monologue

Having lived more than half my life (the latter half) just above the poverty line, I don't travel much, but I remember things from the times I've either been sponsored or gone places on a shoestring.

This week, having recovered from a case of stomach flu/whatever that saw me losing nine pounds in a week (mostly dehydration, of course) and looking at food mostly with fear and loathing, I'm suddenly craving poutine like crazy. Seriously? Poutine? What the heck is that all about? I mean, I bought the supplies for my usual perfect comfort food meals, meaning grilled ham and cheese sandwiches (made on cheap white bread with orange american cheese and margarine, like an elementary school cafeteria sandwich) with malt-flavored Ovaltine, and yeah, they're nice and all, but I have this wild craving for poutine, instead. What's with Canadians, not making a frozen version that you could buy at Trader Joe's? Are Canadians out to get me?

I wonder if there are any cheap flights to Canada this week.

Gah. WIll have to see if they sell fresh cheese curds at the Amish market, in case I have to try and make my own.

I sat there, with my lower lip slightly out but not in a pout as much as in the signifier of earnest concentration, with a string and a tab in one hand and my filthy blue-gray Mrs. Beasley doll in the other. With perfect calm, I slow-w-w-wly released the cord, regulating its retreat as my schoolmarmish plastic pal croaked out a word.

"GRAAAAAAAAACIOUUUUUUUUUUUS," she growled, in a low, saurian crackle.

I pulled the string back and let it slowly play out again.

"GRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAACIOUUUUUUSSSSSSS MEEEEEEEEE, YOOOOOOOUUURRRRR GEEEEE--"

I let it go and the rest of the sentence blipped by at high speed, like parakeet gossip. My father wrinkled his nose, looking up from the paper.

"Son, why don't you just let your mother get that fixed."

I pulled the string and she shrilled out another phrase, which was "Idothinkyou'rethenicestlittlefriendIeverhad," though you'd have to be a mosquito or someone on a spaceship nearing the speed of light to understand. The newspaper came back up again, a momentary defense against the alternating sounds of squeaky voice and growly voice.

"Mom didn't get Mrs. Beasley fixed," I said. "She took her back to Sears Surplus and exchanged her. I like this one."

"Well, I don't like this one."

With grim determination, I pulled the string again to play another phrase, regulating it as best I could this time. With proper control, it sounded almost like it was meant to, albeit with an unearthly warble.

"Lo-o-ong ago, Iwasalittle gi-i-irl, just like you," she said.

My father huffed.

"That damn doll is broken."

I shrugged, then slowly pulled the string again. My father folded up the paper and left the room with his coffee cup, looking for a fresh charge of caffeine.

"Do you want to hear a secret?" asked the mock-grandmotherly voice of some anonymous voice actress doing piece work at the doll factory. "I know one."

"What's the secret, Mrs. Beasley?"

I pulled the string, but let it out too fast.

"Bbbepllthpht!"

Before it could skip to the next phrase, I pulled it back, and let it play out properly.

"If you were a little smaller," she said, "I could rock you to sleep."

I just smirked back at her.

"You're silly, Mrs. Beasley," I said, and dumped her on the couch to run outside, in search of something new.

My tiny stuffed panda talked, too, but I did the talking, in what my family refers to as "the time when Joe talked in a falsetto for a whole year."

Of course, Teddy was fairly opinionated on seemingly every subject and had a patrician bearing that Julia Child would have thought was a bit over the top, but I could hardly silence my tiny friend when there were factual errors to correct.

"Son, do you have to talk like that?"

"Like what?"

"All high and sing-song."

"That's just Teddy, Dad."

"You don't...think he's actually talking, do you?"

I rolled my eyes and giggled at him.

"Teddy is a stuffed animal, Dad. He's made of mohair, wire, articulated limbs, and a genuine authentic sterling silver tab in his ear."

"A genuine authentic sterling silver tab, you say?"

"He's from Western Germany," I said, with the obvious pride of someone who owned something from Western Germany.

"Ja wohl."

"What?"

"Never mind. As long as you're clear on who's talking."

"The bear."

"Of course," he said, and went back to the Accent section of the Evening Sun.

I tucked Teddy into my pocket and ran outside.

Cathy Moriarty
Catherine O'Hara
Jim Varney
Joan Cusack
Susan Tyrell
Dianne Wiest
Julie Christie
Wallace Shawn

Computers? I hate the damned things. More precisely, I hate the squinchy little Wii-playing neck-bearded nerdlings and their head-up-the-backside committee managers and the soulless marketing demons who all apply their tragic little non-degrees to the task of human stupidification to build these monstrosities, and I hate them most of all because I actually love computers, or at least I love what they can do when they work, and the worlds they make possible when they work.

Just to clarify, I'll readily admit I love 'em for software synthesis and audio editing, the internet, mp3s, and being able to use a spreadsheet to plan out my meager financial prospects, but some days, these neat and wondrous things just drown under the waves of digi-dumb.

