Today, Karla and I visited the remains of the Union Canal, not far from us, in Lebanon, PA. The Union Canal (so named for the merger of two companies–it was unrelated to the Civil War) was one of the first canal systems in early America. It actually started at Middletown, our current home, and extended to Reading, PA, in an attempt to connect the center of the state with the port in Philadelphia. Today, only 5/8 of a mile remains, right here in Lebanon. And part of that remaining stretch includes the Union Canal Tunnel–the oldest “transportation tunnel” in North America. It was pretty awesome! There are few things I love more than these vestiges of early American history that are hanging around in our own backyards. Here are some pictures and videos I took.
I know A LOT of people who hate Valentines Day, so it seems. And every year, most of them feel a need to unleash an anti-V-Day screed of some kind via social media (almost always involving the word “Hallmark”, “corporate”, or “made-up”. And hey, I get it. In fact, I essentially ignore almost all holidays, and I’m quite fortunate that my life partner feels the same. We don’t really hate any holidays, we just don’t really notice them (with a few exceptions). But what I’m wondering right now, as I continue to see these same people with these same rants about these same holidays year after year after year…why not just ignore it? Let it pass with zero comment from you. There is little more that a holiday hates than a complete lack of attention from you, whatever holiday it happens to be that you hate. Just a suggestion, of course. Certainly I have lots I like to bitch about, too, but it just seems to me like bitching about a holiday is some wasted bitching.
I sure love my dog. Who doesn’t love dogs?? But I feel a very special way about Benji because I’ve been lucky enough to be brought into his life late. Benji is 15, which is nearing the absolute oldest he can get for his breed (at the absolute most, he might live two more years but that is unlikely). I spent almost all of my adult life wishing I could have a dog; almost all of that time, I lived alone and worked jobs with long and erratic hours and was hesitant to own a dog under those circumstances. But, once I found my love Karla, she came not only with Boy, but with Dog, and my time with Benji has been very special. Now, he is not without his quirks (a truly obsessive-compulsive licking thing that can literally coat an entire couch if no one is watching) but in just about every way, I could not love him more. I’m sad that I don’t get more years with him, but the time I do have fills my heart. Almost anyone who has a dog says “They are part of the family”, and never has anyone meant it more than we do.
Here is the earliest known photograph (actually it’s a daguerreotype) taken in the city of Harrisburg. It is from freakin’ 1860!:
1. When I say “we all”, I am only talking about baseball fans. I am under no illusion this is of significant import to the wider world.
2. I like the Chicago Cubs.
OK, now. Here’s where I’m at. I know we all feel for the much-ballyhooed long-suffering Cubs fans. It’s been over a hundred years since they won a championship. And they have always, at least within my lifetime, been a likeable team, and how can you not like Wrigley Field? And all the mythos around their losing streak (the “curse”, the goat, Steve Bartman, etc). The Cubs winning a championship would be HUGE. We have ALL grown up with that storyline in baseball–everyone alive today has grown up with that being part of their baseball experience.
I vote we keep it that way. While I feel for the Cubs fans (but really now–they’ve had plenty to enjoy from the Bulls, Blackhawks, and even the White Sox), in the quickly-evolving world of baseball, the Cubs losing streak is too powerful of a tale to give up. It helps to connect baseball fans within our grand narrative. The Red Sox used to have a long losing streak, and it’s now over, and with the face of baseball inevitably changing as our culture accelerates through change, let’s not lose some of the only historic stories we have. If the Cubs are no longer perennial losers, what do we have left???
Listen, I hear you. You think I’m being a weird contrarian. And maybe I am. I like this Cubs team (but I like Cleveland’s team more). And think about this: wouldn’t it make an excruciating but undeniably delicious chapter in the Cubs’ losing streak for them to make it to the series and lose??? To Cleveland, on the same year that entire city’s losing streak was just broken by their basketball team??? This world series, I’m rooting for intense, epic historic narrative. Plus I saw the Cleveland baseball team play when I lived in Erie :)
It’s been awhile since I posted about old postcards, so for those of you new to my old bloggy-wog: one of the things I have an interest in is old postcards. I love them blank or with writing (they are two very different artifacts!). I adore finding collections of these in antique or specialty stores and spending hours poring over them.
Old postcards with writing are especially fascinating: they are glimpses into the past. The off-hand messages written by people (almost certainly now dead, written to people also now dead) who never expected long-distant strangers to be buying their postcards and reading the messages and pondering the lives of those in the past–it can often take my breath away. In addition, the evolution of the postal service (and by extension, our culture at large) can be traced via how the postcards are addressed, stamped, and postmarked. And the postcards themselves are beautiful and delightful artifacts, themselves changing in style and purpose about every two decades.
Anyway, I recently came across an enormous cache of old Harrisburg postcards at a local bookstore and my postcard interest has been renewed. I present to you here one that I just bought today.
This postcard is from the early 1930s. Almost anytime you see a postcard in this style–artist’s renderings in vibrant colors with a white border–they are from the ’30s. It shows what was then the Harrisburg Educational Building (now the State Archives):
The back, postmarked August 14th, 1933 (that’s 82 years ago, folks!) in Philadelphia, and sent to Marietta, PA (a town about 30 miles from Harrisburg). It is of interest that a Harrisburg postcard was sent from Philadelphia to a town near Harrisburg. Elements of the address are of interest. It was sent to:
Mrs. Frank Ziegler
Front St
Marietta Lanc Co
Penn
Of course the whole Mrs. Frank Ziegler isn’t surprising for the time, but given how the world has changed since then, it is of interest. The street address being simply Front St with no number speaks to a much simpler time, at least mail-wise, if nothing else. Note the absence of a zip code. The inclusion of the county was, I believe, even strange for the time period–I’ve never seen it before.
The text of the postcard is thus:
Monday, August 14, 1933
Dear Aunt Mabel
Dorothy and Marion are bringing Mother to Marietta to visit Mrs. Peck, so I decided since I wasn’t nursing I would like to bring Bob and myself along with them and stay all night with you then go to Quarryville on Thursday to visit Ado. That would mean four of us staying at your house Wednesday nite. [name I can’t read], Marion, Bob & I. Hope it is OK, See you Wed, Mimmie
My love and I just took quick day trip to Washington, D.C. to visit the National Museum of American history. She, like me, is interested in most anything, although I must admit I funneled our decision toward that particular museum because I find our nation’s history particularly interesting.
There were people everywhere. In this day and age of technology and immediacy, I must say I was surprised by the size of the crowd; and they were people who did seem to genuinely want to be there and were quite interested in the whole affair.
We started out on the third floor in the exhibit highlighting our nation’s many and varied armed conflicts. We were tickled by some of the astonishing items on display from the Revolution and Civil Wars (Washington’s uniform! The furniture from the surrender at Appomatox! Lots and lots of rifles!). We took our time perusing the extensive collection. There were even plenty of items from such footnotes as the War of 1812, the French and Indian War, and our conflict with Mexico (including Teddy Roosevelt’s San Juan Hill uniform). Then a World War I display–tanks, bombs, more guns, and more of the same in World War II, including some amazing photographs of “nukes”. By the time we got to the Chinook helicopter that flew missions in Vietnam, we looked at each other, seemingly reading the other’s thoughts. “Do you want to move on?” I asked. She replied, “I’m just tired of war.”
It’s an interesting time in our country, for sure. Things seem to be getting a lot more “liberal”, which is good. I recently told a friend I could sum up my political and social philosophy just by saying “I want to make sure everyone is alright”; apparently, this is a liberal ideology, and so be it. I’m not afraid to put a label on it. It is what it is. Whatever that is.
At times when our nation goes through divisive growing pains like this, there is always a very vocal group that just wants everyone to get along. “Why can’t we all just believe what we want and leave each other be???” they bemoan. And it’s a lovely notion, even though it’s complete horseshit. I don’t want anyone thrown in jail for thinking gays can’t get married or for pushing for the continuance of institutional racism, but I don’t want to just let them be. What kind of complacent, docile, horrific world do these people want? They’d rather the boat didn’t rock than actually stand for something. Rock the fucking boat, you motherfuckers, rock the fucking boat. I’d rather live in filth than in a land of complacent hatred.
And why is it that the people who most frequently tell you to read your history books are the ones who clearly have never read anything at all? Doo-Doo, Dee-Dee.
We live next door to an artist. She doesn’t know we know she’s an artist, but we know. A little sleuthing and a little circumstance led us to the knowledge. She has a garage full of huge canvasses that look surprisingly like Mark Rothkos (I thought they were Rothko paintings at first). Immense color fields, oranges, deep blues, with smaller squares of blacks and browns in the middles. And a large, unfinished sculpture in wrought iron of what looks like a male ballerina, mid-adage. I want to talk to her about it. I want to name-drop Mark Rothko. I want to tell her I love John Sloan and Auguste Rodin. But I’m not going to. But maybe she’ll catch me wearing my Rousseau hat.
You try so hard at things in life that mostly will never matter. Will anyone care, after I am gone, how close I got to my ideal weight? How close of a shave I managed to get, how many points I racked up on my grocery store loyalty card, whether I had all the Arcade Fire albums on vinyl? (I do). Holy moly. It seems so cliché and trite but I just try to be better everyday than I was the previous day. Nicer and more caring and less selfish. And it is so hard and it never gets easier.
