Category Archives: random thoughts

I Drather

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It is getting dark, and I am still at work.

I woke up this morning to the sound of my cell phone ringing in the wee morning. Someone in a different time zone needed my help. I sprang out of bed to answer it, heading out of the bedroom and into more cell-friendly areas of the house.

But I immediately hit my head on the door.

I didn’t know I’d closed it.

And the man in Uraguay is telling me that he can’t make a connection because no one is there, and I am trying to ask him how he knows that no one is there if he hasn’t made the connection.

And I can’t seem to figure out how to open the door. Is it locked? I lock and unlock it several times before I realize that I can’t open it because I’m leaning against it.

But at that point, the cell reception fades entirely and the phone connection is lost.

I sit down on the couch and call the other person whose time zone it is and tell him what he needs to do to take care of Uruguay’s problem. Problem solved.

And I’m awake. And my head hurts a little. Might as well get over to the office.

I’ve got to find a better way to make a living.

SONG FOR THE MTA

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YAY! THE BUSSES ARE BACK!

People get ready
The busses are running
Don’t need no picket signs
Just get on board
All we needed was patience
To hear the diesel’s running
If you run out of health insurance
Just Pray to the Lord

Reasons why I don’t like our school system

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“As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through exams, so long must we take the examination system seriously. If another ladder to employment was contrived, much so-called education would disappear, and no one be a penny the stupider.”
-E.M. Forster _Aspects of the Novel_

creative

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I am feeling the urge to spend most of my life energy on being creative. Most of my life energy right now is spent on my job, which is no longer creative.

I know that I should be practical, but I would rather be doing those things that burn in my breast. I am not excited by anything I do at work anymore. Challenged, just a little. It’s good to use the ol’ brain muscle every once in a while.

But there is a better use of my head than what these attorneys are using it for. I have my own ideas of how to use my head.

There are a number of creative types here. We all share that look-down-at-the-floor-and-raise-your-eyebrows-while-you-sigh realization that the bills come every month regardless of the burning in your bosom.

One guy is an actor, really with parts in things and stuff. He works early mornings and weekends. He has a SHIFT and does not have to stay beyond it.

One other guy is a musician. He was working and working so hard he finally put his foot down. He said, “I cannot work these hours. Change it or I’m leaving.”

He left.

But they negotiated, and he came back, part-time and paid hourly. But the hours are more and more not-so-part-time.

I am thinking of something like that too. Yes, lucky me, I am paid hourly. At least I am paid for every minute this job takes me away from myself.

But the hours are getting too long for doing something I don’t care about. 50+ hours a week. And with the bus strike, I am having to DRIVE to work. There is not enough head space to let my creativity reach critical mass and release itself.

It seems like I am gonna have to start getting creative about finding a way to get creative.

I watched the sun rise

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It was a work induced viewing, but a beautiful sight nonetheless. Through the smog, the entire flaming circle is visible, with streaks of smog making it darker.

It seemed like somehting that couldn’t be real.

Dia de los Muertos

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Today is All Saint’s Day. All Hallow’s Day, which comes after Hallowe’en.

Today is the Day of the dead, a mexican Holiday. My friend loves the day of the dead, she and I are going to go to a celebration this afternoon, a dia de los muertos party.

“This is pretty much my favorite holiday!” she told me.

I had been reading websites she’d sent me and asking questions about this whole celebration. I am still taking it on faith somewhat, that this is a joyful occasion. I tend to prefer joyful occasions to sad ones.

After her little outburst, I paused. Her favorite holiday?

“Do you know anyone close to you that has died?”

“No, not really,” she answered.

“I have,” I said. “I actually know a lot of people that have died.”

So yesterday, in preparation for the celebration today, I tried to remember everyone.

How many is a lot? I asked another guy I know if he knew anyone that had died. He was from Ireland; I thought maybe he’d had some friends die in the troubles.

He told me this story:

it’s kind of funny, you know? My teacher, in the equivalent of what would be high school talked to us about this. He stopped us, and told us that statistically speaking one of us would be dead before we reached 30.

And you know, it was only a year later, that my classmate Sean was in America and he was caught in a fire and killed. So what the teacher said came true, almost right away. It’s kind of amazing like that.

That was his story. Statistically speaking, we tend to drop off. I wonder if his teacher wanted them to be more careful?

THe day of the dead is supposed to be a day where you remember and tell stories about the ones who have passed on.

THere are so many, but maybe I can try.

My first brush with death is something that happened when I could concievably be so young that I don’t remember it. And in fact I don’t. But I do remember the effects of it.

I was three years old, maybe four. My parents had loaned our car, I don’t know why, but they had loaned our yellow VW bug to a family that lived up the street. They got in a car accident. The mother and the oldest son died. THe car was totalled.