For starters, why in the bloody freaking planet of sizzling vinger-stung cold sore hell do we have to log on to our goshdang computers like we're wage slave peons working in a government accounting office? I get that there's some Unix-y BS to it all, but it's STUPID. Seriously it's STUPID. Can someone tell me one good reason why we need user accounts and administrators on our computers, other than to hide the fact that we love homo porn between bearded Italians in business suits from our wives and darling children? My computer is always logged in, because it's just silly to pretend that I'm running a shared computer in a medium-sized law office, and I'm smart enough to keep all my most embarrassing and incriminating data on a flash drive like smart folks.

It's innocuous enough until you try to launch a program you need to use and get a message that "YOU DO NOT HAVE FULL RIGHTS TO FILES ON THIS SYSTEM, SO THIS PROGRAM CANNOT BE REGISTERED. PLEASE CONTACT YOUR SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR" as it neatly quits again. Well, heck, lemme get my full-time, highly-paid, superintelligent system administrator on the phone right away so I can work this little quibble out—OH YEAH, I'M THE ADMINISTRATOR! Ironically, this only ever happens with the most expensive software on my system, which would actually work just fine if I'd stolen it from a WAREZ site, but because I believe in rewarding programmers who make a good product by buying it, I'm out of luck. Gaaah.

Of course, I've been having a jinxed week, which is why I'd even bother to express the inexpressible rage of computer ownership, but I'm just constantly in awe of how awesomely, insanely bad this stuff is, and how stupid people are to just roll over and accept it.

I've got this little netbook thing, which is the best example of failed potential in the recent history of automatic thinkin' machines. It was cheap, it's tiny, the screen's bright and gorgeously clear, and it weighs something like a pound or so. It could easily be the coolest thing in the world, but, well, it doesn't work. What's lousy is that it works in little fits and starts, just enough to tantalize with the promise of unfettered mobile computing without the fear factor of toting a thousand dollar fragile six pound surfboard around, but it's just enough.

The browser's nice, until—hey, the little wi-fi thing's gone all spinny again. I don't get it, of course, because the router is FIVE FEET AWAY, but what the heck, I'll just click the spinny thing and…nothing and…nothing…and more nothing. Have to restart. Really? I have to restart the thing every half hour?

I started out with my dirty little Linux fetish, trying to use the dumbed-down Xandros "distro" that came with the netbook was like trying to paint the Mona Lisa with a plastic watercolor set from a dollar store, and I couldn't actually install anything I really needed. No prob, sez I, the big data socialistic populist, I'll just go to Ubuntu (or rather eeebuntu, the rendition designed to work properly on the netbook's Atom processor). All glorious for a day. Trackpad's a nightmare, with a real jumpy cursor, so I spend many teeth-grindingly enraging hours reading various smarty-pants Linux forums to find a solution. Everyone's real helpful, but nothing works. The one "solution" forces the trackpad to be locked into that idiot mode where every time you as much as lighten your touch on the pad, the thing clicks whatever you're hovering over, which is why I'd looked at more horrible ads in the last three months than in the rest of my tragic existence on this planet.

Screw it, going to Windows.

Got an illegal copy of Windows (hush, I'd happily pay for even the issueth of the great digiSatan once I can see if it'll work), set it up on the netbook, and had a semi-blissful week. Of course, there's no way AT ALL to kill the tap-touch on the trackpad, but it sort of works most of the time. I can't run update for fear of outing my illegality, and it cheerfully reminds me six times a day that my time before "activation," i.e. surrendering my humanity to the anti-privacy gods, and it does that other Microsoft thing—constantly warning me about threats, viruses, risks, and on and on and on, without end.

I'm not the enemy of Microsoft because I'm an Apple fanboy, you know. Like my presidential vote, I go with the least wretched option, but I'm not much of a Mac evangelist these days, because Macs are for rich people. I know, I know, feature to feature, they're all as cheap ass…and so on, but why does a Mac Mini cost $600 and a Dell Inspiron Zino HD cost $230? Give me a basic Mac and I'll evangelize like that sad lunatic who used to spend his afternoons outside the student union, warning us about the evils of a degree in the liberal arts, but that's not out there.

I'm the enemy of Microsoft for one reason that trumps their bad business practices, horrendous design, and general doofery—there's a combination preacher and schoolmarm embedded in every single program or operating system Microsoft makes. I'm stuck using Word at work, and I have to close my office door some days to muffle the anguished cursing, because I DON'T WANT TO HEAR WHAT WORD THINKS.

Seriously—I don't want to be told that my spelling is wrong, my punctuation is wrong, and worst of all, that there's something wrong with my grammar. Here's the thing, Word. I know how to spell, and I know more about grammar than you will ever, EVER know, you obnoxious little application, and I'm sick of the red squiggly lines and talking paperclips and little cartoon dogs and the auto-correction, which makes me want to punch my keyboard and screen until I'm bloody.

"Oh, Joe, you can turn those things off," the apologists say, but you know what? You can't. You can turn them off for a session, for a moment, for a break, on some rare occasion, but they always come back. THEY ALWAYS COME BACK. I've tried every trick I've ever been instructed in by some computer smarty-pants, and they've never worked. They always come back, and nothing in the world will kill my writing groove faster or more completely than having a program mark up my document with a lot of snide little notes generated by a code. I don't give a crap if I make a typo, spell something wrong, or use fanciful grammar or punctuation—that's why we proofread (those of us who still care enough to do so), re-read, re-write, and otherwise take an interest in our work.

