There was a fire across the street from my bus stop this morning.

I noticed it first because of the huge black plume of smoke. Actually, I noticed it before I noticed it. I thought it was foggy outside, and I was worried that the bench would be too wet to sit on. Then I noticed the pillar of smoke.

Since I was still stupefied from being up too early, I didn’t realize that the smoke was unusual. I just thought it was from a smokestack. Then I thought, hey, there’s no smokestack on that building. Which is when I saw the fire.

It was burning in a grove of trees by the highway. The orange glow flickered through the black outlines of the trees growing between me and the flames. It seemed rather small, especially when compared to the multi-acre fires we’ve been used to this year. I watched it for a while before I thought, should I call the fire department?

There were a few men in the parking lot across the street, they were closer to the fire. I thought they must have called, since they were obviously watching it. But it was quiet, and time dragged on with no sirens. I became suspicious and wondered if those people were the ones who had set the fire.

There are crazies out there, you know.

If I’d had my phone with me, I would have called. I’ve never called 911 before, it would be a good thing to know how to do, in case of emergency. But this was an emergency. There was a fire across the street.

I’d had a fire near my house before, at a nasty slummy place I lived in Anchorage. The building over burned down. We all got out on the balconies and watched it. But the trucks were already on the scene.

I was waiting for the bus, and I was concerned because it was late already. I had an important meeting at work I didn’t want to be late for. But there was a fire burning. What if no one called 911? In my sleep deprived state, I just watched it burn. I was reminded of how much I love the smell of woodsmoke. It always reminds me of fall in Alaska.

But this wasn’t a fire in a woodstove. What if it raged and I ignored it, because I needed to go to work?

That’s what’s wrong with the world today. People don’t care. Maybe I should go inside and call the fire department.

It seemed like an eternity before the trucks appeared. But they did blare up the road, and let me off the hook.

After they fire was put out, wispy flakes of ash began to rain on me.

In LA, every waitress is supposed to be waiting for her break to be an actress.

My Muzhik novelist from last Sunday was probably not a professional writer, not yet.
I don’t know what he did to earn a living.

One of my friends from book club was telling me about her career in Television. “They are grooming me to be a producer. But I just don’t know…I REALLY want to write coming-of-age books for children.”

The guy that I had coffee with was the director of a very respected news program. “But that’s not what I came here to do,” he says. “I have more in mind.”

And me?
I’m a video conferencing professional, but I just signed up for a journalism class.

Charles Dickens, author of Great Expectations, had his hero in Oliver Twist say it for us:

‘Please, sir, I want some more.”

Yeah, we all want some more. More from our jobs, more from life, more from ourselves.

And more from our JOBS. That’s a critical thing. After the basics are taken care of–food, housing, clothing, etc.–that job takes on a different meaning. The struggle for survival takes so little effort, that we think we can do it with one hand tied behind our back. That leaves us with an extra hand to do all kinds of other things! Maybe we begin to resent the effort it takes to have a job…And we want to get both those hands working together to do what we “really” want to be doing.

A lot of books are written about that. What Color is Your Parachute? and 7 Habits of Highly Effective People are just two well-known examples. These authors write out systems of how to articulate your values and line up your life according to what you believe is most important.

That’s great! that’s why those books are such bestsellers. Who wouldn’t want to achieve perfect balance?

And they continue to be top sellers, because people are not achieving that balance. In large droves, we continue to have difficulty finding the perfect job.

Does it exist?

I remember talking with my friend a long time ago, we were griping about work. I said, “Don’t you think that this is your dream job? I mean, when you were a kid, if someone told you that you would get to be a computer programmer at NASA, you would have been thrilled!”

“Yeah,” he said. “I remember taking a tour of NASA when I was about 14 and being completely impressed.”

“And you worked hard to get the chance to work there. But now, you complain about it! Being an adult sure turns out to be different than what we thought it would be like when we were kids.”

Maybe the idea of the perfect job is not for everyone. On This American Life, they ran a show that talks about it. In the last segment the narrator talks about his love of making things, crafty art pieces that engaged his whole self in the making.

