Obama, Haiti, Oracle

On the eve of what is shaping up to be a disastrous loss in the Massachusetts Senate race, and in the wake of the still patchy relief effort in disastrous Haiti, and in celebration of pretty near exactly a year of the Obama presidency, my mind wanders to that central question in modern life, the database. That is what I mean by Oracle in the title, though there are more ways to parse data than Oracle, as we know.

Every major disaster seems to follow the same script, and five days in there is a lot of confusion on the ground, those in need are not getting relief, and the international effort is bogged down. Chaos among the afflicted begins to mount as the initial shock recedes. I know I am in danger of appearing callous, and given that my only experience of disaster was the 89 earthquake here in San Francisco, I do not want to make light of the challenges faced by those who bravely go where no one wants to be.

But in this instance, as in so many, it seems to me that we are not making effective use of the new tools at our disposal. No doubt that failure is conditioned by the inertia that marks most politics at most times. But there are times in human history where entropy gives way to revolution, and this ought to be one such time, the more so given the revolutionary impact that electronic life has had on everything else.

Because what we have here is a database problem. There are evidently initial response and rescue teams scattered around the globe. They rapidly converge, but not rapidly enough, and once they are on the round, the means to move them to the actual hot spots are sadly lacking. Roads are always impassable after disasters; the afflicted always get in the way; there is always a fog surrounding information and communication. SO what those rescuers need are helicopters. In the case of Haiti, it is simply shocking that we did not have a hundred, two hundred helicopters in situ within 24 hours. That should always be the goal. And the instrument to deliver that goal should be the US Navy and Air Force.

We know people will need water and food. The world community should be stockpiling emergency supplies not where disasters happen, but where there are large concentrations of airplanes and runways. In other words, every major international airport should have a supply of water that can be rapidly airlifted to the nearest landing strip to the disaster from where those helicopters previously mentioned should move it to the site of the disaster. That coordination is all about a modern system database.

I work every day with a system database that runs one of the world's most remarkable major research universities. From my central seat, I can tell you that the database is like a teenager ... beautiful, powerful, unruly, prone to bad decisions, needs a lot of sleep (bug fixes), and always promising to be more tomorrow. But regardless of the madness that surrounds administering such a Borg, it actually works remarkably well given the immense human complexity that it endeavors to manage.

Another example of a database is the Obama campaign. The press talks about his Internet outreach and fundraising, but behind all of that was a database operation that tracked people, kept statistics, managed communication, updated and ran a web site, and evidently did a pretty good job of security also. My problem is this: notwithstanding Obama's promise to run his Presidency as he ran his campaign, why did he abandon success and repair to the tried and true? Where was that database when it was time to mobilize mass events in favor of health care reform? Where was that database when it came time to retain Edward Kennedy's Senate seat?

When I first arrived at MRU (that is the name that I give to the major research university where I hand-count bits and bytes in exchange for a few shekels delivered twice monthly), I tended to share the attitude that the database was the enemy, the great impersonal beast that wanted only to devour our individuality and reduce all variation to flat form. But I was professionally required to sell the database to the reluctant, and in doing so I came to understand that human variosity always survives the systems that are designed to contain it ... those systems strive to keep up. But persnickety abstinence is no strategy to deal with technological change, notwithstanding the Andy-Rooney common sense that is so au courant among my dear friends who like to mock social media. I have seen every excuse to resist the database. The issue is not to resist it, but to harness it to our oldest and most persistent problems.

Like disaster. And social change.

The greatest idiocy of the self-styled conservatives of the present era is their failure to see that American military might can be turned into a worldwide force for betterment and disaster relief and implied threats to the assorted ancien regimes that still haunt the planet. But this is a re-imagining. And at the heart of that re-imagining is to understand just how powerful the modern database has become. Unleash Google on disaster relief. Or unleash the amazing students who constructed the course catalog that MRU released and that I manage ... they saw in an entirely different light a problem that I understood thoroughly ... and they changed my way of understanding my own information.

So this becomes the question: when will government and international relations catch up with the technology that runs Amazon and eBay and Facebook? When it does, the Haiti earthquakes of the future will entail much less suffering.


Photos by Arod, from around town. From my ongoing series that I call "Flat Faces".

A New Year

I decided to have a look at my last post from 2008, a year ago, and it is entitled Loss. And then my first post of 2009, and it starts with "I just cannot get a "write" on. Back to work this week after three weeks off, and the mind reels from idea to idea."

I'm kind of morose right now, and I am still having difficulty getting a write on.

But none of that should obscure that 2009 was an excellent year in my life. Notwithstanding the stress and the inevitable fits and starts, the job has advanced in precisely the direction I seek, and I am more or less in the position that I hoped to be when I thought about it a year ago. I cannot say that I am bubbling over with glee at facing the office again on Monday, but what confronts me is not drudgery but rather a set of opportunities just waiting for my energy to transform them.

The job was the proximate driver of the most significant personal changes that I made in 2009. I got my first set of full-time glasses ... extremely fashionable German mykita frames. Curiously and serendipitously, the model name of the frames is Richard ... the Germans go in for this sort of cloying naming, evidently ... and Richard is my sainted ex. So, all bedecked in the new glasses, I importuned Richard to accompany me to Macys Union Square Men's Store in order to upgrade my appearance. I was looking for newer khakis, frankly; Richard suggested I look at some dress pants. "There is no way that I am going to ..." I sputtered, and as I looked up from my protest, there approaching was broadly-smiling, nattily dressed Leland, as I later learned. "I heard that, and I think I can help."

Leland is a young middle-aged, evidently gay, black guy, and I think he will have to be my 2009 Man of the Year. Since that fortuitous and, at least from my point of view, unplanned meeting, Leland has transformed me into the sort of middle middle aged guy who is not comfortable under-dressed in public. I virtually never go to work now without a tie, and I always wear dress pants, and a fine shirt. That's a change, and it is more than cosmetic. It is accepting that I am 56, that the job is critical to my happiness, and that 56 year-olds look better tarted up than slumming it. The simple choice: elegant elder or schlumpy old goat. I choose the former.

Ooops ... friends have arrived for a little local new Year's celebrating, so I shall return to this tomorrow.

Turned out that we had a perfect Traditional Kielbasa New Year's Eve Party. Perhaps I will explain the origin of this "new tradition" at some point ... what you need to know is that it is all tongue in cheek ... but the end result last night was that the five inmates of the two-flat building in which I live noshed on cheese and sausages, drank elegant champagne cocktails, and toasted each other at the fated hour. The two rather more "pop" of our company had a momentary panic when it became clear that there was no local TV coverage of the moment ... they almost fled in horror ... but we held on to them long enough for a toast and a hug. Then off they went to the roof to watch the fireworks on the Embarcadero from afar.

Back to my earlier ruminations.

Last year was a reimagining of the image and my quotidian modus operandi. That was good. I have no resolutions for this year other than to continue the reimagining. If I am as advanced in my job a year from now as I am now advanced over a year ago, then it will have been a good year. That's the queen's message at this point.


The break is always a little difficult because the free time comes with the commitments and mania of the season, and it also and contrarily affords a respite into which to pour the exhaustion of a year of constant running. In the days after Christmas, I fought off a sore throat by lalley-gagging about in bed for a few days. Eventually I forced myself into some action beyond reading and ruminating, and the immediate result was a trip to Mama's, pictured above, in Mill Valley. If riches suddenly descended upon me, I would probably spend a month or two doing nothing but eating breakfast out, reading my book, walking the dog, and staring into space ... and the week after Christmas is just like that. Mama's is a great little place, and they are genuinely glad to see you.

So I luxuriated there a while, then rolled on to Berkeley via the Richmond/San Rafael Bridge, and made my way home for some more indolence and reading and puttering.