So I threw in the towel with Windows on the little netbook, after the millionth question or warning, and wiped it out on the day when it announced that it was no longer going to run for me unless I called the mothership. Screw it. Back to eeebuntu, and back to unreliable wi-fi, jumpy trackpad, sound drivers that come and go, and an upgrade manager that won't go away and more or less destroys the few things that work if I'm dumb enough to try it. The time I've spent trying to get the thing to work is easily ten times the time I've spent doing productive work with it.

It's freaking sad.

Of course, I'm a Mac guy, more or less, having been a Mac guy since I stopped being a Commodore guy, way back in the eighties, but I'm kinda tired of Apple at this point, who just flat-out refuse to make a nice basic machine. I rode out the System 6 to 7 transition, the Motorola to PowerPC transition, the System 9 to 10 transition, and the PowerPC to Intel transition (halfway there, between my Intel Mini and my G4 iBook), but I'm tired of having half of my specialized software die permanently every time Apple makes another surge forward (permanently because the developers of things I use tend to be small, and not properly capitalized to manage five platforms at once—heck, at least Microsoft was thoughtful enough to be so backward that these things didn't happen as often). I'm a Mac guy, but this effing permissions BS is just making me want to put my computers in the closet forever and ever, Amen, and I don't want an aluminum laptop where they've managed to put even MORE fragile glass into the thing, and nor do I want a keyboard that's just a picture of a keyboard. They're so close, sometimes, and yet they just stay in the thrall of a very skinny, very rich, and often very silly man and make "people's computers" that are people's computers in the same way a VW Phaeton is a people's car.

This is all where my recent typewriter fetish comes from, naturally. I spend a weekend afternoon fighting with the computer, and all I want to do is get one of my perfect little forty year-old Olympias and hold it like a baby, just like anything that's fine and perfect enough to love, unlike the wretched neon disturbances of a computer. It's just…I've got work I want to do this weekend.

Screw it. I'm taking my scooter out to run some errands, and I'm going to enjoy riding an anachronistic conveyance made with prehistoric technology and an engine with something like four moving parts, and nothing to ask me a question, request a password, or tell me that I don't have frickin' permission to use my own damn machine.

Sigh.

I'm on the public radio WYPR program The Signal today, reading an essay about riding the school bus, not being a superhero, and trying to fix the clock at the Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower. The show airs at 12-1pm and 7-8pm today on 88.1 FM in the Baltimore, Maryland area. If you're out of the area or away from your radio, you can listen online at The Signal's podcast page (airdate 11.13.09) and subscribe to the podcast, if you're currently missing out on this great show.

Listen!

The one lasting regret I have about my short stint as a freelance contractor five years ago was that I gave up my recently-won status as essentially debt-free (not counting a student loan at an interest rate so small as to barely count). I'd busted my backside and lived like a pauper for years to knock down one clump of fake money, stewing in a broth of murderous 29% interest, after another, triumphantly cutting up cards as I went along until I was free. Vacation? I'll enjoy long walks and meals with family and friends in my pleasant little town, thank you. New car? Yes, I'll take the bare-bones economy sedan with a dent for $4000 and a payment of $130 a month, ma'am. New TV, fancy clothes, $25 haircuts, etcetera? I'll make do, thank you very much.

Debt is a filthy, insidious thing, a loathsome, dirty habit for itchy people, proffered up by moneylenders that bleed you with one hand and genuflect with the other. At the end of it, I'd felt lifted, like someone had adjusted the gravity settings for the world, and I clearly remember the moment when I had a little pile of halved cards in front of me, corpses of tiny demons, and how it felt to be worth nothing at long last, instead of a big minus sign.

Of course, I took on a freelance career, where my skills for work beat all and my skills for the grim machinations of business were absent, and the siren's call was answered, a little bit at a time, just to keep me afloat, though I rarely floated, until I'd amassed a third of my prior debt again.

In conventional terms, it's not much debt. It's the notion of it, the wretched state of surrender to the selfsame banks that made a solid decade of my life into a grinding, stress-filled, oppressive time, and I'm irritated to have to spend another moment in the state, even if I've got the tools to pay it down relatively quickly and return to the bliss of nothingness (financially speaking, which might as well be literal nonexistence in our money-driven existence).

After another career change, the direction of the slope I'm on has shifted, from a gradual slide downhill to a gradual ascent, but in the transition, I accidentally bumped into the realm of the surreal fees three times. While waiting for a last check from the former job, I took a cash advance off a card, just until payday, at an ATM. Ha! Zapped me with a ten dollar fee for an ATM cash advance (in my fine print—I looked it up…sigh), then zapped me for $39 for going over limit!

Well—why didn't you idiots just decline the advance, for frick's sake?

Ah, yes, I remember. Ultimate force of evil in the universe and all. I actually told some hapless customer service representative the entire story of the frog and the scorpion on the phone one day, proffering it up as an example of why the banking industry crashed and why their whole rationale will eventually kill them and us. Of course, that's just me being mean, torturing some poor wage slave who's as mired as I get, but that's my forgivable sin, alas, a certain need to use my words to exasperate.