He researched whether he could get a job doing crafts, but concluded that if it was his job, it would no longer be his passion. He would be compelled to do it, instead of free to do it.

That show has really stuck with me lately. I like my job a lot, it is satisfying and it pays my bills. But I have been struggling with pursuing it as a career, since I am not sure that it gives me the opportunity for expression of my best talents.

But maybe we as human being are more complicated than that. Maybe our best talents, that we are all trying to foster and get more opportunity to express, are not things that we can access 40 hours a week.

This was originally an email, but I thought it was blog-worthy.
———————–

Last Sunday, I had a chance to meet someone off of Craig’s list…We’d been emailing wittily back and forth, and we decided we had to meet face to face. We decided to meet down at a place called Psychobabble…It was open mike night.

I didn’t know what he looked like, but I told him I would wear a beret, and he would recognize me. I was sort of looking around, and I looked hard at this one guy, thinking it might be him.

The guy (it wasn’t him) kind of skulkily followed me up to the counter. He nerved himself up to ask me, in a thick Russian accent, if I had come for the poetry.

“Is it poetry night?” I said. “If only I had come prepared!”

“You write poetry?”

I looked him straight in the eye and said, “Doesn’t everybody?”

He said he would be reading his poetry. I told him I would have to make sure to listen for it.

Then he noticed the copy of Crime and Punishment I had brought. You never know if these internet types will actually show up. I figured I’d better have reading material in case I got stood up or had to wait a long time.

“Oh, are you reading that? He is my favorite author”

“Yeah, I’m almost done with it. But I think I like Tolstoy better.”

“Well, yes but..Tolstoy was very different. I mean…”

“Yeah, Tolstoy was from a different era.”

“Yes! Yes!”

I had obviously impressed the socks off this Russian poet Muzhik.
He had to regain some ground.

“Well, if you like Tolstoy, you would probably like my novel.”

That’s quite a claim.

“You’ve written a novel?”

“Yes. I could email it to you, so you could read it.”

This is a new line. So much for etchings. We’ve gone on to novels!
But I know better now.

“Sure, give me your email address.”

Better to get his than to give him mine. I had to get rid of him somehow. The guy I was really there to meet had showed up, and it’s bad form to be hit upon while meeting another male for the first time. Even though it was a platonic meeting, they can get miffed.

I got his email on a napkin and me and the other guy slipped out of the cafe.
I missed my chance to hear the Muzhik’s poems.

I’m still undecided whether I want an e-novel sent to me or not.

Although the wonderblog is supposed to be “musings about art and the meaning of life,” I’ve been a little short on the art portion of that. At least, I have never really done a critique of a piece of art yet.

Today, that will change. And I invite comment, please. Isn’t good art supposed to evoke a response?

That’s what they say.

Art should challenge you. Art should change your perspective. Art should make you uncomfortable sometimes.

Right.

But the major patrons of art in the 21st century are corporations. Art for the foyer. Decorative sculpture for the drive up to the main office. Ah yes.

Should lobby art make you uncomfortable? Perhaps the “challenge” of corporate art should have it’s base in challenging the workers (dare I say proletariat?) to do their best work for the company.

My company has been going through some renovations, which included my floor. It was several weeks before the renovation process got around to the part where they hang up pictures. There is a poster by Georgia O’Keefe in the mailroom now. Not her best work—I can say this, since I’ve been to her gallery in Santa Fe—but it is an interesting perspective of the trunk of a tree and some of it’s branches. I appreciate it. There is another work by the elevator; I call it the crayon tree. It’s a sort of white abstract tree trunk on a black background, with brightly colored marks or dabs along the sides. It looks like it’s raining crayons, as I wait for my elevator to arrive. Not sure about that one’s merit, but whatever. It’s cheery.

The one by my buddy’s cube is a sort of college-dorm poster. It’s a poster of a stretch of road going off into the distance, and an enormous moon hangs over it in the twilight blue sky. I think that a college freshman with a desire to travel and/or own a motorcycle would really dig it.