And so the days went ... until the Monday looming when I will strap on one of my new ties and get back at it. Bound and determined not to bracket myself in the gloom which I quoted above from last year. Bound and determined to soldier on and be grateful for the good position in which I find myself, notwithstanding the banal horrors which so many more face.

There's a post, friends ... and here's to another new year. May yours be wonderful and bright and better yet than any before.

Photos, top and bottom, of me by Tony Fox at the War Memorial Opera House when we attended the Nutcracker on December 27; photo in the middle of Mama's in Mill Valley by Arod.

I Picked Up Two Monks Today

I picked up two monks today as I was driving back from my Sunday morning dog walk through Fisherman's Wharf and North Beach. It was at Scott and Eddy; they were standing there all a-crimson and orange be-robed. Late-middled-aged white guys, one had a guitar case. The intersection was slow and as I waited, the seeming leader of the pair put out his thumb and gave me a little smile. I waved them in on a whim, and off we went. They needed to go to 22nd Avenue and Fulton, an entrance to Golden Gate Park most proximate to the day-long concert in celebration of the 40th anniversary of Woodstock.

The guitar-laden of the two got into the back. These were big fellas, and I have a tiny car with a large dog of occasionally dubious temperament in the back seat. So there was some maneuvering. The transplanted suburban yuppie Frau-mit-Kindern in the giganto SUV behind me, impatient, pissily swung around to pass and gave me that little lippy look that really deserves a good slap if said slap would not sully the hand that delivered it. But, whoops, I have two Tibetan monks climbing into the car, so I stilled my pique and calmed my heart and diffused into the joy of the sublime.

The guy in the back kept chatting away as if I were not there, so I interrupted and focused entirely on the guy in the front seat. He explained their particular devotions which are ecumenical in the Buddhistic sense, though it seems that the central affiliation is with the Kagi sect of Tibetan Buddhism.

It turns out that the Moody Blues is playing the park today. I told him that the first concert I ever attended was the Moody Blues at Massey Hall in Toronto. According to their web site, "Massey Hall was a gift from the Massey family to the city of Toronto in 1894. For over 115 years, its famous red doors have welcomed audiences to a stunning array of events, personalities and artists. It has earned a unique place in Canadian music history." It's a cranky old building, but famous for its sublime acoustics. We broke in that night ... it was November 29, 1969. Perhaps I should do a 40th anniversary celebration. I do not remember the concert very well, but I remember breaking in with my friend Sara who was expert at it. We managed to get into the Mariposa Folk Festival for free once also. I was very nervous in both cases ... I do not have the constitution that would be required for criminal activity, even back in those days when I participated in the notion that everything ought to be free. That notion is still around, but only CEOs actually practice it legally.

Back to the monks. I told them that my friend Michael Merrill, dead these 20 years, was a co-founder of the Hartford Street Zen Center, and that I had been a guarantor on the initial real estate purchase. Their web site says it was founded by Issan Dorsey, but that is a long-standing myth. Issan was a distant adviser as I remember, but he was such a larger than life character that the tale is juicier when he is founder. But it didn't happen that way. I must have all that paperwork around somewhere since I never throw anything out. Perhaps I willl send it to them some day in favor of historical accuracy.

The front seat monk thanked me for my efforts given that he lived at Hartford Street for a while.

I told him that Michael had died at the hospice at Hartford Street, and then quickly corrected myself as Michael actually died in a hospice on Geary Street. He tried to die on Hartford Street, but in extremis he was moved to Pacific Presbyterian Hospital and pumped up with fluids. They have their own hospice on Geary Street, and Michael clung there to life for two more weeks. He died as I drove south to the Pac-10 tournament in 1989 with my friend Jack Green, who is also now gone.

But I didn't tell that to the monks. We kept it light. I didn't want to be proselytized; one has to be "catholic" in the rejection of religion. Swanning around in red and orange is certainly less damaging to human life than being a papist or a fundie or a mahometan ... what's in a name ... but it is still delusion. Warm fuzzy delusion, but delusion. Of course, one does not want to be put into a position where it would be necessary to bring up the bloodthirsty history of the Tibetan lamas as they actually ruled. They were rather fond of extractive torture ... eye-gouging, tongue snipping, amputation ... in aid of their hegemony. And that's the point with religion: it's all cutesy when people are blessing each other and wandering around in a haze. But religion in power, even near power, is always brutal.

I figure if I ever were to find myself in a prison, though, I would be a Buddhist. Perfect religion for atheists, they have a rich literature unlike the literature-starved post-Sumerian monotheisms that dominate the world, and the meditation would pass the time nicely.

None of this came up with my monks. I liked the guy in the front seat. The fellow in the back seemed non-plussed that his conversational dominance had been usurped by the driver of the ancient Honda Civic. Maybe he was just grumpy ... I can grok that.

I pulled around the corner at 22nd and Fulton and they piled out. The front seat monk gave me his card and invited me to drop him an email if I needed a blessing or anything. I admit I was tempted ... that is how religion gets to you. I smiled, but did not proffer my hand. I don't think monks like ot be touched.

No pics yet. I am still channeling my inner Aperture, and I should be able to make it a more worldly effort shortly.

Metablog

I appear to have sailed on to a bit of shoal in my psyche. I am prone to these things, and once I am sufficiently convinced of the problem, I apply what my great friend Michael Merrill, deceased these twenty years, used to call "main force". So I am in the process of gathering main force.

One thing I have done is to force myself to spend a half hour at lunch reading the manual for Aperture, the more advanced of the Mac products for photo processing. iPhoto was so bloody easy, but I had to decide to upgrade and I have lost control of where anything is. And I hate creating posts without photos. So that is one of those effective ways of stymieing oneself in the modern era. A tight little circle of pointless self-undermining.

I think maybe I will buy a little more memory for my laptop ... that'll surely jog something.

I'm also planning to buy one of those horrible earpieces to improve the cell phone life. I loathe phones, and double-triple loathe cell phones. But that is like a baby loathing mother's milk or a Bostonian loathing the Red Sox. Amusing but ineffectual.

When one is on the shoals in the present era, one spends more time on Facebook than is sensible. Facebook is like a pile of gravel where Twitter is like a pile of sand. Doesn't matter in either case the shape of your shovel, you're still gonna miss more than you observe. But dig away, dig away. That's the spirit.

So trying to buck up - perhaps I should feel fine that Congress attached our right not to be beaten to a bloody pulp to some military expropriations bill ... ooops, that's appropriations ... and now we will soon have the majesty of federal law on our side when some gaggle of thugs take out their frustrations at not being able to ball each other without shame.

In that vein, catch this ... no homo ... for crying out loud ...


Of course, protecting people from hate offends religious sensibility. I mean, what would religion be without hatred.

Crappers ... trying to buck up, here. Maybe the Manhattan that sainted roommate and bartender RL just handed me will help.

I'll go with that ... and the fact that I have posted something, anything. More anon.

Heading Home from the Gold Coast

I'm starting this post in the Auckland airport, this time at dusk ... six in the evening ... finishing it as we take off over the dark South Pacific heading home to San Francisco. The bright modern architecture of Auckland's new international area is suffused with low sunlight. There are four big goofy teenage boys in some kind of all black uniform at the next table, giggling and glancing at me as I have obviously noticed them, as hard as I try to pretend I have not. New Zealander youth, from my brief experience, seem to wear a lot of black. These black T-shirts are emblazoned with "Oceania Penrith 2009" on the back and New Zealand Canoe Polo on one sleeve, and i-4 on the other. The good life.

Sad moments as we said our several goodbye's earlier in the Brisbane airport. Not just the departure from family half a world away from everyday life. But the underlying tragedy that struck us a month ago; see my post xxx for those details.

