2/23/04

Not the first time, to say the least. Much of my life has been configured on wheels to musical accompaniment, merrily merrily on my way to the next gig or safe house or rest area or just a wide spot by the road. You know what I'm talking about -- cruising down the freeway, going nowhere in particular, radio or stereo blasting a favorite tune. You're the star of whatever movie moves in your mind. It's the American Dream. Literally.

Our storytelling selves are prisoners of a randomly constructed (at last report) universe that happens to provide us with the means of observation and interpretation of that randomness. We're happy to make up any weird shit that crosses our minds and paste it on the Mona Lisa smile of reality. Sometimes our narrations are relatively accurate -- whew, missed that sabertooth cat -- other times less so -- I claim this land in the name of the King -- and upon occasion, almost beyond classification -- we hold these truths to be self-evident -- but comedy, tragedy or simple memoir, they clutch us in their grasp, wriggle though we may in the details.

Indeed, it is not too much to say that humans need stories more than they need the truth. Certainly our history bears it out -- given the choice between a sweet lie and a sour veracity, people choose the lie purt' near ever' time. And it's far from a conscious action -- the internalization of perceived patterns is almost automatic. Belief is just a swallow away.

Where those beliefs come from has had a good few variations over the course of human events. We seem to have shown up in the caves already sporting mythology: the Neanderthals had ceremonial tools and formally buried their dead. Certainly the Cro Magnons were up to their bearhide-clad tummies in it. And by the time of the first agricultural civilizations, organized religion was a velvet strait jacket on the rapidly growing population, legends built into overarching principles of life.

Right on down, the most common form of Great Explanation was divinely inspired, at least nominally. The Gods declaimed, the priests and prophets took dictation and passed it along to the rest of the crew, and everyone went along with it. Even at the heights of the Greek and Roman cultures, nobody questioned the process. Perhaps in moments of guarded rationality this ancient or that muttered into his beard that the Gods were a bunch of poopiebritches, but nobody ever wrote it down.

And then there was the Renaissance. Along with the resurrection of a half a zillion classical manuscripts and the rediscovery of the arts of the ancient world, there came an enormous flood of interest in rationality as a wellspring of knowledge, a human source for the patterns of meaning man craved. A hundred flowers blossomed, a hundred thoughts expressed themselves. And then there was the Counter reformation and a hundred battles raged, and continue to rage to this day, between the isms and the schisms and the guys that just wanted to be left alone to count on their fingers.

Still, since that time we've become more and more a secular civilization, no longer bound with the glue and clamps of Mother Church. And more and more our stories have changed too, our fairy tales evolving into science fiction and our mythos into quantum physics and postmodern deconstruction. The primordial juice of divinity no longer raises our actions to epic levels. While warriors of the past could draw upon their intimate relationship with Mars or Mithra, Thor or Kali, those sources of supernatural awareness have all but faded from our lives. The odd suicide bomber or soldier of god is looked upon with dread and a certain superciliousness as an anachronism.

And yet, and yet... We need our archetypes, as surely as we need language or art or good opening lines in singles bars, and nature abhors a vacuum. Into the gap left by the demise of religion rushed the soiled ponies of popular culture. And absurdly enough, they've served quite readily as a substitute for hifalutin' tales of faroff times, frequently as lowfalutin' tales of those same faroff times as told to Abbot and Costello. As our intellectual selves bloom, our superegos have gone on a steady diet of coke and twinkies. Disney! WWF! MTV! Rolling Stone! Oh brave new world! Excuse me while I go recycle my lunch.

And there I am, back in my car on the highway, wailing down the road into the dramatic cinematic Pacific Northwest autumn afternoon, cruise control and soundtrack engaged, lost in a movie that bears no more plot than my trip to Tacoma to install some linoleum but feels like an epic journey on a twenty foot silver screen accompanied by the London Philharmonic in full 5.1 surround conducted by Sir Sedgewood Foot, a gala performance of breathtaking depth and passion, not to be missed, two thumbs up, awesome, glorious and exhilarating, you'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll kiss eight bucks goodbye...

Great googling Mowgli, Hollywood done got us all. The kings and fairies and knights and princesses and dragons and hidden cities and mysterious islands, lost children and darkling woods, yes and gods and demons and heavens and hells, all subsumed by the popcorn delights of the Saturday matinee. Worshipers at the multiplex, celluloid heros and heroines posing by false-front mansions on backlot B shoots.

It's the American Dream. Literally.

2/16/04

And in other news, last week or so was, yeah, my birthday.