But still. I don’t want to gain my weight back, and I do LOVE my Arcade Fire vinyls. Life, it sure is complicated.
It rains and rains some more. Some would say That’s summer and some say This should be over by now, but in the end, it’s raining a lot and the rain doesn’t know what month it is. I wonder if the months themselves know what month it is. It’s my understanding that months don’t care about much.
I saw the new Jurassic Park movie. I liked it well enough. It entertained me, which is more than many movies do, but of course much less than I ask of the movies I’m passionate about. One can’t deny it is occasionally nice to be simply entertained. But even as the genetically-engineered dinos were (inevitably, terrifyingly) taking over the park, it can be difficult to shut off the part of my viewing mind that wants to pick everything apart. Is the female character strong enough? Does she exist just for the male character to obtain glory (in this instance, it passes my feminism test–but just barely). What does a movie about resurrected extinct creatures (even if said movie is a summer popcorn flick) have to say about animal rights and the ethics of genetic cloning (in this instance, quite a bit, but it’s all a little aimless and lacks coherence). These and many other questions I simply CAN’T turn off when I’m watching a movie, but ultimately, sometimes I just want to be wowed. And at least this dino flick provided me with interesting questions to ask in between raptor maulings.
My love’s son (which makes him My Little Love, or for the sake of brevity, in the future on this blog he will be My boy) is a very active and delightful little guy. My love and I spend hours playing with him in the backyard (meaning: we chase him around) and we have developed quite a few fun routines. One of our favorites is when he balances on the row of bricks that line our patio. He carefully balances on one before moving to the next. As he reaches each brick, he pauses and announces to all assembled one of two things: he says either Doo-Doo, or Dee-Dee. There doesn’t seem to be any particular significance that causes it to be a Doo-Doo or a Dee-Dee. He can walk around the approximately dozen bricks and one will hear a random assortment of the syllables, like this: Doo-Doo, Doo-Doo, Dee-Dee, Doo-Doo, and so on. It’s a special kind of adorable. My love and I now find ourselves saying it moments when the boy isn’t around, when we have a moment of careful or precarious walking, or some such thing. Secretly I’ve started thinking of it as a mantra for any moment that requires great care or special attention, or when you are close to great accomplishment. Holy moly, that cop almost gave me a speeding ticket. Dee-Dee. Or maybe We got the discount even though the sale ended last week.
I went hiking today with a dear friend of mine. It’s been a long time since I went hiking. I used to be very familiar with the woods and parks and trails around here; it was a passion for me. Then I got gripped by the circumstances of my life and ended up spending a few years in a city, far removed from any kind of real wilderness. Today was a real joy for me to spend time in the real woods again (and with Michael) but it raised more questions for me than it answered. Do people necessarily have to be Country People or City People? Is this like the old Cat Person/ Dog Person question, where people won’t let you be both? How did I spend so long away from the woods and not feel like I was missing something? And how did I love the city so much yet not feel its absence now? What is the true sound of my soul–cicadas or car horns?
Can you even imagine–I mean can you imagine–what this land looked like to the first European settlers when they landed here? Here in what would become Pennsylvania, it was all trees. Very literally. All trees. The going must have been rough if you were trying to bring your boat inland for any reason, or build a fort. Clearing a little land to plant some crops. I can imagine some of those scraggly be-hatted Euros probably thought of the amount of trees as an actual hindrance. Imagine! Today Michael and I spent two or three hours at a picturesque Pennsylvania State Park–in which our government has politely provided restrooms, clear hiking trails and other amenities, all while doing a fair job of conserving nature to a high degree. The whole time we were there (it wasn’t a beautiful day, but it IS June) we saw about 7 people. I bet on a similar day in 1950 we would have seen 700 people.
This isn’t just a typical bitching about people not enjoying nature anymore. I’m just wondering. How long will it be until nobody remembers why we’re keeping these places around? How many country boys will hear car horns in their souls? It’s even been brought to my attention recently that most people dislike sweating! What will become of the parks?
We saw like a thousand frogs today, and one big fish that was standing still underwater like it was dead, and then it disappeared.
Shackleton, after being stranded in the arctic with his men for two years, finally saved them all with zero loss of life. He did this by sailing (with four of his crew) for 800 miles in a tiny boat to the whaling outpost on South Georgia Island, which, coincidentally, was the same island they had embarked from on their mission two years earlier. One can only imagine (you can only imagine) how much these men must have thought about, talked about, and dreamt about getting back to this island, which itself was a far-flung outpost of civilization. Ernest Shackleton and his 28 men were eventually all returned to their normal, day-to-day lives. Shackleton had already been quite famous and of course he became more so then. But somehow, only four years later, he found himself back on remote and barren South Georgia Island, preparing to embark on another quest. But as luck would have it, his luck had run out, and he had a heart attack and died, right there on South Georgia Island. And he’s still buried there. The island he made a monumental and Herculean effort to get to, so he could get back to civilization, that’s where he’s buried. Doo-Doo, Dee-Dee.
The section of the Susquehanna River that flows past Harrisburg has, by far, the most bridges in close proximity I’ve ever seen in my life. At one point the vehicle, train, and pedestrian bridges are so close to each other, you might be tempted to think immense, 300-foot-high mirrors have been slid behind some of them. The reflection off the water only heightens the effect. When one first encounters and really ponders them, many natural questions follow. Why so many, so close? How did this come to pass? The city, the river, and the bridges have, I suspect, a long tale to tell.
It is this time of year that I am most alive. I can feel the air buzzing around me, the close buzzing of air and oxygen and the thickness of invisible moisture. All-everywhere life is springing forth, preparing to display its full self. Today I was simply unable to stay indoors, needing to feel the pavement under my bicycle wheels, exploring this city which I have always kind of known but never known, letting the sun warm up my skin, feel my pigment change shade. I was made for heat.
Once every few years I become immersed for a few weeks in one of my minor tangential interests, early polar exploration. It’s not something I’m interested in enough to become an expert, or to have it be a true hobby, but it’s definitely something that intrigues me, for reasons I don’t quite understand. I have a special interest in Franklin’s lost expedition and the great adventure of Shackleton’s Endurance. I just finished reading the definitive book on Shackleton’s journey, “Endurance” by Alfred Lansing. I finished the last two thirds of it in a breathless sprint today, in coffee shops and under the summer sky by the river. My brain is filled with polar agony, soaked horsehair sleeping bags, salt water-filled mouths, brittle frozen beards. The thing that I always find in these tales is that despite some of the hardest and most intense human suffering you can imagine, they are always filled with joy, hope, and celebration. And also mystery, and the idea of being somewhere nobody else has ever been, or probably will ever be again, and the vast majestic mystic magical landscape, in a world that doesn’t give a shit about you. So yeah, cherry stuff. Good summer reading.
In the quiet moments that I have, I’ve always spent an inordinate amount of time contemplating the bigger issues of the universe. Time, past, memory, and the nature of oneself. Not to sound hoity-toity, that is just what I do. Lately I have found myself mesmerized by the change that has occurred in the recently, and suddenly. I spent most of my adult life espousing the fact that being alone was my best gateway into the secrets of the universe. And I’m not backtracking now, I’m not saying I was wrong. Just that maybe these long years alone were perfectly setting me up to best experience the other side of the coin. Now I can see that living with a partner, child, and, yes, a dog, are enlightening parts of myself I’ve never even seen or thought of before. In the best possible ways, I don’t even know who I am anymore.
Karla and I were taking a walk through our new neighborhood the other day, when we walked past an ornately and oddly built and designed church, sporting in huge block letters across the front PLACE OF PRAYER FOR ALL PEOPLE. We stopped to look at it and talk about its unique brickwork and design, when we noticed the two large angel statues at the top of the building on either side of the minaret. They were odd-looking men (both were identical). Unlike most religious imagery on most ornate churches, the faces of these male angels looked…modern. Like some dude you might see in the mall. But there was something else strange about them that we couldn’t quite put our finger on. Then it dawned on me. I turned to Karla and said, It looks just like George Carlin. After a moment’s hesitation, Karla burst out laughing. It was undeniable.
I’m actually dictating this blog entry into my cell phone, while sitting on a bench in the black of night overlooking the vast but comprehendible Susquehanna River. It’s a warm night, warm enough for the bugs to be nibbling at my legs, but the breeze off of the river is calming and cooling, drying my sweat off my skin enough to keep me temperate. It reminds me of summer days and evenings in Erie, a period of my life that is not that long ago, but is also quite different than recent. The temperature and the breeze transport me right inside my 2008 Saturn Aura, with the windows down driving down Peninsula Drive, heading out onto Presque isle, the peninsula that juts out into Lake Erie, making it also the northernmost point in the state of Pennsylvania. On one side you have Presque Isle Bay, the safe harbor formed by the city of Erie and the peninsula, and as you drive your car around the tip of the peninsula, it opens up to the vast lake, a body of water that climbs to the horizon like a mountain, not unlike an Arctic ice floe. I remember the wind through my car, the heat and humidity, the breeze off the water, an enormous plastic cup of Dunkin’ Donuts caramel iced coffee, the sugar crunching at the bottom as my straw tapped it, The National’s “Squalor Victoria” blasting out of my stereo. It was quite a day, and quite a period in my life. But that guy, he and I don’t stay in touch anymore. I don’t know him. There’s a new me here to discover. The past is a melted glacier.