But life moves on. Mother's 80th birthday is tomorrow, and that was the proximate cause of this trip. My sister brought mother here as a birthday present, and I decided it was the ideal time to make my first pilgrimage to the country my sister adopted as her own three decades ago. Life has always been too packed with immediacy to spur me to make the trip before and, besides, I saw her every couple of years in Ontario. I feel bad about that, the more so because of how much I enjoyed Australia.

Except for the one day in Brisbane, I spent the entire time on the Gold Coast and its immediate hinterland in the Great Barrier Range. Again, not the plan, but the great dust storm had its way. I spent all of every day except one with sister, brother-in-law, and nephew, and also visiting mother.

The Gold Coast where my sister's family has lived for nearly two decades is decidedly new. Explosively new. Not just the skyscrapers of Surfers' Paradise, but the sprawling suburbs that wrap around the canals and manmade lakes. That said, it really does feel like the good life ... the sun, the g-day mates, the broad visible happy middle class, the lack of any discernible poverty or misery. A tiny slice of the land down under, mind you, and the failed trip to Sydney is the more unsettling because the slice is broader and bigger and more troubling there, I am quite sure.

But this thing slice of the good life kept me thinking about my own good life. The pros and the cons. I'm not going to go through a laundry list, and indeed I have not been going through a laundry list. I've just been thinking that this is the time in life when I need to husband the pros and nudge the cons out of view. As those immediacies become less inistent, the broad generals need more attention.

Early in the week, we visited Tamborine Mountain, and I have been humming Hey Mr. Tambourine man, sing a song for me ever since. The Bob Dylan version is a song from my youth, when there was a lot of immediacy to everything, where every tiny slight or setback felt like an avalanche in my face. Notwithstanding that, and notwithstanding that I was a decided hothead politically and intellectually, I thought of myself as on some level cool, and music was the locus of the cool. So it was ironic to be humming Mr. Tambourine Man as an old guy who cannot help but be a lot cooler than he ever was if only by reason of how much energy it takes to get worked up. Not that I don't get worked up; I just don't like it any more.

The trip was very Mr. Tambourine Man, laidback, contemplative, sing-a-song-for-me, in the warm embrace of famly that endures and hugs.

I always want to learn something when I travel, and that's what I learned ... sing a song for me. I thought of it as tearful mother disappeared up the ramp in Brisbane ... a day shy of 80, hardly a gray hair on her head, remarkably spry and sharp. I thought of it as I hugged my sister and brother-in-law goodbye, feeling the pain of their loss, and vowing that our ancient connection needs all the attention it deserves, vowing to sing a song for each other, warm and laidback.

What else to make of Australia? I watched a couple of "footie" games, a Rugby League semi-final and the Grand Final of Australian Rules Football. In both cases the team that we were rooting for lost. In neither case do I remember the name of a single player. Both were excellent games, but the AFL Grand Final was gripping. It's a great sport ... wide-open, fast, athletic, spectacular men, both speed and pure force. A lot like hockey in that the game just keeps going, although the coaches have even less direct control over the actual game than hockey. I love AFL, and I wish we could see more of it in the States

But isn't it curious that the Australians have invented two complete games pretty much just for themselves, their own version of rugby and AFL? They call them, as well as Rugby Union which is rugby played by the universal rules, "footie." I'm a footie fan! And footie, it seems to me, expresses something about Australia ... old games made new.

Australia is a new land built on the most ancient continent facing the new challenges for which the known answers will not be enough. Even so, they enjoy the surf and sun, they dig the footie, they groove to their own language.

So, not to put too fine a point on it, what I learned from travel in Australia is that my own life is a new life, insofar as I have marched to my own drummer, but yet it is still built on those ancient dynamics of surviving and finessing the challenges for which no known answer can be ultimately enough as time drones on. I kept thinking about how isolated Australia seems when one is not there, and yet it is fully "here" and not at all isolated when you are there. Just like one's own life. Just like wherever you happen to be. So as I ruminated on the good life ... and that in the context of the personal pain we felt at our family tragedy ... the easy life amid the universal dross, I vowed to redouble my own commitment to those parts of my life that are good.

One more point, and then I'll put this computer away and lean back into the enjoyment of a 12-hour flight ... no sarcasm there at all ... and my current re-re-read of the Persian Wars. My nephew just came back to Australia after a half-year trip around the world, including to family in Canada. Aussies travel. But when they come back home, they settle into where they belong, back to the good life of the special secret Aussie joke on the rst of the world ... the one we all know about but don't quite grok.

Again ... we all have a little secret conspiracy, and the world doesn't quite get it. We smirk back at the world, knowingly, laughing, hoping that in some way our personal conspiracy is funny enough to carry us on in some kind of comfort and personal joy.

How odd. From this trip, from my communing with the Aussies, I found again a new urging to the quiet joys that are available to me, that are there for simply basking in them, sunning myself. Not what I expected; not what was on the agenda. But that was good.



Photos by Arod.

The Good Life

I just realized that I have been posting these Australia travel notes with San Francisco times ... I will have to go back and adjust the previous ones, and this note will disappear when I have done that.

When one travels, it is hard not to imagine that things are inherently better or worse somewhere else. Certainly things are different, but I would like to operate from the notion that notwithstanding vast differences in practice and expectation, not to mention material well being and circumstance, that most groups of people average the same amount of laughter and sorrow. I would like to operate that way, but not sure if it is right.

The most "exotic" places I have traveled ... and that probably means the place the furthest from my life experience ... are Haiti and Papua New Guinea. In the latter, people laughed a lot and life seemed good notwithstanding the rather restricted range of foodstuffs available to the highlanders. There is a good life in Papua New Guinea that would not seem very bloody good to me if I were compelled to live it. In this sense, Australia is probably the least "exotic" place I have ever traveled because the foodstuff range is pretty comparable to here I come from, the people speak English, and the expectations seem broadly similar.

Even so, the good life in Australia has a different timbre than the good life in San Francisco.

It's quite chilly this morning ... I even have a "jumper" on. A few days back it was warm in the morning, and the TV news was reporting that the weather was nice. The morning heat filled me with a certain foreboding because I fear the insufferably hot days for which this place is famous. The real foreboding should have been that the heat was a predictor for the dust storm of the century.

My point here, as attenuated as it apparently may be, is that the good life here is bloody hot. Most people go about their lives, working and doing, but the tiny strip where sand meets surf is where the good life abounds. The famous swagger of the semi-clad Australian youth points to and derives from that strip, and from the blazing heat and the quenching waves.

Some years ago on the island of Nias, Ian and I were walking through Gunungsitoli to a boat that would carry us back to Sumatra. Blazing hot. A bunch of Aussie surfer guys loudly declaiming as they strutted along, their accompanying women trailing behind, pouting, clearly not having quite the time of it that their males were having. We were cranky about them because they had interfered with our idyll at Teluk Dalam, on the south coast. The Aussie's claimed the western point of the bay on which we were staying because the surf was good there. As we sought inner peace and solitudinous reflection in the evening, they drunkenly whooped it up and made asses of themselves.

This is the favored fable of Aussie surfers. Life has moved on, of course, and Aussie women are as liberated as women anywhere else. But the actual swagger I witness here is not loud and aggressive, but sleek and self-assured. Notwithstanding that there is something cloying and annoying about people who are beautiful, athletic, unemployed and fancy free, yet evidently still with sufficient means to enjoy the good stuff ... the beach bums are the proximate definition of the good life here. They don't seem to need to rub it in or lord it over. They just strut along the street secure on the corner of the good life that has accrued to them. Of course, this notion would be considerably disabused were I to venture to the notorious nocturnal drinking binges where alcohol and youth conspire to turn the good into its opposite ... but I am not looking at the dialectic of sublime and crass here. Rather, I am trying to put my finger on what passes as the middle middle Australian sublime.