Hold the flying objects, please. Yes, I'm making a big deal about my birthday. No, I'm not expecting you to. The passage of time in my particular sensorium is of no consequence to anyone except me.

Still, old reflexes die hard. I've always paid excessive attention to my natal anniversary, right back to the bad old days when I was the hideous reptile child and had a birthday party to which only one painfully polite and neatly-dressed member of my (second grade?) class came. I've had my share of birthdays for one, complete with a pathetic cupcake-and-candle and a self-purchased gift. I've also had wild drunken orgies with tons of pals and surprise parties that wouldn't let me change out of my dirty work clothes before devouring me.

This year was relatively laid back. I kind of took the day off, sort of, and S crocheted me a slightly imperfect but eminently lovable skullcap. The ol' ring around the sun didn't have that much of an impact -- 53, it turns out, is far less different from 52 than, say, 7 was from 6. But the sum total of my chronology, that sneaky invisible slow-motion landslide that keeps piling up and up and up, has begun to impact me in ways I was always warned about but never really expected.

Take f'rinstance the Senior Benefit -- no, not 50% off at the thrift store, doofus, I mean eoina (pronounced "eyew!"): Everything Old Is New Again. If you missed the last thrill-packed Star Trek series, never fear -- here it comes again, in syndication. Got hornswoggled by some heartless young thang in your twenties? They'll never be able to pull that crap on you again, no matter how hoochie they are (like they'd try). Politics, fashions, social movements, even slang -- it's all recycled. Doing a handyman job for a contemporary female client with teenaged sons the approximate size, weight and perception levels of sides of beef, I was greeted from the rec room at one point by Bob Dylan's greatest hits. The early ones, when he still played guitar and harmonica and whined and that was it. I managed to refrain from the old kecker laugh-at-impetuous-youth bit, but lawd was I tempted. Like in Uncle Sig, "I just sit back and I get my kicks/ listening to them stealing each other's licks/ I never worry about it no more/ I know it all has been done before..."

It's more than just the finite imagination of commerce and culture. I find that after a certain point I started seeing more things familiar than new. When you've been around, everything comes around. It's the scenery on a Nevada highway, which S once theorized consisted of one mile of road repeated over and over -- after the first ten thousand gorgeous sunsets or mists on lakes or bustling exotic-scented craft fairs or tempestuous love-making sessions (ooh la la), they all start to blur a little. Which repetitive strain leads to a sense that the excitement of a genuinely new thing swarming into your ken is not in the cards. And when something does come along that's a touch different, you feel like setting off fireworks in celebration (eh, fireworks, seen it...) I find myself eternally grateful that despite my best efforts, the universe is perpetually capable of surprising me, of coming up with weird shit that I'd never have the imagination to think up myself.

The best defense against them ol' been-there-done-that blues, we're told, is to maintain the innocent openness of a child and see each sunrise or lake or fair or trist with eyes (or whichever appropriate organ) bursting with fresh minty goodness (okay, that's not quite the image I was looking for...) And that's all well and good. But there are some areas of life, like advertising or presidential elections (there's a difference?), where a thick veneer of crabby middle-aged sulk is sword and shield against the onslaught. I'll willingly lay down my weapons for fields of flowers, but Dubya and Kerry get both barrels and the pit bull, thankee kindly.

In some respects, I've got the aging thing down a little better than most. I've always been inappropriately immature, so I'm reaching the point where it comes across as youthful vigor instead -- Roger Rabbit behavior that would have marked me as a wack in my twenties is becoming cuter and cuter as I mature. I've never really shackled myself to a particular social or political cause, so I'm in no danger of spending my declining years like other prunes I've seen, bemoaning the downfall of the Gengrich revolution or refighting Viet Nam or the Clinton impeachment endlessly in some online chat room for leftover obsessives. I seem to have dodged the poison pills of obscurity or eccentricity, or worse yet, foxy grandpadom. While I never bred, and hence have no offspring to carry my sedan chair, I also have no offspring to bail out of Leavenworth or endure the endless hectoring of about my inappropriately immature behavior.

And despite the enlargement of my wattle and vague dissipation of nearly every other portion of my anatomy, I can still revel in membership in the Gang of Baby Boom. I may be some old fart but there's plenty more where I come from, often in the oddest places. In pursuit of supplies for a gnarly home improvement project, I weighed anchor to my friendly neighborhood hardware store -- not Home Creepo, mind you, but one where the help actually know what they're talking about. The electrical desk guy was the appropriate older, avuncular expert, the kind that reassures suburban housewives and nervous young account executives installing their first garbage disposal in their Alki condo. He and I, however, bonded over a Frank Zappa quote on my shirt. We Are Everywhere.