I remember little Heather, the youngest daughter, who was a year younger than me. I remember my mother bringing her over to play with me a lot. And I remember my mom telling me to be nice to her.

But what I remember most is the new car we got out of it. The father of this family bought us a huge station wagon, the kind that’s made to look like the sides are made out of wood.

I clearly remember the arrival of this car, and my amazement that someone would give us a car for a present. Later, thinking about it, I put the pieces together.

I remember when the grandmother of that family died, several years later. I remember I was maybe ten, and they were describing the kind of cancer she died from. It made me think of stalactites on her insides, that grew until she was completely filled and had to die.

We had left to move to California for a little period of time, and then moved back to Alaska. During the California stay, I made friends with this great girl, she was a little older than me, but we were very silly and had lots of fun. Back in alaska I wanted to find her, have her address and write to her.

I found out she had died, but in this bright-flame-soon-put-out kind of way. It had a huge impact on the community, saved her sister from some awful dysfunctional relationship, etc.

That made me feel very serious inside for a while.

Grandma Mary died in there somewhere. I remember my father getting the phone call. That was it. That one was very mysterious. I like Grandma Mary. She was really nice and gave good presents, like fun board games. But we were far away and didn’t see her very much. But she was dad’s step-mother, since his mother had died when he was five. Mary had come into his life when he was 11 or 12, and I really don’t know his feelings about her. I think the animosity was towards his dad.

But that one was remarkable only for it’s lack of impact.

Who’s next? let’s see…THere was the baby that died at birth, my friend’s mother had this little baby. The family was so sad and devastated. They seemed like nice people. The mom was pretty nice. My friend was a little weird. As I later figured out, the mother had been a prostitute, and the daughter, the oldest had been involved. Don’t get me wrong, the daughter was well under 10 years old when this was happening. She had some trouble adjusting to the new life in church that the family became involved in.

Us girls, ages 12-15 or so, had a little trouble knowing what to do with Tara’s stories of her mother sending in the men to her room to “do what they wanted”. None of us were allowed to kiss the boys we liked, and Tara’s stories seemed incredible.

The poor little child, the baby dead at birth seemed to weigh Tara’s mom down with immense and almost unbearable grief. THe family had three or four children at the time, and i watched her with amazement.

I remember asking Tara, after the funeral with the very small coffin, “Are you sad?” I didn’t know what I felt. I was wondering what she felt.

But the most popular girl in our pathetic little group turned on me with a veangeance. “WHAT KIND OF STUPID QUESTION IS THAT? Her sister is DEAD, what do you think she feels? OF COURSE, she’s sad.”

I tried to defend myself, “Well, she didn’t have very much time to get to know the baby.”

That did not fly at all. I just kept my mouth shut the rest of the funeral.

Then there was that other time, that the church held a funeral for someone that only came Christmas and Easter. There is a saying about faithful churchgoers: “At the church whenever the doors were open.”

Boy oh boy, that was us. The doors were open, and even though it was a funeral for someone we didn’t know we were there. It was a most interesting experience, everyone sayign nice things about this woman. I don’t know how she died.

There were a lot of people. Maybe the pastor asked people to show up and pad out the seats, I dont know. But there were a lot of people that knew the poor woman too. It turned out that the ladies who taught me ice skating very briefly, for the short period of time we could afford it.

“Did you know her?” they asked me. They had been talkign to one another and beign very somber and sad.

“Not really, I’m just here because it’s my church.” This seemed an incredibly inadequate excuse for my presence. “But from listening to the service, I really wish i had known her, ” I fumbled.

TO BE CONTINUED

Ideology and fires

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You know, way back when Darwin first came up with the idea of survival of the fittest, he categorized humans as an animal like all the other animals. Bears, pigs, monkeys and humans. We all eat, breathe, sleep, defecate and scratch where we itch.

The idea was hugely controversial. The church of the time wanted to believe that man was only a little lower than the angels, that animals were completely different from us altogether.

Now, we say that man is an animal without thinking about it. Yes: primate, vertebrate, whatever you call it, that is us.

And this classification brings us into greater relationship with our surroundings, our environment. Like cows, we eat grain. Like tigers, we eat meat. At least some of us do. And we grow grain and meat, using our environment to create food and do all the things we do.

As the smoke builds up in my city, we are saddened by the destruction of our environment. For some people, it is their whole environment, their home, that is destroyed. For some, like me, it is the beautiful outdoors, the natural environment that has been destroyed.

The fire was set by human means, there was arson which involved matches, and also a flare set by a lost hunter.

But the reason the fire became so huge is because of some bark beetles that killed the trees. They were standing timber, just waiting to be ignited. And we knew about this, we knew this would happen when the beetles first infected the trees.

This fire was inevitable. Perhaps the vast destruction was not inevitable, but a fire had to happen. Nature was doing what it does.