Yesterday Shane and I toured Byron Bay, surely one of the most exquisite places anywhere in the world. Natural beauty, beautiful people, leisure ... alas, artless architecture obscuring the few traces of an older more genteel world, crappy souvenirs, cars everywhere. Exquisite these days is not what it once was.

And there's a point ... worldwide, exquisite used to be reserved for the rich, and now there is increasingly an exquisite that crassly goes well down the social ladder. Australia is a particularly pointed argument for this, because it is a place founded broadly on a principle of elevating the working class. There is a leveling force here that brings the very broad middle up. The good life here is for everyone if they make the right choices ... work hard all year and go to the beach on your holidays; that's the meme.

Shane complains about the louts who live on the dole, clog up the streets, do nothing, get drunk and stoned, and view the good life as entitling them to a lifetime of free stuff and fun. Cranky, me too. When you work for a living, you resent those who game your taxes for leisure and indolence. Of course, long-term those who ply this thin trade find diminishing returns; we saw a few of those, skinny, leathered skin, shoeless, ambling. I think most of the beautiful surfer types do it until they marry up and family down.

This is just not a society which believes that the ordinary life is a trap or a failure ... this is not a society that sees Michael Jordan as success and everything else as not good enough. This is not a society that runs by the moronic motto that "you can be anything you want to be if you just try hard enough." The American mythology of excess is tempered here. They have three "footie" leagues that are very successful and barely known off the continent. No athlete in Australian society is making 20 million a year. But they are successful nonetheless.

The night of my dust-induced discomfiture, I asked of the family that we do something out there, something other than the warm embrace of togetherness and familiarity. I was disappointed that my excursion to Sydney was drowned in that now infamous red dawn. Let me wax a little personal on that ... this has been one of those middle-aged voyages of self-discovery in which settling in with my intimates provides an inner warmth and recovery that I probably could not have managed so freely when I was younger. That said, I did want to have my indefatigable wild streak massaged as well. The 24 hours in Sydney was my chance to be a fag, that is a self-actualized, self-defined individual, unknown in the big city, observing, being observed, haunting and strutting in such a strut as I still manage. It was my mid-50s version of the good life, formed up and pared down to a single day and night of forced-march tourism, as I like to call it. It's really all I needed. And the fact that it was stolen by nature's sudden descent did not reduce the humbling that it induced. I am over the humbling now, and back to smirking about how little our little conceits matter in the larger frame. The memory of what I missed is not part of my inner self-mockery, and that will be my mental souvenir. That, and the vow that the next time I come to Australia (in three years for my nephew's promised graduation) I fly into Sydney and do it first.

So back to the family's night out. We went to the Currumbin Surf Club ... an Australian style institution which supports the good life by plowing the profits back to supporting the surf patrol. Leslie and Shane are members; Scott, my nephew, came along as well. Mother was enjoying a Happy Hour with my sister's mother-in-law at the seniors' development. And, to set the scene, Currumbin is surely the coolest town on the coast here, seemingly least developed, most like it ought to be, low rise, long beach, laidback.

We didn't get a table right away, but drank our beers on the balcony ... the air was still filled with dust, though we could see the moon and one start. The In The Bin Film Festival "Board Shorts" were showing on the flat panels when we got our table which was right next to where a bunch of dreadlocked musicians were setting up for what promised to be a bloody loud set of music. Hmmm, we nervously, middle-agedly, fretted. Can we thrust these burgers down fast enough to get out of here before the racket interrupts. Mother was waiting to be picked up at 8, we got our table after 7 ... so this was the big night out on a foreshortened schedule.

And then the band started. They were incredible ... called a FRENCH BUTLER called SMITH. They say of themselves that they are a world music band that plays "high energy Latin, funk, instrumental fusion" ... a little Chick Corea, a little didgereedoo, lots of funk, jumping and jiving. The guitarist, Scott French, was a wave, and the bassist, Jake Martin, was a babe and a force of nature. There was a sax and a trumpet. Wow.

So that was my little sight of the good life on that dusty evening. The Surf Club, the world funk jive grooves, the crowd mixed of middle aged and youth. A skinny kid in a German hunting hat, as I call it, tapping his foot and watching to see who watched him. Huge burgers. And the roiling sky outside, still plugged with the dust that is the harbinger of the ultimate end of it all.

I did buy the CD, and had a sweet chat and a tap of the arm with the sexy bassist pictured below. Ah, the good life.



Photos by Arod. 1. The Lighthouse at the easternmost point in Australia. 2 and 3. Byron Bay. 4 and 5. a French Butler called Smith in performance at the Currumbin Surf Club.

Saturday Night is Ear Cleaning Night

I got a laugh out of that line at work. I keep 'em laughing at work ... I try to keep 'em laughing wherever I go. To make 'em laugh, you have to play the fool a bit, the cynic a bit, the wry observer. You have to be aware of your own tomfoolery. Yes, mostly you have to play the fool a bit.

I can keep 'em laughing almost all the time, but occasionally the stress load gets sufficient that I crumble a little and the response time is down. Notwithstanding that I got a laugh out of ear cleaning night, that is how I have been feeling. The annual course catalog ... regular readers will remember that I string type together for a major research university (MRU) in exchange for a twice-monthly supply of alphabet soup ... gets to be a grind as it nears the end. This year, we are entirely online, and so we went live on August 1. But live and online is bloody different than going to press. Since go-live, we have been tweaking the courses site daily, and cleaning up the degrees site regularly. I am in the final, final phase, where I make a giant pdf of the thing. In other words, I still make a book; I just don't send it to a printer.

The pdf production is where my lifetime as a copy editor drives me crazy. "Nuts!", to quote Inspector Kramer of Nero Wolfe fame. Nuts. The technology is cranky and backward, and I come face to face with the thousands of prose discourtesies that emerge from the mouths of the careless and the overweening. I won't say the ignorant because most of this prose is written by people with PhDs. So one has to wonder where they imbibed the notion that prose is about slapping a few dashes hither and yon, and capitalizing any word that makes them burp with satisfaction, and stringing puffy adjectives before and after the noun so as to hide the meaning.

All of this is to say that I will be free to return to my more airy being as incipient curmudgeon this weekend.

And I will get back to photography, most of which is not the shooting of the photos but the manipulating of the stream of resultant files.

I didn't mean for this post to go this way. It is the fifth hour in the morning; I went to sleep at 10, so that condemned me to be awake before 4. I just heard the coffee pot chirp ... so brb, as we say in chat ... be right back ...

Coffee in hand at 4:47. So you're wondering about ear-cleaning. That would be the dog's ears. I have committed to dog and vet that I will clean his ears weekly in aid of preventing the hidden fungal infection that was the proximate cause of the head shaking that was the proximate cause of the hematoma which sucked down 2 weeks and $800 of my affection for the great beast. He is all snuggled up beside me on my pillow-bestrewn "Chinese wedding bed". That is what we have long called this Malaysian-manufactured, cast-iron, mother-of-pearl inlaid, canopy bed (sans canopy at this point) where I nightly sleep and play with my laptop, not necessarily in that order. My old friend, now gone, Kurt bought it when he was a Peace Corps dialysis technician in Malaysia in the very early 70s. The shopkeepers told him it was a Chinese wedding bed, and notwithstanding that I do not know of a Chinese wedding bed tradition, that's what I call it.

Dog with ear midst pillows. That's where we are. The vet shaved his ear, drained the hematoma, sewed it up, wrapped his head in a bandage, and told me to make sure he didn't make a mess of himself. For two weeks. During the busiest time of my year. And, by the way, my 86 Honda Civic asked for and received a brake job in the middle of all this.

So it's been a cranky period, and the result is that I have dedicated Saturday evening ... leastwise 5 minutes of same ... to cleaning the dog's ears.