2/9/04

Before that was a different story -- my little boy genes made me a perfect candidate for blind intemperate ingestion of interminable car races, slower-than-paint-drying baseball games, boxing slugouts and football wars. Maybe I was just too young to know any better, maybe I was an early victim of TVitis, or maybe I liked hanging out with my stepfather and grandfather and that was the only way to do it. I spent hours and hours glued to the tube while black and white ghosts performed symbolic physical activities for my benefit and spokespeople tried to sell me shaving cream and soda in the breaks for theirs.

Nowadays I occasionally watch a sports event for the simple reason that it's virtually the only reality on television, not excepting Reality Television and the nightly news. At the moment the pitcher lets go of the ball and the batter braces to swing or the quarterback calls the snap or the centers go up for the tipoff, there's no script anywhere that dictates what the outcome will be. For that moment you're watching events that have no nuance other than the bounding circumstances of the game itself. And that, in our postmodernity, can be a refreshing thing. Dull, but refreshing.

It would be entirely inappropriate for me to say that the spectacle of Miz Jackson's Boobie at the craptacular Superbowl Halftime last Sunday was in keeping with that kind of scriptlessness, both because mankind cannot take very much reality and because so many people seemed offended by it, including me -- though for different reasons. But I'll say it anyway. Face it, this was a surprise that broke the market for surprises, for the participants as much as the observers if their expressions immediately after the act were any indication, despite what all the cynical media observer types said afterwards.

But this all took place within the framework of an event so rich in subtext that attempting to attach a single significance to it is like trying to put a pair of sneakers on an octopus. Somebody called the Superbowl our preeminent secular holiday (Christmas went off to sulk). If so, its celebration invokes the best and worst of our culture, from the noble struggle of urban gladiators, aspiring to a symbolic prize but maintaining decorum and the rule of law within that competition, to the promulgation of that grand and glorious principle of egalitarianism I call the Superbowl Syndrome: One Superbowl winner, 31 Superbowl (cue Ace Ventura) looooooosers. Not to mention the run from what is utterly without irony presented as a serious, dignified inspirational patriotic event, with its flag saluting, waving and invoking, to the gawdawful carcrash of a kinkoid sex parade that was the halftime show.

I mean, we're talking cheerleaders with peekaboo skirts and s/m robots in deconstructed bondage gear straight (if that's the word) out of your local dungeon, bumping and grinding that would have been banned in a burlesque hall fifty years ago, and a general atmosphere of tease-and-withhold that could jam the pacemakers of every dirty old man in the country. Throw in the ads for erectile disfunction drugs and one wonders if the Evil Masters Of The World are worried about our reproductive rate. All with the one small pasty of smarmy virtuousness that they weren't showing anything. Quite.

That I even tuned in on this...this...thing, was a tribute to how pervasive the general sense of its significance has gotten. I wasn't going to miss the biggest thing since sliced bread, no sirree. By the middle of the halftime, I had already turned it off once and back on, lecturing myself that I needed to see and hear this stuff to know what was going on in the rest of the American mind. But I was powerfully repelled by the whole Jackson dance sequence, drill squad sensibilities and shiny black and chrome color scheme alike. The sub-hiphop R&B didn't help, and the Orwellian "socially relevant" messages she kept blaring ("TOLERANCE! SELF RESPECT!") came across like heavy metal played backwards.

And, of course, in the end, having eaten my nourishing predigested garbage dinner, I got my dessert, or deserts as the case might be: a two second flash of tiny, blurry and quick-faded tit. Oddly, it was both outrageous and anticlimactic: here was the whole point of the affair, the invisible elephant in the room, the subject of all the groping and wiggling, the preposterous outfits and the ritualized stomping about, dumped from its confining vessel and out in the open for all to see. Just an anatomical feature, droopy with age, plain and even sad despite its pierced decoration. In the tradition of all TV sports, reality had trumped the script. And in this case, it wasn't pretty.

There's plenty more weirdness where that comes from -- this looks to be a Go Go Go Said The Bird moment with a little something for everybody. One might, for instance, note that while Janet subsequently got bounced from the Grammys, Justin didn't -- so it's all right to rip the shirt off a cheap hussy on international television if you say you're sorry afterwards, but the cheap hussy is totally wrong. I'll gladly leave that stuff to more appropriate commentators -- they're welcome to it.

But here's one last bit of media surrealism, just to prove that there really is a God, even if he only plays one on TV. I changed channels soon afterwards and landed directly on top of Julia Roberts in Notting Hill, snuggled up under the covers as charming and toothy as anything, asking, I kid you not, "What is this interest that men have in breasts? I mean, every second person in the world has them."