I sure do like blue skies, clear wide-open blue skies and the wind on my face. Getting tan. Getting tan is like taking the outside world into yourself and then shooting it back out. And all those vitamins and good vibes. Also I like movies. I like watching movies in air conditioned rooms while sweat dries on my skin. I like rice with salt on it, and dogs who smile.
I’ve been watching a lot of cable news lately, but I don’t necessarily think it’s good for me. I’ve just become addicted to it, as I’ve been known to become addicted to just about anything from time to time. I suppose it must just be cable news’ turn. I mean, there is plenty that I like about it. It really does inform you, and depending on what you’re watching, you usually learn about stuff you might not otherwise be following, like that shit in Iraq. CNN is the way to go. Typically they’re gonna tell you about the stuff that’s important, not just the tabloid stuff. But regardless, most of it is rot. You’re better off reading newspapers. Please read newspapers. They need you, and it’s still the best thing going.
I’ve recently come across two different poems about turtles that really floored me. It makes sense that turtles would make such rich poetic subjects: ugly, slow, and capable of withdrawing entirely into themselves. They’re just begging for the poetic treatment. The first is “Turtle” by Kay Ryan. Watch her read it here, and the text of the poem is here. The other is “To a Box Turtle” by John Updike. Watch me read it to you! Right here:
To a Box Turtle
by John Updike
Size of a small skull, and like a skull segmented,
of pentagons healed and varnished to form a dome,
you almost went unnoticed in the meadow,
among its tall grasses and serrated strawberry leaves
your mottle of amber and umber effective camouflage.
You were making your way through grave distances,
your forefeet just barely extended and as dainty as dried
coelacanth fins, as miniature sea-fans, your black nails
decadent like a Chinese empress’s, and your head
a triangular snake-head, eyes ringed with dull gold.
I pick you up. Your imperious head withdraws.
Your bottom plate, hinged once, presents a No
with its courteous waxed surface, a marquetry
of inlaid squares, fine-grained and tinted
tobacco-brown and the yellow of a pipe smoker’s teeth.
What are you thinking, thus sealed inside yourself?
My hand must have a Smell, a killer’s warmth.
It holds you upside down, aloft, undignified,
your leathery person amazed in the floating dark.
How much pure fear can your wrinkled brain contain?
I put you down. Your tentative, stalk-bending walk
resumes. The manifold jewel of you melts into grass.
Power mowers have been cruel to your race, and creatures
less ornate and unlikely have long gone extinct;
but nature’s tumults pool to form a giant peace.
You may have noticed, on various and sundry platforms of social media, that I am losing weight (again!). There will, of course, be a larger blog entry devoted to the subject once I hit a certain milestone, but I wanted to stop officially ignoring it on the blog. So yes, I am once again losing weight. If you’re a long-time reader, you may recall we’ve been down this road once before. I’ll stop short of saying I’m a chronic “weight bouncer”—I’ve only done the up and down once, now going on twice—and I do think I’m going to be able to maintain it this time, seeing as how I actually do enjoy the “lifestyle” one must switch to in order to stop gaining the weight back. I don’t want to go into too much detail, as the first of the “milestone” blogs on the topic should be coming soon. But if you’ve noticed that I’m a little more energetic, happy as an idiot, and generally manic lately—this is the main cause.
I don’t like, any more than you do, the way that things in our culture seem to have gotten so divisive. Everything appears to be very “black and white” or “us vs. them”…either you agree with me, or I hate you. All issues divided into two sides—usually liberal and conservative—so that most critical thought is now not required; you just have to know what team you’re on. I don’t like it any more than you do.
But there seems to be, to most people, a thought that this is a terrible deviation from some Golden Era of American discourse. That, not long ago now, everyone just kind of got along and accepted divergent opinions and engaged in a spirited and lively debate of the issues, before saying, ah, forget it! and heading out back for a barbeque. This fever dream is made possible by the fact that nobody actually knows anything about our own history, and is cursed with the widely-held human belief that all things have just recently been much better than they are now.
Things have, of course, never been like that. We’ve always been a country at one-another’s throats. That’s because the issues that we disagree about are pretty fucking important and are not trifles. If the biggest debate in America was chocolate vs. vanilla, I’d say some of us might be overreacting, but we debate about matters of deepest morality, life and death, and core philosophy. If you’re not passionate about these things, get out of the ring.
The division seems more pronounced now that we’re on the internet all the time. The biggest factor that plays into that is that we routinely interact with many people who we would previously not have been interacting with. Before the internet, we just naturally and gradually gravitated to people of like-mind. Now, we, in small ways, interact with dozens of people “on the other side” daily, which can cause little internet skirmishes which then, in turn, feel larger and more intense than real-world interactions, because we can’t gauge how the other is talking, as well as these skirmishes taking place in front of our 300 or so “friends” and remaining to view long after the words have been said.
The ease with which these divisive interactions can occur has given rise to something even worse than the “cultural division” itself: the everything is hunky-dorey crowd. This “crowd” includes just about everybody. We’re all so tired of having these online skirmishes with people with opposing views, almost nobody engages the argument anymore. Nobody wants to appear “divisive”. Everyone wants to make sure they are “accepting of other people’s views”.
The bottom line I’m trying to get to is this: I keep an open mind about things like calamari, the official naming of snow storms, and the future of the designated hitter in professional baseball. But I’m an adult now, and I’ve thought a lot about my core beliefs, and I don’t have an open mind about abortion, gay rights, gun control, or even—yes, even the existence of a higher power. I know what I think about these things. Not only that, but having an open mind about these things would make me a man of feeble constitution.
If you know me (and I think you do) you know that, obviously, I am a man with a ton of opinions. Well, one of those opinions is that these things that pop up on social media as “photo challenges” are some of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen. If you’re not familiar with them: they propose to be “30 day photo challenges” that list a thing you’re supposed to take a picture of once a day for thirty days. First off, if you need a “challenge” to take interesting pictures of the world around you, you’re not interesting. Period. Secondly, the items in these challenges are never even remotely challenging or creative. It’s like, “Day 1: Selfie. Day 2: Food. Day 3: Car”. Really? You spent time creating this, anonymous internet user? How dreadful.
So, I thought I’d make an interesting one! Some things here are interpretable, whch, again, makes it interesting. For instance, “Birth” wouldn’t necessarily be looking for a picture of something being born. You decide what it means. If anyone actually wants to give this a spin, let me know, I’ll put it into a dedicated blog entry so it’s easier to reference.
Actually Interesting Photo Challenge
Day 1: An animal that you want to take home
Day 2: Gum
Day 3: Something Upside-Down
Day 4: Paint
Day 5: How you’d like to be perceived
Day 6: How you feel inside
Day 7: Something you hate
Day 8: Birth
Day 9: A chair
Day 10: The passage of time
Day 11: Something you love but can’t have
Day 12: Space, area, void
Day 13: Underneath
Day 14: Scar
Day 15: Home
Day 16: Your bathtub.
Day 17: Work
Day 18: The ground
Day 19: The sky
Day 20: Between the ground and the sky
Day 21: What you believe
Day 22: Utensils
Day 23: Lights
Day 24: Transportation
Day 25: Idealized
Day 26: Action!
Day 27: Water
Day 28: Unattainable
Day 29: Before you were born
Day 30: Celebrate
Life, and all that stuff, is sometimes too interesting to bear. What I mean is, it can be very cyclical, or circular, or appear to be laden with damned meaning. See, I’m a man who doesn’t believe in much. I mean, I believe in science, and form and order amidst the chaos, but not in any Fate or creator or grand design. Just rules and laws that govern the movements and the heat of things, basically. So when life seems to have plans, folks like me sit up and take notice. Not because it’s changing the way I think—I have thrown away my open mind—but because coincidence or happenstance on any large sort of scale is just so unlikely.
Take, for instance, a story from my life. When I first got sober, I was 25 years old. This was a little over eleven years ago. I went to live with my mother and her husband in a small town in New Jersey. This was the first time I’d lived anywhere outside of Central Pennsylvania. This small town in New Jersey was relatively close to Philadelphia…maybe an hour, I think? At any rate, it was certainly the closest I’d ever lived to a big city.
Eleven years may not seem like that long ago, but I was inhabiting a very different world back then, and I was also a very different version of me. I drove a 1983 Ford Escort, named Earl Grey. This car was a bona fide piece of shit, and it broke down with an alarming regularity (chronic fuel pump issues). I had no cell phone. No GPS. When I wanted to go somewhere I’d never been, I printed out MapQuest directions and read them as I drove. If I needed to call someone, I found a payphone and retrieved my list of phone numbers, hand-written on a sheet of paper inside my wallet. It was interesting. It wasn’t as bad as it sounds. I drank a lot of Red Bull and wrote poetry almost every waking moment and listened to Pearl Jam like it was my job.
I had a very close friend who I’d been through the addiction wringer with. She had a similar problem as I did, and we’d gone to the same rehab, and really just been to Hell and back together. She had landed in a Recovery House in Harrisburg, PA. After the tumult of the end of our addictions, we now felt very far apart. Recovery Houses don’t allow you much leeway with visitors and phone calls. Remember, this is also before everyone was texting and Facebooking (it’s even before MySpace). I missed her very much.
She did manage to e-mail on occasion, and, ill-advisedly, we planned for her to sneak out one night. We would meet in Philadelphia. We were going to walk South Street.