Got zapped again by another card for being one dollar and twenty-five cents over limit—$39. What makes it irritating is that it was an accident, a card pulled out of the wallet in lieu of the one I meant to use, and that it should have just been one of those incidents when a blushing cashier would whisper, "umm, it didn't go," but the banks (Capital One in the first case, and JP Morgan Chase in the other—heck, I'll name names) know where their profit lies, or rather, their sea of lawyers, board members, middle managers, and other slaves to the writhing corporate gestalt know, inasmuch as a monstrous collective can "know" anything.

It's a chain of aggravating phone calls left to be made, a chore I don't relish.

Unbelievably, though, Capital One called me.

"Sir, I don't know if you know this, but new legislation is going to take away your rights to use your credit cards unless you act."

I listen to the guy's spiel, and I can't believe my ears. The gist is this, at least as it immediately concerns me—that credit card companies won't be able to give you the "privilege" of charging over your limit, unless you're actually stupid enough to opt-in to the "privilege."

"Are you kidding me? Why would I want the privilege of being slapped with a $39 charge because I forget that I'm close to my limit?"

"Well, you might be out somewhere, like the desert, and need gas for your car."

It feels so good, watching the monsters flail.

"I'd just have to make do, then. I don't really like paying thirty-nine extra dollars for a tank of gas."

The guy sputters, and tries to stay on script. I'm relentless with these people, and can't avoid laughing at him.

"You guys just screwed me for forty bucks for being a buck over, and that's a privilege?"

Needless to say, I didn't opt-in, and you shouldn't, either. You should read the Credit CARD act of 2009, know it by heart, and torture every single bank company wage slave who's stuck with the task of recruiting a new army of idiots to build an economy for fools. It used to be that we made do with what we had, and that worked for all of us for generations, but decades of crazy time have really done us all a disservice.

Today, I'll make some phone calls, enrage some customer service reps, and continue on my second route to freedom, even smarter than I'd been the last time I made this trek. If I still fell for the pop psychology that rules my idiot countrymen, I'd probably feel bad for letting it happen to me again, and it would be impactful of my self esteem (to use the brogue of the moron brigades), except I don't believe in that stuff anymore. In buddhism, they call it "samsara," the cycle of suffering and rebirth, the way these loops of mistakes and vanities overtake us, but I just see it as the way to learn, to make smaller mistakes each time around, until the day I cut the last card, cancel the last credit line, and become a credit-line bodhisattva, a pauper at peace.

I have to wonder, though, if people are really buying this line, this claim of salvaging a "privilege" that some credit company claims is being taken away by those bad, bad people down in Washington. The banks live the same way politicians, TV networks, insurance companies, and conservative talk radio hosts live, by feeding our fears, and fanning the flames of uncertainty, but could people really be that stupid?

Sadly, it seems so. Me—I'm getting off this thrill ride again.

I guess I'll just have to leave my car in the desert and stick out my thumb.

Thing is, when I spent all those years trimming back, making the choice to take the simpler route, to enjoy my home life instead of a three thousand dollar vacation, to enjoy a nice walk instead of dinner at a restaurant, and to drive a basic car, and have basic things, and to live like I had to pay for everything I had with actual, earned income, my life got better. Credit sells you the future today, but it's at the expense of right now, and of the pleasure of just being who you are, and where you are, and what you are, when the whole culture in which you live does nothing but daydream about who they're going to be when they grow up.

It's already out there, and the only price is letting your ego…go.

Have you seen this thing? This is just the damnedest thing I've ever seen!

She stands there with the toy in her mouth, holding it up as if to show me, then runs off with it, then comes back, then runs off, then comes back. With a shake, she flips it around, then drops it, and looks up again.

Get a load of this crazy thing! What IS this? It's compelling, don't you think?

I pick it up. Her ears are radar dishes, tracking every movement. I raise my arm and twitch, just a bit, in a fake-out, but she's smarter than that. I fling it across the room, against the door, and she's off like she's tied to it with a rubber band, then snatches it, brings it back, shies away, and retreats to a safe distance to flop down on the floor with the toy between her paws.

It's a little red fabric thing wrapped around a double-lobed rubber ball like a little snowman, trailing red straps that look like pieces of leash, just a toy without much consequence, but it is, right now—right here and right now—the most magical, wondrous thing ever created. Her long, gangly tail is uncontrollable, marking time on the rug, and she just goes after the thing again and again, from every angle, until—

She freezes, and her ears go wild, the radar searching the skies for incoming squeaky objects, and she looks up to me with her eyebrows caught in that look of perfect canine astonishment.

Did you HEAR that! What the—

She manages to get hold of the toy just right, and it squeaks again. It only takes a second, that moment of discovery.

I did that! I made that sound, with this amazing thing! Watch!
For a moment, it looks like she's going to need smelling salts. She brings it back to me, red tendrils aimed my way, in a dare. I take it in my hand, but she won't let go, tussling with me in that ancient ritual that would be slightly cuter if it didn't have something to do with a deep-down genetic understanding of how to break a neck. I give up on the fight, and she looks disappointed, then takes two steps forward and lays the toy at my feet.