My buddy hates it.

These pictures are all of a bland nature. They are there, they give your eyes a place to rest on, but they are mostly non-intrusive.

The piece that really stopped me was on a different floor. It is a piece called “Candy Bar” by Mel Ramos.

Let me see if I can describe it accurately. It is mostly made out of cardboard, and it looks like a Baby Ruth wrapper. There is an edge of the cardboard with what seems to be instructions posted in the upper left corner. I don’t remember what it says exactly, but it starts out saying, “Cut along the lines.” The candy bar wrapper looks partly opened, and the cardboard cutout of a young blonde 70’s-style knockout is inserted into the wrapper. The edges of the wrapper come right to the right spot on her chest, all you see is a bit of cleavage. But the whole thing is mounted on a mirror, so when you come up to get a closer look, or to read the instructions, you can see that her entire backside is naked. You can even see her tan line, a pale stripe running across her back and another blunt triangle across her naked bottom.

This one is hanging up across from a popular video room, so I get to pass by it a lot. The first time I saw it, I was flabbergasted and I had to take a better look. The idea of a woman being in a candy wrapper was so obviously sexist that it seemed to be almost anti-sexist. And when I got closer, I saw that it was mounted on a mirror, and I saw her little tan lines.

The whole thing is only about a foot tall. Probably not even that. She’s not much bigger than a Barbie.

An apt comparison.

But since I have to pass by this candy bar frequently, I am becoming more and more disturbed. Yes, it is a blatant portrayal of women as consumables for male palates. Or even female. It broadly states the objectification of women, and the role women are expected to play in society. How much the artist is aware of this is unknown. Maybe he is portraying his own attitudes, and they coincidentally are widespread.

It’s witty. It is an exaggerated perspective of an often unspoken reality. In the right mood, it might be profound.

I’m trying to be objective and open about it.

But I don’t think it is the sort of thing that belongs in a company hallway. Yes, women are commonly objectified. But they should not be experiencing that kind of treatment at work! So why should this piece of art (and I think it is more artistic than the crayon tree or the dorm poster) be displayed here?

I don’t think that Japanese Americans would like to have artistic photographs of War scenes from WWII posted in the hallways.

I don’t think African Americans would appreciate having scenes of slavery posted in public rooms.

Corporate art has to be more subtle. More bland, maybe.

Art is not art is not art. That is to say, there is a time and a place for different kinds of art. And some of the most profound and life-changing or life-enriching art must be handled carefully. Like a volatile substance.

I have in the past, a long time ago, made snide comments about the meaninglessness of corporate art. Those strange abstract geometric shapes made out of steel or concrete and rise up tall in the parking lot—“What does that MEAN?” I would say. “That’s not art. It’s just a way to fulfill the government’s requirement to spend x percentage of new construction on ‘art’.”

That was before I started going to work in those buildings.

But here is my dilemma now:

Do I swallow it? Do I just ignore Ms. Candy Bar?

Or do I try to get it removed?

I had to be at work this morning SO early, it broke my watch.

Really.

It is a hard thing, being awake at 4:30 AM. It is also a hard thing to stay awake at 4:30 AM. I suppose for full disclosure, I became permanently awake for the day at 4:36. There were some snooze-alarm fits and starts before then.

As a child of the universe and an employee of the global economy, I have to be able to work in the slivers of overlapping time zones. Today’s time zones were East Coast and West Coast.

I rode in on the bus, with my nose buried in a magazine. When I looked up to see how close I was to my stop, I noticed how different the city looks in the dark. There are neon lights wrapped around the tops of some of the skyscrapers, and the lights were the focus points on the periphery of my vision, rather than architecture.

I arrived at work when the newspapers were being delivered. As I was watching the heavy stacks being carried to their individual vending machines, I looked up at the sky.

Someone at work had asked me about the Iditarod sled dog race the other day. He was asking about how long it was, and remarking about how the dogs and people would have to travel in the cold through the dark of night. I told him that dark is not so dark there, because the snow reflects all the light. There may only be a moon and a few stars, but the snow is so white that it glows.

