Thursday, February 26, 2009

Pachyderm

* Why do you even do those things, anyway?

* It’s fun.

* Really?  Looks hella boring.

* No, it’s good.  It relaxes me.  And it’s so satisfying to work them out.  You start with all these mysteries; it looks like they couldn’t possibly have have told you enough to mean anything or get anywhere.  The numbers just swim around like fish, each one in its own little bowl, perfectly disconnected.  But if you approach it methodically, row by row and column by column, the truth begins to emerge.  Maybe you get one number for sure, or can narrow it down to a couple of options.  It’s still wide open and mostly empty but you’ve got that first little toehold toward a solution.  Then you pull back and look at the big picture again - is there someplace you can really be analytical?  You think about how verticals and horizontals impact each other, or specific arrays with low-hanging fruit.  Can you fill in just one more square, and does that give you the leverage to get a few more? Sometimes I can stare at the grid for a couple of days, totally stuck, losing confidence, reworking everything over and over in my mind to make sure that I haven’t made any mistakes, and then like a bolt from the blue a connection will click in my brain and I’ll suddenly see a place where something cannot be, which means it must go somewhere else, which suddenly resolves a whole slew of mysteries.  Then all the cryptic little notes I’d left for myself in the corners of all those boxes start paying off, answers tumbling into place one after another, each new realization resolving another old question somewhere else… it’s logic and vision and deduction all coming together in different ways, intersecting and aligning.  For a long while, the farther I get, the harder it becomes to pick up the remaining pieces.  But my mind gets sharper and I eventually see structure through the chaos - but I have to think my way through to it.  It’s never a matter of what I already knew or being in on a joke - externals don’t come into it.  It’s me and the numbers and the matrix.  And once every row, column and array is neatly and uniquely filled, I wind up holding a piece of the universe in my hands that I’ve fixed, and I can stop and take solace that in this broken twisted world, I’ve done something pure and clean and perfectly ordered.  It’s a good feeling, a deep, gratifying feeling.  That’s why I do these. 

* Yeah?

* Yeah.

* I dunno, man, whatever.  I just don’t get it.  But hey, um, do you know a nine-letter word for “trunk toter?”

Visual entertainment: cellphone shot of the art light installation under the Fremont Street Transbay Terminal overpass.  It’s a miserable gritty stretch of shut-in streetscape, but they’ve installed rainbow lights that change color and shine happily on the underside of the overpass.  If you wish to return today’s blog post, keep the photo as my free gift to you.  All rights reserved; licensing by written agreement only; Rule Against Perpetuities will be enforced to the fullest extent of the law.  Other than that, enjoy.

Friday, February 20, 2009

Wolves and Knives

My recollection is that being six years old was a complicated affair.  I understood some things well enough; some others confused me or seemed inexplicable though so generally accepted as to preclude questioning; and some big stuff apparently evaded my meager notice notice altogether.  Regardless, I demanded, impertinently, my measure and more of participation and respect from society, and blithely blinded myself to the limitations of my immaturity.  I wanted answers to my questions, a say in decisions affecting me and an unearned degree of autonomy.  It took an English table setting to put me in my place. 

Dad’s studies took him to the Bodlean every so often, and 1970 was his sabbatical year so we all went along with him.  For six months we traded homes with an Oxon don who was doing a stint at UCLA, and set up housekeeping in the fair and pleasant England of Blake’s imaginaings.

Of course, he also imagined “dark satanic mills.” Had I known those lyrics at the time, I might have better prepared myself for the experiences that followed.  Then again, maybe I was better off blithe.  The foreknowledge might have crippled me.  As it was, I at least woke up most mornings expecting the best, and that was probably the best I could have done under the circumstances. 

My age placed me approximately in what my Albionic hosts called “first form,” and as I was facing half a year among them I was duly enrolled in a nearby public school.  “Public school” is what they called it, anyway, but that’s something of a misleading term.  It was certainly a private institution; I had to interview to get in and wore a uniform and all that.  Wolvercote, it was called, charmingly enough - a name up to which it seemed eager to live.  Their school year bore no resemblance to the one I knew from back home, and their curriculum was notably more advanced.  Back home in kindygarden I’d been playing with colorforms and copying out letters; now in first form we were doing book reports and subtraction.  I’d also spent six weeks in a full arm cast shortly before making the trip to England, further impairing my already limited physical skills, and I wore ungainly orthopedic shoes, so under the best of circumstances I’d have been at a notable disadvantage.  Add thereto my freakish accent, my heretical Judaism, and a native strain of public school attitude for which no child can truly be prepared, and I never really stood a chance. 