Throw it throw it throw it throw it…

…And of course I do, and she races over and takes a defensive position on the other side of the room, a sudden inquisitive virtuoso of the magical squeaky toy, coming up with dozens of articulations of the sound, with long, whiny shrills and little patterns of pitched bird chatter, and I am sad for so many reasons, even as I can't help but laugh at her.

Daisy is another kind of dog altogether. Rose, my dear little disaster, wasn't much for toys, except for her green ball, which she'd fish out from underneath the couch, now and then, and take to her little den under the table, where she sit there and bite it in a precise and regular rhythm that seemed to satisfy a need, making a gentle squeak-squeak-squeak until she tired of the thing.

In the last years, she just hurt, all the time, and when she felt lonely, she'd go find the ball and carry it back to her bed, then drop it, because she just didn't have the strength even to bite her green ball anymore, not enough strength to get a single squeak out of it. I have the ball set aside, and I will give Daisy the world, but that green ball is mine alone now, something I can reach for when nothing will do but tears.

I wasn't going to get another dog. It's only been four months, though it seems like years have gone by, without the regulation that came from Rose, without her regular snoring, and her meals and ponderous trips to the yard, where she'd stand there, lost, wondering where she was. I wasn't going to get a dog because sometimes the most natural thing in the world is to shy away from the things that hurt us, and that bring back the memories we'd rather let slowly fizzle away into our impending hazes of early senility, and Rose hurt, by the end, right down to that last moment, when she was there on the stainless steel table at the vet's office after a series of seizures, sleeping under a sedative as the vet squeezed a hypodermic of red liquid into her vein.

Don't hurt my girl, I thought, please don't hurt my dog, but it was time, and she breathed in, then out, then in, then out, and that was it, after fourteen complicated years.

Daisy ran back with the toy, and I caught it, laughing, and waved it in the air, almost giddy with the ridiculousness of her, and those absurd, bat-like ears, then snapped it back and flung it into the next room.

Fourteen years.

If Daisy has the longevity Rose had, I will be fifty-six when her time comes. It used to seem so long, a stretch of time like that, and now it's so much more conceivable, a road I've traveled from end to end almost three times now, and if I feel like I've become wise and grown into an full-fledged adult member of my species, it's just because I've always been vain enough to think so.

She is so transfixed by that stupid little toy, like it's a whole new world, and the part of me that might have made me a good parent if that had been destined for me stirs, joyously, into the flush of being. Every thought she has is telegraphic, played out on those big dumb ears and little eyebrows like sailors trading gossip on semaphore flags, and I feel like I already understand her in ways I never understood Rose, even when I tried.

Hey! Did you see my toy? I just can't get over this crazy thing!

Daisy spins in a little circle, orbiting the tiny cosmos of the toy, then settles down on the floor and starts to play out a little rhythm of squeaky noises. It is so damned adorable I feel like I need an insulin shot, and yet I feel like I could cry.

It's probably the first toy she's ever gotten to keep, a novelty that she can't quite believe yet.

She was rescued from a house in South Carolina, a festering morass of obsessive-compulsive hoarding, and the medical report points out that they pulled thirty-eight ticks off of her after they got her out of the locked crate where she'd had no food for days and no water for a while, too. They had to put her on morphine, her fleas were so bad, just to keep her from scratching herself to pieces, and yet she comes to me sleek and clean and smelling just enough like a dog to remind me that she is a dog, and now she's my dog.

I wonder what she remembers.

I remember everything, and I wonder if that's the invariable casualty of growing up and heading in the direction of wisdom—the sense that things cannot be divorced, that everything full of awe and wonder and delight has in it, just under the surface, deep roots tangled up in trauma. You think these things, sometimes, when you are as happy as you can ever remember being and still the ugly times are right there, right with you, as raw and vivid as ragged knots of freshly-healed scar tissue. You think these things when life changes, suddenly and almost without warning, for the better and you're caught completely off-guard, waiting for something to cancel out what feels like it must be too good to be true.

When you're lucky, or when you're really grown, just like you've been thinking you were all along, you know that these things are always inseparable, always wrapped gently into each other like the tails of the taijitu and the truth that the things we think of as light and dark are always tied up in each other, revealed through reason and the humility that comes from realizing how little of what makes us wonderful is our own invention.

Daisy curls up ever more tightly, a ball of golden fur and ears wrapped around the little red prize, and squeaks it gently, quietly, just a few more times before she's deep in sleep, dreaming of things I can't even imagine, and I think of Rose and how much I loved her, and how she watched over me, even at her worst, and how she was there when things had never been harder, through death and loss and the deepest strains of depression, and she's just gone…just…gone, and that is supposed to be impossible, because love is supposed to conquer all and set us free and make us happy forever and ever, and…

I spend enough time returning to an old familiar line from an old familiar book, because it speaks to me, and thinking about it just now, I find a tendril of an idea curling out of the soil.

