with other folks you know, (usually couples you and your husband know) and you wonder why I don't call you - well enough said about that. If you call me up indignant that I have not stopped by in ages - and you don't even know where I live, despite the fact I have invited you over.... well, I have philosophical enemies who know me much better than that and who are a lot more fun.
If you have never read my blog - if you don't even know I have a blog -- are you my friend? Since I am a writer, can you really know me? I am a a charming performer, but when I am no longer on, I am really rather a recluse.
Then what kind of friend am I? I rarely call anyone. I am a recluse. I am, at this late age, no longer interested in talking about how I FEEL. I have learned its what you do that really counts. And what do I do? I forget people's birthdays, often fail to appear at parties, abruptly stop returning phone calls. Often I have my reasons. If you want to know why, ask.
I suspect I will spend my elder years in a tiny eldercare apartment, playing bingo in badly decorated dayroom with people who can't remember my name and I won't be able to remember theirs either. And then friendship will be like skating - moving smoothly through a bingo game with a wry nod and a smile, living in the present moment, until tea or the next meal or bedtime.
I am not sure what I mean by any of this....
I have never been much of a party person. I have days when I can work a party room like an insurance salesman- charming even strangers, cajoling and connecting. Other days I sit in the corner nursing coffee or alcohol without saying anything unless directly spoken to.... I think this is a fairly common failing.
In advance of a party where I don't know anyone but the host, or where I haven't seen or spoken with anyone there since last year's party - I work up a great deal of dread. Over the years in a changing life, one can accumulate annual parties where your only existing connection with the other party-goers is a memory of a past connect that may be decades old. You don't know them anymore and they don't know you - but someone keeps inviting you for old times sake, or for the sake of a memory of friendship past.
But you can't recreate a friendship that has died with party small talk. There isn't time in a half a minute of conversation to catch someone up on the nuances of a year of your life or to understand their life in return and when those un-communicated nuances pile up over decades between people - what you have is no longer a friend. What you have is an acquaintance.
Then there is the question of what is a friend. That's not as simple a question as the teenagers think it is. I am not talking about having 2000 "friends" on YouTube or Facebook. That's a study in volume not nuance.
Then there are folks who use you as an emotional dumpster. For instance, if someone calls you up over 18 years only when they need to vent about their boyfriend, spouse or children misbehaving - is this a friendship? If you call me up and invite me to watch you clean your house, (yes I actually have had two different women do this repeatedly), and a part of the conversation is the various fun things you have done with other folks you know, (usually couples you and your husband know) and you wonder why I don't call you - well enough said about that. If you call me up indignant that I have not stopped by in ages - and you don't even know where I live, despite the fact I have invited you over.... well, I have philosophical enemies who know me much better than that and who are a lot more fun.
If you have never read my blog - if you don't even know I have a blog -- are you my friend? Since I am a writer, can you really know me? I am a a charming performer, but when I am no longer on, I am really rather a recluse.
Then what kind of friend am I? I rarely call anyone. I am a recluse. I am, at this late age, no longer interested in talking about how I FEEL. I have learned its what you do that really counts. And what do I do? I forget people's birthdays, often fail to appear at parties, abruptly stop returning phone calls. Often I have my reasons. If you want to know why, ask.
I suspect I will spend my elder years in a tiny eldercare apartment, playing bingo in badly decorated dayroom with people who can't remember my name and I won't be able to remember theirs either. And then friendship will be like skating - moving smoothly through a bingo game with a wry nod and a smile, living in the present moment, until tea or the next meal or bedtime.
I am not sure what I mean by any of this....
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
10 AM poetry reading not too early for Doris Henderson fans!
When I heard Doris Henderson was giving a reading from her new full length poetry book called "What Gets Lost," at the Danbury Library, I was excited. I am a big fan of poetry of the surreal, and poetry with a sense of humor and Doris hits the mark on both counts. When I heard it was a 10 AM reading on a Saturday, starting just as the library opened its doors, I wondered if the usual suspects would manage to be up and out of the house that early on a Saturday. I made sure to arrive early and sat down with poet Bob Taylor in the front row, didn't look behind me until later.
At the end, there were questions. Someone wondered where she got her ideas. Doris mentioned that she kept a notebook where she wrote for at least ten minutes every day, sometimes much longer. The writing was a completely unedited "free write" of whatever comes to mind. She said that later, sometimes a long time later, she would go back and find in those writings, the start of a poem.... Hmmm might have to try that!
Friday, December 11, 2009
POEM: The Matrix of all (from Inverse Origami)
The Matrix of All rumbles at critical mass,
a macro-synaptic storm
in cascade
in perpetual toss
Opposed and opposing:
heads-tails
crest-trough
light-dark
alph-nul
the perception of water and thirst
a macro-synaptic storm
in cascade
in perpetual toss
Opposed and opposing:
heads-tails
crest-trough
light-dark
alph-nul
the perception of water and thirst
Standards, formats, codes - how do new solutions arise..
this is a column I wrote for a newspaper in another state (it's long since closed), appeared in a 1990 edition of that paper. The editor then used to yell out that he had a hole on the editorial page, how large the hole was and how much time I had to write a column to fill it.. What a rush...