I looked out at the sky of the dark pre-dawn morning in downtown LA and it was a dull red. All the lights of the whole city mixed with and reflected off the fog-smog of the morning, and kept the sky from being black.

Red. Or Pink. I would not have expected the sky to be that color. The lights the sky reflected seemed to be white or maybe yellow. I don’t know how the sky came out pink. Maybe it is similar to how the sky turns red at sunset because of the pollution. Perhaps LA smog makes light red.

Much later, after I had gotten the video conference for the two coasts working and could finally relax with a cup of coffee in my cube I noticed that my watch had stopped. It had stopped at 6:40. I reset it, but it is done tracing circles.

I guess I will have to go through the rest of my day without it.

This weekend I completed my plan for getting a job in LA by packing up all my stuff and moving it to my new LA apartment.

When I started this process, I didn’t think too much about moving my things. I have moved a lot in my life, most of it as an adult. While it is difficult, I know it’s possible. I just put it out of my mind; I had enough other things to worry about.

But the day arrived, and I was faced with my piles of boxed and unboxed belongings. I had called upon my family and friends to help me, and I had rented a Uhaul truck.

After filling out the meandering paperwork and listening to all the dire warnings designed to sell the extra trip insurance, I was presented with the keys to a vast, lumbering, scraped and dented truck. After examining this land leviathan, I bought the extra insurance.

Then I drove the 2 miles to my apartment and all my things. This massive truck was the truck that I would be driving 400 miles that day. Lord have mercy. Best not think about that, one ought not hyperventilate while driving a Uhaul.

Parking the car, I noticed that some of my friends were already there. This helped take my mind off the doom of driving the truck over Highway 5, and made me think about all the things that needed to be packed.

We went inside, and all of us immediately set to work. Cheerfully, in the blazing heat, my friends set to work moving my stuff.

The incredible part of it was, as I looked at all of my things, I began to be pit-of-the-stomach afraid that, as cavernous as my beast of a truck seemed, all my stuff might not fit.

It also began to dawn on me that I was not as packed as I had thought I was. I had a lot left to cram into bags and boxes.

And my amazing friends and family packed cheerfully, like intelligent ants, moving my belongings into the space of the truck carefully, plotting out how to use the space efficiently.

I didn’t have to direct anything, which was good, because I had to pack all my loose stuff and toss the stuff I couldn’t keep.

All the while the others were packing. And when they noticed my rising panic, they reassured me that everything would be okay. Things would fit– I shouldn’t worry.

What incredible people! I could barely believe that I knew these incredibly nice people, let alone that they cared about me so much that they would work in the scorching heat to pack all of my pitiful stuff into a truck with care.

I should never have asked them to do such a thing! These fabulous people should not be doing this! I should rather have taken them out to nice restaurant and treated them to dinner, counting it a bargain because I could just spend the time in conversation and good company.

But here they were, doing this arduous task, because I needed help.

I really needed help.

There was no way I could have done all that work on my own.

I had asked for help, because I was pitiful and needy. But there was no obligation on their part to give it. Really, they could have said “no.” Any reason would have sufficed, or no reason at all. It would not have been rude or wrong. Certainly, a million things might have been more important or pleasant.

But they went one phenomenal step further and said “yes.” I didn’t deserve it. Perhaps I should have been responsible for my own crap, and hired movers to take care of it, instead of burdening my dear friends.

But I had not done that, and the time was too short now. I needed their help, and though I didn’t really deserve it, it was given.

As that realization dawned upon me, I felt truly humbled. And then God revealed himself to me in that space.

Jesus was packing my truck.

Because isn’t undeserved grace the gift of Christ Himself? And when these beloved people came to help me—they didn’t have to—they became the arms and legs and strong back of Jesus. Their actions were pure shining Christian love, pouring out from God through them to me.

Did I mention feeling humbled?