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…and one fine morning—

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

This Daisy, the one balled up on the rug with her new toy, isn't that Daisy, and the name comes from a sentimental notion that I'll name all my dogs from here on out after flowers, just like I did for the first one, just because of her little pink nose and the way she'd get red around the eyes like a person when she was worked up made me think of a flower and a perfectly silly name for a dog. She isn't that Daisy, and still, the threads and tendrils and grasping green extensions of our thoughts tie everything together, and make everything about everything, on every level, unless we really work to deny ourselves that mixture of pleasure and the pain it takes to measure it by.

You think too much.

So they say, and it's true, but some people say "think" when they really mean "feel," without knowing it, and it's true. I feel too much, and there are days when I know this only too well, and days when I know, at my core, that I wouldn't change a thing, or give up any of the joy that can't be completely separated from the moments of loss and sadness that have come and gone or are still looming, way off in the distance, when things start to wear out again. I have been lucky enough all my life to be able to fail to forget, to always have the measure of loss to remind me what's here when I have the courage not to shy away, and if I look at Daisy and want to cry over Rose and all the things I wish I had still, it's because I am alive and because I know that I have already seen the end of the world more than a few times, and will again. I can only escape that ending by denying myself everything else, and life is far, far too short.

Daisy is sleeping hard in that way that dogs do, when they're curled up with their eyes pinched shut as hard as they can, and she's far enough from here that I can gently reach for the toy, and hold it in my hand, feeling the texture of it, the cool dampness of the rough fabric it's made from, and the way the rubber inside it yields to pressure, and right now, it's something brought to life by the enthusiasm of a little dog from down south, who just wants something she can keep all for herself, and someone to fight her for it and throw it so she can chase it and chase it and chase it again. Her eyelids twitch slightly, and I hope I'm there in her dreams.

On my desk, the green squeaky ball sits where it's been for months now. I start to reach for it, but stop myself.

Rose. Just—Rose.

The world keeps on.

Howdy, friends.

I've been getting acclimated to the new job, and haven't had the time to write much, but I did finally get in gear to restart my stalled podcast, 12 Minute Travelogues. Number 8 is up and running on the feed, and I'm hoping y'all enjoy it. It's the first one with words, though they're far from the central theme in this one.

If you've not subscribed yet, you can go to the 12 Minute Travelogues page at sonacast.com and click on the subscription links or manually download No. 8 and the previous seven episodes.

I'm also working to revive my storytelling podcast, Last Night I Dreamed I Was You, and hope to have a new series started by the end of this month.

Thanks for your patience and support,

Your pal, Joe!

P.S. If you enjoy this podcast and you use iTunes, please take a moment and review me on iTunes (you can get to the podcast's page there by going to the iTunes store and searching for "12 Minute Travelogues" in the search box. I'd love to bring in more listeners, and every review or rating helps. If you're not using iTunes, I appreciate if you use whatever review functions are available to you on your particular RSS reader. Thanks!

When I worked at the American Visionary Art Museum, I'd arrive early in the morning some days, when the sun was just about to rise, and climb to the roof of the sculpture barn, where you could see the whole campus of the museum all at once, and just take it all in. It was an experience somewhere in between being in a temple and opening up a giant toybox, and it fed the soul, that sense of presence and involvement.

When it was time to move on, I thought I'd just return to the old lines of work, to life locked up in an office, tending to the surge and flow of data, and I spent a lot of time preparing myself for that work, and that kind of life, never with much conviction, but things change, and opportunities arise from place you'd never expect.

They say that when one door closes, another opens, but I'm a skeptic.

Still, in my case, that door opens into the most magical room in the world.

Temple or toybox? It's going to be a lot of work, this job.


I suspect I won't be bored.

It's a beautiful day, and just in time, too.

I went for a long, long, aimless ride on the agriculture research center with my lovely machine. The air was fragrant with the scent of pine straw and flowers, the bike tucked and turned like she was as happy as me, and we burned up fifty miles of back roads without a hitch or hiccup.

( snapshots of the day )

Of course, I'm just buzzing about it.

Two packages came, one for the home hive and one for the hive at Old Bean's place.

We hived his first.

( more pics of your friend, the apiarist )

Bear in mind, dear hearts, that I was, in fact, actually sick and not just faking the voice, and that my dance moves were a little muted for the same reason, but this is what I did, in some form or another, for the museum for the last eleven years (among other things):

It's called the "blessing of 'da feet'," and serves to give our intrepid kinetic sculpture pilots a little bit of the ol' Saint Christopher for the race.

(I got my voice back, eventually, for what it's worth.)

It seems like it took forever, but…well, the timing's good. Had to buy my own insanely-expensive self-indulgent little middle-age crisis machine for my birthday, but after noodling all through Baltimore, roaming the pretty winding lanes around Ellicott City, and plunging through crowds of revelers leaving Merriweather Post Pavilion and getting caught in the rain, it's all just gorgeous.

Her name's "Madeline," or "Miss Madeline," after someone incalculably special and long since lost to my family, a classy broad who could always make you think, smile, and feel like you belonged wherever you happened to be. I think the name fits well.


I'll write more about all this soon.

For the record, I've got a full-face helmet, a Vanson Leathers armored mesh riding jacket, leather gloves, and steel-toed, over the heel boots, and I'll be taking the safety courses as soon as I can afford them, in case you're worried about me buzzing around on that little thing.