I drove old rickety Earl Grey the hour to South Street, paging through my MapQuest directions. I drove right past South Street at one point and just decided to park as soon as I could. I found a spot and hopped out of my car. As I walked away, I realized I might later have no idea where I had parked. I got back into the car and grabbed my journal, the sacred notebook where I wrote all my poetry. I looked around for a landmark and wrote it down, and put the journal in my backpack.
I met up with her and it was glorious. I treasured being in her company, if only for a night. I don’t remember what we did on South Street. I don’t remember what we did at all. But it stands as one of the more significant nights of my life, on my long road to becoming the current version of me.
A week or so ago, I decided to go back through some of my old journals and see if I had missed anything of value, any pieces of writing I could turn into something good. I never did get around to it, but I threw the two oldest ones into my backpack, planning to look at them the next time I came to rest in some park. I promptly forgot about it.
This evening, I was riding my bike through what is now one of my favorite sections of Old City (technically, the neighborhood known as Society Hill). I love this section for it’s old houses, churches with expansive, historic graveyards, and shade-dappled side alleys. I came to one of the more significant landmarks to me, the house that Thaddeus Kosciuszko lived in when he lived in Philadelphia. Kosciuszko is my favorite revolutionary. I feel deeply connected to him across the vast gulf of time. The version of me from eleven years ago wasn’t yet even interested in history. He would have had zero interest in this Polish freedom fighter’s house. But I certainly do now.
I recalled, tonight, how the last time I was in the house, the park ranger had told me the woman who owned it and rented it to Kosciuszko was buried in the cemetery across the street. I have spent some time in that cemetery before (American painter Charles Wilson Peale is buried there, and so is George Dallas, who was Vice President under James K. Polk), but I thought I’d wander through again and look for her grave.
It didn’t take me long in there before I had to face the fact that I couldn’t remember her name, and my iPhone’s power was getting too low to make Googling a wise choice, so I decided to leave and ride my bike elsewhere. But as I stepped onto the sidewalk, the shade of sense memory hit me. I’d been here many times these past six months, but perhaps never at this time of evening, in this kind of mid-summer air. Suddenly I wondered it I’d been here before, long before.
I sat my backpack on the ground an hurriedly opened it, finding the oldest journal. I looked at many pages before I found it, scrawled in my own unmistakable hand:
4th St., across from St. Peters Church
I craned my neck at the cemetery gate above me, and sure enough: St. Peters.
Sure, maybe no big deal. So what, this is where I parked that night? If I moved to the city, it stands to reason I would pass by the place I parked that night, eleven years ago.
But the way that it came to me out of the blue, the way I had that journal on me, which was extraordinarily unlikely, the way I’d never noticed before that this was the place. It has been long ago enough now that it’s starting to feel like deep past; I felt my younger self there. I felt her younger self there. I saw me getting out of my Escort, completely oblivious to Thad Kosciuszko’s house a half block away, not caring, not caring, not caring. And life is crammed full of these bizarre cycles, these glances-back, these cosmic happenstances. Like combination locks clicking into place. But then the lock, it just keeps on spinning.
I sure do like blue skies, clear wide-open blue skies and the wind on my face. Getting tan. Getting tan is like taking the outside world into yourself and then shooting it back out. And all those vitamins and good vibes. Also I like movies. I like watching movies in air conditioned rooms while sweat dries on my skin. I like rice with salt on it, and dogs who smile.
1. Nothing says “I’m a boring person” quite like posting pictures of your alcoholic beverage to Facebook. Seriously. You went out to a bar or club and you think the interesting thing that is supposed to happen is the drink itself? Uninteresting, repetitive pictures of the person you’re with, or even another selfie, are more interesting than a beverage in a glass. We’ve got the whole internet, and you want us to look at a beverage.
2. I’ve brought this up before, but I just have to keep digging at this one. Why are there two kinds of screws and screw drivers, ie flat head and Philips head? I’m not over here like, meh, there should only be one kind! I am confident there are very good reasons for there being multiple kinds of screws, but I just for the life of me can’t figure out what those reasons are. Anyone with any insight, please comment!
3. War is terrible, but man, for a nation so young, we’ve had two very interesting wars! I’ll be damned if the Revolution and the Civil War aren’t two of the most amazing stories ever told.
4. With Philip Seymour Hoffman dead, the greatest actor of this generation (ie the generation currently the correct age to play the most interesting parts in the kind of films that get made the majority of the time) is James Franco. Discuss.
5. I get pretty tired of taking the trash out. I mean, we really just have to keep doing this?
6. Look at this picture of my dad and sister on vacation in Brigantine, NJ in 1980. What’s not to love about this picture? I want to sit on a porch listening to that radio, wearing those socks, next to a child dressed like that:
7. I recently asked a few friends of mine which baseball team they would like, if they had only to consider the teams uniforms/ colors and logo. Where you grew up and your previous loyalty should be not considered. I got a few interesting answers—Billhanna said the Astros, which was a damned good answer. My answer? The Marlins or Blue Jays.
8. Gabriel Garcia Marquez died this week. He is one of my (and many others’) favorite novelists. His most famous book is “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, which I love, but my favorite book of his is “Love in the Time of Cholera”, a book about a man who is obsessed/in love with one woman for his whole life, and dedicates his whole life to being with her. It sounds creepy, and at times, it is, but what I love so much about it is that it is the only work of art in any medium that I have ever encountered that treats the obsessive side of love with the tender and insightful kind of care that most people reserve for “romantic” love. It is a game-changer of a book. Here is the first sentence from that book: “It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.”
9. I understand you didn’t ask for my postcard or letter in the mail, and I understand, in this day and age, you’re not really sure how to respond to such antiquities. I really don’t care too much. Ideally you’d send a letter back, but I’m not expecting that. You can ignore it. That’s fine, you didn’t ask for it. You can text me a response, which is the main thing people do, and that’s fine, if a bit gaudy. But please, please…don’t post a picture of it on Facebook.
Sometimes when driving, or riding the train, or walking around in some park, I will try to get an image in my head of what the land around me would have looked like 400 years ago. The same hills, the same landscape, but in my mind I’ll cover it in nothing and wonder what it was like to be the first person to chance upon it. This is always useless to me. There is so much wonder in this world, but I always have trouble getting past our influence, our disasters and clumsy systems. And even in those places where there is some real beauty, like over at Bartram’s Gardens, or up on Presque Isle, or back home on the Appalachian Trail, all I have to do is take one look at the skyline in the distance, or the cement path I’m walking on, or hear the sound of the Honda hatchback blaring through the trees, and I am out of the tenuous illusion and coldly back in reality.
We are constantly tethered to some safety line. There is always a lantern, or a map, or a screen, or a cell phone. These things guarantee that whatever experience we’re having is just an attempt at connecting with something foreign and old, that it’s not real, no matter how real it looks. We’ve sketched out a new world over the old, and they are in two separate universes; the old is lost despite the remnants we see of it every day. If properly prepared, one could live entire decades indoors, in a world of their own creation.
Sometimes, I’ll stay indoors for a day or two at a time, talking to no one and doing nothing of value. Once I do go outside after a long stretch like that, it still feels fake, like some slide in front of my eyes. At a certain point, I’ll have to tell myself, This is actually real and I am actually here, that dog or building or mountain range in the distance is a real thing inhabiting the same space that I am. I think that must be a very modern sensation, that of having to convince oneself of reality.
All they could do was act oblivious
holding their bodies still for the camera,
sometimes one of them thinking to move
and leave a blur for posterity.
Most just held their smiles, forever.
The young couple, he in a vest three
sizes too large, her in a flapper’s skirt
and Cloche hat, with a tulip in it.
Two sisters sitting on a low curb
above a dirt street, a horse behind them,
the sun casting their shadows diagonally
behind them like knives, or long fingers.
A squinting man outside a bus station
playing the guitar and singing.
A young boy in a bowler hat very close to the camera,
winking and sticking his tongue out.
What is up with this trend of inane lists on the internet that have a purposefully odd and senseless amount of items in them? 38 Things White People Don’t Know or 16 Ways I Blew My Marriage or The 42 Most Haunted Places in Ireland. When they first started popping up, I just assumed the list makers had gotten lazy and didn’t feel like making a list that made it to an even number, but it soon became obvious that the trend was too prevalent and too consistent to be an accident or a product of laziness. Something about this odd-number list is a draw to readers–or at least a proven click generator–and I just can’t figure out why. Why would an oddly numbered list prove to be more attractive to a reader? Is it just a curiosity thing? Maybe the number itself jumps off the screen at you more, because our brains are trained to scan past numbers we see all the time, like 10, 20, etc? No matter the cause, it should surprise nobody that this annoys the shit out of me. I like my lists nice and tidy with rounded numbers, you know, like you were kind of trying. And don’t get me started on the silly, needless lists that this tactic has caused to pop up on my news feed. Sigh. I really do kinda hate the internet. But it’s definitely a love-hate kinda hate.