How Saturday has changed. I never go out on Saturday evening. Many were the decades that Saturday evening was a fright of activity. Let's not be bashful ... it always ended up with cruising in whatever was my favorite bar of the moment. All that will be a fond fond memory as I swab dear Loki's wet and quivering ears.

I meant to talk about my new hobby ... gardening ... and leave this on a positive note. That'll have to wait. Feeling my warm inner cranky. Besides ... it's 4:57 now. Feet on the floor by 5:29 ... that's the rule. So I have a half hour to catch up on the news.

Can You Row?

Notwithstanding that my web sites are live ... see previous post ... and that the period of my annual course-catalog-related discomfiture is formally ended, I am still under the gun. One more week of that ... I could bore you with the details, but let this suffice ... pdf! Yes, the pdf ... in other words, even if you no longer have to print the damned thing, you still have to make a pdf so that the hangers-on can print something like what used to be printed and handed to them. So the only part of out-of-the-print business that I can really embrace is that I no longer have to spend a day with sweaty truck drivers tking delivery of 40 tones of books.

Ah, the pdf ... this week's torment.

But that is not the story. On Friday, I worked from home and that involved a vast amount of walking. Have I noted that the dog, my sainted Loki, took the opportunity of my annual deadline insanity to sprout a hematoma on his left ear. That bloody left ear has cost me a couple of thousand dollars over the course of dear Loki's life. We're into this episode to the tune of $800 and counting.

So on Friday, I took him to the vet's in the morning to have the bandage changed, and to board him there so that my assistant and I could spend the rest of the on Dreamweaver and our annual celebratory lunch. But that had to wait for breakfast ... so I left the vet's and walked along Fillmore heading to the Sidewalk Cafe on California.

The Fillmore is an historically Black district that was Japanese before WW II. Like everything in San Francisco, it's historic character is crumbling in the face of the cheap money of the rich that is infecting our world. But it is still Black at its core. So there I am walking along Fillmore in the early morning, and a dapper man, dressed to the nine's, looking every bit a Black church deacon, calls out to me as I pass, "Do you row?" Say what, I said. "Do you row?" he repeated. I made a gesture in the style of a man rowing. And then I looked a little more closely. The dapper old man proffered a bag of marijuana and some papers in an obviously arthritic hand. He was saying, "Do you roll?" But for middle age, a job, and a decided preference for whiskey and martinis in the evening, I could have turned my non-arthritic fingers into an early morning toke. I made some awkward excuse and rolled on, as it were.

When I were a young fart ... "as it were" ... I got a job at a place in Windsor called Canadian Bridge where we manufactured hydro-electric transmission towers. What we did was to manipulate steel "angles" that would be combined into the aforementioned towers. At one point, early in my short career, I was assigned to assist an ancient Polish man famous for his raging anger and quick temper. My job was to feed angles into a device which cleaned then with some sort of metal shot prior to their being galvanized. My Polish workmate ... his name has long since vanished form my memory ... starts yelling at me "Sha - een". I was befuddles, and he yelled it again. "Sha - een". This went on for a while and my Polish workmate worked himself into such a froth that I finally called the shop steward to protect myself. It turned out that "Sha - een" is the Polish-Canadian pronunciation of "chain". The man wanted a chain.

The can-you-row thing reminded me of the Sha - een episode. And it reminded me of the madness of work where words matter no matter how weird the moments may be.

Sunday evening ... haven't been blogging enough ... the week looming ahead will be the last nasty week of this season ... that's where I am hanging my hat ... that's where I'm rolling my chain.

Note on how it is

It's almost 10 and I am still working ... editing course descriptions, which is something I can do in my sleep, and often do before I sleep. I loathe sloppiness in prose ... loathe .. and the closer one comes to the humanistic core, the sloppier the prose. So I am growling now from having to correct infantile errors made by humanist scholars who ought to care more about the quality of their words. I rarely have to spend much time on scientific or engineering prose; those folks produce lists of terms that occasionally demand Googling, but not much else. But the humanists seem to think that excesses of froth equal better content. Yech.

I am a week from going live with the course catalog for MRU, the major research university where I clip verbiage for a living.

Worked from home today, as I often do in the period. Instead of lunch, I went into the back yard and yanked great strings of trumpet vine from the bushes. It was the proximate meme for yanking BS from humanist course descriptions ... not to mention other prose obscenities. I could ramble on.

I loathe sloppy prose, and I utterly fail to understand how any educated humanist could sleep with a puddle of such filth on their conscience.

Still, only a week to go.

The dog has developed a hematoma on his ear. Not critical or an emergency ... but why now, my sweet friend? Why now? We have an appointment for a draining and possible sutures on Tuesday ... that would be four days to go-live. I am obsessed at his discomfort ... notwithstanding that he is sound asleep, dog-like, three feet from me.

Better prose on this blog, at least as I see it, shortly ... specifically after August 1. And more photos.

For the moment, one more slurp of bourbon and then sweet, sweet Morpheus.

And wondering ... a life with deadlines ... they torment me. Who would I be without them?

Just a little note

Just watched the American Idol finale on reprise with my friend of two decades, Tony. What a show! I am a smidge drunk, but surely that does not make me more sentimental than usual. Loved Alison and Cindy. Blown away by Kris and Keith. Poor Rod Stewart ... give it up dude. And blown out of the water by Kris and Adam and Queen. Those Queen guys must have been blown out of their minds by Adam.

It takes guts to sing ... never forget that. Sing!

Wet

Every morning, after the dog walk but before I put on my tie, I grab a handful of koi pellets, go to the pond in the back yard, and thrust my arm almost to my elbow into the cold water. I let the pellets slowly float free to the surface from between my fingers, but keep enough in my down-turned palm that one or another of the koi find it worth their while to nibble directly from my hand.

Th water is cold, and it has an unmistakable odor. It is one of the most sensual moments of my far too lock-step day. Each day a different memory of water floats into my head as I resist the urge to get my hand out of the frigid wet.

The koi water and the water of my numerous aquaria are the only regular associations with water in my life, and I regret that. When I am feeling stress, I often think of water ... the open ocean at night, great rivers, and, most of all, the endless streams and lakes of northern Canada.

I remember when i was a teenager and a bunch of us were on some sort of camping expedition ... the details are foggy. My friend Peter, with whom I was secretly in love, and I filched a rowboat from some other campers. We paddled around in overgrown waterways. Suddenly, Peter dropped his glasses into a muddy byway. He stripped to his underwear and dove in. When he was gone, I was frozen in lust ... his all but naked body revealed. He surfaced, wet and pale white, gathered his breath, and plunged down again. He never found his glasses, and I have never recovered from that association of wet and the object of my ardent, teenage desires.

I thought of that today when the Washington Post published this photo:


Water is the other medium, other than air, where we vacation but where we do not live. Many are those whose lives are entirely bound into water. But they still live in air.

I hanker for water. My sainted ex, Richard, had a kayaking hobby for some time, and I vicariously kayaked with him. I still treasure the photos he took when surrounded entirely by water in Alaskan fjords.

Water drives history, of course, and it will drive the torments that await us in the next centuries. I have been reading Mesopotamian history, and we know that hydraulics lie underneath the economics that created empire and power and majesty. But, curiously, the Mesopotamians set water to the side of their cosmological views, and worshiped instead air and sky in the "persons" of Enlil and Marduk. Water surrounded and undergirded. But it was never the center.

Last evening, it rained just a little ... enough that I took the cushions off the yard chairs.

The first time I visited Berlin, I sat by the fountain in Kufurstendamm one morning, transfixed simultaneously by the fountain itself and some passing beauty seated on the other side of me. I had no camera, so I have no record. But the fountain took on that extra meaning of unrequited lust. The last time I visited Berlin, I tried to find that moment again. Instead, I found a great fountain.

Water is like that. We trace our passions in it, and it washes them away.