I can't top that. I just can't.

2/2/04

The turning point of the dark season, Imbolc, Candlemas, midwinter. A day the Celts dedicated to Bridget, goddess of crafts and of Brides. Punxsutawney Phil, dour old specimen of Marmota monax, makes his annual appearance to the accompaniment of TV cameras and reporters, casting inflexible judgement upon the year: six more weeks of winter or no? His judgement a product of his deepest terror, his own shadow.

We happy many who walk around in coats of flesh perceive nothing so much as distinction, the lines between things frequently more vivid than the things themselves. Despite the kaleidescopic plethora of sensory input, most often it is the difference that matters most. That may well be the source of the primal fear we share with the groundhog, the fear of the Shadow: in the recognition of the variety of things, we also see the state of nonbeing, of the antithesis of sweet represented by salt.

At some point in each human life, the feckless spirit is shoved rudely up against the fact of mortality and left to meditate on it, usually to limited utility and almost universally to bone-chilling horror. The simple explanation is the body's own defenses -- organisms have always evolved to greater and greater survival potential, which includes a healthy instinctive dislike of their own demise. Living things of every phylum resist being killed, which may or may not translate into some internal state of aversion. But as critters of thought as well as deed, humans have a more complex relationship with their incipient termination.

We are falling down
down to the bottom of a hole in the ground
smoke 'em if you got 'em
I'm so scared I can hardly breathe
I may never see my sweetheart again
-- John Prine, "The Bottomless Lake"

This past Yule I participated in a classic American ritual for the first time: I passed out at a party. Never mind how or why -- suffice it to say that I'm a cheap date. While I did see it coming enough ahead of time to warn those around me (and likely avoid bumping my head when I went down like a sack of potatoes), I still ended up on a random patch of floor, staring blurrily up while someone asked if I could move my arms and legs. Reassured that I wasn't the victim of a stroke or worse, they helped me to a couch and let me grope my way back to full consciousness.

That at the age of 52 I could even manage to party in any respect that hearty was at least a partial balm to the considerable embarrassment I felt at being overcome by recreational diversions at my level of maturity. But I was also struck by the character of the event itself, or more correctly at the lack of character. For a timeless moment (they told me I was only out for a few seconds) I entered the no-place where no-thing happens never/forever. There were no angels, no devils, no lights or sounds or presence. It was just dark. Really, really dark. Which is to say, it wasn't the popular accounting of Death you're told about on Sunday.

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome. -- Issac Asimov

Sandahbeth may well have had a more fruitful inspection of the brink than I. During one of her more intense surgical procedures, involving two weeks in the ICU knocked out on forgettamine, she reported an episode of seeing The Big Light of numerous fables, starting towards it and then being called back by a lessor light which she identified with -- uh, me, actually. Seeing as how by all medical accounts she really did Almost Die that night, she remains a far more credible witness to the transmigration of the soul than ol' party animal Thaddeus. I had a whiff within my own dance with Mister D (or more accurately Mister PantywaistCan'tHandleHisFun) that S had returned the favor, dragging me back from wherever it was I'd gone. But my only perception of that place was in the contrast between there and here, the realm of the senses, in the gradual return of thought and timeflow after being gone. The place itself was beyond observance.

This is the only version of nonbeing that most people ever encounter and return to tell about, the Nothing. Near death experiences of the tunnel of light and the greetings of ancestors type are far outweighed by getting coldcocked and waking up in the drunk tank with only a big black hole where your sensorial record should be. And while the body might fear dismemberment, mutilation, immolation, disease, the thousand disposals reality foists upon complex biological mechanisms, the soul (or whatever you call it) flinches at its own opposite, its own absence. As animals we fear death as the product of eons of evolution urging us to be fruitful and multiply; as humans we are gnawed by the existential realization of our status as brief candles of consciousness in the great blank expanse of the void, a negation seemingly greater than the universe.

Death is that little old man who perches on your shoulder and laughs and whispers in your ear, "You're alive!" --South American proverb

And yet, that self-same void, that immense bogeyman haunting all our days and nights, is really nothing (well duh) more than the shadow of our own perception, the blind spot on the retina of our mind's eye, the necessary partner to all that we see and hear and touch and taste, even as a physical shadow is the inevitable result of the physics of light. Just as consciousness cannot exist without the twin of unconsciousness, so also are we powerless to see our shadow without the light we generate it by.

Something for all you groundhogs out there to think about.