I still have yet to be able to find any information about those piers in my video on my previous blog. Of course, I’m just Googling. Does a more in-depth way of researching things still exist? Does going to a library and…I don’t know, doing something there increase my likelihood of figuring something like this out? I mean, not everything is on the internet, believe it or not, but I seem to have lost the ability or the know-how to do any research aside from internet searches. Don’t get me wrong, I’m really good at internet searches, but still…
Sometimes in life you say something, maybe just a few words, a sentence, and you regret saying it. Even twenty years later, you regret it, and maybe you regret it for the rest of your life. Because saying something is an action, and maybe something you said hurt somebody, and somewhere deep inside us we know that some things do last forever. And you wish you hadn’t hurt that person. You wish you hadn’t said or done the thing. People love to talk about not having regret, but you do. You have regret because you’re a human being and having regrets is as much an ingrained part of the human experience as pooping, or stretching in the morning, or hating the Pittsburgh Penguins. You can get into some stupid language game like well to me regret means blah blah blah, but I don’t, I just use experiences to blah blah blah. Whatever. Stop watching daytime TV. Life aint tidy. Own your regret.
I’m sure glad I stopped drinking before this whole “craft beer” thing started happening. I certainly would not like these sludgy beasts. Oatmeal beer and wheaty stuff and dark beers with bits of rice floating in them, or whatever. Of course, I am sure that many people are constantly forced to pretend to like these things by a hipsterish peer pressure. I can tell just by looking at these bottles that these “micro-brews” (once you’re bringing science into beer, you’ve probably lost the plot) are like beer syrup. They probably make Guinness look like Coors Light. No thanks. Thank you, sobriety!
Copy the application, and paste in an e-mail, along with your answers, to sdellinger1978@gmail.com. You will receive a reply within two shakes of a lamb’s tail.
1. What is your favorite season, and why?
2. Rank the following authors in order of their academic relevance:
–Barbara Kingsolver
–Wally Lamb
–Thomas Pynchon
–Dave Eggers
–Stephen King
3. Do you think gay people should have the right to marry each other?
4. Say you and I go out to dinner at a diner. Not a fancy place, just a straight-forward diner. The waitress is not a bitch, but she isn’t very nice. The food comes out on time and is of an acceptable nature. The bill totals $18. How much do you tip?
5. On a scale of 1-10, to what degree would you say you have a “badonk a donk”?
6. Without using the internet, can you name a poem by Robert Frost? Nevermind, I have no way of knowing if you used the internet.
7. If you could move anywhere in the world, where would it be?
8. You can have a full bedroom set made out of walnut or cherry. Which do you choose?
9. What is the best shape of pasta?
10. Do you own any white denim pants?
11. What is the ideal amount of band members to be in a rock band?
12. I need lots of my own space and am frequently grumpy and sensitive. There’s not a question here, I’m just letting you know.
13. What is the farthest you would drive to see a Revolutionary or Civil War battlefield? Don’t lie to me about this, I’ll know.
14. Salt or pepper?
15. Discuss the last time you thought the Academy Awards got the Best Picture award correct.
16. If you could choose one animal to represent you, what would it be, and why?
17. What did you score on the SATs? I didn’t do that great, I’m just wondering.
Back of card. Postmarked on June 14th, 1910, in Cape Vincent, NY, being sent to Limerick, NY:
Dear little Nephew:
have been thinking of you all day so I am sending you a card. I hope that you are enjoying your birthday and wish you “many happy returns of the day”. With love from Aunt Beatrice.
It occurs to me with no lack of regularity that, because of my persistent status as single and childless, that I have significantly fewer opportunities to receive presents as the rest of you romantic and procreating beasts. And hey, listen, I’m gonna admit something most people avoid saying out loud: I would like more presents!
So recently, I was thinking, maybe it’s not just the lack of Valentines, Father’s Day, and anniversary (as well as the extra gifts one gets at Christmas and birthdays etc, from your significant other and children) that are preventing me from getting a significant amount of free goods. Perhaps part of the problem is, when gifting times roll around, many of you potential gifters think my interests are limited to just a few things, like pompous music, post-1930s American and British poetry, and the films of Alfred Hitchcock, and you just don’t know how to buy presents for a guy like that! And, while it is true that I really love those things, the fact of the matter is, I have literally hundreds of interests, and with the advent of the internet, there is nearly no shortage of ways you can spend money on me! And the internet also means it is very easy for me to re-sell something you may accidentally get me that I already have!
So, in case you have just been hankering to buy a gift for a guy but don’t know who the hell Philip Larkin is, I will here lay out for you a massive list of interests I rarely talk about, but I assure you I am just crazy for!
20. Any DVD that says it is part of the “Criterion Collection”…you can buy me that.
21. I am a big fan of motorized inclined planes, or “funiculars“.
22. I love backscratchers. It is not possible for me to own too many of them.
23. Books or materials about early American filmmaking are always great (post 1910 and D.W. Griffiths only, I have no interest in Edison’s important but dreadfully boring experiments).
24. Dr. Strange is my favorite comic book character. I have plenty of stuff but feel free to take a leap of faith, there’s a lot out there. Statues, figures, and busts are especially desired.
25. The easiest thing on the list: I love all Philadelphia sports teams.
26. I have an interest in Quantum Physics. There are tons of books and DVDs on the subject. I will read and watch them all.
27. John Sloan, the painter. That man painted my soul.
29. Post-Revolution, my favorite historical figure is Aaron Burr.
30. I could always use a new (good) digital camera.
31. I have an interest in but have not read much about behavioral psychologist BF Skinner.
32. I am a major evangelist for Dr. Pepper, and even more specifically Diet Dr. Pepper, and I will, without irony, wear, brandish, or otherwise use merchandise imprinted with this soda’s logo.
33. I have always been smitten with now-deceased scientist Carl Sagan, and any of his books are welcome. Likewise, his television series, “Cosmos”, and any materials related to it, are high on my love list.
39. I have an odd interest in the history of the Mormon religion, specifically the handcart disaster, the Mountain Meadows massacre, and the early life and “visions” of founder Joseph Smith.
42. If I hit the lottery tomorrow, two of the first purchases I’d make would be the complete series of “The Fraggles” and “24” on DVD. Don’t judge me.
43. My favorite living poet is Billy Collins. I have all his books. See what else you can do.
44. I love riding my bike. But I’m not a serious biker, like, wearing spandex, etc. I do it just to cruise around. But I could use a new lock, gel seat cover, or other biking stuff you might think of. I could also use a new bike, but if you want to go that far, we should probably collaborate on that.
45. Anything relating to the old TV shows “Northern Exposure“, “Twin Peaks“, or “Picket Fences“. I own the entire series of “Northern Exposure”, but other than that, it’s open season.
46. I find the Donner party very interesting. I have read this book on it, but nothing else.
47. I like to use caramel coffee syrup in my coffee and oatmeal. I can never have too much of it.
48. I love newspapers, but it’s not easy to find merchandise regarding them, such as hats, shirts, etc. My favorite newspapers are The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and USA Today.
49. Museum memberships. Any kind of museum. Art, history, whatever. I can’t imagine a gift I would love much more than a membership to just about any museum. Currently, I am a member of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, but no other museums.
50. Old coinage, pre-1900, from early America or other countries. Confederate money would be very cool.
I know advertising isn’t the Devil. By itself, removed from cultural context and its own long, insidious history, it is in fact a pretty good thing. It’s a solid economic model that performs well in a healthy Capitalist society, and it alone is responsible for the continuing existence of television, magazines, newspapers, and very close to everything else. Without advertising, our culture would look very different—in some ways for the better, but mostly to our detriment.
So, why do I still feel like advertising is the enemy? Why do I still feel like a mark when I chuckle at a TV commercial, make a mental note of an ad in a magazine, or slow my car to finish reading a billboard? Why do I feel like a complete fool when I finish a conversation with someone about “that commercial we just love!”?
It’s a fact that not all advertising is fear-based, but it’s certainly a fact that most of it is. Granted, I can’t think of a (reasonable) explanation for how this adorable camel hump-day Geico commercial is trying to use my fear to get me to buy a product, but exceptions like this are few. Long, long, long ago, the folks in charge of creating advertising realized the purchasing public responded with their wallets and pocketbooks the most when you scared the shit out of them. And that is why I feel like a schmo for responding to their wiles. I’ve let them scare me.
Here is a famous early print advertisement for Pears soap, from England, circa 1900:
Pears soap (which was named after its founder and had nothing to do with pears) was one of (if not THE, depending on who you ask) the first mass produced and mass marketed soaps, not to mention the world’s first registered brand, of any product.
So how did this early ad play on Britisher’s fears? This ad, one of a series of similar paintings, depicts Britain’s upper-middle class at the time (a class that had only just started to exist). Ads like this mostly ran in publications read by the lower classes (who were nonetheless, obviously, literate, and therefore upwardly mobile, meaning they had money to buy things). By associating products with classes or lifestyles we could possibly (although rarely easily or practically) obtain, companies consistently prey on our fears that the lives we are living are not good enough, are not as good as everyone else’s. The ultimate fear: we are not as good as everyone else. But guess what? Pears soap can help you get there!
If you don’t have a Swiffer, you’re wasting time. If you don’t use Axe body spray, you aren’t sleeping with enough women. If you don’t have Aflac, you will get hurt at work and not be able to pay your bills. If you don’t use Purex, your clothes aren’t as bright as your neighbors’.
Often, the fear of inadequacy is not as blatantly stated in the ad’s content, but in the unrealistic idealized world created by them. Watch this seemingly innocuous ad for Johnsonville Bratwurst, but watch it now as a skeptic. How does the ad create, in a short space of time, an idealized world that the product’s target audience wishes they lived in, but which is an unrealistic world? How does the ad play on a fear of inadequacy to sell its product?