We never touch the same water twice. Though we try.



Top photo by Arod of fountain at the Major Research University where I wet wash for wages; middle photo from the news today; bottom photo from by Arod from Berlin.

Dizzy by Daylight

What does one do when the mind is awash .. awash with what will have to wait for subsequent recollection.

That's what I feel like.

On the train this morning as we arc-ed down that same well-streaked path, I glanced up from Bottero's Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia to notice a tallish, dirty blond middle aged man in dumpster-diver couture pissing into the bushes some 20 feet from the tracks. Imagine if you can ... the entire right side of a train full of office workers on their way to still extant if not secure employment gazes briefly in passing as you piss in public. Some people do not have the sense to step 5 feet into the bush so that no one sees them.

Perhaps he thinks like this ... I'll give all those office workers a little thrill of self-satisfied disgust and piss for them in plain view. Maybe this was the highlight of his week.

See ... I want to blog something meaningful, but all I can think about is folks like me ...in the broadest sense ... who live in Tehran. So all the meanderings and observations pale when we know in our guts that there are people just like us being cut up and tortured and killed for merely suggesting that they ought to have the simple freedom of saying that I do not agree.

I loathe religious bigotry ... and all of religion is a sort of immanent bigotry ... but contemplating it in the context of lives lost and the terror of even waking up in a society like Iran. Wow.

Remember folks that the hell of Iran is what the fundies have in mind for us. No ... not remember ... never forget that religion in power kills and maims and tortures.

Meanwhile, the pisser referenced above will live on oblivious. Trains will still run, derelicts will urinate on bushes. But things happen, and lives are destroyed.

Perhaps that is why I prefer to spend my commute time in ages past. The pain of the present, unlike the pain of the past, is that it does not need to be this way. Even so, it still is.

On Heterosexuality

This has ended up being a very long ramble. I take a risk here because I engage in what I like to call "pure speculation" about heterosexuality ... by "pure speculation", I mean speculation unencumbered by fact or reference or proof, and founded upon the ramblings of my own mind. I do not want to offend anyone. But dynamics that we all experience deserve playing out and talking about. I believe in transparency, and I believe in making mistakes, especially of interpretation, in aid of finding your way forward. So here goes.


I spent the afternoon with my excellent friend Roy Ortopan at the American Conservatory Theater's production of Edward Albee's new and not so new At Home at the Zoo. So, spoiler alert, I plan to reveal anything I feel like, so those of you who might want to see this exquisite production should consider bookmarking these scribblings for future reference.

The play is a combination of two acts: the first act is new writing and concerns a discussion about matters of relationship and sex between a long-married couple Peter (Anthony Fusco) and Ann (René Augesen), both long-time regulars at ACT. It has the form of a prequel to the second act which is Albee's iconic first playThe Zoo Story, written in 1958. So a little criticism to start ... the first act exhibited the exquisite writing of a , each line crafted and yet natural. Augesen and Fusco oozed the comfortable relationship whose very smoothness is its own threat. The second act, Pinteresque in writing and in staging, is rougher, even coarser, with a long monologue in which Jerry (Manoel Feliciano) recounts to Peter a murderous story about a dog and works himself from accidental interlocutor to incarnate violence.

The unsettling nature of this production is in its interconnected but stylistically and emotionally distinct one-act plays. The challenge is to find the resistances that flow from the one to the other.

In the first act, set in an exquisite modernistic living room, white and sterile and clean, the exchanges between these comfortably married middle-aged Manhattanites expresses what I would call the inner dynamic of heterosexuality. That is, the dominance of the female irrespective of the power relationship, and therefore the alternating current of resistance and attraction to the female that is the dynamo of male heterosexuality. Let's lead by noting that there's a lot in that that is probably bullshit ... I mean that. But as a lifelong gay guy (notwithstanding an earnest and meaningful heterosexual relationship of 18 months at the end of my teenage years) I observe male heterosexuality as a sort-of alien force in the kitchen of my being. It is there, it is clearly real, and yet it is hard to quantify. It is passing difficult to quantify how the female principle drives straight men even as they alternately dominate it and submit to it.

I never fully accepted the inside game of feminism's more abstruse ideological perambulations. The obvious and ineluctable force of women demanding equality is not feminism ... I call that women's liberation, and I separate it from the ideological prescriptions of the high priestesses of feminism, especially in the 70s and 80s before they slowly faded from relevance in the face of rising female equality. So, a play like this throws light on our present post-feminist era. Women and men may continue to spar as they have done for centuries, but women have a better block from which to jump off than ever before, leastwise in Western society.

Ann presses her complacent husband to be dangerous. It is he who resists, who tells a story of the one time in his youth he was dangerous, and how it was terrifying and almost destroyed his life. This is a flip from stereotypes, because it is the female who is supposed to crave the secure and the predictable. But it is Peter who argues that he thought that they had agreed before marriage that theirs would be a peaceful and predictable journey where excitement was not at issue, but the pleasures of the long and the assured were in the fore.

There is no one heterosexuality, of course, any more than there is only one homosexuality. But one thing that distinguishes heterosexual men from exclusively homosexual men is that one way or another they must encounter the female principle in all its permutations. Gay men ... and this describes me to a T ... love women for the intelligence and wit and, most emphatically, their non-maleness. But the female principle "in all its permutations" we can take or leave. We don't live with it and we don't go home with it. Straight men do. The notion of the traditional chauvinist is that he pedestalizes women in order to wall himself off from those permutations; in other words, chauvinism is a way of isolating and crystalizing femaleness so that it can be used without interfering in the more fundamental and more powerful maleness which the chauvinist prefers.

There is another kind of chauvinist ... I call them "true heterosexuals." These are the men who are focused exclusively on women, and who hardly notice men at all. There are curiously few of these men. I had a lecturer in college who was a great influence on me and with whom I had many excellent conversations. But if there was a single woman present, I ceased to exist for him. I invited him once to my home for a slide show of a recent trip to Indonesia and we were having a rollicking conversation until a then temporary roommate, female and young and pretty, stopped by. He was gone; I never got him back.


But nowadays, notice how most coupled men ... and the more so the more urban or younger or more middle class they are ... foreground the female. Things as simple as walking a half step behind while girlfriend wife gabs on the cell phone (this drives me nuts), or as complex and laudable as the immersion in childcare or domesticity. It is that new convergence that Albee was expressing in his first act. But he is not afraid, as so many commentators are, to express the discomforts of the new prominence of the female in heterosexuality.

Peter found in his female approach to his marriage the comfort of taking the sting out of his masculinity. He complains at length ... and this gets plenty good laughs from the audience ... that his circumcision is retreating. Not that his foreskin is growing back, but that the glans of his penis is ever so infinitesimally disappearing under what foreskin was left by the surgeon's long-ago snip. Meanwhile, Ann complains that from time to time she wants Peter, whom she describes as a great lover and lousy fuck, to be dangerous, in essence to rape her with consent ... though she does not put it exactly that way.

So here we have the male principle slowly shrinking simultaneously happily and nervously, and the female principle casting around looking for the excitement that its very dominance precludes. Nice dialectics ... I love conundra like these. And as with the real world, there is no denouement, there is resolution. Life goes on, uneasily. You wonder if after this conversation they can return to the sweet satisfying lovemaking that Ann both accepted and rejected and that was all that Peter cared to do.

"Cared to do" ... because in the most violent portion of the conversation, Peter relates the one time when he was dangerous, when he had anally penetrated a woman and injured her, caused her to bleed sufficiently to send her to hospital, during a fraternity-sponsored initiation orgy long beforehand. Just that one brush with danger was enough for him, and the idea of role-playing violence with his gentle-voyage wife was thereby abhorrent.

Remember this ... it was blood and penetration forced upon Peter by the other that haunted him.