I didn’t have much fun at Wolvercote.  Classes, as I recall, were sufficiently benign, but I spent my daily playground time walking slowly around the perimeter of the field, dragging my hand along the hurricane fencing and trying to avoid being forced to articulate any quaint Americanisms for the entertainment of my peers.  I seem to recall an incident at their swimming pool in which I, a nonswimmmer with tubes in my ears that shouldn’t be submerged, was dragged out of my depth and left to sink, for which I received a sound and ironic ear-boxing by my academic overseers.  However, the incident that caused my parents to remove me from Wolvercote’s clammy grasp was when I came home asking to be taught to use a knife to cut my food.  To that point, I’d been satisfied to have my parents do the mealtime knifework for me, and they were overprotective and anxious enough to keep me well clear of dangerous objects like butterspreaders.  Why the sudden interest?, mom asked, as dad patiently positioned my fingers on the blunt blade.  In response I shared this story:

We had all gathered in a refectory for, I guess, refectation - a meal of some sort, the specifics of which I now disremember.  What I do recall was that something on the plate was made of meat and needed to be cut up, and I was unprepared for that task.  I requested assistance, as a six-year-old boy sometimes does, and the headmaster, if memory serves, came forth in response.  He cut my food, but he wasn’t happy about it.  Any student in his school would have proper table skills, he coldly informed me, the knife ripping through my meat and scraping harshly on my plate.  And until I had developed those skills, he went on, I did not belong at a table with civilized people.  Better, he told me, that I eat outside, where the rats wouldn’t be offended by my ineptitude.  His exact words escape me today, but his sending me out to the company of rats I clearly recall.  I also recall the derisive hoots of my classmates as I carried my tray outside, and sitting down by a cinderblock wall next to a dumpster to eat my meal.  I even remember a measure of relief at dining alone in peace, safe from uncharitable taunts. 

I came home requesting cutlery instruction, was asked why, and told that story.  Shortly thereafter, I left the Wolvercote School for good.  I was done with Wolvercote. But now, having spun this story out nearly four decades downstream, I’m still not sure it’s finished with me. 

Monday, February 16, 2009

Nu, Again?

It has been said that everything old is new again, but never before has it seemed more true than now - and I mean, never in the history of the planet, with which I enjoy an unrivaled personal familiarity.  Lately all kinds of stuff from twenty years ago and more has been coming back to ask me where I’ve been and why haven’t I paid a call.  There’s no excuse, really.  Some of that old stuff is pretty damn good.  Let’s enumerate, inasmuch as this is the whole gist of my post today:

1.  Okay, this isn’t going back 20 years but it’s a good place to start: remember CDs?  They’re still a pretty useful way to cart music around sometimes, especially when your MP3 player is on the fritz, as ours was till the good folk at the Apple store replaced it FOR FREE for us last week.  But even then, sometimes one of us would have the ‘pod and the other would have the car, and the one with the care was stuck with the ignominy of radio because our in-dash CD player has been on the fritz for more than a year.  We’d gotten a great disk (Keller Williams, if you must know) for xmas ‘07 and had popped it in the cd player right away, only to have it jam and stick and stop playing.  “Eject” was ineffectual.  The disk was lodged permanently in the player and we lacked the motivation and resources to repair it.  The case stayed in the car as a constant reminder of our audio failings and just in case the disk spontaneously self-ejected at some point, but after twelve months and more that just didn’t seem too likely.  Kel had even taken to giving Jesse the empty CD case as a fallback kiddy distractor, when pretzels and emergency road flares stopped entertaining him.  At some point, though, she realized that, as he played with the empty CD case, IT WAS NO LONGER EMPTY.  Somehow the disk had gotten back inside of it.  This, she found mysterious, and she asked me about it the next time we were out driving together.  As it turns out, one other old disk was rattling around in the door-side cubby, and I pressed it to the long-latent CD insertion slot to see what would happen.  It should have bumped up against the disk already in the slot, impotent and mocking.  Instead, it slid right in as if it were the most natural and usual thing in the world, and Bud E. Luv’s “Iron Man” chimed out from our speakers.  Somehow, the CD player had repaired itself.  It was like waking up to discover that I’d regained the special senses I have in dreams and lose upon waking.  “Better than ever” now means “just as good as before” - and that’s good enough by far for me. 

2.  Old friends, via Facebook: when I started blogging, it was a means to keep up with new friends, basically none of whom I still see anymore.  However, shortly thereafter I began to make new, on-line friends, and many of these continue to be among my most cherished acquaintances, even those I’ve never met face-to-face, and even those who no longer keep their own blogs nor read mine.  Yes, friends - cyber and real - have come and gone.  My core group of friends from college have remained with me, for whom I am eternally grateful.  However, I have given almost no thought in all the time since leaving them, of my friends from before college - high school, jr high, and for gods sake elementary school and even pre-school.  There were some decent folk in that crowd but I have kept up with almost none of them, and apart from one reunion I have had basically nothing to do with any of them since I ran away from the twerp I’d become by senior year of high school to re-invent my twerpdom anew in college.  The weird thing here is that Facebook, that blog for those who do not blog, has suddenly blown up in my face with dozens of erstwhile friends from my formative years.  It’s truly blowing my mind that I’ve got a date now to have supper with a dozen people with whom I went to pre-secondary school.  Some of them have reminded me why I’d sought their friendship in the first place, and I now regret the many years I’ve let lapse without the pleasure of their company.  It’s a repossession of my own social history, and there are a few chapters I actually look forward to expanding upon in the future.  I know, I’m as surprised as you are. 