I'm off on vacation this week, and it's my favorite kind of vacation, the kind I always enjoyed long before financial panic brought the neologism "staycation" into common circulation. I'll be puttering around the house, cleaning and fixing things, attending to little tasks that I've let slide for too long, and heading out to West Virginia a little later in the week to attend to some of the needs of my slumping mountainside retreat there before it's time to go back to the day-to-day.

It's also the week my new acquisition will be coming home with me, after a lot of paperwork and title and tags and other bureaucratic minutia finally settle, and I'm making a specific and targeted effort not to be like a hyperactive little boy, vibrating like a tuning fork at the base of the xmas tree as he waits forevvvvver for his parents to haul themselves out of bed.

I've bought a jet-black year-old Genuine Stella motor scooter with a mere 502 miles on the clock, against all the advice and eye-rolling from my two-wheeled mentor, Old Bean, who's still convinced that I've made a tragic, expensive mistake. I've never really been a proper motorcyclist, at heart, my love of old machinery notwithstanding, but Old Bean managed to arouse my interest in the subject by virtue of being the kind of motorcyclist I'd have been had I had the resources and patience to approach the field with a skeptic's eye, simultaneously absurdly-practical and still a motorized romantic, an intentional and well-practiced Blake on wheels.

When I'm asked, rarely as it happens, what I believe in, I almost always opine I'm a clockwork taoist, which is to say that I know what I know of the world because of my sense and awareness of the way things flow when they're let to flow without fussiness and excessive intervention, even as I doubt the supernatural. Coming of age, especially in the last decade, I've found my truths in that flow more and more, and trusted, increasingly, in how the fluidity of being like a reed beats the hard and the unyielding, and I've slipped away from that understanding of late, so I've had to relearn some of the way of it—the watching, the waiting, the surrender of realizing that desire sometimes reflects that undercurrent and pull directing you back to the channel that was made for you.

The Stella is a ridiculous object. I fully accept that, and embrace it in the way I embrace all of the ridiculous things I adore. It's, oddly enough, the exact embodiment of the second motorbike to set me free, almost twenty years ago; a battle-hardened beast of a Vespa P200E that I took on insane, absurd adventures, and that felt like a part of me, a piece of hardware that was just right in every visceral way. They're built at a factory in India that used to be a wholly-owned subsidiary of Piaggio/Vespa, built on the same presses, using the same tools, and are, down to a small handful of parts, intercompatible with any PX-series Vespa built from '78 until Piaggio went in more environmental, modern, and refined directions (which, for the record, I see as a pretty good thing, my love of cantankerous old junk notwithstanding).

For me, though, I love the stinkin', popcorny, buzzy wildness of the old beasts, right down to the little flaws, like how every vintage Vespa leans slightly to the right because the engine hangs off the rear axle on that side, and this is, possibly, the last chance anyone will have to buy a new example of such things.

Old Bean's right, in his way, to suggest that I'd be better off with something bigger, something that'll top the sixty mile-an-hour top end of an unmodified Vespa, and there will be a time when I take his advice, when I'm a little older, a little richer, and when the perfect bike emerges from the miasma. We've got so much in common, I think, and I have to have a little blind faith in the inexplicable in spite of myself when I see him with his bikes, either solo or in the loving chaos of the open-ended machine circus headed up by Wild Gears, because he sees it—as pragmatic, as classically stoic as he is, he sees the immortal hand and eye in the fearful symmetry of what should just be machines, no more or less. It's obvious to me that we met in the flow, in the currents of things that needed to happen, and that is a good thing.

Where we part is in this—I've started, more and more, to regret the smaller world, the endless highways, the instant communication, and the lust for more and more speed, the better to rush through the world with. Old Bean's not speed demon, except when he's on that damn Ducati, but he's still got the love of that, that thing that I lack, possibly to my detriment, in how I ride, or rather, in how I rode.

As much as I love to travel, to wind out the ways, whether it's on my shambling old Mobylette or my three-speed bicycle, or even the grand old ruin of my Citroën, which even now sits, calcifying into a fossil, in front of my house as a monument to a brief springtime of financial abandon that I no longer possess, it was always about stopping for me, and about turning away from the big roads, the familiar routes, and the easy access.

Maybe it's a sign of my scattered awareness, my ceaselessly dividing attention span, and that crow-like love of something new and shiny and distracting, but I drive to and from work lately feeling the flush of old memories, of what my old Vespa felt like, and how easy it was to just stop, to dart off the beaten track and down some little dirt lane, or gravelly side road.

If I was on a scooter, I'd have stopped there, my mind says to me, that hunting vision in full resurgence. There are stories there, and scenes, and colors and things I haven't seen, or ways to see I haven't bothered to explore.

And we talk about this small world, and set out to recreate the routes of famous writers, who went On The Road and learned Zen in their motorcycle maintenance, but it's not the same, not with unbreakably-reliable bikes and cell phones and GPS maps calling out directions. That's not a bad thing, either, per se, but there's something to be gained in constraints, in holding back from being a properly materialist boy scout, prepared for everything that might come with an accessory for every need. I'm just not sure I care to take a three thousand mile trip, averaging seventy the whole way, when I've taken hundred mile trips by moped, puttering along on the shoulder at barely twenty, that I still remember with biblical precision, from moment to moment to moment, each one full of something small and still wonderful.