And we as humans, were decided what we wanted to do about that nature. Mostly, the idea that we should leave it entirely alone was the prevailing ideology.

For many years, most of which are in living memory, America with it’s democratic capitalism fought a war of ideology with Communist Russia. This war was called the Cold War, but it was only cold inside the two countries. It was hot as hellfire in some places.

Because we were using our ideologies to justify various actions in different parts of the world. Like one side or the other would prove themselves more RIGHT by having more little countries pick their ideology to govern with.

Lots of countries got caught in the middle. Remember Vietnam? Cuba? Zimbabwe? Tanzania?

Well, not all Americans are capitalists. There were and are a lot of lefty-type americans who were rooting for the communists, or at least socialism abroad. They, and socialists from other countries, were happy to see the so-called 3rd world countries embrace socialism.

Alright. I would now like to present Tanzania. Tanzania tried socialism. It tried it really hard. Socialism didn’t work in Tanzania. Nyerere, the president of Tanzania, and seemingly a very nice guy, admitted that it did not work and that Tanzania was pretty much impoverished by the experiment.

Tanzania was trying something out. It didn’t work, so maybe they ought to try something different.

Russia, the motherland of communism, is also trying this ‘something different’ themselves. Smart. If it’s broken, fix it.

NOW,
back to the fires in Los Angeles.

These fires, as I said, were naturally ocurring. We kinda knew they were coming. Fires come every year.

There is an ideology of conservationism that says, “Don’t touch it! We have to pretend like we don’t exist! Humans should not touch nature, we’ll screw it up!”

Alright, I think the experiment of pretending that we are angels who float above the surface of the planet and don’t make any marks has come to a failed conclusion.

If we are indeed part of the ecological system that we inhabit, it is impossible not to interact with it. Denial is more than a river in Egypt. The time has come for the conservationists to realize that we should direct our interaction with the planet in a useful way.

Let’s use this human intelligence to choose wisely. Let’s cut down and use controlled fires to protect the environment, WHICH INCLUDES OURSELVES, from these kinds of uncontrolled acts of nature.

Let’s be wise and careful, and let’s use our smarts to protect the environment. This whole “Don’t touch it!” ideology has hurt my state.

It also hurt my home state Alaska, with people who want to treat the beautiful interior of Alaska as some kind of pinned-down insect. It’s not a dead, static thing. It’s a living place, and getting some people up there to get the oil out and spend a little attention on preservation will do a lot more to help the area than leaving it alone.

It’s time to change when we’ve been proven wrong. Don’t cling to outmoded ideas.

One Stressful Day

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You know, I already wrote about the movie One Fine Day as being sweet and romantic. But the whole premise of that movie is that two single parents have to ddeal with their children and intense pressure at work.

For both of them, there was no tolerance for mistakes. How harsh is that? Is this how careers are everywhere? Does every culture demand perfection as much as America does?

The cost for one mistake, at least on the day portrayed in the movie, was so high. I wonder if there is another way. For me, i can’t deal with that pressure. That’s why I always try to be early when it’s something I care about.

Just makes me think…

Burning down the…city

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The ash continues to fall. The fire is getting worse.

I looked down the block as I was walking to work. I tried to figure out exactly the point where the smoke haze began. Usually, it’s to far to be so precise. But right now it is a thick batting around us.

Two Blocks. That’s how far it takes before things haze like a romantic movie shot.

People are beginning to get sick from it. I can taste it in my mouth as I am walking outside.

You shouldn’t be able to taste the air.

I wish we’d all been ready

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My new hometown in the middle of Los Angeles looks like a scene from the apocalypse today. We’ve had our troubles with grocery store strikes; we’ve had the buses come to a halt for a mechanic’s strike.

It is extremely hot, unseasonably hot-reaching the 100s. And the Santa Ana winds, the ones Raymond Chandler blames for murders have begun to wake up.

The heat, the wind and I believe the discontent have resulted in many fires in our surprisingly brambly metropolis. One in particular is out of control.

45 miles away, where I work and breathe, white ash flecks were raining down. I walked through the grand opening of disney hall, with red carpet and velvet ropes mutely broadcasting BY INVITATION ONLY. And just in case you didn’t get it, there were cadres of police security to remind you that YOU were NOT invited.

The cloned waitstaff lined the street in a military at-ease position, their red-vested backs to us, the unininvited. The huge metallic hall, more modern than the day after tomorrow is blurred by the thick air.

The commuters walk in lines to their cars, and the cars file in lines to the freeways, which are far from free at this time of day.

Some self-employed commuters in unwashed clothing hold cardboard signs for the cars driving by: “Hungry. Homeless. Need Help. Need Food. God Bless.”

At my space in the wavy asphalt, my sedan gathered small drifts of white ash.