So the act wraps up with Peter leaving awkwardly to go for a walk with his book, to take a read in Central Park


Remember that the second act was written in 1958, and the language and staging is coarser. I would argue that this is both by reason of Albee's youth and by reason of the writing occurring before the rise of women's liberation. Jerry, a drifter, strikes up a conversation with Peter. From its inception, this conversation bristles with the implied violence of male-to-male heterosexual relations. That Jerry reveals in the course of the conversation that he has sexually hustled men only adds to that unexpressed violence. While in the first act, the audience is satisfied in a conversation that starts and ends essentially nowhere and travels from one indeterminate to another, in the second act, the audience knows that this cannot end well. Blood will be spilled; someone will die.

When straight men are together, they always bristle a little. It can be nice bristling, it can be humorous, vigorous, laidback. It can be any kind of bristling you want, but there is always at least a tiny charge. Perhaps it is almost as if everyone wants to put out a positive electrical charge to make sure that they all equally repel if they get too close. I think this is what explains the tendency to violence under the influence of alcohol, because the tiny positive electrical charge fades and suddenly, unexpectedly and most unwelcome, two men may find themselves too close.

I think that most men actually prefer the company of men ... notwithstanding my notion that the modern defusing of the male/female relationship leads to greater comfort between men and women. Because when men are together, the female principle no longer threatens or demands; it becomes a kind of icon for waving or saluting or acknowledging or, mostly, ignoring. That is why gay men, and I include myself in this, are always vaguely unnerved by being the lone gay guy with a bunch of straight guys. Again, this is meant to express underlying subcurrents, not some supervening agenda. Keep that in mind. Gay guys are unnerved because we do not output that tiny positive electrical charge. To turn the metaphor on its head, we are more AC with each other than DC ... we play by flipping from positive to negative charge, pushing and pulling, alluring and demanding. So the electrical pressure of all those positive charges we experience around a bunch of straight guys is demanding.

It is in this sense that Albee's depiction of the confrontation between Peter and Jerry is so successful. He plays with what I would describe as the AC/DC thing ... alternately repelling each other and attracting each other. But each submission, each attraction makes the subsequent repulsion the stronger. At one point as the denouement approaches, Jerry starts to tickle Peter who laughs and enjoys himself. That rapidly devolves into a fight over territory that leads quickly to Peter picking up the knife that Jerry threw to him, and Jerry impaling himself on the knife as Peter holds it as warning that Jerry must not approach further. The knife which Jerry provided is like the penis which the sorority girl had demanded in Peter's previous encounter with the dangerous. But where his youthful danger was male/female, and ultimately resolved itself, his adult danger was male/male, and death was the result.

Albee's genius here is in the way he flips back and forth. Remember that the earlier part of Peter's life was written recently, where this terminal encounter was written 50 years ago. I wonder how long Albee has been thinking of the prequel.

So I have rambled on as is my wont. These are irresolvable questions, in constant flux. The names of the principles may be eternal, but the practice of them is always changing. Whenever you hear of an eternal principle, keep that in mind. The name may be eternal, but nothing human is eternal. Nothing is solid.

Photos by Arod from a lengthy series I call "Flat Faces" ... pix of men on billboards or posters out and about.

share this: facebook

Twittering the Drupallers

I spent all day Saturday at BADCamp ... the bay Area Drupallers periodic big meeting of code. I am not actually a techie, I just play one on TV. They held an all-day introduction to Drupal about half of which I already knew, half of which was indeed new, and half of which was seemingly pointless credentialing. That's three halves, but then again it was a long day. Enjoyable, but long.

When techies get together, the two biggest issues are power outlets and wifi. My colleague Eric arrived with a backload of video and audio recording equipment which he proceeded to set up very professionally ... I should know because I was married for a decade to my sainted ex who is a lighting and video pro. More importantly, Eric arrived with a massive power bar which made him instantly popular. I will never go to a conference again without a power bar. I want to be popular too.

As for the wifi ... well, the SFSU MBA program where the event was held had a very efficient wifi situation, and all was peaceful in the kingdom of geeks.

Good thing there was wifi because four long sessions had their slow moments. The first session was a little unorganized, and that led to peppered questions from those in the audience impatient for the truth. Any good presenter knows that every audience is littered with those whose greatest enjoyment is hearing themselves interrupt the good flow of information. The second and third sessions were excellent and informative, but the fourth and final session concerned matters not relevant to my own need to master this medium.

So I slid into Twitter world. When you are in a room full of geeks, replete with power bars and wifi, you are never more than a micro-second from the new universe of social media. And I have begun to Twitter.

On one hand, Twitter is a wonderful and rather enigmatic aggregator of links to information. I have three accounts, one associated roughly with this blog, another associated with work, and a third rather more unfocused one that follows feeds as my fancy strikes. I don't really look at the third one very often, but the other two are constant friends. You have to garden and prune your Twitter feed both actively and passively if you want to get the most out of it. On the professional level, I am looking for resources, contacts, and perspectives. So I am pretty brutal about who I follow.

But my personal Twitter feed, arodsf, is for the more expansive purpose of being involved in the galaxy of social media, so I can be free and fanciful. In the fourth Drupal session, I started checking out the #FollowFriday tweets. FollowFriday is a convention whereby people advertise Twitter feeds that they like or find useful. You can click on the feeds and find people you want to follow. I read the bio and check the most recent tweets. Two much mindless nonsense about shoes or where you are having lunch, and I ignore it. But some pith and some references get me to follow.

And so I found @arjunbasu. And he changed my whole approach to Twitter. He writes Twisters, 140 character short stories. And he does it really well.

The water tasted bad. He was thirsty but not desperate. So he opened the drawer and found his emergency flask and began the day with bourbon

And the car came straight at them, pulled in by their gravity, and in the moment before it hit, he thought of all the porn on his computer..

I couldn't wait to get home and start writing a few myself. It is harder than you think, but I just relaxed and let it come.

Tweeting on the front steps when the neighbor walked by and glanced. A little smile. They still ignore each other at the bus stop.

That was the first one. I stick to 130 characters so that anyone can retweet them and not cut off the end. The following was the first one I really like:

Two men at the intersection, one facing west, the other south. They see the flash and start. One reaches the far side, looks back.

I think these Twisters are essentially syllogisms, and occasionally enthymemes. There are two premises, though one can be unspoken, and then there is a conclusion. The success is in invoking an unexpressed emotion, or a doubt as to meaning or import and consequence. They can express an unformed bitterness ...

He lay awake night after night trying to figure it out. His lover slept through it all. They kissed in the morning, left for work.

... or the banality of everyday life ...

The soup was cold on delivery. The waiter said they do not have a microwave. He left a short tip but returned a week later anyway.

... or a vague and unexplored sexiness ...

Toto's Africa plays as he coffees, watches the waiter. Later, they cross paths at the opening, agree that they like ephemera best.

ArjunBasu gets downright sexual from time to time. I may go there sooner or later. But what I really want to do is play with history. So this one I have not yet tweeted, but I am actually proud of it:

Antoinette mounted the scaffold with scorn. My head in a basket is finer than all of you. She sighed at the basket's coarse weave.

After the final session at BADCamp, I went down to the food court with the other attendees on the promise of free booze from Sun Microsystems. But I had to wait too long and grew impatient. I wanted to get home and start writing my Twisters. I think I have found a new hobby.

Is that the waiter? Heads turned without a moment's pause in the conversation. No, not the waiter. What are we still doing here?

Photo by Arod, from a storefront on Haight Street. Twisters by @arodsf except for the first two by @arjunbasu.

Death Throes of the Gourami

I live with a bunch of animals. One dog, Loki, and a bunch of fish and amphibians. Many fewer than in years past, but still there are a lot more frogs and salamanders in this house than most people have.