3.  DYNABALL!  Back in my scrawny geeky grade school days (as opposed to my current scrawny geeky days, if you’re keeping score) I had a little exercise device that I really enjoyed - as much for its nerdacious scientific angle as for any actual benefit it did me, since I didn’t use it nearly enough to make a difference.  It was a gyroscopic ball in a plastic sphere that was capable of thousands of rotations per minute, generating a powerful isometric force when one rotated it in small circles in the palm of one’s hand.  It served me well, if infrequently, until I dropped it on the pavement of my backyard and it broke.  Easy come, easy go, eh?  Well as it turns out, I wanted another one but it didn’t come nearly as easily as it had gone.  I have actually spent the last several decades looking for a replacement.  And now I’ve found one.  Ladies and gentlemen, I am delighted to present to you:
Dynaflex!
Apart from the new garish colors, the rubber fist-grip, and the groove for starting it with a little shoelace which is a lot easier than just getting it rolling on a pantleg or by telekinesis, it’s the exact same toy/tool as I recall from my old days as a toy/tool myself.  I’m using it on the bus, waiting in line at the Apple Store, during my pre-dawn workouts, and whenever the spirit moves me.  It still generates a powerful resistance that runs from my fingers up to my shoulderblade, and one of my colleagues has already gotten one of her own to help her golf game.  I can feel the improved strength and vigor of my upper appendages.  It’s a nice feeling, and it’s about freaking time. 

4.  Witch Mountain: All I knew about it at the time ("the time” being around 1978) was that my classmate Ike was in yet another big movie.  Ike was among the busiest “real” actors in my jr high, and he regularly was featured in Disney productions, where his malleable androgynous features had made him quite the child-star.  And more power to him.  I wasn’t auditioning for any of those parts.  If he was getting them, I had nothing to complain about and it was something I could brag about to the kids at camp.  And now I see that a new Witch Mountain movie is coming out.  Ike is not the main attraction in it, nor is Eddie Albert who failed to be returned from the dead to reprise his original role - Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has taken that place.  The commercials make it seem a bit higher tech and cooler than the old one appeared to me to be, back when I wasn’t watching it originally.  I guess it goes to show me that nothing is beyond being remade.  I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this time it was actually better than the original, but I’d have to check with Ike about the particulars if I wanted to know for sure.  Dwayne probably doesn’t remember it well enough and anyway he never returns my calls anymore since that “smackdown” incident. 

5. The Watchmen: I don’t mean to be a Hollywood harpy or to marginalize myself as a comicbook fanboy, but damn I am excited about the upcoming release of The Watchmen.  Back in 1986 I started reading the books as they were released once per month over the course of a year, and they remain the only comic books I’ve ever gone out and bought for myself.  Not only that, but I read them with scrupulous care, stored them in plastic bags, sealed the bags with velcro and taped them to heavy cardboard, and kept all 12 issues in mint condition in a binder in my closet lo these many years.  This is not something I’d do for a typical comic, but then again Watchmen was the only graphic novel that Time Magazine named as one of the 100 best novels of the past century.  I’m not going to get into the intricacies of the story, but it’s a good one and very powerful - not escapist, but more the opposite, like a story of what happens when you try to escape but can’t.  I’ve been looking forward to a film adaptation since I finished the last book back in ‘87, and the trailer and commercials I’ve seen for the new production suggest to me that my hopes are likely to be fulfilled, at least on a visual level.  The film looks gorgeous and the commercials are like panels from the actual books. 

And just to humiliate myself a little, let me share how deep my interest lies: here‘s an image of the most dangerous being on the Watchmen planet, Dr. Manhattan… and

here’s a photo of my left calf.  I don’t have much ink, but what I’ve got is Watchmen-related.  As I said, I’m looking forward to seeing this movie.  I don’t think I’ll take the kids. 

And now for something a little different: the last post here was about my dolphin shirt.  I was asked to post a photo of it, so Blogopolis could make up its own mind how embarrassed I should be for wearing it in public.  Never one to shirk my obligation to imaginary strangers, I went out last weekend on a good run in my favorite old T so I could take a representative photo of myself in it.  On my way out the door Kel ruminated that she’d probably have to sneak in and burn it for me while I slept.  However, immediately after taking this

photo, I went to pull the shirt off over my head and ripped the back of the collar seam in three places.  I don’t know if I’ll ever ride the dolphin again now.  But at least I know that I sucked every bit of satisfaction I could out of it.  Not everything old is new again.  Some of it is just regular old old.  Speaking of which, I’m getting tired.  I think I’ve mined this vein for long enough.  Have a good one and keep your history polished and handy.  Sometimes it turns out to be more gratifying than you’d anticipated.