Drive anywhere in the continental United States and the radio jingles sound just like the ones at home. It's the same with building codes.
"What? Who's building radio codes? The Government?" asks my Uncle Henry who has placed the 20-odd parts of an old electric fan motor on a clean cardboard on the floor in front of him. They're arranged in meticulous arching rows, like a movie audience with Henry perched on a concrete block in the middle, all knees and elbows pointing a square can of three-in-oil at them like a gun.
"The government gets into everything these days, except balancing its budget," he says, polishing a bearing ring on his green coveralls, and re-adjusting his orange cap askew.
Radio jingles are kind of like building codes, I repeat. Henry squints at me quizzically.
I tell him it's the format. Format radio: they only place certain songs over and over again -- only cuts from proven hit-makers. The station guarantees the play list; the advertisers guarantee the money. They buy their little jingles on tap -- same notes different call letters all over the country.
The only problem is that new or off-beat music doesn't get played because it doesn't fit the format. It's only heard on college stations or on PBS or maybe on WMWV which has its own tossed salad format. (Or did back in 1990)
"Uncle Henry," I say, "Did you ever stop and consider that tucked away inside walls all over the country, are two-by-four studs, and they're all exactly the same distance apart wherever you go?"
My uncle scratches his chin, looking gravely concerned. He's not one for offbeat music, but he read this statement about two-by-fours to me out of a newspaper a while back, and he considers it his side of the argument.
One of his favorite themes is how the government, the world at large and TV in particular are trying to make us all the same. Not in a big way, but by tellings us what to do in a million little ways -- sneaky-like, they conspire to drain that spark of creativity right out of us.
I guess I 've been listening to Uncle Henry too long. Yes, there's plenty to be said for standardization, cheap goods, mix and match replacement parts. It makes things easier and often safer. There's even the comfit of that familiar jingle 1,000 miles from homes.
But when one way of doing things becomes an accepted standardm or even worse, a legal code, what happens to innovators? Innovators are a valuable natural resource, like lake shores or national forests.
Town codes are important and they may protect Uncle Henry from himself, but the may also deprive the world of some outstanding or novel or just place cheap and serviceable building technique that he might have invented. Maybe it's unlikey but who knows?
Hey, even the town of Conway plants its feet and refuses to follow some standards handed down from "above." We don't take state bridge money, according to the town engineer because if we did, we'd have to overbuild our bridges in a very expensive way.
He didn't just accept a given. He looked at the facts and really thought about them.
It's codified engineering, as opposed to creative engineering, that says tertiary level sewage treatment has to cost a lot when Ken Kimball of the AMC suggests letting silage corn do the nutrient removal for free. No technological wonders, no fancy chemicals. Just some plants growing in the sun. I like it. It's not in the engineering books, but it makes sense.
What about those people in Colorado who've been building houses from old tires? And the guy in Arizona who used empty glass bottles filled with sand instead of bricks to build his home. When the dessert wind blows over the mouths of the bottles, the whole house must howl softly - a jug band lullaby.
You might not want that, but it's a sample of the marvelous diversity and imagination of our kind. He hasn't got a neighbor for miles, so he's a little nuts - so why not?
If an unconventional structure meets setback requirements, is screened from the neighbors and has an engineering calculation or two to prove it won't collapse on its owner (and isn't to godawful noisy) why shouldn't a man be able to build it?
Now don't misunderstand me. Much as it pains Henry to hear me say it, there's a long-range benefit in all these codes - but FLEXIBILITY is the thing that can keep them useful -- and keep open the possibility of new solutions.
We are a foolish lot, we humans. We clear cut and dig up and mow down and dam up everything in sight. We even built a strip in North Conway in the lap of some of the prettiest mountains anywhere.
But the Zone Board of Adjustment is asking the Planning Board for changes to non-conforming zoning rules that will give it some flexibility.
Can that same kind of consideration go into building codes so we can make allowances for Yankee eccentrics and innovators and for poverty that sometimes mandates a shortcut or two?
Building codes like three-acre zoning can be used as a form of social engineering to exclude the poor. In Connecticut I heard of a family whose home was condemned and they had to move out because it didn't have plumbing. It didn't matter that they had nowhere else to go or that they had to go on welfare once they were separated from their garden and ther chickens.
Maybe that's not likely to happen in Conway, but it's important to know it does happen. I guess that's why the planning department fights so hard about the wording of its regulations.
Uncle Henry takes off his hat and shakes his saggy head. "You got to fight it," he says. He gets out his trusty Stanley measuring tape - the kind that disappears with a clatter when you press the button on the side. "measure those," says my ornery uncle pointing to the studs inside the garage wall.
Well, the rest of the world may building 16 includes on center, but needless to say Uncles Henry is a little off, by exactly the same small measure every time on purpose. That's the way he is...
Codes, jingles and new solutions
Drive anywhere in the continental United States and the radio jingles sound just like the ones at home. It's the same with building codes.