This is just a short primer on the subject, which I intend to return to shortly. I am far from the first person to make these observations; folks much smarter than I have written full books on the topic. The rabbit hole, in fact, goes much deeper than this. Does advertising, in fact, manipulate the wants and needs of the consumers so badly and on such a grand scale as to change our cultural desires and tastes to a point of unbalance (one can never write off the importance of personal responsibility in our choices, but did enough fear play a role in our nation’s current obesity epidemic, our dependence on credit, and even the recent housing bubble? I think you can guess where I stand)?
I thought I’d get the conversation rolling. Your thoughts are appreciated.
It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Pennsylvania. I think it is a freakin’ magnificent state. Does it have flaws? Yes, of course it does. It doesn’t stand out as a modern jewel of progressive liberalism, it doesn’t have any famous exports like potatoes or cheese, no glitzy seaside resorts, no Yellowstone or Yosemite. But, perhaps I am biased, but I still think it’s the greatest state in the Union.
All the specifics for why I think it is so great, I will save for another blog. Suffice to say, I think it’s great, which you may be able to tell by how often you may see me poking around the state’s history and culture. Its history, in particular, I find of special interest. Most people that live here don’t give a hoot about our state history, but I think an argument could be made for Pennsylvania being the most important as well as most interesting state in our nation’s history, and it is not just blind ethnocentrism to suggest that would also make this state one of the most important stops in world history. Them’s no small shakes.
Ever since I moved into New Jersey, right across the state line from Philadelphia, I’ve been keenly aware that although our state as well as our nation began in that big city across the river, there was a blighted and forgotten city not far away known as Chester, Pennsylvania, where our state’s founder, William Penn, first stepped ashore onto his new land (He’d been in the New World for awhile at that point, but mostly in New Jersey). I knew there was a marker in that falling-apart city that commemorated his landing, and for a Pennsylvania-lover like me, it was a must-see. But I kept putting it off. Having been briefly and quickly through Chester a few times, I knew it was not prime real estate; it is in fact not much better than Camden, New Jersey, which I chronicled here and here. Not that I’m afraid of a blighted city, it was more of there being not much else to do there.
Well, today I was on my way from one place to another that took me through Chester on a day when I had nothing else to do, so I hopped off the highway and set about finding the marker that denoted the very start of our colony. And despite the fact that I was prepared for it to be in a slum, I was still shocked by the level of poverty going on there. I only managed to snap one picture as I was driving around, before I found the marker. This is that picture:
It didn’t take me long to find the marker and the small “park” around it; its address is Penn and Front street, and if I have learned anything in my travels, it is how to find places in river towns with addresses on Front Streets (just drive toward the river, where you will find Front Street, then pick a direction. If you chose wrong, you’ll know soon enough. Then go the other way). I was not surprised to find a tiny park in an unremembered industrial part of the broken-down city. I was not surprised to be the only human being there for the approximately 45 minutes I stayed. I was not surprised by the sense of sadness I had that the world has passed these memories by, coupled with a true happiness that such monuments still exist at all. I was not surprised by the weight of time crushing me as I attempted to picture what the area must have looked like then, what these people were like, what they thought about this land and if William Penn could ever have envisioned me, standing in the exact same place he did, incredibly distant in the future.
Below is some video I took of the monument area, for any who are curious, and below that, some pictures.
The modest park as seen from the street; the marker is at the end of the brick walkway.
At the entrance to the park, a placard about the historical role of Delaware County, PA.
The marker commemorating William Penn’s first steps in Pennsylvania
From behind the marker, looking back at the street.
I walked around the brick wall behind the marker and snapped this shot: a factory to my right, the Delaware River (upon which Penn would have sailed), and the Commodore Barry Bridge, which of course came hundreds of years later.
For the last few months, I’ve been slowly trodding through Ron Chernow’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of George Washington, Washington: A Life. I love biographies, especially “life” biographies (meaning books that trace a person’s life from beginning to end, as opposed to some biographies that focus on a specific time in a person’s life, like the very hip Doris Kearns Goodwin book Team of Rivals ) because full-life biographies not only allow you to see the amazing or substantial things that person did, but also allow you to see how their life, like just about everyone’s life, is kinda sorta like yours, no matter when they lived or what they did.
George Washington’s life was certainly very different than mine, at least as far as its “plot” is concerned. But in many ways, it was very similar. He had obsessions, failures, doubts, triumphs. Women he could never get, purchases he could never make, expecations he wrestled with, and the insidious pallor of mortality. Reading Chernow’s biography–widely considered the most accurate yet written–is really making the man come alive for me, and I’m finding this book to be not only very informative, but quite surprisingly emotional.
One of George Washington’s best friends was French general Marquis de Lafayette (Gilbert to his pals), one of if not the largest French figure of the American Revolution. Layfayette was 25 years younger than Washington–he was only 19 years old when he came to our young nation to help us win our independence, and at first, Washington played the role of a mentor to the young Frenchman. But by war’s end–a war that certainly had to be one of the most emotional and amazing experiences in the history of mankind, and the participants were far from unaware of its immense magnitute—Washington and Lafayette had become great friends and equals. A portrait of Lafayette hung in Washington’s parlor in Mount Vernon.
I tell you all this so I can put in here a passage I just read that moved me to tears. It felt odd to be moved to tears by a biography of George Washington, but this is why I love history so much. There were real people doing extraordinary things.
After all the incredible things these men had been through together in the war, there was a time of relative tranquility, before Washington knew he would become president, when he was looking forward to just farming his land in Virginia and resting. Lafayette visited him for an extended stay, but eventually, it came time for him to go back to France. This almost certainly meant the two close friends would never see each other again. Ocean crossings were no small deal in those days. Washington rode half the way from Virginia to Philadelphia (where he’d be sailing from) with Lafayette, and somewhere along the road, the two men said goodbye.
A short while later, back at Mount Vernon, Washington wrote Lafayette a letter (they never would see each other again, by the way). The portion of the letter that moved me so is as follows:
In the moment of our seperation upon the road, as I traveled and every hour since, I felt all that love, respect, and attachment for you with which length of years, close connection, and your merits have inspired me. I often asked myself, as our carriages distended, whether that was the last sight I should ever have of you? And though I wished to say no, my fears answered yes. I called to mind the days of my youth and found they had long since fled to return no more; that I was now descending the hill I had been 52 years climbing; and that though I was blessed with a good constitution, I was of a short-lived family and might soon expect to be entombed in the dreary mansions of my fathers. These things darkened the shades and gave a gloom to the picture, consequently to my prospects of seeing you again. Know, my friend, that I have loved you true, and my life stands altered for it. But I will not repine—I have had my day.
This is how it doesn’t happen:
you’re on a train from London to Paris
and a woman in red sits down
across from you. No need for talk,
the distance exactly what you both need
on this fog-chilled morning,
the 70-year-old scent of siege still in the air,
the sunrise damp thick in your overcoat.
This is how it doesn’t happen, how all you do
is offer her a paper-thin wafer of chocolate,
bittersweet as monochrome,
how nothing happens,
how the train churns on to Paris,
how in Paris you leave the compartment,
walk your separate ways,
how the sharp smell of grease is perfect,
how the steam is absolutely perfect.
Many of you know that I am a big fan of using “snail mail”. I send plenty of postcards, letters, and larger, miscellaneous package-type things. I love the idea that something that was just in my hands, or was created or written by me, can be in your hands and your possession just a few days later.
I’m an especially big fan of the postcard, with its picture on the front that you can either choose to write about or ignore completely, and the very limited space for writing on the back, forcing you to be very judicious with your words.
So yesterday, when my mother and I were out browsing at the local antique stores, I was naturally curious when I saw a bin full of old postcards. I was even more delighted—and then moved beyond almost all measure–when I started reading the messages written on the backs of some of these postcards. I bought the ones that moved me the most, and knew I’d have to share them with you on here.
I don’t think you need me to over-explain what is so moving about these. I’d love to see some comments on here about your feelings and interpretations and what these mean to you. What I’ve done is scanned the front and back of each, and then typed the text underneath, including the date it was sent, either from the postmark or something written on the postcard. Let me know how these make you feel.
Sent from Ocean City, NJ, to Bridgeton, NJ. Not sure of date, but possibly 1975.
Mother dear,
Your letter here when we arrived at 6. Will write you tomorrow. Do not bother with sending flowers, we now expect to go Elmer’s Fri and wouldn’t be here and its too much bother for you. Lidie is at Elmers now. Saw them last night.
–e
Sent from Disney World, Florida, to Bridgeton, NJ, 1972
Hi
Well we got hear today. It sure is great! I bet you’d like it hear. I never seen anything like it.
Love,
Aunt Ida, Uncle Dan
No date or location information; appears to maybe not have been sent. Seems to be pretty damn old, though. I’m open to various interpretations of the third sentence, either in its meaning or my reading of the handwriting.
Dear cousins. I gathered some violets today. Paul can walk when he holds to something. The clock don’t get tired now. Tell Robert I saw some jack rabbits coming from town. Baby has 5 teeth. from Keith.
Sent from Chicago to Ephrata, PA, 1932
Johnnie and I “did” Chicago yesterday–both day & night. We’re making good time and should be in Yellowstone by the end of the week. We’re spending the night in a log cabin with a creek at our back door. –Dot R
Sent from Springfield, Missouri, to Ephrata, PA, 1944. It is of note that the recipient of this postcard is almost certainly the author of the previous one, a miss Dorothy “Dot” Schmeck, who signed the previous postcard (from 12 years before this one) as “Dot R”.