I don't deny the joy in the high of the highway, but it's not the path that's calling me right now. I'm at the age, or rather, of an age, that's a common thing for those of us with XY genes, when I'm seeing that I'm on the other side of the mountain, having climbed and climbed and now seeing the valley below, all the way down, on the other half of my life, and I'll forgive myself the indulgence of surrendering to a familiar instinct of nostalgia and wanting.

I can call it all up effortlessly, of skidding sideways down a hillside, hollering, with my handsome friend Faisel hanging on as tightly as possible as we both expected to be flung face-first into the rocks, and how that grip felt, how instantaneous and comforting, even as we both screamed like little girls from the moment we hit the corner too hard. I can call up the way we laughed, the way you can't stop laughing, as we sat in the dust at the bottom of the hill, in utter shock that we'd somehow come down a hundred feet of rock without a scratch.

The instants and instances become a flurry, a storm of recollection.

My old Vespa chugging along, creeping down a broken concrete drive, still slipping, obnoxiously, out of gear because of a worn cruciform selector, rolling up at a walking pace alongside an immense ruin of a dead factory in rusting rural Pennsylvania like we were on a dock beside some half-sunk ocean liner there, and the quick duck inside, into the cavernous miles of the factory, lit by sunlight shining through broken skylights. I could hear each stroke of the engine, each d-d-ding-d-dung-ding of the engine echoing in the space, and smell the burning oil that's the signature of a Vespa, as I rode on the long-stilled metal plates of a conveyor that once fed the monstrous place. On an impulse, I tapped the horn, the tiny little beep lost in the space, and suddenly, every bird in the world was in flight, a swirling, chattering symphony in the air there, witnessed by no one but me in that way that makes you feel anything but insignificant.

The bike churning, cooking at its top speed when that top speed was enough for American highways, back before we all went mad with power, heading north for New York, back before I knew that you really don't take a featherweight motorbike onto the insanely high wind-tunnel of a bridge crossing the Susquehanna. The bike and I burst out of the hillside and the trees and onto that thread of highway over the distant river, and the wind caught us, flung us across two lanes and into the frighteningly-low jersey wall, where, for a millisecond that lasted for years, all I could see was down and the shower of sparks of my engine cowl skidding along the barrier. I jerked the handlebars, another novice mistake, and overcompensated my way across three lanes of traffic, where I recreated the previous experience, but from the other side, before getting off the bridge, pulling over, and hyperventilating until I was calm enough to cry like a little kid.

Scenes of us in the Holland Tunnel, back when you never saw a Vespa on the road, and certainly not there, or scurrying down the little narrow side streets of Philadelphia, or going to a town like Tuscarora, Maryland, for no better reason that it's a town called Tuscarora. These all unfold, over and over lately, and it's always possible this is just a lark, just a wild hair, and that I'll regret it and go on to something else, but that's not how it feels, and I've been too loyal to what I should do and what is practical to do for a little too long.

My mother and a group of my friends and family cringe at my building enthusiasm, imagining everything that can go wrong, but I'm not entirely sure that there'd be a big difference in damage if I went broadsides before a semi in my tiny four-door economy sedan or on a little black motorbike. I've got my gear, though, from my white helmet (statistics, my dear, not aesthetics) and my kevlar, leather, padding, and mesh jacket that looks like crazy overkill for a scooter, or like I'm suiting up to fight giant robots and leap canyons, but I'm not taking chances—I'm just working to manage them.

The eyes readjust, like leaving a darkened theater and a long, slow movie that didn't tell the story it promised to tell, and I wonder, in a way, what I'm doing, and where I'm heading, but that's only my choice to a point. I look out and around, and the endless roads start opening up, twirling out of their sleep like flowers unfurling, roots uncurling, reaching into the richness of the soil that's all around, and there's nothing to worry about but this moment, right now, and then the next, and the next, until it's all over, and that's all any of us can do.

Old Bean will just have to check his mirrors, slow down a bit, and keep an eye open for the little spark of the headlight on a pretty silly little anachronism chasing at his heels, but there are adventures ahead…oh boy. Tiger, tiger, burning bright, hang on a second, while I adjust my gear cables tonight!

And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?
Now hand me the offset screwdriver and that can of diet soda, will you?

If you're mighty patient and relaxed (or in the mood to be relaxed), you might just want to watch me make some of my very slow music. I made this little rough video of the work in progress on the seventh part of my twelve part podcast, and it's also the first piece I've done that was entirely made with electric guitar (an instrument I don't actually know how to play in a conventional sense). Take a look, and see what I do when my chi is all going in the right direction.


P.S. I've updated the podcast feed so the final edit of 07 is now available. I made a mistake in the feed, so if your podcast aggregator or iTunes grabbed 07 in the twenty minute stretch before I fixed the problem you may have to redownload that episode (the filename was not updated, so you'll end up with a mislabeled second copy of 06). If the image for 07 appears the same as the one for 06, you've got the mislabeled file, so delete that one and reload. If you have further questions or need help with anything, just drop me a line. Thanks for listening!