"What? Who's building radio codes? The Government?" asks my Uncle Henry who has placed the 20-odd parts of an old electric fan motor on a clean cardboard on the floor in front of him. They're arranged in meticulous arching rows, like a movie audience with Henry perched on a concrete block in the middle, all knees and elbows pointing a square can of three-in-oil at them like a gun.
"The government gets into everything these days, except balancing its budget," he says, polishing a bearing ring on his green coveralls, and re-adjusting his orange cap askew.
Radio jingles are kind of like building codes, I repeat. Henry squints at me quizzically.
I tell him it's the format. Format radio: they only place certain songs over and over again -- only cuts from proven hit-makers. The station guarantees the play list; the advertisers guarantee the money. They buy their little jingles on tap -- same notes different call letters all over the country.
The only problem is that new or off-beat music doesn't get played because it doesn't fit the format. It's only heard on college stations or on PBS or maybe on WMWV which has its own tossed salad format. (Or did back in 1990)
"Uncle Henry," I say, "Did you ever stop and consider that tucked away inside walls all over the country, are two-by-four studs, and they're all exactly the same distance apart wherever you go?"
My uncle scratches his chin, looking gravely concerned. He's not one for offbeat music, but he read this statement about two-by-fours to me out of a newspaper a while back, and he considers it his side of the argument.
One of his favorite themes is how the government, the world at large and TV in particular are trying to make us all the same. Not in a big way, but by tellings us what to do in a million little ways -- sneaky-like, they conspire to drain that spark of creativity right out of us.
I guess I 've been listening to Uncle Henry too long. Yes, there's plenty to be said for standardization, cheap goods, mix and match replacement parts. It makes things easier and often safer. There's even the comfit of that familiar jingle 1,000 miles from homes.
But when one way of doing things becomes an accepted standardm or even worse, a legal code, what happens to innovators? Innovators are a valuable natural resource, like lake shores or national forests.
Town codes are important and they may protect Uncle Henry from himself, but the may also deprive the world of some outstanding or novel or just place cheap and serviceable building technique that he might have invented. Maybe it's unlikey but who knows?
Hey, even the town of Conway plants its feet and refuses to follow some standards handed down from "above." We don't take state bridge money, according to the town engineer because if we did, we'd have to overbuild our bridges in a very expensive way.
He didn't just accept a given. He looked at the facts and really thought about them.
It's codified engineering, as opposed to creative engineering, that says tertiary level sewage treatment has to cost a lot when Ken Kimball of the AMC suggests letting silage corn do the nutrient removal for free. No technological wonders, no fancy chemicals. Just some plants growing in the sun. I like it. It's not in the engineering books, but it makes sense.
What about those people in Colorado who've been building houses from old tires? And the guy in Arizona who used empty glass bottles filled with sand instead of bricks to build his home. When the dessert wind blows over the mouths of the bottles, the whole house must howl softly - a jug band lullaby.
You might not want that, but it's a sample of the marvelous diversity and imagination of our kind. He hasn't got a neighbor for miles, so he's a little nuts - so why not?
If an unconventional structure meets setback requirements, is screened from the neighbors and has an engineering calculation or two to prove it won't collapse on its owner (and isn't to godawful noisy) why shouldn't a man be able to build it?
Now don't misunderstand me. Much as it pains Henry to hear me say it, there's a long-range benefit in all these codes - but FLEXIBILITY is the thing that can keep them useful -- and keep open the possibility of new solutions.
We are a foolish lot, we humans. We clear cut and dig up and mow down and dam up everything in sight. We even built a strip in North Conway in the lap of some of the prettiest mountains anywhere.
But the Zone Board of Adjustment is asking the Planning Board for changes to non-conforming zoning rules that will give it some flexibility.
Can that same kind of consideration go into building codes so we can make allowances for Yankee eccentrics and innovators and for poverty that sometimes mandates a shortcut or two?
Building codes like three-acre zoning can be used as a form of social engineering to exclude the poor. In Connecticut I heard of a family whose home was condemned and they had to move out because it didn't have plumbing. It didn't matter that they had nowhere else to go or that they had to go on welfare once they were separated from their garden and ther chickens.
Maybe that's not likely to happen in Conway, but it's important to know it does happen. I guess that's why the planning department fights so hard about the wording of its regulations.
Uncle Henry takes off his hat and shakes his saggy head. "You got to fight it," he says. He gets out his trusty Stanley measuring tape - the kind that disappears with a clatter when you press the button on the side. "measure those," says my ornery uncle pointing to the studs inside the garage wall.
Well, the rest of the world may building 16 includes on center, but needless to say Uncles Henry is a little off, by exactly the same small measure every time on purpose. That's the way he is...
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Ambient Music Meditations: Water Callings
Here is a brand new ambient music video, cooked just this morning. Click on the photo to watch it on my YouTube channel. I have a feeling this is one of those things you'll either love or hate.
The basic singing track was recorded in Garageband. The track was duplicated and altered over and over both in that program and in iMovie. I kind of like the wavy plaintive effect... It vaguely reminds me of birds or whales calling to each other...
The video is of the stream at the entrance to the Stamford Nature Center.
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