As with all of God’s gifts, there is no adequate way I can pay them back. If they had been hired movers, I could have given them my MasterCard and kept my pride. But I am not supposed to hold on to pride, anyway. The Truth reveals that I have nothing to be so proud of—I have only to rejoice in the fact that God loves me whether I deserve it or not.

And so, apparently, do Bonnie, Alex/Steve, Bryan, Chris, Dad and my brother Chris. I sincerely thank you all so much for your help. It meant a lot to me.

God bless you.

As I have previously mentioned, I am getting ready to move. To Los Angeles.

My Parents are getting ready to move to Sacramento

My Brother is finishing moving to a new, cheaper apartment.

My other brother is trying starting to move into an old, cheaper apartment.

Whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on.

Green family on the move!

Anyway, this creates a problem, or at least a difficulty. We are ALL moving, and we would all normally help each other with the moves. But it’s a little difficult choreographing everybody’s different moves. I mean, when it comes down to it, you are responsible for your own stuff. And when it really comes down to it, you are Liable for your own lease. So you can’t wait on everybody else to be done.

Well, we are doing our best to help each other out, and all of us are suffering extended bouts of sore moving-muscles. There is so much to be done!

Dad, the man for the job, has been making multiple trips IN ONE DAY to Sacramento, getting all his stuff taken over there. My brother has been coming to terms with the excessive amount of personal possessions he owns.

And there are the inevitable trips to the DUMP.

Ah, the dump. I remember the dump as a child. Dumps in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s in Alaska were a big pit in the ground. I am sure that many people bypassed the dump altogether and just threw their stuff in a ravine, on or off their property, whatever. But we did not do that. Keep America clean! or something…There were a lot of signs up on the way to the dump:

“Watch out for bears.”

Bears were very attracted to the dump. It was a smorgasbord for them. But the reason that you had to be careful of the bears is that there was absolutely no separation of the trash. No separation of YOU from the trash, and no separation of the trash from amongst itself. There was simply a huge pile, or a huge amount of trash in a hole. The bears would go through it, tossing aside balls of disposable diapers to get at that lovely bit of uneaten cheeseburger. I knew of and knew personally many people who also sorted through the trash for treasures. I myself could not help glancing at the strange items mixed in with the nasty cans and plastic. There could very well be perfectly good items in this pile. If I recall correctly, there were posted days when people were allowed in to scavenge. Why not?

The dump in Santa Clara was not this type of bear-friendly free-for-all dump. It made me think of some kind of industrial-age hell nightmare.

The stench was quite amazing. I am not sure if all dumps are this smelly–I know that all dumps are odorous–but it was stinky. This one had the added benefit of having a sewage treatment plant next door. Why not? Good city planning to put the two together, if you ask me.
Have one big ball of stink instead of two.

Wow, it was stinky.

But it wasn’t enough just to dump it and run. NO! There were types and classifications of trash, and each had to be handled in its special way. Concrete was special, it must be put THERE. Dirt is something else, and must go over THERE. Cardboard goes here, and paper there. Ordinary trash goes in a different place. And, oh my goodness! Nothing toxic. You are only allowed to throw away poisonous things once a month, between 8:00 AM and 1:00 PM on a Saturday.

Regular trash had to be put in a different place from all of these.

And they couldn’t leave any of the trash alone! There were huge bulldozers pushing it around, and scooping it up to move it to a whole nother place. For a reason that I could not understand, there was a complicated trash blower, that took the regular trash from a hidden area down below and brought it up through a tube, blowing it out of the open mouth about 40 feet in the air. The trash shot out in an arc, landing on a pile that the bulldozer could then play with.

The wood trash section was run through a gigantic chipper; a big pile of damp-looking wood mulch lay around the back.

It was mysterious, appalling and impressive.

So was the stench. Because of the difficulty of understanding their sorting system, we had to be there a long time, dropping off the multitude of different kinds of trash in all of its correct drop-off receptacles. It was powerful. I really wished I had an Altoid. That might have helped.

But it descended into your stomach through your nose and mouth and sat there evilly.
It was quite a place. It took me half the day to recover.