Dear Dot,
Your letter was swell and you need never apologize about it. I was happy to get it and hope you keep up the good work. Don’t get a paper and Eleanor keeps running around so you may keep me up on the hometown news. Keep Eleanor toned down to her level now that I’m not there to do it.
Too bad about the men that must go into the service. Wish it would end soon, don’t you? Didn’t know you were worried about the male situation? Guess it is serious, isn’t it?
Kids are OK the way I feel now. So don’t be too sorry. This is interesting work, tho.
How about writing me back to make up for the months you didn’t know?
Life chugs along here in Philly/ South Jersey. There are quite literally more things to do than I have time for! The list of ways I want to spend my time keeps growing and growing and I rarely fully check something off of it. In addition to tourist areas/ landmarks (which my mother and I tick off a list at the rate of about one a week), there are larger projects I can’t seem to get my feet under me for: familiarize myself with the local rock music scene, find when and where nationally-renowned poets are reading in the area, figure out the local New Jersey history, take pictures of as many Philadelphia historical markers as I can, become familiar with Philly record stores…and on and on. Luckily, I like doing things.
There was a hurricane yesterday. Despite all signs pointing to the fact that we should have been, like, directly in the worst part of the hurricane, close to nothing happened here. Just a whole lot of rain, and a little bit of wind. For a moment it looked like there might be a flood danger. Watch this video I took, once an hour from between 1pm and 5pm:
A few nights ago I went and saw the band El Ten Eleven at Philly’s North Star Bar. It was interesting to finally see a show at this venue, as about two years ago, when I was living in Erie, I had planned to see the band Hey Rosetta! at this location when I was home on a vacation, but those plans got changed, however, I had stayed on their mailing list and have recieved monthly e-mails from them for two years, detailing the bands playing there. While there are dozens and dozens of venues in Philly, it just so happened that the North Star Bar would end up being the first place I actually saw a band in Philly after moving here. It was, essentially, a dump. But I loved it.
This concert was somewhat unique for me because I attended it WITH SOMEBODY. I went with my friend Bill Hanna, who doesn’t have a Facebook, so it’s almost like he doesn’t exist. But he does have a Twitter account, and I’m sure he’ll hate the fact that I just linked to it.
El Ten Eleven is post-rock, which I reference all the time but you still don’t know what it is. Damn lazy readers. Anyway, it’s really serious music for really pretentious bastards like me. But seeing post-rock live is pretty much the most intense experience I ever go through. It is life-affirming, gut-wrenching, and sorrowful. And seeing it live with a friend is even more intense. Kudos to Bill Hanna for making the trip, as I think he still has just one foot into the genre, not yet sure if he likes the temperature, although he is a certified fan of this post-rock band.
Anyway, the day of the show, I spent wandering around Philly before meeting up with Bill and going to the show. I made this video of footage from that day, set to El Ten Eleven’s “Lorge”, followed by footage I shot of them opening their show that night with the same song:
Other intense things lately: my mom and I saw a show of some of Winslow Homer’s paintings, including this hum-dinger:
Went to the intriguing Franklin Science Center with the sis, nephews, and mom:
I’ve visited the building Thomas Jefferson was staying in when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, the house where Walt Whitman died, four Phillies games, toured a battelship, taken a million (really good) pictures, eaten way too many cheesesteaks, allowed my mother to teach me that, yes, plants are actually badass, recieved multiple cool owl things from my sister, played a seriously challenging game of hide-and-seek with my nephew Ethan, bought a really sweet new record player, went to the damned zoo, attended a meeting of our development’s Homeowner’s Association with my mom and Brian (formerly known as Pumpkin Latte on this blog, but that would be too weird considering my recent career change, so to my blog readers: Brian is my sister’s husband and also a registered Shaman in Alaska), went to dinner at a fancy schmancy joint with a visiting Michael, became obsessed with the works of this poet and even found a book of his in, yes, an actual bookstore, visited Newville and had my dad take me on a tour of his childhood, oh and this and also this, and really almost too much stuff to name.
I took a break from the blog for awhile, just basically finding where it fit into my new life, but things have settled into a nice rhythm now, so expect it to come roaring back, with a vengeance. Also, vote for Obama, you bastards.
“This Train Revised” by the Indigo Girls is an absolute masterpiece of music, literature, and culture. In order to fully grasp the gravity of the song, first you must become familiar with “This Train”, a traditional American spiritual song that the Indigos are “revising”. The Girls’ version takes the spiritual song to Hitler’s Holocaust, where a train is not just a train; it is a train packed with human bodies on their way to extermination camps. Another way of seeing this train ride, in the eyes of the Indigo Girls, is “this train is bound for glory”; Dachau may not seem like “glory” to many, but considering the very few ways that the trip could end, one can’t help but see their meaning.
The song is laden with lyrical flourishes that don’t so much excite the listener as they effectively compound the vicarious misery an empathetic observer must feel anytime we aggressively confront the Holocaust. From the simple list of the various “types” of people who were lost in the Holocaust and the human toll their loss incurred (“here is a dancer/ who has no legs/ here is a teacher/ who has no face”) to the more complex image of how the camp “doctor” covers “our eyes with clear blue skies”, the Indigo Girls attack the Holocaust head-on, but in a fashion I’ve never seen before.
This all comes to a thematic head when the Girls compare the countless dead bodies of the emaciated exterminated to “answers, stacked like wood”. Finally, in the ultimate analysis, the only way for us to comprehend what happened in those places is to remove the dead from their humanity, just as their tormenters did. That many bodies “stacked” (here we’ll assume most of us have seen enough of the gruesome photographic evidence of the concentration camps that we have a basic, accurate picture in our minds of what the mass graves actually looked like) is incomprehensible; cords of wood, however, we can at least begin to grasp. “Here are the questions. Here are the answers, stacked like wood,” the Indigo Girls tell us, leaving us, essentially, where we began when contemplating the Holocaust: it is all nonsense, and any answers are not come by easily.
(unfortunately, the only video of this song on YouTube has some political messages attached, but I’m not sure I disagree with them)
It’s a fish white belly lump in the throat razor on the wire skin and bone piss and blood in a railroad car 100 people gypsies queers and David’s star this train is bound for glory measure the bones count the face pull out the teeth do you belong to the human race doctor doctor are you unkind do you shock the monkeys cover our eyes with clear blue skies this train is bound for glory here is a dancer who has no legs here is a teacher who has no face here is a runner who has no feet here is a healer who has no hands here is a builder who has no back here is a thinker who has no head here is a writer who has no voice these are the questions these are the answers stacked like wood this train is bound for glory these are the questions stacked like wood these are the answers here is potential gone for good
1. Philadelphia is the fifth most populous city in the United States. It’s kind of a big deal.
2. The city of Philadelphia is its own county—the only instance of a city-county in Pennsylvania.
3. The Greek translation of “Philadelphia” is literally “brotherly love”.
4. It is one of the twelve “four sport cities”.
5. As of December 31st, 2009, there were 829,873 registered Democrats living in the city, and 134,216 Republicans.
How I’m Doing!
I am really having a grand old time. Living around people I know again, as well as working at a job whose main training tool is basically telling you to be really really nice to people, has started to make me come back around to caring about my fellow human again. I love my new job. I have really, really fallen in love with my mother’s cats, and I dare say they’ve started falling for me, too. Living with my mother is not only easy and tolerable, but downright great (and I don’t care how that sounds coming from a 34 year old; you can stuff your societal norms where the sun, it does not care to shine. I am talking about your bunghole). I have way too many fun and interesting things to do, all the time. This new setup is redefining what I am interested in, and how I spend my time and money; where I’ll end up on that spectrum remains to be seen. I will say that without a doubt, there will not be a year-end “Top Ten Movies” list of 2012. I just cannot seem to muster the interest for movies right now (although there most definitely will still be a music list). I finally got back to Central PA to visit friends and Dad. It was a transcendant time. Dad and I’s developing interests in local history are making for lovely, lively, emotional visits. I only got to see a few friends on that visit but plenty more will be coming soon. Paul is coming here to see the Phillies vs. Marlins with me next Wednesday, so that should rule. I’m drinking a lot, a lot, a lot of coffee, and not just at work. I got a new, finally very nice record player. I’m kind of obsessed with it. I’ve decided I like owls now and my sister keeps finding rad owl statues/ figures for me. I cautioned her not to overdo it but with finds like these, I’m not sure overdoing it is possible.
Things are settling into what feels like a normal life here in Mantua. It took quite some time to feel like I wasn’t just visiting. (I’m not entirely there yet, but it’s getting close). I’ve been visiting my sister, nephews, and mother in this very cul-de-sac for…what?…a decade now? So psychologically it’s been strange to wrap my head around the fact that, for the time being, this is my home too. Not to insinuate that everyone hasn’t been extremely hospitable. Everyone has been note-perfect in making me feel at home. I’m just saying…finding myself suddenly living here (because really, once I started applying for jobs, the whole thing happened pretty quickly) has been a challenging but very fun mental exercise.