The last few days have seen the slow demise of a very old gold gourami. It is the last of three that I got over five years ago ... I never keep any records of my critters, so I am never quite certain how old they are. I thought I had two females and a male, which works out much better than two males and female. But sexing gouramis, especially young ones, is a bit of an art. I think we made a mistake, because one of the three rapidly declined under pretty steady assault by the one that is now in its death throes. Once the third one was gone the remaining pair quickly mated and produced three or four crops of fry. I took those that I could net to my vendor, a fine Burmese/Chinese couple who have a hole in the wall place off Polk Street that is a temple of the aquarium arts. It's called Ocean Aquarium, and any aquarist in San Francisco would be well-advised to check them out. Tell them Stephen sent you.

I don't really care to breed fish, and I was happy to know that some of the fry made it to adulthood. But the effort appeared to exhaust the female, and she only lasted a few years. I figured the other guy would soon follow, but he has hung on for years and years. Now he is at the end. I want him to die soon; I do have a method for euthanizing fish when it is necessary, which is when their incurable disease could harm others in the tank ... I put them in a container of their own water in the freezer and let them slowly fade away. But how can I take this creature from the home it has graced for so long and make its last few moments on earth a trauma. I know, it's only a fish. But it has been a sweet presence in my life. It has been looking at me every day for many years in the vestibule as I arrive and as I leave.

I started keeping fish and 'phibs in the late 80s. I love being around animals ... I would have many more if I could. I do not have cats because I am allergic, and that is a big bummer. I started keeping fish and amphibians under the influence of my great friend Kurt who died on May 10, 1992. I remember the date of his death by looking at the first page of any of the books he willed me because I marked each one with that day. To check again today ... I always forget the day ... I pulled Marvels of Insect Life, edited by Edward Step, F.L.S., with no publication date, but with a signature on the front page "Ethel Eaton, December 1945." The book is a treasure.

I revel in the old. I love living surrounded by thousands of volumes of books, many of them old and cranky, not used as much as they might prefer, but waiting for the moment when they are cracked anew. I am their guardian, ensuring that when I, like the gourami, pass on, they will be ready for another stage in their longer than my life. Book should outlive us, just as we should outlive our animals.

Yes, this is maudlin. But I have a pass on indulging my inner-maudlin. I am at the end of the first day of a three-day weekend, one in a series designed to slake some of the tension of the upcoming two and a half months of stress in my job, notwithstanding that I spent this first day off at an all-day Drupal training session. I have three major web sites to go live between now and September 1. The first two will be a new course and class search site and the course catalog for which MRU the major research university where I stack shekels in aid of higher education and my own sustenance; the last of the three will be a new Drupal-powered replacement for the Registrar's site for which I am webmaster. I have worked my whole life to hard deadlines, and I do enjoy the electric stress more than is healthy. But facing the looming period of madness ... I pause.

The big boss, whom I admire, set up a little half hour meeting with me for Tuesday. I asked him what it would be about. He said with a laugh he did not want to tell me because it might give me a heart attack. Now I write this knowing that he might, or at least could, read my blog. I do not think that he does read my blog, not because he is uninterested, but because I keep him apprised in person of my latest speculations on history and happenstance and the ludicrousness of life. But if you do read this, dear T, remember that I say it fondly and drolly. It did give me a heart attack. I truly, honestly hope that the announcement is more work ... I can always handle more work and more responsibility. What I dread is the notion that I might be reconfigured to somewhere less felicitous. Given all the water under the bridge, and my assessment of the situation, I have come to the conclusion that the announcement will be more work, of a very specific sort which it would pointless to adumbrate here. If so, I am ecstatic, because the key to mastering work is to know how to take on more work and make it work. I am game for that.

Aside ... I always misuse the word "adumbrate" but this time I do not care. I am not even going to look it up as I do 4 or 5 times a year.

So this is the three-day weekend so far ... dying gourami, day-long session at a Drupal conference in downtown San Francisco, wondering what it is that the big boss thinks would give me a heart attack. And a re-encounter with the Marvels of Insect Life.

I could ramble on, and I intended to do just that. But this is surely enough.

For those of my dear friends who keep accounts, this is the Friday post; I owe you a Sunday post, and I will repay your diligence with yet another excursus into old Sumer. Given that I have Monday off, and that I am late with the Friday post, the Sunday post may not happen until Monday. I checked with my internal oversight committee and got an okay. FWIW, we have no Internet in the house, so that explains my lateness on the Friday post. I finally managed to connect up via an unprotected WIFI from next door ... but I do not want them to know about it since their inattention has saved me more than once from the horror of being offline.


Photos by Arod of my sweet friend, Loki. I do not have the heart for photos of the dying gourami.

Potentially Ephemeral

Tuesday morning we had an annual wrap breakfast meeting for the division in which I work at MRU, the major research university where I turn pirouettes in exchange for a sack of tutus delivered to my bank account twice monthly. Naturally there is a grim mood everywhere, and our division had its share of cuts and layoffs. But we soldier on ... I think I see a lot of that in higher education, soldiering on. Until that layoff actually knocks at your front door ... think grim reaper ... my job is to make the most of it, to rise to the challenge, to continue to shape my job.

Work is so utterly different now than it was when I first entered the work force in the 60s as a teenaged convenience store gnome. We all know that. Nowadays, very few jobs worth having are stable; there is constant change and pressure not just to grow and learn, but to move and re-orient, and most importantly to re-invent. Notwithstanding the stress and nerves, I really enjoy that part. I am not particularly adept at letting go, but I hold my breath and do it when necessary, and most often whenever I have let go of something at work, a week or a month later I can only wonder why I had an issue with it. You just have to roll, and when you don't feel like rolling, roll anyway and pretend its okay ... soon enough it will be okay.

The other aspect of modern work that drives us mad is that the workload constantly increases. It is like a giant snow-shoveling operation in which you keep pushing the stuff ahead of you. Yeah, I get a lot done, but I spend too much time managing the things I do not yet have time to do. Even that provides an opportunity ... the opportunity to play with new technology in search of better ways to stay ahead of the work that new technology produces.

A few weeks ago, facing the reality that even work that seems so solid is in fact potentially ephemeral ... I'll come back to that phrase ... I decided that a change is as good as a rest, and I resolved to ante-up the fashion statement. Since then, I have started to wear dress pants, dress shirts, and dress shoes. I always wear a tie to a meeting, which means a tie pretty much every day. Why? It just seemed like the right way to make a statement that I understand that I am committed to this work thing, notwithstanding that life as a gentleman farmer would be so much less stressful.

And, yes, I know that "potentially ephemeral" is an abomination of a phrase ... because the potential might only be exhausted long after the ephemeral had evaporated. But I wrote it, and blogging is about spitting it out, and I like it ... and it stays. Besides, work really is potentially ephemeral because once the ephemeral, the quotidien, is gone, so is the potential. That is how modern work differs ... before, jobs could go on and on relatively unchanged for decades. They were potentially immutable. Immutability dissolved into ephemerality at some point, and we hardly noticed. We were too busy flitting from one thing to another.

BTW, don't get me wrong. I love my job. It is the perfect job for me. I do really well. I do wish I had more power, I certainly wish I made more money. I wish I were 6 feet tall. But it is all pretty damn good. Certainly a hell of lot better than the alternative.

I guess that alternative would be the realized ephemeral, and that would be the grim reaper.

I meant to ramble on about something totally unconnected with what I have written ... but I'm going with this. I meant to think about stress and avoiding becoming an old scold. Oh well, there's another post in the closet ready to be dragged out when nothing else occurs to me.


Top photo by my staff the day after I pulled an all-nighter to get the catalog to press in 2004. Bottom photo by Arod of an architectural detail from MRU, the major research university where I wander around with my digital camera taking pictures of architectural details.