I’ve been slow to begin “exploring” my new surroundings. Those of you who were here for my Erie Journal will recall my immediate submersion into that local culture. A few things have slowed my explorations this go-round: mainly, when I moved to Erie, I was continuing work with the company I’d been with before, in a position I’d worked in before. For this move, most of my focus has been on work, as I train for a new company, performing a job that is very different from my last one. Hence, most of my mental capacities at the time are centered on the new job until I can be certain nobody there perceives me as a buffoon. Secondarily, because of the timing of when my last day was with my previous job and when I started my new job, I just went 5 weeks without a paycheck, which will turn anyone into a homebody.
All this is my way of saying to my loved ones—both in Central PA and also the ones right here in this cul-de-sac— you’ll be seeing more of me soon. I know part of why I and some of you were excited for my move was that we’d get to see more of each other, and I’ve been here for a month now without even a plan to visit Central PA and very little time spent with my family here. I think I see the light at the end of my “adjustment period” coming soon. Be patient with me, I’m a fickle bastard.
Those of you tuning in occasionally hoping to see a bunch of “Hey, look at all this neat stuff I’m doing!”, stay tuned. I have so many things planned in the near future, it’s damn-near frustrating. Although today, my mom and I did go see the room in Independence Hall where our nation was born:
Thirft stores. Elizabeth Taylor in her prime. Tapioca. The Occupy Movement. Chipping from the rough with a nine iron. Corduroy. Bevelled edges. Public transit. Micro-loans. YouTube. Gay marriage. Blu-Ray Disc. Crescendoes. Mark Twain. Febreze. Cork boards. Roe vs. Wade. Sun Dials. Road ID. Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The Sierra Club. The three-camera sitcom. Glossy paint. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Welfare. The GI Bill. Advil. Waiting periods for gun purchases. Boots. Megabus. Varnish. Synchronized Swimming. Egrets. Carbon offsets. Matt Lauer. Not feeding the Mogwai after midnight. Net Neutrality. Mandolin. Psychoanalysis. Stiff penalties for illegally downloading and stealing music or movies. The price of a US postage stamp. History Detectives. Comic books. Actually listening to the voicemail I left. Attempting to find your own true self. SETI. The freakin’ elliptical machine. Crosswalks. Pierced navels. Bananas. Tipping the barista. Sustainable fishing. Netflix. Paisley. Day-Quil. Hot dogs. Geothermal energy. Wearing a seat belt. Staycations. Water parks. The price of concessions at the movie theater (get over it). Presidential libraries. Jazz fusion. Curling. Abstract Expressionism. Craigslist. Dancing in the rain. The Large Hadron Collider.
I am currently in the midst of a months-long creative and intellectual mania. I often say I don’t have enough time in a day, but it has certainly never been more true than it is now.
I attribute this primarily to getting healthy and exercising; it definitely kickstarted an increase in energy, and a change in mood to the extreme end of “good”, and energy plus super good mood=extreme mania, and it’s lasting a long time. Which is good—damn good—but my lack of ability to do every single thing I want to is getting a little annoying. Let me describe a little better what the mania entails:
First and foremost, I want to do stuff constantly. Like, outside of the house stuff. It being winter, there are a limited amount of things to do, but I have lists of things I want to do when I have time, like “take pictures on Raspberry Street” or “tour the Watson-Curtze Mansion“, etc etc. When I do have time for activities such as this, it’s damn difficult deciding what to do.
Secondly, I have an enormous list of creative and artistic projects that I want to start, work on, or complete, and the list of projects itself has become a project. When I’m at work or out and about, I find myself typing ideas into my cell phone’s “notepad” for me to add to the project list when I get home. Hell, my list of potential blog entries alone is staggering. This aspect of the mania is the most frustrating, as I am getting more and more interesting and ambitious ideas and I simply don’t even have the time to start on most of them.
The mania is also driving up my appetite for media/ information consumption, even as the mania means I have less time to partake of that particular fountain. For many years now, most of you know, rather than watch much television, I’ve (through Netflix) watched, on average, one new movie a day. Even as my appetite for film continues to grow, my attention to other projects and interests is decreasing my time for them. And the mania has only increased my desire to read; I currently could probably read all day for four straight days and not get sick of it. Information, information, information, my mind screams at me. I currently have very little desire to read fiction (although, Mom, I really DO want to read that Stephen King book you sent me, and probably will start it in about 2 weeks). I read the Erie newspaper every day, and often stop somewhere for a USA Today, New York Times, or Wall Street Journal, depending on what’s happening in the world or if I heard about an article or feature in one of them from one of the websites I simply can’t stop reading thoroughly every day (Slate. Huffington Post. Oh, and Hacking Netflix and Deadline). And my magazine consumption, which I had finally whittled down in recent years, has skyrocketed during the mania. I can’t seem to read enough science writing. I currently read all of the “big three” science mags (Popular Science, Discover, and Scientific American; I’ve been a big Discover supporter for years but right now it’s just not enough), and it seems my hankering for history now bleeds over into magazines. America’s Civil War has been a mainstay on my bedside table recently, as have some oddballs such as Archaeology and The Saturday Evening Post. And these are all in addition to the standard entertainment, arts, news, and cultural magazines you’d expect me to be reading. Oh, and yes, I read books, too!
I have also taken quite a shine lately to just listening to music. I have found that, in most of my adult life, I have rarely simply sat down, doing nothing else, and listened to music intently. And now I have started doing it and it is changing my life. But where is the time???
Oh, and I have REALLY started to enjoy just puttering around my apartment, re-arranging things, finding new homes for this or that, hanging the artwork in new arrays, paging through my old books, putting old photos in little frames, etc etc.
In short, I literally do not have enough time in a day right now. I already start out with a deficit, working 50-60 hours a week. Then, remember, I’m spending between 8 and 12 hours a week in the gym, so there is potentially almost 80 hours unavailable a week. And then there’s sleep, at some point, and getting on the internet. I have essentially zero downtime. Please do not misunderstand me: I am loving this. I am in a constant good mood, and never even remotely close to being bored or sad. But damn. Who knew there could be so much to do (without, really, doing anything)? Also, this is a way of explaining to some of you how and why I might occasionally sound out of my mind, especially after a day that may have been devoted to intense, marathon bouts of reading, followed by writing or otherwise creating something incredibly personal and emotive, followed by going to a hockey game or something, and then back home to shower in the dark while The National plays on my stereo. It’s a whole lot of fun, but sometimes can make me a little crazy.
I anticipate things leveling off as my body continues to adjust to being some degree of healthy. But I just had to put it out there how wild and fun and jam-packed my life is at this point, even if it might not sound particularly fun to a lot of you, it is for me. And almost everything I’m doing or want to do is free or relatively cheap (not to mention my food budget being more than halved in recent months) so I’m actually saving a lot of money recently (concert-going has all but stopped, and there’s much less time to go to the movies now). How one starts saving money by doing more stuff is some sort of mystery!
I struggle with knowing myself. I try to be a very self-aware human being, understanding any changes I am going through, my motivations, the way I treat other people. For most of my adult life (or at least my P.S. life [Post-Sobriety]) I have thought I was pretty good at it. But lately it’s become more and more clear that that was a foolish, illusory notion. I have only a glancing understanding of what powers me. The only thing I am sure of is that I am complicated–not simple–and that my motivations and desires are a shifting, fluid grab-bag. Go figure.
Dear NFL: I am a somewhat new convert to enjoying your game and your league. I can still be won over for life, or lost. I understand your reasons behind your complicated system for which games get televised in which markets. I get it and I approve; however, I think sometimes you need to just televise the really desired games. This season, you’ve got a fantastic story in Tim Tebow. The drama and storybook quality of it has helped reel me in to your league even more this year, but I’ve only been able to follow it via highlight reels, newspapers, and talk radio. Not a single Denver Broncos game has been broadcast in my area (unless there was a Monday or Thursday game, in which case, I had to work, but still…not a single Sunday game). Now today, they are playing the Patriots in a game I would very much like to see. When you’ve got a golden soap-opera opportunity like this one, you should capitalize on it, not make me watch Bengals vs. Rams. A glance at the games being televised in my area today reveals nary a single game of interest, either nationally or locally. I understand you want me to GO to the game, but shouldn’t you, secondarily, at least want me to watch?
I note often (in conversation at least, perhaps not online) how surprised I constantly am by how drastically my likes and dislikes are changing over time, as this strange process of aging continues. There are obvious things such as my taste in music and movies (which is changing more than my public persona admits to; probably my favorite discovery this year has been this). But even bigger things are changing; nothing like my basic philosophical outlooks, but here’s a big one: this year, I don’t really hate winter. Previously, hating winter has been a large part of the public image I present to the world, and much like any time these large blocks change, I’ve been hesitant to admit to it publicly (people like keeping you the same in their minds), but I can’t deny it any longer. I am kind of enjoying the frigid darkness. I’m curious to see if it lasts.
The title of this entry is just a line from a Pearl Jam song that I was listening to today. It has no significance.
My hometown (OK, my second hometown) of Carlisle, PA is home to something known as the Carlisle Indian School. In Carlisle, there is a sense of pride concerning our place in history, as the Indian School is indeed more than a footnote in our national history. It is just recently that I’ve begun to fully comprehend the vile, evil nature of what our nation did with the Carlisle school and other “Indian schools” that came after it. So I just want to put it out there, now, that I am no longer proud of the Carlisle Indian School.
When I’m really attracted to a woman, I can be viscerally affected by even her handwriting.
Notes From the Fire 